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.
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