Ezra Klein on What’s Wrong with Trump / Maggie Haberman on What an Unleashed Trump Might Do

Maggie Haberman on What an Unleashed Trump Might Do

Oct. 25, 2024

Ezra Klein

By Ezra Klein

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/25/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-maggie-haberman.html

 

Donald Trump’s past, present and possible future.

This week, I released an audio essay on Donald Trump. And in a way, it was about Donald Trump’s mind and the peculiar ways in which it works, the degree to which he moves through the world without inhibition and the ways in which that is potentially worsening as he gets older. But more than that, it was about the relationship between Trump and the people and institutions that surround him.

 

And the basic thesis of my piece is that Trump has always been a remarkably disinhibited human being. But in his presidency, he was surrounded by people and institutions that inhibited his worst impulses. He governed, in a way, in coalition with the Republican Party he did not yet fully control. His White House was full of factions, full of people who did not agree with him, who were serving there in part out of duty, in part out of a belief that maybe he would not be as bad as he feared he would be. And in many, many, many, many cases, things that Donald Trump wanted to do, he was not allowed to do.

 

But much of that will be different if Trump wins again. So I want to talk about Trump, about the people and processes and institutions that surround him with someone who knows him much better than I do.

 

Maggie Haberman is a senior political reporter at The Times, and she’s the author of the great book “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America.” And she was kind enough in a very, very busy season to sit down with me.

 

Note: This conversation was taped before Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly went on the record saying that Trump meets the definition of a fascist and confirming that the former president made admiring statements about Hitler.

 

This is an edited excerpt from our conversation for my podcast. For the full conversation, watch the video above or listen to “The Ezra Klein Show.”

 

Maggie Haberman on What an Unleashed Trump Might Do

The New York Times political correspondent discusses Donald Trump’s past, present and possible future.

I had sent you this essay I was working on, on Donald Trump, and you said that some of it landed for you and some of it needed more nuance and context. You know the guy so much better than I do. So what landed? What didn’t?

 

Everything you wrote about him, I think, actually was pretty on target. I think your descriptions of him as uninhibited — although why he’s uninhibited, I think there’s lots of reasons why that could be, and I’m not a psychiatrist, and neither are you — but that’s certainly how he behaves. That he has gotten more of himself as time has gone on, I think, is a real thing. I think he is a little different since the shooting in Butler, Pa., this summer, which I think is a factor.

 

I think it is in his head, and I think that it is in the back of his mind, much more than we realize, and has become incorporated into whatever we’re seeing now, where he is not a different person, by any stretch of the imagination — the stories that he’s telling on the campaign trail and at rallies, including this story about Arnold Palmer, the golfer, and his private parts, that he’s been telling for years. But there’s some level of filter that’s gone. And I don’t happen to think it’s some strategy to egg people on.

 

I mean, he likes being subversive, so maybe that’s part of it. But I think that his ability to read a room has been significantly altered, and the only thing that I can chalk it up to is, first, the assassination attempt in Butler, and that was followed nine days later by Joe Biden dropping out. So those two events coming so close to each other — but just happening at all — seem to have impacted him significantly.

 

You’ve interviewed him a lot over the years. How would you say age has changed him?

 

He’s definitely older. I can tell by talking to him that he’s older, and I can tell by watching him that he’s older.

 

He is not as sharp. Peter Baker did a very thorough piece on this a couple of weeks ago. If you look at his 2011 Conservative Political Action [Conference] speech, which was his first real modern Republican Party appearance, it’s the same getting bored with the text, right? He’s got a printed speech in front of him. It’s not teleprompters. And he starts telling stories, and you can see the crowds fading, and then he says something, and they like it. So he repeats it. That’s all familiar. But he’s much sharper. It’s faster. It’s clearer. He’s doing this thing when he talks where it’s like he’s dropping the proper nouns out of his sentences. It can be a lot harder to track. He’ll just say “he” in the middle of a sentence, and unless you’re really following what he’s saying from the start to the end, it’s not always easy to tell exactly what he’s talking about. But I attribute that to age. I attribute that just to being older.

 

I don’t actually think there’s a huge difference in his energy levels. I really don’t. He doesn’t present old, at least in the way that Joe Biden did. And I think that was part of what was sticking for voters. But I don’t think there is some massive difference in him. I really don’t. For the most part, he is the same person that he has always been, with far less interest or ability in presenting a filter in any situation.

 

I had not tracked that. So they’re around, if I’m remembering the numbers right, 45 minutes in 2016. And now they’re above 80 minutes, on average. And that’s a thing that I think people are going to present as his vigor: Look, he’s up there doing these long rallies. Would Joe Biden be up there doing these long rallies? But this actually strikes me as an example of his aging. He’s become just a ramblier old man.

 

He’s more incoherent, and he is ramblier. He’s more meandering. And when I say “incoherent,” I don’t mean the “cognitive decline” definition that keeps getting used, but he is harder to track. He’s just harder to follow. And it’s possibly for the reason you’re describing.

 

But I was also just struck about your description of what about him appeals to people. You talked about him attacking John McCain. That was another example with him of the man meeting the moment with the Republican Party. So he’s attacking John McCain because he’s uninhibited, and yes, people like that. But base Republican voters liked him attacking that particular target, because they thought John McCain was why they lost the ’08 election, because McCain was too genteel and too establishment and too nice to Obama.

 

So situating Trump in the context of where he is, I think, is very important, in terms of understanding how he reflects what he’s seeing in front of him. And so, yes, he’s uninhibited, but he sees a market, and so he acts more uninhibited.

 

I think that’s all right. In some ways, the big thing I want to talk about today is Trump and the institutions and party that surround him.

