When President Donald Trump’s phone rang in September, he was not eager for a lengthy conversation.
“The President was really in a bad mood,” recounted the man on the line, US Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, who was hoping to learn whether the President was, in fact, withholding security assistance to coerce Ukraine into investigating political rivals.
“I wouldn’t say he hung up me,” Sondland recalled, “but it was almost like he hung up on me.”
The absence of phone etiquette is hardly a surprise for a President not known for his manners. But the episode, recounted by Sondland during his daylong private deposition before lawmakers for the impeachment inquiry, helps color the portrait of a mercurial and loyalty-minded President that emerges from thousands of pages of transcribed sworn interviews.
Like a new book written by an anonymous administration official, the transcripts depict a President consumed by festering grievances and an administration perpetually thrown into chaos by rash decisions – and the tweets that announce them. Unlike that book, these recollections are provided by named individuals, speaking under the threat of criminal prosecution for lying to Congress.
In the transcripts, which have dropped each day this week, Trump emerges as fickle, susceptible to flattery and prone to grudges.
“They tried to take me down,” the President said of Ukraine during a now-scrutinized Oval Office meeting in May, venting it was Kiev that had attempted to damage him during the 2016 election – a theory rooted in conspiracy that, despite efforts by his advisers to debunk, Trump ran with.
Far from acting as guides to his foreign policy, diplomats and senior officials working for him are shown struggling to ascertain his positions and bracing for groundbreaking policy shifts to come without warning. Professional diplomats – some of whom still work in the administration – emerge from the testimony appearing shell-shocked by what was happening in Washington, at least at the moments when they could actually learn what that was.
At others, they describe futile efforts – including by watching Fox News – to learn what Trump’s associates were doing in the countries where they were posted, and after-the-fact realizations that they were being undercut by their own employer.
“With the advantage of hindsight, you’re going to think that I’m incredibly naive, but I couldn’t imagine all of the things that have happened over the last five or seven months,” the onetime US ambassador in Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, said during her interview. “I just couldn’t imagine it.”
Like others who were interviewed, Yovanovitch expressed her deep concerns at the parallel foreign policy in Ukraine carried out by the President’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani. He emerges in the pages of the transcripts both as a proxy for the President and a foot soldier attempting to nudge the Ukrainians into taking actions that would help Trump politically.
