Loading summary
Transcript61 lines
- [00:04]
A
This week I'm joined by Maggie Haberman, New York Times journalist who co wrote the best selling book Regime Change with Jonathan Swan. Maggie and I covered a ton of topics from the process of writing the book to what she left out to the way that she gathered information in the Trump White House, how this is different than the Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0. I tried very hard to get her to talk about some things that she left out of the book, but she left them out of the book. She left them out for a reason. Maggie is truly doing God's work in the way she's reporting on Trump, the way she's out there finding facts and that she's writing about them in the New York Times and also now in her best selling book, Regime Change. If you don't have the book, it's a must read. I hope you get it. I hope you devour every page like I did. But first, you can listen to the interview and hear what Maggie has to say directly from her mouth. So here's my interview with Maggie Haberman. All right, welcome everybody. This is really exciting. Welcome everybody. Back virtually after a little bit of a summer break, I'm so excited to see everybody and I'm so excited to be joined by my guest today. She's a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, bestselling author of Confidence man, and most recently, a little book named Regime Change, which she co wrote with Jonathan Swan. Maggie Haberman, welcome. Welcome to Lunch with Jamie. Thank you for joining me, Jamie.
- [01:28]
B
Thanks for having me.
- [01:29]
A
There have been so many times over the past year, years or decade, I've wanted to talk to you and I feel very lucky that this is the first time you're joining because in many ways all things work out. So I'm going to start with the toughest question of the day that I ask everybody, which is this is Lunch with Jamie. We're not eating lunch. But since I know you're a New Yorker, since we went to the same high school, it's true. If I was coming to New York to have a bite with you, where would you be taking me to eat?
- [02:03]
B
Would we be in Manhattan or Brooklyn? These aren't working. So just taking.
- [02:07]
A
It's up to you. It's up to you. You have to get all five burrows.
- [02:09]
B
I think that we would probably be going to Nobu.
- [02:12]
A
Oh, there you go. There you go. Love it. I can't go wrong with Nobu.
- [02:15]
B
Can't go wrong with Nobu. Unless it's really hot and it's a Monday, in which case or, sorry, a Friday or a Saturday, in which case you might want to wait until the delivery comes in.
- [02:24]
A
There you go. Exactly. Okay, well, first of all, I just want to say thank you for your reporting for many years, and especially over the past few years, you really last decade, you really put yourself out there and put yourself in a line of fire. And we all owe you just a debt of gratitude because it's not easy to do what you do.
- [02:47]
B
Well, thanks. But it's also, it is what I do and it's what we all, you know, for those of us who are doing it, it is what, it's what we. It is literally the job. And Jonathan SW and first of all, thank you for having me. And I'm glad that the timing worked out in terms of the book, which was supposed to be published later this year and it got moved up pretty dramatically to be as close as possible to the events that we were describing. But just a word on what you just said. Jonathan always has this line. Jonathan Swan, my co author, who's Australian and has been covering Trump almost the entire time that he's been in this country, he'll always say, we're not in Fallujah, mate. You know, when somebody talks about how, how hard our jobs are, this is tough and, and we aren't. I mean, that is really important to talk about. And to point out a now former colleague of ours, TM Gibbons Neff, who just left the paper. He was a war correspondent, also a former military guy himself, which a lot of war correspondents end up having a military background of their own. But he's now gone, literally back to school. He's got a fellowship at Brown and then he's going to be a teacher. And he wrote a great piece for the paper the other day about reflecting on, on Afghanistan and what he saw and how he dealt with it. And anyway, it's just, I would really, really urge people to read it. But I will say that this is, you know, we have colleagues around the globe who are facing, you know, lengthy prison sentences, facing death, doing their jobs. That's, that's not what we're facing. But obviously this is the most aggressive time for reporters by a government, a US Government in my lifetime. So it's just a different, a different world.
- [04:36]
A
I appreciate you saying that and I think it's important to take note of that. Congrats on the book. I mean, the success is extraordinary. I mean, you're proving that people are still reading your people, proving people are buying books. It does help that the, the subject is obviously a very, you know, one that draws a lot of attention, but it's the great writing. And David Remnick wrote Regime Change is exceptional. It transcends its genre. The book is packed with news that will stay news. This is reporting of consequence, and I think that's really well said. I guess. I guess one of my questions, though, is that did you at any point feel like you. There's a. There's a world where there's Trump fatigue coming up. The book. I mean, obviously, you can't expect. You can't ever expect something to be so successful, but, yeah, I mean, we
- [05:27]
B
were both very bearish on the idea that this was going to be a success, honestly. I made a bet with my husband that it wasn't going to make the bestseller list, which was not, because we thought that it was, and he always thought it was going to find an audience. To be clear, my husband, who is one of our. Our most trusted readers, as is Jonathan's wife, Betsy, and both of them are journalists. But Jonathan was bearish, too. I mean, I would. I was listening to what you said, and, I mean, we were. Were blown away by Remnick's review. David Remnick is a gold standard reader. He's also not somebody who doles out praise easily. So it was quite striking to both of us and very gratifying. But the reality is that I was listening as you were talking about what this book shows about the market. I don't know what it shows about the market. It shows something about the book. And we both say that, you know, with a sense of pride in our work. This is definitely the best work that either of us has ever done in our career. And we both are quite candid about that and honest about. I mean, Jonathan's 40. I'm 53 almost. You know, we've both been doing this for a while, but this was just a different level of quality for both of us. Although Jonathan did win an Emmy for interviewing Trump in term one, and it's the best television interview that's been done with Trump. But there is Trump fatigue. I mean, you look at people both after, and I mean, just among news consumers and among readers. So the Wall Street Journal declared the nonfiction market dead a few months, literally dead a few months before our book came out. I guess Bell Burden would be the exception to that one. Trump books in particular, since. Since 2022, since early 2023, have not done especially well. So we were not sure how this was going to go. But. But I do think that what it shows is that people want a deeper understanding outside of what has become a daily barrage of, you know, I don't want to say bite sized news, but generally speaking, you know, smaller headlines that tend to, you know, cycle hot and fast and then out, which is the trend in the Trump era. They want a deeper understanding of how their government is functioning. And, and part of that, Jamie, and you didn't ask this question, but I want to say it is part of the challenge of this reporting, this book, and also part of why I think it has done well is this, this group of, of Trump officials, and it's a very small group that are making the decisions in there. It's like a half a dozen people. They are so much less leaky than last time. I mean, last time you really had to like, walk around with like a slop bucket and your leak would fall in because they all hated each other and they were all. It was, you know, I did a podcast actually with Remnick in the first year where I was comparing it to the, the Crips and the Bloods of the White House. I mean, it was like, it just was open gang warfare. It's not like that now because it is a group of people who either were radicalized along with Trump during his four years out of power or who believe in him deeply or who believe in a set of policy agendas that they want to see come true, or all of the above. And it has made the collective desire to see him succeed very, very strong. Whereas that was, you know, in term one, he had a lot of people who he had never met before working for him. He had never worked in Washington. He had never won a city council race, and he had never met the vast majority of his government before he came in. And several members of his government saw him as somebody who was a danger and needed to be stopped. And there are certainly people who have alarm at some moments in this government, but that's really the further you get out from the concentric, the inner circle around him.
