“In Trump’s first term, there was a huge amount of daily

reporting about how his White House was working.

"You’ve got Reince Priebus, the establishment Republican.

Steve Bannon, the fiery Alt right

nationalist Jared Kushner supported Democrats

in the past."

"The president sharply told his feuding team members quote,

work it out.

The communications director, the National Security Advisor,

the deputy national security advisor.

That’s a lot of turnover.

That’s a lot of turnover."

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's functioning for Donald Trump

and how it's functioning for the rest of us.

As always, my email at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

Ashley Parker, Michael Scherer, welcome to the show

Thanks for having me. Yeah, thanks for having us.

So I want to begin with Donald Trump’s theory of what went

wrong in his first term.

You wrote 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?

Ashley. His first term.

You have to keep in mind that 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, right.

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 lure was that when he told her, Hope,

I’d like you to be part of my campaign.

She thought it was a campaign for, she said,

which golf course.

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 he doesn’t trust,

many of whom don’t like him, don’t trust him.

And privately say he was their 16th choice to be president.

And, and a lot of them view themselves as guardrails.

They are there.

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, 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 asked for something twice,

we have an unofficial rule, which is that we do it, right.

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.

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,

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.

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.

Like, 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 nasty viper pit of rivals around him.

And he had Kellyanne Conway and Jared Kushner and Stephen

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 just that was bad staffing.

I mean, that was a design of his White House.

But I think for the people who came

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 what you’ve seen, I mean,

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 wanted 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.

And by that metric, I would argue

that some of the staffing got better in certain ways.

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 the first term,

and he expected the presidency genuinely

to be like a monarchy.

And he was frustrated when he wasn’t king.

And it turned out that, a single senator, John McCain,

could tank something he really cared about.

After seven years of promises to repeal and replace

Obamacare, it came down to just one vote.

John McCain’s, with all eyes on McCain.

He cast his vote with a thumbs down.

Republican Leader Mitch McConnell

stonefaced his arms crossed in defeat.

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 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 Hemispheres division, who

will be crucial for what he wants 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 the destruction of the administrative state,

they are much better staffers in that mission.

But how do they achieve that?

You describe in one of your pieces

the mission as their staffing up for the second term

is, quote.

This time loyalty would be absolute.

The federal government is 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 do they do it?

He has this great litmus test because of January 6,

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 so that was 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.

We reported that in the first term,

Stephen Miller would go 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 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 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 that every one of them 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 imposed loyalty tests

to replace those people.

And Ezra, you mentioned Marco Rubio.

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,

there was a sense that Trump from 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.

And then when Joe Biden, even Joe Biden

ran on returning to normalcy.

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 Romneys of the world, they left.

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 campaign,

the 2024 campaign, particularly after

the assassination attempt and then when he eventually wins,

that the party’s relationship, the way the people around

Trump look at Trump seemed to me to change.

I would say that I feel like Trump gets treated

as the grand ayatollah of the Republican Party now that he’s

like 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 a great man

of history figure Yeah, I don’t think that’s correct.

It’s not the case that it’s entirely of yes man,

White House now.

I mean, the person we haven’t yet mentioned,

who’s the most important person in this story is Susie

Wiles, his chief of staff, who stepped into the role that no

one had been able to handle before.

Every one of them tried to intervene and stop him

from doing stuff.

Every one of them burned out, ingloriously. Susie, 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 is able to go to him and say,

I don’t think that’s a good idea or 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,

and 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 6 felons or just

some of them, whether they’re not pardon the violent ones.

And there were people around Trump who were saying to him,

I don’t think we should pardon the violent the people who

were actually beating on police officers and trying

to hurt people.

He overruled them.

But a more recent example is the president

said a couple of weeks ago, I think

we may have to nationalize elections in 15 places, which

is not what his government has, 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.

Tell me about their relationship.

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 and some other, Sarah Huckabee Sanders,

who could talk to him more.

Frankly, sometimes Susie has talked

about her own relationship with her father,

who 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 super structure 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 percent,

of the senior people in the White House are Susie

people.

They work for her.

And 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 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 of discipline that’s been imposed,

often very subtly, from her within the government,

which I think has served the president well.

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.

You have different kids.

And if I’m messaging something to my seven 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 2

and 1/2 year old.

I’m not going to say what age I’m arguing the president is,

but all of those women understood Trump,

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, 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.

And because they understand that that’s how he takes

in information and understands it.

And I think that’s been incredibly helpful.

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 four,

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 not from knowing exactly who was going into the Oval

Office and who was not going in the Oval Office.

Susie does not try to do that, and that

complicates the job for us.

Well, 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.

And one more thing on Susie is that Vanity Fair piece Michael

mentioned.

I assume your listeners know but it was

Susie gave a bunch of candid interviews to Chris Whipple,

and they were on the record, and he ended up

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.

