Jonathan Swan’s Dive into Trump’s Reality

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So get Shopify for God 6, with Shopify nothing stands between your idea and a real business. So go make it one, start your free trial at shopify.com/tws, start your free trial at shopify.com/tws. Everybody, welcome to the weekly show podcast, my name is John Stuart, we are back from our summer hiatus refreshed and ready to tackle it is Wednesday, September 9th, normally

we would tape this on a Tuesday, we would release it on a Wednesday, we had to shift over because obviously Labor Day and some other concerns and events that I have to be a part of and I know tonight and we obviously can't cover it on the podcast today but everybody is going to be tuned into the Republican Trump Appaluse National Committee midterm convention 53 glorious speakers on night one, 53 oh what a delightful items and speakers on, I imagine

a health care affordability with the tabulous, the immigration affordability, oh the Republicans are so on top of it and I can't wait and I really hope Ken Paxson you know it is Texas that Ken Paxson gets and awful lot of time he deserves it, couldn't be a better guy and couldn't be a better representative for the state of Texas and so I am going to be eyes glued on the Republican midterm convention two day Trump Appaluse and in no way well I actually

be just watching football, why would I be watching the Seahawks and Patriots play in a repeat of the Super Bowl when I could see Ken Paxson, the humongcules himself stand on stage as a paragon of morality and good government, motherfuckers, speaking of morality and good government our guest today is just one of the best in the business at holding said government officials to

“account his name is Jonathan Swan, you may remember him as writing the book with Maggie Haberman”

on regime change but he's so much more than he's just one of Australia's finest exports and just a fantastic reporter and I'm delighted to get an opportunity to talk to him so let's just get to it. So we are delighted today we are joined by Jonathan Swan White House reporter the New York Times and co-author of regime change with Maggie Haberman Jonathan Swan welcome. Thanks for having me, John. And I know we so appreciate you being here you've been on this

wildbook tour with regime change, your family's expanding you have a new baby at home as well so we appreciate whatever time you want to stay awake for during. I'll do my best, thank you.

So let's just catch up. I spoke to you when you first came out with regime change since the book

came out what has the response been, not amongst you know readers and journalists, but of insiders, is there anything when you put a book out like that? Is there a sudden rush afterwards

Well there's the president's response and he's written several

angry truth social posts about it, you know everything's fake, maggot haggerman he calls me her flunky and her lightweight assistant, you know, that's fair. You got off easy, man. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Magit Haberman and you're flunky. Yeah, exactly. What's been interesting actually and quite a few people have commented on this is there hasn't actually been any specific denials of any of the scenes in the situation where we're multi-oval offers

“and pretty early on. I think he got a there's sort of been very little talk publicly from”

anyone in the administration about the book and early on the vice president was actually on

making Kelly's podcast and he said he thought that we might have tapes in the situation room and I think that statement kind of to me anyway revealed that there were quite a few of them at the senior level who were probably reticent to make specific denials. We haven't commented one way or the other on that stuff, but we're still today. Today is the day Jonathan Swan announces whether or not the tapes are real. But it's been notable for the lack of denials. I'm sort of

constrained somewhat in, you know, they've been people who've reached out privately about

“different things and particularly with Iran, we've done some reporting since the book came out”

where we have heard from people saying the situation is worse than you understand and in particular we've done some reporting on how this war has depleted America's weapons supplies to a really alarming extent and that reporting has you know become the subject of league investigations and other things. So it's been a very difficult time. I mean some of my colleagues had the FBI show up at their houses for another story. So I would just say generally it's a pretty in terms of the

national security reporting right now. It's a pretty delicate time and we're just trying to make sure that everything we write is completely bulletproof and and button down. How do you do that? What's the process? So if people reach out to you and say this Iran war, you're not getting the whole story and not not to frame it in, you know, these are the Pentagon papers. But what is the process? So just stick with that larger claim, you know, we have a depleted supply of missiles or armaments or

the supply chain is broken because the attacks of that Iran did on our bases in the Middle East

were more damaging than they had, you know, first, how do you go about the process of making those

“claims bulletproof? What's the difference between accountability and actual sort of specific evidence?”

Well, it's difficult for lots of reasons, but one is because during this war information has been kept extremely tight. I mean, central command has been really, really secretive about all kinds of things and they will say, you know, it tips off our enemies if they know how many of add offense interceptors we have. The problem with that argument and we have reported quite a bit on the lack of add offense interceptors and in some cases, gotten quite specific with numbers. The problem with that

is China and Russia have pretty sophisticated ways of surveilling America's weapons supplies, both with human spies and also with electronic surveillance. So it's not like they're in the dark about this. And from our point of view, yes, there are probably things that, you know, shouldn't be published because they might endanger lives, but we we lean pretty heavily on the side of the public has a right to know about the state of the American weapon stockpiles in a war

that Congress had no role in approving that the president went to war without even, you know, any kind of, I mean, under the Constitution, the Congress is supposed to clear war. There was no such thing happened here. I'm sorry. You said the country constitution. I know it's a quite notion, right? We don't declare war anymore. We just have military actions or martial discussion, and that's your notion. It's not a excursion, not a war. So this is actually one area where

You can say, you know, there are X number of patriot interceptors in the European command stocks.

There are X number of Javelins, Tomahawk's, you know, Jackson's, whatever. Is that accounting generally known like Duke? No, it's not. Well, I'm sorry. Now at this point it is largely, frankly, largely because of our reporting and several other news organizations reporting, but the specifics of just how many interceptors we have total and in certain commands, that's still not publicly completely known and, you know, that stuff that we're still working on. What is the cat and mouse

game like for reporters at the Pentagon? So a headset was very clear, you know, they've

“removed so many of the people who were placed at the Pentagon. Does that make it more difficult?”

Is this, you know, you talked about Russian, China have, you know, human intelligence, but also

electronics, surveillance and all kinds of other things. Are you relying on human intelligence? Is it purely based on whether or not someone will be open to giving you that information? Without sort of exposing the keyblower of secrets of how the cookies are made, I am curious how you are able to get specifics of those things. And obviously, you don't want to give away operational details that could in any way place people at harm, but you want the American

public to be aware of whether or not there's a recklessness or what the effects of this has been.

It's not about how the cookies matter. What I'm very sensitive to is protecting sources,

because the people who are giving us this information are taking huge risks.

“And what is the risk that in your mind is what they're doing illegal?”

I really don't want to comment on the legal side of things that we're getting. But let's just say generically, you can go to prison for leaking classified information, okay? And this information is classified. This is not the kind of thing that is known on a kind of military audit. Again, I don't want to say, no, no, I'm just, it's difficult to get an order. The position I mean, the position I mean is, I just don't want to give any legal ammunition to the people who are

already trying to sue us and come after us and, I see, potentially have an espionage case. Let's just say generically, hypothetically speaking, not anything I've reported on, but hypothetically, information about how many weapons America has of certain types is some of the most sensitive and guarded information that we have, particularly how many air defense interceptors we have left that that is very highly sensitive information, very highly sensitive.