- [09:15]
A
It sounds like, from what I've heard, you have enough material for multiple more books on Trump through what's on the cutting room floor. And not surprisingly, Donald Trump has talked about how this book is fake news and has said some other really kind things about you.
- [09:33]
B
He's been saying the same things for years.
- [09:37]
A
But, you know, I don't want to spend too much time on this. But how, what was the, the, what was the decision of how something made it into the book? And then in addition, what are, you know, is there Something that now a couple months or a month, I don't know, away from release that you're, you're just kicking yourself. You didn't include that did meet the factual standard.
- [09:59]
B
There's nothing that was on the cutting room floor that either of us feels like should have been in the book. So just to back up a little bit, and I just want to warn you that there might be a guitar carry teenager who comes slamming in the house in a second. So forgive me, but I just realized what time it is and there's another one upstairs who also might be kind of loud. We signed this deal in 2023 with Simon and Schuster and we were looking at it very much as a book that would be about the last act of Trump. And we did not know what that act was going to be. There was a very real chance that it was going to be Trump ending up in prison. I think people forget that with reason that he had was indicted four times, that he is the first convicted felon serving as understand he rails against that judgment, but it has not been, it has not been overturned even though he's appealing it. And he has a, he has a steep bar to get there. So that was a very real possibility as well as financial ruin because of the civil fraud suit that the New York attorney general had brought against him that came with a $450 billion judgment. We write about this in the book, but it really came very close to potentially crippling his company because they couldn't cover the bond initially. And there were even discussions about having that some friends of the president were approached about of the family, you know, could you help cover this? Which for someone like Trump is, is not something that's a pride point. But so it was either going to be that or it was going to be him ending up back in the White House. And it became pretty clear as 2024 progressed and especially after the shooting in Butler, that the latter was the likelier outcome and after the debate with Biden in June of that year. So we ended up jettisoning literally thousands of pages of reporting like it was heartbreaking. I cannot even express it to you. We used the best of what we had from that interregnum period to describe what animates him and what animates his world and how much prep certain people did for a second term, particularly Stephen Miller, who I assume you're going to ask me about at some point. So I don't want to go down a rabbit hole on that one. But within the first few months of his term back, it became clear that we were covering just a fundamentally different type of US Presidency. It was a remaking of the US Presidency, which is not to say that no US President has ever expanded executive power before. The term the Imperial Presidency was coined by Arthur schlesinger, schlesinger in 1973. And you can argue that the Imperial Presidency has been having a mission creep since fdr, but not like this. This is just fundamentally different. It is smashing across systems, it is gutting, it is plowing through any guardrails. There really are no governmental checks outside of the courts at this point. And even then, this administration really only treats the Supreme Court as the only valid word for whatever reason they do. I've been asked why, and I think there's a couple of reasons why. I don't really want to speculate, but. So our bar was very, very high for what was going to make it in terms of this book. Which is not to say that we're not still reporting out things that we were pretty certain were true, but there was a 5% doubt in our mind. And so those are things we're still reporting for the paper. If you say the word next book in front of either of our spous houses, it will not go over well. Jonathan's wife is due to give birth like almost any minute now, so that's not something for their third kid. But that was, that was how we went about it process wise. And so there's, we don't have regrets. There's no, A, there's no backseats with a book. But B, it's not, you know, going up on the website and you're correcting it. But B, you know, we, we were incredibly, incredibly careful about what went into the book.
- [13:53]
A
You mentioned something about just A, reporting when it comes to books. And I know you've talked about this, but how do you make the decision of what you hold back for what you hold back for a book and what you held back for this book? And I don't want you to speak for other journalists. There's obviously been, people have discussed this topic a lot recently and does it concern you a bit that some people may hold back, things that are critical and should get out sooner?
