The Bulwark Podcast - Michael Schmidt: "I Didn't Know They Made People Like That"

Episode Date: January 19, 2023

Before John Kelly became chief of staff, he thought the chaos at the White House was due to the people around Trump. Instead, each day was about getting through the day without Trump doing something illegal, immoral, or damaging to himself or the country. Mike Schmidt joins Charlie Sykes today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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scriptwriters for 2023, but I mean, at some point, don't just step back and go, okay, there's just too much stuff. If George Santos, whatever his name is, was actually a drag queen, I mean, are the heavens that good to all of us? I don't know. He is absolutely denying it. Meanwhile, Trump allies are getting key positions on the Oversight Committee. This is from this morning's New York Times. Several of the most extreme Republicans in Congress and those mostly closely allied with Mr. Trump have landed seats on the Oversight and Accountability Committee, the main investigative organ in the House from that perch. They are poised to shape inquiries into the Biden administration and to serve as agents of Mr. Trump in litigating his grievances

as he plots his reelection campaign. Interesting. Kevin McCarthy, who, of course, made all sorts of concessions, apparently one of them was to name Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, Lauren Boebert, and Scott Perry to this committee, the number one investigative committee. Really, if you wanted to put together a group of deplorables who would probably put the Republicans in the worst possible light, I don't know how you could do much better than all of that. So we have a lot going on. We are joined today, we're very fortunate to be joined by Mike Schmidt, Washington Correspondent for the New York Times, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, author of Donald Trump versus the United

States. And that book's paperback edition is out this week and includes a new 12,000 word afterword, which is basically a biography of General John Kelly and details of his time as Trump's chief of staff. So first of all, good morning, Mike. How are you? Good. Thanks for having me. Although it does feel like we are going to be caught in this time loop of cleaning up the mess of the Trump years for the rest of our lives. Do you feel that way sometimes, Mike? It's all I do. We're still here with the mop out in the aisle, cleaning up what's left of the Trump administration.

Doesn't seem to end, but that's, you know, we don't pick the stories. We just try and cover them. Well, I mean, and it also has such a long tail because, you know, whatever happens with Donald Trump, you know, you have this entire new generation of Trump lights, Trumpkins, the Marjorie Taylor Gre the focus back because I find the story of John Kelly to be interesting because it really goes to this question of, you know, do I stay or do I go? Is it better for me to be in this shambolic administration because the alternative would be worse? Can I make it better? Or am I simply complicit in all of this? And John Kelly basically is at the center of all of this. So your new afterword starts back in July of 2017. Long time ago, six months into Trump's presidency,

Kelly had been the Secretary of Homeland Security. And Trump starts pressuring Kelly to make him chief of staff. And Kelly doesn't want the job. So, Mike, tell me about that. The Trump pressure campaign to convince John Kelly to leave Homeland Security and to come and take Reince Priebus' job. So Kelly had found himself in Trump's orbit because he basically said, I would work for any president. And he thought that Trump's rhetoric on the campaign trail was something that was more for show and for votes and would be tempered once he came to Washington and was sobered by the office, the institutions of Washington and the guardrails that come with it. What happens is, is that the Trump presidency begins in as chaotic fashion as possible. And Kelly's taken aback by it. But he thinks that Trump's problems are about

process and staffing. Trump just needs to be staffed better. He just needs to have a process around him and he'll be better off. And he's telling Trump this in the first six months of the presidency. And Trump is saying, well, why don't you come and do that for me? And, you know, in Trump's administration, Kelly was probably best equipped to do that. But what happens is that Kelly says, look, I have a really important mission at the Department of Homeland Security. In some ways, it was sort of a dream job for Kelly to have a cabinet post that had a national security mission that had a, you know, something that was central to the country's security, that he was in charge of.

