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2 MICHAEL WOLFF

House rather than, in a distinction Trump could never firmly grasp, the
president himself—demonstrated little ability to make problems disap-
pear and became a constant brunt of Trump’s rages and invective. His legal
interpretation of proper executive branch function too often thwarted his
boss’s wishes.

Dowd and his colleagues, Ty Cobb and Jay Sekulow—the trio of law-
yers charged with navigating the president through his personal legal
problems—had, on the other hand, become highly skilled in avoiding
their client’s bad humor, which was often accompanied by menacing,
barely controlled personal attacks. All three men understood that to be a
successful lawyer for Donald Trump was to tell the client what he wanted
to hear.

Trump harbored a myth about the ideal lawyer that had almost noth-
ing to do with the practice of law. He invariably cited Roy Cohn, his old
New York friend, attorney, and tough-guy mentor, and Robert Kennedy,
John F. Kennedy’s brother. “He was always on my ass about Roy Cohn
and Bobby Kennedy,” said Steve Bannon, the political strategist who,
perhaps more than anyone else, was responsible for Trump’s victory.
“‘Roy Cohn and Bobby Kennedy,’ he would say. ‘Where’s my Roy Cohn
and Bobby Kennedy?’” Cohn, to his own benefit and legend, built the
myth that Trump continued to embrace: with enough juice and mus-
cle, the legal system could always be gamed. Bobby Kennedy had been
his brother’s attorney general and hatchet man; he protected JFK and
worked the back channels of power for the benefit of the family.

This was the constant Trump theme: beating the system. “I’m the guy
who gets away with it,” he had often bragged to friends in New York.

At the same time, he did not want to know details. He merely wanted
his lawyers to assure him that he was winning. “We’re killing it, right?
That’s what I want to know. That’s all I want to know. If we’re not killing
it, you screwed up,” he shouted one afternoon at members of his ad hoc
legal staff.

From the start, it had become a particular challenge to find top law-
yers to take on what, in the past, had always been one of the most vaunted
of legal assignments: representing the president of the United States. One
high-profile Washington white-collar litigator gave Trump a list of twenty

SIEGE

issues that would immediately need to be addressed if he were to ta
on the case. Trump refused to consider any of them. More than a doz
major firms had turned down his business. In the end, Trump was left wi
a ragtag group of solo practitioners without the heft and resources of t
firms. Now, thirteen months after his inauguration, he was facing p
sonal legal trouble at least as great as that faced by Richard Nixon and B
Clinton, and doing so with what seemed like, at best, a Court Street leg
team. But Trump appeared to be oblivious to this exposed flank. Ratch
ing up his level of denial about the legal threats around him, he breez
rationalized: “If I had good lawyers, I’d look guilty.”

Dowd, at seventy-seven, had had a long, successful legal career, bo
in government and in Washington law firms. But that was in the past. H
was on his own now, eager to postpone retirement. He knew the impo
tance, certainly to his own position in Trump’s legal circle, of unde
standing his client’s needs. He was forced to agree with the presiden
assessment of the investigation into his campaign’s contact with Russi
state interests: it would not reach him. To that end, Dowd, and the oth
members of Trump’s legal team, recommended that the president coo
erate with the Mueller investigation.

“I’m not a target, right?” Trump constantly prodded them.

This wasn’t a rhetorical question. He insisted on an answer, and
affirmative one: “Mr. President, you’re not a target.” Early in his tenu
Trump had pushed FBI director James Comey to provide precisely th
reassurance. In one of the signature moves of his presidency, he had fir
Comey in May 2017 in part because he wasn’t satisfied with the enth
siasm of the affirmation and therefore assumed Comey was plotti
against him.

Whether the president was indeed a target—and it would surely ha
taken a through-the-looking-glass exercise not to see him as the bullse
of the Mueller investigation—seemed to occupy a separate reality fro
Trump’s need to be reassured that he was not a target.

“Trump’s trained me,” Ty Cobb told Steve Bannon. “Even if it’s ba
it’s great.”

Trump imagined—indeed, with a preternatural confidence, nothi
appeared to dissuade him—that sometime in the very near future he wou

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