Trump’s Guardrails Are Gone
The president’s more pliant senior advisers might end up indulging his ultimately self-sabotaging behavior.
One Saturday in June 2017, President Donald Trump called Don McGahn twice at home. The president ordered the White House counsel to fire Robert Mueller, who at that point had been leading the Russia probe for one month. “You gotta do this,” Trump told him. “You gotta call Rod.” In his second call, Trump told McGahn, “Call me back when you do it.”
The special counsel’s report—released on Thursday to the public—goes on to reveal that McGahn refused to call the then-Acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and direct him to fire Mueller. Instead McGahn called then-Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and then chief strategist Steve Bannon to let them know he was resigning, that the president had asked him to “do crazy shit.” But Priebus and
