On with Kara Swisher - The Revenge Presidency with Maggie Haberman

Episode Date: May 29, 2025

As the One Big Beautiful Bill Act lumbers through Congress, President Trump lobs threats at Russian President Vladimir Putin on Truth Social, and the administration continues their war against Harvard, we’re bringing back New York Times reporter and de facto Trump chronicler Maggie Haberman to weigh in on the president’s state of mind.  Kara and Maggie talk about the startling scale of disinformation coming out of the White House, Trump’s ambivalent relationship to Supreme Court rulings and democratic norms, and his ever-widening campaign of retribution against institutions and individuals, (including pop stars like Maggie’s favorite, Bruce Springsteen). They also revisit Haberman’s prescient analysis from earlier this year that Stephen Miller is wielding immense power within the administration and discuss whether Elon’s power is shrinking or he’s simply slipping out of public view.  This episode was taped on the afternoon of Tuesday, May 27th, before Elon Musk spoke out against the omnibus bill and Russia proposed to hold peace talks with Ukraine. Questions? Comments? Email us at [e-mail] or find us on Instagram, TikTok, and Bluesky @onwithkaraswisher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi everyone from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is On with Kara Swisher and I'm Kara Swisher. My guest today is Maggie Haberman, a White House correspondent for the New York Times and a political analyst for CNN. This is the third time Maggie has come on the podcast and we always have a fantastic conversation. Maggie's been covering Trump since when he was a real estate guy in Queens and someone who knows him really well and has covered every stage of his career, which makes it important to read what she has to say about where we are now with President Trump. Confidence Man, Maggie's bestselling book from 2022, showed how Trump's familial upbringing and his roots

as a 1980s New York real estate developer formed him, shaped his worldview, and basically informed who he is as a person. One of the things I really like about Maggie is she often goes contrary to other people. When Trump was on the down and out, she was the only person who said to me, just watch. He's going to get up again.

And in fact, he did did and when the election was happening She thought he had a very good chance when others did not so the book comes out in paperback on June 10th Including added a material from her so it's perfect time to have her on for Trump the sequel Our expert question comes from the Daily Show correspondent and co-host Jordan Klepper. So stick around. -♪ The Tribeca Festival is back June 4th through 15th, and it's packed with camp-miss experiences. Catch Sandra Oh on a live podcast recording of The Interview from the New York Times. Cheer on track-and-field superstar Allison Felix in the documentary She Runs the World.

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Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. Support for this show comes from ServiceNow, who are enabling people to do more fulfilling work, the work they actually want to do. You know what people don't want to do? Boring, busy work. But now with AI agents built into the ServiceNow platform, you can automate millions of repetitive tasks in every corner of your business. IT, HR, customer service, and more. And that means your people can focus on the work that they want to do. That's putting AI agents to work for people. It's your turn. Get started at ServiceNow.com. Maggie, thank you for coming on on.

Karen, thanks for having me. Recently there's been a lot of speculation about President Biden's state of mind, but I wanted to start by asking you about Trump's. Last week on CNN, you said basically that President Trump is increasingly making statements that aren't true. For example, he showed a video to South African President Cyril Ramaphosa with crosses lining a road and said they marked the actual burial sites over a thousand white farmers. That's completely false. During an ABC News interview, he showed a photo of Kilmar

Abrego-Garcia's knuckles and insisted that the obviously Photoshopped text MS-13 were actual tattoos. Why is this happening? He's easily debunked things more than before. He's not known for his truthiness. Does he not understand what's going on or does his staff not want to correct him? There is an analogy that I used to use in term one, particularly in the first year, about Harold and the Purple Crown, which is a children's book and Harold is the character and he's a little boy who has a purple crown and he gets out of bed one night and he draws an entire city and he draws buildings and that's his reality. And I'm not suggesting

that Trump's version of that is benign, but that is a version of what he's doing. He is creating a reality that he wants other people to adhere to. He's always done a version of this, but there are fewer people around him who are trying to tell him, don't do that. The difference between term one of Trump and this version of Trump is there were a lot of people in the White House last time who saw it as their job to stop him or stop things he was doing. And that would include things like this, but it would also include policy that he had run on that voters had, you know, known what they were getting when they voted for him. There are now a lot of people who are incredibly true believers in him, who are very radicalized

by the last four years of investigations and indictments and the assassination attempts, and they share his impulses. And so that's the main reason why these things are happening. It's not that he's going from having said a lot of things that were all verifiable to suddenly saying a lot of things that aren't verifiable, but it is true that he is trying to force other people to buy into his version of reality, I think in a more pronounced way than we saw before. And to your point, the MS-13 tattoos that he insisted were on Kimar Abrego-Garcia's knuckles in that photo, which were of tattoos on his hand, but then someone had written, you know,

MS-13. Yes, above it to indicate what it might mean, right. His insistence, especially in that interview with Terry Moran of ABC, that these were real tattoos was quite intense. His insistence on showing that video to Cyril Ramaphosa, which as I understand it is a memorial, that's what it was. And his insistence that it's not just that he's debating whether there are white farmers who have been attacked, it's that he's insisting it's a genocide, and the word genocide is very specific. That is more intense than it used to be. And so to what do I attribute it? He's untethered in a way that he was not before.

So do you think he believes that? I think, you know, look, I can't read inside his mind. He is very good at convincing himself that something is true when he is very good at at least appearing to believe something is true. And for all intents and purposes, when he's sitting there with a foreign leader saying these things or giving an interview to a major broadcast outlet, I'm not sure it matters whether he actually believes it or not. Right. But he certainly has had a history of doing this, just the stick-to-itiveness and the frequency has increased rather dramatically. Well, and I would say that the stakes and the subject matter have become more significant.

