This is an edited transcript of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts.

Maggie Haberman is a White House correspondent at The New York Times, a Pulitzer Prize winner and an author, alongside Jonathan Swan, of “Regime Change,” which I would say is the single best book on the first 14 months of Donald Trump’s second term.

She joins me now.

Ezra Klein: Maggie Haberman, welcome back to the show.

Maggie Haberman: Ezra, thank you for having me.

So I want to talk about the experience I had reading the book, which is remembering how much energy and ferocity there was in the first six to eight months of the second Trump administration.

Many of the things that you all were tracking here — from the tariffs to DOGE to parts of society bending the knee to Trump to the Iran war — now feel like they have deeply run out of some kind of steam, or they’ve ended up trapping the Trump administration in its own decisions.

So I want to start with the big picture. This book is really about Trump’s Year 1, mostly. What does Year 2 feel like to you?

First of all, thank you for having me. I wish Jonathan were here, but his wife is having a baby soon — and I have permission to say that.

There’s a reason that the first section of the book is called “Whirlwind.” And I was thinking as you were talking about the running-out-of-steam piece.

I would put it a little differently. It’s not black-and-white. And Elon Musk is obviously not working for the government anymore.

I do think it’s remarkable how much of DOGE is memory holed. He came in, he was supposed to change the way government was going to work. In reality, DOGE didn’t do anything close to what it was supposed to do, but it did do things like show how Trump was going to govern by fiat in large measure.

Elon Musk shut down U.S.A.I.D. — just shut it down. Shut down an entire congressionally created agency.

One of Trump’s first unilateral actions was firing a bunch of inspectors general — did not notify Congress, which he’s supposed to do, about why, and he was supposed to give Congress a 30-day notice. None of that happened.

Stephen Miller, in particular, rolled out with a bunch of executive actions that — I would say, some of them didn’t run out of steam: the ones focused on D.E.I., in particular; the one about trans women in sports, in particular. And certainly a lot of their activities at the border have not.

If you were a Trump supporter and you voted for him for those reasons, which were things he did talk about on the campaign trail, just those three, you’d be happy.

Most of his base didn’t vote for another potential forever war in the Middle East. So that is, I think, not just running out of steam, that is injecting fresh chaos. He has now just launched a fresh trade war.

So there’s the combination of new tariffs, plus potential escalation, back to engaged combat with Iran. It could be really interesting for the economy.

So I don’t know that I think it has run out of steam, but things tend to end one way with Trump. And it’s usually in some form of the lack of strategy being apparent, and I would say that’s what you’re seeing right now. So I don’t know that it’s running out of steam. It’s running into Trump reality.

I think often of something that the conservative analyst Yuval Levin said to me early in the term. He said that administrations have a rhythm. At first, they are the master of events. Everybody is responding to them.

It’s true.

And then they are responding to events. And in Trump’s case, he’s often, even now, responding to events he created.

Correct, which is what I was thinking when you were saying that.

There’s been a lot of reporting, for instance, on Iran right now — that Trump is in the mood for “revenge.” And I thought it was such a strange word that was being chosen. Like, he attacked Iran, decapitated the leadership, threatened to end the civilization.

Iran has not completely capitulated to him, so he’s like, he needs — is “revenge” the right word there? I’m sure he feels it is.

I saw that reporting, and I actually wondered whether it was just about what you’re describing, which is some kind of retribution for a military intervention that he began, or whether it was part of this ongoing anger at Iran, that really is quite real with him, about the threats against his life, about ——

Do you want to talk through that? Because I think that’s an important thread of the book.

Sure. It’s very much an important thread of the book, and I think it was incredibly — I don’t think, I know. I mean, Jonathan and my reporting really did show us how radicalizing those four years out of power were, not just for the investigations that Trump was facing and that a lot of his advisers got swept up in.

But what also happened in 2024 — right after he was convicted in a state court on falsifying documents in connection with a hush money payment to a porn star who said he had an affair with her — was that a Pakistani man was indicted in connection with a murder-for-hire plot who was allegedly engaged by Iran. This was a proxy.

So the allegation is Iran had a proxy who was trying to hire a murderer to kill Donald Trump.

Correct, and was indicted, by the way — under the Biden Justice Department. He was indicted.

But the assassination attempt in Butler, Pa., happens after that, where Trump was shot, and it was a galvanizing moment for the campaign. It was a galvanizing moment for him.

All of that in his mind becomes one big blur.

And around that time is when, and I don’t remember if it was right before or right after, but Iran had successfully hacked the Trump campaign manager’s emails — Susie Wiles’s. Iran, according to officials, was behind it. And they started releasing them, and that was hugely embarrassing to the entire campaign. It also added to this sense of siege that they all have.

And they all went back into the White House this way, for different reasons in some cases. But for that core group, and for Trump himself, Iran and this feeling of being under threat is constant.

You heard it when he spoke to ABC News’s chief Washington correspondent, Jon Karl, after the Ayatollah was killed at the beginning of this war. Trump said something to Jon Karl that I don’t think I’ve heard him say since as a repeat, but it was: They tried to get me twice.

