A Warning

It didn’t take long for President Trump to start turning the powers of his office against the foundations of our democracy. The White House culture was primed for abuses of executive authority from the start, given that Trump spent most of his pre-government life in positions where he had almost total control. These organizations didn’t require a collaborative, democratic approach to governance. He didn’t have to build bipartisan coalitions or respect a sprawling bureaucracy. It was his show, and it was all about his victories, his ratings, and his name atop big buildings. Following the 2016 election, in which he expressed the customary words of political unity and solidarity, Donald Trump quickly pivoted, eyeing ways to use his White House and taxpayer-funded federal investigators—whom he thinks of as his investigators—to go after political enemies.

Most Americans shrug at Trump’s bombast. Surely he doesn’t really want to investigate and jail Democrats who opposed him. This is just another feature of his outlandish entertainment persona. He can’t put Hillary Clinton behind bars because he doesn’t like her. Right? Donald Trump thinks he can. He is serious about his commands to prosecute and persecute anyone who challenges him. Many of us have come to learn the hard way how angry he gets when the law and his lawyers in the administration do not bend to presidential dictates.

Trump’s anger reaches its apex when his unethical bidding is not carried out. Advisors might be sitting around the Oval Office, ostensibly to discuss monetary policy or some other issue, and we will suddenly see the president’s eyes darken. He’ll glance around the room, fidget with the Diet Coke in front of him, and then launch into a long harangue about how his lawyers have failed him, how the attorney general has failed him, how this person or that person needs to be investigated. One time, apropos of nothing, he launched into a tirade about Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who by then was long gone: “Man, he is one of the stupidest creatures on this earth God ever created!” The aides in the room tried not to look at one another. Hoping the storm would pass, they wondered as usual, “What does this have anything to do with… anything?”

Trump is particularly frustrated that the Justice Department hasn’t done more to harass the Clintons. In his first year in office, he complained to Jeff Sessions that the department hadn’t investigated people who deserved it, citing the Hillary Clinton email scandal. Days later he tweeted about the issue, writing, “Where is the Justice Dept?” and noted that there was “ANGER & UNITY” over a “lack of investigation” into the former secretary of state. “DO SOMETHING!” he demanded. The directive was not given to anyone in particular, but it’s obvious to whom Trump was speaking. However, Sessions was effectively recused from the matter since it was tied to the Russia investigation.

In December 2017, the president pulled Jeff aside after a cabinet meeting for what was intended to be a private conversation. “I don’t know if you could un-recuse yourself,” Trump told him, according to the notes of an aide, who believed the president was talking about investigating Hillary Clinton. “You’d be a hero. Not telling you to do anything.” The president reportedly mused that he could order General Sessions to investigate if he wanted to, but then added that he wasn’t going to do that. We were all familiar with these “wink, nods” from Trump. He suggests he can order someone to do something, but he hopes he doesn’t have to do it explicitly—that way he’s not tied to the outcome. Trump’s little hints are in fact improper demands masquerading as innocent suggestions, and the administration’s history is strewn with them. In any event Jeff didn’t budge, surely a contributing factor to his eventual firing.

Trump nominated another attorney general, and right away he started telegraphing similar requests. In a March 2019 interview, the president sent not-so-subtle signals to recently confirmed attorney general Bill Barr, telling a reporter that he hoped Barr would “do what’s fair” when it came to investigating Clinton. Not long after, he again took to Twitter, openly calling for an investigation into the “crimes committed” by his 2016 Democratic opponent. The messages weren’t meant for nonprofit groups or part-time investigators to take up the cause. They were clearly meant for the Justice Department. He was skirting the lines of propriety once again. Presidents are not supposed to influence investigative decisions like this, but Trump knew what he was doing. Bill Barr certainly knew. All of us knew.

Our Founders had many differences, but most were united in their apprehension of powerful presidents. They had just broken free of a tyrannical king, after all. Revolutionary-era thinkers discussed the topic ad nauseam. As American historian Bernard Bailyn explained, the Founders’ conversations on power “centered on its essential characteristic of aggressiveness: its endlessly propulsive tendency to expand itself beyond legitimate boundaries. Like water, it will flow into whatever space it can reach and fill it.”

Thus, the American colonists concluded that protecting liberty required putting checks on the wielders of authority. They built institutions meant to be circuit breakers on government power. Under a system of checks and balances, they hoped even the worst intentions of public officials would be frustrated by the machinery itself. This was the rationale for divvying up responsibility by creating an executive branch, run by a president; counterbalancing it with a legislative branch, consisting of the House and the Senate; and further leveling the playing field with a judicial branch, which contained the courts and the US Supreme Court as the ultimate arbiter of the law of the land.

The Trump presidency is one of the biggest challenges to our nation’s checks-and-balances system in modern times. Donald Trump has abused his power to undermine all three branches of government, at times flagrantly and at times in secret. In the process, he has weakened institutions vital to the functioning of our democracy, assailing them as “corrupt.” Trump is not fazed by the precedent that he is setting by making it easier for his successors to wield the executive office for personal or political gain. In fact, he is actively working to break free of the protections inherent in the American system meant to limit that power.

We ought to care about that. A lot.

Burying the Deep State

Theodore Roosevelt was no one’s idea of the Republican “establishment.” Many traditional Republicans despised him. Throughout his career, he was considered a renegade, a maverick, a guy who liked to shake up the system. Once he succeeded to the presidency, he also understood that he couldn’t change government on his own. In his autobiography, Roosevelt offered a reflection on those who helped him, including his cabinet and the large group of people within the federal bureaucracy.

“As for the men under me in executive office, I could not overstate the debt of gratitude I owe them,” Roosevelt wrote. “From the heads of the departments, the Cabinet officers, down, the most striking feature of the administration was the devoted, zealous, and efficient work that was done as soon as it became understood that the one bond of interest among all of us was the desire to make the Government the most effective instrument in advancing the interests of the people[.]”