He said, look, you ran on immigration. We're here trying to deal with that issue. Let me be. And Kelly didn't want to go to the White House. He knew that the White House came with political baggage that he hated. Kelly was truly a four-star Marine general that believes in the civilian-military divide. And although he was in a political position as a cabinet secretary, the White House would be a different entity completely politically. And he'd be going to work for essentially the most

political president in American history, someone who had no real core beliefs, but in the process had, you know, taken on a lot of accusations of wrongdoing, was accusing people of other things, just really sort of politics at its most basic, darkest fashion. And Kelly's trying to stave this off and tell Trump that he doesn't want this. And what happens is, is that in this back and forth between Trump and Kelly, Kelly thinks that he's kind of, you know, kept Trump at an arm's length distance and talked him out of this. And Kelly learns via tweet that he's become the White House chief of staff. Which, of course, is the way things should be done, right? Your analysis, though, of Kelly as a military man and what he was thinking. So he's looking at the chaos of the administration

and he thinks it's not necessarily Trump, it's the people around Trump. He thinks Trump needs a strong leader to impose discipline. He's a military guy. When the president asks you to do something, you do it. But I thought it was interesting that as somebody who had studied military history, Kelly was worried that this chaos could result in absolute disaster. I just want to read something you wrote here. To Kelly, it was simple. A vacuum of leadership was clearly emerging around Trump where he did not have sober and well-informed people who could provide him with the best information so he could make the right decisions. And when such a dynamic exists at the top of the American government, it has the potential to destabilize the world order

and lead to destruction and death. So Kelly was worried that this could lead to what? That what would happen if there was an actual disaster or a terror attack? What would happen? So you have a president of the United States who Kelly, from the Department of Homeland Security, a little bit on the outside looking into the White House, thinks he doesn't have the right people around him. He doesn't have the right process. And if he doesn't have the right process, the right options are not going to be brought to him. And he's going to make a mistake. And being president of the United States means that every, you know, so often you have to make that huge decision about what to do on a national security matter or in response to a natural disaster. And he thinks that Trump is in a very vulnerable position because he doesn't have that

process around him. He's not getting the best information. And he's not someone that is schooled in the ways of Washington and national security. And he can make a huge mistake. And this is what Kelly thinks the problem is, is he's coming in huge mistake. And this is what Kelly thinks the problem is, is he's coming in as chief of staff. You also have this interesting tidbit that I don't think I've ever seen before that, you know, while Trump was pressing Kelly to take the chief of staff job, he was also what he was suggesting that he also take over as FBI director after he fired Jim Comey. He wanted Kelly to take over the FBI and stay at the Department of Homeland Security at the same time, a move that led some of the administration to think that Trump was trying

to like sort of tie up Kelly in a way that like would have hampered the FBI. I'm not sure Trump is that much of a six dimensional chess player. It just seems like a bad idea more than anything. But in the process of this, Kelly says to Trump, he asked for his loyalty if he were to become FBI director. And that's important for two reasons. One, it's just an extraordinary thing for a president to ask of a potential person that would run the country's top law enforcement entity that was investigating the president and his ties to Russia and whether he obstructed justice. And on top of that, it echoes things that he said to Jim Comey

about asking for Comey's loyalty earlier in the administration. And the thing that you have to wonder is that if he asked for the loyalty of Jim Comey and John Kelly, two people that if you knew anything about them, that probably wouldn't go over well. Like you don't need to really be inside their heads to know that that is something that sort of runs in the face of their core values. That if he's asking them to do that, how many other loyalty oaths do we not know about? Do you think John Kelly and Jim Comey are the only people that Trump asked for the loyalty of? You think those are the two? Those are the only two that we found just happen to be the two people that sort of hold themselves out as sort of nonpartisans that are national security focused people that believe they took an oath to the constitution and not an

oath to an individual. So those are the only two that we found in the whole administration. It just happens to be John Kelly and Jim Comey. We didn't find any others. He still thought he could fix things. But as you report, Kelly later acknowledged to confidants that he'd miscalculated. He'd miscalculated about what Trump's problems were and what the real root of the problems were. And the interesting quote, I didn't know they made people like that. How long did it take John Kelly to go, oh my God, what have I done? I think it happens in a matter of hours, if not days, that Kelly sort of realizes, okay, I was right. There is no process. He needs to be staffed better. That is right. But there's a bigger problem. At the heart of it is someone who is far dumber, more limited, lazier, more immoral,

