Sadly, there is also another villain in the tale: Russia. On Saturday, I invited the Russian president, the German chancellor, and the Israeli prime minister to a base of operations I set up not far from here in rural Virginia because of their proven capabilities in cybersecurity—and, in Russia’s case, in cyberattacks. The latter two came and were supportive and helpful. Every American owes Germany and Israel a debt of gratitude.
The Russian president did not come but sent the prime minister to act sympathetic. We now know what they had already done to support the attack and why. First, they knew all about it well in advance and refused to tell us, even when I asked. Then, to help the Saudi princes keep their identities secret, they handled the fund transfers Suliman required to pay for the plot and even hired mercenaries and an assassin to support it. They wanted to use our weakness not to finish us off with nuclear weapons but to cripple us so badly that they would be free to increase their stranglehold on their neighbors and assert their power and influence in every other region of the world. As he was leaving Saturday night, I told the prime minister what we suspected and assured him that there would be an appropriate response. Yesterday I took step 1, expelling the Russian ambassador and all Russian employees of its embassy in the United States. This is step 2—making sure the whole world knows they are the world’s worst bagmen.
The Saudis have been fully briefed on the plan. They are dealing with their traitors.
And Suliman, religious or not, has gone to meet his Maker.
Saturday, none of this was certain. For in the final frantic hours, when we were racing the clock, our headquarters was attacked by well-trained professional killers, the third such attack since I left the White House to work on this. Many of the assailants were killed, but so were two brave Secret Service agents who died to save my life and to save our country when both were in peril. They are heroes.
Another person was also killed, a remarkable young woman who was the brains behind the cyberbomb but who, along with her partner, a young man who loved her very much, decided she couldn’t go through with it. They escaped from Suliman’s operation and took unusual steps to warn us about and help prevent the attack while doing their best to survive Suliman’s wrath and long reach. Only the young man survived. If they hadn’t found their humanity in time, the outcome we applaud today would likely have been very different.
In a clever, roundabout way, the woman made the first contact with us, gave us enough information about the plan for us to take it seriously, and made it clear that only she and her partner could stop it. In return, they wanted to be free of prosecution and to be returned safely to her homeland.
Her partner, who was highly suspicious of our government, made his way here separately, then contacted us to say that the two of them would only deal with me and demanded that I meet him, completely alone, in a highly public place.
That is why your president went missing.
Given the stakes, I decided I had to take the risky, very nearly fatal step of going to that meeting in disguise, alone. I still believe it was the right decision, but I pray that no future crisis will force another president to do anything like it again.
A lot has happened in the last couple of days. We will release more details as we can. There are still loose ends to be tied up and security concerns to consider.
While I was gone, the press went into overdrive, and for good reason—where was I? Why was I off the grid? What was I doing? Earlier, I had agreed, against the advice of my advisers, to appear before a special committee of the House that had been set up to decide whether to start impeachment proceedings against me.
In the vacuum I left, there was a firestorm of speculation. Friendly media outlets suggested I went off the grid because I was dying of my well-known blood disease or having a breakdown from job stress, declining popularity, and the still raw wound of my wife’s death. Less friendly outlets jumped immediately to darker thoughts: I was on the run, with lots of money in secret accounts, having betrayed my country to the world’s most notorious terrorist and the country most committed to corrupting our democracy.
In fairness, I invited that response by not telling anyone but my former chief of staff what I was doing and why. I didn’t even tell Vice President Brandt, who would have succeeded me had I died last night.
I didn’t tell the congressional leaders because I didn’t trust them to keep it secret. If the story had broken, it would have caused a national panic and undermined our efforts to stop the attack. Even worse, we suspected a traitor among the small circle of people who were aware that an attack of some kind was looming. Besides my former chief of staff and me, only seven other people, including Vice President Brandt, could have known about it. We hadn’t figured out who it was by the time I had to go, so I left even the vice president in the dark.
After I left, the Speaker contacted her to say that he had the votes to impeach me in the House but needed a few more votes from our side to get the two-thirds necessary to convict me in the Senate. He asked her to help get those votes, saying he didn’t care if she became president because engineering my removal would give him control of the House and the national legislative agenda for a long time.
To her everlasting credit, the vice president refused to go along.
I say this not to reopen my long-standing feud with the Speaker but to clear the air so we can make a new beginning. We should have been fighting this threat together, across party lines.
Our democracy cannot survive its current downward drift into tribalism, extremism, and seething resentment. Today it’s “us versus them” in America. Politics is little more than blood sport. As a result, our willingness to believe the worst about everyone outside our own bubble is growing, and our ability to solve problems and seize opportunities is shrinking.
We have to do better. We have honest differences. We need vigorous debates. Healthy skepticism is good. It saves us from being too naive or too cynical. But it is impossible to preserve democracy when the well of trust runs completely dry.
The freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights and the checks and balances in our Constitution were designed to prevent the self-inflicted wounds we face today. But as our long history reveals, those written words must be applied by people charged with giving life to them in each new era. That’s how African Americans moved from being slaves to being equal under the law and how they set off on the long journey to be equal in fact, a journey we know is not over. The same story can be told of women’s rights, workers’ rights, immigrants’ rights, the rights of the disabled, the struggle to define and protect religious liberty, and to guarantee equality to people without regard to their sexual orientation or gender identity.
These have been hard-fought battles, waged on uncertain, shifting terrain. Each advance has sparked a strong reaction from those whose interests and beliefs are threatened.
Today the changes are happening so fast, in an environment so covered in a blizzard of information and misinformation, that our very identities are being challenged.
What does it mean to be an American today? It’s a question that will answer itself if we get back to what’s brought us this far: widening the circle of opportunity, deepening the meaning of freedom, and strengthening bonds of community. Shrinking the definition of them and expanding the definition of us. Leaving no one behind, left out, looked down on.
We must get back to that mission. And do it with both energy and humility, knowing that our time is fleeting and our power is not an end in itself but a means to achieve more noble and necessary ends.
The American dream works when our common humanity matters more than our interesting differences and when together they create endless possibilities.