Trump is the Most Powerful person of All Time
of them said, “You are all that matters to me.” Um, it’s about as good a summation. You get the idea. The Secret Service was quite alarmed by them, the these letters. And she’s still in the employee. Yes. Because what he will say, she’s ever present. She’s arguably, you know, she would be in more consistent presence in meetings than just about anyone. She sits um inside the room with a laptop open and she’s in every meeting. Yes. But so those three were there. We walk in, the president walks in, we’re looking around uh at the gold. Um and this is when he had started putting um uh challenge coins onto bare places in the wall. Uh and he comes in and he said, you know, very polite and says, “Nice to see you.” And in, you know, this was 17 days into the war in Iran and so we thought there might be like, you know, maps on his desk or and instead he’s got pictures of trees and he picks them up and he says, “I’m I’m I’m these are maple trees that he’s looking at. He’s picking maple trees for the White House grounds.” He says he’s good at picking trees. And then and then under there or maybe nearby are, you know, pictures of his ballroom designs and he’s talking about the columns. And so we that was about 10 minutes, I would say, right? Maybe 15. maybe 15. So we we were only given an hour, by the way. And so we sit down, we we ask a few questions, and then we asked him a question about power. And the question about power was something we had been talking about a lot. This was somebody who had just taken the country to war without consulting Congress. Um you know, had been blowing up boats uh uh coming up um from Central and South America uh without consulting Congress um just doing it. And so we knew that he had been talking to people about how powerful he saw himself in comparison to other US presidents. So we asked him a question about that, how he sees himself. And he he tells Natalie, “Go get the printouts.” And so he or whatever it was. So he she comes back in. She’s got these two printouts. They’re two pagers. And she hands them to us. They’re unmarked. They’re just, you know, it’s like you were printing out of your home printer. And he says that this was something put together by a historian. And the the the thesis is stated at the top which is that Donald Trump is the most powerful person who’s ever walked the face of the earth. And then it goes through a list of very notable figures um you know of history. Alexander the Great, Attilla the Hun, um the Caesars, Tamarlain, Hitler, Mao, Stalin. And he’s not looking at this through a moral lens. He calls them the top 10. The top 10. They’re the top 10. And the point that and he’s just reveling in and do you think he’s trolling you when he’s saying this? No, he was because he’s he’s shown this document to allies like he’s proud of the document. this this we we learned after we had seen this uh that he had been showing it to people like he was very proud of this and so and the idea was it goes on this document to say that uh he is more powerful than they are because of the American military because of his communications reach uh because he’s the president of the US uh and and uh that he’s willing to use power uh in a way that that not everyone of the US presidency that others don’t. That was the takeaway he wanted us to have. And the the kota to this was that it was not a historian. It was a guy who reads a lot, but who was was golfer Gary Player’s caddy um who I guess Player introduced Trump to him. Anyway, but they kept saying to us, he’s a historian. He’s atorian. We went down this rabbit hole finding the guy. But it was it was a remarkable moment. We have both spent a fair amount of time around Trump and listening to him describing himself in these terms historically speaks to frankly it was really our premise of how he is approaching this term. But he wants to leave an unerasable mark on the world and be seen as a capital G capital M great man of history. And the interesting part of that is throughout this reporting it was pretty obvious to us early on that he was far less responsive to domestic political pressures than he was in the first term. So in the first term, you know, poll numbers go down. He would be very reactive to that. You don’t think he’s being reactive right now? You don’t think that this this ceasefire in Iran is related to the midterms? It’s not black and white. I’m not saying he’s not at all reactive to it. And obviously this war very clearly he thinks is going badly, going poorly. I actually think it’s less about the midterms than just it’s just he’s kind of doesn’t have the patience for this long drawn out conflict and it’s not going well. Gas prices. We’re really low on munitions. It’s actually when you talk to people in the Pentagon, it’s a real problem. National crisis actually longrange munition. So it’s not black and white, but he’s far less um reactive to it. And you’ve seen that he’s more willing to take big risks than he was in the first term. He went to war in Iran without even talking to Congress. George W. Bush, as flawed as that decision-making process was, it went through Congress to go to war in Iraq and Afghanistan. He went and snatched Maduro, a sovereign head of state, out of his bedroom in the middle of the night in his pajamas. U sent Delta Force into Karacus. He didn’t talk to anyone in Congress before he did that. He didn’t talk to anyone in Congress before he launched a trade war against the whole world. So he is willing to take these risks that in the first term he simply was not willing to take. Okay. And then the then the the