The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Jim Sciutto – The Madman Theory: Trump Takes On the World

Episode Date: August 13, 2020

Jim Sciutto - The Madman Theory: Trump Takes On the World CNN Profile CNN.com Richard Nixon tried it first. Hoping to make communist bloc countries uneasy and thus unstable, Nixon let them think he was just crazy enough to nuke them. He called this “the madman theory.” Nearly half a century later, President Trump has employed his own “madman theory,” sometimes intentionally and sometimes not. Trump praises Kim Jong-un and their “love notes,” admires and flatters Vladimir Putin, and gives a greenlight to Recep Tayyip Erdogan to invade Syria. Meanwhile, he attacks US institutions and officials, ignores his own advisors, and turns his back on US allies from Canada and Mexico to NATO to Ukraine to the Kurds at war with ISIS. Trump is willing to make the nation’s most sensitive and consequential decisions while often ignoring the best information and intelligence available to him. He continually catches the world off guard, but is it working? In The Madman Theory, Jim Sciutto shows how Trump's supporters assume he has a strategy for long-term success – that he is somehow playing three-dimensional chess. Now that we are four years into his presidency, we can see his unpredictable focus on short-term headlines has in fact lead to predictably mediocre results in the short and long run. Trump’s foreign policy has undermined American values and national security interests, while hurting allies who have been on our side for decades, leaving them isolated and vulnerable without American support. Meanwhile, he comforts and emboldens our enemies. The White House’s revolving door of staff demonstrates that Trump has no real plan; all serious policymakers—and those who would be a check on his most destructive impulses—have been exiled or jumped ship. Sciutto has interviewed a wide swath of current and former administration officials to assemble the first comprehensive portrait of the impact of Trump’s erratic foreign policy. Smart, authoritative, and compelling, The Madman Theory is the definitive take on Trump’s calamitous legacy around the globe, showing how his proclivity for chaos is creating a world which is more unstable, violent, and impoverished than it was before. Jim Sciutto is CNN's chief national security correspondent and anchor of CNN Newsroom. After more than two decades as a foreign correspondent stationed in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, he returned to Washington to cover the Defense Department, the State Department, and intelligence agencies for CNN. His work has earned him Emmy Awards, the George Polk Award, the Edward R. Murrow award, and the Merriman Smith Memorial Award for excellence in presidential coverage. A graduate of Yale and a Fulbright Fellow, he lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Gloria Riviera, who is a crisis communications professional and journalist for ABC News, and their three children.

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get everybody involved, listening and watching the show because what else can you do? It's a quarantine land. So there you are. Today we have a most excellent guest in his extraordinary new book that he's got out called Madman Theory, Trump Takes on the World. Jim Sciutto is with us today. He is CNN's chief national security correspondent and anchor of CNN Newsroom. After more than two decades as a foreign correspondent stationed in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, he returned to Washington to cover the Defense Department, the State Department, and intelligence agencies for CNN. I always think of that as being like oxymoron intelligence the intelligence agency, but you know, there you go. His work has earned him Emmy Awards, the George Polk Award, the Edward R. Murrow Award, and the Miriam Smith Memorial Award for Excellence in Presidential Coverage. He's a graduate of Yale

and a Fulbright Fellow. He lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife, Gloria Rivera, who is a crisis communications professional and journalist for ABC News and their three children. Welcome to the show. How are you doing, Jim? I'm great. I've been looking forward to this. Thanks so much for having me. Awesome sauce. So you've got this new book out on shelves. Where can people go pick it up and, of course, find you on the interwebs? Amazon is the easiest, or your local bookstore should be there. And it'd be an honor if you'd take the time and you could always reach out and send me

feedback on Twitter. There you go. And you're on weekdays on CNN, too, as well, in the morning, right? 9 to 11 Eastern every day. Yeah. Get the plug in there. So welcome to the show. You've written this book.

You've written several great books that people should check out. Give us an overview of what this book is about and what made you want to write it. So big picture, this is a deep dive on four years of America first, right? What does Trump mean for the world? We've heard a lot of criticism. We've heard a lot of defense of him. So I try to take an open mind, sit back and talk only to people who worked for Trump at the senior most level. I spoke only to Trump appointees at the very top and

almost exclusively on the record because I wanted I didn't want this to be a book of blind quotes. I wanted it to be on the record analysis and was able to get that took some work, but I was able to convince people. And, you know, that's what I tried to do here is just be fair and open-minded, but also, you know, measure him up against some hard metrics. You know, here's what he inherited, and here's what he's leaving after four years. So he's leaving after four years, so there's that. You may have a second book, you know, if he gets reelected. So you talk to everybody.

You talk to people that maybe were fired by him and got on his bad side and then people that are still on his good side? That's exactly right. And all folks who accepted the job he appointed and worked to the best of their abilities right for him. But I speak to Peter Navarro, right, still in the administration, very much a public defender of the president, really with a purview beyond trade now, right?