more impulsive than I thought. And that quote, which is perhaps the most telling quote about Kelly's view of Trump, I didn't think they made people like that, is a real summation of Kelly's view. And Kelly could have quit at that point. And he could have left. But Kelly's view, I think, is basically, if I wasn't going to quit on the battlefield, I'm not going to quit now in the White House. And if I thought it was important that there be order and process and someone like myself to be chief of staff or someone to sort of impose that, it's even more important now. Because not only does that process not exist, but there's an unbound president sitting in front of him. Someone who Kelly is unsure is like, how would this person make a major decision? What is at the

core of this person? And so not only does the White House staff have to be managed, but someone has to try and keep this president on the tracks. And Kelly being a four-star Marine General was probably the best equipped person to take that on. So he basically decides to stay. I'm not even sure it was a conscious decision just to stay, but basically a mindset comes over him that I'm going to stay here as long as possible to take as much pain as possible. I'll take it. I'll do it as long as I can to try and keep this on the tracks. And he does that for the next 18 months. So you described the very first day. Guy walks into the White House. He's the new chief of staff. Trump orders him to fire Anthony Scaramucci.

You know, after, what, 11 days, he walks in, he sees people milling around. Nobody's got any jobs. And he heard a rumor that Steve Bannon had actually bugged his office because Bannon was afraid that Trump was ready to fire him. And this is day one that he's learning how things like the fact that there was a dispute between Melania and Ivanka about the fact that Ivanka wanted to become the first lady. He has to figure out how to tell Omarosa that she can't have pool parties at the White House pool because it's not hers. People are complaining to him about the size of their office and whether they have access to government planes. While he's confronting those things, which I'll put in the bucket of frivolous, he's also realizing that at the heart of all of this, and at the time from the outside, we thought Trump's biggest problems were the Mueller investigation and whether he was obstructing justice and what the

questions were about his ties to Russia, Kelly identifies something far larger. And he's afraid that Trump is pushing the country to war with North Korea and that this is the biggest issue that Kelly has in front of him. And what's happening at the time is that Trump is using not only public, but private language about using force against North Korea. If you remember Fire and Fury, that happened seven days after Kelly starts, Little Rocket Man, all these different things. And Kelly, being a student of history and a student of war is fearful that Trump is going to say something and put the North Koreans in a position in which they think they have to act, that Kim needing to appeal to his people and show that he is strong and is not getting pushed around

by Donald Trump is going to do something, is going to do more than just a missile test. He's going to launch a missile at South Korea or at an American ally or at American forces in the area or towards the United States. The United States is going to have to immediately react and knock it down. So North Korea would be acting because of Trump's rhetoric. And all of a sudden, we would find ourselves in a shooting match with North Korea, with Donald Trump as the president, someone who doesn't want to look weak. So you have two people that Kelly views as insecure

in their positions, Kim and Trump. And he thinks that a missed signal can easily set off war. And he has to move Trump off of this rhetoric. He has to get Trump to stop publicly saying that he wants to essentially, you know, giving signals that he wants to go to war. And what Kelly does is he tries to use that process. He brings in the generals to say to Trump, basically, look, this is a conflict that if it started could kill thousands of people. And that doesn't resonate with Trump. Kelly says to Trump, look, you can destroy the economy that you've created. You know, Kelly, knowing that Trump was probably most proud of the economy that didn't get through to Trump.

