How Trump Has Changed, With Maggie Haberman

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Maggie Haberman Interview

1:00— Maggie Haberman, welcome back to the show. — Ezra, thank you for having me. — So I want to talk about the experience I had reading the book, which is remembering how much energy and ferocity there was in the first six to eight months of the Trump administration. And then knowing how many of the things that you all were tracking here, from the terrorists to Doge to parts of society bending the knee to Trump to the Iran war, by now feel like they have deeply run out of some kind of steam or they've ended up trapping the Trump administration in its own decisions.

Trump's First Year

1:40— This book is really about Trump's year one, mostly. What does your two feel like to you? — First of all, thank you for having me. — And I wish Jonathan were here, but his wife is having a baby soon, and I have permission to say that. — So there's a reason that the first section of the book is called Whirlwind. — And I was thinking, as you were talking about the running out of steam piece, I would put it a little differently. I think it's not black and white. And Elon Musk is obviously not working for the government anymore. I do think it's remarkable how much of Doge's memory hold.

2:11He came in, he was supposed to change the way government was going to work. In reality, Doge didn't do anything close to what it was supposed to do. But it did do things like show how Trump was going to govern by fiat in large measure.

Elon Musk and USAID

2:24Elon Musk shut down USAID, just shut down an entire congressionally created agency. One of Trump's first unilateral actions was firing a bunch of inspectors general. Did not notify Congress, which he's supposed to do, about why. And he was supposed to give Congress a 30-day notice. None of that happened. Stephen Miller in particular rolled out with a bunch of executive actions that I would say some of them didn't run out of steam. The ones focused on DEI in particular, the one about trans women in sports in particular. And certainly a lot of their activities at the border have not.

2:55If you were a Trump supporter and you voted for him for those reasons, which were things he did talk about on the campaign trail, just those three, you'd be happy. They didn't vote for most of his base, another potential forever war in the Middle East. So that is, I think, not just running out of steam, that is injecting fresh chaos. He has now just launched a fresh trade war. And so there's the combination of new tariffs plus escalation back to engaged combat with Iran could be really interesting for the economy.

Trade War and Economy

3:26And so I don't know that I think it's that it's run out of steam, but things tend to end one way with Trump. And it's usually in some form of the lack of strategy being apparent. And I would say that's what you're seeing right now. So I don't know that it's running out of steam. It's running into Trump reality. I think often it's something that the conservative analyst Yuval Levin said to me early in the term. He said that administrations have a rhythm. At first, they are the master of events. Everybody is responding to them. It's true. And then they are responding to events.

3:59And in Trump's case, he's often even now responding to events he created. Which is what I was thinking when you were saying that. There has been a lot of reporting, for instance, on Iran right now, that Trump, he's in the mood for revenge. And I thought it was such a strange word that was being chosen. Like, he attacked Iran, decapitated the leadership, threatened to end the civilization. Iran is not completely capitulated to him. So he's like, he needs revenge. Like, is revenge the right word there? I'm sure he feels it is.

4:30I saw that reporting, and I actually wondered whether it was just about what you're describing, which is some kind of retribution for a military intervention that he began. Or whether it was part of this ongoing anger at Iran that really is quite real with him about the threats against his life.

Iran and Revenge

4:51Do you want to talk through that? Because I think that's an important thread of the book. Sure. It's very much an important thread of the book. Like, I know, I mean, Jonathan and my reporting really did show us how radicalizing those four years out of power were, not just for the investigations that he was facing and that a lot of his advisors got swept up in. But what also happened in 2024, right after he was convicted in a state court on falsifying documents in connection with a hush money payment to a porn star who said he had an affair with her was a Pakistani man who was indicted in connection with a murder-for-hire plot that was supposed to be allegedly engaged in by Iran.

5:30This was a proxy. The allegation is Iran had a proxy who was trying to hire a murderer to kill Donald Trump. Correct. And was indicted, by the way, you know, under the Biden Justice Department. But the assassination attempt in Butler happens right after that, where he was shot. And it was a galvanizing moment for the campaign. It was a galvanizing moment for him. All of that in his mind becomes one big blur. And around that time is when, and I don't remember if it was right before or right after, but Iran had successfully hacked the campaign manager's emails.

6:03Susie Wiles, Iran, according to officials, was behind it. And they start releasing them. And that was hugely embarrassing to the entire campaign. It also added to this sense of siege that they all have. They all went back into the White House this way for different reasons in some cases. But for that core group and for Trump himself, Iran and this feeling of being under threat is constant. You heard it when he spoke to John Carl after the Ayatollah was killed at the beginning of this war. And Trump said something to John Carl that I don't think I've heard him say since as a repeat.

6:37But it was, I'm paraphrasing, but it was, I got them once. They tried to get me twice. Whatever he's referring to, I don't exactly know in terms of the twice, but it tells you what his mindset is. One story that we've heard a lot is that Netanyahu talked Donald Trump into this war.

Netanyahu and Trump

6:52There's another story that Trump himself had distinctive views on Iran, has for some time, has always said they cannot have a nuclear weapon, tore up the Obama nuclear deal. Over the objections of his own advisors, has always had a very hard line on Iran. Going back years, I mean, you can find old interviews way before the presidency where he talks about Iran humiliating us. When you get the respect of the other countries, then the other countries tend to do a little bit as you do. And you can create the right attitudes. The Iranian situation is a case in point.

7:23That they hold our hostages is just absolutely and totally ridiculous. That this country sits back and allows a country such as Iran to hold our hostages, to my way of thinking, is a horror. And I don't think they'd do it with other countries. I honestly don't think they'd do it with other countries. Obviously, you're advocating that we should have gone in there with troops, etc., and brought our boys out. I absolutely feel that, yes. I mean, you write about this, but a lot of Trump's politics seem very rooted in the 80s and things that happened to America in the 70s and the 80s.