More dissonant words could not be spoken about the Trump administration. Rather than affectionately praise the civil service, the current president has launched a brutal assault on them. We are talking about the millions of people who carry out the daily duties of government, whether it is delivering the mail or monitoring economic developments. They act as a “check” on power by making sure the laws are executed faithfully and not subverted by a rogue politician. These days, however, such people are routinely mocked, maligned, ignored, and undercut by the Executive Office of the President. To Trump, their ranks are replete with traitors, an evil “Deep State” out to get him and destroy his presidency.

Early on, he claimed he didn’t like that phrase. In an interview with the Hill newspaper, Trump said he avoided it because “it sounds so conspiratorial.” He added, “And believe it or not I’m really not a conspiratorial person.” This was like the Marlboro man saying he wasn’t a smoker. It wasn’t remotely believable. As the Hill pointed out, Trump used the phrase only two weeks earlier to describe an opinion piece written by… me. The Deep State was a threat to democracy, he claimed in a tweet, but what he really meant was that it was a threat to him because he was being exposed for who he really was.

Those seeking Trump’s favor, or money from his supporters, have made repeated references to the term. They’ve written variations of the same book—from Jason Chaffetz’s The Deep State: How an Army of Elected Bureaucrats Protected Barack Obama and Is Working to Destroy the Trump Agenda, to Jerome Corsi’s Killing the Deep State: The Fight to Save President Trump, to George Papadopoulos’s Deep State Target: How I Got Caught in the Crosshairs of the Plot to Bring Down President Trump, to Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie’s Trump’s Enemies: How the Deep State is Undermining His Presidency, and a collection of alliterative titles by Judge Jeanine Pirro, also making the exact same points: Deep inside the government are a group of people out to destroy democracy, Donald Trump, and America.

Since one of those people, according to the president, is me, I would like to take the opportunity to clear the air and respond with a better-substantiated allegation: Trump is out of his mind. I’ve worked closely with civil servants for many years, whether inside or outside of government. Generally they are good, patriotic Americans who want to serve their country. While some have strong political views like any citizen, the vast majority don’t let it affect their work, and regardless of who is leading the White House, they do their jobs. They don’t conspire to secretly reverse the policies of the administration in power.

Do you think your mail carrier is having secret meetings to destroy Donald Trump? Do you think federal law enforcement agents, whose culture leans conservative, sit around trying to find ways to get Democrats elected? Is the Pentagon’s librarian a mole for Bernie Sanders? The president’s claim of a Deep State sounds preposterous because it is. The person intent on destroying democratic foundations is Donald Trump, not the honorable public servants who go to work every day to make sure our government runs—to get Social Security checks out on time, to protect communities from criminals, to keep food and prescription drugs safe from contamination, to uphold our Constitution.

Don’t believe it? Consider this: The administration can’t even consistently define who exactly is part of the “Deep State,” and it changes depending on the day. Who exactly is part of “the Deep State” in Trump’s world depends on the day. The term is used to dismiss any agency, report, finding, anonymous quote, news story, or other mode of disagreement with the president. Someone in the government differs with President Trump on global warming? That’s the Deep State. A report comes out that says Trump officials have violated ethics laws? That’s someone from the Deep State. Lawyers tell the president he can’t do something? The Deep Staters are at it again!

Sean Hannity once devoted part of his cable news program to what he called “The Mueller Crime Family,” including supposedly nefarious individuals who were part of the Deep-State plot to investigate Donald Trump. One of them was his own deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein. Rosenstein has since won praise from President Trump for his public service, even though the president once retweeted a meme showing Rod behind bars for treason. Which means that members of the “Deep State” really are just people whom Trump doesn’t like. Once he likes them, they aren’t in it anymore.

The concept has fueled a paranoid and secretive atmosphere across our administration. The White House constantly shuts out and shuts up the public servants of the executive branch, often with the president’s blessing, because of suspicion they are disloyal. Meetings are often held for “politicals only,” a term used to describe settings where only presidential appointees are welcomed. Sometimes such meetings are held inside the secure White House Situation Room when they have nothing to do with classified information because aides don’t want to risk the possibility that a non-political employee might overhear the development of a controversial policy.

The president is alert to this as well, as he is wary when he sees faces he doesn’t recognize. If ever experts from within the administration’s bureaucracy are brought into sensitive White House discussions, they must be the “trusted” ones. Skepticism about career staff is so intense that sometimes Trump aides deliberately disclose false information in meetings to see if it ends up in the press so they can root out suspected traitors. (The people who do this are the ones you’d expect, and I’ve seen them hypocritically leak to the press to promote themselves, despite running their own anti-leak operations.) What this means is that Trump is limiting information he hears from within his own government to more inexperienced political types who tend to agree with him in the first place and who he perceives are personally loyal.

The worst part is that America’s public servants, whose jobs we are paying for with our tax dollars, are not trusted to do their jobs. We have a government filled with experts on every topic imaginable, from award-winning medical professionals to world-class economists. They’re not useful if they’re ignored, yet the White House has given implicit sanction to departments and agencies to relocate or otherwise dismiss these voices when they cause problems for the administration’s agenda. At a bare minimum, the work of such government employees is frequently left on the cutting room floor.

A common silencing tactic is to tell an office it’s “under policy review.” That means politicals are trying to decide if the office will be elevated, moved, disbanded, or otherwise reorganized. With their futures hanging in the balance, those employees try not to cause problems while they are stuck in a holding pattern. As a result, many having been standing down on their work for the entirety of the administration, such as scientists focused on climate change or health experts wary of environmental deregulation. If some Trump politicals are hoping these functions will wither in the meantime or people will leave in frustration, they are getting their wish. We are losing talented professionals every single day because of the president.

The result is that our sprawling government is often run by a skeleton crew of partisans. Important issues get neglected with regularity. In fact, a good chunk of the crises we deal with at the highest levels of government emerge, in part, because no one has an eye on the ball. Some of the stupidest actions you’ve seen our administration take were the result of a plan hatched by a group so tiny that it couldn’t see the mountain of secondary consequences right in front of them. Good advice is getting ignored because it isn’t being sought in the first place. Even the policies the president wants to champion—such as education reform—are getting dropped because there are not enough trusted people around him to pay attention (a reality that led Education secretary Betsy DeVos to admit that “education clearly has not been at the top of [the president’s] list of priorities”). Ultimately, with the civil service boxed out of running our government, the American people are getting less than what they pay for, and much less than what they deserve.