 

But I’ve been thinking about it in a different way today because on the chyron in the office — the TVs are on — is all Kamala Harris campaigning with Liz Cheney. And there’s something about it that has this deep irony to me. Because Trump feels, to me, like a creation of a series of, at least in my view, policy disasters by the Bush-Cheney White House, particularly but not only Iraq and also political failures by McCain and Mitt Romney.

 

It’s like you bring those two things together for Republicans: The people in charge, they have screwed up the economy and destabilized the entire Middle East, and they keep losing elections. And all of a sudden there’s a hole, a market opportunity, a void for somebody who will say: These people are losers and idiots, and they don’t know what they’re doing.

 

Correct. And you just described the various factors that led to the Trump rise and what was taking place in the Tea Party era, which is sort of the proto-Trump period — 2010, 2011, the reaction to the election of the first Black president.

 

That’s clearly a factor here. But also that took place around the same time as the fiscal crisis for which none of the big bankers were indicted. And a lot of people who suffered financially watched and felt like the bad guys got away with it. And yes, they fault Obama, they fault Bush, they fault Cheney for the wars.

 

I don’t think we can overstate how important the post-9/11 period was to the rise of Donald Trump, in terms of anti-Muslim sentiment, which he stoked in 2016, in terms of anger over those wars, in terms of a feeling among a lot of families of military vets that they had been left behind and forgotten about — unlike families who lost people on Sept. 11. There were a lot of stakeholders at those various sites where there was rebuilding, and people were very interested in their stories. People have generally not been that interested in the stories of these soldiers who died. And all of those frustrations and all of that desire to give a giant middle finger to whomever was encapsulated in Donald Trump.

 

I always think there are two, broadly speaking, types of nationalistic or, if we’re being a little more direct about it, xenophobic politicians. And one is the kind that comes from a place that does not have many immigrants, does not have much diversity — the sort of rural populace, maybe.

 

The other is the kind that comes from the urban centers, the places that do. You don’t get in the modern era, because of how blue cities are, that many top Republican politicians who come from cities, but Trump comes from New York City. One of the things that is so important to me about your book is how much you situate him in New York politics. So when you say that Trump is the one who senses the anti-Islam sentiment and stokes it — obviously immigration is crucial to his politics, but he’s in a place that is deeply diverse, where he is shoulder to shoulder with all kinds of different people his whole life — how do those pieces of him fit together? What is different about the sort of urban dimension of him?

 

There’s a misconception about New York and how its tribal, racial politics work. New York has always functioned as an environment in which race and class collide, race and education collide.

 

So yes, the Upper West Side of Manhattan, which is where I grew up, it’s a lot of people who are college educated. It is very liberal. That’s not all of New York. That’s not Queens, much of Queens, where Trump grew up. It’s not a lot of Staten Island, which is a bastion of his supporters.

 

And he came of age during the civil rights era, when there was a lot of movement of Black voters north, and there was a lot of othering. And so a lot of Republican operatives and politicians found ways to demagogue Black voters, in particular. Trump has been, you know, making disparaging comments about Black people, if you talk to people who worked for him, all of his life. And in New York, fears of a rising Black political class defined it for a really long time.

 

David Dinkins, who was the city’s first Black mayor, before Eric Adams, who’s the second, arrived in politics in New York representing the whole city, at a time when crime was up, when the economy was not terrific, and Rudy Giuliani, who succeeded him as mayor, dramatically stood with a bullhorn on the steps of City Hall, while police were holding a rally, cursing about David Dinkins, literally cursing. And the N-word was used about a Black city councilwoman as she was walking into the building. And so this idea that New York is this bastion of inclusivity — it’s very tribal, and it is broken into what segments of racial blocs elected officials could get, and wedge politics were always at play.

 

And so Trump learned that and saw how it played. I asked him about that, actually, for the book. I asked him about racial politics in New York, and he had — as he often kind of drops words out of his sentences — but he said: Racial is more severe in New York than in other places. I’m paraphrasing, but that was his perspective, and that was the milieu in which he came up.

 

It’s funny, because to me, the other piece of Trumpism that is not from him but is all around him, is from Southern California — Stephen Miller. I know people who grew up with Stephen Miller in Santa Monica. Steve Bannon. Andrew Breitbart is a Los Angeles construction.

 

Breitbart was sort of — it’s Hollywood, it’s L.A. Bannon was involved in the film industry. It’s more complicated here, but Ben Shapiro, who in many ways is one of the key figures on the modern right, was, at least for a very long time, in Los Angeles. There is a strange way in which, compared to what was happening in the Republican Party before, the modern strain of conservatism feels, to me, like it emanates from people who felt like they were on the outs in highly diverse, ultimately extremely Democratically controlled cities. And there was resentment of that.

 

That’s a big piece of it, and it clearly has a racial component to it in terms of how to stoke a certain level of populism and a certain kind of voter. But that’s absolutely true that this idea of outsiderism has driven all of the people who you were describing.

 

The irony, by the way, with Steve Bannon being that he worked on Wall Street. And so when you think about it, he actually was an insider at one point. Stephen Miller I don’t think ever was. Donald Trump couldn’t really ever decide what he wanted from the establishment. He wanted to be accepted, but he also wanted to punch people in the face.

 

And that’s always who he was. And he both wanted to reject people before they could reject him. And he wanted everyone to love him and invite him to their parties. So one of the things that’s so fascinating about him is this sort of chip on his shoulder that he has because he inherited so much wealth. And because so many connections were forged for him by his father, who rubbed shoulders with a mayor and a governor and who knew everybody and was deep into the Brooklyn political machine.

 

But Trump still always felt like he was being looked down on somehow.

 

You have a moment in the book that I found very strange, where you, I guess, asked Trump in an interview what his father, Fred Trump, would have thought about him running for president. What did Trump say?