other question which relates to where he thinks his power lies is this idea that Congress and the Senate have not held him to account in the same way and how he uses his own influence to prevent them from doing that. So, we write extensively in the book about how he and his political team decided that they were going to lord over the Republican party with, to quote them, it’s their words, an iron fist. And Trump likes to talk about people ruling with strength and with an iron fist. And he has used that description for all manner of leaders, whether it was me espazito in Brooklyn, the democratic uh machine leader or uh Xihinping. But uh that is how they see the need to keep members of Congress, the Republican Congress in line. And they made they had one loss which was Matt Gates, which I still actually forget that he had been nominated to be the AG briefly. That was the one they pulled. When it became clear that Pete Hegsth might have problems, Trump and his allies and allied uh conservative groups went to town on Joanie Ernst, the Iowa senator who was expressing concerns. Suddenly, her divorce records were being talked about on Twitter. She was facing a primary challenger. She’s now not running again. He has ended the career of people who go against careers of people who go against him. It doesn’t mean they don’t leave a mark. It’s obviously, you know, you saw Bill Cassidy and Tom Tillis have attacked him, but um they’re both leaving office now and that’s they have put a premium on that. Um, I mentioned the idea of trolling earlier and I wanted to come back to it because there’s lots of things that he says that sometimes people take seriously and then other times people
Reporting Assumes False until proven True
that? [laughter] Um it was the hardest journalistic project either of us have done um by a very long distance. Uh we killed ourselves on this work and we actually left on the cutting room floor a painful amount of material like what thousands of p thousands of pages of reporting that we there was a 1% or 2% or 5% doubt in our minds about its accuracy or there was a dispute dis you know two different accounts of a conversation that we couldn't square and we just weren't by the way how did you decide who in this case given that you have all of these people who I imagine are trying to tell you all sorts of crazy stories and they all have their own motivations and in how did you decide who to trust? Well, trust is not even a word that we consider. Um we have a policy of assume false until proven otherwise. Literally, we've had that policy for quite a long time with Trump. And I think people have a misconception. Um, in the first term being a Trump reporter was basically walking around with a bucket and just catching the the vomit. You know, everyone was fighting, everyone was leaking. You would have an almost real time stream of consciousness out of the overall situation room. This term it could not be more different. There's a reason I think one of the reasons the book is resonating, hopefully there are others, is you haven't seen this kind of reporting inside the room from this administration. It hasn't really existed. And the reason is it's because it's hard. It's really hard to get inside those rooms. And so, a it's a lot of hard work. B, we don't take anyone's one, you know, there's no single source, one person's account. You don't get that from here. And we just worked really, really hard. There's I don't think there's a huge like secret or um glib line to describe it. It was just us working really really hard and benefiting from, you know, I've covered him now for 11 years consecutively. Maggie's covered him for even longer. you develop deep and wide source networks in that time and and they pay off. And also um you know there are people uh even though the most senior people it's a very tight disciplined in the circle there are people um who in the administration there's not that many of them but there are some who are alarmed by what they're seeing and and taking great risks in some cases to speak to us. So we take that responsibility very seriously of protecting those people. Um, and there's a lot of information in in the book that, you know, could get people in a lot of trouble and we take that responsibility very seriously. Um, so Vance, uh, Vice President Vance, as you know, has worried um, apparently aloud about this idea that there was taping going on in the situation room and that's where you got this stuff. Um, can you speak to any of that? No, we're just not going to talk about sources. No way, mate. No, [laughter] I had to try. Um but I would I would note that um this book has been out for three days. Uh some of the excerpts ran well ahead of time uh including on scenes in the situation room and and no one has disputed the reporting. Okay. So here's my question. You get this big sitdown interview with the president at the end of the process. Are you thinking he first of all, did you think he was going to meet with you? Did you not think he was going to meet with you? What did you when when when you're going into this having now worked on this as long as you did, how much did he know and his office know about sort of where you were coming in with this stuff and what was that meeting even like? Should I tell him the thing when I would test? Yes, you should.
QUESTIONS:
How much does the President think about the average American, as compared with his own Power and place in History?
Why does Trump like to talk about his power?
If Trump is so powerful, why does Trump have to tolerate critics?
Who are Trump’s role models?
How has Trump changed journalism?