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- [00:00]
Mike Pesca
The gist is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations.
- [00:22]
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Ben Terris
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- [00:48]
Mike Pesca
It's Thursday, February 13, 2026. From Peach Fish Productions, it's the Gist. I'm Mike Pesca. It was a great order on two levels from Judge Richard Leon of the District Court of the District of Columbia, a couple of districts there and he laid that down. The strict dissing did the district court judge all right, that stretch district strict dis of Pete Hegseth because what Pete Hegseth was trying to do was to strip Senator Mark Kelly, also Captain Mark Kelly, of rank and pay and this would not fly, said Justice Leon. Senator Kelly does have First Amendment rights and I even tweeted where I went through the judge's ruling. I look for everything. That ended in an exclamation. There was a lot Defendants respond that Senator Kelly is seeking to exempt himself from the rules of military justice that Congress has expressly made applicable to retired service members. Horse feathers. In other words, the horse feathers argument was a description of what Hegseth was saying. If legislators do not feel free to express their views and the views of their constituents without fear of reprisal from the executive, our representative system of government can not function. Simply put, defendants remember it was Kelly brought the action, so Hegseth was defending it. Defendants response is anemic explanation. This is a troubling development in a free country. And exclamation. And then later please. He does a please, this is not the law. Yeah, it's terrible that Hegseth and the administration tried it's terrible that they tried to go after the senators and congressmen and congresswomen who put together that don't give up the ship video. But it's good that they lost. And in this analysis, the good that they lost part. There are people who more or less agree with me who are quite aggrieved that they the administration is trying this overreach, who do not take good that they lost as enough. And maybe it's not enough, but it is very good that they lost. The courts seem very strong in these matters. Even in Minnesota, where right now the Trump administration is said to be not following up to 70 something court orders. According to the Scalia clerk who is now in charge of the the Minneapolis courts that rule on such things, they have pulled back. They are more or less in compliance. The courts are taken seriously, maybe not by the rhetoric of those outside the courts, but when inside the courts they are quite taken seriously. They are, to use a phrase, a bulwark. Though I listen to shows that I like with smart guys like Jonathan V. Last of the bulwark. And he made the point that if Donald Trump had just mused about prosecuting the senators and congressmen, that would be bad enough. And then he takes it to. But they brought a case and. But they tried to get a criminal conviction. Yes, and what? It's bad. It's all very bad. The normal people who follow the rules know this to be bad. And then what? And then it becomes something like, well, it should be scandalous, it should be disqualifying. Sure, Donald Trump should have no appeal based on this and, and other things he's done, like deny the election. But what is the job of the analyst in a world where Donald Trump does have appeal, argue against that reality, try to convince the same people for whom Donald Trump has no appeal that it shouldn't be this way, but it is. So I think the usefulness of analysis is not to say, calm down, there's no big deal we got out of it, is to say it is a big deal, but look what is actually happening at the end. The important institutions are holding. They won't always hold. And, and not to be blase about it, but to accurately assess this. I think the analyst does bring and can bring that to the table. And that is my advice for how to take these things seriously and literally, but not perhaps catastrophically. On the show today, speaking of these exact same themes, Ben Terrace is here. He recently visited Donald Trump. He wrote an article about the president's mental health, little bit about his physical health too. And then the article for New York magazine became an analysis of just how the Trump administration does its thing. I don't think Ben concluded that this man is going to be expunged via the 25th Amendment, and not just because the 25th Amendment depends on other cabinet members to get together and say this guy is not up to the job. The dynamic is not there for that to happen. I think Ben Terror said is interesting. This is bizarre. There are some clear moments of lucidity or the lucidity are blended into an overhyping of Trump as a superman. But also, I think we could take a step back and assess the entire situation and find it somewhere between tragedy, farce and an imperiled republic. Ben Terrace, New York Magazine up next, The gist is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations. Ben Terrace wrote a big piece about a big guy in New York magazine. Actually, maybe not so big a guy. Quote, trump looks trimmer than he does on television. Why wasn't the White House floating that quote? Because the issue was Trump's health and not just his physical health, but that, but also his mental health. And then the piece, I think, took on dimensions that maybe questioned our questioning of Trump. It was very good. Ben's a great reporter. He joins me again on the gist. Hello, Ben.
- [08:24]
Ben Terris
Hey, thanks so much for having me on.