 

So it was actually Jason Horowitz who asked that question in 2016 when Trump was running. And it’s a fascinating moment. It was really striking at the time. It’s still striking. Jason Horowitz asked — Trump, I think, was 70 at the time that Jason asked this question — what his father, who had passed away many years ago, would have thought of him running for president. And Trump said: He would have allowed me to run.

 

And that sort of said it all about what that relationship was like and how significant his father is to him and was to him and how large he loomed.

 

There’s one other thing I want to touch on before we leave the New York era, which is an argument you make that New York City politics — it’s classically machine politics. This was the place of Tammany Hall. And you say that on some fundamental level, Trump’s understanding of politics is that of a New York City party boss. What does it mean to be a New York City party boss? How does that help us understand the way he acts and thinks?

 

So it doesn’t mean as much these days as it did back in the ’70s, which is really the period that I’m looking at with him.

 

What it used to mean is that the party bosses — these were Democratic Party bosses, because the Democratic Party’s overwhelming in New York City — had fiefdoms in their boroughs, and they controlled who got certain contracts, and they controlled who got certain patronage jobs, and they were in charge.

 

The main example of that would be Meade Esposito, who was the Brooklyn Democratic Party boss, who Trump talks about and he used to talk about in the White House all the time. And I asked him about Esposito in one of our interviews, and he started telling some story that he had told in the White House repeatedly, and it was something about Meade having a cane and swinging it at people. He said to me that Meade ruled with an iron fist, which is the same description that he uses about President Xi Jinping.

 

So the Democratic Party bosses were perceived as in total control, in charge, whatever they said went, and it was all very localized and kind of small ball. And that’s his understanding of how executive power works.

 

I’ve known a lot of politicians, and I find that different ones feel, to me, like they are attracted to the work of politics for different reasons. If you spend any time around Barack Obama and Joe Biden — they love the work of governing. They really, really like it.

 

And I’ve met other people who like people. They just want to be out there shaking hands and slapping backs. There’s something about them that is pathologically extroverted —

 

Bill Clinton.

 

Others really love ideas. And obviously people are a mix of different things.

 

What does Trump like about it? What does he, this is a 78-year-old guy running for a second term, like about the work of governing? What does he want here?

 

He doesn’t especially like the work of governing, didn’t when he was in the White House. But he likes power, and he likes being praised, and politics combines both of those things. Now I think it has become something different, too, in terms of winning.

 

No. 1: He is facing the prospect of jail time — however unlikely that may seem — if he loses, because he’s been convicted in New York, and there are other indictments that he’s facing. But No. 2: He really wants to, in his mind, avenge the loss in 2020, which he still won’t admit was a loss, but that would be proof that he didn’t really lose.

 

And there are things that I think he wants to do differently, but I also think that he wants to exact payback on people who he thinks deserve it. He’s been quite clear about that. It’s not about some governing philosophy. There are a lot of people he surrounds himself with who have an interest in specific types of governance and how to use the mechanics and levers of governing in order to impact policy.

 

He just wants certain things done, and whatever it looks like to get that done is how he does it. I would like to just make the point that I have covered other wealthy candidates/chief executives, and they all have a bit of a blind spot on how government works. They all go in, and it’s not quite what they’re used to in their companies or what they’re used to on their own.

 

This is something fundamentally different with Trump. He is utterly disinterested in it. He has no use for democratic norms. He has no use for Washington process. He has no use for the way good governance works or the way their transparency rules are supposed to work and so forth and so on.

 

“Process” feels like an important word there.

 

The C.E.O. types who I have watched run for president, who I’ve interviewed — I would say the thing that most of them share is a sense that “None of you idiots know how to manage an organization.” They actually love process. And their senses are really good at process. I always thought that in 2012, the true core of Mitt Romney that year — I’m not sure that’s where he is now, but then — was the management consultant.

 

I think that’s true.

 

The sense that America could really use somebody who knew how to run an organization, which he thought Barack Obama did not. And in that way, the C.E.O. thing with Trump has always, to me, been very misleading, because he seems less interested in running an organization than — I mean, I think he’d like to be the person in charge of it, but he doesn’t love the org chart, so to speak.

 

Not at all. Don McGahn, the former White House counsel, used to describe it as a hub-and-spoke model, where Trump was the hub and the spokes were everybody else. So it made having a chief of staff almost nonexistent. And he managed that way at the Trump Organization, which, incidentally, is a pretty small company.

 

It has a lot of employees in various holdings, but it is ultimately a small family shop. And he would do things like talk to one of his consultants and give them a piece of information and say: Don’t tell the person running my casinos. Even though the person running the casinos needed to know this.

 

And he would do this at the White House, too. He loves pitting people against each other. And he loves watching them duke it out in front of him. The idea of Trump as mega-C.E.O. was forged through “The Art of the Deal,” the book that he published in 1987, which was ghostwritten by Tony Schwartz, and then on “The Apprentice.”

 

And the degree to which that image of him from “The Apprentice” really lingered for people — in their homes, because they saw it on TV — was profound. And I was not an “Apprentice” watcher. I did not realize the impact of that show — that, to me, was pretty clearly not based on real life, because he’s firing Gary Busey — until I went to Iowa for the final weeks of the caucuses there in 2016.

 

I remember being in Dubuque, Iowa, and talking to caucusgoers and rallygoers at his event, asking them a pretty leading question, which is: Are you here because it’s the last time you’re going to see him?

 

They were utterly confused. And they said they were caucusing for him. And one guy said it was because he’d watched him run his business. And so that’s where that comes from. But no, I mean, Trump and Mitt Romney are not the same type of businessperson.

 

One similarity between reality television and the presidency is they both do create a centrality of the main character that’s not really true: “The Apprentice” is a bunch of people doing the writing and doing the cameras.