The most illustrative example of Trump-maligned government employees is the US intelligence community. These agencies, such as the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency, have some of the most important jobs in America. I wish more Americans could meet these patriots in person to fully grasp their devotion to duty and country. On a day-to-day basis, they are responsible for keeping us safe, going to work in places they cannot discuss to solve problems they must not reveal. Their most stinging defeats are put on public display, while their greatest victories in protecting the American people are celebrated in silence. Many risk their lives—and some give them—without their hard work ever being known. Think about that. It’s one thing to lose your life, but to willingly give up your legacy on top of it is an act of eternal sacrifice. This is the ethos that defines the intelligence community.

Donald Trump’s attacks on America’s covert workforce began before he was elected. He resented the intelligence community’s conclusions that the Russians were interfering in the 2016 election to his benefit. Advisors urged Trump during the campaign to call out the Russians publicly and to disavow their meddling. He had to take a stand, they said, but Trump was unmoved. During one debate-prep session, a member of the team spoke up. He said the candidate needed to acknowledge the intelligence and use the debate stage as a platform to denounce Moscow. If he was going to show solidarity with Secretary Clinton on anything, this was it.

“Yeah, I don’t buy it,” he said dismissively, waving his hand. “It’s total bullshit.”

He was egged on by Mike Flynn, an intelligence community dropout who eventually became Trump’s first national security advisor but was soon removed for lying about his contacts with Russia. “He’s right,” Flynn later agreed. “It’s all politicized bullshit.”

People around him were stunned. What did he say? Why on earth did they think the intelligence had been made up?

As the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Flynn knew better. As the Republican nominee, Trump should have as well; he’d already started getting official US intelligence briefings. The bizarre reaction stoked fears, including within Trump’s circle, that he was somehow in Putin’s pocket. Once elected, he went on to further deride the official assessments, telling reporters who asked about the spy agencies’ conclusions aboard Air Force One, “I mean, give me a break. They’re political hacks.” That’s one way to describe people who would give their lives for the country. His casual dismissal of assessments by intelligence experts was disturbing. The intelligence community had been working hard since its major error about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to strengthen information gathering and analysis. Without their dedication, we never would have found Osama bin Laden or thwarted deadly attacks against the United States, yet Trump is willing to put his “gut” instincts ahead of their expertise.

Donald Trump wasn’t always so dismissive of the intel community. At points he tried to stand up for them. Trump repeatedly faulted Barack Obama for allegedly skipping intelligence briefings. During the 2016 campaign, he seemed to imply the professionals sent to brief him (whom he said he had “great respect for”) felt alienated by Obama, who supposedly didn’t take their advice. “In almost every instance, and I could tell—I’m pretty good with body language—I could tell they were not happy. Our leaders did not follow what they were recommending.” That all changed when he decided they were out to get him as part of some Obama conspiracy. Once elected, Trump suggested a president doesn’t need daily intelligence briefings. “I get it when I need it,” he told Fox News’s Chris Wallace. “I’m, like, a smart person. I don’t have to be told the same thing in the same words every single day for the next eight years.”

When he does sit down for a briefing on sensitive information, it’s the same as any other Trump briefing. He hears what he wants to hear, and disregards what he doesn’t. Intelligence information must comport to his worldview for it to stick. If it doesn’t, it’s “not very good.” As a result, the president of the United States is often ignorant on the most serious national security threats we face and is, therefore, ill-prepared to defend against them. In fact, I’d submit that he’s less informed than he should be on almost every major global threat, from nuclear weapons proliferation to cyber security.

Trump further insults these hardworking professionals by behaving recklessly with the information they give him, which he’s supposed to protect. In May 2017, the president allegedly revealed highly classified information in an Oval Office meeting with Russia’s foreign minister. The incident was detailed in a report by the Washington Post, which claimed Trump disclosed details about spying operations in Syria. As soon as the story hit, it spread like wildfire. “What the hell happened?” aides texted one another.

Intelligence officials—already on edge by the president’s public comments—were mortified by the allegations. Whether the story was accurate or not, the fact that anyone thought it was plausible for the president of the United States to leak intelligence to an adversary says a great deal about the growing perception of the nation’s chief executive. Only a few months earlier, Trump was caught on camera reviewing sensitive documents about North Korea on an open-air terrace at his Mar-a-Lago resort, using the light of cell phone screens (which of course have cameras on them) to read in the darkness alongside his visiting counterpart from Japan.

Trump’s inept handling of intelligence was on display again one day when he flashed a peek at classified documents to a reporter at the White House. “See?” he said, holding up a fistful of papers and waving them as he tried to make a point about how in-the-know he was on world issues. “Many countries have given us great intelligence.” Although the reporter couldn’t see the content, the incident was discussed within the White House. The president has the authority to classify or declassify information as he wishes, so technically he could have shown the journalist whatever he wanted. Still, top National Security Council staff fretted about the president’s carelessness, which they speculated could put secret programs in jeopardy.

The growing list of security lapses threatened a result more woeful than the exposure of “close hold” information. Some realized it could put people in danger, increasing the risk of harm to American citizens, and compromising the agents we recruit to collect such information—those who put their lives on the line to help America see around corners and anticipate new threats. According to press reports, agencies were forced to devise a plan to extract a high-level intelligence source from a hostile foreign country, partly out of fear that Trump’s repeated disclosures might put the person in danger. Regardless of the veracity of the report, Trump’s behavior certainly had a chilling effect throughout the national security community, making the already difficult jobs of those charged with safeguarding our country that much harder.