I mean, this is a guy who's even delving into the debate over COVID treatments, right? Steve Bannon, kind of a thinker from behind the scenes, but also others who serve. H.R. McMaster was a national security advisor. Joseph Yellen was his chief North Korea negotiator. Fiona Hill, of course, is chief Russia advisor and others in the Defense Department. Just to get the broadest view possible. You know, a lot of folks ask me, OK, what's the madman theory? How did you arrive there? And the way I got there was this.

And I'm sure, Chris, you've heard this, you know, for years from the president or his loyalists. You know, they'll always say the president or his loyalists. They'll always say the president is a disruptor and he keeps everybody off balance. And he swoops in at the end with an outrageous concession or an outrageous demand. Here's the art of the deal, right? But he wins out. He's got a strategy. He makes it happen. Now, as I covered him as a president with that kind of strategy in mind,

it harkened back to me, the madman theory that Nixon famously used or tried to use. This is where I start the book. In the height of the Vietnam War, Nixon instructs Kissinger to communicate in no uncertain terms to the North Vietnamese, Nixon is just mad enough to order a nuclear strike. Almost in a sense of, man, the old man, I don't know what he's going to do, but he's just mad enough to do it. And the idea was that would scare the North Vietnamese into concessions to give the U.S. a more favorable exit from the war. Now, the fact is, it failed. We know how the war ended, but Nixon owned it. It's in H.R. Haldeman's memoirs, described as the madman theory as a way to approach geopolitics. So 50 years later, we have a president come in with his own version of it, although Trump's is different in a couple of ways. One is this,

just as likely to use it against allies as adversaries. Look at our relationships with NATO allies or with South Korea, you know, threatening to yank U.S. troops unless they pay more money, or Canada, who the president declared a national security threat, right, to impose steel tariffs on them, and the president willing to unleash it on his own advisors. I've got a whole bunch of stories in the book about how the president undermined them, contradicted them, reversed U.S. policy in a moment like that. So that's Trump's madman. And then what I try to do in the book is test it out, see how it worked, if it worked.

Yeah, if the results maybe you want to decide. You know, it's interesting you bring this up. When Nixon was doing that, was he in the depths of Watergate? It was before Watergate, but it was in the depths of a crisis, right? I mean, it was a war for the U.S. that was not going well. Vietnam, yeah. I was wondering if he did it as a diversionary tactic. I didn't get a chance to read up on it.

And, you know, I just noticed here in pulling up the madman theory on Wiki, in 1517, Nicola Machiavelli had argued that sometimes a very wise thing to simulate madness. I don't know. I haven't heard that he has. And given his reading habits, I doubt that Trump has read Machiavelli. But there is some, you know, that's the idea. There's some braggadocio in there, you know, from Trump and others saying, I know how to do this.

You know, I got trust my gut here. I don't want to scare people into thinking I'm crazy. The trouble is, when you see it play out, it's not often or ever really connected to a contiguous, broader strategy. It's kind of the whims of him in the moment and thinking that he just knows better. And then sometimes also changing his mind in the moment as well. So in some of the interviews, what were some of the kind of far edges of both sides that you got? What were some of the standout interviews, I guess, that made you go, okay? Let's see. I'm going to start in the loyalist category, if I can,

for a moment. I'm going to start with Peter Navarro, because he's a true believer, right? And I gave the true believers a chance to explain their view of all this, right? And one thing about the world of Trump is that what you or I or others might see as folly, his loyalists see as wisdom, right? Like he has a plan, you know, this whole three-dimensional chess idea. Navarro talks about that. Navarro will say not only that the president is thinking harder and better than we realize, but he also reflects the president's views. I'll give an example. You know, the president has raised questions about whether our alliances mean anything or whether our allies are truly our allies, right? He takes shots at Germany,

takes shots at the French. He, you know, takes shots at Canada and Mexico. And if you think that is just in the moment, sort of, you know, I'm just trying to gain some leverage in this particular negotiation, it really isn't. Because when you dig down deeper, he and his loyalists really question whether those people, those countries are our allies. I had this exchange with Peter Navarro. And I said, well, what about Canada? You know, they, you know, as he was questioning various alliances, you know, the US with Europe, you know, how loyal are they really to us? And I said, well, what about Canada? You know, they, you know, as he was questioning various alliances, you know, the US with Europe, you know, how loyal are they really to us? And I said, well, what about Canada? I mean, our neighbor's longest peaceful border in the world. He's like, are they really our allies? And I said, well, I don't know, bled on the beaches of

Normandy, you know, their tip of the spear in Afghanistan. And I've been there and I've seen them and they died there, much more so than many of America's other allies, Vietnam, et cetera. And he said, well, did they really do that for us or for their own interests? I said, well, shared interest. Right. I mean, the democracies were on the same side. Like, I'm not so sure about that. That's like Canada. I tell my Canadian friends and they're like, really? I mean, this is this is the viewpoint that you get from them. So when the president's saying, tweeting this kind of stuff, he's tweeting it from the heart, you know?

