Current and former Trump administration officials are worried about what might happen on Nov. 4.
There will of course be an Election Day — and it could be one of tumult, banners colliding, incidents at the polls and attempted hacks galore. More likely than not, it will end without a winner named or at least generally accepted. America will probably awaken on Nov.4 into uncertainty. Whatever else happens, there is no doubt that President Trump is ready for it. I’ve spent the last month interviewing some two dozen officials and aides, several of whom are still serving in the Trump administration. The central sources in this story are or were senior officials, mainly in jobs that require Senate confirmation. They have had regular access to the president and to briefings at the highest level. As a rule, they asked for anonymity because they were taking a significant professional and, in some cases, personal risk in speaking out in a way that Mr. Trump will see as disloyal, an offense for which he has promised to make offenders pay. Several of them are in current posts in intelligence, law enforcement or national security and are focused on the concurrent activities of violent, far-right and white supremacy groups that have been encouraged by the president’s words and actions. They are worried that the president could use the power of the government — the one they all serve or served within — to keep himself in office or to create favorable terms for negotiating his exit from the White House. Like many other experts inside and outside the government, they are also concerned about foreign adversaries using the internet to sow chaos, exacerbate divisions and undermine our democratic process. Many of those adversaries, they report, are already finding success in simply amplifying and directing the president’s words and tweets. And they’re thoroughly delighted, a former top intelligence official told me, “at how profoundly divided we’ve become. Donald Trump capitalized on that — he didn’t invent it — but someday soon we’re going to have figure out how to bring our country together, because right now we’re on a dangerous path, so very dangerous, and so vulnerable to bad actors.” None of these officials know what will happen in the future any better than the rest of us do. It is their job to fret over worst-case scenarios, and they’re damn good at it. I can’t know all their motives for wanting to speak to me, but one thing many of them share is a desire to make clear that the alarm bells heard across the country are ringing loudly inside the administration too, where there are public servants looking to avert conflict, at all costs. It is possible, of course, that this will be an Election Day much like all other Election Days. Even if it takes weeks or months before the result is known and fully certified, it could be a peaceful process, where all votes are reasonably counted, allowing those precious electors to be distributed based on a fair fight. The anxiety we’re feeling now could turn out to be a lot of fretting followed by nothing much, a political version of Y2K. Or not. Many of the officials I spoke to came back to one idea: You don’t know Donald Trump like we do. Even though they can’t predict exactly what will happen, their concerns range from the president welcoming, then leveraging, foreign interference in the election, to encouraging havoc that grows into conflagrations that would merit his calling upon U.S. forces. Because he is now surrounded by loyalists, they say, there is no one to try to tell an impulsive man what he should or shouldn’t do. “That guy you saw in the debate,” a second former senior intelligence official told me, after the first debate, when the president offered one of the most astonishing performances of any leader in modern American history — bullying, ridiculing, manic, boasting, fabricating, relentlessly interrupting and talking over his opponent. “That’s really him. Not the myth that’s been created. That’s Trump.” Still another senior government official, who spent years working in proximity to Mr. Trump, put it like this: “He has done nothing else that’s a constant, except for acting in his own interest.” And that’s how “he’s going to be thinking, every step of the way, come Nov.3.” One of the first things senior staff members learned about Mr. Trump was that he was all but un-briefable. He couldn’t seem to take in complex information about policy choices and consequences in the ways presidents usually do in Oval Office meetings. What they saw instead was the guy from the first debate. He’d switch subjects, go on crazy tangents, abuse and humiliate people, cut them off midsentence. Officials I interviewed described this scenario again and again. In the middle of a briefing, Mr. Trump would turn away and grab the phone. Sometimes the call would go to Fox television hosts like Sean Hannity or Lou Dobbs; sometimes the officials wouldn’t even know who was on the other