It's only when Kelly says to Trump in sort of a desperation move and in appealing to Trump's darkest sides of his ego, you're the ultimate dealmaker. No one has engaged directly with Kim. No American president has been able to cut a real deal with him. You can do it. You can be that dealmaker. And if you remember, sort of a question of the Trump presidency is that how do we go from fire and fury and little rocket man and my buttons bigger than yours to the love letters? How did we get there? It was sort of this weird evolution of Trump. And one of the reasons is that in private, Kelly is pushing Trump to ratchet back that rhetoric, but to do it because he's the ultimate dealmaker, to engage directly with Kim. And Kelly knows that this is not going to lead to a denuclearized North Korea,

but it's going to take us off this potential war footing and this situation where this public rhetoric is out of control. So John Kelly made himself or tried to make himself into a student of Trump's psychology to figure out what made this guy tick. So talk to me about that. He's trying to decode, you know, what's going on inside this guy's head. He realizes that he's unlike anyone else he's done. So how does he go about figuring that out? I think that Kelly is forced to think on his feet. So you have to remember, like, in life, if you run into a problem and you're a regular person, there's other people you can call

to help you, right? You know, you witness a crime on the street and you call the police or, you know, if you need medical help, you call a doctor. When you're standing between the president and the abyss, there is no one else to call. There's no other White House chief of staff to call. There's no one else there to help you. There's no other president of the United States that can come in and help you. It's just you and the president. And Kelly's looking for anything he can hold on to, to try to contain Trump and try to ratchet Trump back from this. And it's in that desperation to sort of contain him that he realizes that the direct path to Trump is through his ego and to appealing to his ego. And that is why he heads

down that path of saying, look, you're the ultimate dealmaker. You can do this. And it's an important thing because it shows itself to be successful because Trump's rhetoric does change. And it's Kelly and Trump one-on-one. There was no one else who could really help Kelly. Sure, he had the other senior national security officials that were in his orbit and that were in Trump's orbit that were part of talking to Trump. But Kelly is spending more time with Trump in 2017 and 2018 probably than anyone else. Just drill down a little bit in some of the detail that you have in this afterward, the daily routine. Kelly comes up with a strategy that he thought would help create stability. And so he gets up every day at 3.30 a.m. And the first thing

he does is he turns on cable news. Walk me through his early morning routine to be able to manage Donald Trump. Kelly knew that to deal with Trump was to understand what was on cable news in the morning. Most presidencies are thought out days, weeks, months in advance. They're planned down to, you know, the five minute increments. In the case of Trump, it was just getting through the day. And the day was usually dominated by something that Trump heard on cable news in the morning. And so Kelly would keep cable news on. So he knew when Trump came down around 11 o'clock in the morning to begin his workday that he knew what had been said. And he's watching shows like Morning Joe, a show that Trump insisted that he didn't

watch. Kelly's keeping his eye on it because he knows that Trump is watching it and he's seeing what Joe Scarborough is saying. And he's trying to track with it. So when Trump comes down and the day is dominated by some angry tirade that Trump has about what people are saying about him, he has a familiarity with it, so he's not caught flat-footed. So while Kelly's taking the presidential daily briefing and getting up to speed on the problems facing the country, he's keeping his eye on cable news because he knows that that will probably be one of the predominant issues he deals with during the day. I think we know that, but you emphasized how strange it is that

you have the president of the United States that really doesn't come down until 11 o'clock and, you know, General Kelly, who's a military guy. I mean, you didn't expect everybody to have the same kind of discipline, but this is what you wrote. Here was the president of the United States who was supposed to be solving the country's problems and taking in the best information so we could make the best decisions, coming to work an hour before most people began eating lunch and expressing no interest whatsoever in the greatest threats to the country. So he's working for a president who spends the whole morning just up in the residence watching television. That was Donald Trump's routine. Yeah. And I think that the thing that

