Niko Henrichon (4:45)

And he was a totemic figure in this city. Right. And in some ways, that's a similarity with Trump. He's been a kind of figure in the life of New York for decades.

Michael Wolff (4:54)

Well, yeah. No, and actually, it's interesting. And because I've been a reporter in New York for a very long time now. I mean, I have seen the entirety of the Rudy story, which was a great story, a very. A very New York kind of kind of story. And then, of course, with 9, 11, an international story, and a story that Rudy thought would, in fact, make him the president of the United States, when it did not, in a kind of desperation move, he signed on with Donald Trump. But I remember in the old days, Rudy was one of those people, one of those people in New York who looked down on Donald Trump. Donald Trump was a joke. And Rudy saw that joke. I mean, he took tickets to sporting events from Donald Trump in Atlantic City. But beyond that, Donald Trump had little use for Rudy. And only when Rudy got to that point in his life, he wasn't elected president. I mean, he ran for president in 2008. That was. That came a cropper, to say the least. He got himself into a horrible marriage. And then in 2016, saw the possibility of latching onto Donald Trump. And I must Say he was early in seeing this. And, you know, and I remember there was a kind of, kind of great scene which Steve Bannon described to me, of Rudy Giuliani and Roger Ailes going out to Trump's Bedminster golf course to talk campaign strategy in 2016. And as Bannon described it, all they did was sit around these three guys quaff hot dogs and talk about war stories from past campaigns. And.

Niko Henrichon (7:08)

But there are a few people who've got a worse track record in presidential campaigns than Rudy Giuliani.

Michael Wolff (7:13)

Yeah. No, no. Well, then, I mean, obviously in 2016, Donald Trump got elected and then Rudy. And then actually even because everybody within the Trump, the Trump campaign was always trying to push Rudy out, but Rudy was always coming back in. And then Rudy took over the defense, Trump's defense, during, during one of the impeachments, the first impeachment, which was a

Niko Henrichon (7:43)

clear sign, if ever there was one, that this had become a kind of joke legal defense. Right. When you were relying on Rudy rather than a proper professional lawyer.

Michael Wolff (7:53)

Absolutely. But just to say that didn't really matter. I mean, Rudy. So the. Rudy's virtue, and that is the virtue that Trump always seeks, was absolute loyalty. Rudy was willing to say the most ridiculous things. And then of course, in 2020, after the election and the steal, Rudy stepped in and took everything over. It became the Rudy show. The Rudy show in defense of Donald Trump. And this is the moment which basically bankrupted Rudy, disgraced Rudy and put Rudy out to hardly even out to pasture, just out at the curb.

Niko Henrichon (8:42)

And we can't forget Dawn Four seasons, total landscaping. Right?

Michael Wolff (8:46)

We cannot. No. I mean, that was, that became this. I mean, this is one of the interesting things that became this incredible joke. I mean, everything about that was a joke. And yet somehow, remember Rudy with the, with the hair dye? So at every moment a joke. And yet somehow Donald Trump, not Rudy Giuliani, but Donald Trump, rose like the phoenix out of that, which Rudy again kicked to the curb. And they got rid of Rudy almost immediately. When Trump returned to Mar a Lago and he got a new cell phone number, one of the rules was don't give it to Rudy. So at any rate, Rudy now, I

Niko Henrichon (9:36)

think it's also just a crucial thing just to remind ourselves that when he was America's mayor, he was genuinely impressive. He genuinely did become this kind of unifying figure that certainly in New York was very popular, was popular across the United States. He did seem like a very smart, very well together put together guy. And I think it's just Also a telltale sign of how your brain can go as you move through the decades.

Michael Wolff (10:00)

Right.

Niko Henrichon (10:00)

Which potentially is something else we're seeing with Trump.

Michael Wolff (10:04)

Well, I don't want to go too far in praising Rudy. I mean, Rudy was always Rudy. Remember the marriages? Remember calling a news conference to say he was divorcing his wife before he told her Rudy was Rudy? But nevertheless, yes, he managed to do these two things, to somehow be Rudy and somehow be a mayor of New York who engendered relatively good feelings. I mean, certainly in hindsight, there are many people who continue to think that Rudy was a good mayor. He was the person who pulled the city back from its. Its for those terrible crime decades and set the city on some kind of financial. Relative financial equilibrium. Again. Let's not get carried away here. But. And then. And then this. Yes, things, his life, his career happened. His career went on. He did get older, he did start to drink more and more and more bad marriages. And then Donald Trump. But I think the thing to remember and the thing to really keep in mind is that he is a historical significant example of what happens when you get too close to Donald Trump.