Is the information about how we went to war a different category for you than it is the specifics of operational specifics? Definitely. And although, I will say, we've we've done both. I mean, yes. Even though I'm not going to get into whether, like, I'm going to look up and describe some, both categories are areas that we've reported in great detail. The going to war is, you know, conversations in the situation room, what was the president briefed

“on, what were those conversations? And we, I think, did some of the most detailed reporting”

on that march to war and how those decisions were made and what was presented to the president? Right. Is this the kind of information this class of information that Donald Trump might safely keep in a moral logo bathroom? Is that, or maybe a box by a car? You know, Jonathan, have people then talked to you about not just this information, but their their survival of what this Middle East scenario is going to look like in the future. You know,

obviously, they came out a week into it and said, we won. We have utterly obliterated, not just their nuclear program, but their ability to, they don't have a navy, they don't have an army, they don't have an air force, they don't have anything. We've won it. We control the straight, clearly the information you're getting is the antithesis of that. Right. Does that have any accountability in Washington? And I guess this gets at sort of what I wanted to talk to you about,

which is the frustration between great reporting and its consequence. And is it difficult, you know, and maybe I have a kind of hazy nostalgia, and this might have been born of a kind of watergate

the Vietnam war is no longer viable, and the American public, their conscience is shocked, and

the watergate reporting done by Woodward and Percy shocks the nation into accountability. The biggest difference between now and then is the congressional branch has just pieced out. When you have a Congress that is inert, you don't actually have the only accountability mechanism is the courts, and they give the president, how's that going? Exactly, exactly. And they give the president a huge amount of difference in conduct, particularly foreign policy, and national security,

and then the press. And so the one thing I will say is it's pretty clear that the American

“public is very unhappy with this war, and I think that that is to a large extent based on what”

they're reading and seeing and hearing. And a lot of reporters have done very, very good work,

not just New York Times, but other places to get out that information. You know, when President Trump says the Iranian military is completely demolished, decimated, we published a story saying they regain access to 30 out of 33 of their missiles at their cruise missile sites alongside the long straightaway moots. So you're not just saying you're wrong, you're actually saying here is real information, you know, because to me, it's all about my job is about providing information.

You can only act on information. You can't act on a vibe or a feeling, and so

every day I wake up and try to get more information out there in the public sphere. So we've

done a lot of reporting, enormous amount of reporting about this war, and try to inform the public. But the accountability mechanism doesn't really exist. It may, you know, they're made, I'm sure with Democrats take the House, there'll be investigations, and what have you, but I think people are underappreciating just how difficult oversight will be potentially in this administration, and what happens when if the administration essentially refuses to cooperate with Congressional

oversight congressional subpoenas, there isn't a Congress jail. There's no place that Congress doesn't have, right? It's not like a stadium where in the bottom of it there's a dungeon where people that throw rocks get put in, right? So the enforcement mechanism is Congress is, you know, this is really bad, and we're going to refer it to the Justice Department, the Justice Department

“that is run by Donald Trump's personal lawyer, former personal lawyer. Okay, so that's what we're”

dealing with in terms of accountability. I hate the news. I hate what it's doing to me emotionally. I hate that you don't really know where the information is coming from. Sometimes you don't know how it's being manipulated, and it adds to the creeping fog of sadness that grows, but I have to keep up. I have to understand what's going on in the world. And that's why ground news, it's, they've got a website. It's an app.

It lets you compare news coverage across the board to understand how your being zoomed. Do you know what I'm saying? You can see how different news outlets will frame the same story. They've got a blind spot feed so you can challenge yourself about your news consumption. You'll see who owns what news outlet to understand why they're framing the stories the way they are. This is the one,

“this is the one you should get a hold of in light near yourself. Please,”

to get the same unlimited access to the vantage subscription, go to groundnews.com/sture and subscribe to get 40% off. discount only available for a limited time. That's groundnews.com/sture or scan the QR code on screen. I hate to frame it in this way, but it's sort of the difference between information and evidence. The information is just sort of a broad base. This is what's going on. But some of it is evidence of malfeasance or of a secretive nature or misleading

and so much of the information that you put out there could also qualify as evidence. And how do you look at the two of those as you're going through? Is there a goal in your mind of, okay, they're saying this and this and this have been depleted and otherwise. And you're saying but the information we have and when you discover the discrepancy, is that information now evidence?

of illegal proceeding. I mean, one thing that has been really notable about this term is just

how influential the Supreme Court's 2024 immunity ruling was. You felt that you feel the difference to that. Oh, I think you just got nauseous. Oh my gosh, beyond. So indeed, term one, covering Trump, it was, I kind of overstate this. I'm not saying he changed that much, you know, in terms of his deep character or anything like that, but it's unrecognizable. I mean, they were certainly in the White House Council's office, quite cautious. I mean, people in the White

House administration would prohibit it from talking to the DOJ. There was like a real attempt to enforce

“some kind of a, a firewall. That's why Trump kept having to do these sort of talk to this person.”

Can you please whisper in Jeff Sessions's ear? You know, that's all being obliterated. You felt there was real caution there. Who was, can you recall who were the White House Council people then? I know Sessions was the early. Don't began. Don't began. Pat Cipaloney. And they're gone. Oh, beyond gone. But but it's not really just about the story about the White House Council. It's really just about Trump. I mean, he feels, he feels that no one can touch him.

And understandably so. I mean, we had reporting in our book that he's been saying privately, that he's going to pardon anyone who came within 200 feet of the overlossers. He literally said that. And he says it in this sort of joking way, but you kind of know it's not a joke,

because certainly the way he was at the end of the first administration. I mean,

I spoke to a senior official who was working in the first administration and they're actually kind of a clean sort of, uh, by the book type person. And they were sitting with Trump and Trump's like, "Do you want a pardon?" And they were like, "What? What? What? What was they want a pardon for?" But that was at the end of the first term. And now you've seen how the pardon system has evolved. So how would I even qualify? I'll give another example that just shows how different it is and how

much freer he feels to act. So so, so term one, Trump used to say almost kind of yearningly. I say, you know, we talk about drugs. He'd say, you know, there's no drug problem in China, because she just kills them. She just kills them. He just kills the drug deals. And because there's no problem in the Philippines, because you know, to tell you, he just kills them. That's right. Well, this term, what happened? Donald Trump said, I am going to determine myself that people in fishing

boats who are trafficking cocaine, maybe we actually don't necessarily know that all of them were, but you know, let's just take their word for it. Let's take their word for it that these people are all trafficking cocaine on fishing boats. Usually that's a law enforcement problem. You know, the Coast Guard interdix them, you know, arrested, you know, there's a there's a proceeding. There's due process. Trump said, we'll just kill them. We're just going to call them enemy combatants,

describe this as essentially a war and kill them. And there's no appeal process when your body is scattered at the bottom of an ocean after being, you know, blown up. There's no appeal process. You can't put your limbs back together and go and say, hey, actually, you know,

“this one, so that's what's happening. And they didn't really even bother to justify it legally.”

I mean, they have lawyers in one of the biggest things that Stephen Miller and others did between term one and term two was change the types of lawyers that they start started administration. More aggressive lawyers, lawyers who are willing to push the envelope, lawyers who are willing to get to yes and not put up a no. So their internal legal opinion basically green lit this whole operation of blowing up boats in term one. You had people like Mark Esper, the defense secretary,

now they're saying absolutely not. This would have never have flowed in term one. It's interesting that they still feel the need to even make a kind of theatrical move towards justification legally. But they didn't really join. It was like, they didn't even publicize it. They think it's like they put out said, here's our legal, here's the framework around it.

Here's what it was like, you know, it was basically take our word for it. This is legal.

They didn't sort of go to great lengths to make a legal justification to the public. Do you think this is the learned effect of, and I don't want to blame everything on January 6,

“but January 6 strike minutes. And January 6 was the culmination of a strategy. People I think”

like to point to that day is boy, that was just a day that got out of hand in chaotic. But I thought

He loses his first idea is, well, I'll just call up the states that I lost and say, can you flip those votes, please, because, you know, I actually won. And when that didn't work, he sort of started the process of, you know, then I'll go after the people that certify the election. So I'll call the Republicans in Michigan, or Wisconsin, and I'll say, don't certify it. And when that didn't work, he went to the next stage. But at each stage,

“there were meetings, and he was meeting with a team going, what else can we do?”

