Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan Take Us Inside Trump’s ‘Imperial Presidency’

lifetime, to Hanson, how long we live, maybe it'll remain that way, but he's not just going away. That's very true. [MUSIC] Hi everyone, from New York Magazine in the box media podcast network.

This is on with Cara Swisher and I'm Cara Swisher. The covering president Donald Trump's second term is not an easy job, but few people do it better than New York Times reporters, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swann. Their new book regime changes out now.

It's an incredible account of Trump's return to the White House in January 2025, and the

chaotic year that followed. We all remember the headlines like the outrageous cabinet picks, the ice rates, the doge cuts, and the gifted Katari Jet to name just a few. But Maggie and Jonathan's book takes readers inside the conversations at Mara Logo and the Oval Office and even in the situation room to tell the stories behind those headlines.

What comes through is a portrait of a president and administration untethered from the historical constraints of the office and willing to take extraordinary risks in the pursuit of absolute power.

“I think it's really important to chronicle this in real time, especially the enormous amount”

of corruption going on with the Trump family, which has essentially monetized the White House for their own benefit. As I have said, Trump is a coin-operated president, and as you'll see here, a lot of people have been putting coins into the vending machine. And one more thing before we get started, if you're going to be in Washington DC on July

16th, please join us at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center for a live taping of on. I'll be talking to Gina Rimando, Commerce Secretary, under President Biden and former Rhode Island Governor about what AI means for the American workforce. And as a special bonus before that conversation, I'll be speaking with Johns Hopkins

President Ron Daniels and University of Notre Dame, President Father Robert Dowd about how universities are approaching AI and workforce issues. You can get tickets and learn more at voxmedia.com/carouswisherlive. All right, let's get to my conversation with Maggie and Jonathan.

“There are second and none when it comes to covering Trump.”

This is a fascinating conversation. Stick around. Support for this show comes from the Guardian and their new show, "State Side." Where journalists, Kyri, and Charter Sherman use the entire independent reporting resources of the Guardian to slow down the news and wrestle with the questions we all have about

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“How many third party vendors does your company use?”

20? 200? Thanks to AI, someone on your team probably added three more this week, and your security lead has no idea.

Traditional third party risk management can't keep up.

Vanta gives you continuous coverage across every vendor, automatically, so you actually know what's in your stack, and what to do about it. Hey, Ion, risk off, Vanta.com/TPRM. Maggie and Jonathan, thank you for coming on on. I'm excited to talk to you about this book.

Thanks for having us. Maggie, you've said in a few interviews that writing this book nearly killed you and Jonathan, and you said that unlike Trump's first term, you had to assume people in the administration were not telling the truth to start with. I mean, you capture some incredible scenes in the book down to the empty ice cream cartons

and potato chip bags that Trump would leave on the floor of the White House bedroom. Talk about adapting your reporting this time, first, Maggie, then Jonathan.

We first got this book contract in 2023, and we would always planned on a book that was

going to be the last act of Trump. Whatever that was, whether it was him going to prison, whether it was, you know, which

And once he was back in the White House, it was very clear that we were covering a radically

“different presidency than anything we had seen and certainly in most ways unrecognizable”

to term one.

So we shifted the focus to the first 14 months of this term and ended up jettisoning

a solid 99% of our reporting. In some cases, there is material that appeared in the New York Times, such as, you know, some things related to Elon Musk, although we go a little deeper here on that topic. When we were remotely uncertain about something, it went on the cutting room floor, because we wanted to have the most accurate version of history that we could about this remarkable

chapter. And we are clear I that this is a first draft of history that there will be other people who are going to interpret what has happened and probably add onto some of the episodes that we're describing, but we wanted to focus on a, what was our viable, b, what explained how this government works and how decisions are made and what their areas of focus

are. And you will see that that's a cross-tech. It's across taking control of how the American story is told at this Smithsonian. It is across the Pentagon. It is across various aspects of the government.

And what about working with sources, especially if you thought they were maybe not telling me to truth to start with? Presumably you begin with assuming people. You begin with false until proven otherwise.

“And the only thing in your introduction, I would disagree with is your characterization”

of like first term, we sort of could trust the sources.

Now we can, no, actually no, not at all, false until proven otherwise became my default setting in the first term as well. The biggest difference is the shrinking of the circle, which just makes it much more difficult to get information, but I will say, again, we don't want to get too much into a sourcing conversation for reasons you'll find very obvious, but we've published some

very detailed scenes in the situation room with very specific dialogue, scenes that are not exactly flattering to the administration. In some cases, quite damaging to the administration. There hasn't been one denial. There hasn't been one specific denial from any of the participants in these meetings.

The only thing there has been is Trump himself doing a sort of all purpose denial saying the whole thing is fake, but no one who's quoted in any of those scenes has denied anything so far.

“Maggie, did you want to add something to this?”

No, I then it's exactly right. In fact, the Vice President told Megan Kelly that he was concerned that we had recordings because of the specificity and accuracy of these scenes and we have not commented on that one way or the other and won't. But I don't assume that any of the people that I deal with in politics or in government

are telling the truth and that's not specific to this administration and by any stretch of the imagination, we hear something and we learn a piece of information and then we build on that and then we look and see how the corners of the information from the various people that we're dealing with overlapped and if there are major disagreements about either what was said or events that happened, they're discarded.