 

And we treat the president — I mean, I think if you read the media well, we do a better job of this than maybe I’m about to make it sound — but there is a way in which American politics becomes a great drama, of which the president is the main character. And anything that happens during a presidency — we talk about Obama’s economy, Biden’s economy, Trump’s economy — like they’re sitting there themselves deciding the rate of inflation.

 

I’ve been trying to think about this distinction between the outcomes of Trump’s term and what Trump wanted to do while he governed. You cover this incredibly closely. What strikes you as examples of Trump getting what he wanted, and then what were things that Trump wanted to do that, because of the system that surrounded him, he didn’t get? But if he did, maybe our president, his presidency, would look different to us.

 

I think your description is really dead-on of sort of this idea of a president being made into the character in a show called “The American President” that voters look at and think that they’re engaging with. And I do think that voters like to think that they have some relationship with the president, even if it’s hating the president. They want to see their president.

 

And so one of the things that Trump did very well was be everywhere at all times because he likes headlines about himself. In terms of something he wanted to do: He wanted to impose tariffs on China. He did. He wanted to make a tax-cut package happen. And that did happen. So those were two major things. And he wanted to appoint Supreme Court justices because that’s memorable and that’s a legacy item. And that’s something that the average person understands. And it’s also something he had promised in 2016.

 

Something that he wanted to do that he couldn’t do — I’m still not sure it would be entirely possible, but it probably would have been more possible had he not behaved the way he did — is he wanted to undo Obamacare. He was singularly focused on, for lack of a better way of putting it, undoing traces of the Obama presidency. It was part of how he ran. It was what rose him to national prominence in Republican circles in 2011 — was this focus on the birther lie.

 

But he couldn’t get Obamacare done, primarily because John McCain would not go along with it. And John McCain at the last minute voted against this repeal effort. And that was that. And it was the first real legislative effort that Trump tried. It was very embarrassing to him. He was very frustrated. And he’s been all over the map about Obamacare repeal since. Obamacare is now very popular.

 

But that’s an example where somebody — who actually understands that governing is not just yelling at people and getting exactly what you want through dominance — might have done something differently.

 

How do you think about the almost endless series of cases that come out of reading any reporter’s coverage of the first Trump term — maybe the only Trump term, we’ll see — in which Trump would propose either once or repeatedly something that wasn’t within the normal boundaries of American politics?

 

So you’re talking about things like Obamacare appeal, tax reform, but firing Patriot missiles into Mexico to destroy drug labs. There were all kinds of musings about using the government to exact vengeance upon his enemies. There was talk of nuclear weapons for this or that.

 

Trump exists in this sort of interpretive fog for people — does he mean it, or is he just a guy who talks? If he had a more pliant bureaucracy or more willing set of people around him, would they have done it? Or was that never serious? How do you take moments like that?

 

So a couple of things: The Patriot missiles thing, he didn’t really talk about that publicly that much. That was mostly private. And that’s also not how Patriot missiles work, which is just as an aside, to make that point.

 

But you could fire missiles into Mexico.

 

You could fire missiles into Mexico, just not those missiles. Yeah.

 

He did more than just muse about, you know, prosecuting people. The Justice Department actually really looked into various targets of his. But yes, he would publicly talk about this on Twitter or at press conferences or news events with reporters. And it just was completely beyond the bounds of the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence. So there’s that.

 

I think that he wanted to do all of these things. I think he didn’t understand how government worked. Would he have fired missiles into Mexico? Maybe, maybe not. A military action is a little different with him.

 

Would he have engaged in prosecutions against people he viewed as his critics or targets of his ire? Yes, 100 percent. And generally speaking, he was stopped on a lot of these things. And it was people around him. It was not because the office doesn’t permit it. The unitary executive theory is that the chief executive, the president, has these powers and that Justice Department is part of the executive branch and that he should be able to do these things. So if he has more pliant staff or more pliant lawyers or people who are helping to get him get to a point of “Yes, you can do this,” as opposed to “No, you can’t,” I believe he will.

 

I don’t quite understand people who at this point, post-Jan. 6 and the lead-up to that, think that it’s all just kind of messing around and seeing how far he can take things. I do think he tries to see how far he can take things, but I think he’s very clear that he likes power and likes revenge.

 

Does he understand the office better now? Did he actually learn it? Do the people around him understand it better now? Or both or neither?

 

I think both. I think that he certainly understands aspects of it.

 

There are large aspects he will never understand. He had no use for most of his cabinet. The person whose job it was to do something was whoever was standing in front of him at that moment. So that was how he was in his business, too. That’s no surprise.

 

The people around him do understand it much better, and there are a lot of people in Washington who might have parted ways with him in a bad way but are willing to go back this time. And these could be people who understand it quite well and understood it before and are just more willing to do what he wants because he was elected again or because he’s actually more popular in all the polls this time than he was before.

 

When people want to look at the difference between now and the 2016 campaign, he has such a stranglehold on the Republican Party. It doesn’t mean he will necessarily do everything he says he’s going to do, but I think people should assume that’s the default.

 

One of the things that has always struck me about reporting on Trump is what I would sometimes hear from people who worked for him. As much as liberals hate him, what they said was actually worse.

 

Sometimes they didn’t mean it to be worse; it was just somehow more insulting. I always think of somebody telling me the briefing Donald Trump was like chasing squirrels. Just the act of trying to keep his attention on something was sort of running squirrels around a garden.

 

But then you get things like: Mark Milley was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2019 to 2023. When Donald Trump was president, he apparently just told Bob Woodward that Donald Trump is a fascist to his core. And particularly the national security types say things like that. That’s one of the more striking ones, but they talk about the danger. They talk about him as unpatriotic.