Niko Henrichon (11:42)

There was also the Sacha Baron Cohen hotel room incident.

Michael Wolff (11:47)

I mean, it has been. I mean, Rudy is a. I mean, it's a kind of a tragic story. Tragic, comic. But, yes. And in the end, Trump had no use for him. So always all of these people. And again, it's one of those things I can't quite fathom is the people who continue to go to work for Donald Trump who do not see Rudy Giuliani as the cautionary model for a Trump career.

Niko Henrichon (12:20)

And we've got a whole cabinet full of them right now. A few of them have already been thrown overboard, but the others must be starting to look over their shoulders, right?

Michael Wolff (12:27)

Yeah, no, no, each of them. And I wonder if they do think I could end up like Rudy Giuliani. But anyway, Rudy Giuliani appears to be on death's door. He is in critical condition, and we wish him a speedy recovery.

Niko Henrichon (12:52)

We do.

Michael Wolff (12:53)

So let's. I think we have to go dive into the Strait of Hormuz.

Niko Henrichon (13:01)

So Trump's bully boy tactics with Iran don't seem to be paying off. They're not backing down.

Michael Wolff (13:10)

Well, I mean, he has gotten himself into a situation which he cannot get out of. I mean, that's. I don't know, other than to retreat. He's kind of screwed at this point. Now, I was speaking to someone over the weekend in the White House, and one of the things that's now happening in the White House is that on, almost on a moment by moment basis, people are calling out the price of oil, the Brent crude barrel price, because that has become one of the significant political measures of the moment that this oil is going. I mean, it's at $114 a barrel yesterday, maybe it's 113 today. There's expectations that it will go over, that if this goes on, if the standoff in the Strait of Hormuz goes on for another couple of weeks, which everyone expects it to do, it could go to 120, it could ultimately go to 160. The administration and this administration and certainly the midterms is, in a way, there's one number and that's the number the price of gold, Brent crude.

Niko Henrichon (14:35)

And let's not forget that the higher it goes, the more it benefits the people that were supposedly on the other side. Right. So the Russians want to see the price go up. The Saudis like to see the price go up. The Iranians themselves like to see the price go up. The people who don't are the American people, especially those who are filling their tanks with gas. Right.

Michael Wolff (14:55)

Again, it is just caught in this vice of not looking forward, of not seeing what might happen, of the kind of hubris that so often accompanies foreign adventures and of what happens when you get snookered. By Bibi Netanyahu. There was a very good piece in the Times, I think, the other day, by Scott Anderson. Now, Scott Anderson wrote this past year one of my favorite books, King of Kings. It's about Iran when the Shah was deposed. So 1979, an extraordinary book, an extraordinary story which he tells, an edge of the seat telling of this story. Again, one of those situations where nobody, certainly nobody in the Carter administration had any idea what was happening, any idea when it happened, what to do, and found themselves in a screwed. I mean, actually, Jimmy Carter.

Niko Henrichon (16:15)

Jimmy Carter's reputation has not recovered to this day from the oil shock of 1979.

Michael Wolff (16:21)

He lost the presidency because of their failure to anticipate what was happening in Iran, the failure to appreciate the forces that were ready to come apart in Iran and their reliance on the Shah. So Anderson had a piece in the Times, and I just want to read a piece of it because I think it really gets to exactly what's going on here. There are now only two outcomes to the conflict. Either the kind of wholesale destruction of Iran that Mr. Trump posited, or a settlement that will leave the government intact and empowered and a blustering president humiliated. The first option is increasingly remote. By publicly threatening the commission of war crimes on an enormous scale, Mr. Trump has given both his domestic and foreign opponents time to marshal resistance. As the latter and more likely outcome. This was predictable if only the President and his administration had bothered to take note of a new feature of modern warfare, a feature that can be boiled down to a single word, drones. Now, this is also interesting, too, because it goes to another blind side of Donald Trump, which is Ukraine. So the lesson that everyone should have been learning if they paid attention to Ukraine, which Donald Trump was not doing, was not interested in doing, rather stubbornly refused to do, is that the nature of warfare was changing, and it wasn't

Niko Henrichon (18:15)

even new in Ukraine. I mean, Ukrainians have been facing this barrage of Shaheen drones built by the Iranians, which are being deployed by the Russians. But previous conflicts have also seen that same thing over the last few years. We had the Karabakh conflagration and even that small dispute between two small nations, but still, it was the drones that were becoming the primary kind of focus of the warfare.