This is the way he views the world. It's a pretty remarkable way. I mean, I use it, you know, there are better words than remarkable. Mind-blowing might be the better one. You know, I always joke with my Canadian friends because I love my Canadian canadian friends they're just such wonderful people i don't know what went wrong with us but i always joke that we're like the drunken brother we're the billy carter of of you know we're just running around there hey man we're wrecking everything and they're just like oh god we have to deal with these people live next door to him um so yeah it's really interesting you you

bring up the one point i was trying to find out before the show who, who the originator of this, cause it's been kicked around a few times, but a lot of people, I think, I think it might've been Steve Smith that said at first. Um, but basically they made the point that, that Trump, everyone thinks Trump's playing three-dimensional chess, like with Putin and stuff, but really Trump's just sitting there eating the checkers. And so there's that. I remember Nixon went through the period, too, where he was drinking so much and wandering the halls of the White House that they had to tell him to stand. They had to tell the nuclear launchers to stand down if he called in a strike on Cambodia. brought up in an interview was talking about how much confusion this does to the intelligence agencies and, you know, all the levels of government that have to respond, that have to deal with,

you know, if he says something horrible about some country or some leader, you know, some ambassadors are going to go run out there and go, well, you know. Yeah, I mean, and even have to hem in his worst impulses, you know, evocative of that, you know, Nixon in the latter stages of Watergate, when the military was, you know, pulling back his military authorities. I tell the story about how at the worst point of the tensions between the US and North Korea, the Pentagon hesitated to give him military options because they were afraid that he was going to use them. And US diplomats were communicating to their North Korean counterparts in North Korea that the president was unpredictable and they didn't know what he

was going to do next, not as part of a grand strategy, Nixon style, but out of genuine concern that the two countries were on a path to war and they didn't want there to be misunderstanding. You remember the concept around the time of a bloody nose strike, you know, some sort of limited military engagement that would push North Korea to the negotiating table. No one in the Pentagon believes such a thing existed because their analysis was that North Korea would view a limited strike as just the first salvo of a decapitation strike. And then in response, rain down hell on Seoul, which they have the capability of doing. They got hundreds of artillery pieces, very powerful conventional weapons, but also chemical weapons and more. The U.S. estimates, intel estimates of what a limited strike,

what the death toll of that would be, was in the tens of thousands. So in the midst of that, the president's senior most advisors did not trust his judgment and therefore sought to hem in how far he could go. Yeah, and even our soldiers, which are there. I think I heard even higher than that, but maybe I was thinking of the numbers of the soldiers that are there. I think there's 36,000 or 40 or 60, some soldiers there. And yeah, sometimes when I watch Trump, you know, you have a deep understanding of how the intelligence agencies,

the State Department, everything works. I have kind of a layman's amateur sort of thing. But, you know, watching it, reading books, understanding, it just must drive them up the walls, like, just about every time he tweets because, you know, they have to balance so many different things in fact uh one thing um was the uh was the i think it was the ran strike where he's going to dump on 150 people i think it was and they had brought the the options to him and they put this crazy one in there because he thought they thought it was too crazy and he went for it if you remember that story uh talking about maybe the killing of Qasem Soleimani, right, too.

Yeah. As opposed to that level, which was a strike. Listen, Qasem Soleimani is a bad guy, no question, responsible for supplying bombs that killed 600 service members in Iraq. I covered some of those attacks when I was there as a reporter. I think there was some surprise in the Pentagon when he took that strike as an option and concern about what the carry-on effects were. Iran did strike back, injured a lot of U.S. forces. It did not start a war, almost luckily, right? Not because there was any grand discussion of that. I think from what I saw and saw reported, and you would know more than I would,

a lot of those soldiers suffered massive amounts of brain damage and probably permanent. And I think maybe with George Bush or, well, Dick Cheney, excuse me, President Dick Cheney, we would have had another war there. I don't know if Obama would have went to war with Iran. He seemed to, well, during his era, a lot of people didn't want to have war. So it's really interesting in your book. You've got this whole picture that you paint with all the interviews, and I'm going to be excited to finish it because all the different interviews of different perceptions of people. You know, Mary Trump's book is a really interesting book, and she talks about how he's a scared little kid he's unimaginative he's uneducated uh mcmaster the same has said the same thing and a lot of different

other people john bolton of course was not uh was not that excited by him in fact i think john bolton also did the same thing he he kind of kept close to the vest some of the different options and was really careful at what he pushed and even surprised at some of the things he did from push. But sometimes I wonder how much of it is, you know, this is a guy who, you know, he's a small guy running out of his office, running an image sort of business, and suddenly he's thrown into this whole world that's way bigger than what he can even deal with or imagine. You know, we've got a malignant narcissist, in my opinion, in many people's opinion. And so a lot of what his planning was, and I don't know if Bannon talked about this,

but, you know, him and Bannon planned pretty much to just throw grenades. And, you know, Trump's notorious for saying, hey, you want to see something fun? You know, he'll make a crazy tweet and watch the world go to hell, and people are just like, holy crap, man. So the crazy like a fox or you're just eating the checkers or what Mary Trump talks about is a lot of the craziness at keeping a fee going, keeping tons of crazy stuff, throwing hand grenades, no one figures out that you just have a pea shooter, you don't have a gun. Your enemies just go, man, he's got a lot of grenades.