- [08:25]
Mike Pesca
So I was thinking about lead times and the timing of this piece, and it must have been, well, you tell me, was it commissioned after the summer months when there was the Trump is dead meme going around and piecing together shots of his bruised hand or his enlarged ankles? Is that when your editor said we got to do this, or was it in the works beforehand?
- [08:49]
Ben Terris
No, no, it was sort of after that, actually. So, I mean, the way it worked was I had some stories that came out near the end of the year and was talking with my editor about what we wanted to do for the beginning of this year. And, you know, Trump had been in office or will have been in office for a year at that point. And sort of we wanted to take a look at him. And the big question that we had going into 2026 was just, is Trump okay? Right. And so we had seen all that stuff over the summer, and, you know, by winter there was even more signs of, you know, possible issues with his health and his mental health. And we really wanted to get a sense of, you know, one year in, is Trump okay?
- [09:29]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. So here was some of the chatter or the conversation beforehand. A guy named Adam Cochran, professor of policy, consultant, independent journalist, did a 31 tweet thread and it got a lot of traction, alleging that over the summer, Trump had an ischemic stroke, I think that's how you pronounce it. Public notice, which is which has a big substack following Aaron Rupar and some other people wrote, it's shocking that since July, no major news outlets have done serious investigations about Trump's health and what the White House is trying to cover up about it. So clear inference there. Garrett Graf, who is a historian and Pulitzer finalist, smart guy, been on the show, but very. I want to find a different word than alarmist. Very concerned about all of this, wrote, it has been very clear, at least so far, that Trump's health is not a news event. But what's even more puzzling is the extent to which national media doesn't even treat it as a news story. And then he talked about how, you know, the. They're so flagellating over the Biden mental decline that wasn't covered aggressively. They now seem, quote, intent on repeating the exact set of mistakes and blind spots in their reporting on Trump. Now, I don't know if you read or knew about those specifics, but generally, this was a sentiment within America and the media. So how much did that inform what you were thinking about going in?
- [10:53]
Ben Terris
You know, going in, I really had the idea that, that everybody in this country seemed to believe they knew what was going on with Donald Trump's health. Like, half of the Internet thought he was gonna die tomorrow. A part of the Internet thought he had died at one point. It trended at one point when he was not seen for a few days. Trump is dead. So there's this whole portion of the country that is sure that he is super ill and has dementia and is getting secret IV medicine injected into his hands. And that's why you see the bruising. And, you know, they all are sure that he's about to die. And then there's part of the Internet and part of the world and Trump's inner circle and Trump supporters that think he's basically going to live forever, or at least they talk that way about him.
- [11:33]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. So it's, it's easy to riff on that and play off that, to tell yourself, well, he's living in either a house of lies or an echo chamber. Or if the question is, how do we assess his health and we. We're not running the MRI machines or have training and access to Trump, you could use that as a proxy. They're so crazy over the top in calling this guy Superman, they must be hiding something. And of course, as your piece, I think implies, the problem with that is he's over the top about everything. It's really a poor proxy. Do you think it's an entirely poor proxy about his health?
- [12:10]
Ben Terris
I don't think it's entirely poor. I mean, you know, the thing about Trump, like you said, is he speaks almost entirely in hyperbole, and it kind of makes you have to wonder whether he's being honest about anything, because you can see with your own eyes that he's not the healthiest man alive. Right. We've seen the swollen ankles, we've seen the bruised hands. We've seen him nodding off or appearing to nod off in meetings. That doesn't mean he's super unhealthy, but it means he's almost 80 years old. Right? I mean, he is almost 80 years old. And with that territory comes aging. And if you're going to talk about yourself and people are going to talk about you, like none of that exists, you know, it's like, who. Who are you going to believe? Like, the people who are talking about him are your own eyes. And so my job was to try to clarify the picture as best I could, both about his health, but also sort of about how his administration is running. So it wasn't just a story about the health of the president, but also a story about the health of the presidency.
- [13:03]
Mike Pesca
Right, right. And telling the president what he wants and telling the people what they want the people to know. Totally untethered to fact at some times. So of the things that you mentioned, the ankles, the hands nodding off, what are their explanations for each of those? And do they fly?
- [13:23]
Ben Terris
Yeah, it's a good question whether they fly or not. So for this story, I had this very strange, kind of surreal experience of being beckoned to the Oval Office and meeting with President Trump and his doctors from Walter Reed. And the first thing I noticed with these doctors was they were holding pieces of paper that said talking points at the top.