I’m paraphrasing, but it was: I got them once. They tried to get me twice.

Whatever he’s referring to, I don’t exactly know, in terms of the twice, but it tells you what his mind-set is.

One story that we’ve heard a lot is that Benjamin Netanyahu talked Donald Trump into this war.

There’s another story that Trump himself had distinctive views on Iran and has for some time — has always said they cannot have a nuclear weapon. He tore up the Obama nuclear deal over the objections of his own advisers.

He has always had a very hard line on Iran. Going back years — you can find old interviews, way before the presidency, where he talks about Iran humiliating us.

Archival clip of Donald Trump: When you get the respect of the other countries, then the other countries tend to do a little bit as you do, and you can create the right attitudes. The Iranian situation is a case in point. That they hold our hostages is just absolutely and totally ridiculous. That this country sits back and allows a country such as Iran to hold our hostages, to my way of thinking, is a horror. And I don’t think they’d do it with other countries. I honestly don’t think they’d do it with other countries.

Interviewer: Obviously, you’re advocating that we should have gone in there with troops, etc., and brought our boys out.

Trump: I absolutely feel that, yes.

You write about this, but a lot of Trump’s politics seem very rooted in the ’80s — things that happened to America in the ’70s and the ’80s.

But what, at this point, is your view of why Donald Trump decides to actually do a regime-change-oriented war in Iran?

The final piece of reporting that we did in “Regime Change” was about the lead-up to the Iran war.

There were things that happened that I’m sure will be either unearthed or could fill out a fuller picture, but we were really just focused on a few discrete meetings and conversations. These were Situation Room meetings, one of which included a foreign leader coming to the Situation Room to have a very sensitive intelligence conversation with the U.S. president. I have to say I tried to find some other example that was an analogue, and I couldn’t.

And so Netanyahu comes on Feb. 11, 2026, and he paints this pretty compelling, to Trump’s ears, story about why now is ripe for a regime change. And Trump is always very receptive to: You could be the person to do X, Y, Z.

So Trump says some version of: Sounds good to me.

His own C.I.A. director, his own secretary of state — the next day, they have run these scenarios. They say some of what Netanyahu is proposing in what the Israelis would call their decapitation scenario: take out certain leadership — that some of it could be done. They could degrade the ballistic missile program in Iran, for instance. But the regime change scenarios that Netanyahu had presented, including a video of who could take over — most of the Americans found it to be silly.

John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, called it farcical. Marco Rubio was much more explicit. He said, in other words, it’s [expletive]. And Trump said regime change will be their problem. It wasn’t quite clear whether he meant Iran or Israel, but he still thought it was worth a try to accomplish the other objectives.

So that, yes, was definitely Netanyahu making a case. But No. 1: Netanyahu, in our reporting, in 2024, has this meeting with Trump to essentially go kiss the ring and make nice after a break in their relationship. And Trump says to him privately: I’m going to be much more aggressive on Iran this time. This is right after Butler.

Remember that, as you said, Trump was doing things against the objections of his own advisers on the nuclear deal, certainly the Obama nuclear deal. Taking out General Qassim Suleimani at the beginning of 2020 was also against what some of his advisers wanted. It is part of what has made him such a target for Iran.

But he is more hawkish on Iran than he is about other parts of the Middle East, to a degree that has always surprised some of his own aides, and that his current aides have really misread, I would say. They will continue to insist that he doesn’t like Netanyahu, that he doesn’t like this, he doesn’t like that.

And he definitely says different things to different people, depending on who he’s talking to. But it’s always been pretty clear that he has a firmer view here.

And Trump believed Iran was a paper tiger after the 12-day war of last year, because their response was pretty tepid to the strikes that the U.S. engaged in. It was sort of some choreographed strikes toward U.S. allies. Trump believed that was going to be the extent of it. It was just a massive miscalculation on his part, and a lack of understanding of what was happening.

And he was also fresh off this Venezuela effort to capture Nicolás Maduro earlier this year. That also made him believe we can do these things. I’m not saying that’s a rational belief, but I am saying that was his belief.

And he believes things will work out for him, always, and he said that to Tucker Carlson, which was in the book, as well.

It gets to something that I think comes through in the book, and I think about a lot from our coverage from the first year, even just on this show: There’s really, in my view, no Trumpism. There’s only Trump.

Correct.

Which is to say that the amount of energy that gets wasted chasing down purported doctrines — the Mar-a-Lago Accords that were getting floated at one point, to do a massive currency rebalancing all across the world, “The Donroe Doctrine” — we’d be focusing on the Western Hemisphere, we wouldn’t be entangled in all this war and conflict in the Middle East.

Trump just weaves in and out of theories. I mean, there are things he holds to.

Correct.

He is hawkish on immigration, has been for a very long time. That is sustained. He has his views on trade. But even trade — the objectives have flitted back and forth on that.