- [14:17]
B
So I can't speak for anybody else. I mean, I can only speak for myself on Confidence man previously and then on this book. Anything that was of vital importance, that was really important for the public to know in real time, matters of national security, matters of war. I would give you an example. I mean, on Confidence man there was Absolutely nothing that I learned during the presidency that became controversial afterwards, where I knew about it in real time and could have reported it's just not true. And so it just is what it is. But I think one of the, one of the things that's tough, Jamie, is that no matter how many times I say that or Jonathan says that or whomever says it, people just are going to think what they want and that is what it is. All we can just do is tell them what our process is. But I'll give you an example which is the Iran war and the lead up to how Trump took the country to war. And I can't think of a more important topic for people to be informed about than how a president takes the nation to war without talking to Congress, without. He hasn't given a televised address about the war, like a real focused discussion. He has given comments about how Iran can't have a nuclear weapon. They have changed what the stated goals were supposed to be the objectives of this war repeatedly. But all of them have not worked. Every single one. You know, Iran can't have a nuclear weapon. Well, I mean, if that's the broad goal, then you might be at war for a very, very long time, number one. Number two, you know, Trump thought this was going to be a quick in and out experience based and we write about this extensively in the book based on a, on a gut feeling and how well the operation to grab Nicolas Maduro out of Venezuela went several weeks earlier. These are not comparable situations. But that was how in our reporting he was looking at it. We reported that information which was reporting that we did for the book in the New York Times almost immediately. It was five weeks into the war. I don't know how much quicker we could have done it. The publication of this book was moved up and I mentioned this before, several months. It's unheard of to have a book that covers a 14 month span and then have it get published on Month 17 of the Presidency. It's just like a, a, a ground to air speed record in publishing. It's just unheard of. And I really give huge credit to the Simon and Schuster team and to our editor, Jonathan J. O. But for, you know, so for other situ, other pieces, some of it is a judgment call. But I also think there's a misapprehension about books that, you know, we, we, you sit there and early on you get like, it's like I was talking about the slop bucket that you had a bucket. And everybody puts their thoughts into the book. Book the book bucket. And then you just put it away for 13 months and then suddenly you, you add water and there's a book. A lot of this reporting took a really long time, both because we are not exactly dealing with reliable narrators. Our, our baseline assumption is it's not trust but verify. It's don't trust and verify. We assume we are not being told the truth at every given outing. And so it's only to your question before, when we have really made sure that multiple accounts overlap of a specific meeting, if there is anything that we are uncertain about, it gets tossed or it gets. If there's multiple people who describe the gist of something the same way, but the wording, they don't totally remember the right. You know, we will paraphrase and we describe this as in a long sourcing note at the start of the book. But I will give you another example, which was our reporting about how close Trump came to trying to suspend habeas corpus for undocumented migrants, which was. I know it's going to sound silly, because if you read it, I'm sure it looks like, how could this be so tough? But it was like a white whale. You know, part of that had been public, by the way, in, in April and May. Trump mused about it publicly. It was after he had had a loss at the Supreme Court to just have a free hand to quickly expel migrants who were in the country illegally without giving them the right to challenge their detention. Habeas corpus is, as I'm sure many of you know. I'm sure there are some lawyers on this call. It is enshrined in the Constitution and it is older than the Magna Carta. And the Supreme Court has never, you know, said that it doesn't really apply to any group of people. And it's only been used as a suspension basically four times in this country. And every time was the case of war, starting with the civil war or an invasion. You know, the la. The, the final examples would be when W. Bush was trying to set up military tribunals at Gitmo. And even then, this court didn't. Supreme Court didn't side with him. So, or his administration. And so we had, we, we knew they were talking about this. Cnn, you know, Trump alluded to it, and then CNN reported that's what they were talking about. But there was clear there was more here. And so we started really pulling at it. And it took months. You'd get one piece of information that there had been this meeting, but then there was this meeting and Then people disagreed. And then we found out that there had been these memos that the staff secretary to the White House, a guy named Will Scharf, who is a very little known, not high profile, very conservative lawyer, had written to the White House chief of staff where the implication of the memo about habeas corpus, the other was about Insurrection act, was that this is a line. In both cases it was. These are not lines the White House should cross, at least with the Insurrection Act. Certainly not if the facts on the ground were what they were last year. It took a really long time. And even that when we also put out in the paper in the New York Times pretty quickly. So I know there's no answer we can give that's going to satisfy everybody. But books do allow you to go deeper and it takes time. There are, there are magazine investigations and even some of the New York Times that, that take a year, which is more time than we took on this book.
- [20:34]
A
So, yeah, I mean, it's shocking how fast you're able to do this. And I, I do take you your word. So I, I'm sure the rigor you put to, to things that are in the best in the importance of national interest. And you did, you did. I mean, you talk about the crypto, I don't know what you want to call it, scam that Trump ran. My words, not yours. No, my, my words.
- [21:05]
B
I'm happy to address this, though.
- [21:06]
A
But I'm curious, I think, and I think I've read you've talked about, I mean, obviously the financial corruption or criticism Trump has gotten is sort of, it's, I'm sure there's a book written on it already and there's going to be multiple more books. And he really, I had someone the other day say to me, has Trump really made that much more money in his family and the president? He has other presidents and families. Yeah.
- [21:31]
B
I don't know of anybody and I don't know of any other president who's made $2 billion while in office on an industry that he was not involved in before 2024 and that he regulates. Do you have, is there another part of the question?
- [21:43]
A
Well, it's really more, more than the crypto because I think it's just this goes a little bit to what you maybe left out of the book. But it's when you look at some of these other, what are some of the other sort of aspects of that that maybe didn't make it into the book. And why do you think his base appears not to really care in A, in a significant way about the financial corruption.
- [22:07]
B
So a couple of things just to address your first. Well, your second question, if we had reporting that could be reportable, it would be in the book. And anything else we're still reporting out is not ready for public consumption yet because it falls in the process in the category of rumor or unverified, whatever, which is not the business we're in. In terms of the first.
- [22:24]
A
Could I push back for one second? But let's just look at for an example, like, you know, things along the lines of what the Trump family has received or equity stakes in company.