Trump's Politics

8:00But what at this point is your view of why Donald Trump decides to actually do a regime change-oriented war in Iran? The final piece of reporting that we did in regime change was about the lead-up to the Iran war. And it was not, there were things that happened that I'm sure will be either unearthed or could fill out a fuller picture. But we were really just focused on a few discrete meetings and conversations. And these were situation room meetings, one of which included a foreign leader coming to the situation room to have a very sensitive intelligence conversation with the U.S. president.

8:34And so Netanyahu comes on February 11th and paints this pretty compelling, to Trump's ears, story about why now is ripe for a regime change. And Trump is always very receptive to you could be the person to do X, Y, Z. And so Trump says some version of sounds good to me. His own CIA director, his own secretary of state the next day, they have run these scenarios. They say some of what Netanyahu is proposing and what the Israelis would call their decapitation scenario of take out certain leadership and then some of it could be done. They could degrade the ballistics missile program in Iran, for instance.

9:06But that the regime change scenarios that Netanyahu had presented, including a video of like who could take over and most of the Americans found it to be silly. John Radcliffe, the CIA director, called it farcical. Marco Rubio was much more explicit, said it's bullshit. In other words, it's bullshit. And Trump said regime change will be their problem. It wasn't quite clear whether he meant Iran or Israel, but he still thought it was worth a try to accomplish the other objectives. So that, yes, was definitely Netanyahu making a case.

9:37But number one, Netanyahu, in our reporting in 2024, has this meeting with Trump to essentially go kiss the ring and make nice after a break in their relationship. Trump says to him privately, I'm going to be much more aggressive on Iran this time. This is right after Butler. Remember that, as you said, he was – Trump was doing things against the objections of his own advisors on the nuclear deal, certainly the Obama nuclear deal. Taking out General Soleimani at the beginning of 2020 was also against what some of his advisors wanted.

10:07It is part of what has made him such a target for Iran. But he is more hawkish on Iran than he is about other parts of the Middle East to a degree that has always surprised some of his own aides. And that his current aides have really misread, I would say. You know, they will continue to insist that he doesn't like Netanyahu, he doesn't like this, he doesn't like that. And he definitely says different things to different people, depending on who he's talking to. But it's always been pretty clear that he has a firmer view here. And Trump believed Iran was a paper tiger after the 12-day war of last year because their response was pretty tepid to the strikes that the U.S. engaged in.

10:43It was sort of some choreographed strikes toward allies, okay, U.S. allies. Trump believed that was going to be the extent of it. It was just a massive miscalculation on his part and a lack of understanding what was happening. And he was also fresh off of this Venezuela effort to capture Maduro earlier this year. That also made him believe we can do these things. I'm not saying that's a rational belief. I am saying that was his belief. And he believes things will work out for him always. It gets to something that I think comes through in the book. And I think about a lot from our coverage from the first year, even just on this show.

Trumpism

11:15So there's really, in my view, no Trumpism. There's only Trump. Which is to say that the amount of energy that gets wasted chasing down purported doctrines, the Mar-a-Lago Accords that were getting floated at one point to do a massive currency rebalancing all across the world, the Don Road Doctrine, right? We'd be focusing on the Western Hemisphere. We wouldn't be entangled in all this war and conflict in the Middle East. Trump just weaves in and out of theories.

11:48I mean, there are things he holds to, right? He is hawkish on immigration, has been for a very long time. That is sustained. He has his views on trade. But even trade, the objectives have flitted back and forth on that. And everybody who says, I know what MAGA is, I know what Trumpism is, if it is anything, as J.D. Vance would put it, it's no new wars. They end up wrong because Trump is right. I think it's possibly you he said it to. Michael Shearer at The Atlantic, he said it to.

12:18He's the one who decides what it is. MAGA is whatever I say it is, is what he said. Now, I think that's true now. I guess I have a slightly different take on it, though I generally agree with you that trying to pin him to some ideology is just an absolute fool's errand and has always been a fool's errand. He does have these id-like impulses that he is very interested in, but it doesn't mean they can't be sublimated if the occasion calls for it. But I think MAGA is a movement, I do. I don't think MAGA is the entire Republican Party. I think MAGA is a movement within the Republican Party.

12:50And the coalition that exists around Trump in that framework has always been very uncomfortable and strange because he will say different things to different parts of it. And I think that they would only be willing to ignore the parts that don't match their own view for him. I cannot think of another figure who can unite these different facets of this movement. But I do think that this movement is having fissures, not just because of Iran and Israel. It started with Epstein. Right after the 12-Day War is when the Epstein crisis, and I'm calling it a crisis, what it actually is, is a multi-administration failure to deal with a pedophile who people of both parties found entertaining or useful or whatever.

13:36But it was the MAGA movement leaders who had been talking about a need for transparency over many years leading up to Trump's election in 2024. And they then get caught up in that because Trump wants nothing to do with this. He doesn't want anything released. So it becomes a crisis because there is growing anger by Trump's own base about what's happening. There's growing anger by victims about why have these files not been released? Why is nothing being looked at? So you end up in this remarkable series, and we've read about these in the book, these situation room meetings.

14:06It's the same place where Trump decided to take the country to war in Iran was what they were using for crisis comms on how do we get ourselves out of this mess. But if you want to track a moment that Trump started losing his own base, it was then. But did he lose his base? I mean, I've had people on the right on to talk about Trumpism cracking up and him losing his base. And then, you know, you look at the polls and the base is almost entirely with him. He's able to intervene in any primary he wants. He has not actually seemed to lose influence in this way.

14:36Tucker Carlson kind of breaking with him, at least on some issues. These things really happened. And yet his influence with Republicans seems pretty undimmed. The people who challenged him, like Massey, like Marjorie Taylor Greene. They lost. They lost. They're gone. They're gone. I think two things can exist at once, though. A, there was polling last year showing that even with his own base, mostly private polling, his numbers were ticking down. Now, there is no question that people who have opposed him because the Republican base is so Trump dependent will find themselves out of a job.