And this goes back to his revisionism around what happened on January 6, 2021, when a pro-Trump mob attacked the Capitol. He has been rewriting the history of that day for several years now, and he has slowly over time had some effect on his supporters, on some Republicans, if you look at it in polling. Yeah. Trump's effect on his supporters dovetails perfectly with your book, which is coming out in paperback. It's called Confidence Man. Con man is essentially what you're saying. But in the new afterword to the book, you write that Trump, quote, revealed that many

Americans shared an appetite for autocratic behavior, for dominating and humiliating the political opposition and intimidating dissenters, for disrupting the lives of others and forcing their unpleasant personal frailties into the sunlight for scorn and mockery. Would you have guessed this about the American public before Trump came down that golden escalator in 2015? No, I don't think that it was clear how broad an appetite for, you know, sort of this is beyond smash mouth politics. This is something a little different, uh, existed out there, but I think that it should have been clear that there was some appetite for it. And I talked about, I talked about this in the book that in 2010, I was covering this gubernatorial race in New York and Carl Paladino was the Republican nominee. Uh, and he was very much a proto Trump in a lot of ways, first-time candidate businessman,

so forth, at least first-time statewide candidate. I don't think he had run for something before that. Had a colorful personal history, had made racist and sexist comments in a series of emails he had sent, some of them about Michelle Obama. And he was running against Rick Lazio, who had run as the Senate, the Republican nominee against Hillary Clinton in 2000 in New York. And Paladino didn't win, Andrew Cuomo won, but he won the primary Paladino. And it became clear in hindsight that the more that we were reporting on things that in previous campaigns or election cycles would have been disqualifying, they were actually helping Palladino among a certain group of the Republican electorate.

And that race took place in the shadow of President Obama's election and in the shadow of the fiscal collapse and in the shadow of a lot of anger about the Iraq war. And all of those factors together are what helped fuel Donald Trump. And Ron Fornier wrote a piece of National Journal in Nothing We Trust was the headline. And that is where we are as a country in a lot of ways.

And so when that happens, people are very angry. And I think Trump is expert at channeling people's anger. And people don't want to be told what they should vote for and how they should vote. And I think that that is part of what you're seeing too. So did I anticipate there would be this much fervor for some aspects of what he's running on? I did not, but I will say it should have been pretty apparent over the last few years that things like him talking about border crossings and him talking about crime and him talking about the economy. These were areas where President Biden was really struggling. And that is what a lot of voters were focused on too. Now, do you think it's the appetite for autocracy and domination unique to the right? I mean,

could a charismatic left-wing populace with so many violent rhetoric have captivated voters too? You know, I think that what you would hear from Trump's advisors and supporters is that it's not about the violent rhetoric, that it's about other matters. Could somebody on the left in theory do that? I think any, I'm done predicting what could happen or couldn't happen, but I certainly think that it's not about autocracy, but in terms of what we've seen in the last few years on the left, but there certainly was a lot of group think around President Biden. And I don't think that's ever healthy. Right, right. Every episode we get an expert to send us a question,

and we're getting to yours early in the interview. Let's hear it. Hi, Jordan Klepper here. Much has been made of Donald Trump and his sense of humor, his sensitivity around humor, his use of humor often veers into the cruel or the references of former golf pros and the size of their genitalia. And I was curious, Maggie, as someone who's gotten to spend some time with Donald Trump over the years, if he's truly made you laugh. And not unintentionally or about something silly that he's done, but if there's been a moment where he's had the intention of making you laugh and how he achieves that and what it felt like in that room to experience that

moment of humanity, if it ever did come. So the one time that he has ever made me laugh, but I can't speak to whether it was intentional or not. I wrote about this in confidence man. I was when I called him about a story that was in the Washington Post in 2015 where The it was that Reince Priebus had sternly lectured him about his rhetoric about about, you know Mexicans and about the wall and it was right after Trump got into the race and I was asking Trump about it, and he said, I'm doing this from memory now,

but he knows better than to lecture me. And then there was a pause, and I believe what he said, and again, I don't have it in front of me, but I believe it's in the book as it happened, this is not a five-star army general or something like that. And it just, just made me laugh. Whether he was trying to make me laugh, I don't know. I think he was more just being sarcastic. But I have never known him to spend a ton of time trying to make people in a room laugh in the way

that I think- Or be comfortable. No, I mean, I think he does actually try to make people be comfortable. It's just in a certain way. It's on his terms and it's for a certain reason and it's usually if he's trying to extract something. I've seen him try to make crowds laugh, but that's a group think issue. It's an interesting question and I hadn't really thought about it in that way. So Bill Maher, infamously speaking, putting on a charm offensive, visited the White House in April and instead of Trump,

he's much more self-aware than he lets on in public and a crazy person doesn't live in the White House. A person who plays a crazy person on TV a lot lives there. Putting aside any opinions on Bill Maher's trip to the White House, does that been true to you? Is that something that when he's not playing to the camera that that happens or in that case, he just wanted to make Bill like him? That would be my guess. Well, trying to make Bill like him would be an example of what Bill was talking about, right? Which is that it's more calculated than it seems sometimes. And it is more calculated than it seems sometimes. And then other times it's not. And so, you know, there was always a big thing

in term one when he was on Twitter all the time, which was he would do these all caps posts, and the reaction in the press corps would be, oh, he's fuming, Trump fumes, was a whole genre of stories. Sometimes he was laughing as he would write these posts. Sometimes he's not. And so, you know, the problem is figuring out which one is which. I think the fact that he is capable of charming people in certain settings doesn't mean that

everything is sort of a clear through line of thought. And I think that's the issue I take with that description. So according to your book, you wrote, quote, a core tenant of the Trump political movement has been finding publicly acceptable targets to serve as receptacles of pre-existing anger. You then write, quote, anger helps signal his supporters who are bound to him more by common enemies than shared ideals. It's a really interesting thought. He's been promoting and encouraging anger towards immigrants, trans people, government workers, the news media, elite universities. Law firms?

