The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart - Jonathan Swan’s Dive into Trump’s Reality

Episode Date: September 10, 2026

As Trump’s second administration pursues a radically different playbook from his first, Jon is joined by Jonathan Swan, New York Times reporter and co-author of the book "Regime Change." Together, they discuss what’s changed between Trump’s first term and now, how to puncture the president’s reality distortion bubble, and the craft behind a great interview. Plus, Jon takes listeners’ questions about causing political diabetes and Trump’s 9/11 efforts. This episode is brought to you by: GROUND NEWS - Go to https://groundnews.com/stewart to see all sides of every story. Subscribe for 40% off the Vantage Subscription only for a limited time through our link https://groundnews.com/stewart AVOCADO GREEN MATTRESS - Find an Avocado near you or shop online at https://AvocadoGreenMattress.com/TWS  — and check out their mattress and bedding sale! BOMBAS - Head over to https://Bombas.com/weekly and use code WEEKLY for 20% off your first purchase. SMALLS - For a limited time, get 60% off your first order, plus free shipping, when you head to Smalls.com/TWS Follow The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart on social media for more:  > YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@weeklyshowpodcast > Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/weeklyshowpodcast > TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@weeklyshowpodcast  > X: https://x.com/weeklyshowpod   > BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/theweeklyshowpodcast.com Host/Executive Producer – Jon Stewart Executive Producer – James Dixon Executive Producer – Chris McShane Executive Producer – Caity Gray Producer – Brittany Mehmedovic  Producer – Gillian Spear Video Editor & Engineer – Rob Vitolo Audio Editor & Engineer – Nicole Boyce Associate Producer - Rebecca Rottenberg Music by Hansdle Hsu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Folks, you know, I am nothing, if not a generator of ideas that may never work. Obviously, we've talked a little bit on the show about the crumple, which is the portable dog bed that you throw on the ground that makes a different topographical shape each time you do it. Or maybe I'll make an app. Maybe I'm always thinking of different apps. Or maybe I'll make an app that helps people create and run their great business ideas. Oh, wait, I don't need to do that because it's already existing. Shopify. Somebody probably sat around having a Shopify idea about an app that would help people bring their ideas to fruition, like the Crumple.

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With Shopify, nothing stands between your idea and a real business. So go make it one. Start your free trial at Shopping. Shopify.com slash TWS. Start your free trial at Shopify.com slash TWS. Everybody, welcome to the weekly show podcast. My name is John Stewart. We are back from our summer hiatus, refreshed and ready to tackle.

It is Wednesday, September 9th. Normally, we would tape this on a Tuesday. We'd release it on a Wednesday. We had to shift over because of obviously Labor Day and some other concerns. and events that I have to be a part of. And I know tonight, and we obviously can't cover it on the podcast today, but everybody is going to be tuned into the Republican Trumpapalooza National Committee midterm convention.

53. 53. 53. Oh, what a delightful. items and speakers on on on on on on i imagine a health care affordability with the tabby list the immigration affordability oh the republicans are so on top of it and uh i can't wait and and uh i really hope ken paxton you know it is texas uh that ken paxton gets an awful lot of time he deserves it uh couldn't be a better guy and uh couldn't be a better representative for uh the state of texas and so i am going to be

eyes glued on uh the republican midterm convention two-day Trumpa-palooza and in no way will I actually be just watching football why would I be watching the Seahawks and Patriots play in a repeat of the Super Bowl when I could see Ken Paxton the homunculus himself stand on stage as a paragon of morality and good government, motherfuckers. Speaking of morality and good government, our guest today is just one of the best in the business at holding said government officials to account.

His name is Jonathan Swan. You may remember him as writing the book with Maggie Haberman on regime change, but he's so much more than that. He's just one of Australia's finest exports and just a fantastic reporter, and I'm delighted to get an opportunity to talk to him. So let's just get to it.

So we are delighted today. We are joined by Jonathan Swan, White House reporter, the New York Times and co-author of Regime Change with Maggie Haberman. Jonathan Swan, welcome. Thanks for having me, John. And I know we so appreciate you being here. You've been on this wild book tour with regime change. Your family is expanding.

You have a new baby at home as well. So we appreciate whatever time you want to stay awake for during. I'll do my best. Thank you. Thank you. So let's just catch up. I spoke to you when you first came out with regime change. Since the book came out, what has the response been?

Not amongst readers and journalists, but of insiders. Is there anything, when you put a book out like that, is there a sudden rush afterwards of people going, you think that's bad? Let me tell you what how do how do the insiders respond to it? Well, there's the president's response and he's written several angry truth social posts about it right. You know, everything's fake, Maggot Hagerman. He calls me her flunky and her lightweight assistant. You know, that's fair.

You got off easy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Maggot Haberman and you're flunky. Yeah, yeah, exactly. What's been interesting actually, and quite a few people have commented on this, is there hasn't actually been any specific denials of any of the scenes in the Situation Room or the Oval Office. And pretty early on, I think you've got to, there's sort of been very little talk publicly from anyone in the administration about the book. And early on, the vice president was actually on Megan Kelly's podcast. and he said he thought that we might have tapes in the situation room.

And I think that statement kind of, to me anyway, revealed that there were quite a few of them at the senior level who were probably reticent to make specific denials. We haven't commented one way or the other on that stuff. Right. Until today. Today is the day Jonathan Swan announces whether or not the tapes are real. But they have, so that it's been notable for the lack of, of denials. I'm sort of constrained somewhat in, you know, there have been people who've reached out privately about different things. And particularly with Iran, you know, we've done some reporting since the book came out where we have heard from people saying the situation is worse than you understand. And in particular, we've done. We've done. some reporting on how this war has depleted America's weapons supplies to a really alarming extent. And that reporting has become the subject of leak investigations and other things.

So it's been a very difficult time. I mean, some of my colleagues had the FBI show up at their houses for another story. So I would just say generally, it's a pretty, in terms of the national security reporting right now, it's a pretty delicate time. And we're just trying to make sure that everything we write is completely bulletproof and buttoned down. How do you do that? What's the process? So if people reach out to you and say, this Iran war, you're not getting the whole story. And not to frame it in, you know, these are the Pentagon papers. But what is the process? So just stick with that larger claim. You know, we have a depleted supply of, of missiles or armaments or the supply chain is broken because the attacks that Iran did on

our bases in the Middle East were more damaging than they had, you know, first. How do you go about the process of making those claims bulletproof? What's the difference between accountability and actual sort of specific evidence? Well, it's difficult for lots of reasons, but one is because during this war, information has been kept extremely tight. I mean, Central Command has been really, really secretive about all kinds of things. And they will say, you know, it tips off our enemies if they know how many air defense interceptors we have. The problem with that argument, and we have reported quite a bit on the lack of air defense interceptors. And and in some cases, gotten quite specific with numbers. The problem with that is China and Russia have pretty sophisticated ways of surveilling America's weapon supplies, both with human spies and also with electronic surveillance. So it's not like they're in the dark about this.

And from our point of view, yes, there are probably things that shouldn't be published because they might endanger lives. But we lean pretty heavily on the side of the public has a right to know about the state of the American weapon stockpiles in a war that Congress had no role in approving that the president went to war without even, you know, any kind of, I mean, under the Constitution, the Congress is supposed to declare war. There was no such thing happened here. I'm sorry. You said the Constitution. I know. It's a quaint notion, right? We don't declare war anymore. We just have. military actions or martial. An excursion. Yeah, that's right. It's now an excursion, not a war.

So this is actually one area where it's hard and it's also in some ways easier because there are actual numbers that you can put to it. You can say, you know, there are X number of Patriot Interceptors in the European Command stocks. There are X number of javelins, Tomahawks, you know, Jassims, whatever. Is that accounting generally known? No. It's not.

