← The Ezra Klein Show
The Ezra Klein Show
Who Has the Power in Trump's White House?
01:11:59
It has been harder to get insight into the dynamics of President Trump’s White House this term compared with the first one, partly because there have been fewer leaks. But after the attack on Venezuela and the administration’s actions in Minneapolis, I’ve found myself wondering: How exactly is Trump making decisions? Who is he listening to? How does this White House work? Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer cover the Trump administration for The Atlantic and have written a series of big profiles on key figures in this administration. Parker previously won three Pulitzer Prizes for her reporting at The Washington Post. Mentioned: “The Wrath of Stephen Miller” by Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer “‘I Run the Country and the World’” by Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer “This Is the Real Reason Susie Wiles Talked to Me 11 Times” by Chris Whipple “Susie Wiles, JD Vance, and the “Junkyard Dogs”: The White House Chief of Staff on Trump’s Second Term (Part 1 of 2)” by Chris Whipple Bo...
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- [00:01]
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Ezra Klein
in Trump's first term, there was a huge amount of daily reporting about how his White House was working. In part, this was because his White House was split between a series of factions, each of which was constantly leaking about the other factions. The result was maybe not a very internally coherent or smoothly working White House, but there was a lot of information about what was happening and why and when. Trump's second term has been different. Trump's staff is selected much more for loyalty. The factional infighting is much less present, and the White House has been doing much more. The balance of coverage is about what they are actually doing in the world as opposed to what they are doing or saying about each other. But particularly recently around Minneapolis, around Venezuela, around a number of major stories, I've wondered, how are decisions being made here? What does a president know who tells him if something is going wrong, who is wielding power and how, and is it on his behalf or on their own? So I want to talk to some reporters who cover the Trump White House day in and day out and can give me a better picture of how it is functioning internally. Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer are staff writers at the Atlantic. Before that, they were at the Washington Post, where Parker won three Pulitzer Prizes. They have covered Trump for many years now, and they have also profiled many of the people around him and so are kind of uniquely placed to explain how something that at this point I think is less like a White House and more like a royal court is actually functioning day to day. How it is functioning for Donald Trump and how it's functioning for the rest of us. As always, my email Ezra kleinshowytimes.com. Ashley Parker, Michael Scheer, welcome to the show.
- [03:00]
Michael Shear
Thanks for having me.
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Ashley Parker
Yeah, thanks for having us.
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Ezra Klein
So I want to begin with Donald Trump's theory of what went wrong in his first term. You read of Trump in your big profile of him, he had realized in his exile that at nearly every turn in his first term, someone on his own team, Reince Priebus, John Kelly, James Mattis, Bill Barr, Gary Cohn, had blocked him. He needed smart people who would figure out how to let him do everything that he wanted to do in whatever way he wanted to do it. So let me begin here. To what degree is that actually true about Trump's first term?
- [03:33]
Ashley Parker
Ashley, in his first term, you have to keep in mind, and it's stunning to remember, but Donald Trump had never run for any office, any political office. He wakes up, he runs for president, and he wins. So he has this kind of ragtag team who has never operated at that level, some of whom had never been really in politics before. Remember Hope Hicks, who played a huge role in his first term? The story, the lore, was that when he told her, hope, I'd like you to be part of my campaign, she said, which golf course? Right. Is it a marketing campaign for Trump, Doral or something at Mar a Lago? And so he ascends to the presidency, and he suddenly has to fill all of these posts with people he doesn't know, doesn't trust, many of whom don't like him, don't trust him, and privately say he was their 16th choice to be. And a lot of them view themselves as guardrails. They are there, you know, they would argue they are there to teach him how the presidency works and how democracy works and these norms, but in a lot of ways, they really are thwarting what he's trying to do. In some instances, you have someone famously taking a piece of paper off of his desk so he can't sign something that they believe is problematic. You have them undermining him by leaking to the media. And you also have them saying, you know, here's the 10 reasons why you can't do this. If you do this, I'll resign this time. And we mentioned this in our piece, but I think it's illustrative. One person we talked to, they said, look, when the president asks for something twice, we have an unofficial rule, which is that we do it. And I said, well, why twice? And they said, well, to be fair, he does say a lot of crazy things, but if he says it a second time, we know he's serious. And we know regardless of whether it's to fire the board of the Kennedy center and take it over or to potentially march on Greenland, if that's what he wants, we are there to make that happen. And it is such a marked difference
- [05:34]
Ezra Klein
I mean, to what extent, Michael, is that. When does that just reflect good staffing? It's important for a principal to have staff who will say, hey, that's a bad idea. And to what extent does that shift into a kind of famously, you know, we are the resistance inside the Trump administration. The reason I ask is because to the extent they set out in the second term to solve this, understanding whether it was a hindrance or in fact a help to him to be restrained seems important.
- [06:04]
Michael Shear
It is good staffing in the traditional sense. And it was good staffing in the first term, in part because Trump also didn't come into office with a policy plan, with an ideology about what really to do with government. He didn't have a plan from day one about what he wanted to accomplish in terms of remaking the federal government. And so I think a lot of people back then were thinking, well, we're going to defend the White House, defend the government as it was. That is our job to make sure the systems work as they have worked for decades. And so by that definition, it is good staffing. Now, I think there was mistakes Trump made in that first term. We should mention that he likes a gang of rivals, sort of nasty viper pit of rivals around him. And he had Kellyanne Conway and Jared Kushner and Steven Bannon and Reince Priebus. I mean, those first few months, those were all independent power centers that were all fighting against each other, and that was bad staffing. I mean, that was a misdesign of his White House. But I think for the people who came in, in that first term who were resisting him, they felt they were defending something that the country wanted, that the country had long established. And I think the implicit part of your question is, why has it changed? I mean, everyone who came into the second term knew what Trump wanted to do to the presidency, what he want to do to the government. And it was pretty radical the second time, and he had plans for it that he just wasn't able to describe in 2017.
- [07:30]
Ashley Parker
And by that metric, I would argue that some of the staffing got better in certain ways. Right. So a lot of these people, the first term were new, if not to government, then certainly to the White House and the executive branch. And the first term, Stephen Miller, for instance, his famous travel ban, executive order, it created chaos at the airports. And a lot of these people spent their four years out of power learning the lessons. And the president, too, he came in in the first term, and he sort of expected the presidency to kind of be like a Monarchy, right. And he was frustrated when he wasn't king. And it turned out that, you know, a Single Senator John McCain could tank something he really cared about. So they all learned these lessons in the four years out of power, and they spend that time essentially getting bigger, stronger, faster, smarter, more ruthless. And so Stephen Miller, when he comes back, and I'm using him as an example, but this applies to a number of people he now know knows how to structure executive orders so that they can better stand up to court challenges. He now knows that if he cares about immigration, it's not just the Department of Homeland Security where he needs his people and true believers and loyalists. He knows that there are certain positions at the Department of Health and Human Services where he needs people who can implement his policies or certain people at the State Department in the Western Hemisphere's division who will be crucial for what he wants to. To do. And so they come back understanding the levers of bureaucracy and government and ways to be creative and push norms and push boundaries in a way they didn't in the first term. So if you like what they're doing, which is sort of the destruction of the administrative state, they are much better staffers in that mission.
