Trump
Is Scared
People
who have speculated that Trump’s COVID-19 treatment altered his judgment
misunderstand the president.
OCTOBER 16, 2020
He seemed
as if he might be delirious. He blasted out bewildering tweets in all caps.
Sick and infectious, he circled the perimeter of the hospital in an armored
SUV, waving to supporters. He demanded the arrest of his opponents.
After
doctors treated Donald Trump with a steroid last week, following his COVID-19
diagnosis, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, other Trump critics, and
national-security experts questioned whether the drug had warped his judgment.
“Roid rage” started trending on Twitter. His condition revived talk about
invoking the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. A Stanford University law professor who
had taken the same drug tweeted that she couldn’t be “president of
my cat” when under its influence.
Those
suspicions miss the point: Trump is belligerent when sick, just as he’s hostile
when well. He sees plots when he’s dosed with dexamethasone and conspiracies
when he’s gulping Diet Coke behind the Resolute desk. Days have passed since he
apparently stopped taking the drug, and he sounds every bit as unmoored.
What’s
been driving him in the final stretch of the campaign isn’t a medication that
messes with his mood. It’s dread, people who’ve worked with him throughout the
years told me. There are less than three weeks to go in a campaign that appears
to be heading the wrong way. “He’s down and he’s likely to lose,” a former
White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to talk more
freely, told me. “This is fear.”
It’s hard
to gauge whether Trump’s thinking was impaired. One measure that doctors use to
spot changes in a patient’s behavior is deviations from the baseline. But
Trump’s ordinary conduct is, “let’s say, charitably, unusual,”
Robert Wachter, the chairman of the department of medicine at UC San Francisco,
told me. Or, in the nonclinical and wholly unscientific assessment of the
ex–White House official: “There’s no way to put lipstick on this pig. The guy
is nuts.”
In
fundamental ways, Trump’s recent behavior isn’t all that different from his
conduct in other moments of personal stress; the stakes are just massively
higher. In his book Trumped, Jack O’Donnell, a former Trump
hotel-casino executive, describes how his boss lashed out about the
installation of a new VIP lounge at one of his hotels in Atlantic City, New
Jersey, in the late 1980s. Trump liked high ceilings, but this one was set low
to leave room for the pipes connected to hot tubs in the suites above.
Inspecting the space one day, Trump swore, jumped up, and “punched his fist
through the tile,” leaving one of his top executives feeling shaken and
humiliated, O’Donnell writes.
Watching
the news after Trump’s hospitalization, O’Donnell told me, he questioned the
“people who supposedly know him who were acting like this behavior is a result
of the steroids. While I think it’s ratcheted up a little bit, this is classic
Donald Trump that you’re seeing.”
Michael
Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, was struck by a moment in 2009 when
Trump berated his eldest son, Donald Jr. He describes the scene in his
book, Disloyal. Donald Trump was about to appear at a World
Wrestling Entertainment event in Green Bay, Wisconsin, when his namesake asked
him if he was nervous. “I’m going in front of millions of people. What kind of
stupid fucking question is that? Get out of here,” Trump snapped, according to
Cohen. (The White House has assailed Cohen’s credibility, along with his book.)
Right
now, the pressure Trump may be “feeling, knowing that he’s going to lose the
election, is intensifying everything that we’re seeing and putting him in a
hyper-agitated state,” Cohen told me.
After all, Trump has pumped
out baseless attacks before, sent unfathomable tweets before, accused opponents
of criminal acts before. Speaking to Fox Business yesterday morning, Trump
sprayed attacks with all the precision of 52 playing cards flung into the wind.
He slammed Pelosi (“she’s got a lot of mental problems”), Joe Biden (“he’s
mentally shot”), New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (“incompetent”), antifa
(“scum”), former FBI Director James Comey (“a corrupt person”), and the news
media (“the enemy of our people”). Referring to Gretchen Whitmer not by name
but by “she,” he said that the Democratic governor wants “to be a dictator in
Michigan.”
“The people
can’t stand her,” he added, just days after the FBI revealed that Whitmer was
the target of an alleged kidnapping plot.
None of
this behavior especially surprises those who’ve heard Oval Office rants dating
back to the start of Trump’s presidency. “In terms of his current behavior, to
me it looks like just another day at the office,” John Bolton, Trump’s former
national security adviser, told me. “He doesn’t need steroids to behave this
way.”
In Oval
Office meetings, John Kelly, the president’s ex–chief of staff, would clear the
room of lower-level aides when Trump grew irate. “His face would get contorted
and red, and you could see spit flying out of his mouth because he would get so
mad about something,” Miles Taylor, a former chief of staff at the Department
of Homeland Security, told me. “Sometimes he’d get mad about something that
wasn’t even the topic of the meeting.”
Taylor
remembers an instance when Trump berated him for taking notes at a meeting.
“What the fuck are you doing? Are you fucking taking notes?” Trump looked at
him and said, Taylor recalled. “And then he waited and he just stopped, and I
closed my notebook.”
“I don’t
think the so-called roid rage was all that remarkable,” added Taylor, who’s
become an outspoken Trump critic.
It might
all get worse. As Election Day nears, Trump’s dread may only grow, and his
outbursts may only become more desperate. He may step up attacks in hopes of
staving off a loss that he’d see as an intolerable rebuke. For someone who
craves adulation and can’t ever seem to get enough, defeat could leave a hole
that no treatment can remedy.
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PETER NICHOLAS is
a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers the White House.