- [13:41]
Mike Pesca
They literally said talking points.
- [13:43]
Ben Terris
They literally said talking points at the top of the paper. And does that mean that it's filled with fake, false talking points? Not necessarily, but it means that they're sort of on script. Right.
- [13:53]
Mike Pesca
Sort of. Literally.
- [13:55]
Ben Terris
Literally. And so I've described this experience as sort of like sitting through a series of plays put on just for me, where all these people have these roles to play. And it's basically like, you know, talk up, Dear leader.
- [14:05]
Mike Pesca
And so a series of plays where they tell the theater reviewer, if it's not a good review, we're going to sue you.
- [14:10]
Ben Terris
Exactly. That's exactly. He said the first thing that Trump said to me was, you know, he was going to sue the ass off of New York Magazine if I wrote a bad story. And so does that make it Convincing when they have, you know, answers for my questions. Not entirely convincing because I know that they're reading from a script. So with that said, they did have explanations for all of those things. The hand, you know, I noticed that right away when I went in. I saw the bruise on the back. I describe it as sort of, you know, looking like an ink blot test on the back of his hand. Everyone's got their own opinion about what it means. You know, I'd seen him. I went to that Mamdani meeting that he had in the Oval Office, and I just spent the whole time looking at Trump's hand, which he had covered up with his other hand the whole time, occasionally sneaking a peek at it as if he was looking at the time. So he's very conscious of it. He covers it with makeup. His people say that he covers it with makeup because he's vain, not because he's hiding something. He's just a vain guy. Which, you know, there's truth to that, right?
- [15:09]
Mike Pesca
Well, vain might be the answer, actually.
- [15:11]
Ben Terris
Yeah. The vanity is certainly part of it.
- [15:13]
Mike Pesca
No, Vei.
- [15:14]
Ben Terris
Yeah, sure, that too. What he says and what his doctors nodded vigorously along to as he was saying it is that he takes way too much aspirin. Just like, way too much aspirin. You're supposed to take maybe a baby aspirin a day to help with heart attacks and strokes and stuff as you age. He takes kind of the full adult dosage of aspirin a day, which I was told he once met with the head of a pharmaceutical company. He told them how much aspirin he was taking, and they were like, no, no, no, no, no. We like that you use our product, but please don't use that much of it. Do your doctors know? And Trebble's like, yeah, the doctors know. They tell me to stop, but, you know, works for me.
- [15:49]
Mike Pesca
It's great. I wonder if he met with the head of Diet Coke. It's like, not that much skin tone.
- [15:54]
Ben Terris
Please don't take that much of our.
- [15:55]
Mike Pesca
Product, that much skin toner.
- [15:57]
Ben Terris
Like, don't. He says he takes it because he wants, quote, thin blood. He wants really thin blood. Having thin blood gives him thin skin. I guess he bruises easily. And when he shakes hands with big burly men with sausage like fingers and a grip like a meat grinder.
- [16:18]
Mike Pesca
Big tough guys who are often crying at sir.
- [16:22]
Ben Terris
He did tell me the sir stories as I sat there. Telling me about men who were literally crying, who had never cried before, just so happy to see him. They couldn't Help but grip his hand so hard that it would bruise. So he gets bruises from handshakes. Sometimes there's bandages on the back of his hands. He claims that's from women's fingernails and their rings, which is ridiculous, but also so ridiculous that it could be true. Right. Like, why would that be your. Like, oh, I can't even handle shaking the hand of a woman because her nails might slice the back of my hand. So he said, that's why the doctor said, absolutely, sir. Like, that is exactly why it's happening. Swollen ankles, that's an issue. He's got a circulatory issue. Doctors have put that out. Basically, they told him he should walk around more, and that could help with that. He then asked, is there anything else I could do instead? He doesn't really believe in exercise, even the lowest form of exercise, walking around. He'd rather not. So, again, I don't know. But again, not a great excuse either. You'd like your president to be able to walk around some. Yeah. And the nodding off, he basically said that's because he's super bored in these meetings, these meetings that he calls himself, they go on three hours. He has everybody praise him. Thank you for stopping the hurricanes, Mr. President. You're the greatest president that ever existed. Thank you for making this country great again. And he has to close his eyes because it's, quote, boring as hell.