Law firms. Oh, I forgot that. Nobody likes lawyers really. Well, you should want lawyers to exist though. Yes, I do. I'm teasing. My brother's a lawyer. What other moves have left in the playbook besides ratcheting up the anger into even darker, more extreme territory? in the playbook besides ratcheting up the anger into even darker, more extreme territory? I don't think there is. I think that's the main play. He will always try to see how far he can go and what he can get away with. And what he clearly feels right now is unencumbered in part because he won, in part because he didn't get killed last summer when he was shot at in part because he didn't go to jail despite being convicted in part because one of the the indictment that most legal experts thought was the most serious and

Airtight one of them was was the documents indictment was dismissed by a judge who Trump appointed and in part because The Supreme Court granted him broad immunity for official acts. And so for all of those reasons, he is going to keep pushing and pushing and see how far he can take things. And you are seeing it on any number of fronts, Kara, but a main one is on immigration. What I don't know is where else these punitive presidential orders will go, who know, who additional targets will be. Do you have a clue of where you think it is? That's a big long list of people. It's a long list.

Personal people like Chris Krebs who worked for him, etc. Yeah, the Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor ones, I put in an entirely different category, which to be clear is not that I'm saying the rest are understandable or the rest are similar to anything we've done in history. Or we've seen in history, excuse me. The law firms, he's using whatever power he can to pressure them. The universities have been a long-standing Republican target for a while and the protests related to Gaza, some of which veered into anti-Semitism, some of which veered into violence, that created a nexus for people to feel more supportive of that in his base and just more broadly among Republicans. But in terms of

Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor, these were people who worked for the government. Now, Miles Taylor is a very outspoken critic of Donald Trump. We know this. I'm also not saying therefore it's valid that there was a presidential memorandum about him. Chris Krebs was doing his job and was saying that the election machinery, the machines were secure. It was not rigged. When I have raised that point with some Trump advisors, the response I get is generally, well, he was grandstanding. Well, I mean raised that point with some Trump advisors, the response I get is generally, well, he was grandstanding. Well, I mean, that's a subjective view, but even if that's your view, don't think that that's criminal. And so we are getting into an area now, and actually you left a couple of people off, then that was part of the increase. Oprah, Bruce Springsteen. Now, I mean,

my fandom of Bruce Springsteen is pretty well established on the website formerly known as Twitter. I'm aware. But that said, I mean, what he's talking about is, you know, he warned Springsteen to keep his mouth shut. Once he gets to this country. Yeah, and suggested that, and said something like, we'll see what happens, and then said there should be investigations. And that gets toward the prospect of criminalizing oppositional speech.

And so everything is being very, very slowly increased. Also, I mean, I would just make the point, Kara, Bruce Springsteen has a history of being outspoken on politics, but it's actually in a very specific way. It's not about all issues. He was very against the Iraq War, and so he was vocal about W. He did not support Reagan's policies. Born in the USA was mistakenly taken as some kind of national anthem as opposed to being about the Vietnam War or about a war vet coming back and finding prospects dim. There's a lot of Trump fans who like Bruce Springsteen's music. And so it's just getting into a different kind of darker area where Trump can just threaten

whoever he wants all the time. Yeah, I think it feels mob bossy. But just for people, many of the people he's attacked personally, Mark Milley, Latisha James, besides Chris and Miles, James Comey, Andrew Cuomo, Taylor Swift, Beyonce just recently under investigation who have, some of them have under investigation, some of them he just attacks, others have had their security clearances revoked. Right. Someone like Chris Kribbs had to leave his firm.

That's correct. And so that goes to his livelihood and- Well, he was threatening the entire company. Correct. But the goal is to, at minimum, eat up time with some of these people, right, and resources and energy, and to draw all of our attention to it. And then in other cases, the goal is to have an end of some kind of a prosecution. Right.

So to the point of feeling unencumbered, in the afterage you wrote that one of Trump's most revealing early interviews appeared in Playboy magazine in 1990. In it, he praised the Chinese Communist Party for showing strength when they killed protesters in Tiananmen Square, which is a very different take. Now the Supreme Court has declared he's immune from prosecution for official acts. What if any limits does Trump acknowledge on his own power? LS It's a really good question. And not many, is what I would say. I mean, what you have seen him say, you have seen Elon Musk doing this on

Twitter, Stephen Miller has been doing it on Twitter, sorry, X, the website formerly known as Twitter. They are raising questions about the legitimacy of judges to curtail the executive branch. And the interpretation of this presidential term so far is you hear a lot of talk about the unitary executive theory. The unitary executive theory says that all power in the executive branch flows from the president. It does not say everything the president does is legal within all legal parameters. Even with the Supreme Court ruling. Now, Trump has said he will abide by what the Supreme Court says, but that is already being tested. And so, you know, I don't think he recognizes much. Look, even if he said, you know, whatever Congress does, I'll abide by, or Congress

has its own role. I mean, he's clearly challenged that with the firing at the inspectors general without notifying Congress within 30 days beforehand and so forth about the reasons why. But he, he controls certainly the House to a lesser extent the Senate with what he would call an iron fist. One other point to Kara that I just want to make when you were talking about the differences between term one and term two of Trump, I don't think that I fully processed until these last few months just how much the existing Russia investigation was something of a chilling on Trump's own behavior, especially after he fired Comey and got a special counsel, and on others in his administration. There was a fear of being subpoenaed.