And I always assume that what ultimately came to him was, they said, "You're, this is your

final chance." If they certify this in the Congress, it's over. So if Mike Pence doesn't somehow, you know, do the right thing and stand up and not certify it. That's your last chance. You're only other chances to disrupt the proceeding, and maybe then that thing gets kicked into the House of Representatives, and maybe then they could, they could just decide because we have the advantage there that you're the president. Is that where he learned? Because there were so many

lawyers that said, you know, including Bill Barr, that's nonsense. You lost, you can't do this.

He lawyer shocked. He ended up with people like Sidney, whatever name was in Eastman, and all

those people that would do that bidding. And is that when he realized, oh, I don't need to change the law. I just need to change the people who will help me justify what I want to do. Yeah, the only part of that that I don't have any supporting reporting for is I don't think that they expected the riot at the Capitol. I really don't expect that part of it. But everything up until that point, yeah, I really don't think that I think that surprise them came as a real surprise.

But everything up until that point was an effort to use every lever to overturn the election. Right. And what happened was, it's not like he had a bunch of lawyers working for him that were squishes as they would say, well, you know, these were loyalists. These were hardcore truck people. But they said, no, this is, we don't have it. We don't have it. Which is a lawyer shop in the

“way. Exactly. Somebody wants people would doctor shop. That's exactly right. And so that's how you get”

illegal team that comprised, you know, city power, Rudy Giuliani and the others. And so I think that that is, that is something that he was Trump would already do that in other areas. So when he wouldn't get the answer, he wanted from his military generals or whatever. He was, you know, going out and talking to others that he might see on Fox or other places. I just think what happened was this term round he came back with a very clear determination that I'm not even going to have that

first step. I'm just looking to have people around me who were doing that type of pushback. And so

you just clear out that first step and start with with the second step. And that's basically well around. And it's so interesting because term one was considered such an aberration from traditional American presidencies that the idea that term two is almost unrecognizable even to term one, which at the time we thought my God, this is utterly pushing the bounds of executive power and of the way that, you know, the executive functions as opposed to congressional oversight,

we thought that was an aberration. I mean, term one looks like the Eisenhower administration compared to what we're dealing with now. That's that's just makes me sad. But then, but and and term one, though, was all leaks. What would you say that's like term one, people just came to you. How do you so now? What is it all deep throat in a garage? Like,

“how does it work now for you now that they have removed so many of the avenues of oversight?”

How does anything? And and maybe do they get to the point where that information, they don't believe it hurts them anyway. Do they not even care? No, I think they care. They still care. He still, he certainly does. Um, term one, the leaks will largely a product of fighting of people, factual warfare. People trying to destroy each other. Jared Kushner's trying to destroy Steve. Steve Bannon trying to destroy Jack Jarrow Kushner, etc, etc. And, you know,

the leaking came about. The reason you've seen so much less inside the room reporting for this administration is because it's just much harder. Just much, much, much harder. And they don't have those factions anymore. There are not people vying for it. It's much more subtle. It's not really factions. Sometimes I'll see commentary that suggests that there's sort of these very bright lights. It's not really the way it works. It's a team that, yes, there are little nuances

here and there, but they're basically all people who believe in Trump, who want to work for him,

who want to implement what he has to do. You know, are not pushing back and trying to stop him. I mean, in the first term, you would routinely, we would talk to, for those of us covering him, talk to very senior officials who fought the Donald Trump was dangerous and saw their job as protecting the country in the world from Donald Trump. That's really what they would say explicitly. They felt they were there as kind of a fire wall. 100% 100%. There's no one at a meaningful

senior level who believes that in this administration. Zero. But at what point Jonathan does reality

“begin to erode that fantasy or that facade, you know, JD Vance who I think is a sheer creation”

of ambition. I don't believe there's anything, you know, he has this ideas or whatever, but I think

he is all strategy, but they say like all hat no cattle, but he's all strategy, no principle. So he sits in the oval office or stands as Donald Trump sits and says, these other presidents got us involved in these wars because they're stupid, but Donald Trump is smart. So and he was talking about Iran, you know, we're in this war with Iran, but it won't turn badly because Donald Trump is smart. Well, now that it's turned badly, did they deny that it's turned? They can't,

they can't truly believe that it's going well. So at what point does reality erode their

belief in his powers of even basic competence? Well, Vance is probably a bad example because he was

actually the single person at that senior level, the inner circle who actually argued against the war in the meetings with Trump and it cost him irritated, it really trumped not want to hear it and we've spoken to people who talked to Trump at the time he was complaining about about that. So Vance actually made a case against the war before the war. But publicly what he made the case or was, it won't go badly because this guy's so smart. Right. And that's just, I mean, you know,

you know. But my point is, yes, if their loyalists who believe in Donald Trump, where is the evidence for their belief other than he's great at becoming president and shitty at being president? Well, it's hard to know what a lot of them actually think, right? Because, you know, I don't want to sort of go beyond what I have in terms of reporting. It's sometimes really hard

“to untangle, you know, personal ambition, pragmatism, cynicism, what you need to do to survive”

the stories you tell yourself, all that stuff. It's very hard to untangle and I'm sure it's much more nuanced than, you know, I mean, there's a spectrum, right? Like, not everyone is Natalie Harp, you know. So, so there's probably, you know, I think they're all just writing the love letters. No, they're not. And, you know, we had reporting in the book for example, just to give you an example, when Trump starts a trade war with the whole world, you know, Scott Besant understands bond markets.

He could see what was happening in the bond markets and him and Howard Lutnik, even Howard Lutnik, who has, yeah, who's, you know, said all kinds of flattering things about Donald Trump. Both of them privately realized this could really go wrong. This could really go off the edge and they made a case to pull back on the tariffs and Trump did. He put a pause on tariffs for

“just about every country, I think, except for China. So there are moments of that. And so,”

if it was just total blind, Natalie Harp level, adoration, you wouldn't have an episode like that. You wouldn't even see it, but they're, so they're still reacting at some level to the reality based community. Yeah, absolutely. And they're making changes. What form might that take when it comes to the Iran war or is that such a clusterfuck at this point? There's almost, they don't have

one of the, by the way, the crying that you hear in the background happens in all of my interviews.

It's not true. Do you actually hear it? Oh, I can hear it. Yeah. Oh, I'm so, John, I'm so attuned. Like, I immediately want to go like, oh, are you like, once you have kids? Oh, that's bad. Just give me one say, one say. Let's go to commercial. Oh, you know, I like to sleep because I'm old, but you know, when you're old, where you sleep matters more than most things, you'd be surprised when I was younger. I could

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Now, that's a baby cry. That's not a six year old. That's not a four year old. It's a three week old. Through a gold. Can I tell you something, man? I like my wife. So I would come home from work. And I remember I'd be like, you know, I had such a tough day. And I'm like, my wife just look at me, like, I'm going to throw you off the roof. I'm going to punch you in the face. And I can remember one day I was like, you go out. I'll take care. And I'll be fine. He cried like that.

Non stop the whole time she was gone. She comes back. I'm in the bathroom. Door closed with a hair

“dryer on because because I think that she had told me like weirdly, like, if you turn on the hair”

dryer, he'll stop crying. I'm sweating. I'm crying. I'm holding a hair dryer like it's a weapon. And she just all I said were like, you go relax. She literally opens the door and is like, I was gone for an hour. Oh, shit. I very much have had not exactly the hairdryer, but it's like you get a new appreciation for them, right? For for your wife. It's a dear God. It's it's someone. It is something. Sorry. The question was about Iran and trade. So yes, I think one of the biggest

problems that American presence tend to have and Trump has has to the extreme is the misconception that you can control events anywhere. That you have the power to control events everywhere. And Trump seemed to believe at an almost cellular level that and I don't know if it was the power

“of positive thinking or whatever, but before I think that, I mean, he is Norman Vincent Peel guy.”