- [09:16]
Ezra Klein
So how do they achieve that? You describe in one of your pieces the mission as they are staffing up for the second term is, quote, this time, loyalty would be absolute. The federal government's a big place. They actually have on it a number of people who, if you had seen them join in the first term, you would have expected them to be part of this more mainstream Republican establishment that might oppose parts of Trumpism. Think of somebody like Marco Rubio or Doug Burgum. So as they come in to this term with the idea that they're going to select for loyalty and alignment, how did they do it?
- [09:51]
Michael Shear
Yeah, he just had a better, clearer idea of who he could choose from. And he was able then to make clear to all of them who they were working for. I mean, he has this great litmus test because of January 6th and the disgrace with which he left the White House of who stuck around, of who was still willing to be seen with him at his worst moment, of who was still calling him after he'd done what he'd done. And, you know, we reported that in the first term, Stephen Miller would go over to the Department of Homeland Security and say, I think you should do this idea. And everyone would walk out of the room saying, no, we're not doing that. That's a crazy idea. This time, if Stephen Miller gets on the phone with them and says, I think you should do this idea. You have to meet this benchmark of deportations this month. You have to go to Home Depot parking lots to pick people up. Kristi Noem and her deputies are sort of saying, he said, jump. We're going to jump as high as we can. That's our role. And I think you see that in every one of the major cabinet positions. You see in those Cabinet meetings that Trump has started holding, it's fealty to the king. I mean, it's very much like a royal court. And they are all answering to them, not to their own bureaucracies and their own traditions. And that's just radically different than the first term where he was constantly negotiating the interests of each one of these departments, the traditions of the Defense Department, the traditions of Homeland Security, the traditions of the lawyers and the Justice Department. He came in this time, he cleaned house wherever he saw doubt, and literally impose loyalty tests to replace those people.
- [11:17]
Ashley Parker
And that loyalty has become easier in certain ways. You know, Ezra, you mentioned Marco Rubio, right? Someone who seemed very unlikely to serve in a Trump administration. But the world changed between his first and second terms, in the sense that in the first term, not just the people around him and Republicans and voters and world leaders, but from everyone, there was a sense that this was an aberration, and it was a fever dream. Even Joe Biden ran on returning to normalcy. Right. And when Trump retakes power, when he comes back to the White House and doesn't just come back, but he comes back after January 6, there is a sense that Trump was not the aberration, perhaps Joe Biden was the aberration. And this is where the country is. This is where the Republican Party is. And if you're someone like Marco Rubio who wants to be a player in what is essentially the modern Republican Party, it instills, I think, a level of loyalty and a level of fealty. And those people who didn't like it, the Paul Ryan's, the Mitt Romney's of the world, they left.
- [12:23]
Ezra Klein
You can tell me if this is wrong, but one thing that I have picked up on talking to people in the Trump White House, in the Republican Party, is that that campaign, the 2024 campaign, particularly after the assassination attempt and then when he eventually win, that the party's relationship, the way that people around Trump, look at Trump, seem to me to change. I would say that I feel like Trump gets treated as the Grand Ayatollah of the Republican Party now that they treat him almost like a mystic, that maybe what he's saying doesn't exactly make sense, but you can't really question it. You have to figure out what it really means. And it goes to the thing you reported, that if he says something twice, they do it. That it doesn't seem to me that anybody around Trump now sees it as in any way their job to restrain him or redirect him, even for his own good, that they treat him as like a great man of history figure.
- [13:21]
Michael Shear
Yeah, I don't think that's correct. It's not the case that it's entirely a sort of yes man. White House. Now, the person we haven't yet mentioned who's the most important person in this story is Susie Wiles as chief of staff, who stepped into the role that no one had been able to handle before. Right. Every one of them tried to intervene and stop him from doing stuff. Every one of them burned out sort of ingloriously because she was there with him during his time in the wilderness after January 6, because she was able to build the campaign that ended up winning, and because she's figured out her relationship with Trump in a way that I don't think anyone else who've ever worked with him at that level has. Susie is able to go to him and say, I don't think that's a good idea, is able to put people in front of him who say, I don't think that's a good idea. I don't think it's a situation where he is not getting pushback. Now, that doesn't mean he always listens to her. That doesn't mean he doesn't go ahead and do the thing he wanted to do anyway. I mean, one example of this was there was a debate over whether to pardon all the January 6th felons, or just some of them, whether to not pardon the violent ones. And there were people around Trump who were saying to him, I don't think we should pardon the people who are actually beating on police officers and trying to hurt people. He overruled them. But a more recent example is the president said a couple weeks ago, I think we may have to nationalize elections in 15 places, which is not what his government, at least at the top, has been currently planning to do. And there were people who went to him after that and said, wait, I don't think this is what you should be doing. And he hasn't exactly backed away from it. I mean, it's a little ambiguous now. It doesn't mean he's not going to try and nationalize a city. But there is pushback. Now, the question of when there's pushback is an interesting one, because Susie does not try and stop him if he's made up his mind. And that's different than Reince Priebus or some of the other chiefs of staff. And she's able to go along. He makes a decision, she'll go along with it. She'll try and make it do as little damage as possible for him. But I don't think it's right to say there's no discussions like that.
- [15:34]
Ezra Klein
Tell me about their relationship.
- [15:36]
Michael Shear
So one thing I've observed with Trump for a long time is that he is oddly better at taking instruction from women around him than men. I think if a man comes to him who's working with him and says, no, you're wrong, sir, this is why I think he can become a little more combative. We saw this in the first term with Hope, with Kellyanne Conway, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who could talk to him more frankly sometimes. Susie has talked about her own relationship with her father. Some of this came out in that Vanity Fair piece last year. But her father was an alcoholic. She had to negotiate around someone she could not control as a child. And she's not saying that Trump is an alcoholic, but she's saying that their personalities are not totally dissimilar. And I think she is very good at offering the president something that he needs, which is structure around him that makes sense, a process around him that makes sense, a superstructure that can actually execute on what he wants to do. And in exchange for that, she has the ability to say to him, this is why I don't think this is a good idea. This is why I don't think that's a good idea. And I think they've formed a very tight bond. And I think the other thing that Susie has brought to the White House is it's not everybody, but 60, 70% of the senior people in the White House are Susie people. They work for her. I mean, they're working for the President, but they are executing on her vision. And so that tension you had in the first term, where you had seven camps or five camps or four camps that were constantly warring, often through leaks to the press with each other about how terrible the other one was, has mostly gone away. And that's just an organizational superstructure that she's imposed. The last thing I'll say about her is that I think she's been very good at keeping people in line. There's a way in which if you step out and this has happened with cabinet level people, other senior officials, when they mess up, they hear it from Susie. And so there is a sort of discipline that's been imposed, often very subtly, from her within the government, which I think has served the president well.
