Behind closed doors, Trump showed me a heart ruled by cold, hard cash

The Trump phone shipped this week, and I found that it was the perfect artifact of the man whose name is stamped on it. The gold-toned slab – which was promised as American-made and best-in-class – arrived late, reportedly with foreign-made parts, overpriced and to withering reviews. Like many Trump products, it was hyped and monetised, but in time, Trump Mobile may see its products thrown in the trash as the number of pissed-off customers outnumbers new buyers.

This is a prophecy of what’s to come.

I saw it play out inside the Oval Office during the “hype phase” of Donald Trump’s first presidency. Now, in the second term, we’re beginning to see the “fail phase” of the largest product Trump has ever tried to brand: the United States of America.

To be clear, not every Trump venture has ended in failure – after all, he has made money, otherwise he wouldn’t still be at it – but a remarkable number have followed a recognisable arc, and it is that arc that has now migrated into the Oval Office.

The anatomy of a failed Trump venture is something to behold, if anything because of its consistency. It often begins with his name going on something he didn’t build and doesn’t seem to understand, followed by a launch that is pure, breathless spectacle – the best-ever, the most beautiful, the toughest! The hype appears designed to hoover up as much media and money as possible before any of the reviews roll in. That’s because the product was never the point. The producer was.

Trump’s attention often swivels after the hype phase. He turns away from the actual product to divorce himself from the aftermath and to preserve the only thing he sought in the first place, that is, his own profit and fly-by-the-seat brand aggrandisement. The terrible steak, the worthless degree, the awful vodka, the ghost town social media site, and so on. After launch, the product quality often craters, and lackeys take over to cut corners and keep the thing limping along. Eventually, investigators and regulators begin to circle after hearing the complaints. And one way or another, the business collapses into dissolution or bankruptcy, with someone else left holding the wreckage.

More or less, that’s how it’s gone for decades. Indeed, Trump’s history as an oft-failing businessman was no secret when he ascended to the presidency. But it was still jarring to watch the first part of this pattern play out inside the US government.

Take the border wall, the supposed centrepiece of his entire first term. I’ll tell you, from having wasted weeks and months of my life in circular arguments with the White House, that it was never really about fixing a broken immigration system. The wall was just another Trump product, hyped to the heights of absurdity throughout a presidential campaign and deep into his first term.

“Two things matter to me,” Trump once told us, leaning back in his Air Force One office. “Price and beauty. I want it to be cheap, and I want it to be f**king beautiful.”

For months, he played with the design, torn between whether it should be matte black slats or concrete because, in his words, “politically, concrete is better for me”. What mattered to the border patrol agents didn’t matter to him. The product, a functioning border, was never the point. The brand was.

The last time I travelled to the border with the President, in April 2019, the trip was not even planned. The secretary of Homeland Security and I were in London for sensitive meetings on cyber security and terrorism threats, the kind of life-or-death work the department exists to do, when Trump called in a fury. He didn’t like the immigration stories he was seeing on Fox News.

“Get your ass to the border,” he barked. We flew back across the Atlantic and out to the desert. By the time we arrived, it became clear what he had really summoned us for, and it wasn’t in-depth strategy sessions on combatting transnational criminal organisation. Bolted to the wall was a plaque bearing his name, commemorating the completion of the first section of “President Trump’s border wall”.

He hadn’t gotten the product launch he wanted. So he forced one and relished in the attention of the press with the wall as backdrop. An aide had even brought along an exact duplicate of the plaque to hand to him at the site. We’d been hauled out of urgent national security conversations on another continent so that Trump could admire his name slapped on to a slab of steel. That’s the whole man in a single image, honestly. The brand always mattered more than the threat.

The pattern turned from farce to cruelty when it came to matters like emergency response, because in those cases the neglected “product” was human survival.

A year after Hurricane Maria, I toured a Puerto Rican school that looked like it had been bombed the day before. Windows were blown out and children were packed into temporary trailers. On the phone with the President later in the day, our team reminded him why the continued flow of aid mattered. “I’m sick of all the money being spent down there,” he cut in. “Pull it back.”

Mind you, this was the same man who’d floated selling the island, or swapping it to Denmark for Greenland, because to him it was a poorly performing asset that didn’t generate a political return.

