For Trump, all pertinent information trickled down from him, not up to him. The other leader was his equal, and his staff members were not. In Trump’s mind, the Hungarian strongman simply had more authority than the American officials who worked for Trump himself. In front of everyone, Trump told Shanahan that the autocratic Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orban, had already explained it all to him when they had met in the Oval Office moments earlier-and that Orban knew the issue better than Shanahan did, anyway. Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan, who was trying to make a point about a critical European security issue. During a cabinet meeting with a visiting Hungarian delegation in May 2019, for example, Trump cut off acting U.S. If a foreign visitor or caller was one of his favored strongmen, Trump would always give the strongman’s views and version of events the benefit of the doubt over those of his own advisers. When Trump was winging it, he could be persuaded of all kinds of things.
This had proved to be a major liability during those conversations, since it often seemed to his foreign counterparts as though Trump was hearing about the issues on the agenda for the first time. We all knew, for instance, that Trump rarely read the detailed briefing materials his staff prepared for him and that in meetings or calls with other leaders, he could never stick to an agreed-on script or his cabinet members’ recommendations. Like everyone else who worked in the White House, I had, by then, learned a great deal about Trump’s idiosyncrasies. What emerged instead was an altogether different sort of spectacle.īy the time of the meeting, I had spent just over a year serving in the Trump administration as deputy assistant to the president and senior director for European and Russian affairs on the National Security Council. That was the kind of show Trump wanted to put on in Helsinki. What better way, in Trump’s view, to showcase his prowess at the art of the deal? Those arms control summits had yielded the kind of iconic imagery that Trump loved: strong, serious men meeting in distant places to hash out the great issues of the day. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Donald Trump wanted his July 2018 meeting in Helsinki with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, to evoke memories of the momentous encounters that took place in the 1980s between U.S.
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