As if to outdo himself, the president tweeted a photo of a failed Iranian missile launch in summer 2019 to taunt Iran’s government. The problem? The photo reportedly came from a US spy satellite and was shown to the president during a sensitive briefing. We were baffled. The “sources and methods” used to collect intelligence overseas are some of America’s most closely guarded secrets, which Trump seemed to be putting at risk again out of ignorance or indifference. Former officials publicly voiced concerns that our adversaries could use the president’s tweet to “reverse engineer” how the United States monitored the Iranian missile program, but it didn’t take the skill of foreign adversaries. Within days, amateur researchers used the clues in the photograph to identify the alleged government satellite in the night sky that had taken the picture, which, if true, could allow those researchers to track it in the future.

Worse than his inability to keep a secret, Donald Trump is the ultimate “politicizer” of intelligence. Say what you want about George W. Bush and Dick Cheney leading the country to war by supposedly cherry-picking intelligence about Iraq. Their claims were at least based on real information collected at the time, backed by intelligence community analysts, and accepted by bipartisan majorities in Congress. Trump wants the information given to him to support his agenda, and he wants his intelligence officials to be “loyal,” rather than to give it to him straight. This is the opposite of what our spy agencies should do. More than that, it’s actually a threat to the security of the country because our commander in chief doesn’t really care about the truth.

When intelligence professionals don’t give him the assessments he wants, Trump attacks them. His biggest worry is when they appear in public or before Congress because he knows they will tell the truth. He doesn’t want them sharing information that contradicts his views. On more than one occasion, the president has thought about removing an intelligence chief for offering a nonpartisan, impartial assessment to the American people’s representatives in Congress.

I remember one day vividly. A top intelligence leader went up to testify on Capitol Hill. An official rang me at home late that evening.

“The president’s red hot,” she told me. “It sounds like he wants someone fired by morning.”

“What the hell happened?” I asked.

She explained that the agency head offered an assessment about one of America’s foreign adversaries. The conclusion was at odds with what Trump had been saying publicly. The intelligence was accurate; Trump just didn’t like it. Someone in Congress must have asked the president about the discrepancy, tipping him off.

We scrambled to make sure Trump didn’t take to Twitter to announce a new firing. Doing so, we argued, would make him look like he was trying to manipulate the intelligence process at a time when that would be very bad for him, especially with the Mueller investigation unfinished. Thankfully, he kept his powder dry, but only temporarily.

In January 2019, the president went ballistic after the heads of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), CIA, FBI, and DIA testified in the Senate. They offered a number of blunt warnings that conflicted with the president’s views, including that North Korea was unlikely to give up nuclear weapons and that ISIS was not defeated. The president went into a rage. An NFL linebacker couldn’t have stopped him from getting on Twitter that day. “Perhaps Intelligence should go back to school!” he tweeted, blasting the “passive and naive” conclusions of his spy chiefs.

He wanted to fire them so badly, but he knew he couldn’t. Instead, Trump summoned them to the Oval Office for a meeting, released a photo of the CIA and DNI heads seated around his desk, and declared they’d been “misquoted” on Capitol Hill. Their words were “taken out of context,” he said. Trump tried to make it seem the spy chiefs came to repent, as if the information they’d testified about was wrong. It wasn’t. And that’s not at all what they told the president when the cameras were out of the room.

Meanwhile, back at the headquarters of those agencies, employees were dispirited to watch Trump (yet again) attack their work product. What’s more, he was humiliating their bosses and using them as props to show that he was in charge and that he could control their findings. You’d think this would have been a weeks-long controversy in the intelligence community, but it wasn’t. By that point, our intelligence professionals were so beaten down by the president’s antics that they’d given up being outraged, though that didn’t mean they’d lost a willingness to call out his misconduct. History has a way of restoring balance, and later in the year, it would be an intelligence community employee who would call out Trump for political double-dealing with his position and the subsequent White House cover-up.

The Oval Office meeting with the spy chiefs was one of the few occasions the president waited patiently to do what he really wanted to do in the heat of the moment. He sat on his hands. Then, several months later, he couldn’t wait any longer and axed Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and his deputy, Sue Gordon, pushing them out because they’d been too forthright about their analysis and too unwilling to become political mouthpieces. Trump wanted spy leaders who were more loyal, he told staff. He wouldn’t hide his feelings, either. “We need somebody strong that can rein it in,” the president told the media. “Because, as I think you’ve all learned, the intelligence agencies have run amok. They have run amok.”

Trump decided to turn the tables. After enduring months of presidential pressure, the Justice Department began investigating the intelligence community and its findings about Russia and the 2016 election, which Trump had long disputed. The probe was described as “broad.” The president could barely contain his glee. “This was treason. This was high crimes,” Trump said of the work done by intelligence professionals. He wanted to do more than fire these Deep State traitors. He wanted to see them go to prison.

Tipping the Scales

The American judicial system was designed to straddle two branches. The executive branch investigates and prosecutes crimes, and the judicial branch determines guilt and innocence in the courts. The distinction is irrelevant to Trump. The president tries to browbeat the lawyers defending him, seeks to influence investigators investigating him, and attacks the judges judging him. As a result, he has undermined all aspects of the justice system in an effort to “tip the scales” in his favor.

When it comes to manipulating the system, Trump’s first instinct is to force the answers he wants from his lawyers. He pressures them daily, and they feel the heat. He will berate them to their faces for not seeing the law the way he sees the law, and he cannot stand it when they tell him “No,” which they incidentally have to do all the time. He presses them to get to “Yes” on issues where doing so would appear wholly inappropriate, even to the most uneducated listener. Trump tells agency heads to fire their lawyers and get new ones if they aren’t getting the right results. If the American Bar Association could see it from the inside, they’d have a field day.

The president’s former White House counsel, Don McGahn, had the backbone to stand up to Trump, which cannot be said of everyone. That’s what is so concerning about his handling of government lawyers. Trump drives them to the edge of what’s reasonable or legal and then badgers them until they take the plunge, bringing the administration along for the fall. It’s an attitude that would be unworthy of a small-town mayor, and which is remarkably unbecoming for an American president.

We can tell when Trump is preparing to ask his lawyers to do something unethical or foolish because that’s when he starts scanning the room for note takers.

“What the fuck are you doing?” he shouted at an aide who was scribbling in a notebook during a meeting. It’s not uncommon for advisors to write down reminders during conversations with the president. How else are they supposed to record all of his marching orders?

