The next morning Dowd told his wife, Carole, “I’m gone.” He called the president and said he was resigning. “I’m sorry I am resigning. I love you. I back you. And I wish you the very best. But if you’re not going to take my advice, I cannot represent you.”
“I understand your frustration,” the president said. “You’ve done a great job.”
“Mr. President, anything else I can do for you, call me anytime.”
“Thank you.”
Two minutes later, The New York Times called Dowd, and The Washington Post called. Dowd could see Trump picking up the phone and imagined him calling Maggie Haberman at the Times. “Maggie? Fucking Dowd just resigned.” Trump always liked to be the first to deliver the news.
At least Dowd felt he’d gotten ahead of it, had resigned before being fired and getting his ass trashed.
Dowd remained convinced that Mueller never had a Russian case or an obstruction case. He was looking for the perjury trap. And in a brutally honest self-evaluation, he believed that Mueller had played him, and the president, for suckers in order to get their cooperation on witnesses and documents.
Dowd was disappointed in Mueller, pulling such a sleight of hand.
After 47 years, Dowd knew the game, knew prosecutors. They built cases. With all the testimony and documents, Mueller could string together something that would look bad. Maybe they had something new and damning as he now more than half-suspected. Maybe some witness like Flynn had changed his testimony. Things like that happened and that could change the ball game dramatically. Former top aide comes clean, admits to lying, turns on the president. Dowd didn’t think so but he had to worry and consider the possibility.
Some things were clear and many were not in such a complex, tangled investigation. There was no perfect X-ray, no tapes, no engineer’s drawing. Dowd believed that the president had not colluded with Russia or obstructed justice.
But in the man and his presidency Dowd had seen the tragic flaw. In the political back-and-forth, the evasions, the denials, the tweeting, the obscuring, crying “Fake News,” the indignation, Trump had one overriding problem that Dowd knew but could not bring himself to say to the president: “You’re a fucking liar.”
1 President Donald J. Trump, first lady Melania Trump and their son Barron, age 11, at the White House on April 17, 2017.
2 After the Access Hollywood tape was released in October 2016, Mike Pence, Trump’s running mate, released a tough statement, and some believed he was prepared to take Trump’s place as the Republican presidential candidate with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as his running mate.
3 Trump named former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State in December 2016, telling aides that Tillerson looked the part he would play on the world stage. Tillerson had spent 40 years at Exxon and was untainted by government experience. “A very Trumpian-inspired pick,” campaign manager Kellyanne Conway said on television, promising “big impact.”
Tillerson and Trump clashed regularly. He called the president a “moron” and was later fired on March 13, 2018.
4 Retired Marine General and Secretary of Defense James Mattis helped top White House Economic Adviser Gary Cohn and Staff Secretary Rob Porter underscore to Trump the necessity of staying in a crucial trade deal with South Korea. “Mr. President,” Mattis said, “Kim Jong Un poses the most immediate threat to our national security. We need South Korea as an ally. It may not seem like trade is related to all this, but it’s central. We’re not doing this for South Korea. We’re helping South Korea because it helps us.”
5 Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Joseph Dunford argued in favor of NATO and against leaving the South Korean trade deal. When Trump asked for a new war plan for a military strike on North Korea, Dunford was shaken. “We need better intelligence before I give the president a plan,” Dunford said.
6 CIA Director Mike Pompeo, a former Republican congressman, became a Trump favorite. Pompeo initially tried to find a middle ground for the war in Afghanistan. Could the CIA paramilitary force be expanded, making a large troop increase unnecessary? Persuaded by old hands at the Agency that the CIA should avoid overcommitting to Afghanistan, Pompeo told the president the CIA was not a viable alternative to conventional forces in Afghanistan.
He was later named as Tillerson’s replacement as secretary of state.
7 Trump felt Attorney General Jeff Sessions had failed him by recusing himself from the Mueller investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. “Jeff isn’t a guy that, through thick and thin, is willing to stick with me,” Trump said. Sessions was an “idiot,” a “traitor,” and “mentally retarded” for recusing himself. “How in the world was I ever persuaded to pick him for my attorney general?” Trump asked. “He couldn’t even be a one-person country lawyer down in Alabama.
“What business does he have being attorney general?”
8 Reince Priebus, Trump’s first chief of staff, believed the White House was not leading on key issues like health-care and tax reform, and that foreign policy was not coherent and often contradictory. The Trump White House did not have a team of rivals but a team of predators, he concluded. “When you put a snake and a rat and a falcon and a rabbit and a shark and a seal in a zoo without walls, things start getting nasty and bloody. That’s what happens.” In July 2017, Priebus was replaced by Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly.
9 Homeland Security Secretary and retired Marine General John Kelly privately criticized the disorder and chaos of the White House. Kelly told the president he believed he could straighten the place out. But he was taken by surprise when Trump announced that he had named him his new chief of staff via Twitter in July 2017. Kelly was soon sidelined by Trump, although he remained in his post.
10 Retired General Michael Flynn resigned as Trump’s first national security adviser on February 13, 2017, for lying about his conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Flynn later plead guilty to lying to the FBI but denied emphatically that he had committed treason.
11 Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster, Trump’s second national security adviser, considered Secretary of Defense Mattis and Secretary of State Tillerson “the team of two” and found himself outside their orbit. He believed Mattis and Tillerson had concluded that the president and the White House were crazy. They sought to implement and even formulate policy on their own without interference or involvement from McMaster, let alone the president. “It is more loyal to the president,” McMaster said, “to try to persuade rather than circumvent.”
12 Trump clashed with his national security adviser, H. R. McMaster; his chief of staff, retired General John Kelly; and his secretary of state, Rex Tillerson. In contrast, his vice president, Mike Pence, kept a low profile, avoiding conflict.
13 National Economic Council Chairman Gary Cohn formed an alliance with Staff Secretary Rob Porter and at times Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis to curb some of Trump’s most dangerous impulses. “It’s not what we did for the country,” Cohn said. “It’s what we saved him from doing.”
14 Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and a senior White House adviser, almost single-handedly engineered Trump’s first overseas visit. The May 2017 summit in Saudi Arabia solidified relations among the Saudi Kingdom, other Gulf allies and Israel.
This was done in the face of resistance from Trump’s foreign policy advisers.
15 Steve Bannon became the Chief Executive Officer of Trump’s campaign in August 2016. Bannon had three campaign themes: “Number one, we’re going to stop mass illegal immigration and start to limit legal immigration to get our sovereignty back. Number two, you are going to bring manufacturing jobs back to the country.
“And number three, we’re going to get out of these pointless foreign wars.”