And it keeps everybody moving, but they don't figure out that you're an imposter, you're a failure, you're a fake, you don't know what you're doing. So I don't know. It's really interesting to wonder if there really is a Wizard of Oz behind the madman or there's just a madman behind the madman. In practice, you know, I asked everybody I interviewed for this book, well, do you have any questions about his mental sharpness? The answer to that question is no.

They don't think he's insane. But the way he operates is the way he operates, right? And he does not read. He is not just skeptical of information, he's dismissive of it. And not just advice and analysis, but hard information, hard data. If it either it doesn't fit his worldview or his view of a particular thing or is inconvenient to him. Look at the pandemic, right? Deaths rising, cases rising. That can't be true. Just raise questions about it because I don't want to deal with it.

You know, I spoke in the book to Susan Gordon, who is the second senior most intelligence official in the country. And she was going to be the director of national intelligence, he pushed her out, you know, insufficiently loyal to him was the read. But she briefed him numerous times and described how, okay, you know, you have the right of the commander in chief to disagree with my opinion, analysis of things. But when you dismiss facts facts that's another thing you know it's you know she says in the book you know there are times we know things right i can show you the photos of this happening or we know the data that this is happening the president even then would reject it out of either denial because it's inconvenient for him or out of this supreme overconfidence that she describes in himself. He knows better, not just his judgment, but his sense and view of the world. And that is a, you know, that is a

combination of qualities that creates enormous dangers, right? If you have a head of state that's making decisions without the best information available to him, but also even when he has the best information, not believing it, it, uh, it sets you up for some disastrous decisions. Some of which we've seen play out. Most definitely.

Um, did, did you see, uh, when people, when you did your interviews, did, did anybody talk about his narcissism about,

uh, in being around that sort of mindset that he has? Yes. Uh, so the overconfidence, but the self-dealing, the mixing of national and personal interests. I mean, Ukraine is an obvious example of that. You know, this is a national security partnership the U.S. has with Ukraine. It's an ally at war with Russia, that he felt no guilt about taking their military aid away to squeeze a political opponent here at home. And that's not a bug. That's a feature of the way he approaches things, right? I mean, think of Bolton's book, the president saying to China, buy some agricultural products in swing states to help me win the election, right?

And listen, I have to say, Russia, his relationship with Russia throughout, because, you know, I asked everyone in this book to explain his inexplicable deference to Russia, because that's arguably the most consistent thing about his foreign policy. That's where he's been most level, his dealings with Russia. And the best answer they came up with is he has admiration for Putin, envy of his power, a shared worldview, kind of a zero-sum worldview that we're all dirty players in a dirty game, but also that he calculates it's beneficial to him. It is not coincidence that in 2016, Russia interfered in the election to help him, and he didn't protest, right, as candidate or president. In fact, for four years, he pooh-poohed that idea, questioned that it ever happened. You read the intel briefing just last week. Russia is

interfering again to help him, and he is not calling them out. Does a president who's willing to undermine the postal service to obstruct mail-in voting, because he perceives that as affecting his political portions? Does the potential benefit of foreign interference calculate, factor into his calculus on whether he stands up to Russia? Fitting with the way he approaches his world, that's not an enormous leap to make. So it might be that he's not necessarily a madman. He appears to be on the outside from us, but he actually has, you know, I think even the most crazy people are like Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini,

had like a certain box of patterns that they would go to, and there was safety in that, and that's their little Rubik's Cube that they spin. So maybe it's possible that he's really not a madman. He's smart enough to know what his little buttons are to push, and it's all about him, maybe. It is. Well, so here's the thing, and to be clear, I'm not accusing him of being a madman.