Everybody who says: I know what MAGA is, I know what Trumpism is — if it is anything, as JD Vance would put it, it’s no new wars — they end up wrong because Trump is right. It’s possibly you that he said that to ——

It was Michael Scherer at The Atlantic, whom he said it to.

He’s the one who decides what it is.

MAGA is whatever I say it is — is what he said. I think that’s true now.

I guess that I have a slightly different take on it, though I generally agree with you that trying to pin him to some ideology is just an absolute fool’s errand, and has always been a fool’s errand. He does have these id-like impulses that he is very interested in, but it doesn’t mean they can’t be sublimated if the occasion calls for it.

I think MAGA is a movement — I do. I don’t think MAGA is the entire Republican Party. I think MAGA is a movement within the Republican Party, and the coalition that exists around Trump in that framework has always been very uncomfortable and strange, because he will say different things to different parts of it.

And I think that they would only be willing to ignore the parts that don’t match their own view for him. I cannot think of another figure who can unite these different facets of this movement.

But I think that this movement is sinking, not just — I shouldn’t say sinking. I think that it’s having fissures, not just because of Iran and Israel.

It started with Jeffrey Epstein last year, and we get into that extensively in the book. Right after the 12-day war is the Epstein crisis — and I’m calling it a crisis. What it actually is is a multi-administration failure to deal with a pedophile, whom people of both parties found entertaining or useful or whatever. But it was the MAGA movement leaders who had been talking about a need for transparency over many years leading up to Trump’s election in 2024.

And they then get caught up in that because Trump wants nothing to do with this. He doesn’t want anything released. So it becomes a crisis because there is growing anger by Trump’s own base about what’s happening. There’s growing anger by victims about: Why have these files not been released? Why is nothing being looked at?

So you end up in this remarkable series — and we write about these in the book — these Situation Room meetings. Same place where Trump decided to take the country to war in Iran, was what they were using for crisis communications on: How do we get ourselves out of this mess?

But if you want to track a moment when Trump started losing his own base, it was then.

But did he lose his base? I mean, I’ve had people on the right on to talk about Trumpism cracking up and his losing his base.

I know.

And then you look at the polls, and the base is almost entirely with him. He’s able to intervene in any primary he wants.

That’s true.

He has not actually seemed to lose influence in this way. Tucker Carlson kind of breaking with him, at least on some issues. These things really happened, yet his influence with Republicans was pretty undimmed. The people who challenged him, like Thomas Massie, like Marjorie Taylor Greene ——

They lost. No question.

They lost. They’re gone.

They’re gone. I think two things can exist at once, though.

There was polling last year showing that even with his own base, mostly private polling, his numbers were ticking down.

Now there is no question that people who have opposed him, because the Republican base is so Trump-dependent, will find themselves out of a job. That is absolutely true.

At the same time, I never thought that I would see enough Republicans cross over and vote for the Epstein Files Transparency Act when Donald Trump was openly telling them: Don’t do this.

This is the only time I can think of, Ezra, where he would say: Believe me. Not what you’re hearing over there.

And there were people who didn’t, including in his own base. What their voter preference ends up being in the midterms or in a primary, it doesn’t necessarily correlate to that.

I realize it sounds like I’m saying two things that are contradictory. I think these are two facts that exist at the same time.

A very real thread of the book is this: What does Trump know anymore? And when or how does he know it?

I wasn’t really familiar with Natalie Harp before I read the book — this person who kind of follows him around and gives him printouts of adoring fan mail and positive news stories from right-wing media.

Right.

But he’s on Truth Social. He’s not really on other platforms.

He clearly has some contact with people like Carlson and others, so he gets some information. But how would you describe the difference in Trump’s second term from his first, in terms of what he knows of the world outside the White House?

I can’t stress enough how radically different Trump 2.0 is from Term 1.

So this government is run basically by a half-dozen people who are in the room with him, and if you are a senior official in this government somewhere else, major decisions can get made, and if you’re not in the room, you will literally have no idea.

The interagency process, in particular at the National Security Council, just really doesn’t exist the way it used to, and that was often how other agencies would be brought in. That’s just not happening now.

The communications process is not quite what it was. Now it’s just sort of pure trolling.

And he gets his information, as you said, from Truth Social. It used to be that he would get on what was known as Twitter, when he was president last time, and he would look at the replies, and he would look at the trending topics. He would talk to more people.

He does watch other cable channels besides Fox. We learned recently that he watches MS NOW a lot on the weekends. Jonathan and I learned that after he appeared to have watched one of our appearances talking about the book.

So it’s a little more variegated than it seems. But most of the information is coming from Natalie Harp, who’s known as the human printer, and from people who know that he wants a constant supply of positive reinforcement. And his aides are afraid of giving him bad news.

I just want to make one other point. Fox is so much less critical of him this term than they were last term, even on the news shows. It is all pretty positive, and especially about the war. They are the last ones in anything that would be considered the MAGA media ecosystem that are really championing this war.