- [17:48]
Ashley Parker
And to Michael's point, I hadn't quite thought of it that way, but I think you're exactly right that a lot of these women who are in very senior, powerful positions have been able to say things to Trump in a way he wouldn't accept from other people. And I think it's their ability, frankly, to. Not dissimilar to being a parent. Right. You have different kids. And if I'm messaging something to my 7 year old and I want her to do something or hear me, I do it differently than I do to my 14 year old or my two and a half year old. Right. I'm not gonna say what age I'm arguing the President is, but all of those women sort of understood, understood what he needed, understood how to present him information. Maybe it's a poll you put in front of him, right. And say, look at this map of the country, look at these states you need to win and look where they are on the overturning of abortion. Because they understand that that's how he takes in information and understands it. And I think that's been incredibly helpful.
- [18:47]
Michael Shear
Another thing I just mentioned real quick is that unlike the other chiefs of staff, she has not tried to control the information flow to the President. And that's a big shift from those first three or four chiefs of staff in the first term where they tried to control the paper that was going in the room. They were trying to keep people from knowing exactly who was going into the Oval Office and who was not going to the Oval Office. Susie does not try to do that. And that complicates the job for, for Susie first and foremost and for others in the White House. But it also, I think, allows the President to feel like he's not being controlled.
- [19:21]
Ashley Parker
And one more thing on Susie is that Vanity Fair piece Michael mentioned. You know, I assume your listeners know, but it was Susie, Gabe, a bunch of candid interviews to Chris Whipple and they were on the record. And he ended up sort of taking, as journalists do, the most interesting and sometimes incendiary parts and publishing it in a very long Vanity Fair piece that got a ton of attention. And I understood why the White House was upset over it and Susie was upset over it because I think there were some observations she made and things she said quite candidly that you wouldn't necessarily want in the public domain. But as I read that, I thought this is what makes her a good chief of staff. She's incredibly clear eyed, right? She knows who's who. She knows when there's been a mistake. She sees, you know, the angle this person is always playing and she's aware of it. So I think she's very savvy and smart of sort of the court around him and who they are and what their motivations are.
- [20:20]
Ezra Klein
One interpretation many people to some degree, myself included, had coming out of that piece. Cause Wiles does not give a lot of interviews. She's not out in public in the way Stephen Miller is or Marco Rubio is or J.D. vance is. She's not spilling all her thoughts on X is that she portrayed herself in that piece as a quite enabling chief of staff. I mean, there's this sort of famous quote, I'm paraphrasing it, where she says, you know, you have other chiefs of staff who have these moments where they like, march into the Oval Office and they tell the president that what they're trying to do is unconstitutional or wrong and they need to change course. And I don't have any of those moments. And given how many things Donald Trump tries to do that are unconstitutional or wrong, it struck me as not a plausible interpretation that no such moments are needed. And that Trump, sort of uniquely in recent precedents, does not give anybody occasion to worry about the wisdom of what he's doing. So you're sort of portraying her here as a quite strong chief of staff, controlling process, creating structure. I felt like a lot of what was incendiary about that was she in some ways portrayed herself as a somewhat mild chief of staff who just sees her role as kind of like helping shape what he wants to do.
- [21:33]
Michael Shear
Yeah, I think there's a lot of nuance here. So, you know, the president decides, I'm gonna pardon everyone from January 6th, there's no discussion of it afterwards. That's what happens. But, you know, I've talked to people who've talked about meetings with her during the campaign and afterwards where she often says almost nothing during much of the meeting. And then she'll say something quietly at the end like, I'm not sure that's a good idea. And so it's not. You know, you could argue that obviously she has allowed things that, you know, many people would say are unconstitutional. But I think there's a different litmus test she's using for a lot of these things. You know, another example that gets at this is after the Preddy shooting in Minneapolis, you had that Saturday, Noem and Miller leading the charge, saying this was basically a terrorist who was going to assault officers. Obviously not true. The President came in and basically reversed his course, overrules Stephen Miller, kind of puts him in the penalty box, overrules Noem, sends Tom Homan up to Minneapolis. We now know that almost all the surge of troops there have been pulled out. A very dramatic reversal that happens very quickly. You know, if you were to ask Susie why did that happen, she would say, well, the President made that decision to do that. But I think there was like a clear set of discussions engineered by Susie and other people in the White House to basically allow for such a dramatic shift to happen. And I don't know if Reince Priebus or some of the other people who work for him in the first term, you know, would have been able to guide that process in the same way.
- [23:04]
Ezra Klein
Let me pick up on something that, that that specific event has made me think a lot about, which is you mentioned the flow of information to the President and traditionally the chief of Staff, National Security Council, Domestic Policy Council. There's a lot of White House structure that is fundamentally about narrowing, prioritizing and rationalizing the flow of information to the President, which can mean if it's done badly, they don't hear things they should be hearing. If it's done well, it means they're not overwhelmed by too much because the responsibilities of the presidency are potentially quite vast. When I listen to Donald Trump talk, how good the information he is getting is not obvious to me. When Stephen Miller lies to me on television, I think Stephen Miller knows he is lying to me. Trump, I can often not tell in certain situations if he has been fed terrible information by the people around him. I watch these Cabinet meetings where his Cabinet goes around and prefaces every incredibly sunny report with totalitarian kitsch style praise of the President. And I think to myself watching this, that if Trump is believing any of this, he's being very ill served, among other things. Right? This is the problem with regimes that work like that. So does Trump get bad news? Is he getting better information than what we see in those Cabinet meetings? Or does he have a bunch of yes men and women around him who tell him what he wants to hear?
- [24:40]
Ashley Parker
One thing is that Trump himself does not really differentiate always between the sources. Right? You may know that an article in the New York Times means one thing and that an article in Breitbart News means something else and interpret it accordingly. You know, the same way as a student, if I'm writing a research paper, I know that taking something out of an original source textbook is one caliber of information, that Wikipedia is maybe a good jumping off point, but something you would never cite. And that, like Reddit, is just a crazy rabbit hole. But Trump is willing to treat those all equally. So if a poll is in his favor, he likes that poll. And you're right, he gets a lot of information from people for various reasons because they want him to like them and he likes them. If they show him a poll claiming his approval rating in New York is 70%, that's exciting for him. He gets information from people like Laura Loomer, who has a direct line to him, who has her own agenda and, you know, potentially her own clients. He does not differentiate between that information. I think his lens of it is someone who's quite transactional. He views a sort of like, is this something I like? Or is this something I don't like? And if it's something he likes, he will repeat it ad nauseam, whether or not it is true. And if it's something he doesn't like, he will choose not to accept it as fact and will probably not put it out. Untrue.
- [26:15]
Ezra Klein
Social but does Susie Wiles see it as her job when the President is saying untrue things to make sure his picture of reality is true?
- [26:23]
Michael Shear
Yeah.
- [26:23]
Ezra Klein
No.
- [26:23]
Michael Shear
Absolutely not.
- [26:24]
Ezra Klein
That seems like a problem.