Well, sorry, now at this point it is. Okay. Largely, frankly, largely because of our reporting and several other news organizations reporting. But the specifics of just how many interceptors we have total and in certain commands, that's still not publicly, completely known. And, you know, that's stuff that we're still working on. What is the cat and mouse game like for?

for reporters at the Pentagon. So Hegeseth was very clear, you know, they've removed so many of the people who were placed at the Pentagon. Does that make it more difficult? Is this, you know, you talked about Russia and China have, you know, human intelligence but also electronic surveillance and all kinds of other things.

Are you relying on human intelligence? Is it purely based on whether or not someone will be open, to giving you that information without sort of exposing the Keebler-Elv secrets of how the cookies are made. I am curious how you are able to get specifics of those things. And obviously, you don't want to give away operational details that could in any way place people at harm. Right. You want the American public to be aware of whether or not there's a recklessness or what the what the effects of this has been. Right. It's not about how the cookies matter. What I'm very

sensitive to is protecting sources because the people who are giving us this information are taking huge risks. And what is the risk that in your mind is what they're doing illegal? I really don't want to comment on the legal side of things because we're getting, but let's just say generically, you can go to prison for leaking classified information, okay? And this information is classified. This is not the kind of thing that is known on a kind of military audit. Again, I don't want to say, no, no, I'm just, it's difficult, John. Being a reporter is hard.

The position I mean, the position I mean is, is, I just don't want to give any legal ammunition to the people who are already trying to sue us and come after us and, I see, potentially have an espionage case. Let's just say generically, hypothetically, speaking, not anything I've reported on, but hypothetically, information about how many weapons America has of certain types is some of the most sensitive and guarded information that we have, particularly how many air defense interceptors we have left. That is very highly sensitive information, very highly sensitive. Is the information about how we went to war a different category for you than it is the specifics of operational specifics.

Definitely. And although I will say we've done both. I mean, even though I'm not going to get into whether, like I'm going to describe stuff, both categories are areas that we've reported in great detail. The going to war is, you know, conversations in the situation room. What was the president briefed on? What were those conversations? And we, I think, did some of the most detailed report.

on that march to war and how those decisions were made and what was presented to the president. Right. Is this the kind of information, this classified information, that Donald Trump might safely keep in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom? Is that, or maybe a box by a car? You know, Jonathan, have people then talked to you about not just this information, but their surmisal of what this Middle East scenario is going to look like in the future. You know, obviously they came out a week into it and said, we won. We have utterly obliterated not just their nuclear program, but their ability to, they don't have a Navy, they don't have an army,

they don't have an Air Force, they don't have anything. We've won it. We control the straight. Clearly, the information you're getting is the antithesis of that. Right. does that have any accountability in Washington? And I guess this gets at sort of what I wanted to talk to you about, which is the frustration between great reporting and its consequence.

And is it difficult, you know, and maybe I have a kind of hazy nostalgia, and this might have been born of a kind of Watergate fable. But I always think of, as, you know, the Pentagon papers drop and suddenly the Vietnam War is no longer viable. And the American public, their conscience is shocked. And the Watergate reporting done by Woodward and Burrinsing shocks the nation into accountability. The biggest difference between now and then is the congressional branch has just pieced out.

When you have a Congress that is inert, you don't actually have – the only accountability mechanism is the courts, and they give the president – How's that going? Exactly, exactly. And they give the president a huge amount of deference in conduct, particularly foreign policy and national security. And then the press. And so the one thing I will say is it's pretty clear that the American public is very important. unhappy with this war. And I think that that is, to a large extent, based on what they're reading and seeing and hearing. And a lot of reporters have done very, very good work, not just

New York Times, but other places to get out that information. You know, when President Trump says the Iranian military is completely demolished, decimated, we published a story saying they regained access to 30 out of 33 of their missile sites, their cruise missile sites alongside along the Strait of Hormuz. So you're not just saying you're wrong, you're actually saying here is real information, you know, because to me it's all about, my job is about providing information. You can only, you can only act on information. You can't act on a vibe or a feeling. And so every day I wake up and I try to get more information out there in the public sphere. So we've done a lot of reporting, an enormous amount of reporting about this war and try to

inform the public. But the accountability mechanism doesn't really exist. I'm sure if Democrats take the House, there'll be investigations and what have you. But I think people are underappreciating just how difficult oversight will be potentially in this administration. And what happens when if the administration essentially refuses to cooperate with, congressional oversight congressional subpoenas, there isn't a Congress jail. There's no place that, you know, Congress doesn't have. Right. It's not like a stadium where in the bottom of it, there's a dungeon where people that throw rocks get put in. Right. Exactly. The enforcement mechanism is Congress says, you know, this is really bad and we're going to refer it to the Justice Department,

the Justice Department that is run by Donald Trump's personal lawyer, former personal lawyer. Okay. So that's that's what we're dealing with in terms of accountability. I hate the news. I hate what it's doing to me emotionally. I hate that you don't really know where the information is coming from sometimes. You don't know how it's being manipulated. And it adds to the creeping fog of sadness that grows. But I have to keep up.

I have to understand what's going on in the world. And that's why ground news, they've got a website. It's an app. It lets you compare news coverage across the board to understand how you're you're being zoomed. Do you know what I'm saying? You can see how different news outlets will frame the same story. They've got a blind spot feed so you can challenge yourself about your news consumption. You'll see who owns what news outlet to understand why they're framing the stories the way they are. This is the one you should get a hold of. Enlighten yourself. Please,

to get the same unlimited access to the Vantage subscription, go to groundnews.com slash steward and subscribe to get 40% off. Discount only available for a limited time. That's groundnews.com slash steward or scan the QR code on screen. I hate to frame it in this way, but it's sort of the difference between information and evidence.

You know, the information is just sort of a broad base. This is what's going on. But some of it is evidence of malfeasance or of secretive nature or misleading. And so much of the information that you put out there could also qualify as evidence. And how do you look at the two of those as you're going through? Is there a goal in your mind of, okay, they're saying this and this and this have been depleted, and otherwise. And you're saying, but the information we have, and when you discover the discrepancy, is that information now evidence? Well, evidence in a sort of colloquial sense, yes. But I don't think

there's any prospect of a legal proceeding. I mean, one thing that has been really notable about this term is just how influential the Supreme Court's 2024 immunity ruling was. You felt that you feel the difference of that. Oh. I think you just got nauseous. Oh, my gosh. Beyond. So in term one covering Trump, it was, I can't overstate this.

I'm not saying he changed that much, you know, in terms of his deep character or anything like that, but it's unrecognizable. I mean, they were. Certainly in the White House counsel's office, quite cautious. I mean, people in the White House administration were prohibited from talking to the DOJ. There was like a real attempt to enforce some kind of a firewall. That's why Trump kept having to do these, sort of talk to this person. Can you please whisper in Jeff Sessions's ear? You know, that's all being obliterated. You felt there was real caution there. Who was, can you recall, who were the White House

Council people then? I know Sessions was the early. Don McGahn. Domagan, Pat Cipollone. Okay. And they're gone. Oh, beyond gone. But it's not really just about a story about the White House. It's really just about Trump. I mean, he feels that no one can touch him.

And understandably so. I mean, we had reporting in our book that he's been saying privately that he's going to pardon anyone who came within 200 feet of the Oval Office. He literally said that. And he says it in this sort of joking way, but you kind of know it's not a joke. because certainly the way he was at the end of the first administration. I mean, I spoke to a senior official who was working in the first administration, and they're actually kind of a clean sort of by the book type person.

And they were sitting with Trump, and Trump's like, do you want to pardon? And they were like, for what? What would they want to pardon for? But that was at the end of the first term. And now you've seen how the pardon system has evolved. So how would I even qualify? I'll give you another example that just shows how different it is and how much freer he feels to act. So term one, Trump used to say almost kind of yearningly, he'd say, you know, we talk about drugs.