The room went silent. The aide seemed confused about what was wrong.

“Are you fucking taking notes?” Trump continued, glaring.

“Uhh… sorry,” the aide said, quietly closing the notebook and sitting up straighter in the chair.

His paranoia is the best evidence of a guilty conscience. After a particularly bad series of leaks from the White House, President Trump inquired about the possibility of surreptitiously monitoring the phones of White House staff. To avoid veering into “illegal” territory, staff interpreted this as the president asking for better “insider-threat detection” systems, a common practice in businesses or agencies working to prevent unauthorized disclosures. Here was a man who was apoplectic at the (completely false) theory that Barack Obama had his “wires tapped” at Trump Tower, but who was more than happy to tap those of the people around him.

The president won’t let the cautiousness of government lawyers stop him from doing what he wants. If he really can’t get the answers he demands, he seeks outside counsel, scouring the legal community for its unseemly members. He’s found them in people such as longtime fixer Michael Cohen, whose loyalty to the president eventually faded when deeds on behalf of Trump landed him in legal hot water, and Rudy Giuliani, the disgraced former mayor of New York City. Few of us who interacted with Rudy over the years would have imagined that he would self-immolate so completely, but that is the inevitable consequence of traveling the globe (and the television networks) in defense of presidential corruption.

Trump’s animus toward the law extends to judges and courts, too. He has less control over their actions, so he uses his bully pulpit to demean them and to question their legitimacy. Recall during the 2016 campaign when candidate Trump disparaged a judge for a ruling related to a lawsuit against Trump University by claiming the judge’s Mexican heritage made him biased. At the time, CNN’s Jake Tapper confronted Trump. “I don’t care if you criticize him. That’s fine. You can criticize every decision. What I’m saying is, if you invoke his race as a reason why he can’t do his job—” “I think that’s why he’s doing it,” Trump interrupted, doubling down and insisting the judge should recuse himself. The judge, by the way, was not from Mexico, but Indiana. Paul Ryan called it “the textbook definition of a racist comment.”

After a ruling against the administration’s immigration policies, President Trump blasted the court’s decision as “a disgrace” and attacked the presiding judge as “an Obama judge” and said the court on which the man served was “really something we have to take a look at because it’s not fair.” Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts repudiated the president’s attack, writing that the United States does not have “Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges… The independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.”

The president didn’t let the comment slide. He went on a tweet storm, mocking the “independent judiciary” in quotations and suggesting the United States needed to break up the “complete & total disaster” Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in order to start getting more favorable rulings for the Trump administration. His comments were liked by more than 100,000 people. In another outburst, the president assailed a judge for an injunction on his travel ban. “The opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned!” He continued: “If something happens blame him and court system.” This is the real threat. Trump may have perverse views of his own about justice, but he is exhorting others to share the opinion that US courts are corrupt and potentially a public danger, further corroding a key pillar of our democracy.

The president has proposed doing away with judges on more than one occasion. Too many of his policies are getting stuck in legal limbo, he says.

“Can we just get rid of the judges? Let’s get rid of the fucking judges,” Trump fumed one morning. “There shouldn’t be any at all, really.” He went a step further and asked his legal team to draft up a bill and send it to Congress to reduce the number of federal judges.

Staff ignored the outburst and the wacky request.

Trump continued complaining anyway. “I’ve only won two cases in the courts as president. And you know what one of them was? A case against a stripper.”

Eyes widened at the reference. He would later repeat the comment, undoubtedly to get the same reaction from a new set of captive listeners.

The unavoidable conclusion is that the president sees himself as above the law, which is a scary point of view for a person who swears before God and the nation to “faithfully execute” it. The perception is evident by his almost mystical fascination with the power of the presidential pardon, which allows him to absolve convicted criminals of guilt. To Donald Trump, these are unlimited “Get Out of Jail Free” cards on a Monopoly board.

He has told officials that if they take illegal actions on his behalf, he will pardon them. Press outlets reported that the president once offered pardons for his wall-builders, urging them to ignore regulations standing in the way of his precious barrier and to plow ahead, regardless of the consequences. He’d have their backs, pardon in hand, if they got into legal trouble. Spokespeople were immediately dispatched to pour cold water on the reporting. Tellingly, they didn’t deny what the president said but insisted his comments were made in jest. Once again, for the record, that’s how you know Donald Trump is not joking—when he sends someone out to say that he was joking.

Trump has also claimed he can pardon himself, if needed. He tweeted in June 2018, “…I have the absolute right to PARDON myself, but why would I do that when I have done nothing wrong?” The comment eerily paralleled Nixon’s statement: “If the president does it, it’s not illegal.” Ask yourself, are these the words of a man who’s planning to follow the law? In a sad way, it’s almost a relief when he makes these statements, because it allows the public to see what advisors are experiencing every day behind the curtain, without the president labeling it as “fake news” from anonymous sources.

Trump reserves a special place in his heart for our last category of the justice system: investigators. It’s essential in a democracy that those who investigate crimes be impartial, that their inquiries are not tainted by outside influence. Yet there is nothing that makes the president’s head explode like the prospect of being investigated, as America witnessed during Trump’s up-all-night, burn-it-down obsession with what he famously labeled “THE WITCH HUNT.” The Mueller Report revealed the lengths to which the president will go to interfere with the investigative process. Before you even dive into the text, the executive summary notes that his conduct involved “public attacks on the investigation, non-public efforts to control it, and efforts in both public and private to encourage witnesses not to cooperate with the investigation.”

You could make the case that the Mueller ordeal wouldn’t have happened in the first place if the president had restrained himself from trying to influence the Russia probe. On May 9, 2017, the president fired FBI director Jim Comey. He sent the director a termination letter that said the attorney general and deputy attorney general had recommended to him that Comey be dismissed. “I have accepted their recommendation and you are hereby terminated and removed from office, effective immediately,” the president wrote. “While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the Bureau.” He closed with: “I wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors.”