15:10That is absolutely true. At the same time, I never thought that I would see enough Republicans cross over and vote for the Epstein Transparency Act when Donald Trump was openly telling them don't do this. It's the only time I can think of, Ezra, where he would say, believe me, not what you're hearing over there. And there were people who didn't, including in his own base. Now, what their voter preference ends up being in the midterms or in a primary, it doesn't necessarily correlate to that. And I realize it sounds like I'm saying two things that are contradictory.

15:42I think these are two facts that exist at the same time. A very real thread of the book is this, what does Trump know anymore? And when or how does he know it? I mean, you have this, I wasn't really familiar with Natalie Harp before I read the book, but this person who kind of follows him around and gives him printouts of adoring fan mail and positive news stories from right-wing media. But, you know, he's on true social. He's not really on other platforms. He clearly has some contact, you know, with people like Carlson and others.

16:14And, you know, so he gets some information. But how would you describe the difference in Trump's second term from his first in terms of what he knows of the world outside the White House? You know, I can't stress enough how radically different Trump 2.0 is from term one. So this government is run basically by a half dozen people who are in the room with him. And if you are a senior official in this government somewhere else, major decisions can get made. And if you're not in the room, like you will literally have no idea.

16:46The interagency process, in particular at the National Security Council, just really doesn't exist the way it used to. And that was often how other agencies would be brought in. That's just not happening now. The comms process is not quite what it was. Now it's just sort of pure trolling. And he gets his information, as you said, from Truth Social. It used to be that he would get on what was known as Twitter when he was president last time.

Trump's Information Sources

17:10And he would look at the replies. And he would look at the trending topics. He would talk to more people. He does watch other cable channels besides Fox. We learned recently that he watches MS Now a lot on the weekends. Jonathan and I learned that after he appeared to have watched one of our appearances talking about the book. So it's a little more variegated than it seems. But most of the information is coming from Natalie Harp, who's known as the human printer, from people who know that he wants a constant supply of positive reinforcement.

17:42And his aides are afraid of giving him bad news. And I just want to make one other point. Fox is so much less critical of him this term than they were last term. Even on the news shows, it is all pretty positive and especially about the war. We stop the fighting and the ceasefire on the 20-yard line. We take it into the end zone. Once you start this, there needs to be a finish. And the only finish is complete surrender by the Iranians. I hate to say it, but complete annihilation. The reason this president will go down in history for a thousand years, the reason the prime minister of Israel will go down in history for a thousand years is because they saw the danger and they stood up to the danger and they're fighting the danger.

18:23They are like the last in anything that would be considered the MAGA, a media ecosystem that is really championing this war. So how much do you think the decisions being made reflect an altered informational environment for him? Well, it's a great question that I don't think that we have the full answer to. I mean, one question that keeps coming up is, does he understand how depleted the U.S. munitions are from this war?

18:54Now, that's not an unknowable thing for his own Pentagon leaders, but I don't know how much they're telling him. We have a scene in the book where his economic advisors, particularly Howard Lutnick, Commerce Secretary, are talking about economic numbers. And Trump, this is ahead of the trade war, Liberation Day last year. And Trump says, those numbers are bullshit. Natalie, get me the real numbers. And so she's Googling to find these numbers. There was pushback in this meeting, but his willingness to operate on his own gut and on what he thinks is reality, I would say is much sharper this term.

19:27There's something also tucked in there, which is you describe his meetings as having this borderless quality that people are flowing in and out of the White House. It's not necessarily, I'm sure it is sometimes, but, you know, from 1015 to 1045, we're meeting with the Joint Chiefs from 10, you know, that ends, they all leave 1045. So can you talk just a bit about that kind of free-flowing nature? Because I think the way he ends up getting information, making decisions actually reflects that, the slightly random assemblage of people who might be around on a certain issue at a certain time.

20:04There's no question about that, but it's also by his design. This White House group of staffers is much more willing to work with that as his preferred state than term one. You had Reince Priebus come in as the first White House Chief of Staff in 2017. He kept trying to put things on Trump's schedule. First, it was we're going to schedule early meetings to try to get him to stop tweeting in the morning. Then the meetings started sliding back and that wasn't working. They tried monitoring his phone calls. That didn't work either. This has always been a facet of Trump is just there's a big, long kind of day.

20:36And sometimes he has all the time in the world. But there is no sort of this person cannot come in. There might be certain moments like that or specific meetings. But in general, he does have an open door policy. Everything becomes this rolling ball session. I'll give you another, for instance, in the book. Laura Loomer comes into this meeting in April. I think it was Liberation Day, actually. And she'd negotiate this meeting with him directly. And she hands him this list of national security staffers who she believed were being disloyal to him and that should be fired.

21:07And he's listening and, you know, he acts on it. But in the middle of that meeting, Congressman Scott Perry comes in to join with his own list of things that he has an issue with. And Trump just has them there. And so, yes, the focus is whatever is in front of him. And he just barks an order at some aid and they go off and do it. Yes. It's just get it done. I want it fast. Fine. What's ever in front of his face. You are correct that it does have to do with the attention. The information he's getting. But trying to stop that is also useless because many have tried. The problem with group insurance is that health care isn't a group decision.

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New York Times Games

22:25I'm Winnalou. I write the game Connections, one of the puzzles from New York Times games. And I love horror movies. I love my dog. And I love trying to trick you. I'm Sam Azersky. And I create the game Spelling Bee and Letterboxd on a daily basis. And I have this thing called promesthesia. I see color when I'm listening to music. I'm Tracy Bennett. I get to pick the wordle word every day, which is not as easy as it sounds. A fun fact about me is that I am descended from a witch who was put on trial in Salem.

22:57Wow. Amazing. And I'm Joel Fagliano. I create your daily mini crossword. I've been making these puzzles for the Times for over 10 years now, which is like 3,000 minis. I am begging the universe for any new five-letter word. New York Times games are made by people, like the ones you just heard from. Go to nytimes.com slash games to start playing today. What's everyone's fastest mini time? Four seconds. No. What? I'll go find it. I have my screenshot somewhere.