end. But whoever it was would instantly become the key voice in the debate. In one meeting about the border wall, Mr. Trump called a person “who built a flagpole at one of his golf courses,” said an official in attendance that day. Mr. Trump explained that because this person “got in a big fight about the size of the flagpole” and because it was “really big,” “the president thought, of course, they would understand how to build a wall.” “Obviously,” this official said, “it is not the same.” “We used to joke that is was like a phone-a-friend thing, a lifeline thing” from “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” this person said. Soon, senior officials — frustrated that they couldn’t seem to get a word in during briefings — adopted their own version of this technique. They’d ask an array of people — some Trump friends, some members of Congress, assorted notables — to call Mr. Trump and talk to him about key issues. The callers just couldn’t let on that a senior official had put them up to it. Two of these senior officials compared the technique to the manipulations of “The Truman Show,” in which the main character, played by Jim Carrey, does not know that his entire life is being orchestrated by a TV producer. In March 2018, Mr. Trump took a trip on Air Force One to Charlotte, N.C., for the funeral of the Rev. Billy Graham. History may note that the most important thing that happened that day had little to do with the religious leader and his large life, save a single thread of his legacy. That would be his grandson, Edward Graham, an Army Ranger “right out of central casting,” as Mr. Trump liked to say, who’d served eight tours in Afghanistan and Iraq over 16 years. In full uniform he met Mr. Trump to escort him, and the two talked about the country’s grueling conflicts overseas. For Mr. Trump, the meeting was a face-to-face lifeline call. When he returned to Washington, he couldn’t stop talking about troop withdrawals, starting with Afghanistan. During his campaign, he had frequently mentioned his desire to bring home troops from these “endless wars.” As president, his generals — led by the polished, scholarly, even-keeled Defense Secretary Jim Mattis — explained the importance of U.S. troops in stabilizing whole regions of the world, and the value of that stability. Suddenly, after talking to Edward Graham, Mr. Trump didn’t want to hear it. “In a normal, sane environment,” said a senior Pentagon official, “were it Obama or Bush, or whatever, they’d meet Billy Graham’s grandson and they’d be like ‘Oh that’s interesting,’ and take it to heart, but then they’d go and they’d at least try to validate it with the policymakers, or their military experts. But no, with him, it’s like improv. So, he gets this stray electron and he goes, ‘OK, this is the ground truth.’ ” Mr. Graham, now working in his family’s ministry, said, “Any conversations that I have had with the president are private.” And, “additionally, when I had those conversations with the president, I was in the Army and I was speaking with our commander in chief.” Several weeks later, at a speech in Ohio, Mr. Trump said, “we’re knocking the hell out of ISIS” in Syria and the U.S. troops there would be coming home “very soon.” Once they heard this, shock started to run through Mr. Mattis and his old friend, John Kelly, who’d commanded Marine forces but was then the chief of staff to the president. Both men understood that the 2,000 U.S. troops in Syria were, soldier for soldier, probably the most valuable fighting force on the planet. They not only fought alongside the Kurds in routing ISIS, which was battered yet still a threat. These few troops helped hold the region intact, supporting the Syrian Democratic Forces, also filled with Kurds, which in turn checked the expansion of Syria’s murderous leader, Bashar al-Assad, and also kept Russia, Mr. Assad’s patron, in check. The Kurds had suffered tremendously in these conflicts, much more than the Americans had. Word spread, and soon much of Congress, the Pentagon, the State Department and Mr. Kelly were doing various versions of “The Truman Show,” trying to get people on the phone that Mr. Trump trusted. This went on for much of the year — as various voices, both inside and outside of government, worked to try to excise this idea of pulling troops out of Syria from the man. On Dec.19,2018, top brass at the Pentagon received notification via Mr. Trump’s Twitter feed, along with more than 80 million of his followers: The United States would be pulling troops out of Syria. It wasn’t clear what, precisely, Mr. Trump was thinking, beyond the tweet: “We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump presidency.” ISIS was shrunken, but not yet fully defeated. And the move meant a radical reduction in American influence in Syria, an increase in the power of Russia and Iran to determine events there and quite possibly a land grab by the Turkish government, sworn enemy of the Kurds.