Michael Wolff (18:45)

No, it's not impossible that we will. That Donald Trump will become the footnote to this time and drones will become the main story. But suddenly, and suddenly he's found himself. I mean, the Russians are stymied by the Ukrainians. I mean, they're literally stuck in place. It's like World War I. And equally, in the Strait of Hormuz, the Americans are stuck in place because the. The Iranians with drones, cheap drones, have been able to hold, hold us and Donald Trump hostage.

Niko Henrichon (19:33)

And I think if you look at the economics of the drones, I mean, the drones are very important in that they change the way that there's a battlefield imbalance. But it costs millions of dollars to fire a missile to shoot down a drone, right? So.

Michael Wolff (19:50)

So a $10,000 drone, you're spending millions of do to neutralize $10,000.

Niko Henrichon (19:58)

So a smaller nation can just be sucking funds and military power from a larger nation in a very, very easy and cheap way. So

Michael Wolff (20:10)

what does he do?

Niko Henrichon (20:13)

Was it about a month ago that he stood up in the White House and he said, oh, the straightforward moves isn't my problem. The Europeans can figure it out now. Well, I think he's at least realized that that's not going to happen. I don't know if in the White House they've realized that they need to come up with a solution.

Michael Wolff (20:30)

I know. Well, that's one of the problems. One of the interesting things in my most recent discussions with White House people, that there's an acknowledgement this is a problem, but that he's in denial about it. So you can't and he gave I think, a speech yesterday in which it was, you know, again, pay no attention. The price of oil is going to come down. I mean, we have won, I mean all of these kinds of things. So he's taken a position on the war that he has been, he is certainly right. The American military has certainly done its job and succeeded and pay no attention to the price of oil. And matter of fact, his he seems to have a position that is could have been much worse. So thank me. So I think everybody within the, within the White House and within the Trump political, the political team is that this is, they don't know what to do about this. They literally do not know what to do. They don't know how to, they don't know how to get us out of the war and they don't know how to manage this on a political basis. Start the spring season off right with a new pair of Tokova's Western boots. Handcrafted in over 200 steps from genuine leather, they're built to last and feel broken in the moment you put them on. From cowhide to exotic leathers to Kovas blends timeless style with all day comfort. Pair them with premium denim Western shirts and accessories for an effortless, polished look. Shop quality Western goods in store or

Niko Henrichon (22:14)

online@dacovas.com I think you saw the change in attitude. Look Trump which want to go inside Trump's head. Trump's head is, is a mysterious place. But if you look at the reaction from say the Pentagon, so we're recording this on Tuesday morning. Pete Hegseth has given one of his 8am briefings this morning and the tone is just completely different to what he was remember the first press conference he did and he was basically yahooing and waving his cowboy hat and what was he doing?

Michael Wolff (22:48)

I didn't see the conference this morning.

Niko Henrichon (22:50)

He the tone was this is a very serious situation. We're taking this seriously. We're looking at solutions. And you could tell from what he was saying that the smart guys at the Pentagon, of which let's not forget there are lots of smart guys at the Pentagon have been saying he would

Michael Wolff (23:06)

not be among them.

Niko Henrichon (23:07)

No, but they have been telling him we're in a big, we've got a big, big problem here and we don't know how to get out of it. They're probably saying to him, you're going to have to go and convince the president that he's going to have to make a tough decision here. And you wouldn't want to be in that position, having to go into the White House to try and persuade Trump to reverse course.

Michael Wolff (23:29)

Well, he's not going to reverse course. What he's going to do is continue to pretend that he has won. But winning will be a retreat. I mean, he will have left the regime in place, all of their nuclear material will be in place, and they will have effective control of the Strait of Hormuz. That is what this will have been. America's 25 billion will have bought.

Niko Henrichon (24:05)

And there was new intelligence leaking out this morning that suggested that US Intelligence doesn't think that Iran's ability to build a nuclear weapon has been dimmed at all by the events of the last year.