But to me, as I was reading it,

and 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 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.

One interpretation many people, to some degree,

myself included, had coming out of that piece

because 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 JD 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 famous quote,

I’m paraphrasing it where she says,

you have other chiefs of staff who have these moments where

they march into the Oval Office,

and they tell the president that what they’re trying to do

is unconstitutional or wrong.

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.

So you’re 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 helping shape what he

wants to do. Yeah, I think there’s a lot of nuance here.

So, the president decides I’m going to pardon everyone from

January 6.

There’s no discussion of it afterwards.

That’s what happens.

But, 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 could argue that obviously she has allowed

things that many people would say are unconstitutional.

But I think there’s a different litmus test she’s

using for a lot of these things.

Another example that gets at this

is after the 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.

Overruled 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.

If you were to ask why did that happen.

She would say, well, the president

made that decision to do that.

But I think there was 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, and I don’t know if Reince Priebus or some

of the other people who work for him in the first term

would have been able to guide that process in the same way.

Let me pick up on something 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.

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.

Sir, as we’ve said very often, economic security is national

security and our country has never been so secure,

thanks to you.

You have brought us back from the edge.

You had the overwhelming mandate

from the American people.

You’re restoring confidence in government.

And I think to myself watching this,

that if Trump is if he is believing any of this,

he is being very ill served, among other things.

This is the problem with regimes that work like that.

Like, 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?

One thing is that Trump himself does not really

differentiate always between the sources.

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.

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 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 them and he

likes them if they show him a poll claiming his approval

rating in New York is 70 percent, 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 potentially her own clients.

He does not differentiate between that information.

I think his lens of it is someone who’s quite

transactional is he views it 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 on Truth Social.

But the Susie Wiles see it as her job.

When the president is saying untrue things to make sure

his picture of reality is true.

I don’t think Yeah no.

Absolutely not.

That seems like a problem.

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.

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.

So I don’t think there’s the president just doesn’t

prioritize accuracy in that way.

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 bending

reality to his will.

And, 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 is the right

that he was the rightful president, 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 believe 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.

I recognize that Donald Trump has

a bullshitters relationship to the truth.

And I mean that in there’s this great philosophical,

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 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 it.

The people around Trump understand

that 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 of months

now to get the president to talk about the thing that will

help Republicans win the midterms, right.

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 impose, 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 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.

So you describe Susie Wiles as a center of the White House.

Obviously, beyond the president,

I was naturally going to move on to Stephen Miller.

I want to ask you about a couple of the figures here

and the role they play.

But let me actually have you decide in which direction

we move, who has the most influence next.

I would say Stephen Miller is the right direction to move.

I’m curious what you think, Michael.

I mean, I think for domestic policy.

Yes Stephen Miller for foreign policy.

You may go to Marco with a little dash of Stephen

on foreign as well.

But 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?

So I mean, formally, he’s a 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 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 100 days that caught everybody

off guard.

He was driving a lot of that.

He was writing a lot of those executive orders.

And then I think the other role he plays he is the voice.

He’s the 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 any discussion that’s going on, he’s going to add

more fuel to that fire, more kindling.

He’s going to go and say something 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, a speech that everybody should

watch at his funeral, in which he basically described this

clash of civilizations.

It’s like full on war for the future of humanity between

the left and his side.

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 thought you could kill Charlie Kirk.

You have made him immortal.

It was like it was like a call to war speech.

And I think he brings that attitude

to the whole conversation inside the government.

In our profile, we described him

as the pulsing id of a president who

is already almost pure id.

And I think that’s just another way of seeing him is

that accelerant.

And one of the first ways we the nation kind

of collectively glimpsed it was during Signalgate,

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 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.

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, O.K, 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.

You described Miller as 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 a organizationally very capable one.

What is his theory of the state of wielding power,

of the administrative role he has?

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, Claremont Institute papers

or has a very sophisticated view of 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 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

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.

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, he’ll joke about how we don’t really want

Stephen to say everything he believes.

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.

Or, we reported in this story an anecdote from the debate

prep in 2024, in which they’re talking about immigration.

And 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 went back to debating immigration.

He said, that’s correct, and then went back to his debate.

But his broader view of government

is of maximalist view.

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 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 Stephen Miller’s view, which he was articulating

a foreign policy view.

But I think it can be applied to government,

the bureaucracy, the administrative state.

Was he basically just said, you

can talk 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 of time

in 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.

Do they believe this particular strategy is

working?

I mean, we were talking a little bit earlier.

Donald Trump is unpopular.

He is 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 is the president’s polling.

How do Republicans look in the midterm elections,

this strategy of relentlessly smashing

through the Overton window is not like moving the country.

It’s mobilizing opposition.