- [26:26]
Michael Shear
No. Because I think you have to understand that the President has a different view of truth. I mean, he simply does not prioritize being accurate. As I was coming over here, I was listening to the President give a press conference about some EPA announcement he just put out. And he was talking about how we've had such great job performance over the last year like no one's ever seen before. And we know that's not true. There were less jobs created last year than there were the year before or the year before that. It's just not true. But the President says those sorts of things, I think knowing that they're not true because he thinks the things he says are made as part of a transaction with whoever he's speaking to, the American people, usually his voters, in which he's trying to get something from them, so he's trying to sell something to them. The President just doesn't prioritize accuracy in that way.
- [27:17]
Ashley Parker
I mean, that's like a genteel way of putting it, but sure. I mean, I would also argue he has a long history legitimately of sort of bending reality to his will. And that's tricky because, for instance, we should all say here, he lost the 2020 election. He just, he lost it. But at the same time, he convinced a huge swath of the country that he was the rightful president, you know, in exile at Mar a Lago, and that the election was stolen. And so I don't really know what my macro point is, because I am arguing that there's actual tangible facts and truth, and I believed in a reality based world. But for his purposes, he is nearly as happy to have those 40% of the electorate think he won the election.
- [28:08]
Ezra Klein
I recognize that Donald Trump has a bullshitter's relationship to the truth. And I mean that in the. There's like this great book of philosophy called On Bullshit. And it says that the bullshitter is different than the liar because the liar is playing a game against the truth. The liar knows the truth and is calibrating against it. The bullshitter doesn't actually care about the truth. I conceive of Trump as a bullshitter, but part of the job of the White House staff is to make sure the president, whatever it is he is saying in public, knows what is true and what is not true. And it does not sound to me like what you are telling me is that the people around Trump understand that
- [28:51]
Michael Shear
to be their job. I think that is not a priority of the White House staff. I think they feel like they need to present to the president reality in a way that would allow him to make good decisions. And I do think there is quite a bit of effort that goes on inside the White House to channel the President. I mean, another example we could just run through quickly is there's been this fight going on in the White House for a couple months now to get the President to talk about the thing that'll help Republicans win the midterms. There's a big problem in the polls right now. The American people don't think their economic situation is getting better. They think he's spending too much time on foreign policy. They're not thrilled with the ballroom. They don't love a lot of the things he likes to focus on. And so they're trying to get him out and do speeches and things like that. He's been resisting that because he's simply more interested in other things. And so that conversation has been one in which people around the president have been trying to implore him to recognize what is just a fact. The midterms will be worse if Republicans don't figure out how to get on the right side of affordability and some of this economic messaging. And right now we're on the wrong side. Your approval rating is bad. That's just a fact. And the president president is kind of negotiating with that now. That doesn't mean when the president speaks publicly, he's going to say anything negative about the way the economy is going now. He's going to say it's the best economy we've ever had. He's going to say any poll that shows Republicans doing bad is obviously false and the lie. So he'll say lots of false things publicly. But that doesn't mean there's not that private conversation going on and that private argument going on behind the scenes.
- [30:25]
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- [31:27]
Ezra Klein
So you describe Suzy Wallace as the center of the White House, obviously beyond the president, who has the most influence next?
- [31:36]
Ashley Parker
I would say Stephen Miller is the right direction to move. I'm curious what you think, Michael.
- [31:40]
Michael Shear
I think for domestic policy. Yes. Stephen Miller. For foreign policy, you may go to Marco.
- [31:44]
Ezra Klein
Let's talk about Miller. Miller. Often he's been described to me, and I sometimes describe him as seeming like the prime minister of the administration. He seems like the person running policy. You did a great profile of him not long ago. What is his role?
- [32:01]
Michael Shear
So formally he's the deputy chief of staff. Informally, I think the president's described him as being at the top of the totem pole. And when he says that, he's talking about policy, and that means he's involved in all the foreign policy discussions, or almost all of them, he's involved in basically leading the immigration policy discussion. He was deeply involved in many of the disruptive executive orders from the first few months, the crackdown on universities. You just list off a lot of the stuff that happened in those first hundred days that caught everybody off guard. He was driving a lot of he was writing a lot of those executive orders. And then I think the other role he plays is he is the voice. You know, he's the sort of accelerant in the White House. The voice. It's always like adding more fuel to whatever fire is happening and saying, we have to go harder, we have to go tougher, we have to do more of this. We can't give up, we can't surrender. We have to push through this stuff. And so in that way, he influences a lot of things. I mean, like any discussion that's going on, he's going to add more fuel to that fire, more kindling. He's going to go on and say something like, ICE agents have total immunity. And so suddenly CBP officers or ICE agents up in Minneapolis feel somehow freer to push the bounds of what is legal in their behavior. And he's accelerated that tension. I mean, I think the most jarring thing he's done was after the Charlie Kirk murder, give a speech that everybody should watch at his funeral in which he basically described this clash of civilizations, this full on war for the future of humanity between the left and, you know, his side.
- [33:41]
Stephen Miller
They cannot imagine what they have awakened. They cannot conceive of the army that they have arisen in all of us because we stand for what is good, what is virtuous, what is noble. And to those trying to incite violence against us, those trying to foment hatred against us, what do you have? You have nothing. You are nothing. You are wickedness. You are jealousy. You are envy. You are hatred. You are nothing. You can build nothing. You can produce nothing. You can create nothing. We are the ones who build. We are the ones who create. We are the ones who lift up humanity. You thought you could kill Charlie Kirk. You have made him immortal.
- [34:37]
Michael Shear
It was like a call to war speech. And I think he brings that attitude to the whole conversation inside the government.
- [34:46]
Ashley Parker
In our profile, we described him as the pulsing ID of a president who is already almost pure id. And one of the first ways we, the nation, kind of collectively glimpsed it was during Signal Gate, right, where our boss, the editor in chief of the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, is inadvertently added to a private signal chain of Trump's top, top, top people discussing a bombing campaign in Yemen. And this is fascinating for a number of reasons for what it reveals, including just the sheer sloppiness to add a journalist to a private signal chain with essentially classified information. But to me, even then, even before I started reporting on Stephen Miller and came to understand the true scope of his power and influence, was that in that debate, you have the Vice President and Pete Hegseth, the Defense Secretary, and all of these top people going back and forth. Stephen Miller is in that chain, technically the lowest on the totem pole, right? He's not elected. He's not Senate confirmed. He's not a Cabinet official. And at one point, Stephen Miller weighs in, and I'm paraphrasing a bit here, but he essentially says, look, as I understand it, the president gave the green light to go bomb Yemen. And then everyone's just like, oh, okay, let's do it, and they do it. And when we were talking to people in the White House, it became clear that a directive from Stephen Miller is viewed as a directive from Donald Trump himself.
- [36:14]
Ezra Klein
You described Miller as like the pulsing ID of a presidency that is already pretty heavily id. But what feels very different about Miller and Trump is that Trump feels loose and intuitive. Miller feels highly ideological. Highly, highly ideological and highly structured. That to the extent he's an id, he's organizationally very capable one. What is his theory of the state of wielding power, of the administrative role he has?
