George Stephanopoulos has done America a great favor in publishing his readable and well-researched analysis of every American president’s use of the White House Situation Room (aka Sit Room) since it was established during the presidency of John F. Kennedy in Stephanopoulos’ The Situation Room – The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis (2024). To learn how other recent presidents (e.g. G.H.W. Bush, Clinton, G.W. Bush, Obama, and Biden) engaged fully with the Sit Room, American intelligence and military experts, and foreign policy crisis’s, I am filled with horror with what Trump did, did not do, and never learned to do as Commander in Chief. Stephanopoulos reveals Trump’s abject incompetence and the danger he poses to western civilization and America’s standing in the world.

As we now anxiously watch how the post-debate Biden crisis unfolds, wait for Stephanopoulos’ interview of Biden on Friday (July 5) and whatever other unscripted interviews the campaign arranges for Joe in the short term, and witness the precipitous loss of public and congressional support for Joe that may well compel him to step aside (despite his expressed intention to continue the campaign), the book reminds any objective reader again of Joe Biden’s personal, moral, intellectual, and presidential superiority over Donald Trump.

I quote below directly from Stephanopoulos’ research describing many insiders’ description of Trump’s lack of use of the Sit Room (pages 271-298) and his chaotic, thoughtless, ignorant, small-minded, egocentric, self-serving, and dangerous approach to foreign policy while President, and what we can certainly expect should he (God forbid) be re-elected in November.

Here is some of what Stephanopoulos wrote:

As Omarosa put it in an NBC interview: “This is a White House where everybody lies. The president lies to the American people. … Sarah Huckabee stands in front of the country and lies every single day.’’… Faith and trust were apparently in short supply in this White House… Almost nothing about it [Trump’s Sit Room] was normal… During the Trump administration, the president was the crisis to be managed.

Trump tore through and wore out his national security team: Four secretaries of defense. Four directors of national intelligence. Four White House chiefs of staff and five secretaries of Homeland Security. The most damning judgments of his competence and character come from those he appointed to these most sensitive positions [each of whom were key players in the Sit Room]. His first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, famously told colleagues that Trump was a “f_ _ _ ing moron.” James Mattis, the former Marine Corps general who served as Trump’s first secretary of defense, described him as a threat to the Constitution ‘”who does not try to unite the American people – does not even pretend to try.” Fellow Marine general and White House chief of staff John Kelly called Trump “the most flawed person I have every met in my life.”

“He was the least disciplined, least organized human I ever met in my life,” Homeland Security adviser Tom Bossert told me. No matter how hard his top aides and cabinet members tried, “None of them stopped him from constantly undermining us and making decisions outside the process.”

“Anybody with any sense-somebody like Mattis or Tillerson – they immediately shunned and stayed away from Trump,” Bossert recalls. “I mean, you couldn’t get Mattis into the White House. His view was “That’s a madman in a circular room screaming. And the less time I spend in there, the more time I can just go about my business.” In fact, Tillerson and Mattis began meeting regularly outside the White House in order to circumvent the President.

National Counter terrorism Center head Nick Rasmussen served for two years under Obama, followed by a year under Trump. The difference, he told me, was profound. “The tempo of the White House Situation Room meetings went way, way down in the Trump administration,” he recalls. “In the Obama years, I would have been to the White House three, four, five times a week” for meetings at all levels. “In the Trump administration, it could be weeks and weeks without any involvement or meetings.”

“I don’t think we got Trump into the Situation Room, in my year and a half there, more than four times,” Bossert told me. “He didn’t like that room. He didn’t like the idea that he had to go to it. He wanted everybody to come to him.”

Trump rarely sought out information from the Sit Room. He didn’t request reports, and he never called down with questions. I asked Bossert whether it was fair to say that for Trump, Fox News channel was as much a conduit of information as the Sit Room. “I don’t even think that’s in question,” he replied. “I think that’s one hundred percent accurate.” Then he told me something I’d never heard before.

“For a while, he didn’t want to see what the news channels were saying. He wanted to see what the chyrons were reading,” Bossert says. Chryons, of course, are the news briefs crawling across the bottom of the TV screen. “He wanted the chryons captured and printed… And so the Sit Room would do that. They would produce for him books of chryons prints” surely one of the most prosaic tasks ever required of the highly trained intelligence officers serving in the White House.

Trump’s penchant for inviting random people into sensitive meetings led to some uncomfortable moments. Those who didn’t have clearances, but were reluctant to defy the president, would find themselves facing irritated intelligence officers. Classified briefings became fraught, with no one in the room comfortable except for Trump, who seemed happy to have his posse with him.