He'd say, you know, there's no drug problem in China because she just kills them. He just kills them, kills the drug dealers. And he goes, there's no problem in the film. Philippines, because, you know, Duterte, he just kills them. That's right. Well, this term, what happened? Donald Trump said, I am going to determine myself that people in fishing boats who are trafficking cocaine, maybe.

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

And there's no appeal process when your body is scattered at the bottom of an ocean after being, you know, blown up. There's no appeal process. You can't put your limbs back together and go and say, hey, actually, you know, this one. So that's what's happening. And they didn't really even bother to justify it legally. I mean, they have lawyers. One of the biggest things that Stephen Miller and others did between term one and term two was change the types of lawyers that they start staffed the administration, more aggressive lawyers, lawyers who are willing to push the envelope, lawyers who are willing to get to yes and not put up a no. So their internal legal opinion

basically greenlit this whole operation of blowing up boats. In term one, you had people like Mark Esper, the defense secretary and others saying, absolutely not. This would have never have flown in term one. It's interesting that they still feel the need to even make a kind of theatrical move towards justification legally. But they didn't really, John, it was like they didn't even publicize it. It's not like they put out and said, here's our legal theory. Here's the framework around it. Here's why we're doing it. None of it. It was like, you know, it was, you know, basically take our word for it. This is legal. They didn't sort of go to great lengths to make a legal justification to the public. Do you think this is the learned effect of, and I don't want to blame everything on January 6th, but January 6th strike me.

And January 6 was the culmination of a strategy. People I think like to point to that day as, boy, that was just a day that got out of hand and chaotic. But I thought it really was the culmination of a very intentional strategy that began right after the election. He loses. His first idea is, well, I'll just call up the states that I lost and say, can you flip those votes, please? Because, you know, I actually won. And when that didn't work, he sort of started the process of, you know, then I'll go after the people that certify the election. so I'll call the Republicans in Michigan or Wisconsin, and I'll say don't certify it.

And when that didn't work, he went to the next stage. But at each stage, there were meetings. And he was meeting with a team going, what else can we do? And I always assume that what ultimately came to him was they said, this is your final chance. if they certify this in the Congress, it's over. So if Mike Pence doesn't somehow, you know, do the right thing and stand up and not certify it,

that's your last chance. Your only other chance is to disrupt the proceeding. And maybe then that thing gets kicked into the House of Representatives and maybe then they could just decide because we have the advantage there that you're the president. is that where he learned because there were so many lawyers that said, you know, including Bill Barr, that's nonsense. You lost. You can't do this. He lawyer shocked. He ended up with people like Sydney, whatever name was, an Eastman and all those people that would do that bidding. And is that

when he realized, oh, I don't need to change the law. I just need to change the people who will help me justify what I want to do. Yeah, the only part of that that I don't have any supporting reporting for is I don't think that they expected the riot at the Capitol. I really, I really don't expect that part of it. But everything up until that point, yeah, I really don't think. I think that surprised them, came as a real surprise. But everything up until that point was an effort to use every lever to overturn the election. Right. And what happened was, it's not like he had a bunch of lawyers working for him that were squishers, as they would say. These were loyalists. These were hardcore truck people. But they said, no, this is crazy. We don't have it.

We don't have it. But he'd lawyer shop in the way that somebody who wants pills would doctor shop. That's exactly right. And so that's how you get a legal team that comprised, you know, Sidney Power, Rudy Giuliani and the others. And so I think that that's, That is something that he was, Trump would already do that in other areas. So when he wouldn't get the answer he wanted from his military generals or whatever, he was going out and talking to others that he might see on Fox or other places, I just think what happened was this term round he came back with a very clear determination that I'm not even going to have that first step.

I'm just not going to have people around me who are doing that type of pushback. And so you just clear out that first step and start with the second step. And that's basically where we're at. And it's so interesting because term one was considered such an aberration from traditional American presidencies that the idea that term two is almost unrecognizable even to term one, which at the time we thought, my God. This is utterly pushing the bounds of executive power and of the way that, you know, the executive functions as opposed to congressional oversight. We thought that was an aberration. I mean, term one looks like the Eisenhower administration compared to what we're dealing

with now. That's just makes me sad. But then, and term one, though, was all leaks. would you say that's like term one people just came to you how do you so now what is it all deep throat in a garage like how does it work now for you now that they have removed so many the avenues of oversight how does anything and and maybe do they get to the point where that information they don't believe it hurts them anyway do they not even care no they think they care He still care.

He still, he certainly does. Term one, the leaks were largely a product of fighting, of people, factional warfare, people trying to destroy each other. Jared Kushner is trying to destroy Steve Bannon trying to destroy Jack, Jared Kushner, et cetera, et cetera, and things break out. You have factions, you have camps and they're all at war. That's how a lot of the leaking came about. The reason you've seen so much less inside the room reporting for this administration is because

it's just much, much, much harder. They don't have those factions anymore. There are not people vying for. It's much more subtle. It's not really factions. Sometimes I'll see commentary that suggests that there's sort of these very bright lines. It's not really the way it works. It's a team that, yes, there are little nuances here and there, but they're basically all people who believe in Trump, who want to work for him, who want to implement what he has to do, are not pushing back and trying to stop him. I mean, in the first term, routinely we would talk to,

for those of us covering him, talked to very senior officials who thought that Donald Trump was dangerous and saw their job as protecting the country in the world from Donald Trump. That's really what they would say explicitly. They felt they were there as kind of a firewall. 100%.

100%. There's no one at a meaningful senior level who believes that in this administration, zero. But at what point, Jonathan, does reality begin to erode that fantasy or that facade? You know, J.D. Vance, who I think is a pure creation of ambition, I don't believe there's anything, you know, he has his ideas or whatever, but I think he is all strategy. They say like all hat, no cattle, but he's all strategy, no principle. So he sits in the Oval Office or stands as Donald Trump sits and says, these other people, these other presidents got us involved in these wars because they're stupid. But Donald Trump is smart.

So, and he was talking about Iran, you know, we're in this war with Iran, but it won't turn badly because Donald Trump is smart. Well, now that it's turned badly, did they deny that it's turned? They can't, they can't truly believe that it's going well. So at what point does reality erode their belief in his powers of even basic competence. Well, Vance is probably a bad example because he was actually the single person at that senior level, the inner circle, who actually argued against the war in the meetings with Trump. And it cost him. Irritated.

Really, Trump did not want to hear it. And we've spoken to people who talked to Trump at the time he was complaining about about Vance. So Vance actually made a case against the war before the war. But publicly what he made the case for was it won't go badly because this guy's so smart. Right. And that's just, I mean, you know, you know. But my point is, if they're loyalists who believe in Donald Trump, where is the evidence for their belief other than he's great at becoming president and shitty at being president?

Well, it's hard to know what a lot of them actually think, right? Because, you know, I don't want to sort of go beyond what I have in terms of reporting. It's sometimes really hard to untangle, you know, personal ambition, pragmatism, cynicism, what you need to do to survive, the stories you tell yourself, all that stuff. It's very hard to untangle. And I'm sure it's much more nuanced than, you know, I'm I mean, there's a spectrum, right? Like, not everyone is Natalie Harp, you know. So there's probably... You don't think they're all just writing love letters? No, they're not. And, you know, we had reporting in the book, for example, like, just to give you an example, when Trump starts a trade war with the whole world, you know, Scott Besant understands

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

So there are moments of that. And it's not, if it was just total blind Natalie Harp level adoration, you wouldn't have an episode like that. You wouldn't even see it. But they're, so they're still reacting at some level to the reality-based community. Yeah, absolutely. And they're making changes. What form might that take when it comes to the Iran war? or is that such a cluster fuck at this point?

There's almost, they don't have the same ability to do what they were doing with the tariffs. They certainly don't. I mean, one of the- And by the way, the crying that you hear in the background happens in all of my interviews. It's not just- Oh, can you actually hear it.