- [36:49]
Michael Shear
I think it's more developed than the President's. I don't think the president is a very ideological person. I don't think he reads, you know, Claremont Institute papers or has a very sophisticated view of, you know, the drift of the Constitution over the last 30 years and what needs to be fixed. He knows what he wants to do. And I think Miller's role then is to fill in a lot of those blanks. And he has operationalized a lot of what the sort of emerging institutional maga world has started to argue in the last five years, which is basically an argument that says the way the government has been behaving over the last 20, 30 years is way outside of what the Constitution has. Was intended to do. And we have to correct for that by doing things that for most observers in Washington, I think, for definitely Democrats, looks extra constitutional.
- [37:46]
Ezra Klein
What a gentle word.
- [37:49]
Michael Shear
To do things that dramatically expands the power of the executive branch, involves the executive branch and the federal government and things that conservatives for decades never wanted the federal government to be involved in. University speech codes and private businesses. One thing I just want to add here is that the president, I think, kind of adores Miller, sees him as very useful, has definitely hugged him and empowered him. It's also true that the president has held Miller at a kind of ironic distance at times. And you've seen this in the Oval Office. He'll say, you know, he'll joke about how we don't really want Stephen to say everything he believes.
- [38:30]
Ad Break / Announcer
I want to thank Stephen Miller, who's right back in the audience right there. I'd love to have him. I love watching him on television. I'd love to have him come up and explain his true feelings, but maybe not his truest feelings. That might be going a little bit too far.
- [38:46]
Michael Shear
Or, you know, we reported in this story an anecdote from the debate prep in 2024 in which they're talking about immigration. And, you know, Miller was speaking about what the answer on immigration should be. And the president, I'll paraphrase, said something like, well, if you had your way, Stephen, everybody in this country would look like you. And Miller answered, that's correct, and then
- [39:09]
Ashley Parker
went back to debating immigration. Right. He sort of said, that's correct, and then went back to his debate. But his broader view of government is a sort of maximalist view, Right? It is to push and push and push until you get any blowback and then to push again even harder in maybe a slightly more creative way or a slightly tweaked way. But, you know, he got a lot of attention for something he said to Jake Tapper, and this was in the aftermath of the toppling of Maduro in Venezuela, as it looked like the United States might be interested in taking Greenland by force. And Stevens, Miller's view, which was he was articulating a foreign policy view, but I think it can be applied to. To government, the bureaucracy, the administrative state was. He basically just said, you can talk
- [39:57]
Stephen Miller
all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world. But are you saying since the beginning
- [40:15]
Ashley Parker
of time, and essentially we are going to do that unconstrained by laws and the Constitution and societal niceties and norms? We are going to do what we want to do until essentially we are all but physically stopped from doing that.
- [40:31]
Ezra Klein
Do they believe this particular strategy is working? I mean, we were talking a little bit earlier. Donald Trump is unpopular. He's quite unpopular at this point. Republicans are getting routed in elections that are in any respect competitive all over the country. They are underperforming in elections that are not competitive. Like, the White House walks with a lot of swagger. But if you were to judge it by most normal ways of thinking about a White House, how much legislation is getting passed, how many consequential rules are being finalized? How's the president's polling? How do the Republicans look in the midterm elections? Like this strategy of relentlessly smashing through the Overton window is not moving the country, it's mobilizing opposition.
- [41:20]
Michael Shear
I think there's enormous concern in the Republican Party right now and inside the White House about the way things are going. And I think we do have the beginnings of a recalibration. I don't think it'll be a recalibration that changes much, and I don't think it's one that most Americans will probably notice. But I mean, to go back to the Preddy shooting, that policy of having roving bands of Customs and Border Patrol agents militarized, go into American cities and break windows of cars and, you know, crash into protesters and shoot people was one that was directly driven by Stephen Miller. And when a guy got shot in a way that anyone who watched that video was horrified by or should be horrified by, Miller was put in the penalty box. I mean, that. That's what happened a couple weeks ago. Right.
- [42:10]
Ezra Klein
So, like, like, what does it mean when you say that? What does it mean that Miller was put in the penalty box?
- [42:14]
Michael Shear
It means Tom Homan, who had sort of been on the outs inside the White House when it came to immigration policy, had been warring with Kristi Noem. Tom Homan was put in charge. Homan is not someone who is going to stop arresting and deporting people, but he is a much more by the book, let's arrest people at jails, let's arrest people with cooperation with local officials, let's de escalate the situation type guy. And Miller, if you look at what he was saying in those days, immediately after Homan goes to Minneapolis, he was looking for cover. I mean, he puts out a statement earlier that week where he says something like, well, it looks like CBP didn't follow their own policies. And we're looking into that. I mean, he was trying to distance himself from this thing that he had pushed for.
- [42:57]
Ashley Parker
But again, to Michael's point of both things can be true. There is in some areas a bit of a recalibration. But the reason that recalibration will not be felt in a super meaningful way by the country is because only Stephen Miller makes Homan look like an immigration squish. Right. By any other metric, we could be here doing a podcast about how Tom Homans is so extreme and far right on immigration.
- [43:24]
Ezra Klein
What is J.D. vance's role?
- [43:26]
Michael Shear
I think Vance is sort of a hybrid, as all vice presidents are. He's one step removed from the structure, like the core structures. He doesn't have any direct brief, but he is a part of the senior strategy meetings. I mean, he is in the room. He was on the signal chat when they're talking about what's going to happen next. So he has a political role where he's out and about carrying the president's message to the country, increasingly carrying a message that hopefully serves him well, I think, is his hope for his own political future. He sees himself as someone who is trying to bring sort of an ideological, intellectual order to what the president has brought to the country. He's trying to be the glue that connects Trump's whims and interests and desires to some theory of governance and theory of what the country should be doing. And then the last thing he does is he's kind of a troll. I mean, he's like a chief troll for the White House. Like Stephen Miller, he's out there a lot, pushing the bounds, owning the libs, getting on fights on Twitter, things like that.
- [44:39]
Ezra Klein
Your point about him being a chief ideologist, is that how Trump sees him, how has their relationship evolved over the course of the administration?
- [44:48]
Ashley Parker
One thing that has helped their relationship, not even in the administration, but just going back to how he ended up becoming Trump's choice to be vice president, is there are a group of mainly young men around J.D. vance, including Donald Trump's oldest son, Don Jr. Who he is sort of legitimately friends with. And these guys, a lot of these young men, they came up under Steve Bannon, and they were there with the president in the first term and were part of the faction that was actually legitimately loyal to Donald Trump. And so he's sort of part of this coterie, this crew, a lot of them. JD Vance was also very close to Charlie Kirk, and so he comes with his sort of Maga Trump bona fides. After you get over the stuff he said about Trump previously, which he's claimed he has evolved and he understands more clearly. And so in that way, Trump trusts him.
- [45:48]
Michael Shear
I haven't heard much tension between Vance and Trump. I don't think there's tension. I think they get along fine. I think Vance is busy. I think he's doing stuff to help the. The president. I think the unspoken tension that is there is that Vance clearly is the next guy up in 2028, and it's not clear Trump's going to be there for him. We just don't know how that's going to play out, you know, and it's not clear that Trump sees Vance as his clear successor at this point. And so I think that's sort of the, you know, an undercurrent tension there.