After Bossert had left the White House, he received a call one day from President Trump.

Bossert was in South Korea at the time, and both he and the President were using cell phones. “I said, ‘Sir, don’t even begin this conversation,’” Bossert recalls. “I’m in a foreign country where I’m connected to their network. There’s a hundred-percent chance your phone’s being listened to, and ninety percent chance mine’s being listened to in this country. Us together on this phone call, it’s a hundred thousand percent guaranteed that they‘re listening.”

Trump replied, “Okay, Tom. You tell them I’m sick and tired of them!” And then he went on with the conversation, completely ignoring the warning. You know, he just wouldn’t listen,” Bossert says, a sense of wonderment still in his voice.

And as much as Trump complained about leaks, he also used that phone to become, essentially, leaker in chief.

“I caught him doing it,” Bossert told me. “I was walking out of the room, and he picks up the phone before I’m out of earshot and starts talking to a reporter about what just happened. And I turned around and pointed right at him. ‘Who in the hell are you talking to?’” the President essentially shrugged, seemingly unbothered at being caught.

“He does it, so he assumed everybody was that way,” Bossert says. “His paranoia was in part because he assumes everyone else acts like he acts.”

…President Trump’s capriciousness drove [National Security Advisor John Bolton] particularly crazy. I asked him how different Situation Room meetings were under Trump than under the other presidents. “They were a disaster,” he told me. “He had no idea what the issues were. He never learned anything.” Bolton believes that Trump felt “out of his element. He was surrounded by people, every one of whom knew a lot more than he did. And so he liked to retreat to the Oval office.”

“He came in thinking that his personal relationship with foreign leaders would define the quality of bilateral relations,” recalls Bolton. “He’s still saying it today. ‘I had a good relationship with Putin … with Xi, or had a bromance with Kim Jung Un’ or whatever.”

You get the idea. Stephanopoulos continued with a description of Trump’s dangerous incompetence during the Covid epidemic, his refusal to wear a mask and his forbidding others in the White House to wear masks because he thought it made everyone appear weak, the impeachable telephone call with Ukrainian President Zelensky in which Trump tried to muscle Zelensky to give him dirt on Biden in exchange for already congressionally approved military equipment, Trump’s fixation on buying Greenland and making a trade for Puerto Rico after the island suffered a devastating hurricane (to get rid of the problem despite Puerto Ricans being citizens of the United States), and, of course, January 6.

The last chapter on Biden shows a fully engaged, informed, reflective, inquisitive, and decisive president who read in granular detail the briefing books presented to him by intelligence community experts, and based on all the information he had, informed by decades of his foreign policy experience as Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and as Vice President, made reasoned decisions. Biden’s greatest failure was the American exit from Afghanistan. Stephanopoulos describes what happened there and why.

The book is a fascinating read, and for history lovers and those who want to understand what’s behind some of the most serious foreign policy crises’s in the last 65 years in every presidency, you won’t be disappointed.

Last Thursday evening was devastating for anyone who loves and respects Joe Biden and for those millions of Americans and world leaders who fear another Trump presidency. I have found myself taking both sides of the argument about whether President Biden should step aside and open up the convention in August for another candidate to emerge, or to tough it out and presume that Joe and the Biden Campaign know what they are doing and are going on overdrive to take back the initiative with a full court press with Joe as the Democratic standard bearer.

Since last Thursday’s disaster, pundits across the spectrum have weighed in on what should happen next and what likely will happen next. The very best advice I have heard is for all of us to cool it for a week or so, take a deep breath, keep the panic at bay, let the dust settle, and wait to see what Joe and the campaign choose to do.

As one individual, I recognize that I have no power or influence to compel a decision one way or another anyway, and neither do any of us. Only Joe and Jill Biden and a few of his closest advisors know in their hearts whether he is capable of serving effectively as President or not. He knows what it takes to do so and he always, characteristically, has placed the best interests of the nation and the American people first. I have to assume that that is what he intends to do. It seems, so far, that Joe and those around him believe he can do the work of the presidency despite what happened at the debate. Certainly, if he does stay in the race and it remains a Biden-Trump contest, there ought to be no question about the choice. Not voting cannot be a third option. Too much is at stake for the country and western civilization.  

I am grateful this morning for the lead Editorial in The Philadelphia Inquirer that spelled out what is before us. Read it here To Serve His Country, Donald Trump Should Leave the Race