Archival clip of Marc Thiessen: We stopped the fighting and the cease-fire at the 20-yard line, we take it into the end zone.

Archival clip of Sid Rosenberg: Once you start this, there needs to be a finish. And the only finish is complete surrender by the Iranians. I hate to say it but complete annihilation.

Archival clip of Mark Levin: The reason this president will go down in history for a thousand years, the reason the prime minister of Israel will go down in history for a thousand years, is because they saw the danger, and they stood up to the danger, and they’re fighting the danger.

So how much do you think the decisions being made reflect an altered informational environment for him?

Well, it’s a great question that I don’t think that we have the full answer to. One question that keeps coming up is: Does he understand how depleted the U.S. munitions are from this war?

That’s not an unknowable thing for his own Pentagon leaders, but I don’t know how much they’re telling him.

We have a scene in the book where his economic advisers, particularly Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, are talking about economic numbers. This is ahead of the trade war “Liberation Day” last year. And Trump says: Those numbers are [expletive]. Natalie, get me the real numbers. And so she’s googling to find these numbers.

There was pushback in this meeting. But his willingness to operate on his own gut and on what he thinks is reality, I would say, is much sharper this term.

There’s something also tucked in there, which is — you describe his meetings as having this borderless quality. That people are flowing in and out of the White House. It’s not necessarily — I’m sure it is sometimes, but, you know: From 10:15 to 10:45, we’re meeting with the Joint Chiefs. That ends, they all leave at 10:45.

So can you talk just a bit about that free-flowing nature? Because I think the way he ends up getting information — making decisions — actually reflects that — the slightly random assemblage of people who might be around on a certain issue at a certain time.

There’s no question about that, but it’s also — yes, that is by his design.

This White House group of staffers is much more willing to work with that as his preferred state than in Term 1. You had Reince Priebus come in as the first White House chief of staff in 2017. He kept trying to put things on Trump’s schedule.

First it was: We’re going to schedule early meetings to try to get him to stop tweeting in the morning. Then the meetings started sliding back, and that wasn’t working. They tried monitoring his phone calls. That didn’t work, either.

This has always been a facet of Trump. It’s just: There’s a big, long kind of day, and sometimes he has all the time in the world. But there is no sort of: This person cannot come in.

There might be certain moments like that or specific meetings, but in general, he does have an open-door policy. Everything becomes this rolling ball session.

I’ll give you another for instance. In the book, Laura Loomer comes into this meeting in April — I think it was “Liberation Day,” actually — and she hands him this list — and she’d negotiated this meeting with him directly — of national security staffers who she believed were being disloyal to him and who should be fired.

He’s listening, and he acts on it. But in the middle of that meeting, Congressman Scott Perry comes in to join with his own list of things that he has an issue with, and Trump just has them there. And so yes, the focus is: whatever is in front of him.

And then he just barks an order at some aide, and they go off and do it.

Yeah. It’s just: Get it done. I want it fast. Fine. Whatever is in front of his face.

You are correct that it does have to do with the information he’s getting. But trying to stop that is also useless, because many have tried.

This maybe goes back to the question I circled at the beginning. Maybe “out of steam” is not the right way to put it, but what I always wonder with him — and particularly around reporting like this — is what picture he has of the way things are going.

Because from where I sit, his trade war has been a disaster. It is wildly unpopular. It has been shredded by the Supreme Court, has made people very angry at him, and it has accomplished nothing.

We’re not seeing a huge resurgence in manufacturing jobs. China is not weaker now. I think the broad and correct view is that China is in a much stronger position today than when Trump stepped back into the White House.

So everything they promised on the trade war has not happened, and the politics of it have been bad.

DOGE completely collapsed after a couple of months. It did terrible damage. U.S.A.I.D. is gutted and gone. People have died. But it did not then cohere into what many people thought you might get, which is like a DOGE 2.0, where budget director Russell Vought and others actually create something institutionalized.

He’s not popular. The Iran war, I think, is not going well. They have no legislative agenda that I can tell.

No.

They don’t have an affordability agenda that makes any sense.

But if you’re him, and you’ve got somebody following you around all day telling you you’re wonderful; you think the media that is mad at you just has Trump Derangement Syndrome; you’re getting presented with peace awards by the head of FIFA; different C.E.O.s are coming in and constantly kissing your [expletive] and telling you how great you are — maybe you don’t buy any of it. You have defied the polls many times.

Well, you just hit on what it is.

We’ve left out one piece that we haven’t discussed at all that I think we will all be talking about after the midterms a lot, which is the incredible, massive self-dealing. You are richer if you are Donald Trump ——

That is the other thing ——

And you have spent your whole life talking about wealth and measuring success through wealth, and you are now wealthier, liquid-wise assets, than you have ever been — from an industry that you regulate, from a company that was created during your campaign, that your sons are running with the sons of your special envoy.

It’s a sentence that really would have been unimaginable not that long ago. And you’re doing it — and Republicans in Congress say nothing, and the Senate says almost nothing.

