The push notifications lit up their phones with horrifying news—the city of Tehran, destroyed by an American nuclear weapon—and they knew immediately what they had to do.

It was time for another intervention.

As President Donald Trump’s most trusted and only advisers, they had become accustomed to this. From the moment he’d accepted the Republican Party’s presidential nomination one year prior, they’d been called upon to carry out the same ritual every 10 to 14 days, first to end his petty feud with Gold Star families, more recently to end his petty feuds with hostile countries. Now, in the sixth month of his presidency, after more than 30 such interventions, they were frankly growing weary of it. Early on, Trump’s children had been key liaisons, helping to quarantine their father, take custody of his smartphone, and hypnotize him with video footage from his campaign rallies played on loop.

But shortly after his presidency began—after he refused to make a timely debt payment to China, before he began carrying the nuclear football around like a briefcase—Eric, Ivanka, and Donald Jr. had severed ties with their father and changed their surnames from Trump to the somewhat-less-mortifying “Santorum.” They called it “rebranding.”



It had been up to the same small crew to “contain” or “manage” Trump ever since. And it was formulaic by now: At the end of each workday, as the commander-in-chief settled in for a pre-slumber marathon of shouting at cable news and Celebrity Apprentice reruns, Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani, and Reince Priebus would gather around a table in the old executive office building, each nursing his own bowl of cereal and bottle of Baileys. Here they’d count down the hours before Trump fell asleep, in the hope that another intervention wouldn’t be necessary.