In cases where there is agreement about the sentiment, then we characterize it. But beyond that, I mean, I don't think it's just a more rigorous and orguous process to your point about how much smaller this circle is. We benefit from the fact that we both covered him for such a long time, we've covered his world for such a long time, so we can have a sense of what angles somebody might be trying

to comment something from their telling us. That does help. Yes. Sometimes you can read something, right, Cara and it's pretty obvious that the microphone has been handed to one person and it's the world according to GARP and here's my version

and whatever. We don't do that, we say on February 11th, at this time Benjamin Netanyahu went down to the situation room, here's where they were sitting. This was up on the screen, this happened, then this happened and this said, then that said, okay, if that was wrong, if any of those details were wrong, there's a bunch of people

that we've named in the room that can come out and say, this is just bullshit, this is a fictional account or whatever and that hasn't happened. Right. Nobody in any of those scenes has denied anything, whether it be the scene, we have with all the big oil CEOs, Chevron, Exxon, you know, very dramatic scene with some of the biggest

oil CEOs in the country with Stephen Miller and Donald Trump in the room with Stephen Miller

texting the attorney general, Trump basically telling the oil CEOs like it's some kind

out of the mouths of these CEOs, you would expect if we had something wrong that the corporate

“affairs department of Exxon or Chevron or Conoco or any of these people in the room might”

say, this is bullshit, this never happened.

The reason that hasn't happened is because for every single one of these scenes, there's like 10 scenes that didn't make it into the book because we just had that little kernel, a little bit of doubt or there was conflicting thing and so I don't think I'll ever do another book car. I'm really not being a nut kidding, like this was so freaking hard and brutal that like as a reporting process, like by the end of it, I was just like, I never want to even think

about a book ever again. I know, I know the feel like there are a lot of different ways from second term is different from the first, you can make a long list, but one of the big differences

this time, tech and business leaders are very much behind him. In the first, they were much

either on the bubble, didn't thought he was a moron or sort of co-operated out of massive self-interest, but very little like. But in this book, you write about how Trump delighting and getting the big tech CEOs to gravel form, which is precisely what they did. He took joy in showing them flattering texts and messages from Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, like they were trophies. Now, you want to start tell us about the lengths both how Trump took to humiliate these billionaires, which I'm

down for. And why they let him do it and the shift that you perceived here in these relationships.

“Let's start with you, Maggie. Yes, short. So I think there's a couple of factors at play that are”

reporting showed. And so one isn't you would know this better than we do. But a lot of tech leaders came to really dislike the Biden administration. They felt like there were certain regulations. There were onerists. They did not like DEI policies. Zuckerberg obviously has been fairly explicit about that. But it was remarkable to us that Zuckerberg, who once upon a time, funded one of the most known pro-immigration groups in the country, goes during the transition to go

have a sort of sayons with Stephen Miller, basically. We're Stephen Miller makes very clear how

unhappy he was with that group. Zuckerberg distances himself from it. Obviously, there were corporate interests. Zuckerberg was in the middle of some kind of, I think it was an anti-trust case that the government had brought among other things. Trump was suing meta over being de-platformed after

“the January 6th riot at the Capitol in 2021. But it wasn't a black and white thing of, you know,”

I'm doing these things that I really don't want to be doing. In our reporting, these tech officials were delighted to be sort of shedding what they saw as constraints that had been placed on them for a variety of reasons. So another example is Jeff Bezos, who goes to dinner with Trump and, again, at Moralago, and he says, he's trashing the Washington Post, you know, and in Trump as too, there's sort of commiserating. Trump is doing it from a coverage perspective.

Bezos is lamenting the business side and describing them as quote unquote terrible, says, you know, describes this as his worst financial investment, whatever he thinks of the financial piece of it, independent journalism is really under siege in this administration of particular. And so it's remarkable that he's having this conversation. When Zuckerberg went to dinner with Trump, Trump sits on the patio, in addition to the texts that they sent him that he, you know,

was showing off at his golf club that led Elon Musk to describe it as first-class grovelling. When Zuckerberg is there, Trump, he's up on his iPad as he's DJing, a version of the National Anthem, sung by what is called the J6 quiet. Yeah, the star-spangled banner. Right. And it's people who are in prison for their role alleged or for which they were convicted in the riot. And everybody, when Trump would play this version would stand on the Moralago patio

and, you know, put hand on heart, Zuckerberg did too. And it's a pretty remarkable moment of buy-in to Trump's worldview, not just bringing him a check, not just bringing him a gift. And then you had this inauguration where you had all of these tech leaders on stage behind him, what whether it was the head of TikTok, who needed some kind of a questionable maneuver to be allowed to continue to operate in the U.S.? Yeah, a big is what I call a law that

to sell a TikTok or make declared a national security risk. The Trump had backed in term one. And so, there are various reasons why these folks are all with him, but at least for some of them, it was quite happily. It was quite happily. Yes, Sergei Bryn would be one, the former who had protested at the San Francisco Airport, the immigration policies in the first term was now enthusiastic

guy through and through. John, how do you look at this? I mean, we're used surprised by the pre-

we'll get to Elon in a second as he's his own singular sensation, but talk a little bit about