It would be an understatement to say that people around him were both pissed off and spooked at what appeared to be Trump’s attempt to protect himself from being investigated. Here, Trump fanboys will throw up a red flag. “Come on,” they might say, “the president fired Comey because the man lost the public trust by grandstanding. Even Clinton was happy.” What those supporters didn’t see, though, was how fast the Washington, DC, switchboards melted down that afternoon, as the president’s advisors called one another with concerned speculation about his action. None of us really believed he was trying to “do what was right.”

Not long after, the president’s justification began to unravel. While he claimed he made the decision at the advice of the Justice Department’s two top officials, Trump’s own explanations in the ensuing days contradicted this. In an interview with NBC News, he cited the Russia probe as one of the reasons he had gotten rid of Comey. “I said to myself, I said, ‘You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story,’” he told the outlet. The same month in a meeting with Russian officials at the White House, the president confessed to them that dismissing Jim had relieved “great pressure.” It was soon revealed that the president had actually asked the Justice Department to draft the firing recommendation that was given to him, which they did reluctantly. It was all staged.

The president’s sudden firing of the FBI director—and then the shifting explanations—were seen within his own White House as a dangerous move that could set in motion a series of events the result of which might be the downfall of the administration. At least one cabinet member mulled resigning. “I’m genuinely worried for the country,” the official confessed, although apparently not worried enough to make the point publicly. Officials held their breath, and it only got grimmer.

Trump became unhinged when Rod Rosenstein, the Justice Department’s number two, made the decision on May 19 to launch an independent investigation into Russian interference. Rosenstein appointed former FBI director Bob Mueller as “special counsel” to lead the probe. We all watched with a sense of doom as Trump soon began searching for ways to get rid of Mueller. Within days of Comey’s firing, he argued that the special counsel needed to go because he was “conflicted,” contending that Mueller was a Never-Trumper, wanted to be named FBI director again, and had a Trump golf course membership. But aides told President Trump the “conflicts” were imagined, and they feared his demand was meant to impede the investigation.

One day in June, I got a message from an administration colleague who was watching an outside Trump surrogate make the media rounds suggesting the president might be getting ready to fire Mueller. The surrogate wouldn’t have said this if Trump hadn’t spoken to him.

“Man oh man, what the fuck is he doing?” my colleague lamented.

“You got me,” I responded. If firing Comey hadn’t toppled the administration, firing Bob Mueller absolutely would. How was this not obvious to Trump? I assumed his white-hot anger was blinding him to the fact that he was putting his presidency on the line.

Trump privately told White House counsel Don McGahn that he needed to have Rod Rosenstein get rid of the special counsel. No way, McGahn warned. “Knocking out Mueller,” he said, would be “another fact used to claim” that Trump had committed obstruction of justice, according to the investigation’s final report. The president tried again on June 17, 2017, phoning McGahn from Camp David. “You gotta do this,” he insisted. “You gotta call Rod.” Trump reiterated the order the next day. McGahn ignored both requests and threatened to resign. When the story broke, the president told Don to dispute it and to “create a record stating he had not been ordered to have the special counsel removed.” McGahn refused to lie, and the president called him into the Oval Office to pressure him, an entreaty his chief lawyer again rebuffed.

After the Mueller Report dropped, hundreds of former federal prosecutors signed a letter stating that Trump’s efforts to derail the investigation constituted obstruction of justice. He would have faced “multiple felony charges” if he weren’t president of the United States, they said. Some of these signers were left-wing pundits as you’d expect, but others served in Republican administrations, including Jeffrey Harris, a former Justice Department attorney under Ronald Reagan and a friend of Rudy Giuliani. “Whether to prosecute this kind of conduct was not a close prosecutorial call,” Harris told one newspaper when asked about signing the statement. “This was a no-brainer.” I’ll leave that conclusion to others, but at a bare minimum, episodes like the one with McGahn are entirely inexcusable for a US leader.

One of the biggest casualties of the Mueller saga was the FBI. The agents that work in the Hoover Building, its headquarters, have no other motive than to serve their country and root out the truth. I’ve seen their work up close. Yet they’ve received a merciless, ongoing beating from the president. Many of these investigators quietly cheered for candidate Donald Trump outside of work, and now they can’t believe the man who tells law enforcement he’ll “have their backs” is stabbing them in theirs, regularly. The FBI director has tried to stand up for his workforce, saying in response to presidential criticism, “The opinions I care about are the opinions of the people who actually know us through our work.” It’s not enough to counter Trump’s megaphone.

The president claims the bureau is an untrustworthy breeding ground of Deep-State conspirators. Over and over again, he calls the FBI “crooked” and disparages its employees. “Tremendous leaking, lying and corruption at the highest levels,” “a tool of anti-Trump political actors,” “politicized the sacred investigative process,” “tainted,” “very dishonest,” “worst in history,” “its reputation in tatters.” Never has an American president taken aim so often, at so many people, for such terrible reasons. Not enough folks around Trump have pushed back and told him to cut the crap, so the president continues pummeling another democratic institution unabated.

The result is that millions of Americans now have an excuse to doubt the conclusions of the nation’s premier law enforcement agency. Trump’s broadsides against the FBI are inspiring commentators to politicize the bureau’s activities and invent conspiracy theories, as Fox News host Tucker Carlson did not long ago when he ridiculed the FBI’s warnings about the rise of white nationalist violence as “a hoax.” Tell that to the families who’ve lost loved ones to racially motivated mass shootings.

Oversight in the Dark

Donald Trump’s attacks on the executive branch and the judicial branch leave one other institution to check his power—the United States Congress. The authorities of the legislative branch are enumerated in the Constitution in Article I, before all others. The ordering was intentional. The Founders believed Congress was the closest to the people. It was the body of their representatives, who were chosen more frequently than any other branch of government, and although all three were meant to be co-equal, if any branch had primacy, it was meant to be the legislative.

The US Congress has been a persistent irritant to our nation’s chief executive, even when both chambers—the House and Senate—were controlled by Republicans. It’s clear to anyone who’s ever had a serious discussion with the president about the legislative process that he has no idea how it works, or is supposed to work. Senate traditions, such as the filibuster, mean nothing to him, and he finds it farcical that congressional committees have authority to oversee his agencies. He is forced to re-learn daily that it’s necessary to build bipartisan consensus to get anything substantial accomplished, and then he promptly forgets.

