Interview
I Alone Can Fix It: Carol Leonnig and Philip
Rucker on their Trump bestseller
David Smith
in Washington
The
Washington Post reporters have unleashed a second startling story of
incompetence and malevolence in the White House
David Smith
@smithinamerica
Sun 25 Jul
2021 07.00 BST
History is
written by the victors but Donald Trump being Donald Trump, he was never going
to go quietly. So when the Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip
Rucker requested an interview about the final year of his presidency, Trump
invited them to the palatial Florida estate he used to call his “winter White
House”.
The
conversation took place not in his private office at Mar-a-Lago but in its
gaudy lobby as waiters assembled a buffet dinner including jumbo Gulf shrimp,
oysters over ice and bananas foster. A model of Air Force One, painted in
Trump’s unrealised redesign, perched on a coffee table. Club members – a Fox
News host and Donald Trump Jr’s girlfriend among them – stopped to chat on
their way to dinner.
“Trump
seemed to love the idea that he was being interviewed as theatre,” Rucker
recalls by phone. “He could show off to his club members that these fancy
reporters from Washington had flown down just to hear what he had to say. And
he enjoyed the interview. He talked to us for two and a half hours and then he
invited us at the end to stick around for dinner and sent us to a table in the
corner of the patio.”
The upshot
of this encounter in March, and private interviews with more than 140 sources,
is I Alone Can Fix It, a follow-up to Pulitzer prize-winning Leonnig and
Rucker’s bestseller A Very Stable Genius (both titles are direct Trump quotations
loaded with irony). It is among a wave of books about Trump’s disastrous final
year hitting shelves just six months after he left office.
I Alone Can
Fix It portrays a man who put himself before his country. It is packed with
hair-raising revelations about the 45th president’s mishandling of everything
from the coronavirus pandemic (he has no regrets) to racial justice protests
(his only regret is not unleashing the active-duty military), but it made the
most headlines with its account of America’s flirtation with fascism.
The key
figure here was Gen Mark Milley who, as chairman of the joint chiefs of staff,
had the monumentally important job of keeping the military out of politics. His
disquiet took root when he joined Trump on a walk through Lafayette Square for
a photo op at a historic church soon after the square had been violently
cleared of protesters. He apologised, earning Trump’s wrath.
Leonnig
recounts: “Gen Milley had no idea when he walked out of the gates of the White
House in his camouflage fatigues that he was joining in this fairly bizarre
public relations staging and he went to sleep that night making a pledge to
himself and to some of his closest confidants and mentors that he was not going
to let the military be used and played in that way again for a political
purpose.”
She adds:
“As the months went on, he became increasingly concerned that Trump would also
use the military to create chaos, to create fear as a distraction, to keep his
grasp on power – that fear there might be a coup. He vowed he would block that
and he spent, according to our reporting, hours and hours monitoring the
situation at the White House and among fringe groups, trying to be sure that
Donald Trump would not get that chance to get what he called ‘the guys with the
guns’.”
Milley’s
concerns only grew when Trump refused to concede defeat to Joe Biden in the
weeks after the November election. He became so worried that the president
might try to deploy the military to remain in power that he and other top
officials discussed ways to stop him, including mass resignations.
Trump has
responded that he is “not into coups” and “never threatened, or spoke about, to
anyone, a coup of our government”, only to add that “if I was going to do a
coup, one of the last people I would want to do it with is” Milley.
Milley even
compared Trump’s rhetoric to Adolf Hitler’s during his rise to power in
Germany, according to the book. “This is a Reichstag moment,” he told aides,
referring to the 1933 fire at the German parliament which the Nazis used as a
pretext to consolidate power. “The gospel of the Führer.”
‘It’s
unbelievable’
The
inevitability of online discussions reaching for a Nazi analogy the longer they
go on is known as “Godwin’s law”. Journalists are usually discouraged from
making such comparisons. And yet here was America’s highest-ranking military
officer doing just that.
Rucker
reflects: “It would have been unfathomable for an American president to be
likened to Adolf Hitler. Just think about the history of Nazi Germany and the
history of the United States and the different paths the two countries have
taken and it’s just remarkable to contemplate that now in the 21st century, in
the year 2020, an American president would have such authoritarian impulses and
rhetoric and behavior that he would draw comparisons to Adolf Hitler. It’s
unbelievable.”
Even before
2020, Trump had long been compared to autocrats around the world because of his
mass rallies, willingness to promote false propaganda, harsh crackdowns on
political protesters, contempt for media freedom, scapegoating of minorities,
admiration for other strongmen and penchant for hiring family members and
putting his name on buildings.