Voters have only started to care about some of it in polling, I’m seeing. And I honestly think the main reason is less the money made — although I do think that is a factor — it’s that they can see visual signs with all of the monuments and all of the, literally, blasting through longstanding buildings or structures like the East Wing, planning to build an arch, putting down drapes so people can’t see your construction projects and so forth.

Symbols are a lot easier for voters to understand. And voters tend to think all politicians are corrupt. But this is different than anything we have ever seen in the U.S. system.

But if you’re him, you have been this kind of walking moral hazard. Your company almost sank in 1991 — and I think people don’t understand how close to ruin he was when his casinos were overleveraged. It was across his properties — it wasn’t just there.

You come back through a variety of reasons, but partly because the banks decided it was worth staying with you, and your father helped you.

You become a reality TV star. You win the presidency after never having run for City Council before.

You are indicted four times. Your opponents keep doing things that are pretty self-harmful. Joe Biden has a pretty nonspectacular last two years, at minimum, of his term.

You are shot at — you survive. You have taken on this mystical quality with not just your followers but with your advisers — who refer to him, or then, anyway, would refer to him as the chosen one, only semi-joking in some cases.

And you believe everything works out for you, which is literally what he said to Tucker Carlson: You know why the Iran war is going to work out, that things are going to work out? Because they always do.

And so you believe that your reality is better than what experts have been telling you. He thinks the economy is boring. He literally will tell advisers he finds this boring to talk about. He wants to talk about immigrants, you know, committing rape or murdering people or committing crimes.

And he’s going to do what he wants to do. Look, he obviously doesn’t want to be impeached again. But when you have to say “again” on impeached, it stops mattering as much, I think, to some extent, in his head.

It’s also not even the first “again.”

Well, that’s exactly correct. It would be Again 3. Well, Again 2, I guess.

He’s already told people that he’s going to pardon everyone who walks in — we write about this in the book — who has come within a certain radius of the Oval Office. And he has an immunity ruling from the Supreme Court that — it’s still not entirely clear what would qualify as a presidential act where he has no criminal exposure, but I suspect it would be most of them if it were pressed.

So if you were him, yes, this moment could be very bad for other Republicans, but he’s not that worried for himself.

Let me ask you about the corruption dimension of this.

When you talk to Republicans off the record, often they will admit they know that we are dealing with a level of corruption that is majestic in its grandeur, that is like nothing we’ve really seen before.

It’s not even a debatable point when you talk to them off the record.

One thing I hear people say all the time in the media and elsewhere — voters, Democrats — is: Any one of these stories would have consumed Washington at another time. Would have sunk another presidency.

You think of Travelgate and pig futures in the Clinton administration. You think of the Trump cabinet member who had to resign ——

Yeah, Tom Price, I think it was.

Tom Price. For, what was it, taking charter jets?

He was using jets. We have referenced that in the book, actually.

Why is it that stories that would have consumed Washington — even would have been a problem for members of the Trump administration at another time — seem to slide off him?

There’s great reporting being done at The New York Times and The New Yorker, at other places. We know a lot. We have numbers now that we didn’t use to have.

Why has he been able to flood the zone on corruption and then escape the consequences it would have attached to another administration?

Well, I would break that down a little bit. So what you’re describing in terms of consequences, from what you just ticked through, was primarily the consequences of a news cycle, the consequences of public information.

No. 1, I think that at this point, if you are a journalist, and you get into journalism in the hopes that — or I shouldn’t say “hopes” — in the expectation that what you write is going to force an outcome, and that is your end, you’re going to be disappointed very, very often, because it is a totally different media landscape. Because this choose-your-own-adventure partisanship really actually allows people just to hear what they want to hear.

No. 2, we don’t have subpoena powers. We can only write up to what we know. In the past, investigations would have been done by the inspectors general. He’s fired inspectors general at the start of his term. They would have been done by Congress on a bipartisan basis.

Everything is tribal now — like, beyond anything we have seen in the past. It was pretty bad before, in terms of partisanship. The House G.O.P. acts like an arm of the Trump administration.

The Republican House members, and some senators, still look at him as a celebrity. Yes, there’s obviously a fear factor. He has shown he is willing to destroy their careers and really humiliate them. But the way that they — grown men — he’ll take chocolate bars out of what they call the chum closet, that has the presidential merch or whatever, and he’ll throw them. And these are House members. They love being on Air Force One with him. And I think ——

And a House member gushing that he knew his first name.

Yes, correct. It’s: This celebrity is talking to me. Not this president — this celebrity. It’s like: I watched “The Apprentice.” I knew Donald Trump.

So that’s one reason. The other is, he has been investigated since literally the second he stepped into office in 2017. So I think there is a flattening effect with the public in terms of their expectation.

At a certain point, it all becomes one — you know, Trump would smear it that way — witch hunt. Explaining to people that there is new information is, I think, a challenge for journalists across the board.

All of that occurs in his favor. There is not one single reason — and I don’t think there will ever be another politician who will have this same experience as he does, but we’ll see.