It's a way to describe his slipshod approach to the world, unpredictable approach to the world, both our friends and foes and his own most senior advisors. He claims to have a wisdom attached to that, a strategy, the three-dimensional chess. But in practice, one, the people who work for him say, no, he doesn't, a strategy, the three-dimensional chess. But in practice, one, the people who work for him say, no, he doesn't have a strategy. In fact, many of his decisions contradict stated U.S. national security priorities, one. But two, also,

you know, he makes these decisions on the fly. And then when you look at the results of them, it's not connected to an endgame. I mean, look at North Korea, you know, for a year, it was fire and fury. And for three years, it was a love affair. After four years, North Korea has more, not fewer nuclear weapons. It's got a more not less advanced ballistic missile program. It failed on both fronts, you know, the sort of scary madman with a nuclear button and then the friendly madman, it failed. So if he could point to successes and say, look, I was smarter than all of them. I won on all three dimensions of this chessboard. But when you look at that chessboard, by and large, the strategies, well, the approach, let's call it that,

because his own advisors said there wasn't really a strategy to it, the approach failed. And, you know, what I've been looking at is if the Trump era does end here in January, November, is what historians are going to look back on. Would Hong Kong have fallen under a normal u.s president or obama or bush or whatever i mean hong kong is definitely just crumpling to um to china and i'm starting to wonder like one of the things i worry about is that china russia or iran are going to go even if biden wins the election they're going to go, you know what? We got a few more months of crazy boy that we can get away with some stuff. Let's pull some stuff.

And, yeah, it's going to be really interesting if any weird stuff really goes on to that effect. But you're right. We haven't gotten any better. You know, we had... I'm so glad you brought up Hong Kong, by the way, because it can't be lost in all this. It's a loss for the people of Hong Kong.

And it's personal for me because I lived there for five years. I was there for the handover in 1997, one of the first big stories I covered overseas. I've got a lot of friends there. Hong Kong was this kind of unusual thing, right? A city within the bounds of China, but it had freedom, a free press, you know, rule of law. It's over, you know, and it's a test of this idea that Trump, you know,

his claim is the world respects us again, right? Well, if that were true, why did China feel they can get away with that in the midst of, you know, the Trump administration ratcheting up pressure? If Putin respects us again, why has Russia become more, not less aggressive over the last four years? In Ukraine, in terms of election interference here, in terms of challenging U.S. military aircraft and ships around the world, you know, even our NATO ally, putatively, Turkish President Erdogan, I mean, he thumbs his nose at the U.S. by buying under Trump, the U.S. under Trump, by buying the missile system.

So, again, when you look at the record, the approach is failing, virtually across the board. Yeah, it's interesting. I look at Hong Kong, like they would not have been able to pull, they wouldn't have pulled off what they're pulling off. And, you know, we recently saw, I believe, the editor of the Apple News,

and taken out. I mean, that's just extraordinary to see. And certainly China's flexing her muscle. I think, and I just take this from the news that I gather, but it looks like when we come out of this whether it's with biden or trump re-election uh what we will have after four years is the rise in power of russia and china and probably iran from what they do with the imperial uh with their uh folks um you know we we had uh andrew zasland who came on and talked about iran and russia and putin recently uh and then you interviewed fiona hill who who, uh, came on and talked about Iran and Russia and Putin recently.

Uh, and then you interviewed Fiona Hill, who I know has written a lot of books about Putin. Um, and this guy, this guy is a sharp dude. I mean, Putin's,

I mean, I, I wouldn't want to play chess or checkers with him. Well, this, you know, his, his top advisors say, and this is, this is a shocking thing to hear, but that not only does Trump admire Putin, but Putin knows it and seeks to take advantage of it.

Intel officials described to me how they believe that Putin has been doing that on Trump with some Putin. And that has an effect then on decisions the president makes, like pulling US troops out of, or a portion of US troops out of Europe as a kind of, you know, finger in the eye to Angela Merkel. Putin knows Trump admires him and plays him. You know, there's this, there's a paper tiger aspect to Trump's leadership, all this bluster, all this supposed strength. But when you see who played whom in North Korea, right, after four years of everything, if North Korea advanced its nuclear program, you know, the US got played. You played. If Russia is more aggressive on virtually every front, who got played in that relationship? Trump claims to be the winner, but it hasn't played that way out on the

world stage. And his own advisors describe that phenomenon. Did you look at Hitler, Mussolini, or Stalin in their authoritarian ways to see if maybe they also, there were embalances of the madman theory with those gentlemen? Why am I calling them gentlemen? Jesus. But you mentioned Fiona Hill. So here's the student from Russia. And what she said to me in terms of describing his approach is the hyper-personalization of the presidency under Trump. It's all about him. The policy is him and he is the policy.

And she said that, you know, remarkably, even Putinism involves more delegation of authority than Trumpism. That in the Kremlin, there's at least some kind of structure. Trust me, it's an authoritarian country. I'm not saying it's by any means democratic, but there is some spreading around of the decision making. Under Trump, it's gone in the opposite direction. So here's Trump's former top Russia advisor saying he's almost more Putin than Putin

in terms of the way he runs the government, personalizes the government around him. And he's done it more so over his four years because one by one he's exiled uh anyone who's willing to stand up to him yeah poor putin's uh his management team is extraordinary they have like four levels and they even he even plays them against each other and they and and and and he has it built just really strategically so that so that he can retain power and that it makes it really

