Michael Kruse is a senior staff writer for Politico.

“My attitude,” Donald Trump said last month, “is whatever happens, happens.”

He was discussing trade talks with China, in the White House, but he could have been talking about almost anything. Because he says this and things like it almost daily.


“Hey,” he said in his first week as president in an interview with Sean Hannity, talking about his pending Supreme Court pick and Democrats’ response, “whatever happens, happens.”

“Whatever happens, happens,” he said last summer in a speech at the Department of Energy, talking about deregulation and the possibility of protests.

“Whatever happens, happens,” he said this April at a rally in Michigan, talking about negotiations with North Korea.

This isn’t just filler language from a famously extemporaneous and detail-light public speaker. It is, in fact, a guiding principle of a downbeat personal philosophy that largely has gone unexamined by Trump’s many chroniclers. But as Trump’s administration lurches into the most high-stakes, high-profile moment of his presidency—next week’s scheduled summit in Singapore with North Korean despot Kim Jong Un—observers express puzzlement at this blithe, shoulder-shrugging, c’est-la-vie facet of his disposition. When he says, “We’ll see,” again and again and again, Trump is giving voice to one of the least talked-about but most abiding convictions of his long, loud, public life—his unambiguous belief in the inherent meaninglessness of human existence, and his repeated self-identification as a fatalist.

“I’m a great fatalist,” he told Newsday in 1991.

“I’m very much a fatalist,” he said on CNN in 1997.

And verbatim, still, in the summer of 2016: “Very much,” he told the New York Times.



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It’s entirely possible Trump, whose aversion to reading books and limited attention span are matters of public record, doesn’t really know what he means by the term. But the accepted definition of fatalism, a belief that people are powerless to alter the course of events because they are predetermined, is more or less the one Trump has cited as a secret to his success, the liberating key to his ability to handle pressure and emerge from his periods of greatest peril alive and emboldened. It is something worth keeping in mind not only heading into the meeting with Kim but as the intensity of the anticipation of the results of the Mueller investigation ramps up this summer.

To some who know him well, Trump’s fatalism has been a source of his unbounded confidence, courage and nerve.

“He fears nothing,” Roger Stone, who met Trump in 1979 and is his longest-running political adviser, told me this week.

“As much as I’ve had personal issues with him,” said Sam Nunberg, one of his earliest 2016 campaign advisers, who was fired twice by Trump and earlier this year called him a “dumbfuck” for doing so, “I respect the president for the fact that he is fearless, and he’s always going to do it his own way and let the chips fall.”

Others, though, see something darker and sadder, a nihilism born from Trump’s disinterest in and disconnect from everybody except his immediate family and perhaps even them.

“A person can be fatalistic when he’s empty inside,” Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio said in an interview.

On the evening of Feb. 12, 2017, Trump hosted Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (left) at Mar-a-Lago. During the visit, news broke that North Korea had fired a missile towards Japan, causing a flurry of action in the club’s restaurant—although Trump was initially unperturbed, as seen in this photo taken by a nearby diner. | Instagram: Erika Bain

“There is no one Trump cares about in any deep enduring way—no one, not even his children,” Tony Schwartz, who wrote The Art of the Deal for Trump and has been for the past couple years one of his most incisive critics, told me in an email. “There are no traditional values he holds deeply—or at all—values which might give him a North Star and a belief that anything matters.”

Trump is nominally a Presbyterian, and a devotee of Norman Vincent Peale’s “power of positive thinking” precursor to the prosperity gospel, but next to nobody sincerely thinks religion or faith in any standard sense drives his decision-making. His deep-seated conviction, however, that nothing really matters? It does.

“We’ll see how it all works out. But in the end, it will work out,” Trump said last month, talking about China and North Korea. “Can’t tell you exactly how or why, but it always does. It’s going to work out. OK?”

To people versed in international diplomacy, this can sound like dangerous naivete, at best an excuse for a lack of preparation for a negotiation that could have global, life-threatening consequences. The White House hasn’t had a Cabinet-level meeting yet, according to POLITICO reporting, and Trump appears ready (or not) “to wing this summit,” in the words of a former George W. Bush aide who worked on Asia policy.