Now more than ever is an appropriate time for Congress to play its watchdog role. The president knows this, too, which is why he has sought to further diminish public support for the body by deflecting criticism onto US representatives and senators for his own failings, sneering at the dictates of the legislative branch, and actively obstructing congressional oversight of his administration.

The president is grateful to have other politicians to blame. When he didn’t get the first budget deal he wanted? The fault went to the Republican-controlled Congress. When he didn’t get the second budget deal he wanted? The still-Republican-controlled Congress. The third time around? Congress, this time run by the Democrats. Factories closing in America? “Get smart Congress!” Immigration? “Congress, fund the WALL!” Caring for our nation’s veterans? “Congress must fix.” The failure to reform health care? “Congress must pass a STRONG law.” Children dying in homeland security’s custody? “Any deaths of children or others at the Border are strictly the fault of the Democrats.” You get the picture.

Congress is an easy target because it doesn’t move very fast. This is partly by constitutional design. The architects of our nation wanted all sides to come together when there were shared interests, and they wanted to avoid a thin majority being able to steamroll everyone else. That’s why Trump told us to hire him, right? He said he could cut good deals; he was better at it than anyone in the world. Yet for a man who built a reputation on negotiating, Trump turned out to be a pretty terrible dealmaker. His record of bringing everyone together on Capitol Hill is dismal. That’s why he’s forced to declare emergencies, on matters ranging from the border to foreign policy, which allows him to take actions which he knows would never be supported by bipartisan majorities. He spends more time posting snarky messages about members of Congress than trying to build support for his agenda, preferring a good schoolyard spat over the hard work of legislating. Consequently, his congressional-relations aides are in a perpetual state of consternation.

Increasingly, Trump has decided to ignore Congress altogether. He’s told advisors to do the same, goading them to flagrantly defy congressional restrictions. One time, a leader of a national security agency asked the president for support in convincing Congress to pass an upcoming defense bill. Trump could use his megaphone to prod representatives who were on the fence to support the legislation.

“Don’t worry about Congress,” the president said. “Just do what you need to do.”

The official explained that it wasn’t like that. The law needed to pass so that certain defense restrictions could be lifted. Until then, the agency wouldn’t be able to do its job to protect the American people. That’s why they needed Trump to champion passage of the bill.

“No, no. It doesn’t matter. You have my permission to do whatever you need to do, okay? Just forget about them.”

The official sat in stunned silence and then gave up, moving on to the next topic.

Donald Trump is also comfortable flouting Congress when the law explicitly says Congress shouldn’t be ignored, should be consulted, or must approve something before action can be taken.

He infuriated Capitol Hill by moving forward with controversial weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates without congressional permission. By law, the president is required to provide Congress a thirty-day heads-up before weapons sales can move forward, allowing them an opportunity to block the transactions. Trump knew there was bipartisan opposition, so he invoked an “emergency” provision in the law, sent it to Congress at the last minute, and went forward with the sales anyway. To be clear, there was no “emergency,” and Trump set another bad precedent for future chief executives to pretend the legislative branch doesn’t matter.

The president hasn’t tried to hide the fact that he actively shuns Congress’s crucial “human resources” role. The Constitution requires the president to nominate the government’s senior-most leaders and to appoint them to their positions only “with the advice and consent of the Senate.” But Trump prefers to keep un-nominated and un-confirmed individuals in key posts, as noted earlier by his own admission. It’s off-putting to watch how agency heads must continuously curry his favor and carry out his bidding if they hope to ever be nominated, and thus, they are more loyal to him and less accountable to Congress. All told, midway through his third year, Trump had nearly 1,400 cumulative days of cabinet vacancies in his administration, days when top agencies had no confirmed leader. By comparison, Barack Obama had 288 cabinet vacancy days at the same point, and George W. Bush only 34.

The gaps mean Congress only has a temporary official to hold accountable. “Acting” leaders are more like babysitters than empowered executives, and are often hesitant to wade into congressional waters until an actual top official is named. Legislative requests get put “on hold.” Hearings get delayed. Transparency weakens. When the organs of state lurch along for months like this, rudderless and without robust congressional monitoring, the functions of government atrophy. The potential for abuse grows, and the end result is bad for organizational management and bad for democracy.

On top of it all, the president has fought to actively obstruct legislative inquiries. It’s become almost a regular occurrence for him to snub congressional requests and even subpoenas, which are supposed to be Capitol Hill’s most powerful weapon to compel information from the executive branch. Trump now treats these official demands like junk mail. He has his lawyers dismiss them by flaunting “executive privilege,” the prerogative of a president to prevent the disclosure of certain confidential information and advice. The refusals go beyond standard practice and have turned into a full block-and-tackle exercise against congressional investigators across an array of Trump administration controversies. The president himself admits as much to this subversion of proper legislative oversight, having declared categorically that the administration will be “fighting all the subpoenas” from Congress and daring the legislative branch to do something about it.

Frankly, this makes it a lot harder to promote the president’s policies when we go up to Capitol Hill. Members of Congress don’t want to listen to us if we won’t listen to them. Meetings these days start off with a list of grievances. Behind closed doors, senators and congressmen rattle off all the ways our administration has undercut their mandates or flat-out ignored them, and I’m not just talking about Democrats. I’ve gotten the same treatment from Republicans, too. We’re forced to tell these representatives that our hands are tied until the president changes his mind or they have something to trade with him.

The obstruction is part of a deliberate and coordinated campaign. Before the midterm elections, the White House counsel’s office started developing a contingency plan to shield the executive branch in case Democrats took power. New lawyers were brought in, and new procedures were put in place. The goal wasn’t just to prepare for a barrage of legislative requests. It was a concerted attempt to fend off congressional oversight. When Democrats finally took the House, the unspoken administration policy toward Capitol Hill became: Give as little as possible, wait as long as possible. Even routine inquiries are now routed to the lawyers, who have found unique ways to say “We can’t right now,” “Give us a few months,” “We’re going to need to put you on hold,” “Probably not,” “No,” and “Not a chance in hell.”