“why you think this happened beyond just regular self-interest, which I think was very clear”

in the first term when they went up to Trump Tower for that meeting. That all of them went up that one time in 2015. What was the difference here from your perspective and did it surprise you? It started to change, I started to notice the change after the Butler assassination attempt when several of them called him. That seemed more sincere to me. I think it was the sort of shocking moment for the country, the president, the potential next president, you know,

gets shocked in the ear and almost dies and stands up and raises his fist. This blood coming down, you know, a lot of these guys saw it as this heroic moment, Basos called him Zuckerberg called him, et cetera. I look, I don't think it's that complicated. Trump has shown very clearly that he's willing to use power, government power to crush his enemies and to reward his friends. Tim Cook is a very low-key, rational guy. He felt compelled to bring a literal golden tribute

to the overall office in full view of the news cameras to the president. You don't do that unless

“you, there's some level of concern, I think, about what the president could offer you, sorry,”

either do you, or just you, or desire for him to do something for you. He's incredibly transactional. He's made clear to all of these people that he's a personalist leader, that he demands a personal interaction that you can just go straight to him. Jensen Huang of Nvidia had no real footprint in Washington before this term. I mean, it was a very light footprint anyway. Trump didn't even know who he was. He sold games just before. It was for games. Yeah, they started to abuse the GPUs,

started to be used for something different, but but Nvidia was a, you know, recently, big deal during

the first time. Trump had no idea who he was. Anyway, he actively gets very active, and we have

we sort of chart that relationship in the book as well. He goes down to Mara Lago with his wife. All of these people understand there's a playbook with Trump. And if you don't play it, your competitors are playing the game. Bezos, you know, we have a scene in the book where he comes into the oval, and this is when Elon Musk is sort of out on the outs with Trump. My recollection was July last year, and Bezos is basically pitching Trump on this concept of contractive diversity

at the Pentagon, meaning don't just give everything to SpaceX, you know, think about us, blue origin. So if you're Bezos and you're watching one of your competitors become the best power of the next president. You've got to get in there. You've got to get in the game. You've got to get in the game.

“And the only way to get in the game, you've got to be all in. You've got to have both feet in both”

arms. You've got to be, I mean, we have when Trump was showing off the text messages, Bezos had sent him this smiling selfie of himself and Lauren Sanchez, Zuckerberg had texted him a lesser from run if he's kids about the golden age of America, you know, they're all in. Yeah. And maybe why the humiliation part? Again, I enjoy it. I think they deserve it. But talk a little bit about what white Trump relishes that. Playing that J6 thing, he does on purpose presumably. Well, that one I do

think is about, you know, sort of forcing some version of a buy-in to his extremely fact challenge view of the election. And of 2020, you know, in other cases, I don't think it's complicated. You know, he loves nothing more than a convert, but he wants to see how far you're willing to go to make him happy. And he has done some version of that to any number of people. But in this particular case, I mean, Trump prizes attention and he prizes fame and he prizes money. And he equates money with

intelligence. And so in this case, if you're going to have the wealthiest people in the world coming and, you know, doing some version of this or talking about how, you know, successfully

you were in how amazing your election was. And so there's like nothing that is is a pure form of

of joy for him. It is a thrill. And so I think that I think that is all it is. Yeah. I mean, there's the other component, which is it's not just the humiliation can't just be in private. That's part of the showing the text soft. It's making sure other people see it. So right. Right. Absolutely. And you're putting them in the front row is also when I saw them in

I was like, oh, and the cabinet. I was like, right next to the family. I was like, oh my god,

“you know, in many ways it was grow task, but I don't blame Trump for that. Of course,”

you do that. That fact that they were there, especially Sinter Pachai was really, you know, who is not. It was keeps his profile quite low. They had an alphabet. One of the more interesting things, people Sergei Bryn was also there, but Sam Altman and Tim Cook were sort of toward the back. And I wondered why you wouldn't have put Sam or Tim in the front because Tim is a well-known person. And I asked people at their companies and one of the company, people responded, it was the greatest

feat of engineering and history within that pan of play. It took a long time. Yeah, I thought so too. Let's talk a little bit about AI because a lot of this is about AI and that's that this is what the race is really about. You capture out Trump seem to go from a skeptic to a booster after just one meeting with two top executives from Open AI during the campaign. You call it quote one of the

“more significant half hours in the history of AI. John, then talk a little bit about the meeting”

and how the ways it came to shape the White House mostly hands-off approach to AI regulation when Trump took office. I'd be remiss if not saying the people he picked like David Sachs are very tight in with these people. And to me, it's all, again, it's a rumble among Silicon Valley people was happening here. But talk about Trump himself because I do understand the other characters like a meal Michael and the rest. So Trump is what you tech people might call a laser doctor,

Cara. He only started text messaging in 2022. Okay, so at the end of 2022, more than 20 years after most of us anyway. So this is the summer of 2024 during the campaign. Trump really had no idea what AI was. To the extent he was aware of it, he thought it was kind of scary, kind of disturbing. He had all these concerns about deep fake. Someone doing a deep fake of himself declaring that a nuclear weapon was, you know, nuclear bomb was heading towards Russia or North