This is the flip side of Trump’s fatalism. What has made him fearless is what has made him careless. Because he’s never had to pay a lasting price for his mistakes. For much of his life he could afford to be cavalier about consequences. First, he had the safety net of his rich father’s money; then he was deemed by bankers in New York and casino regulators in New Jersey to be essentially too big to fail; and finally, and most important, the only person he had to worry about was himself. There was no right or wrong result for Trump, transactional, Machiavellian and unburdened by morals. The only adverse outcome was one that made him look bad. And he trusted that he could spin into a win whatever that was. Ergo: There was no reason to fret—there was nothing to fear. This was the superpower that made him the president.

Trump walks to Marine One en route to Camp David, June 1, 2018. | Getty Images

But now he is the president.

And the stakes aren’t his name or his fame or his unappeasable ego or his ability to profit from all that or to just not be stopped.

There are consequences for his actions, unavoidably, inevitably, and not only for him at this point. For literally everybody else.



***

Trump is nothing if not resolutely self-contradictory, and this talk about meaninglessness and predestination can sound like a rebuttal to his well-established status as a practitioner of a particularly obstinate, self-centered strain of free will—“I alone can fix it,” “I’m the only one that matters.”

“The president,” his former political adviser Michael Caputo told me, “could not fight as hard as he must every single day unless he believed he could change things for the better. That’s not the vigor of a fatalist.”

Trump’s expressions of fatalism also fly in the face of his take-all-precautions, self-preservational habits—always insist on a prenuptial agreement, for instance—as well as his bubble-boy idiosyncrasies. His distaste for travel (“boring”). His resistance to shaking hands (“barbaric”). His affinity for McDonald’s and other fast-food fare (“cleanliness”).

And some suggest he identifies as a fatalist “for effect,” as a former associate put it to me. He “decided it was useful in certain moments, and offers it up when it’s convenient,” said D’Antonio, the biographer. “It’s like his supposed Christian faith—that had never really showed itself until he needed that voting bloc.” Added Barbara Res, who started working for Trump in the 1970s and was the construction manager for Trump Tower: “There is no doubt Trump is portraying himself as a fatalist”—emphasis on the portraying.

President Donald Trump walks across the South Lawn before boarding Marine One and departing the White House June 1, 2018. | Getty Images

But even if there’s a performative aspect to this—and there’s a performative aspect to everything Trump does—he has said these things too much and for too long for it to be only for show.

And it started early on.

“I’ll never marry and I’ll die before I’m 40,” a not-yet-30-year-old Trump told a representative from the bankrupt Penn Central railroad he was dealing with to try to launch his business career in the mid-‘70s.

His older brother, Fred Trump Jr., did die young, at 43, in 1981—an alcoholic, crippled by their cold, competitive father. His death “affected everything that has come after it,” Trump would say, suggesting that Freddy’s “fatal mistake” was that he was “too trusting.”

This was a black mark in the middle of Trump’s initial, reputation-making run of success—the conversion of the crumbling Commodore Hotel into the gleaming Grand Hyatt followed by the inspired, ambitious erection of Trump Tower. Trump crowed constantly, of course, but his overall outlook was not altogether optimistic.

“What does it all mean,” he said, in the New York Times Magazine in 1984, “when some wacko over in Syria can end the world with nuclear weapons?”

“You can’t be scared,” he (Schwartz, that is) wrote in The Art of the Deal, which came out in 1987. “You do your thing, you hold your ground, you stand up tall, and whatever happens, happens.”

We’re here, and we live our 60, 70 or 80 years, and we’re gone. You win, you win, and in the end, it doesn’t mean a hell of a lot.” Donald Trump

After three of his most important casino executives were killed in a helicopter crash in 1989, this view took on a grimmer, even morbid tinge.

“My own sense of optimism and life was greatly diminished,” he told Playboy in early 1990. He called their deaths “a tragic waste.”

“You’re involved in so many activities, deals, promotions—in the deep of the night, after the reporters all leave your conferences, are you ever satisfied with what you’ve accomplished?” Playboy’s Glenn Plaskin asked him.