Oh, I can hear it, yeah, yeah. Oh, I'm so, Jonathan, I'm so attuned. Like, I immediately want to go like, oh, are you? Like, once you have kids, Oh, that's bad. Just give me one sec. One sec. Let's go to commercial.

Oh, you know, I like to sleep because I'm old. But, you know, when you're old, where you sleep matters more than most things. You'd be surprised. When I was younger, I could fall asleep on tile in a backyard, on a bench. When you get older, you've got to have yourself a little bit of the comfort. And that's where the avocado green mattress comes in, man. avocado green mac and before you ask again they're not made from avocados let's not be crazy people it's the name so if you could please not keep asking them that i think they're they're not actual

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slash twes avocattogreen mattress dot com slash twes period now is that that's that's a baby cry that's not a six year old that's not a four year old it's a three week old can i tell you something man I like my wife so I would come home from work and I remember I'd be like you know I had such a tough day and I'm like my wife would just look at me like I'm going to throw you off the roof I'm going to punch you in the face and I can remember one day I was like you go out I'll take care and I'll be fun he cried like that nonstop the whole time she was gone she comes back I'm in the bathroom, door closed, with a hair dryer on. Because I think that she had told me, like, weirdly, like, if you turn on the hair dryer,

he'll stop crying. I'm sweating. I'm crying. I'm holding a hairdryer like it's a weapon. And she just all, I said to her like, you go relax. She literally opens the door and is like, I was gone for an hour. Oh shit. I very much have had not exactly the hair dryer, but yeah, it's like you get a new appreciation for them, right? For your wife. It's, uh...

Dear God. It's something. It is something. Sorry, the question was about Iran and truth. So, so I think, look, I think one of, I think one of the biggest problems that American presidents tend to have, and Trump has, has to the extreme, is the misconception that you can control events anywhere, that you have the power to control events everywhere. And Trump seemed to believe at an almost cellular level that, I don't know if it was the power of positive thinking or whatever, but before-

I think that, I mean, he is a Norman Vincent Peel guy. Yes, totally. He was raised in the church of Norman, but like that is his, you know, lodestar. He believed before the, war, despite everything he'd been briefed, that the Iranian regime would collapse really quickly. And when that is your operating assumption, when that is infused through everything, considerations like the Strait of Hormuz stockpiles, they all are not considerations, because if the premise is this regime's going to collapse like that, these problems don't end up

happening. So when that didn't happen, you saw this, I mean, Trump, you know, we have reporting that early on, first few weeks of the war, Trump almost couldn't fathom that the Iranians were still fighting, that they still had fight left in them. And he was asking, you know, General Kane, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs Staff, you know, is this really what's happening? Yeah, yeah, yep, they've still got fight left in them. They were still doing this. He did not believe that they were going to be as resilient as they ended up being. And so we saw him pivot to diplomacy by April.

And obviously it has not gone well at all. They had the memorandum of understanding that they unveiled in June, which was hailed as the end of the war. The 60-day deadline expired in August, where now last night was heavy strikes, you know, on the Jordanian, the U.S. base in Jordan and, you know, back and further apart than they were the two sides with the MOU. So, you know, Trump has been,

wildly flailing from kinetic action to diplomacy coercion and does not have anything that you could describe as a strategy here. So that's where we're at right now. You, and again, and I so appreciate, you do something that I think very few other journalists do, which is you refuse to speculate beyond the measure of your knowledge, which I think is admirable. and it's the antithesis of cable news television, which is just 24 hours of like, what do you think it means? And people just go out over their skis.

In your experience, though, with Trump, when reality punctures that power of positive thinking, have you ever seen him? You've been involved in two really interesting interviews with him. The first one, I think, was 2018, where you were talking about birthright citizenship. and he mentioned, you know, we're the only country in the world that has birthright citizenship. And you didn't say, that's not true.

And people really went after you on that. It was terrible bad interview. Yeah. Well, and you came out and said, you know, my bad. 2020 was the opposite. You sat down with him about COVID and he was making statements. And you steadfast and he brought up something and I think it was about. about, what was it, the death rate?

Yeah. And you were saying, well, that's not how it's calculated. It's per capita. And we're not doing great. We're doing badly. And people hailed that. Do you notice a difference when you are in front of him and you provide him with irrefutable evidence of reality?

How does he absorb that? does he absorb it? Do you find that that made inroads into his future, you know, framing of issues? How does he absorb reality? I can't believe we're asking this question about the president of the United States. How does he deal with reality? Because his world is so distorted. So I think there are there are realities that are just too intrusive to ignore.

So things like the bond markets, the price of gas, when American service members die. And even then he'll still try to spin it publicly. But it's pretty clear from his actions since April that reality has. intruded because he's changed courts. He's not, you know, he hasn't continued to escalate this war. He's trying whatever he can do to get out of this war. It's just not working. Iran has a vote in that. Iran is extending the pain. It feels like they have leverage. But it wouldn't be true to say that Donald Trump was oblivious to reality because why then would you authorize your team to go and negotiate a settlement? You don't do that if you genuinely think you're winning. You don't say,

oh, Vance, Kushner, Whitkoff, go and get me a deal to get out of this war. If you think you're crushing it and they're totally decimated, Yvonne. You don't do that. So by his own actions, it's clear, even if he's not willing to admit it publicly, that he acknowledges some degree of reality in this war. And so the, you know, because he does seem to have what he falls back on, because I'll say, like, in terms of gas prices, he'll just come out and say, they're actually not very high

I actually thought they were going to be much worse he'll send Besson out to say oh no this is nothing it'll be gone they'll be down to $2.00 down when it comes to you know the casualties of war Howard Lutnik will literally say hey we did this without anybody dying

Trump will say oh my God look how much better we're doing than Vietnam like he'll bring up they'll still spin it but you're saying he is viscerally aware that this has been a disaster. But that gets me back to the other thing. The people around him, do they not see now that his competence was a facade, that he's a reckless

and capricious individual, not this strategic five-level chess Jedi? I don't know, is this the short answer? No one has sat down with me and said, you know, I thought he was a Jedi master and now I think he's, you know, completely incompetent. Right. I think he's kind of a boo. I also think that probably for a lot of them, it wasn't that they thought he was a 5D chess master. It was that it was something slightly different, which is he's an instinct player and his instincts are often, right. I see. Now, has that changed? May well have, but I don't have reporting to support it. How have you changed in dealing with him? You know, those experiences that you had in 2018 and then

2020, what did it tell you about, look, reporters can't have specific evidence at the level to refute on everything? It's just not possible. But are there things that you learned about dealing with him or dealing with his administration in a way that helps. I always said Trump has always stopped usually when it's not the Supreme Court by the legal system because the legal system has evidentiary standards. Anybody can go on CNN and just say whatever the fuck they want. But there are evidentiary standards and it's why they do so badly in court most of the time. So it was two things.

one was just learning, frankly, learning and studying how to do an interview. The first time I interviewed him is the first interview I've ever done on television, on camera, was with the president of the United States. That 2018 interview? Yes. Your first interview was with the president on camera. Yes, yes. What?

You would think it would be good to do. Yeah, it's crazy. It'd be nice if I had done like a mayor or a governor or something. No, Axios starts. No, it was insane. Start out with a mayor. Yeah. You got to start out with a company.

Comptroller and then move your way. Yeah, comp troll or a school council person. A school board person. Oh, Jonathan, that's amazing. No, it was totally fucked. And it was the worst. I faceplanted. And on the biggest stage you could imagine.

I'd go a little easier on yourself. That you didn't face plan. You did what most reporters have always done with him, which is you didn't realize he was going to be a fire hose of nonsense. Well, I guess, shame on me for that. But no, no, sincerely. I mean, I mean, you know, so I've been on television, been on panels and whatever you, I'd never done. So Axios, we launched this HBO show, and that was my first time I'd ever interviewed someone on camera, Donald Trump.