There was a fear of being investigated. And the Republicans controlled the House and the Senate then too. But that concern is now gone. So if you had to say, writing this book, writing the afterword, what was the most substantive thing that you think you got right and something that you were, you just mentioned something you were surprised by, but what do you think has changed the most from your perspective? LS. There are episodes I wish I had spent more time on, certain things I wish I had focused on more. I wish I'd mentioned his interest in Greenland a few more times than

I did. I think I mentioned it in passing. I wish that I had mentioned his sort of interest in imperialism with land acquisitions that he talked about in briefings, but we couldn't see. There are aspects of his time in New York that I wish I had focused more on. Such as? I wish that I'd focused a little bit more on his interactions with Robert Morgenthau, the district attorney, and I did have a portion on it, but I wish I had done more in hindsight. Because I think that how Trump interacts with prosecutors has been a pretty significant theme of the last few years, and eight years, I would say. I wish I had done a little bit more on his relationship with his father. Not that I think that it was something that I got wrong because I don't, but I wish that it is something that

I had pulled more on. On the other hand, if I had done more on all of these, the book would have been 9,000 pages. Yeah. Would you still call it Confidence Man? I might call it Lobster, because he's sort of shifting. I would call it Confidence Man. Confidence Man. This is a book that published in the first print in October of 2022. And I think that what I think has been remarkable is, and this was the theme of the book, is

just sort of how regenerative a figure he is. And that has proven to be true 8,000 times over. Yeah, he keeps growing the arm, gets cut off. Yeah, and he, right, and he's, look, if you are, the thing that I wrote the first time that is true, which is just his sort of refusal to be thrown out of the ring, is unlike anything I have ever seen. And mind you, we're having this conversation, Kara, in a year when Andrew Cuomo is running for mayor, Andrew Cuomo who resigned the governor's office amid sexual harassment scandal. Anthony Weiner is running for city council in New York. I can go on and on of lists of

people who also refuse to be thrown back out of the ring and all come from the same milieu that Trump does to some extent. What I wish that I had done a little more on, Jack O'Donnell said this to me and it's in the afterword. He wrote what I think was the first Trump staff book. He was a casino executive and it was about his time working for Trump. He said something, and I'm paraphrasing what's in my book, but it was something that effective, you don't really understand what it's like when he kind of gets in your head that he's after you unless you faced it. And I think there's a lot of people who are seeing that right now. We'll be back in a minute. Hey guys, it's Andy Roddick, former world number one tennis player and now a podcaster.

It's clay season and pro tennis and that means the French open. On our show serve with me, Andy Roddick, we have wall to wall coverage for the entire two weeks. We kick things off with a draw special presented by Amazon Prime, breaking down both the men's and women's brackets, making picks and yeah, probably getting most of them wrong. Plus on June 3rd, my idol, Andre Agassi is joining Served. Be sure to tune in. After that, we wrap all things French open with a full recap show also presented by Amazon Prime. That's June 10th. So be sure to find the show serve with me, Andy Roddick on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Support for the show comes from Upwork. You've learned to do a lot of things while running your

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Listen now to Planet Money from NPR. So let's dive in to a few recent Trump headlines. They all involved a lot of bluster. It's unclear whether it was just empty talk or actual policymaking. Some people think a lot of it is a distraction from other things. And so let's go through them. The Republican party tent includes deficit hawks and populists. Last week, Trump cursed, coaxed and threatened to primary fiscal conservatives who are holding up the one big, beautiful bill.

And in the end they passed it. But in the Senate, Ron Johnson is saying he has enough votes to stall the bill until they pass larger cuts and Rand Paul has echoed him saying somebody has to stand up and yell the emperor has no clothes. Presumably he's talking about Donald Trump, which is a vision I don't want to see necessarily. Do you see Johnson or Paul actually forcing deeper cuts to Medicaid or elsewhere? And if they do, how do you expect Trump will react? Well, Rand Paul is an interesting person to watch on this conversion, sort of toward Trump

and then away from Trump again. Because what exactly he meant by the Emperor has no closing, I don't know. But I do think that there are a lot of Republicans who, just as frankly this happened in Term 1-2, feel like they are forced to walk the plank on things that are very hard for them to sell back home. I think Ron Johnson also, I think, has a, he did some criticism of Trump and then he walked that back also a little bit, or at least put a different spin on the ball. But it's the same concept. Ron Johnson, you know, lives in a swing state where he has to show that he is delivering. And so it's the same principle where these folks feel like they

are walking the plank and taking difficult votes, and they just need to be able to show that they were forcing change of some kind. But how different the Senate, I will say this, that the makeup of the Republican Senate is so different now than it was will say this, that the makeup of the Republican Senate is so different now than it was eight years ago, that exactly what direction this goes in is not clear to me. Because they're more independent? Because they are both more maguified

and also more toward the end of the time when Trump will be in power. And there are some of them who are going to want to run for president themselves. And so, so they want to wait him out. Now, you know, JD Vance may be in a very strong position in a couple of years, and they may all decide it's not worth it. But I just think that's a dynamic we're looking at right now. Yeah, they want to show their more conservative and want deeper cuts. It's not they don't want to be on Donald Trump's train when they're running for president necessarily. Yeah, and they don't want to have to defend things. They don't want to be on Donald Trump's train when they're running for president necessarily.

Yeah, and they don't want to have to defend things that they don't necessarily believe in assuming that it won't matter in the distant future. So a few weeks ago on Pivot, Scott Galleri predicted that iPhones would be exempt from tariffs on Chinese goods and he was right, but now Trump is threatening to slap a 25% tariff on smartphones made outside the US. Everyone knows the iPhone supply chain is incredibly complex and making them here would be prohibitively expensive. Tim Cook had a good working relationship with Trump,

going back to the first term, but he didn't travel the mid-East with Trump. The New York Times just wrote a piece about this, his latest trip. Is that why you think Trump is threatening Apple? And do you think Trump is bluffing? Because if so, to what end? I definitely think that not traveling to the mid-ideast piece is related, but I think the

major issue is that Tim Cook is not saying that he will move iPhone production to the US because it makes absolutely no sense for Apple to do that. And they're moving some of it to India. I don't know if it's all that. I don't know enough of the parameters of that. They're trying to make it more diverse, yeah. And it's not even clear to me what exactly the end goal is for Trump in terms of the manufacturing base here.