“Life is what you do while you’re waiting to die,” Trump responded. “You know, it is all a rather sad situation.”

“Life? Or death?”

“Both. We’re here, and we live our 60, 70 or 80 years, and we’re gone. You win, you win, and in the end, it doesn’t mean a hell of a lot.”

An impassive Trump stands still while surrounded by worshippers during an Oct. 2016 service at the International Church of Las Vegas. | AP Photo

That year, in his second book, Trump noted “life’s tragedies and the relentless passage of time.”

Surviving at the Top came out when he was barely surviving and nowhere close to the top. He had detonated his marriage by cheating on the mother of his first three children and fallen into billions of dollars of debt as a direct result of his series of terrible business decisions in the late ‘80s.

When this didn’t stop him, though—when he was worth more financially alive than dead to lenders from banks and Atlantic City gaming officials who could have snuffed him out and sent him to personal bankruptcy plus more permanent disrepute, when he came off in the pages of tabloids in their blanket coverage of his divorce as not so much a philandering cad as a conquering Don Juan—Trump’s stated fatalism began to sound less pessimistic and more like bulletproof bravado.

“What scares you the most?” a Newsday reporter asked him in 1991.

“Nothing scares me. Nothing,” he answered. “I’m a great fatalist—whatever happens, happens, and you just have to go along with it. That’s one of the reasons I’ve been able to survive the way I’ve been able to survive.”

“I take things very much as they come,” Trump said. “I deal with the cards that are dealt me. And I think I do it well. I’m very much a fatalist. I always have been but I’m more so now.”

“All I can say,” he added in 1992 in the Sunday Times of London, “is that what’s important is to survive, and I was really blessed with an ability to withstand pressure. Most people would have been in the corner sucking their thumb if they were crucified like I was last year. I’m not going to look back and say it was tough and blame myself. We’ve come through …”

“His fatalism,” Wayne Barrett wrote in his Trump biography that was published that year, “allowed him to hold himself blameless.”

His fatalism allowed him to hold himself blameless.” Wayne Barrett

And no amount of eventually reclaimed success, wealth and esteem altered the fundamentals of his stance. By 1997, Trump no longer was mired in his dicey, self-inflicted financial ditch, and Larry King had him on CNN. The news of the moment was the murder of Gianni Versace. Spree killer Andrew Cunanan had shot the renowned fashion designer in front of his Miami Beach mansion.

“It’s unbelievable what happened to Versace,” Trump told King.

“John Kennedy once said if someone wants to get you, and that’s all they think about, you’re in trouble,” King said.

“True. Absolutely true. And they don’t have to be smart. … They just want to get you, and what you can do is you can take precautions, and you can surround yourself with some very tough people,” Trump said, referring to his stable of burly bodyguards.

“So,” King said, “Trump the fatalist has to be aware and give thought to the Cunanans. There are Cunanans out there.”

“I am aware,” Trump said. “You have to be aware. Otherwise, you’re a fool, but again, I don’t think you can change your entire life. You’re not going to go into a very safe little place and just lock the door and never come out. I just don’t think you can do that. And I am a fatalist. I say, ‘Hey, what happens, happens.’ And maybe it’s predestined. Who knows?”

This continued into the new millennium.

A banner advertising “The Apprentice” hangs from the golden entrance of Trump Tower in New York. | Getty Images

In 2004, Trump was unquestionably a star again, bigger and more famous than he even had been in the heady, easy-money ‘80s—the man in charge, the boardroom boss, the scowling face of “The Apprentice.” Oprah Winfrey had him on her show. In the odd, unexpected context of talking about his strange, flyaway hair, Trump managed nonetheless to sound a familiar, fatalistic note: “So, anyway, in the end, I don’t know if anything matters.”

That same year, he was on CNN for another hype session, there to pump his latest book, How to Get Rich, this time with Wolf Blitzer.

“You got a TV hit, you got buildings, you got golf courses, casinos, you got a great family,” Blitzer said. “You got a new book that’s coming out that’s probably going to be a No. 1 best-seller. What else does Donald Trump want to do in life?”