23:30This maybe goes back to the question I was circled at the beginning. And maybe out of steam is not the right way to put it. But I always wonder with him, and probably around reporting like this, what picture he has of the way things are going. Because, you know, from where I sit, his trade war has been a disaster. It is wildly unpopular. It has been shredded by the Supreme Court. It has made people very angry at him. And it has accomplished nothing. We're not seeing a huge resurgence in manufacturing jobs.

24:01China's not weaker now. I think the broad and correct view is China's in a much stronger position today than when Trump stepped back into the White House. So sort of everything they promised on the trade war has not happened, and the politics of it have been bad. Doge completely collapsed after a couple months. It did terrible damage. It did terrible damage. USAID is gutted and gone. People have died. But it did not then cohere into what many, I think, people thought you might get, which is like a Doge 2.0, where, you know, Russ Vogt and others actually create something institutionalized.

24:36He's not popular. The Iran war, I think, is not going well. They have no legislative agenda that I can tell. They don't have an affordability agenda that makes any sense. But if you're him, and you got somebody following you around all day, telling you you're wonderful, you think the media that is mad at you just has Trump derangement syndrome, you're getting presented with a piece of words by the head of FIFA, different CEOs are coming in and constantly kissing your ass and telling you how great you are.

25:10Maybe you don't buy any of it. You have defied the polls many times. Well, you just hit on what it is. We've left out one piece that we haven't discussed at all that I think we will all be talking about after the midterms a lot, which is the incredible, massive self-dealing. You are richer. If you are Donald Trump and you have spent your whole life talking about wealth and measuring success through wealth, and you are now wealthier, liquid-wise assets than you have ever been. From an industry that you regulate from a company that was created during your campaign that your sons are running with the sons of your special envoy.

25:49It's a sentence that it's really would have been unimaginable not that long ago. And you're doing it and Republicans in Congress say nothing. And the Senate say almost nothing. And voters have only started to care about some of it in polling I'm seeing. And I honestly think the main reason is less the money made, although I do think that that is a factor. It's that they can see visual signs with all of the monuments and all of the literally blasting through longstanding buildings or structures like the East Wing, planning to build an arch, putting down drapes so people can't see your construction projects and so forth.

26:30Symbols are a lot easier for voters to understand, and voters tend to think all politicians are corrupt. But this is different than anything we have ever seen in the U.S. system. But if you're him, you have been this kind of walking moral hazard. Your company almost sank in 1991. People don't understand how close to ruin he was when his casinos were overleveraged. It was across his properties. It wasn't just there. You come back through a variety of reasons, but partly because the banks decided it was worth staying with you, and your father helped you.

27:07You become a reality TV star. You win the presidency after never having run for city council before. You are indicted four times. Your opponents keep doing things that are pretty self-harmful. Joe Biden has a pretty non-spectacular last two years at minimum of his term. You are shot at. You survive. You take on this mystical quality with your followers, not just your followers, but with your advisors, who refer to him, or then, anyway, would refer to him as the chosen one.

27:39Only semi-joking in some cases. And you believe everything works out for you. Which is literally what he said to Tucker Carlson. You know why the Iran war is going to work out? Things are going to work out? Because they always do. And so you believe that your reality is better than what experts have been telling you. He thinks the economy is boring. He literally will tell advisors he finds this boring to talk about. He wants to talk about immigrants committing rapes or murdering people or committing crimes.

28:09And he's going to do what he wants to do. And he is, look, he obviously doesn't want to be impeached again. But when you have to say again, unimpeached, it's stuff's mattering as much, sort of, I think, to some extent in his head. It's also not even the first again. Well, that's exactly correct. It would be again three. And so, again, well, again two, I guess. He's already told people that he's going to pardon everyone who has come within a certain radius of the Oval Office. And he has an immunity ruling from the Supreme Court that it's still not entirely clear what would qualify as a presidential act, where he has no criminal exposure.

28:42But I suspect it would be most of them if it was pressed. So if you were him, this moment could be very bad for other Republicans, but he's not that worried for himself. Let me ask you about the corruption dimension of this. So when you talk to Republicans off the record, often they will admit they know that we are dealing with a level of corruption that is majestic in its grandeur. That is like nothing we've really seen before. It's not even a debatable point when you talk to them off the record.

29:13One thing I hear people say all the time in the media, elsewhere, just voters, Democrats, is any one of these stories would have consumed Washington at another time, would have sunk another presidency. You think of Travelgate and Pig Futures in the Clinton administration. You think of the Trump cabinet member who had to resign, I think it was Andy Price. Yeah, Tom Price. Tom Price for, what was it, taking charter jets?

29:43He was using jets. We have referenced that in the book, actually. Yeah. Why is it that stories that would have consumed Washington, and even would have been a problem for members of the Trump administration at another time, seem to slide off of him? There's great reporting being done at the New York Times, at the New Yorker, at other places. We know a lot. We have numbers now that we didn't used to have, but why has he been able to flood the zone on corruption and then escape the consequences it would have attached to another administration?

30:21Well, I would break that down a little bit. So, what you're describing in terms of consequences from what you just ticked through was primarily the consequences of a news cycle, the consequences of public information. And, number one, I think that at this point, if you are a journalist and you get into journalism in the expectation that what you write is going to force an outcome and that that is your end, you're going to be disappointed very, very often. Because it is a totally different media landscape, because this choose-your-own-adventure partisanship really actually allows people to just hear what they want to hear, number one.

30:59Number two, we don't have subpoena powers, right? We can only write up to what we know. In the past, investigations would have been done by the Inspector's General. He's fired Inspector's General at the start of his term. They would have been done by Congress on a bipartisan level. Everything is tribal now. Like, beyond anything we have seen in the past, it was pretty bad before in terms of partisanship. The House GOP acts like an arm of the Trump administration. The Republican House members and some senators, they still look at him as a celebrity.

31:31Yes, there is obviously a fear factor. He has shown he is willing to destroy their careers and really humiliate them. But the way that they, grown men, you know, he'll take chocolate bars out of the, what they call the chum closet that has the presidential merch or whatever, and he'll, like, throw them. It's like Hershey bars. And these are House members who are like, ooh, me. They love, you know, they love being on Air Force One with him. And I... And a House member gushing that he knew his first name. Yes, correct. It's, this celebrity is talking to me.