- [22:35]
B
That's not, but that's not rumor. I mean, that's just, that's just that we didn't want the book to be 8,000 pages long. But yes, I mean, so we have. One of the, the aspects of this presidency that I agree with you has not really come into stark relief until recently for a lot of people generally, not just the president's base. There's a couple of reasons why on that one. But is the self dealing not just of the Trump family, but of the Witkoff family, of the Lutnick family. It's also the wealthiest cabinet by a very wide mile that we have ever seen. Wealthiest, top leadership. So all of that aside or you know, stipulated to the crypto piece is, is the biggest one. They're, they're a crypto company and these, you know, these meme coins that they have, this is an industry, by the way, that like I had to spend several weeks trying to learn about because this is not, not naturally my beat. But it's made them the most money. It's made Trump the most money. And it has also got all kinds of ancillary components. There's the, the pardon that are controversial. There's the pardon to Shengzhen. Am I saying Zhao, the Binance co founder, I think is his title, who was basically blocked from being involved in binance in the U.S. i think he still is, but he was sort of involved in other, in other aspects outside of the U.S. but that alone raised a ton of questions. There's the pardon industry that exists all around Trump where it's this staggering amounts of money are being made by interlocutors who can get in Trump's ear. And that just gets you around the pardon attorney, which again, he's not the first president to sidestep the pardon attorney process. It's the scope and the scale and the frequency and what's available to people and the fact that the rules don't follow one Consistent, or at least the framework doesn't follow a consistent metric in terms of who gets them. And it doesn't really appear to be about contrition as we write about in the book. It's, you know, the best bet that people have is to say that they were victims of a weaponized justice system, just like Trump was. And that gets met with a pretty welcome reception by the president or people around him in some cases. So that's one. Yes. You have Don Jr. And Eric Trump making new foreign deals in some cases with countries that were facing tariffs, and that there's overlap there. There are the defense contracts in which Don Junior's company is an investor in the firms making them. I mean, this, you know, it goes on and on and on and on. So but we focused mostly on crypto, but not only. We also focused on, and you'll see this in the book, the Trump Library. And so one piece of that is this Qatari gifted jet that has become very controversial now about how secure it is, but that was donated by Qatar, was initially supposed to be bought by the Air Force as an interim Air Force bridge, Air Force One for Trump. Trump has made no secret of the fact that he believed that the US should have a nicer plane than the older Air Force ones. There is a valid aerodynamic complaint here, which is that those planes flew their first trips in 1990. These are old, old, old planes. And for the Air Force, which has to service these planes and maintain them, there is concern about pushing to the max how long planes carrying the president can be in service. So, but putting that aside, Boeing, for two new commission jets ground up with the right specs, are very delayed. So this Qatari jet comes up. It was supposed to be purchased because it's a used jet. Suddenly it's a gift. And as we just say in the book, it was determined at the POTUS level, president level, presidential level, to be a gift. He plans to take it with him when he leaves, which raises all kinds of other questions. And hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money has been spent to upgrade it for security purposes. That's one we describe in the book that Eric Trump was, has been fundraising aggressively for the planned Trump library, presidential library, which is going to be a tower in Miami, which is expected to be a hotel for at least some component. And he's been raising money for or attempting to raise money commitments from, from sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East. We describe, you know, Howard Lutnick, who was on the rocks with President Trump for negative, in Trump's mind, Negative coverage about Lutnick's sons making money off the things related to the administration. They're running Cantor Fitzgerald, that Lutnick gave $25 million to the library around that time. And Trump was very open about it. In the Oval Office in like a large setting, he would say, you know, the only, some paraphrasing, the only reason that I put up with Howard's is because he gave me $25 million. And in another setting, he would say, you know, can you believe it? I asked him for 25 million and he gave it to me. But anyway, that's all in the book, too. So there's, I think we are just all scratching the surface of what's there, honestly, I mean, to your point about how books are going to be written about this, there is so much we can't see. And I have to be honest with you, Jamie, I don't know how much more Democratic led oversight of a flipped House leadership with a new majority is going to be able to get to that, because we haven't really seen what happens if an entire government just doesn't comply with subpoenas. I know they can subpoena bank records for people outside the government and so forth, but, and we write about this in the book, Trump has said he is going to give a pardon to anyone who has come within a certain radius. The number changes. Sometimes it's 250ft, 200ft, 25ft within a certain radius of the Oval Office. And we spoke to many people in the reporting of this book who are counting on those pardons. So I just don't know what this looks like.
- [28:55]
A
Yeah, that's something I heard you talk about, which is the Democrats all, you know, are just praying for this, you know, midterm sweep. And, but ultimately Trump doesn't really seem to care what's, you know, what's law, what, what punishments are sent on him. He's going to do his own thing. So in essence.
- [29:15]
B
Well, there's a, there's a related piece too, which is the thing we didn't talk about in terms of why this term is so radically different from term one and almost unrecognizable. A, he was under investigation for most of the first term. The first two years it was the Russia investigation, then it was impeachment, and then it was after J6 In July of 2024, the US Supreme Court conferred sweeping immunity to all presidents for official acts. Now, what exactly qualifies as an official act has yet to be adjudicated. But I'm gonna Guess it will be most things a president does, and that has added to his sense of impunity. He walks around the White House saying, you know, I'm immune, I'm immune. There will be other people who get swept up in investigations. But, and look, he's not immune from state investigations, but I think after the Alvin Bragg prosecution and the Letitia James prosecution, it's going to be a pretty high bar.
- [30:13]
A
You talk about when you went to go see Trump finally to talk about the book. I mean, at this point, I assume you kind of knew how that was going to go. Was there anything that shocked you about that, that you didn't report or that, that, you know, were you, What'd you say to your husband before you went to that meeting? What did you, you know, what, what was, I mean, was it just another meeting in some ways?
