The authors discarded content that did not meet standards they established to ensure the integrity of reporting. Leonnig and Rucker also spoke about the pressure to be particularly fastidious with their research and reporting in light of Trump’s popularization of the term “fake news.” She recalled a scenario where Rex Tillerson, former secretary of state, tried to explain Russia President Vladimir Putin’s motives to Trump, only to be brushed off after the president insisted he knew Putin better after one meeting. “In Donald Trump’s world, it is an insult to come to him with information, because he knows best,” she said. Leonnig was particularly struck by the psyche of a person who rejects information. “He not only would reject the intelligence briefings but he thought he already had the intelligence – that he was the most intelligent person there and that there was nothing that these generals, CIA operatives, intelligence officers, or regional specialists on the National Security Council could tell him that he didn’t already know,” Rucker said. Rucker found it chilling that senior level advisors expressed that Trump was a threat to security and the Constitution because of his impulses, directives, sense of entitlement and power, and lack of knowledge. The authors interviewed more than 200 people including senior administration officials, advisors, and friends of the president, often spending five to eight hours with each source, and accumulating hundreds of hours of interviews. She is the national investigative reporter. “There was a lot more under the surface that was going on it was much more complicated and actually sometimes much more frightening," Leonnig added. The authors were joined National Press Club Board member Del Wilber. “When we learned what was going on behind the scenes – what the president was telling his advisers, how they were scrambling to try to avert catastrophe – was many magnitudes worse and more dangerous for the country than we imagined and that we knew about in real time,” said Rucker, Washington Post White House bureau chief, during a virtual discussion about the New York Times bestseller on Wednesday. What they learned in the process of chronicling those days for their recently released book A Very Stable Genius was that the president posed a far greater danger to American security and democracy than they had realized in their daily reporting.
Washington Post reporters Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig had covered controversies and crises surrounding President Donald Trump’s first three years when they decided to apply their complementary expertise to take a deeper dive.