So that was a disaster. So I do that interview, and it's a really bad interview, and I get completely shredded. And everyone, you know, because every element of it gets analyzed because it's understandably, it's the president of the United States. It's a huge opportunity. And the ecosystem is you aggregate moments and you pass them out over every sort of internet outlet or social media outlet. That's how things work. Right.

And so after that interview, I made a study of interviewing. I like, I kind of created my own sort of self-curriculum in a sense. I went back and kind of said, well, who's done this really well over the years? and you probably remember Oriana Falachi. She was incredible. She's my hero. I mean, before she went kind of crazy

in the last decade of her life. So I don't associate myself. We all do. We all do. So her last 15 years where she just like went off the bend, but between about 1960 and 1980, she was this fearless,

brilliant, well-prepared interviewer. And I have a book of her interviews, a collection. What did you think was, instructive about her because she was fearless. Fearless. I mean, Henry Kissinger said it was the most disastrous interview he ever did. Really?

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

Oh, come on, come on. And you're sort of reading the interview. Go, don't do it, Henry, don't do it. Don't do it. And he says, all right, I'll tell you. You know, in the American mythology, we love the cowboy who rides into town on the horse on his own. he doesn't even have a weapon. Basically, that's me.

And he just, he just humiliated himself. And then she had unhorsed him so much, so to speak, that he then starts saying, you know, really stupid things. So what I learned from reading her interviews and studying her, and the other one I studied a lot, there's two others, Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes interviews. And also Andrew Neal in the UK, who's just at his best, so detailed.

old, he's so good. When he's on, like, he'll read the bill, the legislation, he'll know the budget, he'll know every detail. But what I love about them, they don't do it. When people know that, sometimes the tendency is to just demonstrate your specific knowledge over and over again. And I've fallen into that trap sometimes where you try to do that. Right.

Those guys prepared, but then they allowed, they were very present. A million percent. A million percent. So present and it would, it never felt like they were performing their knowledge. I thought. 100%. So the thing I, again, I've spent so much time on this, it's sort of insane, and watching tape of people, so knowing what are their program.

Like a prize slider. What are their programmed answers? What are their moves? And so, because I think in an interview, you know, I think about it in terms of lines of questioning. and you only really get to the interesting stuff on the third or fourth follow-up question. It's never the first. The first answer is always glib. It's always rehearsed.

The second one's a little more interesting. The third one and the fourth one is when you really unhorsed them and get to something close to interesting or the truth. And what I found over time as I got better at it was the preparation liberates you. It's exactly what you just said. If you are so well prepared, Mike Wallace used to call it the chemistry of confidentiality. It was this moment at its best where you're sitting down with an interview subject. This is not true of Trump, but most interview subjects. And they realize you've done your homework.

And it's a show of respect, really. You've really done your work. You know the subject. And you're not going to put up with the old bullshit that they give. And there's a moment where they say, you know what? The lights are all here. We're just going to have a conversation. Like, I'm not going to think.

And so that's the kind of holy grail. But what I find in even like the most adversarial accountability interviews is the preparation liberates you to put the notes aside and just listen and just listen to what they're saying. And if they say something really interesting, follow that path. Don't go back to the script. Follow that path to wherever it goes. And have the confidence to do that. And that's what that Trump interview was because we'd spent like 25 minutes on COVID.

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

And that was the most revealing and interesting moment in the whole interview because he was trying to say basically they were winning at death and based on the most kind of preposterous conception of COVID death statistics. So, yeah. But were you surprised because I remember that interview astonishing people. And it astonished people because, I mean, you might look. look at it as, well, that was in that moment and it was the natural thing, the curiosity of a journalist to be in the moment. People are not accustomed to journalists who are not just going down their list of the 10 subjects, allowing the answer, and then just going to the next thing. And I'm surprised that what you did wasn't then modeled, given how.

Now, you know, the incentive structure for journalists is you're also trying to make a name for yourself. Why do you think that didn't then become the norm? I don't know. Is it too hard to do? Are they trying to just produce for 24? Is it too hard to pin him down like that? There aren't. Firstly, he doesn't, he has the perception of ubiquity because he's sort of ever, but he actually doesn't do that many.

serious sit-down interviews. He really doesn't. It's mostly friendly interviews. Or easily manipulated in a, you know, it's so easy to conduct a room. Like the White House press book. I mean, that's the easiest thing in the world. Yeah. Those person. I mean, like, you know, you shout a question, you know, shout at you. You don't have even have a proper microphone half that. I mean, it's, no, it's impossible. And, you know, it's not impossible. You can, you know, ask a tough question and what have you. But you can't do a serious interrogate, you know, so easy to move past.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's it. I mean, it is so stacked in his, any politician's favor in that kind of a setting. And that's why when they refer to that as transparency or accessibility, you just think, well, that's a lie. That's just his ability to dominate a theater of his choice. That's a home game.

And he makes the rules. And he puts that, that's not transparency and it's not accountability. It's a performance. that he gets to put on to satisfy himself. Yeah, I mean, yes, obviously, I'll still, you know, again, I haven't been in, I haven't been in one of these for a very long time, more than a year, actually, I think, since the last time I've had a chance to do one of them. But I'll take it over nothing, but for sure, it's not, you know, meaningful transparency.

Everybody, you know, obviously it's a podcast, so, like, you got to do ads. That's just kind of the way the world. works. But every now and again, a company comes along and you're like, oh, shit, I use those. You actually go like, oh, yeah, those are great. And that's where we're right now, bombus. Bobbous is great. I use those. And not just like, not in the sense of like, oh, socks. Yeah. I mean, everybody uses those. I'm not a delicate flower. I'm not one of those. Docksider, no sock dudes that we all read about in the 80s, Bonfire, the vanities and such, none of that. No, I wear the socks for comfort, but the socks I wear are bombus.

They're phenomenal socks. Now they got T-shirts and underwear, too. What? Start with the foundation and build all the way up in comfort and generosity, by the way. Here's the other thing. Okay. So forget about this. I don't even care.

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that's b-o-m-b-a-s dot com slash weekly code weekly at checkout do it now you fucks did you ever see you know there's something you brought up mike wallace i'm curious if you ever saw it because there was an interview that mike wallace did with roy cone and roy cone being the lawyer that kind of taught donald trump kind of the basic steps of and and power and corruption. You don't hire Roy Cohn to be your lawyer because you want him to make sure you're doing everything by the book

is a manipulative, dangerous guy. It was Joe McCarthy's lawyer, you know, on the House on American Activities Committee. Bad person. Mike Wallace does an interview with Roy Cohn, and it gets back to sort of what we talked about about the power, positive thinking, and reality distortion.

Roy Cohn at the time, is dying of AIDS. And I urge you to go look this up because it is a masterclass not just in what you're talking about as a journalist, but in a subject that is, I think,

quintessential to understanding the way Trump operates. So he says to Roy Cohn, you know, there are reports, you know, that you are a homosexual. Well, that's, no, that's absolutely. Oh, I have seen this. Oh, you say, okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you know what I'm talking about. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're dying of AIDS, a homosexual, not a homosexual, not dying of AIDS, have, you know, you're welcome to talk to my doctors, like Wallace says. Can I because I talk to your doctors and they said I couldn't talk to them unless you said it was okay. Are you saying it's okay? You know, they go through this whole dance.

What's so interesting about it is they both know he's gay. They both know he's dying of AIDS. Mike Wallace is pressing the point incredibly respectfully. Roy Cohn is such a fabulous, fabulous. He's such a great liar and watching him. And that gets to the question I was talking about earlier is, does he believe this? Or is he just so accustomed to the,

the show. And what happens? A few months, he dies of AIDS. And I think ultimately came out and said, yeah, I'm gay. And,

but I thought, you know, is that what it's like when you're faced with someone who just won't give up the game of reality in front of you?