Leonnig
says of interviews with first-hand witnesses: “They were quite concerned his
go-to was an authoritarian impulse. One of the most horrific curses the
president could hurl at any cabinet member or adviser was: you’re weak, you’re
acting weak, or that’s a weak idea. Being tough and being strong was so
important to him.
“What we’ve
learned in the course of reporting for this book and the one before is the
president really sidles up to and admires some of the most authoritarian
leaders in the world: Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. He has an affinity
for them.”
She
continues: “Many times we would be surprised to learn that he was very worried
about how he looked to other international leaders, almost as if he were on a
playground and he was worried about what the other boys thought about him.”
When Trump
learned, for example, that his health secretary, Alex Azar, had bought millions
of coronavirus vaccine doses from AstraZeneca, he was furious it was a British
and not American company because Boris Johnson would laugh at him. Leonnig
adds: “Trump’s aides were flabbergasted: why is he worried what Boris Johnson
thinks about him buying a lot of vaccine to protect his countrymen?”
Just days
after Milley’s “Reichstag moment” warning, Trump addressed supporters at a
rally in Washington and exhorted them to “fight like hell”. He then returned to
the White House and watched on TV as they laid siege to the Capitol, breaching
police barricades, smashing windows and disrupting certification of Biden’s
electoral college win.
Rucker
recounts: “For a while there he liked what he was seeing. People who were
familiar with how he reacted to the television images said he was happy, that
he thought it was a beautiful thing to see so many of his supporters acting
with such strength, waving his flags, wearing his hats, marching on the Capitol
in his name. It was a beautiful sight for Trump.
“When
things got really very violent and deadly he, according to our sources,
realised that this was a problem and yet he didn’t actually act and do
anything. He was effectively awol. He had abdicated his responsibility as
commander-in-chief in that moment. And so when it came to organising a federal
response – law enforcement and military and national guard – to try to regain control
of the Capitol and to bail out those outnumbered Capitol police officers, it
wasn’t Trump who did any of that coordination.”
Instead it
was left to Vice-President Mike Pence, held in a secure location underground,
who worked the phone with leaders at the Pentagon and other senior officials in
the government to coordinate the response and save the Capitol.
“Trump,
according to our reporting, had no such communication with the Pentagon,”
Rucker says. “He had no communication with the vice-president. He just sat
there watching television.”
Trump’s
daughter Ivanka was at the White House and growing concerned. Mark Meadows, the
chief of staff, urged her to pressure the president to publicly back law
enforcement and tell his supporters to go home. But she was neither forceful
nor effective.
Leonnig
says: “Lives were in the balance and it was taking hours for the president of
the United States to say anything. Some people likened Ivanka to a stable pony
with a racehorse: she’s being brought in to calm her father and get him
trotting at the right pace.”
‘For some
sick reason I enjoyed it’
No one, it
seems, can halt Trump’s blind gallop. Even after the horror of that day – five
dead, more than a hundred injured, members of Congress fleeing for their lives –
he told Leonnig and Rucker in their interview: “There was a lot of love. I’ve
heard that from everybody. Many, many people have told me that was a loving
crowd.”
Trump was
equally convinced that he won the 2020 presidential election, even though his
attorney general, state election officials and numerous judges threw out his
bogus claims of voter fraud. It has become known as “the big lie”. So, is he
knowingly lying or does he genuinely believe this stuff?
Leonnig
comments: “Phil and I spoke to so many people inside the administration who
literally were at his shoulder day in, day out, and they told us they are not
sure what he believes. They had his ear, they still are not completely
persuaded that he believes this, although I must say that when Phil and I were
with him in Mar-a-Lago, I was strangely impressed by how completely the former
president said all of these things about the election being rigged with a completely
committed and straight face.
“Many of
the things that are absolutely without any basis in fact – were looked into,
run to ground and rejected by his attorney general – he still says are true.
And his commitment to those lies physically is as if a person really believes
it.”
This was
the alternative reality bubble that the authors found at Mar-a-Lago, where up
is down, two plus two equals five and a twice-impeached one-term president
milks regular standing ovations. Leonnig and Rucker recall that after the
interview and dinner, Trump offered to invite them back if they had any
follow-up questions and admitted: “I enjoyed it actually. For some sick reason
I enjoyed it.”
A
vanishingly rare glimpse of self-awareness from the man who loves to hate the
press?
Leonnig
muses: “I think he recognised that, despite us being part of what he dubs the
fake news media, he needs us and enjoys talking about himself.”
I Alone Can
Fix It is published in the US by Penguin and in the UK by Bloomsbury. To
support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com.
Delivery charges may apply
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