- [30:40]
B
Well, I mean, it was actually pretty. Look, Jonathan and I have both interviewed Trump a lot, so just to set this up for folks, we had been. The epilogue of the book is about this meeting with Trump. And I'm, I'm sorry to slightly ruin it if people haven't read it yet, but, but I still hope you read it because it's actually the most expansive and definitive comment from Trump's own mouth about how he views power now. So we had been asking for an interview with him for several weeks. Not, you know, we were done with our reporting, basically all with the exception of the lead up to the Iran war. But we got there. But he's the subject of our book. We needed to give him a chance to, you know, speak to some of our reporting. We would have taken much more time, but we were given an hour. The press office was blocking us repeatedly. So we eventually just had to go to him directly. Like, literally, it was like a group text of us with him and, hey, Mr. President. And this is. He didn't answer, but he did direct Caroline Levitt to set up a meeting with us, an interview for March 16th. And, John, you know, everybody has Trump's cell phone number this term. I know this is like the subject of a lot of news stories, and some people have gotten information and news and valuable insight from speaking to him in these calls. But for what Jonathan and I do, this is just not worthwhile. We, we don't want a 2 1/2 minute call with him. Neither one of us really wants unstructured time with him, number one. But number two, he then controls the terms of the discussion, and that's just not what we wanted. We wanted to do a rigorous fact Check. So we did. So we went in and it was the first time either of us had been in the Oval Office since he started gilding it. And it's, it's, it's like being inside the jewelry box. It was really overwhelming on the senses. But he, you know, this is right after he had started gluing challenge coins to the door leading to the Rose Garden, and he's putting it up in other, other, other rooms in the West Wing. But he walked in as if, like, you know, everything was, was fine. And you know, he was perfectly civil. He had attacked us on Twitter, whatever it is, Truth, sorry, his social media platform. A few days earlier, he threatened to sue us. We're very used to this. It was, it was some kind of a. Punching us in the face before we walked in the door. And it doesn't matter one way or the other. It doesn't impact what we do. But he came in and he's usually pretty averse to one on one direct interpersonal confrontation. And so when he walked in, that was no exception. We're on day 17 of the war. And so you would think that he had like maps of the Middle east on the desk at the Resolute desk. Instead, it's, it's pictures of maple trees. And he's like, look, I'm, I'm picking trees for the White House. You know, I'm good, I'm good at picking trees. Okay, so under that is the model of his ballroom, which he's been showing everyone. Here's the columns that are supposed to be evocative of Rome, and here's the ones of Athens. And he's very happy that they're bigger than the Supreme Court's columns. Wider, I think. Anyway, that was like the first 15 minutes. And then so we finally start talking about our questions. And the second question we asked him was about power because he had been saying recently, you know, no other president would do the shit I've done. And he meant that self praising. And we also knew that he had said to Tucker Carlson that he was the most powerful president that the US had ever there, that had ever been. And so we asked him a version of that question. And his response was to say to Natalie Harp, this aide who sits along the side of the Oval Office, and she's known as the human printer by his other aides because she used to carry around this portable printer with a battery and print him out a constant supply of good news, positive news about himself. What he would call good news, says Natalie. Get the, get the, get the printout from the historian. So he sends her out, she comes back with three printouts. They're both. They're all two pages. We each get a copy. He takes a copy and he says, it's by a historian, and it's a historian he met through Gary Player, the golfer. And the, the lead paragraph, the first paragraph by this historian is essentially, Donald Trump is the most powerful person who's ever walked the planet. And then it goes on to describe him in comparison to what Trump calls the top 10 as he's talking to us. But it's a list of history's conquerors and monsters. William the Conqueror, Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, the Caesars. And he says, because, you know, there's more than one. Tamerlane, Napoleon, Hitler, Mao, Stalin. There might be one other, but you get the point. And he's reveling in, in being described in this company. And he says, I never thought about it, but, you know, when, when, when he says this, you know, he, I looked at this. He's right. And it wasn't from a moral dimension. It wasn't. It wasn't anything reflective on what these men had actually done in terms of humanity. The point was they had power, but he had more. And the other point that this supposed historian wrote was that Trump is willing to use it. Trump's got greater reach. He has the US Military, he's got communications, he's able to travel pretty easily, but that he is willing to use his power. And the coda is this guy wasn't a historian. He's an avid reader of history. Who's also Gary Player's former volunteer caddy and, and business associate. But taking out the hyperbole of his own first paragraph. This guy, his name is David King. And we went. Jonathan went down this rabbit hole trying to find him and did talk to him. It was the basic premise of our book. Not that he's the most powerful man who's ever walked the planet, but that he is expanding executive power to a degree that we have never seen before in this country. I would argue there are parts of it that are familiar, but it's just across industry. And he is waging these bullying campaigns across every aspect of civil society, multiple industries, law firms, the media, states. You know, I mean, I can go down the list, and he is willing to use it to your other question for an immense amount of self dealing. And so it was a remarkable moment. It was remarkable listening to him reading off this list. I don't really know how else to describe it, but no, I mean, look, we sort of expected some version of what we got, but not that precise thing.
- [37:24]
A
I mean, there's so many amazing moments in the book and everybody has to read this book. It should be required reading. But out of the 500 or so pages of the book, that moment, in many ways I think is the one that sticks with you. And you added. I almost was gonna, I was almost gonna ask you to read us, to actually read us the quote because it's so powerful. But one thing I'm happy to, if you'd like me to, actually. Yeah, would you? Because I think.
- [37:51]
B
Which one.
- [37:52]
A
That what was revealing was not that Trump agreed to the end and to that and that he had more to the end here.
- [38:01]
B
Hang on.
- [38:01]
A
The follow up would be, is that you don't really editorialize much in the book, and that's sort of the moment in that last sentence where you really. We get a peek into you and Jonathan, in a way, I think we, we don't in other places in the book.