I think it's so hard to know sometimes what he actually believes. I'll give you one example where he clearly believed the lie. Terry Moran, who used to be at ABC, was interviewing Trump. And he asked him about Abrago Garcia and the tattoo. And Trump brings up this MS-13 tattoo, which he posted. Yes.

It was photoshopped. Yes. But Trump afterwards, after the interview, was asking people, we need to, you know, this is real, basically, get me the photos, you know, so he, he sincerely believed that this tattoo and was insisting that it was real. But other times, he will say something like, we have all the weapons we need for Iran. Right, right. He knows, he's been very well briefed on the weapons constraints. And if he actually believed everything he's saying about the war, he would not be acting in, like, he wouldn't have authorized his team to try to get out of the war. They would have pressed ahead for regime change.

Lord knows what else they would have done kinetically. You know, he pulled back from major operations that they had planned, you know, huge additional bombing campaigns and things to disable. So clearly he knows that they have leverage because if he believed everything he said, he wouldn't have put. back. He would have gone ahead, pressed the advantage and taken over the country. It's so interesting, though, that you're saying this because it is. It seems like there's two information streams. There's sort of, you know, he's getting updates on the war and things like that. And he's realizing like, so have they given up? Because he can't fake that boats aren't going through the Strait of Hormuz or are going through. Like, you just can't fake that sort of thing.

But things like the MS-13 tattoo on his, on his fist, my guess, is and again don't know for sure and and you can correct me or say well that's just speculation is people feed him a lot of information that they think he wants to see that's the natalie harp the human printer sir your poll numbers are great here's i found this story that says 97% of republicans and they give that to him and so part of the reality distortion field is created in his mind, but part of it is reinforced. Definitely. By a lot of people around him who he goes, is that guy MS-13?

Let's say he is curious about it. Absolutely, sir. Let me show you this. And they do that up to show him like, that's really, and so he thinks that picture's real. And that is actually what he's going on. Like when you got him on the numbers, my guess is they feed him that shit. He doesn't look at it that carefully and say to him, see how well we're doing.

Yeah. And it's almost like, They're feeding him a distorted world as well. It's both, or he'll solicit it. That's right. He goes out, you know, put me together a graph that shows we're doing why. I mean, one dynamic is Bill Pulte, who was the head of the housing finance agency. This is a real estate guy, yeah?

Yeah, real estate guy, but had no experience in intelligence and was briefly the acting director of national intelligence. But he goes to Trump's golf clubs and he brings these foam boards. And it's like they often end up being Trump will truth. A lot of the stuff you see on his truth social on the weekends in particular is sort of Bill Paltese's often his handiwork. And so you have people like him and Natalie Harp who are feeding him what he wants to see. It's very much both ways. He solicits. He gets it.

and then he has obviously, you know, his intelligence briefings and what have you, which are, you know, yes, they're tailored to what he's interested in, but it's not, you know, wacky stuff from Gateway Pundit. It's, you know, intelligence. And they all, and they make little presents, sort of like in the way my daughter got us to get her a hamster. Like they make little presentations with a couple of slides that are easily, you know, well digested. And that's how they get their way with him. He loves a little president. Everything is shark tank to this president, I think, to some extent. Very, very visual. You often see these kind of dramatic, you know, images of, he loves looking at the, you know, the big naval vessels and things like that.

Loves to have his name on it. Where do you think, is there a future, you know, for the, the fact that you talked about, I studied all these interviews, I learned how to do them better, I walked in there. that's an incredibly competent and thoughtful way to go about in a world that is moving away. I feel like you're artisanal. You're like one of those shops where like you go in and a guy is still making chairs by hand and he's got a little lave. And he's like, look. And they're like, yeah, but I just went to China and got 800 of them for $2.

Yeah. The type, we are now in a world of media consolidation. We are now in a world where it's incentivized to quick-hitting, vitriolic, hostile bits. Good journalism has to exist in that world. Can it compete? How does it, what are the incentives that you would like to see change or stay the same? How does this artisanal methodology survive in a new world of Twitter and, you know, Instagram and influencers and media consolidation?

Or does it, how do you break through? So on the interviewing on camera, which is a very specific thing, you know, it is an art and it takes a long time to work on it. And I still feel like I was only 5% of it. of what I wanted to do with that. You know, we had the HBO show for three years. We won the Emmy for that interview, and then HBO canceled the show,

almost two weeks, I think, after the Emmy. Sure. Why wouldn't they cancel an Emmy-winning journalism show? So I don't know. Obviously, I don't know that the reason. I do know that we were doing very controversial interviews, you know. We interviewed Imran Khan in Pakistan, and I pressed him on China's treatment of the Uyghurs, and that caused a huge amount.

I don't know what happened internally. I'm not saying I have any insight into it. I can tell you. Certainly we were doing shows that were getting a lot of public debate, and they were highly political and what have you. And I gather that a lot of these streaming things just don't want to be in the news business. I mean, it happened to you, obviously, with Apple, right? That's right.

Yeah. And by the way, explicitly so. I mean, I was in the rooms where they said. And you know it was so interesting? What really seems to have affected these companies, it's not necessarily even FCC. Ron DeSantis suing Disney. Do you remember when Disney came out?

Yeah, of course. And they took a stand on, don't say. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Him suing them and actually going after their sovereignty. in Orlando. That was brought up to me specifically when it came to they did not want politicians interviewed on the show for fear that those types of repercussions

might occur. And then there were obviously other very touchy political things that they came and we got a lot of pushback on. What you realize is their interest, verges from your interest. Your interest is to get the most interesting interviews that are the most incisive, that are the most revealing, that get to litigate the boundaries of our reality and the people, the powerful people that control that reality. Their interest is selling phones, mergers and acquisitions. You can only hurt them. You can't help them. I think one reason,

so I think that's all true. And this is, I'm almost reticent to say this because it just sounds like I'm being promotional, but I'm not. It's sincerely what I think. The New York Times is kind of a unicorn in that Trump would like nothing more than to shut down the New York Times. But he actually doesn't have, we don't depend on the government for licenses, we don't depend on the government for money. We're run by a family. This is their only thing. They're not in all these other industries.

The New York Times is everything for them. And they're willing to invest and support it. And I'm all for independent media. I think it's wonderful. I'm all for it flourishing. But for the sort of national security type of stories in particular, man, we need that infrastructure, the legal infrastructure, the digital information security. And also knowing that the ultimate power at the New York Times will support us. You know, we're trying to suing the paper and all these sort of things.

They're going to their houses and they're giving them subpoenas. Right. And you know, I'll just say you've never seen A.G. Salzberger give a donation to Donald Trump, go and suck up to him. It doesn't happen. Doesn't take private off the records with him. Right. Nothing. Nothing.

So to me, that's the ideal model. But I'm not naive enough to think that everyone can just replicate that. The New York Times has managed to build in this very difficult egregious. economic environment. I mean, the New York Times was no sure thing 15 years ago. This thing was floundering economically, and they built a digital subscription model, and it's worked. And thank God it has. But it's really hard to do, and there's not many people who've managed to do it, certainly not at scale. Investigative journalism is very expensive. It's not a profit center in and of itself. It's something that gets subsidized by other things. So it's never going to be this pure

commercial things. So then you have other models like the non-profit model, which, you know, philanthropic model, which, again, I'm all for all of these things existing. But it's really hard. And the other issue I had probably towards the end with the interviewing, and I'm sure you've had this issue as well, is once you start doing a few interviews that are tough accountability interviews, people stop wanting to agree to be interviewed by you. So actually getting the interviews becomes an issue. And so I actually didn't see a huge future for myself in on-camera interviewing because it requires a guest booking and access that was becoming apparent to me was diminishing pretty rapidly. And what you have to give up to gain that access.