And if you listen to Howard Lutnick, it's even harder for me to understand it, frankly. But is the goal to move the manufacturing base back to the United States, whether it's iPhones or other products, so that you can have pride of ownership of that factory? Or is it so that you can have jobs for the working class? Or keep it out of the Chinese hands, right?

Or keep it out of the Chinese hands. But I don't know that the working class folks who have lost manufacturing jobs want to keep hearing about how this will be automated, which is something that keeps getting discussed. I mean, Letnik had a line about how essentially that there will be robot care to take care of all this automation. He doesn't know what he's saying. I can't listen to him. I'm sorry. Anyway, that hasn't worked. So what exactly the end goal here is,

other than Trump getting someone to acquiesce is not clear to me, but that is what I think he is angry at Tim Cook about. And you're right, that it is a bit of a dial flip here, because what happened with Tim Cook in term one was he was very good finessing his relationship with Trump. And now Trump has all kinds of other tech leaders talking to him. Mm-hmm. Why isn't this guy?

Right. And, and, and Tim Cook is kind of running his own program about his company and Trump's not, I think, sure how to deal with that. Wasn't in that front row, was he? He was not, but he did donate an awful lot. So yeah. He did. Does Trump realize that moving iPhone production to the US is not realistic?

I would assume he does not. I don't think so, no. Yeah, I think he doesn't understand it. I don't think he knows that and I don't think that for all of the various reasons why, I think he just wants it done. Yeah. So on Monday, Trump said he's delaying the 50% tariffs on EU goods. This is something he does a lot, the red light, green light, on EU goods that he had announced

last Friday. As you've written, quote, more often than not, Trump is reacting to something instead of having an active plan because he was so disorient people. They believe there must be a grander strategy or a secret scheme at play. Whatever he's up to is often part of what he sees as a game whose rules and objections make sense only to him. When it comes to tariff, he's playing a game with the bond market, the world economy, and Wall Street is the adult in the room, really, here, and it hasn't gone well for him. Scott Besant, I would say, as much as anybody is, yeah.

Is the adult in the room, yeah, but he's gone along with some idiotic stuff. Oh, no question. Look, I mean, Scott, well, but Scott Besant is working for a guy who has a certain, you know, belief in punitive tariffs. I think Besson is just doing the best he can. Correct. But the bond market doesn't care. Neither does Wall Street.

No, although I will tell you, Kara, that something Trump does understand is the bond market. And so I don't mean that he's sitting there as a student of it, but that was that the bond market's getting to the precipice on whatever day that was that he hit pause. The bond markets were a major reason why. No, absolutely. But does he have a larger strategy for employing the tariffs? Is it this red light, green light thing, or is he just making it up as he goes along? He sees tariffs as a weapon, and he is deploying the weapon how he wants. And there is not, you know, the end game is, you know, you will hear in broad strokes, better trade deals and- Which aren't coming together.

In some cases, they are, sure. There were supposed to be 90 and 90 days. Well, that was Peter Navarro. But there's no question that there are some people who do want deals. And what his supporters will say, Trump supporters will say is, even people who don't agree with him or don't like him, frankly, will say is there is something to what he is saying about the non-tariff barriers. There is something about what he's saying about the EU countries. There is something about China. There is something real there. It's just that it gets taken to this maximal conclusion of, and I'm going to tear a few into oblivion with no in between. So what the outcome is, it's something that he will say is fair for the US, but in the meantime, the risk for him politically and for his party politically is that he is going

to be perceived by voters, not all voters. There's a number of voters who are going to do whatever he wants and believe whatever he says. But there is a segment of voters who helped put him back in the White House who just want things to be better in their lives. And I don't know that those voters feel like things are yet. Right. That's absolutely true. I mean, a lot of people have been telling me, I agree with this, but not this way.

A lot of them is not this way. So let's pivot to Trump's fight against Harvard. It seems like every day there's a new twist in this conflict. Your colleagues, Jess Ridgewood and Michael Schmidt have written, the administration has the upper hand in the broader fight against Harvard. Do you see him as backing down the way he's done really in the terror fight over and over again? Or does he seem intent on crushing them again? To what end? Does it serve the larger goals about making a show of strength for strength's sake, I guess?

I don't think he's going to back down. I think he'll back down if the court tells him he has to back down. I think that if he is, you know, I know I said earlier, we're seeing that it's tested about whether he will adhere to anybody, you know, questioning his limits. But in some cases we have seen it. I don't think he will continue if there is a Supreme Court ruling, but a lot can happen leading up to that, right? I mean, he can- Right, a lot of damage.

Oh yeah, a lot can be done and a lot of harm can be inflicted on the school. I do think he wants to hurt them. I do think he is angry at them. I don't know the root cause of it. It's interesting because he's such a credentialist and one of the first things he'll say about people is, first in his class at Harvard, first in his class at Yale, first in class at whatever, input the school. Harvard has become a symbol of elitism run amok for a lot of Republicans. We have seen that in these hearings over the last couple of years in Congress.

