Leaders & Notable People
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Donald Trump v. The United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • With unparalleled reporting, a Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times reporter chronicles the clash between a president and the officials of his own government who tried to stop him.
"A meticulously reported volume that clearly benefits from the author's extraordinary access . . . [a] startling dissection of the Trump presidency."-The New York Times
Donald Trump v. The United States tells the dramatic, high-stakes story of those who felt compelled to confront and try to contain the most powerful man in the world as he shredded norms and sought to expand his power. Michael S. Schmidt takes readers inside the defining events of the presidency, chronicles them up close, and records the clash between an increasingly emboldened president and those around him, who find themselves trying to thwart the president they had pledged to serve, unsure whether he is acting in the interest of the country, his ego, his family business, or Russia. Through their eyes and ears, we observe an epic struggle.
Drawing on secret FBI and White House documents and confidential sources inside federal law enforcement and the West Wing, Donald Trump v. The United States is vital journalism from a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter that records the shocking reality of a presidency like no other. It is a riveting contemporary history and a lasting account of just how fragile and vulnerable the institutions of American democracy really are.
"A meticulously reported volume that clearly benefits from the author's extraordinary access . . . [a] startling dissection of the Trump presidency."-The New York Times
Donald Trump v. The United States tells the dramatic, high-stakes story of those who felt compelled to confront and try to contain the most powerful man in the world as he shredded norms and sought to expand his power. Michael S. Schmidt takes readers inside the defining events of the presidency, chronicles them up close, and records the clash between an increasingly emboldened president and those around him, who find themselves trying to thwart the president they had pledged to serve, unsure whether he is acting in the interest of the country, his ego, his family business, or Russia. Through their eyes and ears, we observe an epic struggle.
Drawing on secret FBI and White House documents and confidential sources inside federal law enforcement and the West Wing, Donald Trump v. The United States is vital journalism from a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter that records the shocking reality of a presidency like no other. It is a riveting contemporary history and a lasting account of just how fragile and vulnerable the institutions of American democracy really are.
Editorial Reviews
"[Michael S.] Schmidt chronicles how the professionals around the president tried to bring order to the White House and to keep Trump within the bounds of the law. . . . A powerful accounting of . . . lawlessness and chaos."-The Washington Post
Readers Top Reviews
Sheila
Lots of information i had not known before and laid out in a coherent manner. Good read, hope to learn more going forward.
Another great book with tons of research. It's good that Don McGhan was able to both testify so much before the Mueller Commission and that he seems to have shared these with this author. However, I can't help but have some doubts about McGhan stemming from this book. He appears to be machiavellian and/or obsessed (i.e. filling vacant justice seats.
LAYvonne Hart S
Michael Schmidt’s book “Donald Trump v. The United States” is a commendable effort for a first book. It’s exquisite in some of its inside details, but frustrating for the way it’s written and presented. I wish a good copy editor had gone over it and made extensive revisions. Too many times it’s muddy and opaque and wandering due to amateurish writing, which is strange for a newspaperman, they usually write such clean text. And then there are other parts where he reveals how he gets the juicy, big stories, how hard that is and how good he is at it; or other places where he’s the proverbial fly on the wall in a critical meeting that changed history. His main sources are clearly Don McGahn and James Comey. The book follows their respective stories, mainly from the inside and with their personal perceptions of events as they unfolded. Schmidt offers us lots of details, maybe too many, and spends time dissecting certain documents or giving historical information which waste pages and add nothing extra. The author refers to James Comey as “Jim” half the time, and “Comey” the other half, and his wife as Patrice, and “Tiricey” in Comey’s direct quotes. Call an editor for re-write, please! There are many other sources revealed, but rarely by name, a “lawyer” here, someone who “worked with someone” there. Newspaper/Journalist rules, it has to be that way. But this serves to show what a good reporter Schmidt is. After reading this book, I am left with uncomfortable feelings, about the two main characters, and as well, about the mental stability of our President. McGahn takes inhuman abuse from Trump so that he can keep his job and direct the appointment of judges, including the two to the Supreme Court. It’s hard to respect him. His silence after his departure from the WH only increases that disrespect. And Comey’s breach of FBI policy concerning the Clinton investigation is far worse in retrospect, considering its effect on the 2016 presidential election. Schmidt confirms what the other books have shown: that the Trump WH is not only chaotic, but a health hazard to anyone working there, and now to our nation and the wellbeing of our citizens. Schmidt amply documents that there are no adults there to keep order and do the nation’s business.
Short Excerpt Teaser
I
Rule of Law, Rule of Trump
August 1, 2018
One year, six months, and twelve days into the presidency
WASHINGTON, D.C.-Just before 9:30 on a brutally humid summer night in Washington, I was in a dead sprint down Connecticut Avenue toward the White House, chasing after a man who had no idea I was trying to catch him.
The math, I figured, was simple: I had to cover three city blocks in about thirty seconds before the man reached the northwest gate of the White House grounds and passed through security screening into the eighteen-acre headquarters of the United States' executive branch, safely out of reach. I had a fifty-fifty shot of getting to him.
It definitely occurred to me that it was ridiculous that I was running down the street like a cop chasing after a robber while wearing black dress shoes, jeans, and a sport jacket. But we'd long moved beyond normal in the year and a half since Donald J. Trump had been sworn in as president of the United States and we began confronting the daily bewilderment and furor that came with him running the country. What was unfolding before us was more a rolling series of crises than a traditional presidency, and with every twist and turn it became clearer that the Trump era in America would be the story of our lives.