Can I ask you about another, the flip side of that? You said, you know, when you start doing these accountability interviews, it becomes hard. order to book people. The other thing I found was once the audience gets a taste of something like that, their expectation is for blood. Their expectation now is all interviews must draw blood. I must taste blood. They must draw blood from the right people. Right. And there is a disappointment if it's not because the way that social media has kind of aggrandized the Jonathan Swan eviscerates Trump. Yes, right.

Jonathan Swan lays low the head of. And it's almost as though the audience becomes thirsty for something that you weren't trying to provide in the first place. And did you feel any of that? Man, that's so true. It's so true. I don't know that I've observed it more than, I guess I felt internal pressure to do the best accountability interview I could, but I didn't feel, I've always hated, I've never, never gone into an interview with like, I'm going to take their head off. Like, it's just not my approach. Like, the style of interview, it's not the way I operate at all.

I think it can go, it can take an interviewer to not great places. So, like, I'm sure you've seen a lot of Paxman over the years, Jeremy Paxman in the U.S., in the UK. So I think Paxman's done some brilliant, like, some of his interviews are brilliant, right? But I know where you're going with it. But you know what I'm saying? Yeah. So it became a schick where he would like, like, you know, there was the famous one where he asked the same question 10 times of that hapless guy. And then there was the woman who I think was the Treasury Minister or something where he just, oh, it was so brutal.

She just, he's like, aren't you embarrassed to be, you know, he was so mean and whatever. And so he did a couple of great ones. And then over time, it became a cartoon. And I actually didn't think that it actually revealed much or shed any light. You know, the cliche of heat, not lice. It was all heat and very little light. And not every interview is this sort of boxing match. That's right.

It's just not. I mean, interviews, you have to have range as an interview. You have to be able to elicit and probe. And, you know, whether you agree with his politics or not, William F. Buckley, you know, go watch his old firing line interviews are brilliant. Yeah. They're brilliant. There's a lot of conversation. Dick Cavett was similar to that.

I don't know if you ever watch a lot of Dick Cavett. No, they're so probing. Yeah. And he gets things out of people that are astonishingly insightful. But I think that you said it. It's preparation plus presence. If you have, listen, if those organic moments arise, and by the way, I've done both. You know, I've been in situations where, you know, Rumsfeld famously, where I was like,

I'm going to get this motherfucker. And they were terrible. And it showed. It the narrowness of the questions my lack of being present like it all showed and it was it was poorly executed on my part and and I try to learn lessons from the bad ones but I'm also cognizant like and tend to shy away from that idea of drawing that you know you've got to you've got to punish them and you're like that's it's not punishment if if within the body of the interview these things happen they happen but you don't don't know the alchemy of it. But even like take your Federman interview, like, you weren't, you weren't out for, like, he was very respectful. It was very respectful. And you're giving him every opportunity to explain himself, like every opportunity to explain himself. And, you know,

there was a show on Australian television I used to love called Enough Rope. And, and I just, I just, it was by, it's by this guy, Andrew Denton. Such a good idea. Yeah. And Andrew Denton's a comedian, very smart guy. Yeah, yeah. Brilliant. And that's what the show was. It was, he gave them enough rope. He was probing.

He wasn't disrespectful. He was very respectful, actually. He'd done his homework and met, it was one of my favorite interview shows. It was so good. And I think that's a great concept, you know, the enough rope concept for a lot of interviews. It doesn't always work. Sometimes you need to like fasten it yourself. And that's okay, too.

And I love the fact that you do. I feel like you're the same way, but you're. is like the person you're always mad at after an interview is yourself. Oh, a million percent. Because you're always like, I should have done. I should have said, you know, all those things. Well, I really appreciate the time. By the way, I want to correct something.

I said earlier we talked about Roy Cohn that he had come out at the end of his life. Apparently, he did not. I see. Gillian texted me in the middle and said, actually never admitted that even through his dying day, which, wow, I did not realize. I thought he did at the very end. Jonathan Swan, thank you so much for taking the time. being so thoughtful about the whole process of sort of interviewing in the public square and

in the eye and not going out over your skis over things that you don't know. It's just a rare quality these days. So I really appreciate you. And it's so nice to talk to you and get some sleep because I know you got a baby. Thanks, John. Really appreciate it. Thanks, man. Thanks, man. You know, before I was surrounded by dogs and goats and pigs and sheep and the like in the rustic life that I now enjoy, a couple of cats. And I was, I thought a responsible cat owner, you'd feed him the, what was it, the bag that was like, it was like cereal, like weed of picks, but for cats, like supposed to provide everything. You know, but we know better now. And no one knows better than smalls. Smalls cat food. I'm telling you, man, if my cats

had ever gotten a hold of smalls, or if they had known there was another cat, like, across the hall getting smalls they'd have left me toots sweet they would have been out of there i was you know feeding them like fast food but smalls man fresh cat food preservative free 100% human grade ingredients you find in your fridge back then i wasn't eating human grade ingredients let alone my cats and by the way like it's not hard to get the deliver it right to your door. 88% of cat parents. And you know, if you know people that have cats,

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and free free. treats for life when you head to smalls.com slash TWS. One last time, that's 60% off your first order, plus free shipping and free treats for life when you head to smalls.com slash TWS.S. How alert was he for having a three week old baby? Seriously. It's pretty impressive. Yeah. Yeah. I loved in the middle. I was like, you know, there's a baby crying. That's the different. between, I think, not to be overly gendered, a man and a woman. Tell us more.

Mansplained this, John. That baby could have cried for 30 minutes. And Jonathan and I would have just kept talking. Oh, yeah, you know, it's interesting on the thing. Like, if my wife had been in the room, she's like, somebody get the baby. Like, it's a different visceral. It's all that. It's like what I was saying to him, like, that day I came home.

was like, oh, God, work was so hard today. And she was like sitting there with the two babies and just like, hey, how about I punch you in the face? Do you want to make work a little harder? But he really is. I love how the way that he described preparation, I thought, was all the people whose craft I admire, I feel like prepare in that kind of a way. He studied tape.

I mean, I have so much respect for that. Like, you see so many interviews. that and he was actually like what he didn't mention was like the 2020 interview he held him to account and they covered a broad variety of topics in about 20 minutes like it's not just that he held him to account on one issue and he had to give up so much in order to do it he still was able to get the conversation moving you can do both you can walk and chew gum here right and it is true that you know you can't I think our expectation that reporters must all be in the Jeopardy Tournament of Champions and understand, you know, at a granular level,

the specifics of every issue. But I also think there's room for, you know, and we do to give people at home some insight. There is a chat. And Jillian and Brittany are on it. And also, you know, Rebecca is keeping an eye. And when shit's wrong, when I say something wrong or somebody says something, there is a person who is thinking about the veracity of things. And I don't know why that's not more utilized. It's not like it's a college course where you're like, you're not allowed to use your phone. It's a one book. Right.

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

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

Yeah, you know what? That's so true. And I do feel that like, because there have been a couple of interviews. Like I remember it began with, there was a Jim Kramer interview during the financial crisis. And ever like,

I remember being on the street the next day and walking in the, streets in New York and people like, you fucking took Kramer to the house. Yeah. Like, and you really felt like like like a boxing match. Like you imagine like what OG and Anobie felt like after the tip, you know, not to that extent, but like you're like, oh, that wasn't like the idea isn't necessarily to put people a headlock.

It's the alchemy of it in the moment you're so stunned by someone's lack of accountability or whatever. But that can't be everything. No. And that can't be your goal. It skews things too much. Yeah. I do think, but I also think like interviews have become so friendly on the opposite side of that that people don't expect any pushback.