I hadn't appreciated was just how much the day was about just getting through the routine? Yeah. And I think that the thing that I hadn't appreciated was just how much the day was about just getting through the day. It was like, how do you get through the day without Trump doing something illegal, immoral, or that damages himself or the country? And that that was the goal. And that that's how Kelly saw his job. And that it didn't allow for thinking much more beyond that because Trump was so engrossing and so difficult to manage. And there's a little bit of soap opera here as well. The relationship between Kelly and Jared Ivanka. I mean, you write that Trump wanted Kelly to fire the two of them, send them back to New York. I don't want them here. They're a distraction. Of course, Kelly's understanding that if he fires members of the family, it won't end well. So, I mean,

there was a little bit of, he had to deal with all the tension. He had to deal with the egos, the personality, the family members, the tension between Ivanka and Melania. I mean, it just sounds like it's just a nightmare. Yeah. And one of Kelly's biggest problems that he encounters in the White House is Jared and Ivanka in the later months of his tenure. And one of the biggest showdowns that he has is over Jared's security clearance, where he won't sign off on Jared's clearance. And he tells Trump that if you want Jared to have a clearance, you need to order me to do that,

and we're going to document that, that you ordered me to do that, because I don't think this should happen, and you're going to have to do that in order for him to do that, because I and the other people that are in charge of security clearances here don't think he should have one. Do we know why the officials who were paying attention to this did not want to give Jared a security clearance? We know part of the story, but it's one of the stories that we don't have the full picture on still from the Trump administration. We know that Jared had a lot of problems with his disclosure forms. There were enormous amount of amendments to them. Those in and of themselves raised questions among the people that do the background

checks. On top of that, we know that there is something else that concerned the national security community that was relayed to the White House, that it's something that is classified, that we've never been able to figure out, that also gave these people pause. Putting that aside, it's my sense that Kelly didn't think that Jared and Ivanka even had the basic qualifications to work in the government, let alone to have security clearances. He saw it as nepotism at the highest levels. And just from a basic, like, were they qualified sort of area, I don't think he thought they were qualified to be in the government. Okay. So going back to the beginning where John Kelly had this, the belief that he could maybe impose some order on this because the

problem of the Trump White House was the bad people around Donald Trump. He realizes at a certain point that the no, the problem is Trump. I mean, he had assumed that a lot of the ridiculous things Trump said were just part of being a showman. And then he realized he was wrong and that all of the chaos flowed from Donald Trump himself. So how did that happen? I mean, was that the first day? Was that the first week to realize this is it? This is not the people around him.

He can't be managed. Yeah. I mean it. This is not the people around him. He can't be managed. Yeah. I mean, it's not just the people around. It's not just the fact that it's that at the center of it is a force unlike anything that Kelly had seen before. Kelly had gone to war. Kelly had been part of the invasion of Iraq. He had gone to Iraq at the height of the insurgency there and tried to, you know, deal with local sheikhs and win them over and try and bring some stability to that country. But Kelly had never seen something like the force that Trump was and the malign force that Kelly thought he was. And Kelly basically decides that I'm not going to run from this. I'm going to stay. And it plays out, you know, in dramatic fashion to the point in which by the end of it, Trump and Kelly hate each other.

Well, what's interesting is also is that Trump didn't want advice, even though he was completely uninformed and ignorant of so many things. He he thought that he was the smartest guy in the room and he refused to say, I don't know, I need advice, right? I mean, and as you point out, I mean, among the topics Trump showed that he was, you know, completely lacking in any real knowledge of foreign policy, we talked about North Korea and you quote him saying at some point he asked, why the fuck are we in NATO? Which seems particularly ominous now considering the importance of NATO. So talk to me a little bit about John Kelly encountering a president who is not only uninformed, but unwilling to actually acknowledge what he didn't know. Yeah, I think that for any president, there is a learning curve, right? And like, especially for an outsider like Trump, there would be some time that it takes to get someone like that up to speed and to educate them on the different ways, you know, being president is something you could obviously

prepare and study for, but it's a job unlike any other. But I think that Kelly was shocked by the lack of basic knowledge that Trump had, the lack of curiosity that he had, and the fact that Trump thought he knew that what he was talking about on a range of things, you know, that Trump knew more than, there's a quote in the section about how Trump thought he knew more than the geologists, you know, that Trump professed to have knowledge that he really didn't. And that it wasn't just that he had a low baseline of knowledge of basic facts of American history and American foreign policy and how the government functioned, but also that he thought he knew so many things. So it was the combination of the two of them, I think that was