And so I don't really think he knows quite what the end game is, but again, it's seeing how far it can go. Do you have any sense why Harvard, given Columbia had bigger problems in the area, if he's talking anti-Semitism? Because it's quote unquote the best, that's why. The best, I see, okay. And to what end? To what end is to do a show of force? To what end is to try to bring, I mean, look,

to what end is partly to try to bring whatever changes he can in terms of education in terms of what they will do there are a lot of people and frankly it's not just republicans who are unhappy about including harvard graduates who are happy about some of what they saw with these campus protests you know there are some people who have objected to some of the academic parameters, but again, this is a very extreme reaction. Extreme version of dealing with it, yeah. Yeah. And so it's a confluence of things and we'll see where it goes. I don't know that he has some huge end game. I do know that Stephen Miller often has a big end game in mind.

And so that's a different issue. I want to get to him in a second, but about a week after Trump spent two hours on the phone with Putin and softened his stance towards Moscow, Russia launched its largest drone attack against Ukraine. On Monday, Trump responded with a post that said Putin had gone absolutely crazy. Putin's spokesperson blamed Trump's outburst on an emotional overload. What is going on between them? Lindsey Graham is leading a growing bipartisan push in the

Senate for more sanctions against Russia. Can you see Trump supporting it? Is that what he's sort of working towards? I can see Trump supporting something and I don't think that Lindsey Graham would be doing this if Trump was really opposed to it, honestly. I have a healthy amount of skepticism that Lindsey would be off on his own pushing for this if Trump was really hard against it. And I think it's helpful to Trump as some form of leverage. There's a reason why Trump liked having John Bolton go into certain meetings, and he's talked about this because he thought Bolton would scare other people even if Trump wasn't going to go along with Bolton's program. Ultimately, I think Trump is frustrated. I think Trump is angry at Putin. I think he feels like he is being played. Trump said it publicly on trade social that Putin is

tapping in the long, whether he goes with sanctions, I think is a different issue. Trump told the European leaders, I think it was last week, time has no meaning anymore, on a call that sanctions are not really effective for the US from a financial perspective. And that, look, Trump, everything that Trump approaches everything from is about deals. That is how he looks at things. And so I do think that Trump may end up supporting

some program of sanctions. I think the question is what then? Are they going to be effective long-term? Are they just going to get Putin to the table for some kind of a short-term ceasefire? I don't think they know either. Is their relationship degenerated from your perspective? You know, I don't know. It's a complicated question because it's a thing that everybody

has a lot of theories about, right? Including the best memes ever of them on a horse together. Well, right. But I don't know if it's deteriorated. I think they are both people who are pretty transactional, shall we say, but I think that they come at world affairs from a pretty different perspective. And I think if you're Putin and you are spending all of this capital on a war that you are not winning so far, I don't know what sanctions in particular are going to hurt you or sway you. And then it gets to the question of secondary sanctions on other countries dealing with Russia. I don't know that Trump wants to go there. Yeah. So very quickly, one of the things you told me at the last interview we did was the power of Stephen Miller. You mentioned him. Nobody else was really

clocking him as much as you. We're going to get to Elon in a second, but who is the more performative power was and maybe not isn't anymore. Where is Stephen Miller right now and why does he continue to have such sway? Stephen Miller continues to be underestimated for how expansive his reach is. And the thing about Stephen Miller, according to people who work with him, is he will sometimes be involved in things and you don't necessarily realize it. Stephen has allies in key departments. He has allies at key levels of the government. He has Donald Trump's complete trust.

And he is the architect of the immigration program, which for Trump is one of the most successful pieces so far, at least in terms of the border closure. The border is basically sealed and that was accomplished fairly quickly. And that's what Trump ran on and he did it. And Stephen Miller was a huge part of that. Stephen's influence has not waned. Stephen Miller and Elon Musk were and I think are quite aligned. But Stephen Miller is a long-termer with Donald Trump. Elon Musk is a headline maker of his own, and Stephen Miller tries not to do that. Right. So he continues to have that power, you think? Yep.

They are quite, they're allies and apparently, Milan stayed at his house, I guess, when he was staying here from what I understand. So when I last spoke to you on this podcast in early January, you said Trump was complaining that Elon was around a lot. That was at Mar-a-Lago still. Yeah. Yes, at Mar-a-Lago still. This is before he got to the White House. That moment has passed and Elon now says he's going to devote himself 24-7 to his companies. He won't be spending so much time on politics going forward.

Right. He was there for quite a bit. Like you thought he wouldn't get a West Wing office. He did. He did. I was really surprised. Yeah. That's something I got wrong. I'm fine saying that.

What is the relationship now, obviously? And what, if it's broken, what broke it? Was it Wisconsin? Was it just his... When I hear from Trump people, they call him a nuisance and an irritation and a bully and don't like him. Like, actually, likeability is quite an interesting thing for them. They like his money.

I mean, that's, and Trump likes his money. Yes, of course. But there's a lot of rich people. There's not as many annoying rich people. Yeah, but there's not as many who are going to spend $100 million through Trump's political entities, which by the way, Trump continues to raise money despite the fact that Trump is not running again. And that gives him a certain level of control over his party as well,

because he can threaten to primary people. And Elon helps him with that. Right. 270 million, and he's got more where that came from. That was last, that was the first cycle. But yeah. Yeah, he's pledged and possibly has already given $100 million to groups that Trump controls. That's not what happened last time. It was groups that Elon had more of a direct influence over. In terms of what really changed things, there were a slew of reports from cabinet members who felt like there was a lot of interference. And Jonathan Swan and I wrote about a pretty dramatic meeting, cabinet meeting, where this happened, where there was a confrontation, notably between Marco Rubio

and Elon Musk. but there was also a lighter Sean Duffy back and forth and then Doug Collins from the VA. The main issue, the Wisconsin certainly didn't help, but the main issue was the tank meeting that was set up at the Pentagon, which it was supposed to be a briefing for Musk on China. Pete Hegseth was preparing to it was supposed to be a briefing for Musk on China. Pete Hegseth was preparing to read Musk in on some version of the China war plan according to our reporting. Our reporting was matched by other people. Musk's behavior indicated he may not have realized exactly what he was going to receive. Maybe that's true. Regardless, Trump was unaware of this briefing ahead of time according to multiple people and he read about our reporting when it was on TV right after it broke that night and

was very unhappy and told EXEP to cancel it. And that was the beginning of the end because Trump- Why? Why was that? Because the words Musk and Pentagon and tank and China all in one sentence struck Trump as problematic as a headline and for all of the obvious reasons that should have occurred to anybody who was involved in setting it up. Trump doesn't like to be surprised and he is the commander in chief, so I understand it on that one. So that's why. Yeah. So I've said that Elon served as a heat shield for