Do you think that changes if Democrats get subpoena power?

No, I don’t, because I think that if you are Donald Trump, and you can pardon everyone around you, and you can instruct your entire government not to respond to subpoenas with anything timely, and only do it once the final stop in a court challenge makes you — I mean, look, Trump’s whole thing is waiting people out. And we have seen this over and over and over again.

There are a number of members of his government, and I talked about how radicalized they all are, who do believe that they are going to be not just subpoenaed but prosecuted. And I’m not just talking about when the House flips. I’m talking about under a Democratic presidency.

They genuinely believe — and I’m not endorsing this view, I’m just saying this is their perspective — they are going to be indicted by an illegitimate junta of the Democrats at some point: They are going to come after us when we are out of power, so we are going to do everything we can. That is entirely the mind-set.

They have the same hunted mentality that he does.

I just think that people who think that the House is going to flip, and this is going to look like it did in 2019 — I’m struggling to see that. I could be wrong, but what happens when they issue contempt of Congress subpoenas and they send them to Attorney General Todd Blanche? Does he rush to start an investigation?

I just don’t know what this looks like. But I don’t see it looking like anything we’ve seen before.

A Democratic strategist said to me in 2016, right after Trump won, that the entire country was about to finally understand how much of our system is norms and not laws.

And fundamentally, I still come back to that every time. If you have somebody who is willing to violate every norm — and, really, every norm. I don’t think I can think of one that he — I’m sure there’s something, but it’s hard to go down the list and find something that is still firmly in place.

We have a president who cheered when Robert Mueller died. He cheered when Rob Reiner was killed by his own son, according to prosecutors.

He is making a ton of money, and they’re very blasé about it. They will say: There’s no corruption here — as they continue doing what they’re doing. They’re about to start trying to monetize his Truth Social posts for advance notice.

Wait, can you talk through that for a minute? Because that — the Truth Social ——

[Laughs.] I know. It’s hard to describe, because I remember when I saw it I was like: Wait, what?

They’re trying to monetize rapid trading on Truth Social.

Correct.

But can you explain how?

Yes. What they’re trying to do is sell, for very, very high dollar amounts — I think it’s like $100,000 — advance notification of Trump’s Truth posts. Because they can move markets — and do move markets.

It seems ripe for — even if it’s not violating a law for Trump, because presidents are actually not held to the same ethical standards and laws and regulations as their staff. I mean, how does this not become something else? So anyway.

Well, it goes to something, I think, in what you were just talking about, which is: I think the deep answer to the question we were just discussing is Republicans.

Well, it’s the fundamental answer in terms of a movement. Totally.

On some level, in other administrations, even your copartisans on something like this would say no.

Now, arguably, Republicans did that a bit on the I.R.S. slush fund.

I mean, that was so brazen that it was a little hard not to have problems with it. And I’m actually trying to remember — had the judge already raised questions about that?

Once they did, did that give them cover? I don’t even remember.

But yes, I mean, this was: You’re taking taxpayer money and doing this.

It’s the taxpayer money.

A lot of how not just accountability but investigation worked in Washington — the other side was in power, so they were able to structure investigations, or the agencies were run more professionally. The Department of Justice ran more independently, and so they responded to investigation and responded to subpoenas.

And that creates a structure of, and a sequencing of, information coming out and possible consequences and people being hauled before Congress. And each one is a new news story.

Correct.

And that’s how you get the connection of a congressional operation and media coverage that people understand is a scandal.

Yes. Well, that is true.

That’s how it works. And Republicans just are not going to do that.

No, they’re not. The closest that they have come would have been — and I’m really stretching the word “closest” here, so just roll with me for a second before you say this is absolutely not at all parallel, because I’m not saying it is — but the closest would have been some of what they were doing around Epstein. But of course, that took a detour into the Clintons and all kinds of other stuff.

And by that, I just mean Republican Congressman James Comer’s committee, initially, which was filing a subpoena to former Attorney General Pam Bondi that the administration was not happy with, and then they slow-rolled that.

But no, there’s no analogue. If you look back at the last real effort that attempted to be moderately bipartisan, it would have been the Jan. 6 Committee, and the select committee that was investigating what happened in the lead-up to the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol and Trump’s efforts to overturn the election.

But even that devolved into partisan politics, and so there you have it.

It was striking to me how small a role Congress played in this book.

Well, there are a couple of reasons. It’s a good point.

But the reality is that Congress plays a supplicant role. We did talk about that.

We talked about Mike Johnson’s role with Trump and how incredibly unusual it is historically. There has not been a relationship like this between a House speaker and a president that I can think of, where it’s literally: Give me my marching orders this way.

That is not about policy. It’s about just whatever you want it to be.

But the reality is, there is no legislative agenda, as you said. There was the One Big Beautiful Bill, and we did talk about that, and we do get into what went into that. But this administration knew that it was never going to be able to do much legislatively ——

But this again goes, to me, to this question of what is actually being built here, versus what is just kind of collapsing or being left alone on even a lot of these issues.

