The wall is, to the CIA, Arlington National Cemetery in miniature, a sacred space. In addition to somber memorial services when new stars are unveiled, the setting has been used for ceremonies marking momentous agency events, including the culmination of the hunt for Osama bin Laden. It has also been a backdrop for presidents. In 2009, Obama stood before the stars for a first visit that was also uncomfortable. As a presidential candidate, he had called the CIA’s post-9/11 interrogation methods torture. Once in office, he ordered the agency’s secret prisons dismantled, and directed that the legal memos used to justify their operation be made public. Obama defended those decisions to a wary audience that he acknowledged viewed him with “understandable anxiety and concern.” But he also spoke of employees’ sacrifice and courage, describing the stars behind him—eighty-nine at the time—as “a testament to both the men and women of the CIA who gave their lives in service to their country.” Even those who considered Obama hostile to the agency (and there were many) respected his recognition of so many lives lost.
As the ceremony for Trump got under way, Park was first to the podium, telling the new president that “hundreds more” agency employees wished to attend but were turned away for lack of space. “It means a great deal that you chose to come to CIA on your first full day as president,” she said.
Vice President Mike Pence was next to speak, and hit all the politically expedient notes. It was “deeply humbling,” he said, to appear before “men and women of character who have sacrificed greatly and to stand before this hallowed wall, this memorial wall, where we remember 117 who paid the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom.” He then set the table for Trump, saying he knew the new president was “going to make America safe again,” and that he had “never met anyone with a greater heart for those who every day, in diverse ways, protect the people of this nation through their character and their service and their sacrifice.”
Trump took the stage in a striped blue tie and, though indoors, a topcoat that fell below his knees. “There is nobody that feels stronger about the intelligence community and the CIA than Donald Trump,” he said as he stood facing the bronze gaze of Donovan’s statue. The agency would get so much support under his administration, he said, that “maybe you’re going to say, ‘Please don’t give us so much backing.’” He vowed to rid the world of terrorist groups and assured employees that their new director, Pompeo, was a “total star.”
The speech to that point seemed on track. Park and other agency officials appeared to exhale, gaining confidence that their fears—a confrontation, an attack on the Russia analysts, another Nazi slur—would not materialize. Then midway through his fifteen-minute appearance, without any pause or outward sign, Trump changed course. Abandoning discussion of anything relevant to the agency, he set off on a riff about how youthful he felt—“thirty, thirty-five, thirty-nine”—and described the size of his crowds during the final days of the campaign—“twenty-five thousand, thirty thousand people, fifteen thousand, nineteen thousand.” He falsely claimed to hold the record for Time magazine covers, and teased that he would help build a new room at CIA so that “your thousands of other people that have been trying to come in” would have the privilege of seeing him next time. Drifting into solipsism, Trump called members of the media “the most dishonest human beings on earth” for refusing to acknowledge the “million, million and a half people” he said had attended his inauguration the previous day—an erroneous claim off by a factor of four.
Hard-core Trump loyalists in the crowd stayed with him, standing throughout, cheering the taunts and boasts. But others began to shift uncomfortably, and CIA veterans who read his remarks or watched them online recoiled. There is no shortage of braggadocio at the CIA, an agency regarded by other U.S. intelligence services as permanently afflicted with a superiority complex. But in that setting, between the flags that frame the memorial wall, the display of rampant egotism felt offensive. A CIA veteran called Trump’s address “one of the more disconcerting speeches I’ve seen.” Another called it a “freewheeling narcissistic diatribe.” Brennan, whose career at the agency spanned twenty-five years, issued a statement later that day describing Trump’s appearance as a “despicable display of self-aggrandizement.” The president, Brennan said, “should be ashamed of himself.”
Members of Trump’s entourage had a different reaction: the applause and ovations persuaded his handlers, including Priebus, that the president had made headway in mending his rift with the CIA, and possibly had begun to win over the agency workforce. Pompeo, according to aides, saw the dynamic in reverse: that through ovation and flattery the workforce had begun to win over a president who craved adoration. Either way, Trump’s team considered his appearance at CIA a success.
During his speech, Trump directed applause to two of his closest aides, both sitting in the front row. “General Flynn is right over here. Put up your hand. What a good guy,” Trump said of his national security adviser, Michael Flynn. A retired Army general who had been one of Trump’s most vocal campaign supporters, Flynn was by then already under FBI investigation for omitting large foreign payments from his financial disclosure forms. Within days, he would also be questioned by FBI agents over his troubling post-election contacts with the Russian ambassador to the United States. Next to get presidential praise was Priebus: “Reince. He’s like this political guy that turned out to be a superstar, right?” Trump said of his chief of staff, who was already struggling to tame the chaos of the Trump White House and was soon, like Flynn, banished.
Absorbed in self-adulation and grievances, Trump was blind to a stunning array of problems, some in plain view from the CIA stage: the failings of a national security adviser he’d insisted on hiring despite warnings; the existence of a larger agency workforce beyond this clapping, self-selected crowd that would be profoundly disturbed by his vainglorious performance; the fragments of intelligence being assembled in that very building that would help expose a web of connections between his campaign and Russia, and feed into investigations that would threaten his presidency.
Trump’s ability to see these perils was impaired by his own unfamiliarity with the norms of governance, his insecurity and narcissism. Other presidents had varying levels of these traits, but none had ever possessed such a concentrated combination. These qualities had been on display from the start of his campaign. But now, against a backdrop that symbolized the profound burden of presidential responsibility, his shortcomings seemed suddenly and gravely consequential.
In the reality show that had propelled him to great fame, Trump was depicted as a business titan with peerless instincts—a consummate negotiator, a fearless dealmaker, and an unflinching evaluator of talent who forgot nothing. Week after week, contestants competed for the chance to learn from a boardroom master—to be, as the show’s title put it, his apprentice.
In the reality that commenced with his inauguration, Trump seemed incapable of basic executive aspects of the job. His White House was consumed by dysfunction, with warring factions waiting for direction—or at least a coherent decision-making process—from the president. His outbursts sent waves of panic through the West Wing, with aides scrambling to contain the president’s anger or divine some broader mandate from the latest 140-character blast. He made rash hiring decisions, installing cabinet officials who seemed unfamiliar with the functions of their agencies, let alone their ethical and administrative requirements. Decorated public servants were subjected to tirades in the Oval Office and humiliating dress-downs in public. White House documents were littered with typos and obvious mistakes. Senior aides showed up at meetings without the requisite security clearances—and sometimes stayed anyway. Trump refused to read intelligence reports, and he grew so visibly bored during briefings that analysts took to reducing the world’s complexities to a collection of bullet points.
The supposedly accomplished mogul was the opposite of how he’d been presented on prime-time television. Now he was the one who was inexperienced, utterly unprepared, in dire need of a steadying hand. Now he was the apprentice.
The word, of course, has another connotation, one acutely relevant when it came to Donald Trump: an aspect of servility. Trump’s admiration for the leader of Russia was inexplicable and unwavering. He praised Putin, congratulated him, defended him, pursued meetings with him, and even when talking tough,