32:01Not this president. This celebrity. I watched The Apprentice. I knew Donald Trump. So that's one reason why. The other is he has been investigated since almost the second he stepped... Actually, literally the second he stepped into office in 2017. So I think there is a flattening effect with the public in terms of their expectation. At a certain point, it all becomes one... Trump would smear it that way. Witch hunt. Explaining to people that there is new information is, I think, a challenge for journalists across the board.

32:32All of that occurs in his favor. There is not one single reason why. And I don't think there will ever be another politician who will have this same experience as he does. But we'll see. Do you think that changes if Democrats get subpoena power? No, I don't. Because I think that if you are Donald Trump and you can pardon everyone around you, and you can instruct your entire government not to respond to subpoenas with anything timely, and only do it once the final stop in a court challenge makes you, Trump's whole thing is waiting people out.

33:03And we have seen this over and over and over again. So there are a number of members of his government, and I talked about how radicalized they all are, who do believe that they are going to be not just subpoenaed, but prosecuted. And I'm not just talking about when the House flips. I'm talking about under a Democratic presidency. They genuinely believe, and I'm not endorsing this view, I'm just saying this is their perspective, we are going to be indicted by an illegitimate junta of the Democrats at some point.

33:33They are going to come after us when we are out of power. So we are going to do everything we can. That is entirely the mindset. They have the same hunted mentality that he does. Because I just think that people who think that the House is going to flip and this is going to look like it did in 2019, I'm struggling to see that. I could be wrong. But what happens when they issue contempt of Congress subpoenas and they send them to Attorney General Todd Blanche? Does he rush to start an investigation? Like, I just don't know what this looks like.

34:05A Democratic strategist said to me in 2016, right after Trump won, that the entire country was about to finally understand how much of our system is norms and not laws. And fundamentally, I still come back to that every time. If you have somebody who is willing to violate every norm, I mean, really every norm. I don't think I can think of one that he, I'm sure there's something, but it's hard to go down the list and find something that is still firmly in place. We have a president who cheered when Robert Mueller died. He cheered when Rob Reiner was killed by his own son, according to prosecutors.

34:40He is making a ton of money and they're very blase about it. You know, they will say there's no corruption here as they continue doing what they're doing. They're about to start trying to monetize his true social posts for advance notice. It's a recipe. Can you talk through that for a minute? Because that's the true social. Oh, yeah. The. I know it's like it's hard to describe because I'm trying to monetize. They're trying to monetize rapid trading. Correct. On true social. But can you explain how? Yes. What they're trying to do is sell for very, very high dollar amounts.

35:12I think it's like one hundred thousand dollars. advance notification of Trump's truth posts because they can move markets and do move markets. It seems even if it's not violating a law for Trump because presidents are actually not held to the same ethical standards and laws and regulations as their staff. I mean, how does this not become something else? Well, it goes to something, I think, in what you were just talking about, which is, I think

35:43the deep answer to the question we were just discussing is Republicans. It's the fundamental answer on some level, right? Like in other administrations, even your co-partisans on something like this would say no. Now, arguably, Republicans did that a bit on the IRS slush fund. It was. I mean, that was so brazen that it was a little hard not to have problems with it. And I actually I don't even remember if had the judge already raised questions about that once they did. Did that give them cover?

36:14I don't even remember. But yes, I mean, this was this was you're taking taxpayer money and doing this. It's the taxpayer. A lot of how not just accountability, but investigation worked in Washington. Was it either the other side was in power? So they were able to structure investigation and that the agencies were run more professionally. The Department of Justice run more independently. And so they responded to investigation and responded to subpoenas. And that creates a structure of a sequencing of information coming out and possible consequences

36:48and people being hauled before Congress. And each one is a new news story. And that's how you get the connection of like a congressional operation and like media coverage that people understand is a scandal. Yes, well, that is true. I mean, that's how it works. And Republicans just are not going to do that. No, they're not. You know, the closest that they have come would have been and I am really stretching the word closest here. So just roll with me for a second before you say this is absolutely not at all parallel because

37:19I'm not saying it is. But the closest would have been some of what they were doing around Epstein. But of course, that took a detour into the Clintons and all kinds of other stuff. And by that, I just mean James Comer's committee initially, which was filing a subpoena to Pam Bondi that the administration was not happy with. And then they slow rolled that. But no, there's no analog. I mean, if you look back at the last real effort that attempted to be moderately bipartisan, it would have been the J6 committee and the select committee that was investigating what happened in the lead up to the January 6th riot at the Capitol and Trump's efforts to

37:53overturn the election. But even that devolved into partisan politics. And so there you have it. It was striking to me how small of a role Congress played in this book. Well, there's a couple of reasons. It's a good it's a it's a point. But the reality is that Congress plays a supplicant role. We did talk about that. We talked about Mike Johnson's role with Trump and how incredibly unusual it is historically. There's just there has not been a relationship like this between a House speaker and a president that I can think of where it's literally give me my marching orders this way.

38:24That is not about policy. It's about just whatever you want it to be. But the reality is there is no legislative agenda. As you said, there was the one big, beautiful bill. And we did talk about that. And we do get into what went into that. But this administration knew that it was never going to be able to do much legislatively.

38:42But this, again, goes to me to this question of what is actually being built here versus what is just kind of collapsing or being like left alone on even a lot of these issues. OK, so the big, beautiful bill did pass. It's a big change. And, you know, as the actual changes to Medicaid and food stamps and other things roll out, I think we have a lot of political upheaval around that. Yes. And there will be more focus and there will be more coverage and interest. I agree with that. Look, their trade agenda got gutted. They could have gone to Republicans in Congress to get more power on tariffs.