Like, yes, that is he was raised in the church of Norman, but like that is his totally tough, you know, load star. He believed before the war despite everything he'd been briefed that the Iranian regime would collapse really quickly. And when that is your operating assumption, when that is infused through everything, considerations like the straight-of-hole moves, stockpiles, they all are not considerations, because if the premises this regime is going to collapse

like that, these problems don't end up happening. So when that didn't happen, you saw this,

I mean, Trump, you know, we have reporting that early on, first few weeks of the war,

Trump almost couldn't fathom that the Iranians were still fighting, but they still had fight left in them. And he was asking, you know, General Kane, the Chairman of the Joint Chief South

they were still doing this. He did not believe that they were going to be as resilient as they

ended up being. And so we saw him pivot to diplomacy by April. And obviously it does not go on well at all. They had the memorandum understanding that they unveiled in June, which was hailed as the end of the war, the 60-day deadline expired in August. When our last night was heavy strikes, you know, on a Jordanian, the US-based in Jordan, and, you know, back and forth, further apart, than they were, the two sides with the Emirates. So, you know, Trump has been wildly

flailing from kinetic action to diplomacy, coercion, and does not have anything that you could describe as a strategy here. So that's where we're at right now. You, and again, and I so

“appreciate you do something that I think very few other journalists do, which is you refuse to speculate”

beyond the measure of your knowledge, which I think is admirable, and it's the antithesis of cable news television, which is just 24 hours of like, what do you think it means? And people just go out over their seas. In your experience, though, with Trump, when reality punctures that power of positive thinking, have you ever seen him, you know, you've been involved in two really

interesting interviews with him. The first one I think was 2018, where you were talking about

birthright citizenship. And he mentioned, you know, we're the only country in the world that has birthright citizenship. And you didn't say, that's not true. And people really went after you on that. It was terrible batting to me. Yeah. Well, and you came out and said by, you know, my bad. 2020 was the opposite. You sat down with him about COVID, and he was making statements, and you

“steadfast, and he brought up something, and I think it was about, what was it? The death rate,”

yeah. And, and you were saying, well, that's not how it's calculated. It's, it's per capita,

and we're doing, you know, we're not doing great. We're doing badly. And people hail that.

Do you notice a difference when you are in front of him? And you provide him with irrefutable evidence of reality? How does he absorb that? Does he absorb it? Do you, did you find that that made inroads into his future, you know, framing of issues? How does he absorb reality? I can't believe we're asking this question about the president of the United States. How does he deal with reality? Because his world is so distorted? So I think there are, there are realities

that are just too intrusive to ignore. So things like the bond markets, the price of gas when American service members die. And even then he'll still try to spin it publicly. But it's pretty clear from his actions since April that reality has intruded. Because he's changed course. He's, he's not, you know, he hasn't continued to escalate this war. He's trying whatever he can do to get out of this war. It's just not working. Iran has a vote in that. Iran is extending the

pain, it feels like they have leverage. But it wouldn't be true to say that Donald Trump was oblivious

“to reality. Because why then would you authorize your team to go and negotiate a settlement?”

You don't do that if you genuinely think you're winning. You don't say, oh, Vance, Kushner, Whitkoff, go and get me a deal to get out of this war. If you think you're crushing it and they're totally decimated, you've won. Like, you don't do that. So by his own actions, it's clear. Even if he is not willing to admit it publicly, that he acknowledges some degree of reality in this war. And so that the, you know, because he does seem to have his, what he falls back on. Because I'll say,

like in terms of gas prices, he'll just come out and say, right, they're actually not very high. Sure. I actually thought they were going to be much worse. He'll send best and out to say, oh, no, this is nothing. It'll be gone. They'll be down to $2. It's gone. When it comes to, you know, the casualties of war, Howard Lutnick will literally say, hey, we did this without anybody dying. Trump will say, oh, my God, look how much better we're doing than Vietnam,

like he'll bring up. They'll still spin it. But you're saying he is viscerally aware that

do they not see now that his competence was a facade, that he's a reckless and, and capricious individual, not this strategic, uh, five-level chess Jedi. Um, I don't know. Is this the short answer? No one has sat down with me and said, you know,

“I thought he was a Jedi master. And now I think he's, you know, completely incompetent.”

Right. I think he's kind of a bully. I also think that probably for a lot of them, it wasn't that they thought he was a 5D chess master. It was that it was something slightly different, which is he's an instinct player and his instincts are often right. I see now has that changed, may well have, but I don't have reporting to support it. How have you changed in dealing with him? You know, those experiences that you had in 2018 and then 2020? What did it tell you

about? Look, reporters can't have specific evidence at the level to refute on everything. It's just not possible. But are there things that you learned about dealing with him or

dealing with his administration in a way that helps? I always said, Trump has always stopped

“usually when it's not the Supreme Court by the legal system because the legal system has”

evidentory standards. Anybody can go on CNN and just say whatever the fuck they want. But there are evidentory standards and it's why they do so badly in court most of the time. So it was two things. One was just learning, frankly learning and studying how to do an interview. The first time I interviewed him is the first interview I've ever done on television on camera, was with the President of the United States. That 2018 interview? Yes. Your first interview was

with the President on camera. Yes. Yes. What? You would think it would be good to do. Yeah, it's crazy. He'd be nice if I had done like a mayor or a governor or something. No, Axios starts. No, it was insane. Start out with a mayor. You got to start out with a controller and then move your way. Yeah, a controller or a school counselor, a school board person. Oh, Jonathan, that's amazing. No, it was totally fucked. And I faced, it was the worst. I faced planted and on the biggest stage,

you could imagine. I'd go a little easier on yourself that. You didn't face plan. You did what

most reporters have always done with him, which is you didn't realize he was going to be a fire

hose of nonsense. Well, I guess shame on me for that. No, no, sincerely. I mean, you know, so I'd been on television, been on panels and whatever you had never, so Axios, we launched his HBO show and that was my first time I'd ever interviewed someone. Camera, Donald Trump. That was a disaster. So I do that interview and it's a really bad interview and I get completely shredded and everyone, you know, because every element of it gets analyzed, because it's understands the

present of United States. It's about whatever. It's a huge opportunity. And the ecosystem is you aggregate moments and you press them out over every sort of internet outlet or social media outlet.

“That's how things work. Right. And so after that interview, I made a study of interviewing.”

I like that. I kind of created my own sort of self-curriculum in a sense. I went back and kind of said, well, who's done this really well over the years? And you probably remember Ariana

Falachi. She was incredible. She's my hero. I mean, before she went kind of crazy in the last decade

of her life. So I don't associate myself. Well, I'll do. We all do. So her last 15 years, where she just went off the bed. But between about 1960 and 1980, she was this fearless, brilliant, well-prepared interviewer. And I have a book of her interviews, a collection. What did you think was instructive about her? Because she was fearless. Fearless. I mean, Henry Kissinger said it was the most disastrous interview he ever did.

Really? Um, yes. She got him to admit that Vietnam was a useless war during the war, during the war. Okay? And what she did, I mean, this is moment in the interview with Kissinger. There's stuff that she did that you and I couldn't do. But she said, you know, I'm paraphrasing. But it was like, you know, Henry, Henry, women find you so attractive. Why do you think it is people find you so attractive? And he said, oh, do you have a theory? He said,

you know, I have a theory. But I'm not going to tell you. I'll come on. Come on. And you're sort of

I'll tell you. You know, in the American mythology, we love the cowboy who rides into town on the

horse on his own. He doesn't even have a weapon. Basically, that's me. And he just, he just humiliated

himself. And then, and she, she had unhorsed him so much so to speak that he then start saying, you know, really stupid things. So what I learned from reading her interviews and studying her, and the other one I studied a lot, there's two others, Mike Wallace, 60 minutes interviews, and also Andrew Neil and the UK, who's just at his best. So detailed. He's so good. Yes. When he's on, like, like, he'll read the, the bill, the legislation he'll know the budget. He'll know every detail.