hard for a coup or something to come against him like you would see in Egypt where the military just rises up and takes over. But with Trump, I mean, you see like a lot of it I come back to with him being that child that Fred Trump built. And then I see the entrepreneur, because I've been an entrepreneur all my life since I was 18. I know what it's like to run small companies. And, you know, I've had a few hundred employees, but still, you operate in a little bit of a bubble. I mean, operating a small business and the U.S. government with, you know, hundreds of thousands of employees, I mean,

that's a whole different ballgame. And you're dealing with, you know, mercenaries and people who really kill, torture, meme. You know, I didn't fortunately have to deal with that in the mortgage business, you know, on weekends, maybe, on weekends, you know. But, you know, and so I wonder how much that goes. And then, of course, the narcissism plays into it. If it wasn't for that, you know, the malignant narcissism, the studies that you've seen where, you know, you think that you're impervious and the whole world revolves around you. In fact, it's really interesting, the lack of empathy and everything else. I knew narcissism people that were very much like Trump, narcissists and pathological liars. So I knew exactly what we're getting into with that.

I was crying on election day. Did you see other comparisons with Mussolini, Stalin, or Hitler, or were they maybe more stable, or I don't know, what would you think? Well, here's the thing, another aspect is that, you know, we hear this comparison every day. Trump is authoritarian, right? Trump certainly envies authoritarian power. We see that in Putin. He also views institutions in this country as his playthings, right? You know, the attorney general treats him like his personal lawyer, right?

The, you know, that these institutions that are meant to serve the country he sees as serving himself, right? I mean, he just got the EPA to change showerhead regulations, right? So it has a stronger shower flow because he thinks they don't have a strong enough shower flow. I mean, it's like, you know, you'd have to, in a novel, you'd be pretty proud of yourself if you made that up as a detail. Maybe the White House has bad showerheads or something. It's incredible. But you can make a pretty good case that he's a bad authoritarian, right? Yeah.

Lays it out. You know, it's interesting with, like, this post office stuff. You know, he says in so many words, I don't want the post office to get the money, because if they get the money, then they will be able to process a big influx of mail-in voting. And I don't want that to happen. I mean, even with Ukraine, right, he couldn't make it happen. I mean, he delayed it for a bit, but it was exposed ultimately. So you don't want to, on the one hand, you don't want to underplay the damaging moves that he's making in terms of our institutions, but you don't want to overplay his, either his strat and strategery,

right. Or his brilliance in carrying it out, you know? Yeah. And I think all of our, I think all of our enemies have figured it out where they, they just know that there's, there's a lot of the bravado there in buffoonery and they,

they just know how he is. I mean, uh, at least I think they do. Actually from a senior Intel official. They say that our adversaries know we don't know the next play, was the phrasing. They know that this is a seat-of-the-pants kind of decision-maker,

that he's making these kinds of moves and reversals, et cetera, without a big plan or strategy, and the other side knows that and seeks to take advantage of it. Sorry to interrupt you, but a thought just occurred to me. No, that's great. In fact, and they also know that he's just operating on a national scale. He has no interest for international, the future of America's, you know, presence in the world, what our interest is, is continued democracy. I mean, you bring up really good points.

It's all about him. We're all his playthings, and we can live and die by him and the coronavirus now. So there's that. Yeah, he's ultimately transparent on so many of these things, for better or for worse, right, for all of us. You can see it's not some sort of secret diabolical plan, right? It's playing out before our eyes. I mean, the trouble is he takes advantage of the fact that there are just so many storylines at once, it's hard to keep track.

Yeah. And, I mean, you look at Putin, and Putin you'll never see coming. Like any good person I've ever met who's a good salesman or is good at strategy, you're not going to see them come until they're standing behind you and the knife's in your back you know or in putin's thing you know you're you're falling off your balcony accidentally out your window um you know and uh uh chairman chi of uh china i think the same way i mean i wouldn't want to be hanging around with those guys because i'm just like i'm'm not going to see it.

Like, you know, I'm not going to see the one that gets me. But, yeah, and meanwhile, he's just out blathering around like the village idiot going, but I have a grand thing. And it's going to be interesting to see what comes of this and, of course course what we're going to unearth i mean every present that we have after they leave office we find you know we've only seen the tip of the iceberg especially with like nixon um and uh it'll be interesting to see what the what the final story is going to be or you know how we come out of it i i wouldn't want to be biden right now if they get reelected i mean i would but maybe i wouldn't want to be him um the digging out that he's gonna have to do the cleaning up and then somehow he's gotta come in strong and go hey we're america we're back don't screw with us and uh i think a lot of i think china and russia and iran see us in a weakened condition i mean we really look like

a wounded animal with what's going on with the coronavirus. So I write about that, that China, you know, famously, you know, China's intention is to replace the U.S. as the dominant world power, dominant world economy. I mean, they speak about it openly. And their old goal used to be to do that by 2049, 100-year anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. But then now they speak about it as a more immediate prospect in the 2030s, maybe. And that is not in spite of Trump, but in part because of Trump, because they see a dissolution of American soft power abroad. You know, the American system, listen, trust me, I'm not advertising the Chinese system and that they are incarcerating

a million Muslims in the Northwest. It's an authoritarian regime. But in terms of this battle of kind of, you know, systems and ideas and geopolitics, you know, our problems at home, even the financial problems, you know, financial crisis, et cetera, the Iraq invasion,

you know, these kinds of things from their perception, you know, gives them an upper hand or at least a way to bring us down, you other presidency and then to hear him come out and and one of his discussions i think it was in the bolton book he's just like uh yeah whatever you guys can do that as long as you help me out uh you know with my you know buying some stuff so I can get reelected. Yep. It is. It's accepting, dismissing, 21st century concentration camp.