39:17They chose not to do that. That's true. Would Republicans in Congress keep them from ever changing the filibuster? I don't know. They've been kind of tough on that, but they've also like nicked it around the edges a little. A little. Immigration. They have done a tremendous amount of immigration. I think of everything you can look at, they have done the most on immigration. What they have not done is change the laws. Well, because that takes time. I mean, this isn't complicated. This is. But it also means that another administration can. I understand that. But they also assume that's going to happen regardless. I mean, I think that just to try to explain the mindset here, the person who spent the most

39:50time, and I'm glad you brought up immigration, the person who has spent the most time thinking about a Trump 2.0 and not just from the perspective of immigration, but obviously that's his driving issue and defining issue is Stephen Miller. And he spent four years focused on not just what he wanted to do differently this time. You know, the initial Muslim ban was a disaster and a court-challenged disaster, and it was poorly written and so forth in 2017, and it created mass chaos on flights and so forth. Stephen Miller spent four years looking at how far the law could go on a number of things,

40:25what was in the executive branch's control, what could be claimed as an executive branch power, which they've done a lot. And they've gotten caught in courts on this, as you know. And that's sort of part of what you're saying, I think, is if you don't want to have a big court fight, go work through the actual process. They would rather have a big court fight because if you go through the process, it's going to move slowly, and their gamble is that they can win much of the time, not every time. The trade agenda was a calamity for a variety of reasons, but it wasn't just because they didn't go to Congress.

40:56It was because the formula made no goddamn sense. But Doge is another example where- Doge is a great example. To do what they wanted to do, you actually need to do civil service reform. And they've done a little bit of that, but it's not civil service reform. Yeah, you would have to go and change the laws. Yes, but that's not, again, this actually gets to a different problem. There isn't a they, actually. They don't all work in harmony, even though they collectively want the same thing, which is crush the left, expand our power, focus on a specific set of issues. And we've gone over many of them on this show.

41:28But Russ Vogt actually understands how government works. Elon Musk did not. He just came in and started punching through walls. In some cases, literally, physical aspects were impacted by how he handles things. That is different also than how Stephen Miller wants to handle certain things. And so that creates its own internal crash. Then add Congress to that as a layer, it's hard to see.

42:03This is Maurice Shema, host of The Last 12 Weeks, a new podcast from Serial Productions, The Marshall Project, and The New York Times. A couple of years back, I got an email from a defense lawyer who wanted me to write about his client. The client, David Wood, was on death row in Texas. Had been there for more than 30 years. The lawyer was writing because David Wood had lost all of his appeals.

42:34He was set to be executed. The lawyer's plan to stop the execution was to try and prove something that nobody had successfully done in three decades. That one of Texas' most notorious serial killers was actually innocent. It wasn't that the lawyers didn't have a case to make. I know two people fabricated testimony to get a guy executed. It's just that they had so little time to make it. The Last 12 Weeks. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Power Shifts in Court

43:13Has there been a shift in who holds power in the court in the last year? Yes, but it can change quite rapidly. Marco Rubio had a lot of capital with Trump for a long time. I think still does, but he is really not that involved in the Iran issue. Because Trump doesn't want him or because he doesn't want to be near it? I think it's more the latter, honestly. I think that Trump would welcome his involvement more. And he may get more involved now, but he's been talking about it a little bit more. But I think that Rubio, if you strapped him to a polygraph, this is not where he wants

43:47things to be. Susie Wiles is still hugely influential. Stephen Miller, despite these stories about how he was getting his wings clipped and whatever, after Rene Goode and Alex Pruddy were killed in Minnesota, that was vastly overstated. But the showy displays of, you know, rappelling into a building in Chicago from a Black Hawk, which I still can't really believe happened last year. But they have stopped the great displays of force. They are still using force. But it's not, you know, these ICE drives the same way it's the traffic stops.

44:18That's what the latest shootings were about. Stephen Miller has taken down his arrest number for undocumented immigrants from last year. It was 3,000 a day last year. Now it's 2,000 a day. And he's back to pushing people. And he's very, very aggressive on these calls. So Miller still has power because Miller can also tell Trump, I can get you what you want very quickly, which is also, again, why they don't go to Congress. They want to act unilaterally. Trump wants to act unilaterally. And he just wants to do what he wants. Hegseth is still actually pretty powerful with Trump. Radcliffe is on certain issues. But the person who is most powerful is Trump, period.

44:50Hegseth is powerful with Trump. Trump listens to him. He listens to him on certain issues. Hegseth has figured out how to have conversations. Look, Hegseth, if there was anyone who was in favor of Iran, it was Hegseth. But I don't think he fully envisioned it going this way either. Hegseth often shows up for these briefings with Trump, with Dan Cain. He has figured out how to handle these discussions so that he is turning to somebody who actually has better tactical understanding. But Trump does listen to him anyway. Dan Cain being the former general who...

45:20The former general who is now the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but whose style is very different than Trump's last choice for chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which was Mark Milley, who would get into these sort of grab Trump by the lapels arguments. He did see his job as telling Trump which way to go. Cain has told people he doesn't see that as his job. Hegseth is a diehard Trumper, not MAGA Trumper. And so that buys you a lot of cash internally. Yeah, so that was my question with him. Is he somebody who Trump enjoys as a yes man or who Trump listens to for strategic advice?

45:51More the former than the latter. But the strategic advice is also channeled through these joint conversations with Hegseth. But he does listen to him and he likes him. You know, he's good on TV. He's tough. He doesn't take crap, et cetera, et cetera. And he is a devotee. What have the people in the inner circle learned about how to brief Trump? It's a good question. This is, it sits around the edge of a lot of the stories in your book of people bringing in poster boards, right? Well, that's Bill Fulte. That's one person. But yes, I understand. But I've heard from other people around the briefing books that they're very visual.

46:23Oh, totally. Tell me what people have learned about how you briefed Donald Trump. Trump is very visual, as you said. And this was a big facet of term one, too. Now they all submit to it. I think they resisted it, the government, because it was so unusual to them in term one. But he really doesn't like long briefing books. He doesn't really read them. He wants to be shown how things look. That is how he absorbs them. People describe him, they'll say he's a TV guy, and they tend to think of it as him on the set of The Apprentice. But it's actually really how he absorbs the world is through TV.