- [17:40]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. He calls him himself and he invites the media in to tape them because, you know, normally cabinet meetings didn't have that aspect to them, but with the aspirin in that one, it got a lot of traction. That one. Adam Cochrane, multithread, he asserted that any amount of aspirin would only be prescribed or recommended, not preventatively, but if you've had a stroke or some sort of preexisting or predating condition. And I looked into that a little bit, and I don't know if that's actually true. What did. Not just these doctors, but what do doctors say about not even his unbelievably high dosage, but just taking aspirin if you haven't had something like a stroke or a stroke, mini stroke or a stroke like issue.
- [18:28]
Ben Terris
You know, the thing about Trump is it seems like he takes some of his own health regimen into his own control. Right. It's not necessarily from a doctor. He says that he takes the aspirin because he wants to take it, because it's worked for him. You know, I put in the piece that, you know, Trump says to me at one point, like, look, the doctors are telling me to stop. Like, they don't want me to take this much aspirin. They're telling me to stop, but it works for me, and so I'm not gonna change. And I put in the piece that that's sort of Trump's M.O. in general, right? Like, why would he ever change? The words he said to me is, look, we're in the Oval Office. Like, why would I change? Why would I change anything? And so when he gets advice from doctors, when he gets advice from political consultants, he's free to ignore it because everything has worked out for him. That's how he sees it. And it's kind of hard to argue, right? If a political consultant says, stop saying these things, it doesn't poll well. He can be like, well, I'm President of the United States and I never listened to you guys before. He can tell doctors, look, I've been taking this aspirin for 30, 40 years. I've never had any heart problems. You know, if the worst thing that happens to me is some hand bruising, like, why would I. Why would I change?
- [19:29]
Mike Pesca
How did you try to assess the mental acuity? Because if the guy's bloated or has bruising, that's one thing, but we want him to be operating on a sufficient enough mental level. And I would say, compared to the baseline of what Donald Trump was the first term, or has been for many years. So what was your means of assessing that? Or asking his doctors, asking other doctors, observing for yourself, how'd you try to assess that?
- [19:59]
Ben Terris
Well, it came up pretty naturally in my interview with him. I didn't even actually have to bring it up. I was prepared to. I had talked to Donald Trump's niece, Mary Trump, who is a vocal critic of his, and I talked to her for this piece, and she talked to me a lot about how her grandfather, Trump's father, had dementia late in life. And she explained to me the experience of kind of watching him develop this. It happened slowly, and then all at once, he would forget where he was or not recognize her or other people. He would have this deer in the headlights look in his eyes occasionally. And she said to me that she sees that in Donald Trump when he's in the public sphere. Often she'll look at him and she sees, oh, my God, it's like my grandfather all over again. You know, she's a critic, so she has her own reasons for saying that, but she's also a family member, so it does carry more weight than your average viewer of Donald Trump's speeches. And so I was prepared to ask the President about that, but he kind of brought it up on his own. He told me that he doesn't need to exercise, basically, he doesn't need to eat well because his genetics are amazing. And he talked about his father, and he said, my father had a heart that couldn't be stopped. He had no health problems. Well, he had one health problem is how he said to me. He had one thing, you know, late in life he had. And he pointed to his forehead, what do you call it? And he forgot the word for Alzheimer's. Caroline Levitt, the press secretary, was sitting there and she chimed in and she said, alzheimer's. And the President said, yeah, yeah, he had an Alzheimer's thing. Well, I don't have it. And so that was kind of an opening to talk to him about whether he ever, whether he ever worried about it.
- [21:34]
Mike Pesca
As a trained professional writer, did you say to yourself, okay, there's some irony that is so ironic, I wonder if I could just put it in the piece and back away and let everyone come to their own conclusions.
- [21:46]
Ben Terris
Yeah, it was clear to me in the moment that this was gonna make it into the story. It was a striking moment, full quote. And so that sort of was the way that it came up. We talked about whether he worried about it. He said, no, I never worry about it, because the way I see it, whatever happens is whatever. And he talked a lot about acing these cognitive tests that we hear so much about taking so many of them that people start to wonder, why does he keep taking these cognitive tests? Is that itself a sign? Could it just be a sign that he likes acing tests and then bragging about it like, you know, Donald Trump is a simple man in some ways. So it could just be that he wants to be able to brag about this thing. It could be that doctors are concerned about his memory and so they want to keep testing him.
