The October death of Jamal Khashoggi, a self-exiled Saudi journalist writing for the Washington Post and living in America when he disappeared during a visit to Istanbul, had turned into a test of the president’s diplomatic and geopolitical priorities. After a lengthy investigation, it was the consensus of U.S. and Turkish intelligence that Khashoggi had been strangled and dismembered inside the Saudi consulate—at the direction of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the successor to the Saudi throne and a frequent target of Khashoggi’s critiques.
This posed a dilemma to Trump’s transactional foreign policy doctrine. The crown prince had become an ally of Kushner’s and was instrumental in approving a major arms-sale deal in 2017. The butchering of Khashoggi fit the description of a flagrant international offense for which Washington would traditionally have imposed consequences. Instead, Trump decided to cast doubt on the intelligence findings and declined to give the Saudis even a rhetorical slap on the wrist, willfully ceding America’s role as a symbolic guardian of human rights.
Just as the furor over Khashoggi was subsiding, like a game of presidential Whack-a-Crisis, another problem popped up: Michael Cohen was back in federal court with a fresh batch of incriminating testimony.
On November 29, the president’s former lawyer pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about the plans to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. Contrary to his sworn testimony to congressional investigators, Cohen said the Moscow project was being negotiated well into the summer of 2016—with Trump’s awareness and involvement. This meant the GOP front-runner had been pursuing a commercial interest in Russia while he was publicly praising Putin and arguing to end Obama’s sanctions against the country, all while the Kremlin was waging a sophisticated misinformation campaign aimed at helping him win the presidency.
Trump, aka “Individual 1,” accused his onetime fixer of being “weak” for cutting a deal with Mueller in pursuit of a reduced sentence. Indeed, not long after, the special counsel recommended no prison time for Cohen due to his extensive cooperation. But the Southern District of New York felt differently: Cohen was sentenced to three years for the hush money payments to Daniels and, in a separate case, for lying about the Trump Tower Moscow project.
As if Trump didn’t have enough to worry about, the one thing that had buoyed him throughout his first two years in office—a booming economy—was showing signs of weakness.
In the fourth quarter of 2018, the Dow and the S&P 500 dropped nearly 12 percent and 14 percent, respectively, while the NASDAQ plunged 17.5 percent in the same period. The final month of the year capped this bearish run: Both the Dow and the S&P 500 plunged by roughly 9 percent, their worst Decembers since 1931. When all was said and done, 2018 was the worst year for the markets since 2008.
This was irksome to a president who had long used the bull markets as a crutch. And while there was blame to go around for the decline—fears of inflation, tech companies facing scrutiny and enhanced regulation—the country’s political volatility was undoubtedly a contributor. Trump’s game of chicken with China was proving counterproductive: In December, the Commerce Department announced that the U.S. trade deficit had increased to a ten-year high of $55.5 billion, thanks to soybean exports plummeting and imports of consumer goods spiking. The trade deficit had widened for six consecutive months, and much of the damage was being done by China; in November, its trade surplus with the United States reached a record high of $35.6 billion.
Meanwhile, in late November, Trump was incensed to learn that General Motors was slashing 15 percent of its salaried workforce—up to 14,800 jobs—and shuttering five plants. The brunt of the impact would be felt in Ohio and Michigan, two of his Rust Belt strongholds. In the summer of 2017, Trump had promised a raucous crowd in Youngstown, Ohio, that their lost factory jobs were coming back. “Don’t move!” the president told them. “Don’t sell your house!” Now, little more than a year later, GM was closing its iconic Lordstown Assembly plant in neighboring Warren, Ohio, robbing the area of more than 1,400 jobs.
“I told her, I’m not happy,” Trump told reporters of his conversation with GM’s CEO, Mary Barra. “The United States saved General Motors, and for her to take that company out of Ohio is not good.” In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, he talked even tougher. “They better damn well open a new plant [in Ohio] very quickly,” Trump said. “I told them, ‘You’re playing around with the wrong person.’”4
Trump was speaking as a president and not a businessman. The reason GM needed a taxpayer bailout to begin with was that it had become bloated with legacy costs and blind to the evolution of the market, producing cars nobody wanted at prices their foreign competitors could beat. If GM was to avoid another bankruptcy, visionary decisions had to be made: eliminating a host of poor-selling smaller cars, doubling down on SUVs, and investing heavily in electric and self-driving vehicles. In business, the short-term pain of such decisions is meant to yield long-term gains, building a stronger company that can hire more workers.
The other dynamic Trump seemed to be ignoring, willfully or otherwise, was the role his own policies had played in decisions such as these. GM had warned, earlier in the year, that his tariffs on imported steel would cost the company $1 billion. Ford Motor Company had said the same. And Harley-Davidson announced back in June that it was moving some of its operations overseas due to the crushing cost of Trump’s tariffs, prompting the president to call for a boycott of the motorcycle manufacturer.
It wasn’t surprising that the president’s interventions in the market didn’t work; even in Indiana, where Trump and Pence had made a show of swooping in to rescue Carrier workers with the aid of billions of dollars in state tax incentives, the company continued to jettison jobs throughout 2017 and 2018 as its operations moved to Mexico. “I feel betrayed and deceived—as if President Trump used my pain, and the pain of working-class America, simply to win political points,” Quinton Franklin, a laid-off Carrier worker, wrote in a piece for Vox.5
What was surprising: the silence of conservatives as the American president bullied and threatened private businesses that were making him look bad politically.
IT WAS THE BEST OF PUBLIC SERVICE, IT WAS THE WORST OF PUBLIC SERVICE.
In early December, America mourned the passing of former president George H. W. Bush, a son of privilege who enlisted as a fighter pilot, was shot down over the Pacific, and became the patriarch of America’s premier political dynasty, all while serving in roles ranging from CIA director to chairman of the Republican National Committee. Like John McCain, the elder Bush had planned his funeral service with precision; but unlike the senator, the former president was insistent on Donald Trump attending. There was no debate to be had: Whatever problems anyone in the family or in the party had with him, the commander in chief would be welcome at his service. This was a final act of class and grace, symbolizing a life spent in service to noblesse oblige.
Less than a week after Bush’s funeral brought fond memories of a functional era in politics, Americans were jolted out of their daydream by the spectacle of December 11.
It was supposed to be a three-minute “spray,” with reporters and cameramen from the news networks catching a quick glimpse of the meeting inside the Oval Office. In their first formal sit-down since the midterm, the president and vice president were hosting the top Democrats in Congress, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. Customarily, the president would offer a few words, something about looking forward to a productive dialogue, and then the media would be shooed from the room so the principals could get down to the business of governing.