- [38:16]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think that we, we needed to explain a little bit about this, but I'm just going to start at one point and then I'm going to move on. Trump gestured for Harp to bring us copies of the two page document. He began reading from it, reciting the names of some of history's most powerful figures, explaining how each fell short of his own power as U.S. president. President. Alexander the Great, the Caesars, William the Conqueror, quote, they didn't have airplanes, right? You couldn't travel around, unquote. Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Tamerlane, Napoleon, he said with relish. Hitler, Mao, Stalin. These leaders, quote, maintained their power through fear, unquote. He said, quote, who would ever do a thing like that, Right? He was sort of winking at the camera. Trump lingered on the document's central argument, that each leader, however fearsome in his day, had no global reach. Their power was local, but his was not. Quote, I never thought of it in terms of that. Trump said, it's very interesting, the power. Then he added, but when I read it, I said, he's right. Harp gave us copies to each of us. And Trump rolled on. The document's opening line was the mesmerized citation of an acolyte. Donald Trump is without question the most powerful man that the planet has ever known by a long way. It went on over two pages. Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun were butchers and terrorists, more like the, the Taliban than people with real Power, unquote. It concluded with a flourish on William the Conqueror, who had come up with a con in a conversation between Trump and the author during a round of golf. Quote. If President Trump is the American eagle, then William the Conqueror was merely a sparrow, unquote. Quote. You can't talk about your power, Trump told us, quote, oh, I'm so powerful. You can't do that. Doesn't come off well. He was content to let someone else make the case on his behalf, and he wanted to make sure we left with a copy. We go on and on about who this person was. And yet, if the source seemed peculiar, the issue was not frivolous. That Trump was an American president willing to deploy the full range of the nation's economic and military power without the inhibition that had characterized many of his predecessors, eradicating whatever systemic, systemic checks he could and often ignoring the ones that remained. This was a phenomenon that serious analysts of the presidency had also observed, albeit using very different language. What was revealing was not really that Trump agreed with the thesis, but the way he inhabited it. The evident pleasure he took in the company of Mao, Hitler, and Stalin, masters of state control through murder, torture and detention, and Napoleon, and the untroubled ease with which he accepted a place among men who had reshaped the world through conquest and fear. He drew no distinction between those who built and those who destroyed, between those who liberated and those who enslaved. What mattered was that they had huge power and that he had more.
- [40:58]
A
I mean, that. That moment, at that end, and that is the. I don't want to say shocking, because I don't think anything shocks me anymore, Trump, but were you. Were you shocked in that moment?
- [41:09]
B
Yeah, I was. I mean, shocked isn't the right word, but I was definitely just because, to your point, I mean, it's, It's. There's not a lot that is. Is surprising, but I was really startled for a very specific reason. Not. Two thoughts on this. One is I wasn't reading along, you know, Jonathan, I think was when we finally got these printouts. But. So Trump is reading from. He's sitting back at the Resolute desk and he's reading. And I was watching him. I wasn't reading, listening to him do the Napoleon, Hitler, Mao, Stalin riff. And he was just sort of saying it that way. Napoleon, Hitler. It was quite jarring, especially not just hearing it said, I'm not reading. And it struggled me for a couple of reasons. One, for the. The obvious one about who we're talking about. But also he usually gets very Angry historically, if there is a Hitler comparison to him, part of why he sued CNN was over the use of the phrase the big lie, if I remember correctly. And if I'm, if I'm wrong, forgive me, but I do think that was the nature of that suit. It was jarring on a number of levels. But, but that was, that was certainly one of them.
- [42:33]
A
Yeah, I mean, I 100%. We, we have a very little time left and I have hours of questions. Sorry, is there anybody left that Trump really cares about appro from? Is there anybody he's trying to win praise from? I mean, he got the tech CEOs, you know, does he care about the New York real estate titans? Is it, is it, is it the Spires and the lefrax anymore? I mean, who, who does he, is it Melania? Is it.
- [43:03]
B
Well, I do think, I mean, I actually do think that he is, is a little more attuned to her than it seems sometimes, although you certainly wouldn't know it by these rebuilding projects he's doing. I mean, we, we get very, we got very deep inside reporting on the residents and reporting on this sort of, I think it was like a, like a one person fight about who could have the better bedroom, him or his wife. She was really upset about, according to our reporting, about the ballroom being put where the eastern, the east wing was, which among other things was her workspace, but it meant vastly more construction. She was very unhappy, according to our reporting, that he wanted to just eviscerate the Rose Garden and turn it, which had been her signature project in term one, was a revitalization of it. And actually the Bidens kept a lot of what she did, not just with the Rose Garden, but in the residence. They made very few changes, so I don't think she loves that. But in terms of the approval piece, one of the things, this is what I started to say before a look, he still cares about media coverage a lot and he's quite vocal about that. For whatever reason it is, it is a constant running stream of complaints about his news coverage, not about actual events. You rarely hear him talk about a domestic policy agenda. He is, he is continuing ahead with a trade war. He took the whole country, the whole world into a trade war last year. It had pretty calamitous results. But the reality is going to mean, I think, a broader group of tariffs that stay in place into whatever the next presidency is, because this actually is a new revenue stream. It's not what he says it is, obviously, but, and I don't quite know what the effect of the new regime will look, tariff regime will look like up against another energy shock as the Iran war continues. But that has had some effects. He really barely talks about that. He just talks about how he's not getting credit for what he does. And so, but that's a kind of a constant. It just has gotten more pronounced, I would say. But no, I mean, there's, he, we tried to show this in the book. Advisors around him are very candid and they, this started actually after Butler, that he was seeing himself on a, as, as bigger than just a presidential race, that he, he didn't really have peers. You know, he still equates wealth with intelligence, which is part of why Elon Musk was around so long. But he brought these tech leaders into just utter submission to your point. I mean, they all came and kissed his ring. Not all, but many of them. And, and brought these sort of tributes. Mark Zuckerberg went to Mar A Lago and stood as Trump was playing a rendition of the national anthem that was sung by people arrested during the, the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Everyone else stands at the pat on the patio of Mar A Lago in those moments. And so Zuckerberg stands up and it's a way of Trump getting complicity into, into the way he sees things. But he's always been about dominance. I mean, anybody who knew him in New York knows he was always about dominance. But he never, Jamie. He never had power before, like actual real world power before 2017. And once people get power, they tend to be very concerned about letting it go for a variety of reasons. He's now using it in a way that we haven't seen. But he is so much less reactive to domestic politics than he was in term one, which doesn't mean it's not black and white. It doesn't mean he doesn't care at all about the midterms. But his focus on, you know, claiming the elections are rigged, in his words and so forth. And he has yet to show that, you know, 2020 was stolen from him, despite the fact that he keeps saying it. But that's really about showing that he won and was right. It's less about what could happen in November. Now, that doesn't mean that other people in his government are not worried about that and they are focused on that, but his mind share is just very different.
