Of all the hallucinogenic moments chronicled in Robert Mueller’s report, this is one of the most dizzying. McGahn has been summoned to the White House in February 2018 because a livid Trump wants him to deny something truthful. McGahn explains that he can’t “correct” an accurate report in The Times that the president had instructed him to have Mueller “fired.” He takes notes because he’s a “real lawyer.”
In fact McGahn, like many sucked into Trump’s corrupting White House orbit, takes notes in the same way people try to get themselves inoculated when they enter a zone of contagion. He wants a contemporaneous record of the truth to protect himself and — God knows — the Republic against Trump’s lies. He knows what an oath to uphold the Constitution means. If there is one overwhelming conclusion of the Mueller report it is that Trump, aka, “boss man,” holds the law and truth in utter contempt. That this is unsurprising only makes it more appalling.
“I’ve had a lot of great lawyers, like Roy Cohn,” Trump tells McGahn. “He did not take notes.” You don’t take notes when you want no record of your dereliction. Of course, Cohn is Trump’s role model: In New York, Cohn, McCarthyism’s ruthless enforcer, was disbarred for misconduct including dishonesty and fraud.
The Mueller report won’t move the political needle. Trump’s tens of millions of supporters know all this. They knew he was a scam artist before they voted for him in 2016. One of the reasons the report is devastating is that its portrait of an iniquitous presidency once again begs a question of all Americans: How did we put this man in the Oval Office?
It’s a question for everyone. To deflect responsibility is too easy. The mirror Trump holds up is to America in its entirety, from Hudson Yards to the death of Main Street, from the Kardashians to the opioid crisis, from the financiers doing the rigging to those left out or left behind, from callow Republicans to compromised Democrats.
The idea of America as a land of unbound self-invention is not new — F. Scott Fitzgerald captured that in “The Great Gatsby.” America is about forgetting, hence the extravagance of its creations. Still, Trump’s self-invention is remarkable for its scale and depravity — the way he grasped how hyper-individualism, the money culture, simmering anger, and the collapse of the line between truth and falsehood could be channeled into a victorious presidential campaign. How, in short, he could become the orange icon of the Age of the Unicorn.
The great parable of our age is John Carreyrou’s “Bad Blood,” a remarkable account of how a 20-something Stanford dropout, Elizabeth Holmes, built a company called Theranos that fooled everyone with a supposedly transformational method to test blood. Holmes’ pinprick testing that would do away with the hypodermic needle never worked. It was fakery.
There was no there there in Theranos, ever. There was only Holmes with her strange baritone parlaying zilch into a company once valued at an estimated $9 billion. She entranced a kind of American Who’s Who — including George Shultz, Jim Mattis and Henry Kissinger. Theranos was the ultimate “unicorn” — the term coined in 2013 by the venture capitalist Aileen Lee to describe the several dozen software startups launched since 2003 and valued at $1 billion or more, companies that avoid the scrutiny of going public while raising vast sums.
Belief in the Theranos unicorn split families. Shultz clashed with his grandson, Tyler Shultz, who became a whistleblower after working at Theranos. It also crossed party lines: President Barack Obama appointed Holmes as a presidential ambassador for global entrepreneurship. Joe Biden called Theranos “the laboratory of the future.” Holmes spoke — with Chelsea Clinton beside her — at a 2016 fundraiser for the Clinton campaign.
Myth and manipulation turned Holmes into a billionaire. She incarnated America’s collective hallucination and corruption, its vertiginous loss of bearings.
Theranos collapsed thanks to Carreyrou’s Wall Street Journal reporting. The Security and Exchange Commission charged Holmes with “massive fraud” (she settled), and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California indicted her on federal wire fraud and other charges.
So much for that unicorn. Brexit, another, endures for now.
The unicorn, let’s recall, is a legendary creature believed over centuries to exert miraculous powers, particularly through its horn that — as amulet or powdered — was thought to work as a prophylactic or antidote. Leonardo da Vinci wrote that only “fair maidens” could appease the unicorn’s ferocity. The unicorn never existed. It was collective fantasy. That did not make belief in it less tenacious.
We now have a full accounting of the unicorn-in-chief’s world. I fear he still has America in his thrall.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.