- [22:24]
Mike Pesca
How much access did you get to him?
- [22:27]
Ben Terris
So I had a 40 minute interview with him in the Oval Office, and that was my, you know, one on one time with him. But I did also, in addition to that, get lots of time to kind of his circle. Right. I talked to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, I talked to Stephen Miller, I talked to various top aides that work in the White House, both on background and on the record. People were very interested in talking to me for this piece because it's a very sensitive and important topic for the President. And so I think there's no downside for them in talking to the press and then, you know, being over the top in your praise for the President and his health, because loyalty is the most prized thing. And so, you know, you get a lot of points for, for bragging about how wonderful the President's health is to.
- [23:13]
Mike Pesca
But also, maybe I'm trying to read too much into it. There are some issues where if there was real vulnerability, I'm not sure that people in the inner circle on and especially off the record, would be so over the top and effusive. Maybe some. But I'm not sure that Marco Rubio, if you asked him about the kleptocracy going on within the White House, would want to go on the record as pointedly as he did about his health. If you asked, well, maybe anyone in the White House. Hey, maybe not Stephen Miller. Hey, what about the Epstein files? I'm not sure you'd get so many people saying absolutely not. You'd get a few. Right. Especially on the record. So I wonder how much, if you thought about it and how much that could factor into our takeaways.
- [23:54]
Ben Terris
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, for sure, Donald Trump believes that the real story about his health is a good story for him because he doesn't necessarily notice all the things about him that are in some ways slipping. But he.
- [24:09]
Mike Pesca
That's how humans work. Right. That's how my parents work. That's how outside, you know, you don't notice about this about yourself, but outsiders sometimes do. And when there are hundred million critics of you, they're certainly gonna notice. Yep.
- [24:24]
Ben Terris
And, you know, he really feels like the actual comparison between him and President Biden at the end of Biden's presidency is a good one for himself. So that, you know, he wants to talk because he thinks, look, there's no way, if anyone knows the truth about my health, they could possibly write a bad story. And I think a lot of people around him do believe that he is in better health and better shape than his critics would like him to be. And so I do think there's truth to the way that they talk about him being healthy. I think he is healthy, kind of despite bad health habits, healthy for an almost 80 year old. And so I think that, yes, you can read the story and you can take away that maybe he's not as sick as his detractors would like. And also that the people who talk about his health are. Then there's like a grain of truth and then they're gonna exaggerate because that's just how Trump and his team operate.
- [25:21]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. And it's such a bad way to come at the truth to say that. You have the Trump administration obviously, at best exaggerating, think at certain points just outright lying. If not on this issue, definitely on others. And then you have critics who are so over the top and have disqualified themselves on occasion that the default is to say it's somewhere in the middle. But how does that help? Is it in the middle enough so that if there were a cabinet willing to do this, we should invoke the 25th Amendment? Or is it in the middle like most reasonable Republicans would say, yeah, he's 80, you know, he's fine, he's Donald Trump. And we'll be back in a minute with more of Ben Terrace of New York magazine to finally, once and for all decide, is the president losing his mind or is it already lost? We're back with Ben Terrace of New York magazine. He spent some time with President Donald J. Trump. And Ben, one aspect of this debate or this issue is that I do think that so many of the overblown claims could just lead one to huddle in the middle and say, well, we can't know what's going on, or the truth has to be somewhere in between. But we're not really coming to that from, from any good reason other than looking at these exaggerated arguments that you've documented from the Trump administration. Always exaggerating, always lying about how superhuman Trump is. But then on the other side, there are his critics that have been out there for years. For instance, there's a pretty prominent guy, a Johns Hopkins affiliated doctor, John Gartner. He was on the Daily Beast saying, there's no doubt, and Gartner is an expert in the mind. There is, quote, no doubt that Trump is experiencing symptoms of dementia. But the problem is he's been saying this since 2017. In 2017, he got 25,000 mental help, health professionals, and who knows what that means, attesting that Donald Trump was mentally ill and must be removed. You know, and you say to yourself, this is all driven by a cool assessment of expertise, or is this driven by people not liking Donald Trump? And the reason I bring this up from 2017 is that the experts in dementia, I guess what Gartner is one will say, and I've heard him admit this, that he had to have been wrong back then because if he had the onset of dementia in 2017, it would be full blown by now and there'd be no mistaking it. So I wonder what we do with information when you're trying to make a clear Eyed assessment.