particularly scary to Kelly. Kelly has described conversations that he had with Trump where Trump expressed admiration for the loyalty of German generals to Hitler, which had to be a little bit rattling because Kelly had to inform him, you know, that first of all, they lost the war and some of them actually plotted to assassinate Hitler. Trump was weirdly fascinated with that period of history. I mean, I always hesitate to play that card, but he kept bringing it up, didn't he? There was a fascination with German history and with Germany, but in a way that was sort of looked favorably upon the way that they had done things at times in which no one else really views it that way. educate Trump on the basics of German history, on the fact that we weren't on the sides of the Germans in World War I, and that usually we're on, you know, if the United States is in a conflict, we're on the sides of the good guys, because, you know, there's some very odd coming back to Germany over and over again in a favorable way that I think was surprising. So let's talk about the death of John McCain. It's August 2018. There was a bipartisan

outpouring of respect and grief for John McCain. Trump could not get past the fact that he hated John McCain. You tell the story about the back and forth between Donald Trump and General Kelly about how to handle and react to the death of John McCain. There were some very basic things that needed to happen for John McCain to have his funeral and for the U.S. government to give John McCain the treatment that a war hero like that would typically receive. And Kelly really fought Trump on this. Trump wouldn't put the White House flag at half mass. Trump wouldn't put a statement out. Trump was going to stand in the way of the signing off on what was needed to have a formal military funeral for McCain. And Kelly and Trump really went at it and screamed at each other over this. And Kelly

was basically ready to quit over it because he knew and appreciated McCain and knew what McCain meant and knew what McCain had gone through as a prisoner of war and the fact that he had become such a high profile politician and what McCain stood for. And it's one of the final breaking points in the relationship between Trump and Kelly is over McCain. And it's just an example of how Trump had no regard or respect for those that had really sacrificed themselves for the country. And did you mention there was also that other episode where Trump didn't want to go to visit the cemetery outside Paris with the American war dead on the 100th anniversary of World War I. Apparently, Trump didn't want to get his hair ruined in the rain and didn't understand the point of visiting a memorial site.

He was quoted as saying, they're losers, suckers in the war. John Kelly is somebody who lost a son in battle. And I mean, obviously, having to listen to this must have been, if the relationship was not irretrievably broken before that, that had to have done it. I think it's this recurring thing where Trump says really awful things about those who were killed in battle or taken prisoner in battle or that suffered some sort of significant wound. And he's saying this to John Kelly, the highest ranking American military officer to lose a child in the post 9-11 wars. And it's just part of the pain that Kelly had to endure while working for Trump,

the things that he had to put up with, because he thought it was important, back to your original sort of question and sort of the premise of this, which is that, should I stay or should I go? And is it better off for me to be here or not be here? And part of the pain that Kelly had to put up with during this period of time is listen to the commander in chief belittle and demean people that had given the ultimate sacrifice to the country? So this is an ongoing question that we've wrestled with for years. So Don Kelly is seeing Donald Trump up close and personal and his real sort of insensitivity and disdain for the men and women who fought and died for America. And yet there is this tremendous support among the military and the veteran community for Donald Trump. None of this

seems to have made, to have shaken that support. And always we keep coming back to not just that Donald Trump is Donald Trump, but that millions of Americans look at Donald Trump and they say, yes, that's what we want in a leader. And so as we walk through the story of John Kelly, John Kelly, if he had not been in the White House, might have thought the same thing, but he sees it. And then he tells people about it and it doesn't make a difference. How do we make sense of all of this? If Barack Obama had expressed these sentiments, had refused to go to a cemetery, had called, you know, our honored dead losers and suckers in the war. We would never have heard the end of it. And yet Donald Trump does it and they still like him.