 

Tell me a bit about what the people who broke with him, how they describe him, what they learned about him working with him.

 

They almost uniformly say bad things. Or they say muted things because they don’t want to encourage him to attack them. Or they’ll say: Well, he can be funny and charming, and he got done XYZ policy piece that I prefer.

 

But in general, they say really negative things about him. They’re not all as blunt as Mark Milley, although I reported in “Confidence Man” that John Kelly had emerged from his time with Trump thinking that he was a fascist.

 

I can’t think of anyone else in U.S. history, certainly not modern U.S. history, where so many people who served under high-level positions are against them. His running mate from last time is not supporting him this time. That’s a pretty big deal. His second-to-last secretary of defense, Mark Esper — not supporting him. You can go down the list.

 

They — to a person — say he is not fit for the job.

 

When John Kelly and Mark Milley say they concluded he’s a fascist, what are they saying about him?

 

The idea is that he basically wants to use power as a form of strength and as a form of brute force and that he is utterly uninterested in the way a constitutional democracy works, that he’s not interested in investing people with some power over their own lives, that he wants to dictate what people do. That is what they’re saying.

 

How would you describe the major factions that operated in the White House in Trump’s administration?

 

In 2017, I called them the Crips and the Bloods, basically. So there’s the national security/military folks. There’s Gen. James Mattis. There was John Kelly. These were people who were aligned and who believed in alliances. On the other hand, so was H.R. McMaster, and he was often at odds with those two, and it was entirely personal.

 

Steve Bannon started out as an ally with Jared Kushner for, like, five days going into the administration, and then they very quickly diverged because they don’t see almost anything the same way.

 

Yes, Jared Kushner has a much more business-friendly perspective, what Trump came to call globalism, which was a Bannon term that Trump picked up. Bannon and Stephen Miller actually have more overlapping ideas than, say, Jared and Stephen Miller, but Jared and Stephen Miller were allies. So I guess I’m saying all this to make the point that there was much more of a personality component to this than just a strict ideological one.

 

One question that I have about a second Trump term, if such a thing were to come to pass, is: Would we see those kinds of internal fractures again? There was a Bloomberg interview where he muses about hiring somebody like Jamie Dimon. Would he just do the same thing again, where he hires a bunch of people who sort of oppress him, like Rex Tillerson, and ends up with a lot of people who are trying to conduct their own agendas or don’t really like him? Or modulate him in some way?

 

Or has he and the people who he listens to now gotten better at the thing that at least some of them talk a lot about now, which is vetting and figuring out who’s loyal and who isn’t?

 

They’re definitely better at vetting. But the point you raise is the main concern that I hear from a lot of people around Trump, which is that he is still very susceptible to the shiny object and he’s a credentialist. So if somebody who has graduated from Harvard and Yale and Georgetown and, you know, every Ivy League you can think of at the same time, then he’ll hire that person.

 

A lot of it’s going to come down to who’s the chief of staff. The likeliest choice, at least the person most people in his world would like to see is Susie Wiles, who has run his political world for the last three, almost four, years.

 

But beyond that, it comes down to what you just asked, which is essentially: What mood is he in at that given moment? Does he think somebody looks the part? So yeah, the people around him are much better at trying to figure out what he professes to want. But whether that ultimately is what he wants in the moment, I think, is the big question.

 

Ivanka Trump and Jared seem like they had a lot of sway when he was in office. It seems to me that they have somewhat receded from his political world and Don Jr. is playing a much more central role than he did before — at least reportedly influential in the JD Vance pick. What’s happened within the family here?

 

So I think Ivanka Trump is basically out entirely. I think she’s with her children and she has other projects she’s working on.

 

Jared Kushner is always a little hard to tell. He’s involved in certain things. He still talks to a lot of people in that world. People who are close to him have different views about whether he would want to go back into an administration. He has this fund, which has a lot of Saudi sovereign money in it. And so that would raise all kinds of questions about divesting and how that fund would work. But yes, Jared Kushner is not running Donald Trump’s world.

 

Donald Trump Jr. is also not running Donald Trump’s world, but he has a lot of clout. He has a lot of clout on the MAGA right in his own right, and he has for some time. He’s been very successful in that conservative media ecosystem. He’s very close to JD Vance, who is the running mate, and that gives him a different level of input.

 

The problem is that Donald Trump never wants to be seen as being puppeteered by anyone, and that includes Jared, and that includes Donald Trump Jr. That includes Ivanka. But it is true that the family dynamics have shifted.

 

Outside the family, who is around Trump in his time in office who has remained? Are there key staffers who have continuity, who had influence then and have influence at this point in the campaign and would likely have it if he were to win?

 

There’s almost no one I can think of who was in the White House other than his speech-writing team. So that’s Vince Haley and Ross Worthington. There’s Stephen Miller, who is not full time on the campaign but has been traveling a lot lately. And Stephen Miller has remained very close to Trump and is very involved and would go back into another Trump term in office.

 

There’s not a ton beyond that. No one in the communications shop that I can think of. It’s either a handful of people who worked on either 2020 or 2016 or both or a couple of new people who he’s brought along the way.

 

So then is the difference between some of his past campaigns and the current one — longer rallies is one, but I’m thinking of things like the Republican National Committee moving a lot of its money from get out the vote to election watch, which I think a lot of people look at as election interference efforts. Is it that people just don’t say no to him anymore, that he just has so much more control over everything?

 

Yeah, he has eroded existing institutions, No. 1. I mean, the R.N.C. is obviously a longstanding institution that was around well before he was in politics, but candidates turn it into whatever they want it to be, and he has remade it in his image.

 

There are many fewer people around him who will say no, or they will pick their spots. They will say no once out of every five times, as opposed to three out of every five times. And he has a smaller group around him than certainly he did as president. And the campaign structure itself is still pretty small.