Trump responded to this slobberball of a question by wallowing in his fatalism with an almost depressive world-weariness that certainly wouldn’t have been on any publicist’s list of talking points.

“I think it’s just a continuation, honestly,” he said. “Life”—here he pivoted—“this is sad—no politician would say this, so, you now, I’m not going to be a politician—life is what you do while you’re waiting to die. Sad. Horrible statement. I hate to say it, but I say it, you know, because it’s true: Life is what you do while you wait to die.”

Trump, though, perhaps sensing this was not a tone that would sell books, shifted quickly to a more characteristic call to hedonism. “Have fun. Just enjoy it,” the notoriously impetuous, self-indulgent Trump said, two years before his alleged adulterous, condom-less, single-position Tahoe tryst with porn star Stormy Daniels when his fifth child with his third wife was 4 months old. “Enjoy what you’re doing. If you don’t enjoy what you’re doing, it doesn’t mean anything.”

“People ask me, ‘How do you handle pressure?’” he wrote in 2007 in his book titled Think Big and Kick Ass. His answer: “The truth is, it does not matter. What the hell difference does it make? You see what is going on in Iraq; you have seen a tsunami wipe out hundreds of thousands of people. Think about how 3,000 people died in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001—tragic; and how 300,000 people died for the tsunami in Asia in 2004; 100 times more. What does it really matter if you have a big presentation to give to the president of Citibank at 9 A.M.? Just be wise and have a great sense of humor because problems that may seem big to you really do not matter in the grand scheme of things.”

These Trump credos can sound cribbed from self-help staples like Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff … but in many ways Trump wasn’t sweating the big stuff, either.

“Have you ever heard of Peggy Lee? ‘Is That All There Is?’ It’s a great song because I’ve had these tremendous successes and then I’m off to the next one because it’s, like, ‘Huh, is that all there is?’”

“Have you ever heard of Peggy Lee? ‘Is That All There Is?’” a flittingly introspective Trump said in an interview with D’Antonio for his biography that came out in 2015. “It’s a great song because I’ve had these tremendous successes and then I’m off to the next one because it’s, like, ‘Huh, is that all there is?’”

And in 2016, a little less than three months before Election Day, he was asked in an interview with a reporter from the Times about his father’s Alzheimer’s disease. Fred Trump had died, at 93, in 1999, often unable to recognize the people around him. Trump said he wasn’t scared by the thought that he, too, might go that way. He said he was ready to “accept it.”

“Look,” he said, “I’m very much a fatalist.”



***

What does Trump mean when he talks about fatalism and being a fatalist?

“I’m going to do whatever I want, conventional wisdom is usually wrong, let the chips fall where they may,” said Nunberg, the political adviser.

And what’s he saying, without actually saying it?

“It reminds me of the Christian right predestination concept,” D’Antonio said in an interview. “What they think is that God has a plan and your success is evidence that God intended you to be successful and chose your soul for greatness before you were even born. And it’s a circular kind of logic that says that if I dominate it’s because God wants me to dominate and your opposition to me means you’re opposed to God. And I think that what Trump is expressing is sort of the secular version of that—that all is predestined, the fact that I am president is proof that the universe, or God, intended something great for me.”

It’s worked, till now—for him—but it’s worked, according to Tim O’Brien, another Trump biographer, in a highly specific setting, and one that isn’t entirely operative anymore.

“I think he is a fatalist,” O’Brien told me. But here’s the rub: “He’s empowered to be a fatalist because he’s been insulated from his failures by wealth, privilege and celebrity—so the impact of catastrophes is more muted in his world than it is in the world of an average person.”

The difference now, of course, is that there is no difference between his world and the world. There’s nothing but hot spots. Nothing but high stakes. Iran. China. North Korea. Puerto Rico. The Mexican border. Nothing but consequences.

It will work out.

Can’t tell you exactly how or why.

But it always does.

“It’s an interesting journey. It’s called the land of the unknown—who knows? We’ll maybe make a deal. Maybe not,” Trump said in a speech the other day at the headquarters of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“Maybe and maybe not. Who knows?”

“Remember what I say,” he said recently on the South Lawn of the White House. “We will see what we will see.”