Not long after Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s last chief of staff, left the White House, I asked him about the rambling telephone call he had participated in during which Mr. Trump told Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, to find him enough votes to overcome Joe Biden’s lead in the state.
During our conversation, Mr. Meadows didn’t exactly try to defend Mr. Trump or himself but rather took a stab at putting this potentially criminal request in the context of the unusual epistemology that almost everyone around Mr. Trump has come to regard as part and parcel of his presidency.
“The president has a certain way of speaking,” said Mr. Meadows. “And what he means — well, the sum can be greater or less than the whole.”
The words that will very likely get Mr. Trump indicted in Georgia, and possibly Mr. Meadows along with him, were, a weary Mr. Meadows seemed to be saying, more of the same, part of Mr. Trump’s unmediated fire hose of verbiage, an unstoppable sequence of passing digressions, gambits and whims, more attuned to the rhythms of his voice than to any obligation to logic or, often, to any actual point or meaning at all and hardly worth taking notice of.
Does Mr. Trump mean what he says? And what exactly does he mean when he says what he says? His numerous upcoming trials may hinge on these questions.
Tony Schwartz, his ghostwriter on “The Art of the Deal” — as bewildered more than 30 years ago by Mr. Trump’s disconnected-from-reality talk as anyone might be today — came up with a formulation that tried to put Mr. Trump’s rhetorical flights from earth in the context of a salesman’s savvy. In other words, if you took him at his word, you were the fool, and yet, perhaps even more to the point, he succeeds because he comes to believe himself, making him the ultimate fool (as well as the ultimate salesman).
Yes, he might have seemed to call for insurrection on Jan. 6, but as the events that day unfolded, according to various people in contact with him in the White House, he seemed uncomprehending and passive. He waved a classified document in front of a writer he was trying to impress, bragging about the secrets illegally in his possession. That certainly is in character, uncaring about rules, negligent about his actions, unthinking of the consequences. At the same time, his defense, that he had no such document, that he was waving just press clippings, that he was essentially making it all up, is in perfect character, too.
And then there was the laughable plan to mobilize new state electors. Here was certainly an effort to subvert the election, but it was also a fantasy with no hope in hell of ever succeeding; indeed, he seems to have long delighted in surrounding himself with clownish people (especially lawyers) performing clownish feats to gain his approval — more court jesters than co-conspirators.
His yearslong denial of the 2020 election may be an elaborate fraud, a grifter’s denial of the obvious truth, as prosecutors maintain, but if so, he really hasn’t broken character the entire time. I’ve had my share of exposure to his fantastic math over the years — so did almost everyone around him at Mar-a-Lago after the election — and I don’t know anyone who didn’t walk away from those conversations at least a little shaken by his absolute certainty that the election really was stolen from him.
It is precisely this behavior, unconcerned with guardrails or rules, unmindful of cause and effect, all according to his momentary whim — an overwhelming, almost anarchic instinct to try to invert reality — that prosecutors and much of the political establishment seem to most want to hold him accountable for. The chaos he creates is his crime; there is, however, no statute against upsetting the dependable order. Breaking the rules — often seemingly to no further purpose than just to break the rules as if he were a supreme nihilist or simply an obstreperous child — is not much of a grand criminal enterprise, even though for many, it’s infuriating coming from someone charged with upholding the rules.
Many Democrats have come to assume that the dastardly effect of Mr. Trump’s political success must mean that he has an evil purpose. During his trials, prosecutors will try to establish that precise link. But that might not be such a trivial challenge. He is being pursued under several broad, ill-defined statutes like the Espionage Act, RICO, conspiracy and obstruction of justice. Without an exchange of money or quid pro quo, proving his crimes will largely come down to showing specific intent or capturing his state of mind — and with Donald Trump, that’s quite a trip down the rabbit hole.
His prosecutors will try to use his words against him: among them, his exhortations that arguably prompted the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, his admission — on tape! — that he still had classified documents, his various, half-baked plots about how to game the Electoral College system, his relentless and unremitting insistence that he won his lost election and his comments to his bag man, Michael Cohen, before he paid off Stormy Daniels.
For Democrats, it’s an explosion of smoking guns.
And yet the larger pattern, clear to anyone who has had firsthand experience with the former president, is that he will say almost anything that pops into his head at any given moment, often making a statement so confusing in its logic that to maintain one’s own mental balance, it’s necessary to dismiss its seriousness on the spot or to pretend you never heard it.
Jack Smith, Fani Willis and Alvin Bragg will try to prove that the former president’s words are nefarious rather than spontaneous, that there has been a calculated effort to deceive rather than just idle talk, a series of crowd-pleasing gestures or cuckoo formulations and that his efforts to obstruct the investigations against him were part of a larger plan rather than just the actions of a bad boy. I’d guess that the Trump opposition doesn’t much care which it is — nefarious or spontaneous — but are only grateful that Mr. Trump, in his startling transparence, has foolishly hoisted himself with his own petard.
There is a special urgency here, of course, as Mr. Trump’s chances of clinching the Republican nomination seem to grow stronger by the day. The terrible possibility for Democrats, anti-Trump Republicans and the media that he could become the president again is balanced only by their fail-safe certainty of conviction on at least some of the state and federal felony charges he is facing (a complicated paradox for a democracy, to say the least).
Personally, I’m less sure of Mr. Trump’s legal fate. Prosecutors will soon run up against the epistemological challenges of explaining and convicting a man whose behavior defies and undermines the structures and logic of civic life.
There’s an asymmetric battle here, between the government’s precise and thorough prosecutors and Mr. Trump’s head-smacking gang of woeful lawyers. The absolute ludicrousness and disarray of the legal team defending Mr. Trump after his second impeachment ought to go down in trial history. Similarly, a few months ago, a friend of mine was having a discussion with Mr. Trump about his current legal situation. A philosophical Mr. Trump said that while he probably didn’t have the best legal team, he was certain he had the best looking, displaying pictures of the comely women with law degrees he had hired to help with his cases.
Here liberals see a crushing advantage: As ever, Mr. Trump seems unable to walk a straight line even in his own defense. But his unwillingness or, as likely, inability to play by the rules or even understand them creates a chaos often in his favor. Indeed, the prosecutors’ story of his grand scheming will most likely require them to present a figure of the former president — calculated, methodical, knowing and cunning — that none of his supporters or anyone who has ever met him or reasonable jurors and perhaps even the world at large would recognize.
I can’t imagine what will be produced by this dynamic of strait-laced prosecutors versus a preposterous Mr. Trump, his malfeasance always on the edge of farce. But my gut tells me the anti-Trump world could be in for another confounding disappointment.
Michael Wolff (@MichaelWolffNYC) is the author of three books about Donald Trump, including, most recently, “Landslide: Inside the Final Days of the Trump Presidency.”
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