You know, it's remarkable. And a calculation again, right? You know, the president, you hear this consistently in this book, that the president values his personal relationship with his leaders over all else, imagining that he can work some sort of magic in those relationships to change the situation. And, I mean, look at how it turned out with Kim Jong-un. It doesn't, you know, countries have, you know, no permanent friends, only permanent interests, right?

You know, regardless of how charming you imagine yourself to be. You know, even I tell a story in the book about how the, you know, the president doesn't like spying on our adversaries, because in part, he thinks it damages his personal relationships with those leaders. That's a problem, because going back to George Washington, right? Spies are how you gain advantage in conflict. It's a necessary part of our national security. Does the man-man theory in your book talk about mental decline, which there's some theory that he's maybe in some mental decline of age or frontal lobe,

frontal, frontal, I forget what it's called, but you know what I mean? Is that in there anywhere? I don't try to either psychoanalyze or make a medical diagnosis. I think, you know, with him, the sharpest Trump is still a damaging one when it comes to his worldview, right? Even with all his faculties in place, because he has such a frankly un-American view of the world, right? And the country's place in it. One of the chapters is called The End of American Exceptionalism, right? Because he doesn't see us. Listen, I'm not trying to hold the U.S. up as perfect by any means, but I do believe we're better than China and Russia and that our system has something that it stands for. The president doesn't believe in that and cuts that down. operate in a way that is in line with what we've built as a country or in our relations with the world. We've designed it so that our presidents don't have personal financial interests in

international relations, right? But this president does. And there's genuine concern among the people who work for him that that helped drive his decisions to some degree, a Trump Tower in Moscow or real estate projects in Turkey, right? That that's part of the way he's thinking. It's why, for instance, no one was surprised when there was money for an FBI, new FBI headquarters in the stimulus, it was taken out because it seemed the president calculated if you have a new FBI headquarters across from his hotel, it might help the property values. And it's, you know, that sounds like an outrageous claim to make. But when you look at the big picture of Trump's decision making, you know, it's in the public record that often his personal interests affect national security interests.

You know, I asked Eddie Glaude Jr. when he came on, I said, did we have to go through to this low? Did we have to hit this bottom to find out how bad, you know, how much we trusted the presidency? How much we how much we, you know, do we do we have to hit this bottom between, you know, our issues with racism that we have? I mean, the coronavirus and Trump have just exposed like every sort of crevice that we had into a giant canyon. I just wonder if history is not going to look that, that we had to hit this rock bottom. We had to go to the wall for democracy and, and hopefully we pull back.

You hope so because this country has turned things around before. You know, my worry, and I'm an optimist by nature, and there are so many good people in this country. You and I know them, we meet them, and people who truly believe in the mission. I met them throughout government writing this book and in my day job. You know, the concern is structurally. Like, what are the structural barriers to solving these problems? You know, Congress compromises a dirty word on the Hill now, because it doesn't suit either party's

political fortunes in many districts, right? Because of gerrymandering, a whole host of things, the death of the moderate. And if you can't make compromises, you can't make real legislation. I mean, the only legislation that gets passed these days is just spending money. It's like, okay, I'll write all my checks, you write all your checks, right, you know, everybody's happy. That's not really a great victory. No one's really given up that much. So how can you solve, you know, the education crisis? Can you solve these problems? It's, you know, a lot of good stuff's happening at local level, you know, state level, and so on. But nationally, there are genuine questions about, you know, dysfunction in the system.

And that's the harder thing. You know, one election doesn't fix that, right? I mean, that's about two parties and people working together over time and people giving something up, right? Yeah. It's definitely, I mean, if he gets replaced in November, it's definitely, I mean, there's a lot of pasting back to do. I mean, there's four years of pasting back that Biden would have to do.

And, I mean, do you think we're really perceived anymore as carrying the big stick in the world? You know, we used to have the police officer stick that we used to, you know, fight for democracy and stuff. Do you think that's gone right now? It's damaged, right? I mean, you can see it. I mean, it's in some of this, I cite it in the book, national, international polling, right?