- [47:08]
A
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting I, I asked somebody recently about, you know, why he chose not to use the traditional powers of government during this first term. And he didn't get pretty much anything he wanted pass through legislation. I mean, there was, I mean, I don't think he would have to some extent anyway.
- [47:25]
B
I mean, but they could have gotten more done. Sure.
- [47:29]
A
But it sort of just goes back to this thing that he's. And my words, not yours, that he sort of. He wants to be a king. He wants to. He doesn't. He wants to. He wants to be this version of the president that he's seen, which isn't about passing policy and legislation. It's about coming up with ideas and then trying to, through the press and other ways, make them happen when most of them don't wind up happening because of it. I mean, what, and what is the reason for that? I guess.
- [47:54]
B
Well, it's interesting. You're actually the third person to ask me a version of this in the last week. And that was a, I think that was probably the best way I've heard the question. The other way that it came out was like, why didn't he do the tariffs through legislation? Because you answered your own question. He wants to, he believes that the presidency should function pretty much unilaterally. He just, he wants to do what he wants to do. It's also why, while this group of AIDS has lasted longer as a cohesive group around him in the West Wing, eventually any constraints just become aggravations to him. And I think you're seeing that now. You see it in the form of Bill Pulte getting made. You know, the Director of National Intelligence. This is a guy who is an heir to a, a housing fortune who has no background in, in national intelligence or any aspect of the intelligence community. And you can argue that the, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence should be pared down or that it's kind of redundant at this point. It was created after 9, 11, but that's not what this is. This is just, you know, bulldozing. Find me the, find me the deep state, as Trump would say. He doesn't want things that stymie him. He doesn't want constraints. He also has a Congress that there are a bunch of hardliners who are devoted to him, but he's not always hard, as hard right as they are. You know, we've seen that in a couple of cases with the Republican House group, Democrats are not going to get any votes from. As long as the House is this closely divided, as is the Senate, in terms of just a, a small majority, it's going to be hard for anybody to pass major legislation that's not just true with him. Biden did try. The Trump folks knew that they were going to have one big opportunity, which is hence how you got the one big beautiful bill in his name. They weren't going to try anything else because they didn't really. I mean, some of them thought they could have done one more piece, but most of these were going to be unilateral actions. The pardon process was such a revelation to him in 2017, because he could just snap his fingers and somebody owes him for life. And he has changed somebody's life. And I think that the power of what that means to him is not in terms of somebody's gratitude, but just sort of just literally power, I think gets overlooked. So he could do things to try to go through government. But he had this line that he would say to people just when you were talking about the real estate titans of New York. And this is actually in Confidence man, which was the other book that I wrote about him. But Steve Spinola of Rebny, I don't think he leads Rebny anymore. But he, he used to try to get Trump to join. And Spinola would tell other people this story that, you know, Trump would say, I'm not a joiner. And that's true. He's not a joiner. So he's, he is his own government.
- [50:51]
A
I'm really focused on getting something that you haven't said yet and you haven't talked about in the book out. Maggie. That's my, that's my. In our last few minutes, is there. We all know about his Diet Coke, Love his fast food, love his candy. Which are we doing?
- [51:04]
B
Health.
- [51:04]
A
Is that where we're going? No, no, we're not going to health. We're not going to health his candy that he shares. And is there something that you've seen or you've experienced, you've heard that is an interesting insight into him? A TV show he loves, a movie he loves. Have you ever seen him get on the floor and play with his grandkids or hear about that? Or is there something. Not that I'm searching to humanize Donald Trump, but is there anything that you've experienced or heard that sort of has.
- [51:36]
B
Certainly not that I've experienced. Right. Great stuff that I've heard, you know, which is that he can be, he can be fairly solicitous of at least some of the grandkids. Although, you know, we write about this in the book that Musk's, Elon, Musk's son, Little X was known as a Bit of a terror in the West Wing. While. While they were. Musk was doing his doge effort. We haven't even gotten into any of that. But that's okay for another time. You can have me back in the fall and I'll talk about all of that. But advisors were pretty shocked that Trump was tolerating behavior from this kid, like licking the glass in the Oval Office or jumping on the couches, which he never would tolerate from his own grandchildren. So I think that was more about Musk than anything else. But he's certainly capable of behaving in recognizable ways. What was the rest of your question?
- [52:35]
A
No, that was good. Let me change just one thing, and I would love you to come back in the fall because that could. Okay, great. If there was a person left on earth who had never heard of Donald Trump, how would you describe Donald Trump to that person?
- [52:52]
B
Well, first I would actually want to go get that person, like to a hospital to get tested. But assuming that they were older than 18. But how would I describe them? Honestly, I think that I would describe them as we do in the book, which is he's the most consequential public figure, not just US President, but public figure globally of my lifetime and I think certainly of my children's lifetimes. And I think the. Look, I know there's lots of questions about what it's going to look like at the end of his term in 2028, and we have no reporting to suggest that he is efforting to stay in office. He doesn't seem to love parts of it now, but there's a difference between leaving the White House and leaving the stage. And I have absolutely no expectation that he is going to leave the stage. He is still. Look, it's entirely possible that he continues to become less and less popular, that Republicans abandon him, that suddenly what has been a pretty tribal era in, in the US over the last 20 years plus suddenly becomes less so that this fever that Joe Biden kept talking about was going to break. I don't think it's a fever. We're not going back to 1991. Trump has fundamentally changed the way this president, the way any U. S. Presidency works. Nobody's going to be able to do what he did in office for a variety of reasons. His shamelessness is his superpower. He was a celebrity for decades, I mean, overlooked. Jamie, is that House Republicans and some senators, they don't treat him so much as a president. They treat him as like, like a deity. And even beyond a celebrity, it's just very different than last time. And he's got this board of peace which is, you know, inhabited mostly by rogue nations, but it's being set up as almost an alternative to the UN it's going to be very hard for people to pretend Donald Trump doesn't exist, which is what a lot of people thought they could do in 2021. It was never real. It was just an idea that people in Washington and some in New York had that they could non person him. But it was never connected to a very significant chunk of the electorate. So I would describe him quite plainly and very comfortably as the most consequential public figure of my lifetime.