Korea. What would happen? How would you verify it wasn't him, etc. Anyway, open AI, very smartly haunted the Trump campaign and set up this meeting in Las Vegas. And it was Sam Altman was supposed to be there, but he had COVID, so it was two of his

top executives. And this is the first time Trump had interacted with any type of AI tool in any

meaning for way. And so they're in this crappy little hotel room in Vegas. And they set up contrast contrast contrast contrast contrast contrast contrast contrast contrast contrast contrast conference room, not a hotel or conference room. Yeah, and they set up chat GPT on the screen. And so they, you know, they put in a few and so it's Trump sitting there. It's, you know, some of his team. It's two of the top, Doug Burdon. Doug Burdon is there as well. Anyway,

so they set up the chat GPT. And they put in the prompt, you know, they put in the prompt about the AI executive order, one of them that Trump did in tone one, and they ask it to turn it into a poem. And so of course it does it in Trump's reading because the language is so beautiful.

This is incredible. He was completely bold over by the poetry of the 2024 version of chat GPT.

And he turns to one of his aids, who's a speech writer and says, you know, it's just going to put you out of a job. And so he'd started the meeting in this sort of like almost comatose state. He was yawning. He was tired. It was the end of a long day. And then he was just alert and totally locked in and kind of transfixed by this presentation. And so he starts asking them questions, really basic questions. How does this stuff work? Who funds it? They explained him the concept of

compute and how much energy it requires. And he went within the space of about 20 minutes from being like, what the fuck is this thing? And it seems really bad and terrifying to, how can I help you? That's president. How can I? He's an intuitive. Open the floodgates, get rid of all. And then of course it becomes known to him. He's breathed that Biden had been training these guys up and and that he could be the one to liberate them. So he becomes a convert. He becomes a total convert.

And the first 12 months of the administration was essentially open season for these guys.

“They're changing course now, which is actually very interesting. But that's what it was.”

Maggie, how do you look at that shift? Because Trump from all, for a lot of, he's astonishingly pressed in about tech. You know, Iowa City's world's greatest internet troll, like he's good at it, actually. But he's not technical, obviously. But that's hardly matters because he understands it,

That's what he understands. But yeah. Right. Right. We'll be back in a minute. Support for this show comes from Delete Me. The internet makes easy for scammer stalkers and hackers

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“minute detail, USAID doesn't exist anymore. Correct. And that's what I'm saying. There's a lot of”

costs, including deaths of people across the globe. You write that at some of the administration, it appeared unhinged, which I told you this, Maggie. He would just wander to meeting with Drunk

whenever he wanted to take fights with cabinet members. Talk about the 10 year, that first 10 year,

that created so much destabilization, which the White House still hasn't recovered from or has it. First, Maggie explained that sort of what happened there. Yeah, it's a good question with the recovery piece. So it's almost, it's memory hold at this point with so much that has happened

Drunk basically let Elon Musk become not exactly a co-president, but basically a co-president. He was issuing directives. He was sending out these memos from the personnel management office, you know, the five things, email, senior advisors in the West Wing would learn when the rest of us did. What Musk was up to? It created this sort of presidency with a presidency. And he was demanding cuts at Canada agencies in ways that, you know, there were some people who were

quite falling over him, like Lizelden at EPA. And then there were others who were very, very troubled by the demands that he was making Mark O'Rubio at State Department, Sean Duffy, at Transportation, Doug Collins at the VA, although, you know, it's a sliding scale of how animated everybody was, but he was just sort of doing these slashes of, you know, get rid of this one. He would make accusations. We write about this remarkable cabinet meeting in March of last year,

which was only like six weeks into the administration at that point, where, you know, Elon Musk

“is insisting that Sean Duffy has, I think it was like, you have DEI hires still in the”

aircraft that control towers and, and Duffy was like, who, like, names please? And that was, that was one of the things that became the beginning of the end of Musk. On the one hand, Trump saw Musk as something

of a heat shield at the time. He was the one absorbing a lot of bad press, but the reality is that

Musk also essentially, as was one person put it to us in the course of supporting, hijacked this second administration for several months. And, you know, they've recovered, in the sense that there were, you know, other things that they moved on to, like the 12 day war on Iran, which was early last June. Then there was the summer of Jeffrey Epstein Piles, and I'm sure we'll talk about that at some point. Yes, but because it was Musk cited, you know, there were people who,

they, it's not like they are rowing in different directions in terms of what they want to see happen to gender wise in this administration overall. They really aren't. If this is not Steve Vanin versus Jared Kusha, but how you get there, they're not all on the same page, you know, whether it's Russ Vode or Elon Musk or Steven Miller, as the top people I would put in that bucket. So you have this situation where Musk, yes, they closed a congressional, we upgraded agency in USAID,

just got rid of it, it's just gone. And the rump that was left became Marker Rubio's problem. But beyond that, as you say, they did not do anything close to the savings, they said they were going to do. We had the sitting president do what was essentially an ad for Tesla, buying a Tesla and bringing it up to the White House, which, you know, in a series of pretty astonishing moments, that was one, but that was the beginning. So John, how do you look at

this period of time? Is it just that he gave Trump a lot of money and possibly was a critical