- [28:07]
Ben Terris
It's really hard to make a clear eyed assessment about Donald Trump, right, Because he provides evidence of everything. He's out so often. He's talked so much, he does so much in front of cameras that if you want to see examples of him looking healthy and full of energy, you can find them. He'll do a rally.
- [28:24]
Mike Pesca
He says everything in the opposite, right? Not just with health. He says essentially, hey, march to the Capitol and go peacefully. He gives himself the out. He talks in circles. I don't know what it is, but he's. Like I said, he says everything in the opposite. So there's always evidence for anything you want to.
- [28:38]
Ben Terris
Everyone can choose their own adventure with him. If you have a prior belief about Donald Trump, he will confirm it at some point. And so you think that he's got no energy at all. Then you look at him kind of nodding off in meetings and there's your proof. You think he's got the most energy in the world. He does a rally at midnight in North Carolina or wherever else and dances after a full day of traveling. You know, he provides so much information that it's almost impossible to, you know, find signal, find noise, you know, to sift through it. And so, you know, I have a hard time believing anybody who declares with absolute certainty that they know what's going on with Donald Trump, because it is possible that he has signs of dementia right now. And in two years it'll look like, oh, my God, it was so obvious. We had so many signs. Why didn't everybody say it? But, you know, he could live for another 20 years and never show any more signs than he has now. I mean, not to sound like Jeff Foxworthy, but like, some signs of mental illness could just be signs of Trump being Trump. Right.
- [29:40]
Mike Pesca
What do you think of the concept and phrase sane washing when it comes to Donald Trump?
- [29:46]
Ben Terris
I'm not sure I've heard it. This is like writing about him and cleaning up his quotes and stuff so it doesn't look like he's as crazy as he might sound to people who are watching in real time.
- [29:55]
Mike Pesca
Or it could just be denying that he has dementia. Is this idea of sanewashing?
- [30:02]
Ben Terris
Yeah. I mean, again, it's so hard to cover this guy in his entirety that if you were to just, you know, write a story that fully includes everything he's saying, it would be 10 million pages long and it would make no sense to anybody. And so everyone has to.
- [30:17]
Mike Pesca
If you called it the weave, maybe people would listen to it and pull it.
- [30:20]
Ben Terris
They might. And So I think people are just trying to do their best to try to capture at least a part of the Donald Trump that they see and that they're writing about. I don't think anyone's intentionally, quote, unquote, sanewashing him, at least in honest press. But, yeah, I can understand that there'd be frustration because you have to cover so many things that sometimes you write an article about something he said, and two seconds later in that same speech, he said something completely outrageous. And it's like, well, why didn't you include that? Well, it's like, well, this is a story about the other things.
- [30:52]
Mike Pesca
One thing that stood out was it's always been said, and it's true that the presidency ages a man. And there are these before and after pictures of Barack Obama and kind of everyone who served in the presidency of who we have post daguerreotype photographs of. But it does seem like with Trump, the presidency enlivens him. It's giving him life. Would you. He says that his son Eric said that. Does that seem an accurate statement to you?
- [31:22]
Ben Terris
Yeah, to a degree. Right. The phrase that he told me is that his dad would always tell him that to retire is to expire. You know, he had examples of all these businessmen who lived these great lives, and as soon as they stopped working, they, you know, they started to age or they died. He's, you know, Donald Trump has, according to my reporting, kind of said so much to his staff about his own father that as soon as his dad stopped working, that's when he started to actually seem like the old man that he actually was. And so Trump and the presidency. Yeah, I think he believes that there's a life force he gets from working and what could be more work, in theory, than being president. So I do think it gives him some level of energy, but it also has to age him. Right. When you look at the pictures of Barack Obama, it's like he had this youthful energy, and then he looked really gray. Donald Trump, it could be hard for a while to see the gray because he puts on so much makeup on his face and he dyed his hair for so long, but he has actually stopped dying his hair. This was a minor scoop in the story, was that he stopped dyeing his hair. And it does look gray when you're in person. Like, it does look like an old man's hair. It actually kind of looks better, I think, than, you know, the dye job because it makes him look more like an actual person and less like somebody, you know, in disguise. And so you Know, time and job are aging him, but I also wonder if he is better at compartmentalizing or not getting stress from this job. Like, he has kind of just. I don't want to call him a sociopath necessarily, but he has this ability to let things wash over him in this job that maybe other presidents didn't like. You know, other presidents might be kept up at night by decisions. He doesn't strike me as the guy who second guesses himself too much.