- [46:18]
Ashley Parker
Yeah, Trump has kind of, so far at least, thrown a jump ball between Vance and Rubio, which should surprise no one who just knows Trump's flair for the dramatic. Of course, he would not anoint an obvious successor.
- [46:31]
Ezra Klein
Rubio, to me, has been one of the more surprising stories in the administration. He is considered for vice president, doesn't get it, gets Secretary of State, which is, of course, a tremendous job. Early on, there's a lot of memes about him looking uncomfortable at different events. Becomes national security adviser as well as Secretary of State. Tell me about Rubio's arc here, his role as powers relationship with Trump.
- [47:00]
Ashley Parker
I'll speak to one turning point early that I think gets missed, because you're right. I mean, many of us are old enough to remember little Marco in 2016, running against Trump and being sort of viscerally appalled by everything Donald Trump stands for and represents.
- [47:19]
Michael Shear
I will never stop until we keep
- [47:22]
Stephen Miller
a con man from taking over the
- [47:24]
Michael Shear
party of Reagan and the conservative movement.
- [47:28]
Ashley Parker
So he's not an obvious choice to be in Trump's administration in any way, shape or form. And he gets in, and it's kind of interesting to see what he's gonna do. And early on, this is during the Doge era, and the best friendship with the Elon Musk era. Elon Musk is annoying, to put it mildly. A lot of these Cabinet secretaries, right, because he's going in with a sledgehammer. He's doing things that are not helpful at their agencies. And keep in mind, he decimates usaid, which is something Rubio has been arguing for more funding for during the Biden administration. And Rubio sort of had enough. And in this private Cabinet meeting, he just goes head to head with Elon Musk and really stands up to him and goes after him and says, you know what? Like what you're saying is bullshit, essentially, and you're hurting things. And there's a few other Cabinet secretaries, Sean Duffy among them, who also take part in this. But someone told Michael and I afterwards that in Trump's eyes and estimation, that was a real turning point. And again, this is someone who, even though there aren't the warring factions this time that there were in the first term, this is someone who likes a cage fight, right? I believe we're actually having a cage fight or something close to on Trump's birthday as part of America 250 on the lawn of the White House. And to see Marco Rubio kind of stand up for himself in such a strong way, I think helped Trump just mentally say, oh, this isn't little Marco anymore. And that's one of the first times when he really rises in his power in the administration.
- [49:03]
Ezra Klein
But I guess one of the surprises to me about Rubio's ascendants is if you think about the way Trump described maga, if you think about the way the sort of ideologists around Trump described maga, one of its primary differentiators from the Republican Party before it is that it is non adventurous in foreign policy. It's borderline isolationist. It's America first. It's not concerned with all these United Cities. And you would have described Rubio as representing a much more traditionalist Republican foreign policy. And it's not crazy that you would have Rubio there as representing a somewhat different view. The consolidation of power under Rubio seems pretty distinctive. That Rubio drove a lot of the Venezuela policy that represents a longtime Rubio obsession seems distinctive. Why have they put so much under someone who didn't seem like a natural fit for this administration?
- [49:58]
Michael Shear
I remember being in Rubio's office in 2013, I think doing an interview with him about why we needed comprehensive immigration reform and a path decision.
- [50:07]
Ezra Klein
I remember those days.
- [50:08]
Michael Shear
Rubio has really taken a journey, and I don't think it's entirely craven on his part. I think he evolved independent of Trump after Trump won in 2016, after he lost that election. But Rubio has come to be much more of a nationalist, I think, in important ways. He has come to the Trump view on a lot of this stuff. I think internally, when it comes to Russia, he is the hawk in these discussions. You know, he's the one sitting next to Witkoff saying, wait, we don't really want to trust Putin on all this stuff. This is not a guy to be trusted. But he is very much driving, as you said, this hemispheric view that the President came into his second term with and this idea that the US Needs to project its power south. And he's long pushed for basically a change in the regime in Cuba. And I think he's pushed to Venezuela as a sort of stepping stone to that. The other thing I think about Rubio is in a similar way to Susie, and they're very close. They know each other from Florida. I think if Susie had gotten to choose, Rubio would have been the vice president, not J.D. vance. Rubio understands how to advise the President into getting him what he thinks he wants while also trying to help him avoid pitfalls. And he's earned the president's trust during that process. But he's also very deferential. He's not the guy saying, no, you can't do this. Slamming the table. That's not his role in this process.
- [51:36]
Ashley Parker
And one thing that I think is misunderstood about Trump, but that has allowed Rubio to have a big influence in foreign policy, is Trump is not sort of the pure, say, Rand Paul isolationist that a lot of his base hoped he would be or understood him to be. Trump's aversion is to sort of these, you know, he ran on a promise to end forever wars, the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan, and, you know, sort of using American boys and girls to export democratic values abroad. But he is open to, you know, now we can sort of say it's the F around and find out doctrine. But before that, it was what I thought of as the one and done doctrine, which he was actually quite open to these short kinetic bursts of force. Right. So a single powerful, ideally in his world kind of looks like a badass video game strike on Iran and even what happened in Venezuela. And we may see the secondary and third level consequences. Right. But was a wild success for the American military. Right. It was a quick, precise extraction of a president who everyone agreed was a quote, unquote, bad guy. And so he is open to those sorts of foreign policy adventurism in a way.
- [53:00]
Ezra Klein
One thing that seems true to me about the Trump White House is that there are, even at the high levels, there are people who give orders and people who take orders. And we were talking about Stephen Miller a minute ago. Stephen Miller is clearly somebody who gives orders. Rubio seems to me, you can tell me this is wrong. He is in the listens to Trump but gives orders roll. He's very, very powerful. Some of the other boldface names in that orbit, Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, are they in the gives orders or are they in the takes orders category?
- [53:33]
Michael Shear
Well, I think they're very different. Hagseth had a very rough first year. And when we interviewed Trump last spring, Trump was talking about Hegseth as like a kid who's trying to do well, but just hasn't figured it out yet. That was sort of the tone of the conversation. I think Trump, Trump likes Hegseth on tv. He likes the aggression from Hegseth, like the sort of anti woke reformism, the machismo that Hegseth's trying to bring to the Pentagon. But I don't think he is much of a senior advisor on this stuff. I think the head of the Joint Chiefs, General Kaine, is probably more in Trump's ear when it comes to those things. But Hegseth has earned his place as sort of a cabinet member in good standing. Tulsi Gabbard is different. I mean, she really lost her place early on. She ends up at an agency, the DNI, that the president's been skeptical of. It's a post 911 agency that others in government have said, we're not really sure it's the right structure. Anyway, she had some missteps last year, and because of her tensions with the CIA, she's been cut out of a lot of these national security discussions. She's off doing investigations of election in technology in Puerto Rico and things like that, or showing up in Fulton County. So I wouldn't put her in that same top tier, although she is sort of trying to win her way back into the president's good grace.