“element in it in the election of Trump winning? I believe that to be so. Or something else was happening”

here. And interesting enough, when the break happened, which I predicted would happen, Elon's tweet about Epstein set off the Epstein stuff. Absolutely, to me. He was when I saw that, I was like, oh, no, this is, this is where it's because I had spent a lot of time focused on Epstein stuff in, in Magga world, essentially. It had been a bearing wall for Magga world. And when I saw Elon's tweet, I was like, oh dear, he's really angry if he's putting this up. Talk a little bit

about the course of that relation. Because there was also the, the criticizing, the big spending bill. John, talk a little bit about both those things in Magga, if you have any thoughts, but John, you go first. Well, so the Elon relationship is interesting for lots of reasons. But Trump had no relationship with Elon Musk before 2024, really. I mean, they'd met each other

a couple of times. Elon had been quite critical of Trump. They sort of attacked each other publicly.

There were a series of meetings throughout 2024, you know, breakfast and things like that. And then Elon became a huge booster after the assassination attempt in Butler, and they just went all in, spent around $300 million to elect him. That we know of. That we know of, exactly. Correct.

“Which is just maybe the most ever spent on a presidential campaign by any donor. So I think it's”

that, but it's also Trump was fascinated by Musk. You know, in Magga made the point earlier,

man who ever lived. And Trump would talk about him almost like he was socializing him into the world. You know, he would say like, Elon's a reclusive, but he's not a reclusive anymore. I mean, Elon Musk moved in. He literally was living at Mara Lago in a cottage on the property called Bagnon that Trump usually rents out for $2,000 a night. We don't know what Elon was paying for it. He was getting meals from the Mara Lago kitchen at all now. As he became essentially a housemate,

“and was suddenly involved in everything. Trump, I think, was intrigued by him, flattered that the”

world's richest man was essentially working for him. Trump would constantly usually in previous iterations of Trump. You might think he'd be insecure having someone who was so much richer than him around, but Trump at that point was such he had been so inflated by his victory. He was now indisputably this figure of history. You know, he would say to people, you know, he can't be president. You know, he's South African. He can't be president. He would he would throw that in.

So, Elon was not a threat from that respect, and he sort of, I think, felt that he was larger than Elon, even though Elon was greater than him. It was paternalistic or older brotherish, you know, at one point when he was living at my new that he had a cottage there. Some, one of the Trump people were like, "Oh, it's great. He's there. He's there all the time. I go. That'll get tired in 14 seconds." And he'll call me in two weeks, three weeks, and tell

me, "He crazy." And the person called me and said, "He crazy." Like, it was like, they didn't know what to do. It was like Bob. I kept calling him Bob. The guy who wouldn't leave in the Richard Drive as movie. What do you make of the break, both of you very briefly, of the break between them? And then the reconciliation, which seems to be a foot.

Oh, it was inevitable for the reason that you said. There was always going to be a moment when

Elon Musk did, or several moments where Elon Musk did too much, went too far. And, you know, by the time that he did that Epstein tweet or ex put whatever that we call him, ex post, I will tell you, though, that I don't, I don't show the view that Elon is why that all suddenly

“came to bear. I think that that was a slow-moving disaster in Maga world. And with accelerating”

speed, he made it impossible for people to look away at that point. But that was a different issue. Trump is never going to be happy with somebody else getting spotlight, attention, credit. Elon did become a liability in Trump's mind. He was privately telling people. He was worried about conflicts of interest, which was a little late after the whole Tesla display. But whatever. And the ultimate reality is, I mean, to Jonathan's point earlier about how Trump

uses power and wields it over these tech officials, you know, Elon Musk is not so relevant politically without Donald Trump. And I think that he has seen that. And so Trump cut him off. Yes, Trump did have this remarkable line about how this is why he can't have friends.

You know, they always leave him, which a lot of people have noted to us over at the book.

And we're struck by. But Musk is back because Musk likes influence and power. And because this government still has, you know, sway over some of his companies. And a lot of people around Trump still believe that Elon Musk can be of use to the party financially. I don't think it's more

“complicated, but Jonathan may have a- >> Does Trump think that? Does Trump think that?”

>> Trump's always happy to have somebody invest. >> Yeah. >> Is how I would put it? >> Yeah. Let's talk about some of the ways Trump has also used the presidency to enrich himself and his family. It's a lot wrapped up in technology. Trump has made at least $2 billion after returning to the White House again. I think that's undercounting it. About half of that comes from the family's cryptocurrency business. One of the ways

is getting fees, even as people lose money, they get a big every time. Other ways is like the UAE buying into their companies and getting something else somewhere else. They purchase 49% of world liberty financial and it's a crypto firm. They share with the family of Steve Wittkov, Trump's Middle East and Boy. Talk about this. And what do you make of what's happened here? It's not a surprise. But compared to Hunter Biden, Hunter Biden wasn't an imaginative enough

for apparently in terms of taking advantage of this. >> So compare them is almost absurd at this point. I mean, Hunter Biden was at $80,000 a month that he was getting from Barisma and some paintings specifically. >> Yeah. Obviously, Hunter Biden was influenced pedaling when Biden was vice-president. I mean, he's not on the board of Barisma because he's an energy expert, obviously.