You know, maybe Kramer came on your show really not expecting anything because. Oh, no question. People, you know, he's, he's never, never been asked anything. Like it's, we have to, people should be a little scared when they sit down and they have to do it anyways. I mean, when he mentioned, you know, how he really didn't see a future for himself in television journalism because of the bookings, like Mike Wallace still got. interviews, like what, what has changed here? And they, you know, it used to be tougher. I think it's gotten so much easier. I do think it is like, I think the politicians have figured out what environments they can thrive in and what environments they will, they will crumple in. And how to derail it.

You know, they really figured out how to get around it, the little cheat codes they can do, say, I mean, actually, that was one of the things I was most, you know, it's so basic, but in regime change just like how intentional the administration has become about distracting the media and how they literally have a list of what can we say right we want this new story to go away what do we have in the wings okay well let's do this then you know and it's so strange that there's not a lot of self reflection on the media's part of oh every you know it's like that dog and up you know where every now and again they're like squirrel yeah should we stop doing that and they're not and they're In the book, yeah.

But when it comes to journalists, politicians, even business leaders, they don't have to say yes to interviews anymore. No, they don't. Or they only have to say yes to the ones they know will go a certain way. Of course. I mean, we've certainly seen that. But like, I've been surprised. People will think, like, oh, we'll be so friendly to Democrats on the show. We've had Democrats say no to us because they think it's going to be a tough interview, which is bewildering to me.

But, you know. And if you can't. handle questions. What are we doing? What are we doing? Yeah. Speaking of which, handling questions, what a segue. We've got some dozers for you this week.

Oh, do we really? All right. We're going to hold you to account. They have been piling up. We've been away, so they've been piling up on there. All right. Hundreds. Fucking come at me.

Come at me, bro. Remember when we were going to, I think we were going to do a segment. This was on the old show where it was like, we were going to do a segment called, come at me, bro. And it's like all the people that would talk shit about the interviews and all that, we would just have them on. Yeah. It's like that Jubilee.

They would just fire at me from all different directions. What do they want to know? What do they want to know? John, I'm really mad at you. Oh, come on. I've been on vacation. All right. I listened to you on Michelle Obama's podcast.

And do you really think the daily show is giving the country political diabetes? Like, come on, brother. I don't. I think the point was I don't know. Like you don't know what here's the thing we think we're making healthy food but we don't you don't know the overall you can never know all you can control is what you're making you can't necessarily control how it's being digested what the downstream effects may ultimately be and all those things do I think that no I think that uh

At our best, we can identify the space between what you see on camera and television and what's actually happening in the rooms where that is planned. The best sort of insight and satire. But at its worst, it can create a gamified atmosphere of disdain that is not, it's sort of like, you know, everything. can't make you outraged. You have to always try. And the difficulty when you're iterating a show that often is to make sure you've adjusted your governor, that you've synchronized everybody's watches so that you're not. I used to say it was the snuggles the bear problem where you ever seen comedians that like will go on stage and be like,

if I see that snuggles the bear commercial one more time. And you're just like, really? Where do you go from there? The Snuggles the Bear thing's really good. You don't want to be a ungrounded outrage machine. And so you're always trying to calibrate that because if that's what you become, then it's just Morton down to you.

So the thing that we try to do, and I think it was what I appreciated what Jonathan was saying, he tried to do, is post-mort the reality of what you're doing and how you're doing it and how you're executing it and where you think that wasn't justified or that, you know, you always want to make sure that fairness and veracity and good faith is being,

and context is a part of, that doesn't mean that the tools of satire, hyperbole and, you know, juxtaposition and, you know, adjectives that are not kind can be used because there are things that are contemptible that need to be attacked. but you want to make sure that the targets justify the deployment and the amplification of the tools you're using. And you hope that the downstream effect of that isn't a caricaturing, even though caricature and stereotyping are such a tool of satire.

I don't know if that made any sense. No, it did. It absolutely did. It really did. But the point is, we're definitely not trying to give you diet. But we also don't think we're curing anything, if that makes sense. Sorry. What do we got next?

What do we got next? Okay. John, you've been recognized for your advocacy on behalf of 9-11 first responders. Why do you think Donald Trump hasn't been acknowledged for all he says he did? I mean, he's the president. I think that's, is that not acknowledgement enough of all that he's done to the country? Yeah, he's such an interesting figure in that. in that he really does feel the need, I think, to inject himself as kind of a crucial part of that day.

Yeah. Even from that, you know, the famous one is him going like, I guess my building's the tallest now. Such a, it's such a, like, you know, Tracy loves the narcissist. She loves studying, you know, what's that relationship, Orna's show? I can't remember the name of it, but like. Couples therapy, right? Couple therapy, where, you know, there'll be such a clear narcissist or narcissist on narcissist crime in the couples.

And she's so attuned to that. It's so obviously a destructive caricature trait. It's so obviously corrosive to the people around you. And so to see that rewarded with the position of the most powerful person in the, like, it's hard to imagine the country in a voluntary relationship with such a damaging narcissist. Yeah. That's, I feel like how did, why are we going out with him? Yeah. And we broke up with him and we took him back.

Why did we take it back? Our girlfriends did not help us. He lit the house on fire. This is all you need good girlfriends. They stop you from doing these things. But does anybody go like, girl, don't you remember? He stormed your house. Yeah.

And he did all the, and he almost. We loved the attention. Like, it's. It's some sick shit. That's what I'll tell you. But the sick shit is it almost is like, a country who's like, I know he did that, but he was good to, he was good to me. He bought me. He keeps calling me. Right. You remember my 401k during that relationship? Right.

That, it's almost like, but I remember I, you know, we used to eat at Lyserk and that was really. Yeah, the good times. Even that was a fantasy. My favorite comment he made this week, though, about the 9-11 stuff is when he said, I'm not the smallest guy. The big strong guy is to come and lift him up. And I'm not the smallest guy. I'm big. They lifted him up under the arms. He does love talking about big, strong guys. Yeah.

It's interesting how that story just arose like a couple of years ago and just wasn't one of the, you know, stories. I mean, you could say that it was really big of him to hold on to that story for so long. A lot of people saw it in the spotlight for, you know, not Trump. He said, I'll wait, I'll wait two decades. And then let this. It's just, it's so interesting to see. something so fundamentally awful happened to so many people and so much bigger than anything any of us

can ever conjure. And it's almost like his first thought is, how is this about me? Me. I want to be part of the story. Right. They're not talking about me. And I am now, aren't I? I guess I'm the, I guess I'm the tallest building now, aren't I? That's my takeaway. What's your takeaway from 9-11? I guess the size of my building? Isn't that what everybody? Takeaways? Fucking psychotic. Yeah. Anyway, we're back. I think our next episode is also going to be on a Thursday because of, I guess maybe it's the timing of next week. I don't really.

Emmys. Oh, for God's sakes. Okay. So that's it. Oh, yeah. Who'd you vote for? Oh, everybody. Apparently everybody. But I'm hoping Jimmy. I'd be stunned if Jimmy doesn't, although now I think there's some, they've changed the rules. I'm not really exactly sure. But, you know, but God, why can't they just fucking do it in New York? Just like, at least alternate. Right?

Something along those lines. Well, how can they stay in touch with us, Brittany? Twitter. We are weekly show pod. Instagram threads, TikTok, Blue Sky. We are weekly show podcast. And you can like, subscribe, and comment on our YouTube channel, the weekly show with John Stewart. Beautiful.

It's so nice to see you guys again. It's so nice. I hope everybody had a good break and enjoyed themselves. and got a little rest and relaxation. Our producer, Brittany Mamevig, producer Jillian Spear, video editor and engineer Rob Vitolo, audio editor and engineer Nicole Boyce, our associate producer, Rebecca Rotenberg,

and our executive producer is Chris McShane and Katie Gray. Good to say everybody, and we'll see you guys next week. Bye boy. The weekly show with John Stewart is a Comedy Central podcast. It's produced by Paramount Audio and Bus Boy Productions. On Podcasts.