But what I, what I love about them, yeah, they don't do it. When people know that sometimes the tendency is to just demonstrate your specific knowledge over and over again. And I fall into that trap sometimes where you try to do that. Right. Those guys prepared. But then they allowed. They were very present. I'm very present. So present, and it would it never felt like they were performing their knowledge. I thought. So the thing I, again, I spent so much time on this sort of insane,

and watching tape of people, so knowing what are their progress? What are their program dances,

“what are their moves? And so because I think in an interview, you know, I think about it in terms”

of lines of questioning, and you only really get to the interesting stuff on the third or fourth

follow-up question. It's never the first. The first answer is always glib. It's always rehearsed.

The second one's a little more interesting. The third one and the fourth one is when you really unhorses them and get to something close to interesting or the truth. And what I found over time, as I got better at it, was the preparation liberates you. It's exactly what you just said. If you are so well prepared, Mike Wallace used to call it the chemistry of confidentiality. It was this moment at its best where you're sitting down with an interview subject. This is

not true of Trump, but most interview subjects. And they realize you've done your homework. And it's a show of respect, really. You've really done your work. You know the subject, and you're not going to put up with the old bullshit. Right. And there's a moment where they say, you know what? The lights are all here. Fuck it. We're just going to have a conversation. Like, I'm not going to fit. And so that's the kind of holy grail. But what I find in even like

the most adversarial accountability interviews is the preparation liberates you to put the notes aside and just listen and just listen to what they're saying. And if they say something really interesting, follow that path. Don't go back to the script. Follow that path to wherever it goes.

“And have the confidence to do that. And that's what that Trump interview was because”

we've spent like 25 minutes on COVID. I was only a lot at a 30 minute interview. I knew I could extend him out because his staff wouldn't have the balls to come into view. But I was kind of getting a bit anxious because I had other stuff I wanted to ask him about. And I could have said, he pulled out these papers that he had. And I could have said, no, sir, moving on to the next question. But I was like, no, I'm going to take a look at these papers. What's on them?

Right. And that was the most revealing and interesting moment in the whole interview because

he was trying to say, basically, they were winning at death. And based on the most

a kind of preposterous conception of COVID, um, death statistics. So, um, yeah. I mean,

“but were you surprised because I remember that interview astonishing people. And it astonished”

people because I mean, you might look at it as, well, that was in that moment. And it was the natural thing, the curiosity of a journalist to be in the moment. People are not accustomed to journalists who are not just going down their list of the 10 subjects, allowing the answer, and then just going to the next thing. And I'm surprised that what you did wasn't then modeled, given how, you know, the incentive structure for journalists is you're also trying to make a name for yourself.

Why do you think that didn't then become the norm? I don't know. Is it too hard to do? Are they trying to just produce for 24 hours? Is it too hard to pin them down like that? They're on, firstly, he doesn't, he has the perception of ubiquity because he's sort of ever,

friendly interviews. Or easily manipulated in a, you know, it's so easy to conduct a room.

“Like the way else. That's what it means. I mean, that's the easiest thing in the world.”

Those pairs get, I mean, like, you know, you shout a question, you shout at you. You don't have even have a mic, a microphone, I mean, it's impossible. And you know, it's not impossible. You can, you know, ask a tough question and what have you been doing? No, but you can't do a serious interrogator. You know, so easy to move past. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's it. That, I mean, it is so stacked in his, any politicians favor in that kind of a setting.

And that's why when they refer to that as transparency or accessibility, you just think, well,

that's a lie. That's just his ability to dominate a theater of his choice. That's a home game. And he makes the rules. And he puts that, that's not transparency and it's not accountability. It's a performance that he gets to put on to satisfy himself. Yeah. I mean, yes, obviously, I'll still, you know, again, I haven't, I haven't been, I haven't

“been in one of these for a very long time, more than a year, actually, I think, since the last time”

I've had a chance to do one of them. But I'll take it over nothing, but for sure, it's not meaningful transparency. Everybody, you know, obviously it's a podcast. So like, you got to do ads. That's because just kind of the way the world works. But every now and again, a company comes along and you're like, oh, shit, I use those. Hey, hey, you actually go like, oh, yeah, those are great. And that's

where we're at now, bomb us. Bomb us great. I use those. And not just like, not in, in the sense of like, oh, socks. Yeah. I mean, everybody uses those. I'm not a delicate flower. I'm not, I'm not one of those bold, doxider, no sock dudes that we all read about in the 80s, bonfire of the vanities and such, none of that. No, I wear the socks for comfort, but the socks I wear are bomb us. They're phenomenal socks. Now they got t-shirts and underwear to what start with the

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Do it now, you fucks. Did you ever see, you know, they're set you brought up Mike Wallace. I'm curious. If you ever saw it because there was an interview that Mike Wallace did with Roy Cone and Roy Cone being the lawyer that kind of taught Donald Trump kind of the the basic steps of ambition and power and corruption. You don't hire Roy Cone to be your lawyer because you want him to make sure you're doing everything by the book is a manipulative dangerous guy. It was

Joe McCarthy's lawyer, you know, on the House and American activities to me, bad person. Mike Wallace does an interview with Roy Cone and it gets back to sort of what we talked about the power positive thinking and reality distortion. Roy Cone at the time is dying of AIDS. And I urge you to go look this up because it is a masterclass not just in what you're talking

“about as a journalist, but in a subject that is, I think quintessential to understanding”

the way Trump operates. So he says to Roy Cone, you know, there are reports, you know, that you are a homosexual. Well, that's no, that's absolutely no. Oh, you say, okay. So you know what I'm talking about. Yeah, yeah. Your dying of AIDS, a homosexual, not a homosexual, not dying of AIDS have, you know, you're welcome to talk to my doctors like Wallace says, can I? Because I talked to your doctors and they said I couldn't talk to them unless you said it was okay. Are you saying it's okay?

You know, they go through this whole dance. What's so interesting about it is they both know

respectfully. Roy Cone is such a fabulous, fabulous. He's such a great liar and watching him. And that gets to the question I was talking about earlier is does he believe this or is he just so accustomed to the show? And what happens a few months are he dies of AIDS. And and I think

ultimately came out and said, yeah, I'm gay. And but I thought, you know, is that what it's like

when you're faced with someone who just won't give up the game of reality in front of you? I, I think it's so hard to know sometimes what he actually believes. I'll give you one example where he clearly believed the lie. Terry Moran used to be a ABC was his new Trump and he asked him about

“a brago Garcia. And that's how to. And Trump brings up this MS 13 tattoo, which he posted.”

Yes. It was photoshopped. Yes. But Trump afterwards after the interview was asking people, we need to, you know, this is real. Basically, get me the photos. You know, so he, he, he sincerely

believed that this tattoo and was insisting that it was real. But other times he will say something

like we have all the weapons we need for a run. Right. He knows he's been very well briefed on the weapons constraints. And if he actually believed everything he's saying about the war, he would not be acting like he wouldn't have authorized his team to try to get out of the war. Right. They would have pressed ahead for regime change. Law knows what else they would have done

“kinetically. You know, he pulled back from major operations that they had planned that, you know,”

huge additional bombing campaigns and things that he said. So clearly he knows that they have

leverage. Because if he, if he believed everything he said, he wouldn't have pulled back. He

would have gone ahead, pressed the advantage and taken over the country. It's so interesting, though, that you're saying this because it is, it seems like there's two information streams. There's sort of, you know, he's getting updates on the war and things like that and he's realizing like, so have they given up? Because he can't fake that boats aren't going through the straight or more moves or are going through it. Like, you just can't fake that sort of thing.