I think there’s an 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 will most Americans will

probably notice.

But I mean, to go back to the Pretti shooting

that policy of having roving bands of Customs and Border

Patrol agents, militarized, go into American cities

and break windows of cars and 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’s what happened a couple of weeks ago, right.

So, what does it mean when you say that.

What does it mean that Miller was put in the penalty box?

It means Tom Homan, who had 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.

And Homan is not someone who is

going to stop arresting and deporting people,

but he is a much more by the book.

Let’s do it.

Let’s arrest people at jails.

Let’s arrest people with cooperation with local

officials.

Let’s deescalate the situation type guy and Miller,

if you look at what he was saying in those days,

immediately after Holman 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.

He had ordered up Yeah and but again,

to Michael’s point of why 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.

By any other metric, we could be here doing

a podcast about how Tom Homan is so extreme and far right

on immigration.

What is JD Vance’s role?

I think Vance would is a hybrid,

as all vice presidents are.

He’s one step removed from the structure, the core structure.

So 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.

I think he sees himself as.

As someone who is trying to bring

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

Stephen Miller.

He’s out there a lot, pushing the bounds, owning the libs,

getting on fights on Twitter, things like that.

Your point about him being a chief ideologist

is that how Trump sees him.

How is their relationship evolved over the course

of the administration?

I mean, one thing that has helped their relationship

or 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 JD Vance, including Donald Trump’s

oldest son, Don Jr. who he is 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 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 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 Trump trusts him.

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 president.

I think the unspoken tension that 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.

And it’s not clear that Trump sees Vance as his clear

successor at this point.

And so I think that’s an undercurrent, tension there.

Trump is 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.

Rubio, to me, has been one 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.

SNL makes fun of him.

He becomes national security advisor as well as

Secretary of State.

Tell me about Rubio’s arc here,

his role as powers relationship with Trump.

All 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 in being viscerally appalled

by everything Donald Trump stands for and represents.

I will never stop until we keep a man from taking over

the party of Reagan and the conservative movement.

He’s a man, 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 going to do.

And early on, this is during the DOGE era

in best friendship with Elon Musk era.

Elon Musk is annoying, to put it mildly.

A lot of these cabinet secretaries,

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 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 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, in 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 it.

On Trump’s birthday as part of America 250 on the lawn

of the White House.

And to see Marco Rubio kind of just 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.

But I guess one of the surprises to me about Rubio’s

ascendance is if you think about the way Trump described

MAGA, if you think about the way the ideologists around

Trump described MAGA, one of its primary differentiators

from the Republican Party before it is that it is not

adventurous in foreign policy.

It’s borderline isolationist.

It’s America first.

It’s not concerned with niceties.

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 this administration.

I remember being in Rubio’s office in 2013,

I think doing an interview with him about why we need

comprehensive immigration reform.

And a path to citizenship.

So Rubio, 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.

He’s the one sitting next to Witkoff saying, wait,

we don’t really want to trust Putin on all this stuff.

Like, 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 it as Venezuela as of stepping stone

to that.

But 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 JD Vance.

Rubio understands how to advise the president

into getting him what he thinks

he wants, while also trying to help him avoid a pitfalls.

And he’s earned the president’s trust during that

process.

But he’s also very deferential.

He’s not again, he’s not the guy saying, no,

you can’t do this slamming the table.

That’s not his role in this process.

And one thing that I think is misunderstood about Trump,

but that has allowed Rubio to have

a big influence in foreign is Trump

is not 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 these he ran on a promise to end

forever wars, the war in Iraq into the war in Afghanistan.

And using American boys and girls to

export Democratic values abroad.

But he is open now, we can 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 the short, kinetic bursts of force.

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.

But was a wild success for the American military.

It was a quick, precise extraction

of a president who everyone agreed

was a quote unquote bad guy.

And again, he is open to those sorts of foreign policy

adventurism in a way.

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 if this is wrong,

he is in the, listens to Trump but gives orders role.

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?

Well, I think they’re very different.

I think Hegseth had a very rough first year.

And when we interviewed Trump, last spring,

Trump was talking about Hegseth as a kid who’s trying

to do well but just hasn’t figured it out yet.

That was the tone of the conversation.

I think Trump likes Hegseth on TV.

He likes the aggression from Hegseth

the anti-woke reformism the machismo

that Hegseth is trying to bring to the Pentagon.

But I don’t think Hegseth is like,

much of a senior advisor on this stuff.

I think the head of the Joint Chiefs, General Caine,

is probably more in Trump’s ear when it comes to those

things.

But Hegseth has earned his place

as a cabinet member in good standing.

Tulsi Gabbard is different.

I mean, she really lost her place early on, and she ends

up at an agency, the DNI, that the president’s been skeptical

of it’s a post 9/11 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 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 trying to win her way back

into the president’s good graces.