46:55And so he likes to see how things look. Just having a dry recitation of facts and discussions with him doesn't work very well. But even when it was visuals in term one, the quality of the information was fairly reliable. There's a much bigger fight now about the quality of the information. Whether you include essentially raw intelligence, whether you tell him reports that are unverified, whether it is just a different type of discussion. The amount that he relies on a sense of how things are either playing visually, right?

47:30There are moments in the book, and that I've heard about too, where he sees what it's looking like when the Israelis are doing something. And now he wants to be involved. Or the flip, right? Where he is being shown possible cabinet appointees. And they give him little montages of them on cable news. There is something very deep about Trump's – he doesn't just apprehend the world visually. He is somewhat a master of creating visuals for the world.

48:00A hundred percent, yes. You know, Hegseth is one of many people he sort of cast into his administration. He was an innovator in this. I mean, I think you have to see Mamdani as having like a different version of this, a kind of visual mastery of the world. I just had Morris Katz on the show. They very much found Graham Plattner and cast him in a very particular position. But again, this operates on the edges of the book. But I'd be curious to hear you bring it to the center of the stage, which is what has it meant to have this administration

48:33that both makes internal decisions through spectacle and then communicates through spectacle, that judges visually and acts visually. It becomes a self-reinforcing feedback loop sometimes, right? I mean, so when you were talking about Hegseth, we have a bit in the book about how he got very into these videos of the boat strikes. And they would be privately described as Hegseth's snuff films. But, you know, he would want to have some sent to Trump because he knew Trump would want to see them.

49:05Trump is a master of the attention economy, which is what I was thinking about when you were talking about Mamdani. I think that that is part of the attention economy is creating a visual and is getting something that will grab people. Mamdani was exceptionally good at that in his campaign and still is, honestly. I mean, when I look at his social media, just as mayor, it is actually quite striking how much of it still comes into my feed, even if I'm not looking for it, even if I'm not looking at his thing. But it becomes a way to tell yourself that your view of reality is what's happening.

49:38So, for instance, we have a scene in the book where Stephen Miller comes into, it was really an important moment, he comes into the Oval Office and he's got these pictures of this kid from Doge, whose name online was Big Balls, that's what he was known as, and his actual name is Ed something. But he had been beaten up and he's got these photos that Stephen Miller had gotten from his wife, who had been working with Musk at Doge. That then fires up something that Trump's been wanting to do forever,

50:08which is send National Guard into D.C. It isn't just about seeing visuals that, you know, reaffirm your point. It is basically that your world is no competing viewpoints and that everything is just going in through the eyes. And it stops you from thinking the same way. Because part of, I mean, this is my opinion now, I'm getting a little inside his head, which I try not to do because it's not a very worthwhile endeavor. But I do think that when people are consuming their own content that way, so much of consumption of visuals is about, you react, you react.

50:41And so it's just a constant reaction. And that is what they try doing with these videos that Stephen Chung does when he's trolling. You know, the White House communications director, who's a big UFC guy, for instance. They set these videos of these strikes, like the actual video game music and dynamics. Or, and I thought this was a fascinating detail in the book, to the music of artists who are going to protest. Correct. That's true. Who are going to say, how dare you use my music in this way? And then that's another news cycle for them. Correct. One of the things that Kushner used to tell people in the White House last time was that

51:15he would describe what he called Trump rules. And one of them was controversy elevates message. And so there's no quicker way to do that. But it's also a way to say, I'm not going to follow your rules. What did you make of the Trump-Mamdani meetings? I was so not surprised, and it went exactly as I thought it was going to, in all seriousness. But Trump's own team is a little jarred by how much he enjoys talking to Mamdani and how as much as Republicans are trying to talk about how, you know, socialists or communists,

51:46and Trump is even doing that in his own speeches. But he seems to have a real carve-out for one particular person. And I know he's attacked him a few times recently, Mamdani. But Mamdani is, he's very good. I mean, apparently in their first meeting, Mamdani was referring to the crossover of voters that were Trump voters at his own rallies. Mamdani's been quite smart. The Trump-Mamdani meetings, they reflect what I thought was the funniest part of your book, which is Trump's tendency to be incredibly conciliatory and friendly when he meets one-on-one with people

52:18who he has been slandering, who his administration might be entirely persecuting. But for somebody who is so brash and aggressive, he's a bit of a pussycat one-on-one. He does not like one-on-one interpersonal direct conflict. This has been a constant in his life. Sometimes he does it intentionally, just to sort of make the person be off guard. But with Mamdani, he seems to genuinely like him. So, or whatever that's worth.

52:49Do you feel Trump has changed with age? Are the ages selling him in meaningful ways? I mean, define meaningful. When I watch him on television from even 10 years ago, I mean, I was watching his RNC address in 2016 recently, and it's a pretty jarring comparison to just how his words flow now. He speaks much slower. He's telling the same stories a lot. The weave is getting wide, as Joe Rogan would say. That's definitely true. I will say that Jonathan and I spent an hour with him in the Oval Office on March 16th of this year

53:23for a fact-check interview for the book. We didn't notice anything meaningfully different. And what we did notice is that he seemed like what Steve Bannon describes as pure Trump. There was just much more focus on payback, much more focus on what he wants to be focused on. Very obsessed with the renovation projects. Very. And, you know, here's the models. It's day 17 of the war. Here's my models of the ballroom and so forth. It was like he didn't have a care in the world. But I don't subscribe to this dementia conversation. I don't think Trump is some fundamentally different human being. I just don't. But I think he is much more himself, which is a product of age in general.

53:56There was a sense, maybe the better way to put it, is that there was a thread on particularly lefty social media six, eight months ago around the sort of strange bruising people were seeing. That is weird. I mean, yes. The sort of the ankle swelling that he was quite sick. So in terms of physical health, he has chronic venous insufficiency syndrome, disease, whatever it's called. That means that the blood is not going to his heart properly. So that's not a good thing. You know, on his first medical report in 2018, he had a calcium score of, I think, 133.