 

But yes, in general, he does not like hearing no. And he often doesn’t.

 

Trump took over the Republican Party. It was sort of a hostile takeover. And I would say that in 2017, it was incomplete. It was new. And so House Republicans, Senate Republicans — relatively few of those people owed very much to Donald Trump. Paul Ryan was the speaker. Mitch McConnell is the Senate majority leader.

 

If Donald Trump wins, he’ll come into a very different Republican Party. Possibly Speaker Mike Johnson, if Republicans win back the House. It’s a little bit unclear who will lead Senate Republicans. What would be different about these? What was Trump’s relationship with the institutional Republican Party like, and what would be possible now that it is different?

 

His relationship with the institutional Republican Party was pretty bad. But what I would say is that version of the party doesn’t exist anymore. It’s essentially a vestigial tail. Paul Ryan — not in office anymore. Mitch McConnell — no longer going to be the leader of the Senate Republicans.

 

The Senate Republicans as a whole have become much more MAGA-fied than they were before. And Trump will have a much easier time getting things through. Not every nominee, not every piece of legislation, but he will have a better working relationship with that group. And he has an enormous amount of support in the House.

 

So the Republican leadership in Congress, in both branches, is very aligned with him. He is the establishment now, and I know that he is running as an outsider, but it is entirely his party.

 

We talked earlier about the factions of Trump’s time in office. One thing that seems different now to me is that the MAGA movement has emerged and built institutions and developed personnel to become a kind of ideological force. It has ideas. You have different versions of this, like Project 2025, but there are many others.

 

And Trump’s relationship to this seems a little complicated. I think he’s often pissed off that it’s causing him political problems. But he likes the people. He named JD Vance, who’s one of the more ideological, MAGA-ish members of the Senate, as his running mate. How do you think about the relationship Trump would have to the movement — that understands itself as operating under his blessing and certainly in his service — but the people in it seem a lot more certain about what that ideologically means sometimes than he does?

 

I don’t think we know what this will look like, going forward, as a political movement and a political force under a Trump presidency, other than to assume that if he is president, I think a lot of these people are going to feel a little whipped into place. If Trump does not want something, they’re not going to go around him in any meaningful way.

 

The big concern for MAGA influencers and people who are looking for a role is: Does Trump anoint a successor? And the big question is: Would JD Vance be that successor? It’s hard not to see him as the clear inheritor. It’s also hard to see Trump freely and happily saying, “Someone else can replace me,” because Trump wants to be in charge at all times and be dominant at all times.

 

So I don’t really know that I can say what this ends up looking like. I can see two versions of it. I can see one version of it where he has his imprint within actual governance and within Congress. And then there’s this media operation that exists, which is Breitbart and all of these other start-ups and these various podcasts, and they all sort of exist to amplify what he wants.

 

And then I can see about two years in, people starting to jockey for who is going to replace him. So I don’t really know how he will engage with it. And I don’t think he’s thought about it at all.

 

I’ve heard different theories of what this might look like. One theory is that Donald Trump is a man of whims and rages. And when things — when he likes things, he’s going to give them his blessing. But God help you in the MAGA movement if suddenly you’re causing problems.

 

Another, though, is you’re dealing with a 78-year-old man who doesn’t really like the work of governance, who many people suspect wants to really be a ceremonial head of state. And it feels to some like you’ve got a number of people jockeying to be the real — I don’t want to say exactly — power behind the throne. But there’s a version of this where JD Vance is really running policy in the White House. I know a lot of people who think that the bet Elon Musk is currently making is that he can functionally be a major player. This is a guy who can’t run for president in the U.S. because he was not born here, but maybe he can be a kind of shadow president by being a guy Trump listens to and a guy who other people in the Trump administration owe things to.

 

There’s a view that Trump doesn’t want to do the work of it, and that actually creates an opening for somebody who does or some set of people or institutions or ideological factions that do.

 

Yeah, I don’t actually think that’s dissimilar to what happened when he was president, but I also disagree with the idea that he just wants to be a figurehead. I don’t think that’s true at all. It doesn’t mean that he wants to do the work of governance, but he wants to be more involved than “I’m going to go sit back, and then you’re going to hand me whatever I can claim as my own, and I’m going to continue,” because he likes to see himself as involved with specific things, particularly construction-related projects. That’s why he got so into building the wall. That’s why he got so into the Air Force One replacement and so forth and so on, where the F.B.I. headquarters would be.

 

But I think that existed before, and I think that will exist again. I think there are going to be various factions, and yet I think everything you just said, by the way, is true. I don’t think these things are mutually exclusive. He is a person who operates in terms of whims and rages sometimes, and other times he is more disengaged. And so that allows people openings to come in and try to do some of the work, but it’s not because he’s going to say to them: You do the real work while I go out and do whatever. They’re not forging that kind of partnership. People will fill certain voids, and he will either like what they’re doing or not like what they’re doing. And then other people will come in and fill a void if he doesn’t like what that person is doing. But it will be like that. It won’t be some sort of systemic thing where someone gets anointed to come in.

 

One of the truths about Donald Trump is that almost nothing is ever final until he just suddenly decides something is final. Even then, he’ll undo it. So that is what I expect in the first two years.

 

Are there things that he really cares about or seems to care about accomplishing? Or is it all provisional?

 

It’s pretty much all provisional. On immigration and trying to say that he has engaged in mass deportations: I think he would try as hard as possible and use what political capital he had to make that happen, but that looks very different than “I’m going to pass massive legislation to deport everyone.”

 

In terms of maximizing presidential power, that’s also something different. Most things would be situational. So for instance, as he talks about tariffs, he’s gone anywhere from 10 percent to 20 percent to 200 percent more recently. And then I think he even said, “I don’t even care what the number is.”