Michael Wolff (24:19)

No. So the interesting thing is to see if Trump reality, which is the denial of reality, can eclipse the actual reality. I mean, that's what, from a political standpoint, that's what they hope will happen. And it has often happened with Donald Trump. And that's the only move that they have. So let's go from the opposite of war. And the opposite of war, I think, would be the Met Ball. And yet they are both things that I think you have two sides of Donald Trump in both of those things. I mean, Donald Trump is the presence in both situations. So the Met Ball, which, of course, the Sanchez Bezos took over, they are the primary presence, and they have become also among the key Trump bootlickers. And the entire Met Ball, which many people have boycotted for this reason, but it has now, it has come to stand for a kind of, I mean, it's a Trumpian symbol. Yeah.

Niko Henrichon (25:54)

And probably the leading millennial or younger Hollywood star at the moment of the moment. Zendaya refused to go this year, snubbed the Met Ball, which was once the hottest ticket in New York. And there is a real backlash.

Michael Wolff (26:10)

Well, the mayor of New York, Muhammadani said he wasn't going. There is a backlash in does now stand as, I mean, a kind of vivid Trumpian moment. And all of these, I mean, all of these tech guys, Bezos, Zuckerman was there, crept in a kind of don't notice me, but I'm here fashion because I suppose I want to be here. But all of these people who became Trumpian figures, you know, I mean, the Bezos Sanchez are virtually Trumpian avatars at this point.

Niko Henrichon (26:58)

Lauren Sanchez is one of those people who looks like she should be in the Mar A Lago orbit. She looks like a longtime member of that beach Club.

Michael Wolff (27:07)

No. And I think a beach club. That's a nice way to put.

Niko Henrichon (27:11)

Did I make it sound romantic?

Michael Wolff (27:13)

Yeah, you just made it sound kind of Hamish, you know, but, but absolutely. And I think all of these people become symbols and these are not positive symbols for, for Donald Trump. And as the, and as we go into this, into this midterm six months, this is a, once again, one more, one more indication, one more kind of glaring, kind of, kind of. This is Trump. This is what you are approving of, if you approve of Trump.

Niko Henrichon (27:51)

What I don't understand about Bezos in particular, this is, I mean, it varies from day to day, but basically, the world's richest man who bought the Washington Post in order to add some credibility and some sort of patina to his portfolio, he was already in charge of most sales on earth right through Amazon. But he wanted to own the Washington Post because that gives him stature and status. And then he fell so quickly, he started bowing and scraping once Trump was reelected, which, okay, for short term political gain, that makes perfect sense. But how did he not see the next 10, 15, 20 years that his reputation is going to be destroyed by this man?

Michael Wolff (28:33)

Well, you know, I mean, I think, I think part of the answer is that, I mean, these are tech guys, you know, I mean, we've, because they have so much money and so much influence, we tend to believe that they know something and they know something, but that something is very circumscribed. So the idea of thinking beyond this, of thinking that, of having any idea, any sense that Trump was not only temporary, but probably an aberration, and certainly that Trump, very likely, as he has done so many times in the past, would shoot himself in the foot, would self destruct. So why at that moment they decided we're going to go all in for Donald Trump? You know, I mean, as I said, I think because they got it wrong. They're just in the end, not that smart. Not that smart in the broader sense of smart, not emotionally intelligent. But I also think they're greedy. And that was a moment they thought, we can take this guy and this guy will give us what we want. So now they're here. How do they, I don't know how they get out of this.

Niko Henrichon (30:04)

You've said many times that not only does is Trump likely to shoot himself in the foot, he'll. He'll shoot people around him. He takes people down with him. Right. This is one of the defining characteristics. It was interesting to see Bertrand Arnault, who's one of the other richest Men in the world. Last week, he started distancing himself from Trump, started questioning some of his policies. And he was another of these billionaires who was at the inauguration sucking up to Trump. He's finally realized which way the wind's blowing and is now trying to open up a little gap between. Bezos doesn't seem to have noticed.

Michael Wolff (30:40)

Yeah, I mean, all of the Europeans. I mean, the Europeans, and then we saw this Canada this week bonding with the Europeans. I mean, it's one of the other things Trump has created this absolute fissure in the Western world. So all of this, the unification, the unity of the Western world, which has protected the peace and ensured the astounding economic growth of the last 70 years, has broken apart under Donald Trump.