The One Big Beautiful Bill did pass. It’s a big change. And as the actual changes to Medicaid and food stamps and other things roll out, I think we’re going to have a lot of political upheaval around that.

Yes, and there will be more focus on that, and there will be more coverage and interest. I agree with that.

Look, their trade agenda got gutted. They could have gone to Republicans in Congress to get more power on tariffs.

Right.

They chose not to do that.

That’s true.

And would Republicans in Congress keep them from ever changing the filibuster? I don’t know. They’ve been kind of tough on that, but they’ve also nicked it around the edges a little.

A little.

Immigration — they have done a tremendous amount on immigration. I think, out of everything you can look at, they have done the most on immigration.

Correct.

What they have not done is change the laws.

Well, because that takes time. I mean, this isn’t complicated. This is ——

But it also means that another administration can ——

I understand that, but they also assume that’s going to happen regardless.

Just to try to explain the mind-set here: The person who spent the most time — and I’m glad you brought up immigration — the person who has spent the most time thinking about a Trump 2.0 — and not just from the perspective of immigration, but obviously that’s his driving issue and defining issue — is deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller.

And he spent four years focused on not just what he wanted to do differently this time.

The initial Muslim ban was a disaster, and a court challenge disaster, and it was poorly written and so forth in 2017. It created mass chaos on flights and so forth.

Stephen Miller spent four years looking at how far the law could go on a number of things — what was in the executive branch’s control, what could be claimed as an executive branch power, which they’ve done a lot.

They’ve gotten caught in the courts on this, as you know. And that’s part of what you’re saying, I think, is if you don’t want to have a big court fight, go work through the actual process.

They would rather have a big court fight because if you go through the process, it’s going to move slowly, and their gamble is that they can win much of the time. Not every time — the trade agenda was a calamity for a variety of reasons, but it wasn’t just because they didn’t go to Congress. It was because the formula made no [expletive] sense.

But DOGE is another example where ——

DOGE is a great example, actually ——

To do what they wanted to do, you actually need to do civil service reform.

And they’ve done a little bit of that, but it’s not civil service reform. It’s just redoing Schedule F ——

Yeah, you would have to go and change the laws ——

Correct, yes.

This actually gets to a different problem. They don’t all work in harmony, even though they collectively want the same thing — which is to crush the left, expand their power, focus on a specific set of issues. We’ve gone over many of them on this show.

But Russell Vought actually understands how government works. Elon Musk did not. He just came in and started punching through walls. In some cases, literally, physical aspects were impacted by how he handles things. That is also different from how Stephen Miller wants to handle certain things, and so that creates its own internal crash. Then add Congress to that as a layer. It’s hard to see.

Has there been a shift in who holds power in the court in the last year?

Yes, but it can change quite rapidly.

Marco Rubio had a lot of capital with Trump for a long time. I think he still does, but he is really not that involved in the Iran issue.

Because Trump doesn’t want him? Or because he doesn’t want to be near it?

I think it’s more the latter, honestly. I think that Trump would welcome his involvement more.

But — and he may get more involved now, and he’s been talking about it a little bit more — but I think that Rubio, if you strapped him to a polygraph, this is not where he wants things to be.

Susie Wiles is still hugely influential. Stephen Miller, despite these stories about how he was getting his wings clipped and whatever after Renee Good and Alex Pretti were killed in Minnesota, that was vastly overstated.

The showy displays of rappelling into a building in Chicago from a Black Hawk, which I still can’t really believe happened last year, but — they have stopped the great displays of force. They are still using force, but it’s not these ICE drives in the same way. It’s the traffic stops — that’s what the latest shootings were about.

Stephen Miller has taken down his arrest number for undocumented immigrants from last year. It was 3,000 a day last year. Now it’s 2,000 a day, and he’s back to pushing people, and he’s very, very aggressive on these calls.

So Miller still has power because Miller can also tell Trump: I can get you what you want very quickly. Which is also, again, why they don’t go to Congress. They want to act unilaterally. Trump wants to act unilaterally, and he just wants to do what he wants.

Pete Hegseth is still actually pretty powerful with Trump. Ratcliffe is on certain issues. But the person who is most powerful is Trump, period.

Hegseth is powerful with Trump? Trump listens to him?

He listens to him on certain issues. Hegseth has figured out how to have conversations. Look, Hegseth — if there was anyone who was in favor of Iran, it was Hegseth. But I don’t think he fully envisioned it going this way, either.

Hegseth often shows up for these briefings with Trump with Dan Caine. He has figured out how to handle these discussions so that he is turning to somebody who actually has better tactical understanding.

But Trump does listen to him, and he likes him.

Dan Caine being the former general who ——

The former general who is now the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but whose style is very different than Trump’s last choice for chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which was Mark Milley, who would get into these sort of grab-Trump-by-the-lapels arguments. He did see his job as telling Trump which way to go. Caine has told people he doesn’t see that as his job.