Trump in many ways. Doge was able to take control of federal agencies, enforce cuts and lifts much faster than people imagine possible and doing so. Do you think he was enacting Trump's agenda or Project 2025's agenda or his own? Because at the end of the day, they managed to wreak a lot of havoc, made virtually no impact on government spending. Does Trump actually benefit from Doge or was it better that Elon moved along and has he moved along from your perspective? I don't doubt

he'd bring him back if he needed, but. Yeah, and I don't think that Musk is then involved in the day-to-day, although he's clearly still around in certain respects. I think that this was some combination of Musk plus some, you know, what a deputy mayor who I covered in New York City a gazillion years ago would have called government auto mechanics, just people who really understand where all of the carburetors are and how you pick things apart. Elon was doing things in ways that made a lot of people, even people who were predisposed to like him in government, uncomfortable. I don't think that, look, when you say to people as a concept, do you think that waste, fraud, and abuse should be eliminated? I don't know many voters who are like, no, keep it. But

it was the way in which he did it. It was the way in which he expressed tremendous disdain for the federal workforce. Some of them were Trump supporters. That all became very problematic. What the long-term effect of Doge is, I don't think we're going to know for a while. Will you hear a lot about Elon from Trump going forward? I think if Trump thinks it's necessary or useful to him, yes. And I do think, just to be clear, and I didn't say this before, I do think that Trump feels bad about the attacks that Tesla has had. I do think he feels bad about Musk's businesses and the hits they've taken.

I do think that he believes that Musk has done a lot for him, but I also think that he has, I know that he has grown weary of the negative headlines. The negative headlines that were, and then we're starting to splash back on him, presumably. Yeah, I mean, or risked doing that, yeah. We'll be back in a minute. Support for the show comes from Quince.

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Now face a 30% tariff down. About Congress. The one big beautiful bill enshrines into law and funds President Trump's promises. About Elon Musk and Doge. This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy. Those are the loud stories of the Trump administration. There's a quieter story, though. President Trump's obsession with critical minerals. We believe it's possible to extract enormous amounts of critical minerals and rare earths,

which you know we need for technology and high technology in the process. In South Africa, Ukraine, China, Greenland, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the ocean. What exactly is going on right now? On Today Explained, every weekday afternoon? When comedian Chris Gethard was growing up, he went to a place called Action Park. It was one of the first water parks in the country, and it was built by a man who had no experience building theme parks. Some people called him a berserk Willy Wonka. Anyone who went to Action Park understood you could get really messed up going there.

Not only did we know that, it was a huge part of the appeal. I'm Phoebe Judge. Listen to our latest episode, Action Park on criminal, wherever you get your podcasts. So I want to end up talking about this revenge idea that you have here because it is a much darker Trump than when your book first came out in many ways. So if you look at other countries where strongmen have systematically targeted institutions and individuals for retribution, it's not hard to see how this could go off the rails. We talked earlier about how the Republican senators might stand up to Trump on deficits or Russia. Is there anyone in the party who would stand

up and speak out against him if he takes the retribution too far? Is there a too far? Would it even matter? How do you look at his power right now? It's a good question. I don't know what too far would look like for certain people. I don't think we would know until we got there. I think it would depend on how concerned people were about getting reelected themselves. And I will say this, Kara, and you just also asked about things that I wish I had done differently. He was never as weak as we thought he was in 2021 and 2022. He was damaged, but he was, I would actually argue in some ways, had a stronger hold on the actual party,

if not the apparatus in DC than he did before. And that was an error for a lot of us. What has been surprising to me, it's not the Republican Party, what's been surprising to me is the business leaders. And also the business leaders who thought that he was like kidding. They do. Yeah. I've had those conversations. Right.

He wasn't really going to do tariffs. He doesn't really mean this. The retribution is a joke. It's a wink, wink, nod, nod. What we are seeing so far is actually a lot more of what I expected when he was elected the first time in 2016. But he didn't really understand the levers of power and he was under investigation and he had a lot of people around him who sanded certain things down. This is in some ways not surprising. Yeah. So one of the things that I think is a problem is this corruption, this

possibility of monetizing the White House. Your colleague Peter Baker recently published a piece on the stunning ways in which Trump is monetizing the White House. One of the takeaways was the American public didn't seem to care. Paul Rosenzweig was quoted in our article saying, 80% of the public never cared, 20% were overwhelmed and exhausted. Trump is able to effectively label Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden as corrupt. I saw one explanation is the Biden crime family was secret and we're doing everything in public, which is sort of an interesting argument. I know Don Jr. just said, well, they yelled at us before, so we might as well just do it, you know, and we didn't do it and they did it. So why do you think he's doing these? Not just the pardons, which I think is your basic corruption, but the meme coin, the Qatari jet, do you think it does

matter? Because this personal enrichment corrupts pretty much everything, right? I mean, ultimately, do you think it's a money grabbing thing with them or just why not? I think a couple of things. I think that to your question about whether the public cares, I do think the public thinks that the presidency has been monetized over a long period of time. I don't think they think it's just endemic to Donald Trump. It is the scale and that was what the point of Peter's story was and the real-time effects of what we're talking about that is entirely different. That is the main difference. I had a line in the book about asking an advisor to Trump, I think it was July of 2017. We had just left an Oval Office interview with him, a handful of us, and Trump was just ripping Jeff Sessions.