- [54:56]
Ezra Klein
I mean, I want to note the way you do that. Right. Which is, by the way, at least Gabbard is currently doing it, as I understand it, which is by really going hard in backing Trump up in various conspiracies, the Director of National Intelligence. The way you can win back the president is bad information. And supporting it as a strategy seems very revealing to me.
- [55:21]
Ashley Parker
Or look at Pam Bondi's recent hearing, right? I mean, she is trying to win her way back into the president's good graces by just sort of going hard at Democrats and all of his rivals.
- [55:34]
Pam Bondi
Have you apologized to President Trump? Have you apologized to President Trump? All of you who participated in those impeachment hearings against Donald Trump, you all should be apologizing.
- [55:46]
Ashley Parker
And then at one point, you know, during that hearing, as a sort of non sequitur, talking about how great the Dow was.
- [55:51]
Pam Bondi
The Dow. The Dow right now is over. The dow is over $50,000. I don't know why you're laughing. You're a great stock trader. As I hear Raskin, the dow is over 50,000 right now.
- [56:06]
Ashley Parker
Trying to turn a House Oversight Committee into what we just discussed is a Trump Cabinet meeting. Right. I'm just gonna praise the president. That is how they do it.
- [56:17]
Michael Shear
Yeah. The president's fundamental characteristic is that he's transactional in everything he does, in every interaction he has, in all the macro ways he lives his life. He's always trading to get some benefit for himself. And the way that manifests in the White House is that it functions more like a royal court. Would you have the courtiers who come to the parties and try and please the king in various ways? And the president is constantly asking to be pleased. And so that is from the Cabinet level, more so than the White House staff Because the White House staff works for Susie. It's a different structure, but the Cabinet level. A lot of these people are constantly trying to figure out every day how to please the king and what they can do to please him. And part of that is performing owning the liberals in a TV interview or a hearing or announcing some new initiative for him. Part of that is delivering these policy things. Part of that is doing the things that Trump knows the Department of Justice would never have done in the first term because they're way outside the bounds of what's normal or the Director of National Intelligence would do in the first term. And that's the system he's built up. Those long Cabinet meetings that you described are like the performative part of the whole structure. That's the public version of it, but that's happening all the time. Cabinet members are constantly just hanging out at the White House so they can be around the guy, just so they can get FaceTime. Because if he's thinking of you, that's good for you. I mean, Barack Obama ran a government like a corporation. He wanted to be efficient. He wanted to be effective. He wanted all the rules to be followed. He wanted a process and every. Everyone was playing their part, but it was not about pleasing him.
- [58:21]
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- [58:54]
Ezra Klein
One thing I often wonder about Donald Trump, both because of what I see and then what I hear, is whether he is busy. He seems to have a lot more time than most people I know to watch tv, to watch his underlings on tv. They are performing the way they are at hearings and on cable news, in part because they think the president might see them. He is answering random phone calls from people like you, sometimes without even knowing who's going to be on the other end of the line. He gives very, very long interviews and a lot of them. Some people have described me Trump just seeming to have time to talk. You talked about Obama running the White House like a corporation, famously saying, I wear the same two colors of suits, so I'm never thinking about what I have to wear where he treated his time like an incredibly precious resource. And the idea that he'd be just channel flipping was sort of unthinkable. How does Trump spend his time? What does his schedule look like? I mean, we've talked about things laddering up to him, but it's sometimes not obvious to me how actually inside these policy debates and processes he is compared to recent previous presidents.
- [60:06]
Michael Shear
He wakes up late. Obama would start work very early in the Oval Office and work until dinner time, and then he'd go back to the residence. Trump comes down later in the morning. I think on an average day, he's in front of live cameras. If he's at the White House, I don't know, one to three hours in a day. I mean, that's a lot of time to be just talking on the record to somebody or doing something like that. And I think the rest of the time is much more freeform. I don't think that sort of, like, drive towards efficiency and structure is something that interests him. I think what interests him is how much he can get out of every day, what transaction he can have and what he gets out of each transaction. I think it's the reason he's been so interested in foreign policy. It's an enormous amount of power when it comes to foreign policy. So he can get on the phone with all kinds of world leaders. And he loves talking to anybody. I mean, he really has no problem taking phone calls from just about anybody, talking to the new mayor of New York in a friendly way, talking to try and settle wars and corners of the world.
- [61:09]
Ashley Parker
And he's sort of like Don from Queens, a consummate, you know, talk radio caller or host. It's a very good medium for him, frankly. People say he's incredibly compelling on the phone. He plays a lot of golf on the weekends. He goes to his private clubs, Mar a Lago in the winter, Bedminster sometimes when it's nicer, where he holds court there. And he loves a lot of inputs. But you're right, it's much more of, like, a rolling conversation than it is sort of a meaningful policy debate in the traditional sense. That's absolutely true.
- [61:47]
Ezra Klein
I am not the president. I do a podcast. I do some columns. I feel like I have trouble fitting phone calls into my day. It's like I'm not communicative in the way I'd like to be. I hear about this and I watch some of this, and I wonder how he is not more aggressively scheduled, given all the things that, in theory, in Another White House would ultimately come up to him. And I think it sometimes leaves me with only a couple of options. Either of those things are not coming up to him. So he doesn't know about as much as a Barack Obama or Joe Biden or George W. Bush did. Right. He's trusting his people more. If something gets bad enough, they bring it to him. But the level at which something gets brought to him is very different. Or that he is not sitting and presiding over things that maybe he's brought a sign off, but in a way that Bill Clinton or Obama or Biden really wanted to see their advisors arguing things out in front of them and reading the briefing book. He doesn't care something gets brought to him. Another possibility is I'm just not seeing where in his time this happens and they're having more late night calls or the decisions are made in a different way, but it can't all fit. He can't be both loose and in front of cameras for one to three hours a day and doing the level of oversight that I think his predecessors did. So what is pushed out here, I
- [63:12]
Michael Shear
think, I mean, all presidents have done this differently. I've heard, especially since the last election, quite a bit of criticism from people who worked for Biden about how little they engaged with him when they were in the White House. And he had basically built a structure there at the end of his term where he would weigh in on things. But he wasn't at the center of most of the discussions going on. And that may have hurt the Biden administration. You're describing a president who serves the government, who serves the White House. And I think Trump is sort of the reverse of that. He is a president who is served by the White House and the government around him. The other thing is he's always loved being on the phone with lots of people. I mean, going back to his time in New York, he would get on the phone with reporters all the time, get on the phone with friends all the time. I talked to Bobby Kennedy, the HHS secretary, and he said he gets phone calls really late at night from the President. So I think the president is doing work late at night and he'll just call up cabinet members or advisors late at night to talk through things. The other thing the President has, which we haven't talked about, is he has his own little superstructure inside the White House of aides who basically just work with him, who just provide him information, who just are sort of channeling people to him outside the structure that Susie's created. And so I think he's operating in that world as well. And that includes contact with lots of his friends, contact with business executives, contact with donors. I mean, the amount of time he spent in this first year on planning events for America's 250 celebration, a new ballroom, redoing the Kennedy center, fixing golf courses. I mean, you can just go on and on, redoing the Oval Office, putting signs up on the colony. I mean, he's spending all this time doing stuff that no president has ever spent time doing, but he loves it, and that's what he chooses to do in.