But this is something of a scale that we've never seen before in the American presidency.

And it's actually not even close. The Trump family has made clear to everyone in this second term that you don't actually don't need to go through intermediaries anymore. You can put money directly

government contracts. And in some cases, getting major government contracts. If you're a foreign

government, or a fund attached to a foreign government, you can go into business directly with the Trump family and the WICCO family. And you said, you know, that we don't know the half. We might know five percent of the families making. I mean, like any time you go down a rabbit hole, like we went down in the book a rabbit hole on the library, the presidential library, which I think is a really under-reported excess. Of course, it's not a library. It's a skyscraper.

And the plot of land was given to the Trump's free, very valuable plot of land in Miami was given to them for free. Eric Trump is out soliciting golf, Arab, sovereign funds. This is at the same time as his father is conducting foreign policy with those countries and those countries are seeking

“favors. But it's also, if you want to stay in with Trump, you can give money to him. So how”

at Latinic is Commerce Secretary. Trump was some of our reporting. The book was Trump was very irritated at reading stories about Latinic's sons being involved in business that had overlaps

with his government. Latinic gave $25 million to the Trump presidential library and Trump would

remark in front of people. The only reason I, this is in front of Latinic as well, but others in the, the only reason I put up with Howard's bullshit is because he gave me $25 million. You know, other times he'd say, you know, how great is Howard? I asked for $25. He just gave it to me straight away. So it's all out there. They've made it very clear that they're open for business. And, you know, understandably, many businesses, many rich people, many people who are seeking patterns,

understand that this is the Trump economy in Washington. And you've got to get into it. I've called it a coin operated presidency. You put money in and you get more out. Typically,

Musk is a good example. He puts $203 million in and he's gotten billions out in contracts.

“And he may have reserved those contracts, but some of them he might not have, right?”

But talk about how that's allowed is it because of the Supreme Court's presidential immunity ruling or the fact that Trump is going to pardon or going to try to pardon everything. Because it's not just that. There's luxuries or it's an Albania linked to Jared Kushner, everywhere. It seems everywhere that Trump's sons are doing licensing deals around the real estate businesses that are somehow linked to. So it's essentially the monetization of the White House.

Maggie, how is this going to be? How is this going to turn out this blurring of foreign policy with private interests? Well, there's no question in sorry, Jonathan. I didn't mean to cut you off. I was I want to make sure that you made the lucknick point because that's an example that I don't think I could have imagined before, honestly, as a cabinet official, making sure to stay in a good place that way. In terms of how is it going to turn out? I mean, it's inevitably raising

questions about the overlap between foreign policy and personal finances. There is a bit in the book where Jared Kushner and Steve Woodcock went to go try to hammer out the ceasefire deal with Gaza and get the hostages back. It was a huge deal. It was a big deal. It was a legitimate accomplishment. And their view was what you guys would call unparasing, but what you would all the collected you would call a conflict of interest. These are negotiating assets for us. However,

there is so much overlap that it is really, really hard to determine what ends where and what

“begins where. In terms of how is it, I think you said, how is it allowed? So there's a couple of”

factors. One, people keep saying to me, you know, wait until the house flips, if the house flips. I don't think Trump's going to have a big problem. I mean, you know, there might be subpoenas that he doesn't want to deal with among other things because most processes move much slower than Trump does. Number one, number two, Trump is operating the community decision, which he will often say, you know, I'm immune. I'm immune. Trump runs the Justice Department and

they've made very clear. There is no only lay the South in our book very clearly. There is no separation between the DOJ and the West Wing as there was as opposed to Watergate norm. For a very long time, and Trump has told people that he'll pardon everyone who's come within a certain radius that the number changes. But of the Oval Office, and we spoke to a number of people in the course of our reporting, we're counting on those coordinates. They were explicit about it. You know,

he's going to give out parties. I'm counting on my pardon. I hope he does, et cetera. So that sets up its own incentive structure. And then when you have a group of house Republicans who behave as if they are an extension of the executive branch, that's another way.

like in my humble opinion. And again, I could be wrong. There is no use to some extended

prognosticating. She says before she does it, a version of it. But this isn't going to look like 2019. You know, this is going to be a very, very difficult world for Democrats in the house to get subpoenas. Come, like with. We'll be back in a minute, support for this show comes from Rippling. As a business owner, you know how in demand top talent can be. And that means retaining

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Initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes mislow and at work as busy. C-terms. Let's finish by looking forward at the upcoming midterms in the presidential elections. You write in the book that only Trump seemed uninterested in the midterms but he seems to take satisfaction to the idea of Republicans losing when he's not on the ballot. Which seems on brand. He also expects to be impeached again if Republicans lose control of

Congress. Can you explain that in difference Jonathan? Well first it's not completely black and white.

It's not something he doesn't care at all about the midterms. It's just that he cares about them far less A than he did in the first term. B than his advisors. What would hope? You know that they would hope that he would be more exercised about domestic political concerns and he's just not.

“Things could change but I think you Donald Trump's mind the way he's behaving right now.”