 

But I think that generally speaking, he does want to impose tariffs. He’s been talking about tariffs for, whatever, it’s 40 years, so that’s not really a surprise. What that ends up looking like, I think, is an open question, but it’ll look like something that he can point to and say, “See, I did what I said I was going to do” — whether it’s actually what he said he was going to do or not.

 

I think Donald Trump really feels that liberals have turned the machinery of government into a machine to persecute him.

 

Yes, he does absolutely think that.

 

That the courts are coming after him, that the liberal lawyers and attorneys general and D.A.s are coming after him, that this has all been an exercise in punishing the enemy, that they are the thing that he is accused of being.

 

Now you hear a lot of “the enemy is within” rhetoric from him, a lot of rhetoric about payback. What do you think that might look like in a Trump administration?

 

I think, again, going back to the whole “take him literally or seriously” ethos that we were sort of hinting at before: I think people should take him seriously when he’s talking about payback.

 

I think people should take seriously his threats against media companies. He keeps talking about delicensing broadcast networks. Now, I don’t know that he would be able to make that happen, but as you know, he doesn’t have to directly say to people, “Go do that.” There’s a whole lot of “Will someone rid me of this meddlesome priest?” with him, where he just makes clear what he wants done and signals what he wants done and people do it.

 

And I do think that he would try very hard to make clear to people: This is my desire; make it happen. And I think you will have a Justice Department filled with people who know what he wants, even if they’re not being directed to do something by the attorney general — and they would do it without having to be told exactly.

 

But I do think people should take this all seriously. And I think that he has gone from — some of what he is saying about some of these cases are statements that privately I’ve heard Democrats make as well, at least in the cases in New York. There are a lot of Democrats who were uncomfortable with the [New York] attorney general’s civil suit into his business or uncomfortable with the prosecution over the Stormy Daniels case, for which he was convicted.

 

The other indictments, much less so. He just paints them all with the same brush, as “I’m being persecuted,” and then he takes it a step further, which is “The enemy within is going after me,” and he will maximize what people will tolerate and stand for. But I think people should absolutely take him at his word on this.

 

He is very clear and has been his whole life that revenge is one of his things.

 

You talk a lot in the book about his relationship with Roy Cohn, how important that was. He has certainly expressed a lot of disappointment in his attorneys general when he was in office — Jeff Sessions and then later Bill Barr, who got a lot of critiques, Bill Barr, personally, but did not go along with a bunch of the election interference efforts.

 

It seems to me that the attorney general is a position Donald Trump is going to take a very particular interest in who fills it.

 

You are a wise man, Ezra. Yes, I think that is going to be, first among equals in terms of his focus, followed very quickly by the Defense Department.

 

Are there people who seem to be leading for that? And what do you think he’ll be looking for?

 

There are a range of names out there that I have heard. I don’t even really want to begin to throw any of them out because it’s all so notional at the moment. His transition team, I think, is meeting and talking about names of various folks, but I don’t know what that ends up looking like.

 

I think that he will want someone who can get Senate confirmed without a huge amount of heartache. So that raises the question of: Would it be a senator? Because most senators are going to approve another senator.

 

And I think that he will want someone who he believes will generally do what he wants without being constantly attacked and criticized in certain quarters. And that narrows it down a little bit. But yes, the position of A.G. is really, really important.

 

Just one point I would make — and I was thinking about this as you were talking about Roy Cohn. He’s been saying for years — he said this to me, he said this to a bunch of folks — that the two best lawyers he ever had were Roy Cohn and Jay Goldberg. Jay Goldberg handled his divorce from Ivana Trump, and Jay Goldberg died a few years ago.

 

Trump dropped Roy Cohn when Roy Cohn got sick with AIDS. Trump was very dismissive of Roy for years, well before Roy died. Described him as a “lousy lawyer” to Marie Brenner, the journalist who covered him back in the early 1980s. It’s only since then that he’s become this mythic figure for Trump.

 

And so I raise this only to make the point that whatever he says about what he wants in any given moment of time only has a certain amount of meaning.

 

You said you don’t think his energy is that different. When I have been trying to look at his schedule, it seems like he’s doing fewer rallies per week than he was at comparable times in his past campaigns.

 

That’s probably true.

 

It seemed at the end of 2016, I think there’s a feeling that he outworked the other side, just like personally. Certainly he felt that way in 2020. His tendency to say: I couldn’t possibly have lost, because look at how much better attended my events were than Joe Biden’s. And he feels to me right now like he’s being outworked, by orders of magnitude, by Harris. Maybe that’ll work out for her. Maybe not.

 

I’m not sure that I agree with that, honestly, because I think that she has had a number of appearances, and I think that he has had a number of appearances. I think that earlier this week she had, you know, several in one day with Liz Cheney, but he had several the same day in North Carolina.

 

I don’t sense a huge distinction in their schedules. I do agree with you that he is doing fewer compared to his own median number of rallies, but I don’t think there’s a massive gap between them at this point.

 

So the reporting of him canceling more, the exhausted interviews but also the diminishment of rallies — is your sense that he’s moving some of that energy into other things?

 

My sense is that he is — to go back to that he is older — this is going to sound like I’m contradicting myself, and I’m not. I don’t actually sense that there’s some massive — it’s not like you talk to him and he starts falling asleep when you’re talking to him.

 

Although he did fall asleep at his trial, despite what he claimed — but everybody falls asleep in court, including judges. I’ve covered court, so I can say this.