“But things like the MS 13 tattoo on his fist, my guess is, and again, don't know for sure and”

you can correct me or say, well, that's your speculation is people feed him a lot of information that they think he wants to see. That's the Natalie Harp, the human printer. Sir, your poll numbers are great. Here's, I found this story that says 97% of Republicans and they give that to him. And so part of the reality distortion field is created in his mind, but part of it is reinforced. Definitely. By a lot of people around him who he goes, is that guy MS 13? Let's say he is curious

about it. Absolutely, sir. Let me show you this and they do that up to show him like that's really and so he thinks that picture is real. And that is actually what he's going on like when you got him on the numbers. My guess is they feed him that shit. He doesn't look at it that carefully and say to him, see how well we're doing. Yeah. And it's almost like they're feeding him a distorted world as well. It's both or he'll solicit it. That's right. You know, he goes out, you know,

put me together a graph that shows we're doing why. I mean what one dynamic is Bill Pulti, who was the head of the house, the real estate guy, yeah. Yeah, real estate guy, but had no experience in intelligence and was briefly the acting director of national intelligence. But he goes to Trump's golf clubs and he brings these foam boards and it's like they often end up being Trump will truth it. A lot of the stuff you see on his

truth social on the weekends. That's right. In particular, it is sort of Bill Pulti's often his handy work. And so you have people like him and Natalie Harp who are feeding him what he wants to see. It's very much both ways. He solicits. He gets it and then he has obviously, you know, his intelligence

but it's not, you know, wacky stuff from Gateway Punder. It's, you know, it's right. And they are

and they make little presents. It's sort of like in the way my daughter got us to get her a hamster. Like they make little presentations with a couple of slides that are easily, you know, well digested

“and that's how they get their way with him. He loves a little present. Everything is shark tank”

to this president, I think, to some extent. Very, very visual. You often see these kind of dramatic, you know, images of, he loves looking at the, you know, the, the big naval vessels and like that loves to have his name on it. Where do you think, is there a future, you know,

for the fact that you talked about, I studied all these interviews. I learned how to do them

better. I walked in there. That's an incredibly competent and thoughtful way to go about, in a world that is moving away. I feel like you're artisinal. You're like, you're, you're like, one of those shops where like you go in and a guy is still making chairs by hand and he's got a little leave and he's like, look, and they're like, yeah, but I just went to China and got 800 of them for $2. The type, we are now in a world of media consolidation. We are now in a world

where it's incentivized to wick hitting vitriolic hostile bits. Good journalism has to exist in that world. Can it compete? How does it, what are the incentives that you would like to see change or or stay the same? How does this artisinal methodology survive in a new world of Twitter and

“Instagram and influencers and media consolidation? How do you break through?”

On the interviewing on camera, which is a very specific thing. It is an aus and it takes a long time to work on it and I still feel like I was only 5% of what I wanted to do with that. You know, we had the HBO show for three years. We won the Emmy for that interview and then the HBO canceled the show almost two weeks after the, after the Emmy. Sure. Why, why wouldn't the cancel an Emmy winning journalism show? So, so I don't know, obviously I don't know. They're

recent. I do know that we were doing very controversial interviews. You know, we interviewed Imran Khan in Pakistan and and I pressed him on China's treatment of the wiggers and that caused a huge amount. I don't know what happened internally. I'm not saying it. I have any insight into it. Like, I can tell you. Certainly, we were doing shows that we're getting a lot of public debate and they were highly political and what have you and I gather that a lot of these

streaming things just don't want to be in the news business. I mean, it happened to you, obviously, with Apple, right? That's right. Yeah. So, and by the way, explicitly so, I mean, I was in the rooms where they said, and you know what was so interesting? What really seems to have affected these companies, it's not necessarily even FCC, Ron to Santa, Sueing Disney. When do you remember when Disney came up and they took a stand on don't say him suing them and actually going

after their sovereignty in Orlando? That was brought up to me specifically when it came to, they did not want politicians interviewed on the show for fear that those types of repercussions might occur. And then there were obviously other very touchy political things that, you know, they came and we got a lot of pushback on what you realize is their interest diverges from your interest. Your interest is to get the most interesting interviews that are the most incisive,

that are the most revealing, that get to litigate the boundaries of our reality and the people,

the powerful people that control that reality. Their interest is selling phones,

mergers and acquisitions. You can only hurt them. You can't help them.

“I think one reason, so I think that's all true. And this is, I'm almost reticent to say this”

because it just sounds like I'm promoting promotional, but I'm not, it's sincerely what I think.

down the New York Times, but he actually doesn't have, we don't need, we don't depend on the government for licenses, we don't depend on the government for money, we're run by a family, the source focus, this is their only thing. They're not in all these other industries. The New York Times is everything for them and they're willing to invest and support it and I'm all for independent

“media. I think it's, it's wonderful. I'm all for it flourishing, but for the, sort of,”

national security type of stories in particular, man, we need that infrastructure, the legal infrastructure, the digital information security and also having knowing that the ultimate power the New York Times will support us. You know, we're Trump suing the paper and all these sort of things, they're going to their houses and they're giving them subpoenas. Right. And you know,

I'll just say you've never seen AG sorts burger, give a donation to Donald Trump, go and suck up to

him, it doesn't happen, doesn't take private off the records with him, nothing, nothing. So to me, that that's the ideal model, but I'm not naive enough to think that everyone can just replicate that. The New York Times has managed to build in this, in very difficult economic environment. I mean, the New York Times was no sure thing 15 years ago. This thing was floundering economically and they built a digital subscription model and it's worked. And thank God it has, but it's really hard to do

and there's not many people who've managed to do it, certainly not at scale. Investigative journalism is very expensive. It's not a profit center in and of itself. It's something to get subsidized by

other things. So it's never going to be this pure commercial thing. So then you have other models

like the non-profit model, which you know, philanthropic model, which again, I'm all for all of these things existing, but it's really hard. And the other issue I had probably towards the end with the interviewing, and I'm sure you've had this issue as well, is once you start doing a few interviews that are tougher accountability interviews, people stop wanting to agree to be interviewed by you. So actually getting, getting the interviews becomes an issue. And so I actually didn't see

huge future for myself in on-camera interviewing because it requires a guest booking and access

“that was becoming apparent to me was diminishing pretty rapidly. And what you have to give up”

to gain that access, can I ask you about another, the flip side of that? You said, you know, when you start doing these accountability interviews, it becomes harder to book people. The other thing I found was, once the audience gets a taste of something like that, their expectation is for blood. Their expectation now is, all interviews must draw blood. I must taste blood. They must draw blood from the right people. Right. And there is a disappointment if it's not because the way that

social media has kind of aggrandized the Jonathan Swan eviscerates Trump. Yes. Right. Jonathan Swan lays low the head up. And it's almost as though the audience becomes thirsty for something that you weren't trying to provide in the first place. And did you feel any of that? Oh man, it's so true. It's so true. I don't know that I've observed it more than, I guess I felt internal pressure to do the best accountability interview I could. But I didn't feel,

I've always hated, I've never gone into an interview with like, I'm going to take their head off.

Like, it's just not my approach. Like, the style of interview, it's not the way I operate at all.