I mean, it is very much I want to note the way you do that.

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.

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 going hard

at Democrats and all of his rivals.

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.

And then at one point, during that

hearing as of non-sequitur, talking

about how great the Dow was, 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 trying

to turn over a House Oversight Committee into what we just

discussed is a Trump cabinet meeting.

I’m just going to praise the president.

That is how they do it.

The president’s fundamental characteristic is that he’s

transactional in everything he does,

in every interaction he has.

And 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 like a sovereign like 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 in 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 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.

He wants everybody like 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.

People are cabinet members are constantly just hanging out

at the White House.

They can be around the guy just so they can get face

time, because if he’s thinking of you, that’s good for you.

And that’s not I mean, Barack Obama ran a government like

a corporation, he wanted it to be efficient.

He wanted to be effective.

He wanted all the rules to be followed.

He wanted a process, and everyone

was playing their part.

But it was not about pleasing him.

Obama was not asking people to please him every day.

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 to me Trump, as 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.

He treated his time like an incredibly precious resource.

And the idea that he’d be just channel flipping was

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.

He wakes up late.

Obama would start work very early in the Oval Office

and work until dinnertime and then 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 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 structure, that 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 is 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

like Don from Queens, a consummate 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 a meaningful policy debate

in the traditional sense.

That’s absolutely true.

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 and another White House

would ultimately come up to him.

And I feel like it sometimes leaves me

with only a couple of options.

Either 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.

He’s trusting his people more is something that’s 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 right.

He can’t be both loose and in front of cameras for once

or three hours a day, and doing the level of oversight

that I think his predecessors did.

So what is pushed out here.

I 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 work 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.

I think the you’re describing a president who serves

the government, who serves the White House.

And I think Trump is the reverse of that.

He is a president who has 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.

And he has.

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 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 colonnade.

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.

Reasonable people can argue that they

would prefer their president to spend

that time differently.

I mean, as Michael was saying, Trump

can get incredibly in the weeds.

We have had people say to us, when

he is redesigning the Oval Office,

he is the one who is looking at the different shades

of gold inlay.

And which one should go here and which type of chandelier.

And 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.

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 in 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 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.

I mean, it’s a president who governs and rules on raw,

visceral gut instinct.

And, Michael said he’s very transactional,

a way I view it that I think is helpful in understanding

him and explaining his contradictory impulses 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.

And he has a totally different message.

But when you look, and again, I did not cover Barack Obama’s

presidency nearly as closely as I covered the Trump one.

But my sense was that Obama ran his White House

to 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 the relevant people synthesize

all of that very granular information

and make a decision.

When you look at Trump’s, 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.

It’s just, it’s tariffs against French champagne because I am

angry at Macron.

You don’t 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 going to undo all

of those tariffs because something else has changed.

There is 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, to Ashley’s point

about gut instinct,

I think he gets a presentation like, O.K,

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 poster boards.

I’ve been in the Oval Office in the first term and seen

briefing documents for the president about a for Trump,

about a policy thing that are basically hundred words

on a page, bullet point, things that are 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 to know.

Like a science project diorama.

It’s like, here’s how dinosaurs went extinct.

The asteroid, it’s that.

I mean, it’s just not the same kind of policy.

Whereas Obama, if you’re comparing him to him,

is really in the weeds of economic theory.

And I mean, you did health care 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.

He knows it’s big and beautiful

I think that’s a place to end.

Also, final question.

What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?

And Ashley, why don’t we begin with you?

So I’m going to say "The Secret History" by Donna Tartt,

which is just fantastic.

This next one is a little bit of a cop out,

but I’m going to recommend an author and say any book

by her. Ann Patchett

And I will just read anything she writes.

She just does wonderful, beautiful modern fiction.

And since we’re talking about Trump and I am married to him,

my husband, Mike Bender, who’s also a New York Times

reporter, he wrote a Trump campaign book called "Frankly,

We Did Win 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 want to 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, if I had a fourth, I’d put Bender’s book there.

Thank you.

"An Image of My Name Enters America"

which is a book of essays, personal essays by Lucy Ives,

came out a couple years ago.

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 of growing up

You're such a feminist. Yeah "Palimpsest" by Gore Vidal

came out a while ago.

I just read it recently.

I can’t believe I’ve been in DC so long and not read it.

It’s hilarious.

It’s totally R-rated and often inappropriate,

and often very vicious and about as good a memoir of DC

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 a blood transfusion in 17th century

France between a madman and a calf.

And then it takes you through.

How blood revolutionized how we fight wars and the AIDS

crisis.

And it takes something that’s a part of all of our lives

and tells it to you in a narrative that is pretty

remarkable.

Ashley Parker, Michael Scherer, thank you very much.

Thank you, thank you.