For the better part of the last month, Donald Trump has been winging it. His standoff with his chief of staff, John Kelly, appears to be resolved for the time being, with Trump having decided to return to the seat-of-the-pants decision-making that he believes won him the presidency. That doesn’t mean he has fully given up the idea of firing Kelly, though. One outside adviser to the White House said Trump has recently mulled the concept of creating a new West Wing structure without a chief of staff, one that would instead have four co-equal principals reporting directly to him. Trump seems to be loving his new freedom. “He was fucking excited and jubilant,” said one Trump friend who spoke to him in recent days. “He was like, everything’s great and these fuckers in the media are beside themselves.”
But Trump’s self-liberation comes at a dangerous moment, with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation reaching closer and closer, stoking Trump’s impulses to go to war. Earlier this month, Mueller crossed one of Trump’s stated “red lines” when he subpoenaed Trump Organization business records. According to four Republicans in regular contact with the White House, the move spurred Trump to lose patience with his team of feuding lawyers. “Trump hit the roof,” one source said. Today, Trump’s personal lawyer John Dowd resigned under pressure from Trump.
In the days since Mueller issued the subpoena, Trump has been on the attack. Last Saturday, Trump encouraged Dowd to call for an end to the Russia probe, a source told me. On Sunday, Trump blasted Mueller as partisan, tweeting: “Why does the Mueller team have 13 hardened Democrats, some big Crooked Hillary supporters, and Zero Republicans?” And on Monday, he retained combative lawyer Joseph diGenova, who once declared on Fox News that the Justice Department was framing Trump with a “false crime.”
Trump’s new offensive is a sign that he’s unilaterally abandoning the go-along, get-along strategy advocated by Dowd and Ty Cobb, the White House lawyer overseeing the response to Mueller. Cobb’s standing with Trump has been falling for months, after Cobb made the now-infamous prediction that the Russia probe would be over by Thanksgiving 2017. Dowd assured Trump that he had a “great relationship with Mueller” and could manage him, according to sources. That obviously hasn’t happened. “Trump just wants something to change and nothing was changing,” the outside adviser said. The genial and mustachioed Cobb has always been somewhat of an odd fit for Trump, whose mental picture of a lawyer is Roy Cohn, his early mentor. Sources said Trump reluctantly conceded to allow Cobb to play good cop. “Trump is looking at this saying, I did it your way for months, now I’m fucking doing it my way,” a former West Wing official said. (The White House did not respond to a request for comment.)
In private, Trump friends and outside advisers have been stoking his desire to go on the offensive for months. Trump has heard that his lawyers are “idiots”; that Mueller’s probe is a “coup d’etat”; and that Trump’s only crime is having “won the election.”
Sources said Cobb is unlikely to be fired imminently—although with Trump you never know—but in the meantime, Trump is prospecting for a potential replacement. In recent days, he has made overtures to Emmet Flood, a veteran of Bill Clinton’s impeachment defense team, as well as Ted Olson, George W. Bush’s solicitor general. (Olson declined.) Their reticence highlights a larger problem for Trump: no heavy-hitting white-shoe law firm seems to want to represent him. According to two former administration officials, before hiring Cobb last summer, Trump was turned down by major white-shoe law firms that would have normally jumped at the opportunity to represent a president.
Which is perhaps why Trump is turning to aggressive lawyers like diGenova. According to sources, diGenova was recommended to Trump by Dave Bossie and Jeanine Pirro, two of Trump’s hard-edged outside advisers. Two sources said Trump is likely to add diGenova’s wife (and frequent Fox News guest), Victoria Toensing, to the legal team. “She’s a killer,” one Republican who knows the couple said. Toensing is currently representing William Campbell, a former lobbyist and F.B.I. informant, who claimed in an interview with members of three congressional committees that Russia steered money to the Clinton Foundation to grease the so-called Uranium One deal. The hiring of Toensing would be a sign that Trump wants to flip the script and investigate his investigators. Appearing on Fox News, Toensing has called for a second special prosecutor to investigate Mueller, the logic being that he was F.B.I. director at the time that the Uranium One acquisition was approved.
Sources also said that Trump is considering hiring back Marc Kasowitz to serve on his defense team. “They’re talking a lot,” one Republican briefed on the conversations said. (Kasowitz did not respond to a request for comment.) Bringing back Kasowitz would be a sign of how rattled Trump is by the looming prospect of being interviewed by Mueller. Last July, Trump sidelined Kasowitz after it was revealed he struggled with alcoholism and told a stranger to “watch your back, bitch” in an e-mail. (Kasowitz has denied reports of alcohol abuse.) Sources also said Kasowitz’s return would be a signal that Trump is willing to put his own survival ahead of his family. A month before Kasowitz was ousted, a former White House official told me, he had told Trump that Jared Kushner needed to leave the White House.