“I think it can go, it can take an interview or to not great places. So like, I'm sure you've”

seen a lot of packsmen over the years. Jeremy, you're absolutely. In the UK. So I think packsmen done some brilliant, like, some of his interviews are brilliant, right? But I know where you're going to be. But you know what I'm saying? Like, like, so he became a stick where he would like, like, you know, he, there was the famous one where he asked the same question 10 times of that hapless guy. And then there was the woman who I think was the treasury minister or something where

he just, oh, it was so brutal. She just, he's like, aren't you embarrassed to be, you know, who's so mean and whatever. And so he did a couple of great ones. And then over time, it became a cartoon.

the cliche of heat, not light. It was all heat and very little light. And not every interview

“is this sort of boxing match, just not. I mean, interviews, you have to have range as an”

interview. You have to be able to elicit and probe. And, you know, whether you agree with his politics or not, William F. Buckley, you know, go watch his own, his own firing line interviews. A brilliant. Yeah. They're brilliant. There's a lot of conversation. Dick Kavitt was similar to that. I don't know if you ever watch a lot of Dick Kavitt. No, they're so probing. Yeah. And he gets things out of people that are astonishingly insightful. But I think that you said it,

it's preparation plus presence. If you have, listen, if those organic moments arise. And by the

way, I've done both. You know, I've been in situations where, you know, rum's felt famously,

where I was like, I'm going to get this motherfucker. And they were terrible. And, and it showed

“the, the narrowness of the questions, my lack of being present. Like, it all showed. And it was,”

it was poorly executed on my part. And, and I try to learn lessons from the bad ones. But I'm also cognizant like, and tend to shy away from that idea of drawing that, you know, you've got to, you've got to punish them. And you're like, that's, it's not punishment. If, if within the body of the interview, these things happen, they happen. But you don't know the alchemy of it. But even like, take your fed up and interview, like, you would, you would out for, like, very respectful. It was

very respectful and you're giving him every opportunity to explain himself, like every opportunity to explain himself. And, you know, there was a show on Australian television. I used to love called enough rope. And, and, and I just, I just, I just, it was by, I'm, it's by this guy Andrew Dense.

“Such a good idea. Yeah. And Andrew Dense, a comedian, very smart guy. Yeah. Really. And that's what”

the show was. He gave them enough rope. He was probing. He wasn't disrespectful. He was very respectful, actually. He done his homework. And it was one of my favorite interview shows. So good. And I think

that's a great concept, you know, the enough rope concept for a lot of interviews. It doesn't always work.

Sometimes you need to, like, fasten up yourself. And that's okay too. And I love the fact that you do, I, I feel like you're the, the same way, which is like, the person you're always mad at after an interview is yourself. Because you're always like, I showed it done. I showed it. You know, all those minutes. Well, I really appreciate the time. By the way, I want to correct something. I, I said earlier, we talked about Roy Cone that he had come out at the end of his life. Apparently, he did not.

I said, Jillian texted me in the middle and said, actually never admitted that even through his dying day, which, wow, I did not realize I thought he did it the very end. Jonathan Swan, thank you so much for taking the time. Thanks for being so thoughtful about the whole process of sort of interviewing in the public square and in the eye and, and not going out over your skis over things that you don't know. It's just a rare quality these days. So I really appreciate you. And,

and it's so nice to talk to you and get some sleep because I know you got a baby. Thanks, John. Really appreciate it. Thanks, man. Thanks, man. You know, before I was surrounded by dogs and goats and pigs and sheep and the like in the rustic life that I now enjoy a couple of cats. And I was, uh, I thought a responsible cat owner. You'd feed him the, uh, who was at the bag that was like, it was like cereal, like we'd a bix, but if he had cats,

like supposed to provide everything. You know, but we know better now and no one knows better than smalls. Smalls, cat food. Uh, I'm telling you, man, if my cats had ever gotten a hold of smalls or if they had known there was another cat, like across the hall, getting smalls, they'd left me too sweet. They would, they would have been out of there. I was, you know, feeding them like fast food. What's smalls, man? Fresh cat food, preservative free, 100% human grade ingredients. You

find in your fridge. Back then, I wasn't eating human-grade ingredients. Let alone my cats. And by the way, like, not hard to get the delivery right to your door. 88% of cat parents. And, you know, if you know, uh, people that I've cats, you can't get 88% of them to grand anything. 88% of them say, after feeding smalls, notice the cat has better digestion, softer and shinier, and has more energy to play. Stop serving your little carnivore, a bowl of processed shortcuts for

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plus free shipping, and free treats for life when you head to smalls.com/tws. How alert was he for having a three week old baby? Seriously. It's pretty impressive. Yeah. I loved in the middle. I was like, you know, there's a baby crying on the baby. But that's the

“difference between, uh, I think, not to be overly gendered, uh, a man and a woman.”

Tell us more. That man's playing with us. That baby could have cried for 30 minutes. And Jonathan and I would have just kept talking, oh, yeah, you know, it's interesting on the thing. Like, if my wife had been in the room, she's like, "Somebody got the baby!"

Like, it's a different visceral. It's all that. It's like what I was saying to him, like,

that day I came home and was like, "Oh, God, work was so hard today." And she was like, sitting there with the two babies and just like, "Hey, how about I punch you in the face?" Do you want to make work a little harder? But he really is, I love how the way that he described preparation, I thought, was all the people whose craft I admire, I feel like prepare in that kind of a way. He studied tape. I mean, I'm so much respect for that. Like, you see so many interviews

that and he was actually like, what he didn't mention was like the 2020 interview, he held him to account and they covered a broad variety of topics in about 20 minutes. Like, it's not just that he held him to account on one issue and he had to give up so much in order to do it. He's still was able to get the conversation moving. And can do both. You can walk into gum here. Right. And it is true that, you know, you can't, I think our expectation that reporters must all be

in the jeopardy tournament of champion and understand, you know, at a granular level, the specifics of every issue. But I also think there's room for, you know, and we do to give people at home, some insight. There is a chat and Jillian and Brittany are on it and also, you know, Rebecca is keeping an eye. And when she sits wrong, when I say something wrong, or somebody says something, there is a person who is thinking about the veracity of things.

And I don't know why that's not more utilized. It's, it's not like it's a college course where

“you're like, you're not allowed to use your phone. It's all allowed to write. Yeah. Life is open book.”

I mean, Trump certainly treats it open book. You know, he's got somebody, somebody handing him things in the Jonathan Swan interview. He said, well, let me show you what I've seen. You know, he didn't say just going off the top of my head. That's right. I don't understand why we make interviews that kind of a, it's sort of like, in the way, you know, presidential debates are like, you can't bring your notes and you're like, sure. No, you've got to make,

because when you're the president, you're not allowed to use notes. You're not allowed to use your phone as president. Like, what the fuck are we doing? Yeah. But I also think you guys, when you were talking about how like the expectations of your interviews now and how people are out for blood and stuff, yeah. I do think that ties into the like gamification of like, you know, more fact wise and like crushing on your interviewie. Yeah, you know what? That's that's so true.

“And I do feel that like, because there've been a couple of interviews like, I remember it began with”

there was a Jim Cramer interview during the financial crisis. And ever like, I remember being on the street the next day and walking in the streets in New York and people like, you fucking took Cramer to the house. Like, and you really felt like like a boxing match. Like you imagine like what OG and an OB felt like after the tip, you know, not to that extent. But like you're like, oh, that wasn't like the idea isn't necessarily to put people ahead. Like it's the alchemy of it

in the moment you're so stunned by someone's lack of accountability or whatever, but that can't be everything. No. And that can't be your goal. It's used things too much. Yeah. I do the, but I also think like interviews have become so friendly on the opposite side of that that people don't expect any pushback. You know, maybe Cramer came on your show, really not expecting anything

because people, you know, he's, he's never, never been asked anything. Like it's, we have to

people should be a little scared when they sit down and they have to do it anyways. I mean, when he mentioned, you know, he really didn't see a future for himself and television journalism

here? And they, you know, it used to be tougher. I think it's gotten some easier.

