Trump’s Cold War With the Former Presidents

Vanity Fair excerpts Team of Five: The Presidents Club in the Age of Trump by Kate Anderson Brower:

“Given all of this, it is hard to imagine that, whenever he does leave the White House, Trump will receive a warm welcome into the club. He has accused his immediate predecessor of wiretapping his office ahead of the 2016 election and called his most recent Republican predecessor’s foreign policy the worst in history. He perpetually notes that his relationships with other world leaders are better than those of former presidents. But have the years he’s spent in that awe-inspiring office given him empathy for what his predecessors went through? ‘No,’ he replies flatly. Unlike most of the men who came before him, who aged prematurely and struggled with insomnia while in office, often pacing the halls of the White House in the dead of the night, overwhelmed by the gravity of the position, Trump said he has no trouble sleeping.”

“When I ask him whether he would go to Obama’s presidential-library opening, the question sounds preposterous. Presidents have always attended one another’s library openings as a sign of respect. But: ‘I don’t know,’ he answers. ‘He probably wouldn’t invite me.’ Trump mulls it over for a moment and says, as though he had never thought of the far-reaching ramifications of his ostracism from the club, ‘Why should he?’ It is an astonishing reminder of just how much has changed.”