54:31That suggests some level of heart disease. They have not put out a calcium score since. He was very sick with COVID in 2020. And we still don't know the extent of that. I mean, I reported some on that from information we got well after he was out of office. But, you know, we don't we don't know what we don't know. And his health notes read as if he's written part of them. So, you know, he goes to Walter Reed with more frequency and they release less information. He got imaging. We don't even know what they were. He can't tell us. He says he was treated by 22 specialists. What? 22? I don't know that could be.

55:02And the bruising thing, the explanation has never made sense. It's always been handshaking, aspirin. It could be that 80 year olds have thinner skin, but he's clearly not the picture of great physical health. But I don't know what that means. You know, what I know when I generally know what it means is that electing 80 year olds is a bit of a gamble, right? I mean, electing anybody isn't a gamble. You don't know how somebody's health is going to be, but you can guess where it's going when they're older. How much of his time actually goes into the renovation now? A lot. If you looked at like a chart of his mindshare, like this I will say about getting into his

55:34mind, like 70% of it would be on his renovations. It's a legacy thing, but it's, I always think of legacy with him different than the way we usually use the word legacy. It's not what am I leaving behind for the world? It's what am I leaving behind so the world can't kick me off the world or deplatform me or take my name off buildings in Manhattan or take away my Bronx leased golf course, you know, or debank me. It's what can I do that cannot be taken away? Yeah. How can I create monuments to myself?

56:06Correct. I mean, literally, I mean, he literally said that when Ed O'Keefe from CBS asked him, he noticed the arch, which he's calling the arc to Trump design on the Resolute desk. And he asked her on the desk. I don't know if it was the Resolute. I think it was back by then. Ed said, what is that? And Trump's like, it's an arch. And I said, but who's it for? And Trump said, me. And he was quite clear about it. There was no further conversation. The Kennedy Center, the ballroom, you know, I mean, I can go on and on, but it is all monuments. Can you tell the Macron story with the arch?

56:38I'm going to F this up a little bit. But in a meeting, he calls, so one of the things he was musing about was like, what should go on top of the arch? And it was like, should he put a version of the gold version of like the fight, fight, fight fist from Butler up there? But he calls Macron in the middle of another meeting and starts asking him about the Arc de Triomphe in France. And, you know, what's it like? And how many people, you know, does it have a visitor's desk? Do people jump off of it? I mean, this was the conversation that he was interested in. And he's still talking about this kind of thing, but calls up a foreign leader to inquire

57:11about what his arch to himself should look like. And speaking of the other side of legacy, the more traditional way we would talk about legacy, does he have things he still wants to achieve politically? It's a really good question. I could answer that pretty clearly in 2019 and 2020. There were things that he still wanted to achieve. If there are things that he wants to achieve beyond just sort of not being Herbert Hoover, as he would say, meaning with a giant global crisis, not really. I mean, look, he's resumed his trade war, as you said.

57:43I think he'd like to achieve getting out of Iran. I think he would like to figure out an end to the war that he started. But that's not an achievement. That's a reaction to his own behavior, as we started this episode with. There are people around him who would like to see some form of comprehensive immigration reform, to your question about legislation. That's something that we can work with Democrats on. Boy, do I have a hard time seeing Democrats wanting to give him some kind of a political win that way, especially when it would be, I suspect, a bill they would find less than palatable, as they have almost every single other bill involving anything related to

58:16immigration with him. Maybe another way of asking this is, are there actual policy issues his mind is gravitating towards in the way it does towards the renovation? No, I know what you're asking. Yeah, no. And the answer's no, right? Yeah, I mean, I would give, I mean, that could change. They could be having conversations we're not aware of, but certainly not in anything that we have heard. I mean, if anything, what he spent the last year and a half focused on, you know, as issues top one, two, and three were retribution.

58:47Were these bullying campaigns across various industries and aspects of civil society, where he was pretty successful for a time. The law firms won. The courts caught up with him. But media, he's done pretty well, I would say, in terms of his attacks on the media, not through the government levers, but through lawsuits. But renovations is really a huge part of it. The degree of mindshare on these projects is vast. He is vastly less interested in and reactive to domestic politics this time, just beyond.

59:17And one of the things that we started seeing in 2024, and we get into this, this relates to, in the book, it relates to the mystical quality. He sees himself as big on a level that I think people really don't understand. And it was quite clear when we were sitting with him, and we write about that in the epilogue of the book. But he is playing for history, capital G, great man of history, to be remembered, to be remembered by one name, to have left a mark on the world that is just different than a typical president or what he would say is a normal president.

59:48That doesn't involve the boring work of trying to pass a bill. That doesn't involve the boring work of going to Iowa to talk about XYZ, although his numbers are not great in Iowa now either. I mean, this is fundamentally less interesting to him. Immigration, very interesting to him. I think that if he could find some way to even further change the immigration system and claim credit for that, he would. It did not involve legislation. He may still end up trying to do something legislatively. It wouldn't surprise me at all. I just don't see it going very far. But who knows?

1:00:20I'm willing to be surprised. But no, there is not room in the tank for, here is how we are going to map out XYZ. They are in survival mode, politically, to a degree that I kind of can't express. I think that's a good place to end. Also, final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience? Okay. So I'm reading Charlie Savage's Takeover, The Return of the Imperial Presidency, which was a very, very good look at how particularly Dick Cheney experienced. Expanded executive power under W. Bush post 9-11.

1:00:51I am reading Bell Burden's Strangers because a book that is that everywhere, I sort of feel compelled to have some sense of. I haven't read it yet. Is it good? It's interesting. It's interesting. It's well-written. It's definitely propulsive. It's an interesting choice to write about such wealth in this moment. It was, that was a little hard to get through because there are many people who go through divorces who don't quite have the same resources.

1:01:23And then Keith McNally's I Regret Everything. Oh, that book has been fun. It's actually fantastic. So, yeah. But I've had to cycle out of that one for news and for other reasons. So.

1:01:35Maggie Haberman, thank you very much. That's right. Thanks for having me. Thanks for having me.