Doug Wead - 26 Nov

I t was December 23, 2018. Many on the White House staff had scattered for Christmas vacation. The mansion was almost empty, at least compared with most nights. Outside, spotlights illuminated the building and the grounds. Inside, many of the sparkling Christmas decorations had gone dark. Only security and some service personnel remained on the job, and some of them were shifting their schedules to be home with their families as soon as possible.

President Donald Trump was spotted moving among the Christmas trees on the State Floor of the White House mansion. He was alone. In the shadows, hovering nearby, were staff, some using high-density pen-lights to guide their footsteps, trying to remain invisible. As he passed, the president smiled and bantered good-naturedly, asking about their families. Then he stepped into the Blue Room, where the mansions most important Christmas tree was dark, and from the blackness he looked outside at the glittering night. Just to the left, floodlights illuminated the Washington Monument, which towered above the city. Straight ahead, outside, was the massively lit national Christmas tree, and beyond that one could barely see the glowing marble dome of the Jefferson Memorial.

Donald Trump was now at the halfway mark of his first term as president of the United States, but that night he was one lone man, standing in the darkened Blue Room of the White House, with the images of distant marble monuments to other great men reflecting off the windows.

It had been a spectacular ascent. In 2016 Trump had defied the unanimous opinion of political experts by winning the Republican nomination for president. Months later he had defied the experts again by winning the presidency. On the very morning of the election, the New York Times had given him only a 9 percent chance of winning. But he had won in an electoral landslide.

As a candidate he had promised to be the greatest jobs president God ever created. But the worlds economists universally scorned him and derided his economic predictions. They were denounced as mathematical impossibilities.

Just before the election, the Washington Post declared that if he won he would destroy the world economy.

The day after his election, Paul Krugman of the New York Times predicted a global recession, with no end in sight.

Larry Summers, a former secretary of treasury and top economic adviser to both Clinton and Obama, dismissed Trumps budget as ludicrous. Summers, who had also once been the president of Harvard University, said it would work if you believed in tooth fairies.

But by the end of the year Donald Trumps dreams had become Americas reality. His economy had effortlessly defied gravity. By the second quarter of 2018 the gross domestic product had topped 4.1 percent. Wages were up. Unemployment was down.

CNN had promised A Trump win would sink stocks.

By the end of his second year in office the growing list of accomplishments had been vastly expanded. It was chronicled by Paul Bedard in a Washington Examiner article entitled, Trumps List: 289 Accomplishments in Just 20 months, Relentless Promise-Keeping.

The critics had not anticipated Donald Trumps upset election as president. They had not believed in his promises of an early economic recovery. They were in denial about the fall of ISIS, which had lost its 35,000 square miles of territory. Now they were saying that it had not been completely eliminated and therefore the war had not been won. It was like saying that the allies had not really won World War II because there were still Nazis in the world.

Even before he had run for president, still as a businessman, Donald Trump had favored a quote from the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. In 2014 Trump had tweeted, Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.

What economic and foreign policy experts could not see, what Obama and Clinton could not see, what the media could not see, Donald Trump had seen clearly and openly proclaimed. Like Schopenhauers genius, Donald Trump had found a different way to make the government work, and the results were undeniable.

When Donald Trump was first elected president, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. declared that the colorful businessman had a chance to be a great president because he thought outside the box. It was Trumps iconoclastic, sometimes outrageous, methods that allowed him to jump-start an economic recovery. In the process, the forgotten American middle class was able to once again find its footing and renew its dreams. And it was Trumps ability to think outside the box that had finally brought the elusive ISIS to heel.

Ironically, the more hysterical and desperate the attacks on President Trump and his family, the more outrageous the move toward impeachment, the more deeply the Trumps would be etched into the marble of history. Future writers would not be moved by fabricated stories dubbing him a Russian spy. Or by the national publication that promoted false and vulgar stories about the first lady. Or by popular late-night comedians who asked their television audiences to promote pornographic images about the Trump family.

In time, the gleeful, obscene, personal attacks on the Trump family, egged on by corporate media executives and promoted by their chosen public figures, would make most reasonable observers recoil. History would be built with facts, not by the crude emotion that was used to drive television ratings. Yet that very passion, intended to diminish Donald Trump, ultimately strip him of power, and reverse the will of the people who had elected him president, only ensured that his hours and days in the White House would be more memorable. The accusations added to the drama and helped ensure that the real achievements would not be forgotten. Eventually, the stories that were false would be ground to powder by history. Meanwhile, their very whispered existence would be an irresistible lure for writers, artists, and playwrights. They would add to the fascination and mystery of this rich and powerful family.

In January 2019, I would begin writing the authorized history of the Trump presidency. It would be the beginning of months of discussion with the president, his family, and senior members of his administration. At the time, I fully expected that this would be an unprecedented and fascinating journey into the most colorful presidency in American history. But nothing quite prepared me for what was to come.

It would turn out that the third year, the year that I would be working, would unfold as one of the most eventful years in our nations history. The presidency itself, and our democracy, would be put to the test. And I would be there, on the inside, capturing it all. My job would be to take the readers with me on this journey, inside the White House and inside the Trump family, and let them see and hear what I was witnessing. This was a chance to capture these important events of history from a different angle, from inside the eye of the storm, looking back out at the ferocious winds swirling around them.

It is quite conceivable that in a hundred years, when all of us are gone and most of our grandchildren are gone, they will still be writing books and creating theatrical productions about the Trumps. Whether they will be portrayed cruelly as the Borgias and Medicis, or celebrated grandly as the Rockefellers and Kennedys, will depend on what is written now and on the primary sources that tell their stories. My intention was to write something accurate and something fair.