- [65:06]
Ashley Parker
Reasonable people can argue that, but they would prefer their president to spend that time differently. Right. I mean, as Michael was saying, Trump can get incredibly in the weeds. We have had people say to us, you know, when he is redesigning the Oval Office, he is the one who is looking at the different shades of Gold Inlet and which one should go here and which type of chandelier and, you know, a meeting at Mar a Lago being stopped because he notices out his window that a tree is bending the wrong way. Now, again, would perhaps most voters prefer he take that level of passion and attention to detail to figuring out what's going on in Minneapolis? Absolutely, potentially. But he does have that capacity for what he cares about. And what he cares about is often not the policy weeds.
- [65:59]
Ezra Klein
Does that lead to a deficit in what he knows about inside his own administration and here? I don't mean is he reading in the way that Obama or Clinton would have on policy? I mean, that the administration has a series of very, very, very major projects going on. I mean, tariffs and Venezuela and ICE and CBP enforcement and things that are transformational and disruptive and in some cases violent and in all cases consequential. And the way that many presidents would handle a series of things like that is they would want to be on top of that process and have constant updates coming to them. I guess the question I am getting at here is this seems like it is a much less structured policy process than we are used to. So correct. Is what is suffering in that, what the president knows? Or is it the president actually doesn't want to know more than he does? And the way things bubble up to him is more associative and precise than it would have been at another time.
- [67:07]
Ashley Parker
I mean, it's a president who governs and rules on sort of raw, visceral gut instinct. And, you know, Michael said he's very transactional a way I view it that I think is helpful in understanding him and explaining his contradictory impulses is he is someone who is always trying to win the minute, the hour, the day. He is trying to win over and woo the person directly in front of him, which can send him at times careening. I can remember him talking to dreamers and then the sheriffs get brought into the Oval Office, right? And he has a totally different message. But when you look, you know. And again, I did not cover Barack Obama's presidency nearly as closely as I've covered the Trump one. But my sense was that Obama ran his White House too, sort of like the constitutional law professor that he once was. If he was doing something on trade, he would want to hear all different inputs in a very structured way from economic experts, et cetera, et cetera. All of the relevant people synthesize all of that very granular information and make a decision. Right. When you look at some of Trump's trade things, which sometimes are announced, like much in his administration in the middle of the night on Truth Social that may not have been vetted by anyone, you know, it's tariffs against French champagne. Cuz I am angry at Macron. Agree or disagree, that that's a good way to lead a country. You don't need a rigorous policy process for that. Especially if the next day you're gonna undo all of those tariffs because something else has changed.
- [68:35]
Michael Shear
There was a line in the Obama White House that they would say a lot, that any question that ultimately makes it to the President has no easy answer, that all the easy answers were already made below him. I don't think there are many questions that make it to Trump that Trump doesn't think are easy to answer. I don't think he's spending a lot of time, like, to Ashley's point about gut instinct, I think he gets a presentation like, okay, we're going to do that. He doesn't need to read the source material. He doesn't need to go back through the history of things. Bill Pulte, who runs the Federal Housing Finance Organization, I don't know the proper name for it, will come into the Oval Office with like poster boards. I've been in the Oval Office in the first term and seen briefing documents for Trump about a policy thing that are basically like hundred word on a page, bullet point things that they're not detailed. It's like, here's the five sentences you need to know about this thing before you make a decision. Not here's the 500 pages you need
- [69:32]
Ashley Parker
to know, like a science project diorama, right? It's like, here's how dinosaurs went extinct, the asteroid, you know, like it's that.
- [69:39]
Michael Shear
I mean, it's just not the same kind of. Whereas Obama, if you're comparing him to him, is really in the weeds of, you know, economic theory. And, and I mean, you did healthcare reform. I mean, there's nothing like Obama understood that bill. I don't think Trump has the same level of understanding of the big, beautiful bill. I mean, he knows there's no tax on tips, but he doesn't know exactly what the salt compromise was coming out of that.
- [70:02]
Ashley Parker
He knows it's big and beautiful.
- [70:03]
Ezra Klein
Yeah, I think that's the place to end. As our final question, what are three books you'd recommend to the audience? And Ashley, why don't we begin with you?
- [70:11]
Ashley Parker
So I'm going to say the Secret History by Donna Tartt, which is just fantastic. Classic. This next one is a little bit of a cop out, but I'm gonna recommend an author and say any book by her, Ann Pachette. I will just read anything she writes. She just does wonderful, beautiful modern fiction. And since we're talking about Trump, my husband, Mike Bender, I mainly only read modern nonfiction, like what you see at the front table of an independent bookstore. But my husband, Mike Bender, who's also a New York Times reporter, he wrote a Trump campaign book called Frankly, we did this Election the Inside Story of How Trump Lost. But I would recommend it because it's great. I'm biased, but because one of the things he does is he talks about the front row Joes and he has these vignettes on Trump supporters. And if you wanna understand really who his base is and why they stick with him, this is the book to do it. So those are my three, Michael.
- [71:11]
Michael Shear
If I had a fourth, I'd put Bender's book there.
- [71:13]
Ashley Parker
Thank you.
- [71:15]
Michael Shear
An image of My Name Enters America, which is a book of essays, so personal essays by Lucy Ives. I read it last year and I had so much fun. It was the most fun I've had reading a book in a long time. There are essays about pregnancy, about unicorns and being a young girl, about love, about sort of growing up.
- [71:34]
Ashley Parker
You're such a feminist.
- [71:36]
Michael Shear
Yeah. Palimpsest by Gore Vidal came out a while ago. I just read it recently. I can't believe I've been in D.C. so long and not read it. It's hilar, totally R rated and often inappropriate and often very vicious and about as good a memoir of D.C. as I've read. And then the last book is a book I read a long time ago. But I always recommend it to people because I think it's like the best example of literary nonfiction I've ever read. It's a book called Blood by Douglas Starr. It's actually a history of blood, which is not something I would ever have thought I wanted to read. But it starts with the blood transfusion in 17th century France between a madman and a calf. And then it takes you through, you know, how blood revolutionized how we fight wars and the AIDS crisis. And it takes something that's like a part of all of our lives and tells it to you in a narrative that is pretty remarkable.
- [72:30]
Ezra Klein
Ashley Parker, Michael Shear, thank you very much.
- [72:33]
Ashley Parker
Thank you for thinking of us.
- [72:34]
Michael Shear
Thank
- [72:37]
Ad Break / Announcer
you.
- [72:45]
Ezra Klein
This episode of the Israel Clancho is Produced by Jack McCordick. Fact Checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Geld with additional mixing by Amin Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Marie Cassillon, Marina King, Roland Hoover.
- [73:04]
Ad Break / Announcer
Who?
- [73:04]
Ezra Klein
Kristin Lin, Emma Kelbeck and Jan Kobel. Original music by Aman Sahota and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Christina Semiluski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Penning audio is Annie Rose Strasser.