Which is exactly why he was so catastrophically bad during the early days of the Covid pandemic. There was no glory in the slow, unglamorous, life-saving work of a pandemic response, only blame, so he disengaged and went hunting for an angle.

At the time, one of his taskforce leaders confided to me that the President had mused in a meeting that maybe the virus was a good thing, because now he didn’t have to shake hands with people he found “disgusting”. What finally seized his attention was not the death toll but the polling and the discovery that his handling of the disease threatened his re-election. Once the pandemic became a branding problem, it became real to him.

See how the Iran war has followed the same script, beat for beat. It started with the hype and the superlatives. The air strikes were hailed as the most successful in history before anyone could actually assess them and the objectives. Trump showered himself with personal credit.

But as the weeks wore on, even the “buyers” — Republican senators and representatives — have realised the actual “product” is junk. America got less than it paid for and seems on track to be worse off than it was before the “purchase” of a conflict sold as containing Iran, but which seems more likely to empower and enrich it. Meanwhile, Trump has reportedly lost interest and is “bored” of the war. He’ll put the failure on someone else and leave the consumers with the consequences.

You have to remind yourself of this pattern regularly. You can forecast the lifecycle of Trump policies just like a number of the Trump businesses. Whether it’s the Iran war, his attempt to seize Greenland, his wannabe replacement of the UN with a “Board of Peace” or his ill-fated takeover of Venezuela, it’s the same story. Hype. Personal attention or profit. And a half-cocked product that fizzles out. Sometimes ignominiously. Sometimes catastrophically.

Only now, these myriad snake-oil ventures are conspiring to take the whole of the United States into the death spiral of a Trump enterprise. His follies are compounding.

Before he’s even reached 18 months back in office, Trump has ramped up the deficit and the national debt, wreaked havoc on US alliances, warped global markets and sent prices skyrocketing, gutted federal agencies, put democratic institutions teetering on the brink of collapse and enabled America’s foes to seize the initiative across the globe.

To be sure, he’s extracted his personal profit or self-interested gains in the process, whether it’s acquiring jumbo jets from foreign leaders or sprinting ahead with plans to expand his brand at taxpayer expense by plastering his name in fake gold across federal buildings, paper bills, coins, monuments, ballrooms, park passes, airports, passports, concert venues, citizenship programmes, federal savings accounts, prescription drug platforms, military ships and train stations, to name a few.

That’s how you know the “fail phase” is near. While Trump is not done extracting, the consumer anger is rising and the controversies and alleged criminal conduct are piling up and the investigators – in this case, the Democrats – are circling, with hopes to reclaim Congress and deliver accountability. Almost on cue, Trump has quietly pivoted to another time-tested strategy in his businesses.

Throughout his career, the nondisclosure agreement (NDA) often comes up as Trump’s signature instrument. Company employees, show contestants, women with stories to tell, campaign aides and White House staff have all had papers placed in front of them essentially requiring that they keep their mouths shut or face liability.

When demanding silence didn’t work, his organisation has launched lawsuits and he himself has carried out some of the most sweeping character assassination campaigns against critics until they yielded. That starts to look like an intimidation machine. Profit from the thing while it shines, abandon it when it dulls, and gag people who might be able to describe what they saw as the enterprise collapses.

So it should surprise no one that this week his administration moved to make every federal worker in America sign an NDA. The Office of Personnel Management posted a draft nondisclosure agreement, to be required of new and existing employees across the government, sweeping in a vast and vaguely defined category of “non-public” information. It marks the culmination of Trump’s effort to purge dissenters from the career civil service and replace them with loyalists who will not speak out about waste, fraud or abuse.

But here’s why he won’t get away unscathed.

Many previous Trump products had some kind of an exit ramp. A country isn’t the same. Trump realised as much in panic as he tried vainly to hold on to power in 2020 and to intimidate the Republican Party into sticking with him in the aftermath. Now, he’s losing many of those hardcore supporters who were deluded into buying the product again. The Maga bros and the Maga congressmen and the Maga moms are starting to realise, like Trump-phone buyers, that they’ve been misled.

The United States may turn out to be the biggest bankruptcy of Trump’s life, but the people he’s screwed are the ones who own the company. This time, they may not let him walk away.

Miles Taylor is the former chief of staff of the US Department of Homeland Security and has served on Capitol Hill, in the White House and at the Pentagon. He is a No 1 New York Times bestselling author, regular national security commentator, and democracy reform leader