He's not ever going to run for office again. He's constantly talking about, you know, should be JD, should be Marco, you know, what have you. And he's in what he would talk about as describe I think as legacy mode but a very specific type of legacy, you know, putting his stamp on Washington. He spends an inordinate amount of time thinking about architecture and building monuments to himself renaming institutions essentially branding himself indelibly on Washington.

And also on reshaping parts of the world. I think one of the great appeals of the Iran

situation was that he could be the first president in 47 years to finally deal with this problem.

It's what can get me in the history books. So I think that's part of it as well. Maggie you've also said you're not sure Trump wants a successor and just a few weeks ago he again floated the idea of running for a third term. Is he serious about that or is he just trying to drive

Trump has Robert Murdock about both of them and they're in the room. Talk about that moment. Sure, let me let me work let me work backwards. So from that that was it we have this scene in the book and it was it was a pretty remarkable moment. Yes, Trump likes trolling people. We have no reason to believe in our reporting that Marco Rubio is running for president. You know maybe that will change. You can scale up fairly fast. But JD bands in all of our reporting is the is the front

runner at the moment. But Trump's not going to make it easy for him. And to that point, you know, Trump has Murdock to the White House for dinner in October of last year. While Trump is suing Murdock over some of the Epstein coverage and then Wall Street Journal at the time. Very big group in the blue room at the White House and JD bands and who should answer there, Marco Rubio is there along with a bunch of other people. And Trump starts engaging Murdock,

you know what do you think of JD? And Murdock says well JD has the potential to be great.

“And or good. I don't remember the exact which one was a good or great. Great. I think. Yeah.”

Whatever. I think it was anyway. So and then JD bands who knows that Murdock did everything he could to stop Trump, you know, and which in succeed from making bands that the EP in 2024 is nominee. Oh, thanks. Thanks a lot, Rubio. And then Trump says, you know, well, what about Marco? And Murdock just isolated says cool league, you know, Marco is brilliant. And it was uncomfortable.

And it was a pretty incredible scene just to do this in front of Ben in front of this group of

people. I, you know, and there have been other moments like that where Trump has has made a size or we, we write in the book about how Trump was talking about his, his building of the Oval Office and someone asked him what happens when the next person who succeeds and takes it all down and Trump says Cubans love gold. JD dances not Cuban. So, so Trump, you know, this was misinterpreted when I said it somewhere that, you know, he doesn't what he wants is to be the

the last big sort of leader among Republicans and among the manga movement doesn't mean that he doesn't actually want another president to take over the country. But with the 2028 stuff, it, you know, he just doesn't like other people. He doesn't like seeing the stage. And so the second that he, annoyed someone, that person is going to start the hourglass on Trump, a number one, depending on how he does it and what it looks like to find number one, number two, these things

often start out as trolls with Trump and then they check on a life of their own, like the 2028 thing. Now, it is a really hard to see a world where he could run again. But that said, there's no world

“where he is leaving the stage even if he leaves the light out. And so I think that becomes its own”

complication in various ways going forward. I mean, this was like, it just, I keep thinking about the people who keep talking about this. I keep wondering if they lived through the same 2021

that I did where Joe Biden kept saying the former guy, as if that was going to make Trump never

appear again. He is the most consequential president, certainly of my lifetime, certainly Jonathan's lifetime, you know, to Hanson how long we live, maybe it'll remain that way, but he's not just going away. No, that is very true. So he doesn't really want and it's interesting, John, it's Vance who's been including in your book voicing skepticism about Trump's impulses, that he's the one that seems most not on the same page. Where, how do you look at what he'll do?

Jady Vance is actually when it comes to most of Trump's agenda, we're completely on board if not more aggressive on some issues like immigration. I mean, we have a scene in the book where only a few days after the killing of Alex Prattie in Minnesota, Jady Vance walks into the Chief of Staff's office in the meeting and it's agitating for them to invoke the insurrection act to suppress the left wing protests in Minnesota. So it's not like Vance is, you know, against a bunch of Trump's agenda,

where he was really vocal, what two issues, Epstein and Iran. And the interesting thing about Iran

“was, which I think was quite revealing, was no one in Trump's inner circle thought this was a good”

idea. The closest maybe Pete Hakes said, but basically everyone else was very skeptical about going into Iran, but no one made a case to Trump against it, vocally except for Vance. And it cost him, it cost him the Trump, it irritated Trump. He didn't want to hear it and it strained their relationship.

So I thought that was kind of interesting because if your Jady, I always looked at Vance through

if Trump says you're my guy, that's it. It's over in terms of the primary. So it was just an interesting that he was willing to risk that at that moment and it showed me that ideologically

“it does run deeper for him on certain issues that it does for Trump. Yeah, absolutely. I think he can't”

stand it just in his history. I think he eventually he won't be able to stand it. Trump is also 80 years old and showing signs of aging as Biden did. But Maggie, you've said that Trump's health is, quote, one of the black box secrets of the administration. Why? I mean, obviously they can't figure out what's going on with Mitch McConnell, he's in a hospital. One would assume we could find out, but why is this? This ability to suppress the information about any president's health? So to your point,

it's not just this for all presidents, you know, have some version of being secretive about their health, not to the same degree by any stretch of the imagination all of them, but he's not alone in

that. Trump has always just been very, very, very secretive about his health going back decades

to when he was running the Trump organization. Why? I don't know. It doesn't, you know, it doesn't mean that there is some dark secret. It's an area that really he doesn't want people going to in part because he sees illness as, as weak. He is constantly worried about getting sick. You know, there was an amazing moment in term one where George Stephanopoulos was doing some hours long project with Trump of just a news recording project. And Mick Mulvaney was in the background. Then the