- [55:10]
A
We had a lot of people ask questions about, you know, when, when do we go back to the way it was? We don't, we don't, we don't.
- [55:20]
B
That's the answer. And the longer that people keep waiting for that, I think it's really important to remember, and we talk about this in the book too, he threw accelerant on a number of pre existing trends, but he didn't really create them. One of the most overlooked aspects of his success is that he was speaking directly to a lot of people who were very frustrated by U. S. Trade agreements during the Clinton era, during the Obama era. But it wasn't just that. It's, it's a collection of national traumas, you know, the 2000 election, the 9, 11 attacks, which I could make a pretty real argument. We are still seeing the aftermath of that. Everything about our political system is touched by that still. And you can certainly see it right now in New York City as we approach the 25th anniversary. A, you know, two forever wars in the Middle east that left a lot of Americans dead on bad intelligence, at least in the case of Iraq, A fiscal crisis for which nobody at the top levels of the financial system were prosecuted. Again, I'm just talking about why voters are angry. All of that has led to mistrust in government. And then there was, there was a racial backlash to Obama coming in, There just was. But there was also a backlash to the massive expansion of a program, an entitlement program in Obamacare, which is actually pretty popular right now, but it was not for a really long time. I mean, all of those are forces that Trump was able to harness in a way that nobody else I think I would argue could have. But they didn't exist because of Trump. And if any of you were in New York, you remember the 2010, or might remember the 2010 gubernatorial race. Andrew Cuomo's opponent was a guy named Carl Palladino, who beat the establishment candidate Rick Lazio. It was the year of the Tea Party. Palladino centered around a lot of racist emails about the Obamas. He had a daughter who had, he had had outside of his marriage. He was incredibly aggressive. He was a businessman outside the system, had never run for office before. He, he won over last brick Lazio by 2 to 1. Now he lost Andrew Cuomo by a lot. But that was a proto Trump candidacy. So I don't know where people think that it all just came up with Trump and it's going to go away. It's not. This is, this country is full of convulsions in its history. This is one of them.
- [57:53]
A
You're totally right. I always said Trump just ripped the band aid off a lot faster. Can I give five more minutes?
- [58:00]
B
Yes, you can.
- [58:00]
A
Okay. Thank you very much. Appreciate that. Trump is notorious and we know why in many ways. And you report on it, about never being willing to acknowledge a mistake. I mean, that's the Roy Cohn method. We've seen it. I'd love if you. Is there a mistake that you think he would. In, in private, he would say to himself, is there something that he feels that he could have done, he would have done differently? He wouldn't have done. I know he won't say it ever.
- [58:32]
B
Actually, it's funny. He, he would once upon a time. I don't think he would now, but there were times he would admit mistakes. You know, there were times. There was something in 20. Oh, I know what it was, if I'm remembering this correctly, in 2016, I remember Maureen Dowd did a series of very smart interviews with him at the time. And I think in one of them, he admitted that his attack on Ted Cruz's wife was a mistake during the primaries. And that was done over Twitter. And first he did a. It was a retweet, but then whatever. He'll call most of his staff appointments from term one mistakes, but it's always somebody else's mistake because he got bad advice. The one thing that I ever knew of that he, he faulted himself for sort of was when his first effort to overTurn Obamacare in 2017, which he chased in part because it was a, a long term Republican goal, but for which they just had no plan and they didn't have the votes. He was, they had been talking about doing Obamacare repeal or a tax cut bill, you know, the Trump tax cuts, which ultimately did pass, but the night that the first vote went down in the House or I think, I think it was that the bill got pulled off the floor. That was what happened. And Ryan didn't submit it because they didn't have the votes, which was a humiliation for Trump. And he said to an advisor, I should have done tax cuts first. I think that might be the last time I can remember. It doesn't mean it is the last time, but that's the last time I know about.
- [60:06]
A
What do you think he wants his legacy to be other than the most powerful man in the history of the world? Is there any, you know, and I guess having monuments to himself in D.C. is there something that he wants to look back upon and say he did and he's proud of? Is there one thing?
- [60:28]
B
I think he's pretty proud of what he's done in terms of the border, in terms of, you know, while there's a number of other factors in terms of, I mean, we forget how much, much, you know, the, the dissatisfaction with, with Biden's border policies really was a huge part of 2024, particularly in New York and in other major cities where a lot of undocumented immigrants were, were being sent by Republican governors. But, but it just created a, it created a controversy around resources, for lack of a better way of putting it. He's wealthier than he's ever been in his life. You know, I mean, this is somebody who has spent a lifetime challenging and even suing people who questioned his liquid worth. So I don't, I don't think he's going to regret anything now. What's striking is always how, you know, and he is still having more fun, certainly, than he had in term one. But he, how angry he remains as a default setting. That's still, that's still the case a lot of the time. But no, I don't, I don't think there's anything. I think he'll be upset that he doesn't build his arch. I think he'll be upset if people start pulling his name off of buildings again when he leaves office. But I honestly think that's a lot less likely than last time.
- [61:44]
A
Well, Maggie, I really appreciate your time. Everybody should have the book by now. 500,000 copies are sold. So I'm assume. I assume everybody does.
- [61:54]
B
No, no, not everybody does. Please continue buying it. Thank you. We would like you to keep reading
- [61:59]
A
and gift it to your friend. It really should be required reading. I mean, it is just, it's remarkable. And please thank Jonathan for all the work that he's done over the years as well. And, and I look forward to seeing you in person somewhere soon. And thanks. Thanks a lot. All right. Okay. Bye, everybody. See you soon. Bye. Thanks for tuning in to this week's episode of Lunch with Jamie. As always, be sure to subscribe to my newsletter@jamieslist.com for my thoughts on all things food, pop culture, politics, and more. And remember to join these online conversations and ask my guests questions in real time. Sign up to become a paid subscriber. You can listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Audible, and be sure to leave a review. Thanks and see you next time.