I think that that question is something that continues to lead me to want to cover this story is to sort of understand how it was that the, that people came to view Trump the way that he did and the way that Trump sort of tested those around him and revealed different things about them and how people dealt with an unbound president and someone that was spewing this rhetoric and was saying and doing the things that he was. It's one thing in society, if someone is behaving this way, they usually are ostracized and sort of cut out or fired or pushed aside or such. But when it's the President of the United States, and they have such extraordinary power, and that is much more difficult,

those options are not there. So how do people around someone like that deal with that? How do they deal with that when there is no one else to call and it's just them and the president? How do you confront that and how do you got into that situation, how you came to see what was around you, and how you responded to it. I just think it's a human experience that we rarely see. Most of the narratives and chronicles of previous administrations are about how administrations do things, right? Or they respond to things. This is how the Bush administration responded to 9-11. This is how the Bush administration led the invasion of Afghanistan. This is how the Obama administration passed healthcare. Those are the focuses on the things. This is something completely different. This is seeing into a side of politics, government, and human behavior

that's just so different. And it's one of the reasons that I focused so much of my attention in my reporting, both for the newspaper and for the book, on those around Trump and how they served and how Trump tested them, how we saw them respond and what it revealed about them. And those people being Don McG know, Don McGahn, Jim Comey, and John Kelly, you know, the three primary ones. So General Kelly is done and he's on the way out and he's advising Trump, don't replace me with a yes man, because if you do, you will be impeached. And of course, we know what happened then. Donald Trump then names Mick Mulvaney and almost exactly a year later, Trump is impeached for the first time.

Kelly, on the way out, says to Trump, don't pick a bootlicker. Pick someone that is going to keep you on the tracks. And if you don't, you're going to get impeached. And, you know, critics of John Kelly, you know, will say he should have spoken out, he should have done more, you know, that he should have left, you know, all these different things. But at the end of the day, Kelly is sort of proven true in the most dramatic fashion, because it is in the months after Kelly leaves that he has the call with Zelensky that leads to his first impeachment. And while a lot of things went wrong in the first two years and a lot of things that were major stains on Donald Trump and on the United States. There is a different tenor of the second two years from the first two years. There is a difference. Trump is impeached in 2019 and then 2020 into 2021 into January 6th of 2021 is something that is much fresher in all of our collective memories. And Trump's behavior, especially in 2020, is unbound in a way that is far different than the first two years.

That's not to say the first two years that Trump was some disciplined president, you know, some tactician that, you know, it was only in the second two years that he went off the tracks, but the first two years are different than the second two years. So John Kelly is now telling his story. How outspoken has he been? What is he doing right now? So John Kelly is someone that took a different path than most people in the administration. He has not written a book. You don't see John Kelly on television. You don't see John Kelly writing op-eds. He's someone that's very difficult to find in those areas. He's not someone that's at Washington book parties and such. He's off doing the things that he wants to do. He didn't go out and try to immediately become part of the anti-Trump movement.

He's not someone that has any appetite for partisan politics. And I think he's deeply conflicted about the fact that he sees himself as a retired four-star Marine general, and that the divide between the military and the politics, partisan politics of civilian life or something that he believes is incredibly important to the country and to, I think, to who he is. And because of that, he's someone that has not been a major public figure in the years after Trump left office. And he's not someone that Congress hauled up to testify. He's not been front and center in that sense. You're a student of history. I'm struggling to remember any other administration or presidency in which so many close aides of the president have come out and said, yeah, this guy's really

a problem. He is unfit for office. He has become detached from reality. You know, we're talking about chiefs of staff. We're talking about national security advisors, attorney generals, even if they might vote for him again, secretaries of state. It's an extraordinary list of people who saw Trump up close and personal and in one form or another have said this was really terrible. This was dangerous. And yet among Republicans, it hasn some of the reason that they may not be as forthcoming and turn themselves into sort of public attack dogs of Trump is that they would say, what else do you need to know about Donald Trump to make up your mind? We know more about Donald Trump than probably anyone else in modern American history. And we knew a fair amount of it before he was elected