Of course it must be said that no one here is blameless. The Democrats came into power with uncontrolled anger toward Donald Trump and an attitude that the ends justified the means, as long as it brought him down. They told their base they would investigate anything and everything that moved, which is a particularly stupid tone to strike when your hope is to get the executive branch to cooperate with a probe, if only initially. A number of House investigations are obviously political in nature and lack substance. At the same time, others are the legitimate duty of Congress, from examining executive branch ethics violations to analyzing whether official government actions were taken for political purposes.

It’s not the White House’s job to decide what Congress should oversee. That decision was made centuries ago and effectively enshrined in the Constitution. Congress is a co-equal branch of government, and one of its many rightful roles is to monitor the executive. The more vehemently the president inhibits that proper function, the more likely future administrations will avoid accountability, creating fresh opportunities for government malpractice.

A common refrain you hear in the Trump administration after the president cooks up an unwelcome scheme is “We’ll get enjoined by the courts immediately.” His ideas veer toward impropriety and illegality so often that virtually every senior official has heard this phrase, said this phrase, or fears this phrase. It’s the canary in the coal mine—the signal that a bad idea is about to come crashing down. Donald Trump is the miner with his headphones on and the music turned up, oblivious to the warnings. Sometimes it seems he genuinely enjoys taking actions that will get the administration sued.

While we were on the road one day, a fellow advisor vented about a request issued from the Oval Office. Trump wanted to use a domestic presidential power to do something absurd overseas, which for security reasons I cannot disclose.

“It doesn’t make sense. So I told him he doesn’t understand. We’re talking about apples and refrigerators here,” the official remarked. “He doesn’t get it. He just doesn’t get it. Also, if we do any of this stuff, we’ll get enjoined by the courts right away.”

The phrase stayed in my head. Apples and refrigerators. When the president mixes up words, the result is unusual; when he mixes up concepts, the result can be unlawful. It’s like the time Trump told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that he would consider accepting dirt from a foreign government, such as China or Russia, about a political opponent. The president said he would take it, equating the information to opposition research, or “oppo research.” To Trump, it would be mere politics. To some experts, it would be “textbook illegal.” Hadn’t the special counsel just finished investigating whether this happened in 2016? How could President Trump, after that national nightmare, still not understand the difference between politics-as-usual and naked corruption? Didn’t he care? The ABC interview foreshadowed the answer. No, he didn’t.

Only months later, Trump decided to use the influence of the presidency to pressure Ukraine to investigate one of his potential 2020 election rivals. He urged the country’s president to launch an inquiry into Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, whose profitable work for a Ukrainian gas company drew scrutiny, especially in light of his father’s engagement with Ukraine as vice president. Whether or not the allegation of improper dealings had merit, the system was not supposed to work this way. It’s up to the Justice Department to probe potential crimes. American presidents don’t implore foreign leaders to open investigations into domestic political opponents. But with the campaign consuming his daily mental bandwidth, Trump couldn’t resist the temptation to use his office to gain a competitive edge.

Those of us who have seen these sorts of reckless actions, again and again, wanted to slam our heads against the wall. The explanation that he wanted to help combat “corruption” in Ukraine was barely believable to anyone around him. The obvious corruption was in the Oval Office. The president had apparently learned nothing from the Mueller saga. Only we did. We learned that, given enough time and space, Donald J. Trump will seek to abuse any power he is given. This is a fact of life we’ve been taught inside his administration through repeated example. No external force can ameliorate his attraction to wrongdoing. His presidency is continually jeopardized by it, and so are America’s institutions.

If the president’s assault on democracy seems too remote for most Americans, don’t worry. You can look closer to home because President Trump has sought to abuse his power to target you directly. He has repeatedly tried to leverage his office to punish what he calls “Democratic states”—those where the majority of citizens voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, ignoring the fact that his supporters live in those places, as well. The president surprises staff with horrifying ways to make life difficult for these parts of America.

California is the quintessential example. Trump hates California. He can’t believe that an entertainer such as himself is unable to win over the home of Hollywood. He rants about its governor, Gavin Newsom, for criticizing administration policies, and he believes the state “stole” electoral votes from him by allowing so many supposed “illegal” voters to cast ballots. After wildfires devastated homes and properties in California, Trump insisted that federal funds be cut off to the state. No emergency dollars should be flowing to Californians, the president told staff. Word of his spiteful demand spread throughout the building, in part because Trump was raising the idea, as he often did, with random people. It was jaw-dropping, especially considering that clips of burned-out homes and Americans living in temporary shelters were still replaying on our television screens.

To protect the president from himself, staff members tried to make sure the press didn’t get a hold of the story. Communications aides breathed a sigh of relief when it seemed the storm had passed. Then several weeks later, the president fired off tweets anyway, saying he’d ordered relief aid for California to be halted, probably because he was frustrated that it hadn’t. To my knowledge, officials never acted on the public demand. It faded from view. But the request showed his true colors, as a politician blatantly seeking to hurt people in places where he can’t see an electoral advantage.

He’s found other ways to go after the state, though. President Trump announced that the administration was revoking California’s tailpipe emissions waiver, which for years allowed the state to set a tougher standard when it came to reducing automobile pollution. He’s moved to cut funding for its high-speed rail projects, and he’s threatened to dump more migrants in California to punish it for statewide policies shielding illegal immigrants, only a sample from a longer list. If Congress is examining politically motivated activity in the Executive Branch, might I suggest that some of these threats and decisions warrant further scrutiny.

The net effect of the president’s war on democratic institutions is that he has turned the government of the United States into one of his companies: a badly managed enterprise defined by a sociopathic personality in the c-suite, rife with infighting, embroiled in lawsuits, falling deeper into debt, allergic to internal and external criticism, open to shady side deals, operating with limited oversight, and servicing its self-absorbed owner at the expense of its customers. We should have seen this one coming. This is only what President Trump has done here at home. Remember, this man is also the de-facto leader of the free world.