About respect for the U.S. Down across the world, markedly, except in a couple, there are a couple of countries that are acceptance, one of which is Israel. But in general, no. You hear it in the comments

of our allies, right? In Macron or Merkel saying we can no longer rely on the U.S. for European security. You know, it's heartbreaking because you've built those relationships over years. And, you know, like anything, trust and confidence takes a long time to build. It's easy to give it away. So we got work to do to bring that back. And listen, one could imagine, you know, a putative anti-Trump, right? You know, who who took many of the positions the president did, but did it in such a way that he built more of a coalition to do it.

Right. I mean, for instance, OK, stand up to Chinese trade malpractice, but do it with your allies, not against them. And the president did the latter, not the former, and probably had less success as a result. That's the shame in it, right? Because, you know, some of the initial positions that are not, you know, not unjustified, but, you know, you run it through the sort of Trump meat grinder, right? And it comes out the out the other end and can often be a little ugly. I got a good question for you. In any of your interviews, did you find that him being impeached slighted him even more to make him go for the madman sort of theory

or drive him to more extremes? This idea that he learned a lesson right i mean it was the lesson he learned is uh you know smoke out you know anyone who was against me right and he did one by one almost like a mafia it was like a watching a mafia movie in slow motion all the guys go you know one by one by one you know vinman i covered that story a couple weeks ago when he ultimately, you know, figured that he had no future in the military right after he was kind of drummed out. So, no, is the answer.

It doesn't seem, you know, he certainly wasn't chastened by it. By the way, re-election would, you know, reaffirm all these things, and things that were half measures in the first term would become full measures. You know, Bolton talks about him pulling out of NATO, you know, troops out of Afghanistan. Do you just pull the troops off the Korean Peninsula? Let them deal with themselves, you know, lose interest in North Korea, you know,

just clear victory and move on. Yeah. Vindman, I hope there's something that Biden does with him or gets him reinstated or something. There has to be some beautiful end to that story. There has to be some, there just has to be. I've still got a copy of, you know, him saying right is right. And every now and then if I get a little depressed, I go watch that bit. And so it's pretty interesting. So anything more, Jim, we need to know about the book, what's in it, and everything else? I would just say this, is that, you know, I started this as a, it's a journalistic enterprise, and I started with an open mind. I talked to people who knew him and worked with him to give him an opportunity to criticize or to defend. And what I do at the end is just go to the record. The last chapter is before and after. Here's what he inherited in North Korea, Iran, elsewhere,

and here's where it is four years later. So folks who are listening to this, if you think I've got a one-dimensional point of view of this, and I certainly learned a lot, but give it a read and then make your own judgments. And you could say, well, that's a win, you know, or that's a loss. But if you look at the record, that's really the biggest indictment of his approach, right? Because it didn't move the dial in a positive direction on virtually all of these things.

And that's what you've got to do. You've got to be able to look at it that way, and then hopefully make adjustments either under him or under the next president. I think it's really good how you did the approach to the book where you tried to take a biased effect to it. And you interviewed everybody and compiled those ideas to present them. I think that's really good. To me, in all the reading I've done of history, we've always been this exceptional nation where we've tried to do the right thing, supported democracy, but then you look at our failures, Reagan's Falklands, or not the Falklands, El Salvador, the slaughter in El Salvador, you know, all the different things that we do under the pretense of like we're doing the right thing. And then, you know, we mow over some people and go, oops. And it'll be interesting to see if the Trump, how it all plays out 10, 5, 10 years from now, because that's when we really see it.

And, of course, then once we dig through whatever the burned ashes are in the basement of the White House, it's going on that way. So, Jim, give us a plug on where to find you on the interwebs and your book, et cetera, et cetera. Thank you, Chris. Well, first of all, the book's The Madman Theory, Trump Takes on the World. You can find it on Amazon, your local bookseller. You can Google that. I'm at Jim Sciutto on Twitter, and it's S-C-I-U-T-T-O.

If you ever forget, it's just like Pro Schudo. And I'm on Instagram as well as Jim Schudo, and I do my best to respond to folks when they reach out. I'm always happy to talk and take your critiques or your good words. And I hope we can keep up the conversation too, Chris. You know, I think it's great. It'll be interesting to see how it comes out. So everybody, check out Jim's book,

The Madman Theory, Trump Takes on the World. It just came out, I think, August 11th? That's right. There you go. So just fresh right off the thing. It's got that new book smell. Order yourself up one. You can order up from... He's even got it on audiobook, so you can get the audiobook as

well. I've won. There you go. There you go. So thanks to my audience for tuning in and being here. Be sure to share this show with your friends, neighbors, relatives. Let everybody know. They can go to thecvpn.com or chrisvosspodcastnetwork.com, see all nine podcasts that we have over there.

They can also go to youtube.com, which says Chris Voss, and see the video version of this. You're probably used to seeing Jim on CNN every day. So you can see his wonderful face on the Chris Voss show now too as well. Thanks to my honors for tuning in. Thanks to Jim. And we'll see you guys next time.