Remember him? The first attorney general who recused himself from an investigation. Now we have Trump's personal lawyers leading the DOJ. Jeff Sessions was just a huge target of Trump's ire for recusing himself from the Russia investigation. And Trump would not let it go in this interview. And I asked this person, why was he doing this? Like, what is the, is there an end game here? And the person's answer was because he can. And I think that applies here with the fact that he measures everything in terms of how much money people have. Why was Elon appealing to him? Because Elon is clocked as the wealthiest man in the world and is objectively a very

smart guy, but you can measure it. That is how you measure worth in Trump's mind. And so this is in his mind, a tremendous opportunity, as you said, his family believes they've, you know, forsook it last time and shouldn't have. And so they're going to do this now. Do I think again, is there a point where voters say, my personal finances haven't gotten better, there were a lot of cuts to the government and look at what's happening here? I think Trump is so buffeted by the fact the information ecosystem is so siloed and bifurcated now and trifurcated, a gazillion-fricated.

There's no three television networks. I went and saw Good Night and Good Luck a couple of weeks ago. This is George Clooney's play. Jewish Clooney's play that's ending soon. It was very well done. It's about Edward R. Murrow. We are not in that era where there is, you know, there are a handful

of TV networks and one person who people put their faith into. People get the information from systems they trust and in many cases it's just to reaffirm what they already think. Right. So last question, last two questions really. Trump 2.0 is constantly bombarding us with headlines, right? This is this idea of flood the zone, it's the old Steve Bannon trope and everything else. But speaking of the digital news era, I want to ask you about how the news media then can cover Trump. We've talked about this before. After he was elected in 2016, the conventional wisdom was that the media had given Trump

too much coverage. Now that the media is overcorrected in the lead up to the 2024 election, the public wasn't attuned to enough crazy things Trump was saying. Is there any way to cover this if it doesn't matter? I think that's what you're kind of saying. Maybe you're not. No, that's not what I'm saying because I think that matter is a subjective view. I think that if people are hoping and the people who level those criticisms against

the news media and primarily the New York Times have the perspective that matter means Donald Trump ceases to exist or loses potency or stops being appealing to people. I don't think that's our, I think that's not our role. Our role is to inform the public about what he would do as president and what he is doing as president. And I think the Times, but not only the Times, I think the Washington Post, I think Bloomberg News And I think the Times, but not only the Times, I think the Washington Post, I think Bloomberg News, I think Politico, I think there's a lot of outlets that are doing a lot of really good work, Axios. And our job is to inform folks on what is happening and let them know it is not. I forget who said this. Someone said this on X,

I can't remember who it was, but they had a line about, it was about this line of criticism. And they said, all I can do is write what's happening. What I cannot do is walk down the street and open people's eyes, clockwork, orange style, like with Malcolm Maddow, yeah, and with, you know, surgically, and make them read my coverage. I can't do that. And I can't also say to them, and here's what you should think, that it also is not my role. I think that if you read the New York Times and if you read mine and Jonathan Swan and Charlie Savage's series about if Trump wins, and that was the headline, if Trump wins over a number of stories,

you knew what he was going to do. If you listened to his speeches, you knew what he was going to do. Now to do now Did he say I'm gonna do a series of retributive? Presidential orders no he did not but he certainly was clear about retribution on any number of occasions and so I I I think voters had all the information that they needed and they reelected him and I think that voters are who elect Folks in this country and all we can do is chronicle history and inform the public And I think that voters are who elect folks in this country and all we can do is chronicle history and inform the public. And I think we are.

My last question, speaking of chronicling history, given everything we've talked about, how Trump is playing games with the economy, his autocratic behavior, the revenge, the corruption, the media's struggle to find the right frame and the public's apathy or exhaustion, or they like it. How are you now thinking about this moment? Are we living through a slow motion, crisis failing to meet the moment with the urgency of demands or just the new normal already

beginning to accept? And I know politics can change rather quickly. Indeed. I mean, Barack Obama's election was less than 20 years ago, and that was a pretty remarkable bipartisan election. And it was an election that was a perfect storm of events with a remarkable generational candidate at the end of a war and a fiscal crisis. And so circumstances change things and a unique moment in history change things. I don't know what the longer term effects are. I disagree that we are struggling for the right frame. I actually think the media is doing a very good job, but I do. And I realize that I will get criticized for saying that. But I just don't know. I don't know what a year from now

looks like. I think that, yes, everything is slow moving and yet kind of quick in terms of how fast things can change. I don't know. I think that the biggest issue that I am seeing, or I shouldn't say the biggest, a big issue is just how many people are afraid to voice reason-based criticism of the president, and that gets to a very risky place. That does, unless it just changes suddenly. Unless it changes and things can change very fast. Yeah, we'll see. Anyway, Maggie Haberman, let me ask one last question. What is that, very quickly. This is like Colombo.

What's the toll on you and reporters like you? Oh, you know, we're not, as my colleague Jonathan Swan often says, we're not in Fallujah. There are reporters who are imprisoned doing their jobs in other countries. I feel very privileged to cover this. Yes, it is a lot of hours, but fortunately, I don't like to take a lot of vacations. Me neither. That's what we have in common. Exactly. That's one of the things, yes. Thank you so much. And again, people you can read Confidence Men, the paperback is out now. Thanks, Kara.

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