And so I ran in the dark after this man. Since I'd started at The New York Times two months out of college as a clerk in the sports department, I had probably done stranger things in pursuit of a story. For one of my first big assignments, I tracked George Steinbrenner, the combustible owner of the New York Yankees, as he left the stadium and headed to the parking lot after games, aiming to capture a complaint about his club that would make a headline the next day. From there, I eventually took on a beat no one else wanted-performance-enhancing drugs-and had been hired as a full-time reporter. After four years, I left sports to spend a year in the Times' Baghdad bureau, before being moved to the Washington bureau in 2012. I covered the Secret Service, the FBI, and the Defense Department. But now, having joined a team investigating the Trump White House following the 2016 election, none of my experiences prepared me for the sheer velocity and disorientation of covering this president.
A few months earlier, it had become clear there was an emerging existential threat to Trump's presidency. A team of investigators from a special counsel's office was bearing down on the White House, the president wasn't taking it well, and his volatility itself had become a matter of grave national importance. A president in trouble, whose conduct was so unpredictable, required good sourcing to understand. It pushed us to get better at cultivating and protecting our sources, so I had recently found myself chauffeuring a key witness to the chaos around the Washington metro area. At all hours of the day, I would pick the source up at airports and train stations in my mother's fourteen-year-old Volvo station wagon for secret meetings in the only place where I could have the source's undivided attention and guarantee him that, as we snaked aimlessly through Washington's leafy neighborhoods and talked, no one would see us together or hear what we were saying.
Now, as for the man I was chasing down the street, he had never been a source, but I wanted badly to know everything he knew about President Trump and the inside dynamics of his administration. The man had been in the room for many of the events being investigated by the special counsel, though his significance in the unfolding saga went far beyond just passively witnessing extraordinary, possibly historic, or even criminal events in real time. Based on my reporting, the man two blocks in front of me striding back to the Executive Mansion, Donald F. McGahn II, the White House counsel, was more important to the success and survival of Trump's presidency than anyone else in the West Wing.
McGahn was only really known to those who closely watched the administration and monitored the rising and falling cachet of the people around the mercurial president. From McGahn's perspective, he was there to serve as the most senior lawyer responsible for counseling the president behind closed doors and helping him work the levers of power to achieve his policy goals. But because that president was Trump, this was complicated, and what McGahn actually spent his days doing amounted to trying to fit the square peg of what Trump wanted to do as he worked the levers of power through the round hole of what was legal and ethical. Trump had a profound insensitivity to how his actions would be perceived...
Rule of Law, Rule of Trump
August 1, 2018
One year, six months, and twelve days into the presidency
WASHINGTON, D.C.-Just before 9:30 on a brutally humid summer night in Washington, I was in a dead sprint down Connecticut Avenue toward the White House, chasing after a man who had no idea I was trying to catch him.
The math, I figured, was simple: I had to cover three city blocks in about thirty seconds before the man reached the northwest gate of the White House grounds and passed through security screening into the eighteen-acre headquarters of the United States' executive branch, safely out of reach. I had a fifty-fifty shot of getting to him.
It definitely occurred to me that it was ridiculous that I was running down the street like a cop chasing after a robber while wearing black dress shoes, jeans, and a sport jacket. But we'd long moved beyond normal in the year and a half since Donald J. Trump had been sworn in as president of the United States and we began confronting the daily bewilderment and furor that came with him running the country. What was unfolding before us was more a rolling series of crises than a traditional presidency, and with every twist and turn it became clearer that the Trump era in America would be the story of our lives.
And so I ran in the dark after this man. Since I'd started at The New York Times two months out of college as a clerk in the sports department, I had probably done stranger things in pursuit of a story. For one of my first big assignments, I tracked George Steinbrenner, the combustible owner of the New York Yankees, as he left the stadium and headed to the parking lot after games, aiming to capture a complaint about his club that would make a headline the next day. From there, I eventually took on a beat no one else wanted-performance-enhancing drugs-and had been hired as a full-time reporter. After four years, I left sports to spend a year in the Times' Baghdad bureau, before being moved to the Washington bureau in 2012. I covered the Secret Service, the FBI, and the Defense Department. But now, having joined a team investigating the Trump White House following the 2016 election, none of my experiences prepared me for the sheer velocity and disorientation of covering this president.
A few months earlier, it had become clear there was an emerging existential threat to Trump's presidency. A team of investigators from a special counsel's office was bearing down on the White House, the president wasn't taking it well, and his volatility itself had become a matter of grave national importance. A president in trouble, whose conduct was so unpredictable, required good sourcing to understand. It pushed us to get better at cultivating and protecting our sources, so I had recently found myself chauffeuring a key witness to the chaos around the Washington metro area. At all hours of the day, I would pick the source up at airports and train stations in my mother's fourteen-year-old Volvo station wagon for secret meetings in the only place where I could have the source's undivided attention and guarantee him that, as we snaked aimlessly through Washington's leafy neighborhoods and talked, no one would see us together or hear what we were saying.
Now, as for the man I was chasing down the street, he had never been a source, but I wanted badly to know everything he knew about President Trump and the inside dynamics of his administration. The man had been in the room for many of the events being investigated by the special counsel, though his significance in the unfolding saga went far beyond just passively witnessing extraordinary, possibly historic, or even criminal events in real time. Based on my reporting, the man two blocks in front of me striding back to the Executive Mansion, Donald F. McGahn II, the White House counsel, was more important to the success and survival of Trump's presidency than anyone else in the West Wing.
McGahn was only really known to those who closely watched the administration and monitored the rising and falling cachet of the people around the mercurial president. From McGahn's perspective, he was there to serve as the most senior lawyer responsible for counseling the president behind closed doors and helping him work the levers of power to achieve his policy goals. But because that president was Trump, this was complicated, and what McGahn actually spent his days doing amounted to trying to fit the square peg of what Trump wanted to do as he worked the levers of power through the round hole of what was legal and ethical. Trump had a profound insensitivity to how his actions would be perceived...