“I do think it is like, I think the politicians have figured out what environments they can thrive”

in and what environments they will, they will crumple in. And how to derail it, you know, they really figured out how to get around at the little cheat codes they can do, say, I mean, actually that was one of the things I was most, you know, it's so basic, but in regime change, just like how intentional the administration has become about distracting the media and how they literally have a list of what can we say, right? We want this new story to go away. What do we have

in the wings? Okay. Well, let's do this then, you know. And it's so strange that there's not a lot of self reflection on the media's part of, oh, every, you know, it's like that dog and up, you know, we're moving out again to like squirrel. Should we stop doing that? And let's say, don't the book. Yeah. But when it comes to journalists, politicians, even business leaders, they don't have to say yes to interviews anymore. No, they don't.

Or they only have to say yes to the ones they know, we'll go a certain way. Of course. I mean, we've certainly seen that, but like I've been surprised like people will think like, oh, we'll be so friendly to Democrats on the show. We've had Democrats say no to us, because they think it's going to be a tough interview, which is be well-during to me. But, you know, and if you can't handle questions, what do we do? What are we doing? Yeah. Speaking of which,

handling questions, what a segue. We've got some dozers for you this week. All right. We're going to hold you to a count. They have been piling. We've been away. So they've been piling up on there.

“Oh, 100. Fuck and come at me. Come at me, bro. Remember when we were going to, I think we're”

going to do a second. This is on the old show. Or it's like we're going to do a segment called, come at me, bro. And it's like all the people that would talk shit about the interviews and all that we would just have them on. Yeah. We'd go. It's like that Jubilee, they would just fire at them from all different directions. What do they want to know? What do they want to know? John, I'm really mad at you. No, come on. I've been on vacation.

I listened to you a Michelle Obama's podcast and do you really think the daily show is giving the country political diabetes? Like, come on, brother. I don't, I think the point was I don't know.

Like, you, you don't know what, here's the thing. We think we're making healthy food.

But we don't, you don't know the overall, you can never know. All you can control is what you're making. You can't necessarily control how it's being digested, what the downstream effects may ultimately be and all those things. Do I think that? No. I think that at our best, we can identify the space between what you see on camera and television and what's actually happening in the rooms where that is planned, the best sort of insight and satire. But at its worst,

it can create a gamified atmosphere of disdain that is not, it's sort of like, you know,

“everything can't make you outraged. You have to always try and the difficulty when you're”

iterating a show that often is to make sure you've adjusted your governor that you've synchronized everybody's watches so that you're not, it's, I used to say it was the Snuggles the bear problem where can we, you ever seen comedians that like, we'll go on stage and be like, if I see that Snuggles the bear from her show one more time and you just like, really? Where do you go from there? Snuggles the bear? Thanks, really. You don't want to be a ungrounded outrage machine.

And so you're always trying to calibrate that because if that's what you become, then it's just

more than down to you. So the thing that we try to do and I think it was what I appreciated with Jonathan was saying you tried to do is post more the reality of what you're doing and how you're doing it and how you're executing it and where you think that wasn't justified or that, you know, you always want to make sure that fairness and veracity and good faith is being and context is a part of, that doesn't mean that the tools of satire hyperbole and, you know, juxtaposition and

and, you know, adjectives that are not kind can be used because there are things that are contemptible that need to be attacked, but you want to make sure that the targets justify

effect of that isn't a caricature even though caricature and stereotyping are such a tool of satire.

I don't know if that made any sense. No, it did. It did. It really did. But that's the point is we're definitely not trying to give you diabetes, but we also don't think we're curing anything if that makes sense. Sorry. What do we got next? What do we got next? Okay, John, you've been recognized for your advocacy on behalf of 9/11 for responders. Why do you think Donald Trump hasn't been acknowledged for all he says he did? I mean, he's a president. I think that's

is that not acknowledgement enough of all that he's done to the country. He's such an interesting

“figure in that in that he really does feel the need I think to inject himself as kind of a crucial”

part of that day. Yeah. Even from that, you know, the famous one is him going like, I guess my building's the tallest now. Such it. It's such a, like, you know, Tracy loves the narcissists. She loves studying, you know, what's that relationship Orna's show? I can't remember the name of it, but like, couples therapy, right? couples therapy. Where, you know, they'll be such a clear narcissist or narcissist on narcissist prime in the in the couples. And she's so attuned to that.

It's so obviously a destructive character trait. It's so obviously corrosive to the people around you.

And so to see that rewarded with the position of the most powerful person in like it's hard to

imagine the country in a voluntary relationship with such a damaging narcissist. Yeah. That's, I feel like, how did, why are we going out with him? Yeah. And we broke up with him. And we took him back. Why did we take him back? Our girlfriends did not help us. Because the house on fire. This is where you need good girlfriends. They stop you

“from doing these things. But does like, how, does anybody go like, girl, don't you remember?”

He stormed your house. Yeah. And he did all the, and he almost, we loved the attention. Like, that's something. Yeah. That's what I'll tell you. But the sixth shit is, it almost is like a country. He's like, I know he did that. But he was good. He was good to me. He bought me. He just called me. Right. You remember my 401k during that relationship? Right. That, it's almost like, but I remember I, you know, we used to eat at Lassar, can that be? Yeah, the good times. Even that was a fantasy.

My favorite comment he made this week about the 9/11 stuff is when he said, I'm not the smallest guy. The big, strong guy is such a come and lift him up. And I, I'm not the smallest guy. I'm big. They lifted him up under the arm. He does love talking about big, strong guys. Yeah. It's interesting how that story just arose like a couple of years ago and just wasn't one of the, you know, stories, but I mean, you could say that it was really big of him to hold on to that story

for so long. A lot of people saw it in the spotlight for, you know, not, not Trump. He said, oh, wait, oh, wait, two decades. And then it's just, it's, it's so interesting to see something so fundamentally awful happened to so many people and so much bigger than anything any of us can

ever conjure. And it's almost like his first thought is, how is this about me? Me.

“I don't want to be part of the story. Right. They're not talking about me. And I am now aren't I?”

I guess I'm the, I guess I'm the tallest building now. Aren't I? That's my takeaway. What's your takeaway from 9/11? I guess the size of my building? Is that what everybody's takeaway is? Fucking psychotic. Yeah. Anyway, we're back. I think our next episode is also going to be on a Thursday because of, uh, I guess maybe it's the timing of next week. I don't, I'm really, Emmys. Oh, forgot, six. Okay. So that's it. Oh, yeah.

We do vote for. Oh, everybody, apparently everybody, um, but I'm hoping Jimmy. I, I'd be, I'd be stunned if Jimmy doesn't, uh, uh, although now I think, uh, there's some, they've changed the rules. I'm not really sure. But, uh, you know, but God, but I can't, they just fucking do it in New York.

stay in touch with us, Brittany? Uh, Twitter, we are weekly Shepad Instagram Threads Tiktok,

“Blue Sky. We are weekly Shepadcasts. And you can like, subscribe and comment on our YouTube”

channel, the weekly Shepad. John Stewart. Beautiful. It's so nice to see you guys again.

It's so nice. Uh, I hope everybody had a good break and enjoyed themselves and, uh, got a

“little rest and relaxation. Our producer, Brittany Memevic, producer, Jillian Speer, video editor,”

and engineer Robatollo, audio editor and engineer Nicole Boyce. Our associate producer, Rebecca

Rotenberg, and our executive producer. It's Chris McShane and Katie Gray pod. Good to say everybody,

“and we'll see you guys next week. Bye, boy.”

The weekly show which John Stewart is a comedy central podcast is produced by Paramount audio and bust boy productions.