Niko Henrichon (31:27)

And of course, he has made repeated threats to, for example, quit NATO. But he never quite does it, does he? He's never quite broken these kind of alliances in the way that he's threatened to. Do we think now that now that he's got to, after these midterms, will he start doing those things?

Michael Wolff (31:46)

No, I don't think he'll. No. But what the other side of the equation now understands that they have to do this. You can't exist with this kind of unpredictability. You can't exist with trying to please someone who can never really be pleased. You can't exist trying to deal with someone who is. Who doesn't read the briefings. I mean, who doesn't really know what's going on.

Niko Henrichon (32:17)

Which I think does give us a little insight into what Bezos and Zuckerberg and those people were thinking, which is that, oh, we can persuade this guy, he's not really that smart. We can persuade him to do what we want. And I'm sure they have had some win. Some of these tech bros have, you know, they've liberalized AI laws, for example.

Advertisement/Announcer (32:35)

Right.

Niko Henrichon (32:35)

Which is obviously one of the things that they were super keen to force through.

Michael Wolff (32:38)

Super. But. But that, actually, that was interesting this week, that there's a hurry up and. And, oh, we gotta do something about AI within the White House. And we're gonna try to bring that in and we're gonna try to exert some supervision over that, which will invariably not happen. But that was the political spin of this week.

Niko Henrichon (33:06)

Okay, so if Bezos hasn't realized that it's time to abandon Trump yet, the opinion polls are giving us extremely glaring evidence that America has had enough and that midterms is going to be a bloodbath for the Republicans.

Michael Wolff (33:22)

So The Washington Post ABC News poll puts Trump's approval at 37%, which is striking. I mean, number one, you can't win the midterms on 37%. At 37%, you certainly lose the House. And, you know, it's now more and more reasonable. The contest is in the, is in the Senate. So, again, and this is, I mean, one of the themes that we've been talking about here for the past couple of, couple of months is that this is coming apart, that the run that Trump had in the first, for most, the first year of this, this administration has now come strikingly to an end. So the economy, ice, the war tariffs, the clowns in the administration that surround him, nothing is going well for them, literally nothing. I cannot think of any point now within this administration where things are, we're looking good, where things are sellable. So now and again, we're at this countdown point. We are looking toward the midterms. It is all coming together. The issues that the administration has to defend, plus the war that it can't get out of, plus this, plus, you know, this just general sinking sensation.

Niko Henrichon (35:19)

And I think the Iran war, we're talking about a historically unpopular war. There was a poll this week that suggested the Iran war was as unpopular as the Vietnam War at its lowest point. So Trump has managed a historical feat, almost always as a rallying around the flag when a war begins, and then over time, the popularity diminishes. Trump has managed to hit record unpopularity for the Iran war in only a matter of weeks.

Michael Wolff (35:49)

Extraordinary.

Niko Henrichon (35:51)

And things don't look any better with the economy. Things don't look any better. I think what's really fascinating to me and what's really worrying for the Republican strategists is if you look underneath the top line figures on the latest polling and you look at the intensity of support, Republicans are way down on certainty to vote. And they're also, for the first time in the entirety of the two Trump terms, less than half of Republicans now say they have strong approval of the president. So even when he was at his least popular, top line figures, just after January 6th, something like 70 or 80% of Republican voters still strongly approved. Of course, the independents had abandoned him, but the Republicans were still strongly approving. It's now less than 50% of even Republicans strongly approve. There's no even for the people who haven't yet flipped and said, oh, I'm going to vote for the Democrats, that kind of what seemed undefeatable passion for Trump within his grassroots seems to be ebbing away as well.

Michael Wolff (36:52)

So were I to write a fifth book about Donald Trump, it would be called Downfall.

Niko Henrichon (37:00)

I think you should.

Michael Wolff (37:03)

We will be back on Thursday. I trust and hope Joanna will be back on Thursday. Meanwhile, thank you, Ryan, Heather, Rachel, Devin and Neil. And actually, this is Devin's last podcast. He moves on to a greater, more lucrative things. But we really appreciate it. Devin has been with us from the very first. Devin, thank you. Really. We literally could not have, on a virtually daily basis, done this without you.

Niko Henrichon (37:49)

So the good news is we have so many Beast Tier members now, there are too many names to read out. And we really appreciate your support. Thanks to our production team. Devon Rogerino, Ryan Murray, Rachel Passer, Heather Passaro, Neil Rosenhaus.