- [33:01]
Mike Pesca
I also wonder if we put a comparison of people who are in the public eye, but maybe not actors getting Botox starting at 48 and ending at 55, which is the Obama ages in the White House. What do we see a majority of them who had hair getting gray? I think so, yeah. Yeah, there's a lot. There's. There's a lot like this where it's like, yeah, he's operating on the normal human scale, by the way of the. If you retire, you expire. Any concern that he will not take the mandatory retirement as required by the Constitution and two terms for the presidency?
- [33:34]
Ben Terris
Yeah, I mean, there's some concern, right?
- [33:36]
Mike Pesca
Like, did you uncover that? Did you probe that?
- [33:38]
Ben Terris
I did probe that with some people. I talked to Steve Bannon about this, and Bannon told me he's the one.
- [33:43]
Mike Pesca
Who wants to keep it going.
- [33:44]
Ben Terris
He wants to keep it going. And he said that Trump's already running for his third term. He says he gets his quote, BDE from being president and he doesn't wanna give that up. And so anyone who doesn't believe this is Bannon talking, basically, anyone who doesn't believe that Trump's running for a third term is ignoring what's already happening. And so he says it's a definite thing. He's gonna run again. Eric Trump, Donald Trump's son, he kind of, like, brushed aside that when I asked him, and he said, more like, no, no, no, I think he's just gonna be a kingmaker in the party. He's not away. He's not going to retire. He's not going to sit on a beach somewhere. But he didn't seem to think he was gearing up for a third term. The President has talked about this himself, and most of his comments make it seem sort of like he's not going to do it. But like anything else, he's given himself space to change his mind, to point to statements saying, actually, I did say I was thinking about it, like you said before. He provides answers that can be read anyway any number of times.
- [34:41]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, bd, of course. Braggadocious Donald. Energy independence. Yeah. By the way, how's Bannon doing? How's he looking? He's lost a step. I listen to his show. It's a little rambly.
- [34:50]
Ben Terris
Yeah. I mean, you know, maybe he's worried about the Epstein connection. Uh huh.
- [34:56]
Mike Pesca
All those shirts don't save a man. So in the end, the article wound up being less about Trump's physical health and more about or less about the madness of President Donald and more about the madness of the White House. And that was great. It was a great glimpse. I love the story. It was, you know, glimpse number 100. That, that doesn't change our view. But if there was one, I'll give you even two takeaways about the inner dynamics of how that White House works. Or, you know, if you include Eric Trump, how that ecosystem around Trump, what did you find that maybe you didn't know or realize going in?
- [35:34]
Ben Terris
I mean, so the thing I did know kind of going in that was really confirmed here is about, you know, the, how important loyalty is. How in the first term, Trump had plenty of people in his inner circle that wouldn't necessarily be yes men all the time. And now he's surrounded himself by absolute lackeys and he's created a world in which even somebody like Marco Rubio is like the ultimate yes man.
- [35:55]
Mike Pesca
Or those doctors who aren't even political appointees, they're medical doctors from the best hospitals, Walter Reed, Barbarella and Jones. And they absolutely acted like lackeys. And the end quote is them being forced to say, you're healthier than Obama. Sorry, but go ahead.
- [36:12]
Ben Terris
Yeah, so that wasn't a total surprise, but what was kind of new and interesting to me is Donald Trump has been a guy who has been in control for a long time, and now we're in a moment where he's sort of losing control. I mean, you see that in the polling. You see that in how the midterms seem to be going. You see that with how people feel about the job he's doing on even top issues like immigration and the economy. He's really grasping for control here. And so in the real world, you see a guy who's kind of flailing around a little bit, and then to see that that hasn't really penetrated into his inner circle was new and interesting to me. You know, like you said, if people were worried about how they might sound, they might not talk to me. But there they're so desperate to be part of the team that, I don't know, it really felt like Kind of visiting a parallel universe in a way that I wasn't quite expecting.
