Donald Trump v. The United States

I

Rule of Law, Rule of Trump

August 1, 2018

One year, six months, and twelve days into the presidency

WASHINGTON, D.C. Just before 9:30 on a brutally humid summer night in Washington, I was in a dead sprint down Connecticut Avenue toward the White House, chasing after a man who had no idea I was trying to catch him.

The math, I figured, was simple: I had to cover three city blocks in about thirty seconds before the man reached the northwest gate of the White House grounds and passed through security screening into the eighteen-acre headquarters of the United States executive branch, safely out of reach. I had a fifty-fifty shot of getting to him.

It definitely occurred to me that it was ridiculous that I was running down the street like a cop chasing after a robber while wearing black dress shoes, jeans, and a sport jacket. But we d long moved beyond normal in the year and a half since Donald J. Trump had been sworn in as president of the United States and we began confronting the daily bewilderment and furor that came with him running the country. What was unfolding before us was more a rolling series of crises than a traditional presidency, and with every twist and turn it became clearer that the Trump era in America would be the story of our lives.

And so I ran in the dark after this man. Since I d started at The New York Times two months out of college as a clerk in the sports department, I had probably done stranger things in pursuit of a story. For one of my first big assignments, I tracked George Steinbrenner, the combustible owner of the New York Yankees, as he left the stadium and headed to the parking lot after games, aiming to capture a complaint about his club that would make a headline the next day. From there, I eventually took on a beat no one else wanted performance-enhancing drugs and had been hired as a full-time reporter. After four years, I left sports to spend a year in the Times Baghdad bureau, before

Michael S. Schmidt is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winning Washington correspondent for The New York Times. Over his fifteen years at the Times, he has covered the investigations of the Trump presidency, the Pentagon, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the war in Iraq. He started his career at The New York Times as a clerk answering the phones on the foreign desk before becoming a sports reporter covering performance-enhancing drugs and legal issues. He is a graduate of Lafayette College.

[Michael S.] Schmidt chronicles how the professionals around the president tried to bring order to the White House and to keep Trump within the bounds of the law. . . . A powerful accounting of . . . lawlessness and chaos. The Washington Post