White House was definitely, and Mulvaney starts coughing. And Trump was like, get out of here. If you're sick, get out of here. And it was all on camera. That's a pretty pervasive attitude. But he, yes, he is 80. He obviously looks older than he used to. He sounds older than he used to. His voice is slower, his, his, his language is less crisp. You know, I can watch the same videos everybody else does from 10 years ago. But we don't know what we don't know. And, you know, he has gone to Walter Reed more often

“with less information being released. I think presidents in general have, you know, a desire”

not to be seen as weak in terms of illness. I am astonished that we don't have this information for any president, including this one who's clearly aged. Yeah. I mean, I think this is true for all public officials. I personally am of the opinion, either party in the Penda presidency, Congress members, anybody, you know, if, if you have a condition that is impairing your ability to serve, that is not in the public's interest, that doesn't mean I think he does, by the way,

Trump's. I'm just saying that this is not something that, um, that any president really is particularly forthcoming with. Last question. One of the big arguments you make in the book is that it was Democrats successes in driving Trump from office in 2020. And there's support of efforts to hold him accountable that made him quote the most consequential and feared president of our life times. In other words, the, it ag demand to, to get, one of the things you say, stay out of prison.

The other is to make money. The third is to have a due over here. For Democrats, what are the

risks that come with aggressively going after Trump again? Should they retake power? Well, I don't think it's really a disputable premise. The point was that if Trump had observed a consecutive second term, it just would be nothing like this term. He was hobbling along at the end of 2020. And if he leaked out a narrow victory in that election, he would have had to deal with all the same stuff Biden did. Covert inflation, you know, the notion that he would have avoided global inflation.

I mean, okay, fine. You can claim that, but it's not really plausible. He would have had to withdraw from Afghanistan, which he was trying to do on a precipitous timeline. So that was the argument. He, instead, he leaves power. The public showers on Biden and Trump gets built up as this almost mythological figure through foreign documents, you know, the assassination attempt, holding up the fist, the blood coming down the face. He became a larger figure. He was enlarged by

all of this. And, and had time during the interactive for his team to really prepare for what they wanted to do, people like Stephen Miller. So I don't think that's disputable. That's just like anyone with any common sense can see that. As for, you know, the future, look, I don't think,

I never want to make, you know, confident declarations. But I, I don't think Donald Trump is

“running for a third term. I don't see any evidence that he is. So I think then the political”

risk is simply just energizing the Republican base, right? And impeachment effort, obviously, energizes the Republican base. We've seen that with Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party.

spoken to people who are, you know, advisors to Trump and people who are supporters of JD Vance,

who've said to me the best possible thing for us in 2028 is if Democrats impeach. It would just be something that we could rally behind. I mean, remember, the Republican Party is very divided. Right now, there's all kinds of fractures. And an impeachment effort would just be a, it would be a

“glue. So, I mean, that's the political analysis. I would agree. Maggie, why don't you finish up?”

I'm sort of the opinion, A, like, I agree with everything Jonathan said just about sort of the unifying factor that it would be. I don't really see how Democrats can have been running on Trump as one of the most dangerous threats in the world and talking about accountability and then not pursue accountability, despite the fact that what Democrats have run into every single time, among other problems in their, in their party,

and with their own messaging and their own actions is, it's an asymmetrical fight. Because Trump will, we write this in the book, his, his shamelessness is his superpower. And so, you know, grand platener for instance, due to eventually drop out of the race.

You really, you're never going to see Trump take a similar, I mean, you're not going to be in

that position again, but you're not going to see a commencement action. But what I will also say, just my personal guess. And again, I, you know, this is useless in all the caveats. If it isn't impeachment, there's going to be something else that Republicans unite behind to, as to why they're galvanized against Democrats. And it will be the same for Democrats against the Republicans. Because this is the, this is the world of political polarization that exists.

So, it's just, it's all tribal and neither aside wants to see the other get ahead. Uh, so no more books, right? No, you're never doing a book. Don't say the word, but terrible questions.

“Yeah, but so much good stuff. And that's why you just enjoyed this one. Well, okay. Well,”

but there's a lot of people speak for Maggie. You ain't getting another one from me.

So I know how that feels. Enjoy this one. This was a unicorn. This was all right. Well, it's an excellent book and congratulations on the success and good luck covering the rest of the administration. Yeah. You're going to stay for the, till the end, right, Maggie? Bit of end. Sure. So, so it's Jonathan. Yeah. You too. All right. Well, we'll look forward to more of your reporting in the times. Thank you so much. Thanks, fabulous. Bye. Thanks for having us.

Today's show was produced by Michelle Aloy, Catherine Millsop, Madeline LaPlanet Doobie, Meghan Bernie, and Kaylin Lynch. Nishat Krua is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks for Rosemary Ho, Dave Shaw, Lissa Soap, and Julia Sharplevine. Our engineers are

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