- [37:07]
Mike Pesca
The name of the piece is the Superhuman President A Good Faith Attempt to Ascertain the Truth About Donald Trump's Health. I thought it was, but good faith is one of those phrases like credibility that's entirely subjective. And of course you're going to get blowback for anything. But did the good faithedness of it have a greater effect on this piece than everything you do, which should be good faith efforts? So think about that question, and then I'll tag on another question which may be related is, did the expectations or demands of the New York Magazine audience in any way not shape the piece, but shape the entirety of the perception and conception of the piece?
- [37:53]
Ben Terris
Yeah. So to take the good faith part first. Yeah. Everything I do, I do in good faith. And so that headline was more about everybody else's kind of attempts to ascertain the truth about the president. You know, I feel like.
- [38:07]
Mike Pesca
But I also think it was a little bit softening expectations for the reader.
- [38:12]
Ben Terris
Yeah, I guess there could be truth to that. I mean, yes, because everybody who has decided exactly how healthy Donald Trump is, you know, they're not gonna like anybody else's attempt. But I wanted to say, look, people on the Internet, people who pay attention to politics, people who have strong opinions about Donald Trump, have already decided how they feel about his health. But here I am as a person, I'm a person going in, removing any kind of prior beliefs about it as best I can, and just giving you what I've actually found. And so, yeah, I think that could probably soften expectations for some people, but it was more important to me just to let them know that, like, look, look, this is an actual article. This is an actual journey. This is actual reporting, not just a belief about how he's doing.
- [38:56]
Mike Pesca
And to take that second part, if you need to remind you, it's about the expectations around it and the conception thereof.
- [39:03]
Ben Terris
Sure. I mean, the good thing for me about the audience of New York Magazine is I'm still new enough to New York Magazine that I don't really know exactly what the audience expectations are. I've been at this magazine now for less than a year. I've been a political journalist now for, like, 15, somehow. And I tend not to think too much about the audience. Look, I want people to like the pieces I write. I want to do good work, and I want. You know, I want. I don't know, I want to do a good job. And I always like it when people say Good job. But I don't actually know what's going to make somebody angry or what's going to make somebody happy. And so I just do the best I can. You know, Is there a part of me that believed that a lot of the audience was hoping that I'd uncover a smoking gun about Donald Trump's health? Sure, of course. I mean, look, I wrote a story. My first piece I did for New York Magazine was about Senator John Fetterman. And in that piece, I was able to uncover kind of unknown information about the state of his kind of mental health. And that was an explosive piece because there was sort of a smoking gun. I kind of went into the story knowing that was not gonna happen. Right. Getting people to leak medical information about the President of the United States is just likely not gonna happen. And so it was much more a journey about what we can discover by getting as close as we can.
- [40:20]
Mike Pesca
Do you think if you were working for your former employer, the Washington Post, you would have been granted access to do this article?
- [40:27]
Ben Terris
That's a good question. I don't know. I know that I wouldn't have had as much time and as much space. And so working for a magazine, it matters because I can say, honestly, look, I want to make sure I get this right. I want to. If this takes months, I'll take months. If it takes 5,000 to 7,000 to 10,000 words to write, I will get that space. I think New York Magazine also matters to President Trump in a way that the Washington Post might not. He came up in the 80s and 90s when New York Magazine was really kind of in its heyday. He cares a lot about glossy magazines. He cares about photo spreads and covers. And so I think New York Magazine is a little bit of a skeleton key. That got me into the Oval Office easier than maybe the Washington Post.
- [41:11]
Mike Pesca
Ben Terrace is New York Magazine's Washington correspondent. We've been speaking about his article the Superhuman President, and if you lied to me at all, we're going to sue your ass. Ben.
- [41:21]
Ben Terris
Of course, of course.
- [41:23]
Mike Pesca
Thank you, Ben.
- [41:24]
Ben Terris
Thanks, man. This is great.
- [41:29]
Mike Pesca
And that's it for today's show. Cory War produces the Gist. Jeff Craig does video stuff somewhere out there. Kathleen Sykes runs the Gist list. That Sadie interview we ran today, there's video of it, there's the written form. I mean, we basically have everything except the dance inter weight, I'm told. Substack mike peska.substack.com the dance interpretation is up there as well. Ben Astaire is now doing our booking, and Michelle Pesca oversees it all benevolently with only fair questions. Tough, pointed but fair questions. And yes, thanks to that question, I will in fact apologize. And thanks for listening.
- [42:23]
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