in 2016. So there's a certain part of the Trump story and it's like, what else do you need to know? Right. And sure, you know, these anecdotes in this stuff about Kelly are new and revealing, but it doesn't open a new door into I'm part of Donald Trump that we didn't know about where, you know. So the question that hangs over all of this and that I couldn't, you know, shake as I was reading this is, you know, clearly it's the story of, you know, somebody who thought that, okay, if we just gave them the good advice or surrounded them with the right people, that it wouldn't be so terrible. And then discovering, no, that's not the only problem. The problem is Trump raises the question, if Donald Trump returns to the presidency, who would he surround himself with in Trump 2.0? And I'm sure you've thought about this at all,

because he doesn't want someone who's going to keep him on the track. He doesn't want somebody who is going to tell him no. He's going to make sure that he's going to be surrounded by highly unusual figures that were not wedded in the facts that were, you know, your Sidney Powell's and your John Eastman's or Rudy Giuliani's that were advising him. And I think Trump really struggled to get people out of his way. He struggled even with Bill Barr, someone that is largely seen by Democrats as an enabler of Trump. Trump really struggled to get around Barr and work around Barr because Barr wouldn't do everything that Trump wanted him to do. And I think it's really that last few weeks of the administration and sort of the days leading up to January 6th, where Trump figures out that these individuals that are not really in the

administration that are sort of, you know, the my pillow guy and those type of people that will do his bidding. And we'll do that publicly. And we'll try and take actions to further his causes and dig up the stuff, whatever. He's not someone that's wedded in the facts, so I'm not sure what you're digging up. But that will push the narratives and do the things that he wants and file the briefs and the suits and all that stuff and make the claims. And Trump really struggled to get rid of the guardrails. And while Trump was an unbound president and did things that we had never seen before and things that we didn't think a president could do or were possible, or certainly we thought that the norms and the institutions would restrain, it takes him a long time to really become Trump being Trump completely unvarnished. And that's not to say that the efforts to keep him

on the tracks really kept him on the tracks, but he is increasingly unbound as the presidency goes on until the end. So what are we talking about? You know, Kash Patel as Secretary of Defense, Mike Lindell as Attorney General. Where are you going to get these people to come into this administration except from the loyalist of the loyal? There was that belief early on among the quasi-MAGA establishment that, OK, this is not going to be that terrible. But we're talking about an administration stacked by people like Kerry Lake now. Maybe Herschel Walker will be the ambassador to Germany. What kinds of people

would he bring back? Right along those lines. And, you know, Jonathan Swan wrote this great piece for Axios about what a second Trump term could look like and that they would try and clear out the top end of the sort of civilians that are at the top of the executive branch sort of running the government or the ultimate deep state that they think plagued Trump's presidency. And those are the names, those are the people. But if he's elected president, there will be a fair amount of people that will have had to have supported him to get him there. So they will be able to find the people. And I think this is true no matter where it is or what it is. I think that power attracts people and that people make different compromises to get to power and to get to where they are. And I think a certain type of person was attracted to the first Trump administration.

And I think the second Trump administration would attract a different type of person. I think that's fair. I mean, there's always going to be people who want to fly in Air Force One and want a job in the White House and will be attracted to the power and influence. And it would be naive to think he won't be able to find those. Mike Schmidt, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast. Mike is Washington correspondent for The New York Times, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, author of Donald Trump versus the United States. The paperback edition of that book is out this week. And we've been talking about the 12,000 word afterward, which discusses General John Kelly and his tenure as Trump's chief of staff. Mike, thanks so much.

Thanks for having me. And thank you all for listening to today's Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We will be back tomorrow. We'll do this all over again. The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown. This is an ad by BetterHelp Online Therapy. October is the season for wearing masks and costumes, but some of us feel like we wear a mask and hide more often than we want to. At work, in social settings, around our family.

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