 

I do think he is doing fewer than he used to. I think they are conserving it for things like podcasts and nonbroadcast interviews. He’s definitely playing it safe, in terms of the interviews he’s doing. There’s no question about that. They also did cancel a handful of interviews. I don’t believe it was exhaustion or fear. And he also did this very lengthy interview with John Micklethwait at Bloomberg, and it was contentious, but it was pretty long. It was also really meandering, and it was often very hard to know exactly where his points were going. But I don’t think it’s an exhaustion thing.

 

One point I would make about the events, too: The events are really expensive. He has less money than Harris does, and so what they have been trying to do is find ways to offload costs so other people are picking up the rally costs. Shane Goldmacher and I wrote about that recently, and I think that’s a piece of it.

 

So there are three ways the election could fall. There is a convincing Harris victory, which Trump could protest but not do anything about. There is a convincing Trump victory. And then there’s that middle range. There is a lot of preparation on the Trump side for challenging different votes and creating a lot of lawfare.

 

How would you describe the work going into that, and what do you imagine will happen in an election close enough to contest?

 

That is such a hard question to answer that I feel like I would be a fool to even begin venturing down that path.

 

I guess I don’t mean “happen” in terms of how it will end. But what has been arranged? What are the forces that have been put into position to swarm that kind of situation?

 

There’s the known knowns, the known unknowns. On the known knowns, there’s a bunch of lawsuits that have been filed by Republicans. Democrats are also gearing up for a lot of litigation and filed some suits, too. But that’s basically to handle closely contested outcomes in the seven battleground states. And that is going to be over ballot access and specific polling places and so forth and so on. And that’s within the traditional boundaries of what you would see. I mean, it’s a huge volume of lawsuits, but these are things you would expect to have seen before.

 

The known unknown is: Does Trump try to make any kind of an effort to about voting machines again? And I think we’ll have to see what that looks like.

 

Then there’s the known unknown of potential violence, both on Election Day or at any of the other certification points along the way. And that’s really the one that I’m looking at. We are in a different world than we were Election Day to Jan. 6, 2021, because Trump’s not in office right now. And so that governed a lot of what he was able to do. There are Democratic attorneys general in some of these battleground states, but the question of outside actors agitating in one way or another is, I think, a very open one. And that’s what I’m looking at, because that is the hardest to track and the hardest to see.

 

What is his mind-set on this like? I’ve read the reports on what he did after the 2020 election. Jan. 6 was my first day at The Times.

 

Are you serious?

 

Hell of a day to start, yeah.

 

Wow.

 

But even with that, the answer he gave at the Univision town hall, where he talked about it being a day of love, that we didn’t have guns — they had guns —

 

It’s also not true. People in that crowd did have guns.

 

Both a sort of his unwillingness to even fuzz the way he wanted to describe it for political advantage — I mean, he said exactly what he felt about it, I guess you could give him that — but also the barely suppressed anger in that answer, the fury, the “Our people got hurt.” I found it a little chilling.

 

I think it’s how he really feels about this. I think he knows perfectly well that there was violence that day, but he tries to paint things however he wants them to be. The analogy I used to use years ago was “Harold and the Purple Crayon.” Except Harold is a warm childhood character, and that’s not what this is.

 

I think that you should listen to what he is saying and assume that that is how he sees it. I think that he believes that this was something that was taken from him and that he should have it back.

 

And I think that’s why you had him telling people in 2021 — which I reported at the time, and people got very angry on both sides of the political spectrum — that he expected to be reinstated to office. And I don’t know that he actually believed that or not, but he wanted it to be true, and he was being told it could happen, and so he took it and he put it out there. He believes he should not have had to leave office, and so his description of that day is going to be what he wants it to be until he can convince other people.

 

And one of the things that he has said to people in various contexts in various ways over the years is that if you say something often enough, people believe it and it becomes the truth. And that is what you’re seeing there.

 

That raises one other question, which is something I’ve always wondered about him, which is his actual relationship to the truth. You know better than I do the amount of discourse about whether or not we’re calling Trump a liar or he’s messing with the truth. But there’s also this question of what he believes. Is he convincing himself of these things? Is he trying to pull one over on everybody else? How do you understand his relationship with the truth?

 

My temptation to the question you just asked, which was two separate questions, was just to say yes. Because sometimes he is trying to convince himself, and sometimes he is trying to convince you, and sometimes he is trying to convince you as he’s convincing himself.

 

His relationship to the truth is what he can get away with and what he can get away with saying. That is the case in most situations.

 

And sometimes he just says something to say it, which is also a different form of it. So he said something somewhere the other day that his daughter Tiffany was the first in her class in whatever school she had graduated from. And I saw that whatever school that was actually doesn’t have class rankings.

 

He loves saying people are first in their class. Sometimes he’ll say two people were first in their class when they’re in the same class. He just likes the way certain things sound. That’s one bucket. One bucket is trying to get out of something or get away with something. One bucket is trying to get out of an uncomfortable situation. One bucket is trying to convince people of something so he can get what he wants when he’s in a negotiation. But he does not look at truth the way most people do.

 

We’ve talked a lot about what if Trump wins. What if he loses? What happens to him?

 

That’s a great question. He’ll still be dealing with prosecutions, although they’re in limbo. He will face a sentencing, maybe, in New York, depending on what the judge decides to do. He faces all of these other potential ramifications with civil suits and so forth.

 

He has said he won’t run again. I am very skeptical that he will say that if he loses — I expect that he will say that he is running again because it freezes the field for two years. And the Republican Party is the most successful endeavor he has ever had. And I don’t think he’s going to want to let go of it that quickly. But what that looks like, I don’t know.

 

I think it’s a good place to end. Always our final question: What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?

 

“Kamala’s Way.” It’s the best complete bio I’ve read about her. “Romney: A Reckoning.” And I would urge everybody to read or reread Tim Alberta’s “American Carnage,” because not much has changed.

 

You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.