Hegseth is a die-hard Trumper. Not MAGA — Trumper. And so that buys you a lot of cachet internally.

So that was my question with him. Is he somebody who Trump enjoys as a yes man, or who Trump listens to for strategic advice?

More the former than the latter. But the strategic advice is also channeled through these joint conversations with Hegseth. But he does listen to him, and he likes him. He’s good on TV, he’s tough, he doesn’t take [expletive], etc. And he is a devotee.

What have the people in the inner circle learned about how to brief Trump?

That’s a good question.

It sits around the edge of a lot of the stories in your book, of people bringing in poster boards ——

Well, that’s Bill Pulte. That’s one person. But yes, I understand.

But I’ve heard from other people, around the briefing books, that they’re very visual.

Oh, totally. One hundred percent.

Tell me what people have learned about how you brief Donald Trump.

Trump is very visual, as you said. And this was a big facet of Term 1, too.

Now they all submit to it. I think they resisted it — the government — because it was so unusual to them in Term 1. But he really doesn’t like long briefing books. He doesn’t really read them.

He wants to be shown how things look. That is how he absorbs them. People describe him — they’ll say he’s a TV guy, and they tend to think of it as him on the set of “The Apprentice.” But it’s actually really how he absorbs the world — through TV. So he likes to see how things look. Just having a dry recitation of facts and discussions with him doesn’t work very well.

But even when it was visuals in Term 1, the quality of the information was fairly reliable. There’s a much bigger fight now about the quality of the information.

Whether you include, essentially, raw intelligence, whether you tell him reports that are unverified — it is just a different type of discussion.

The amount that he relies on a sense of how things are playing visually — there are moments in the book where, and that I’ve heard about, too, where he sees what it’s looking like when the Israelis are doing something ——

Correct.

And now he wants to be involved. Or the flip, where he is being shown possible cabinet appointees, and they give him little montages of them on cable news.

There is something very deep about Trump’s — he doesn’t just apprehend the world visually, he is somewhat a master of creating visuals for the world.

One hundred percent, yes.

Hegseth is one of many people he sort of cast into his administration. He was an innovator in this.

I think you have to see Zohran Mamdani as having a different version of this, a kind of visual mastery of the world. I just had the campaign strategist Morris Katz on the show. They very much found Graham Platner and cast him in a very particular position.

Again, this operates on the edges of the book, but I’d be curious to hear you bring it to the center of the stage, which is: What has it meant to have this administration that both makes internal decisions through spectacle, and then communicates through spectacle? That judges visually and acts visually?

It becomes a self-reinforcing feedback loop sometimes. When you were talking about Hegseth, we have a bit in the book about how he got very into these videos of the boat strikes. They would be privately described as Hegseth’s snuff films. But he would want to have some sent to Trump because he knew Trump would want to see them.

Trump is a master of the attention economy, which is what I was thinking about when you were talking about Mamdani. I think that part of the attention economy is creating a visual and getting something that will grab people.

Mamdani was exceptionally good at that in his campaign, and still is, honestly. I mean, when I look at his social media just as New York’s mayor — it is actually quite striking how much of it still comes into my feed, even if I’m not looking for it, even if I’m not looking at his thing.

But it becomes a way to tell yourself that your view of reality is what’s happening. So, for instance, we have a scene in the book where Stephen Miller comes into — it was really an important moment. He comes into the Oval Office, and he’s got these pictures of this kid from DOGE, whose name online was Big Balls. That’s what he was known as — his actual name is Ed something.

But he had been beaten up, and he’s got these photos that Stephen Miller had gotten from his wife, who had been working with Musk at DOGE. That then fires up something that Trump has been wanting to do forever, which is send the National Guard into D.C.

It isn’t just about seeing visuals that reaffirm your point. It is basically that your world has no competing viewpoints, and that everything is just going in through the eyes, and it stops you from thinking the same way.

Because part of — I mean, this is my opinion now — I’m getting a little inside his head, which I try not to do because it’s not a very worthwhile endeavor — but I do think that when people are consuming their own content that way, so much of the consumption of visuals is about you, you react.

And so it’s just a constant reaction, and that is what they try doing with these videos that Steven Cheung does when he’s trolling — the White House communications director, who is a big U.F.C. guy. For instance, they set these videos of these strikes to actual video game music and dynamics.

Or, and I thought this was a fascinating detail in the book, to the music of artists who are going to protest.

Correct. That’s true, too.

Artists who are going to say: How dare you use my music in this way? And then that’s another news cycle for them.

Correct. One of the things that Jared Kushner used to tell people in the White House last time was that he would describe what he called Trump rules, and one of them was: Controversy elevates message.

And so there’s no quicker way to do that. But it’s also a way to say: I’m not going to follow your rules.

What did you make of the Trump-Mamdani meetings?

I was so not surprised, and it went exactly as I thought it was going to, in all seriousness.

But Trump’s own team is a little jarred by how much he enjoys talking to Mamdani, and how, as much as the Republicans are trying to talk about Socialists or Communists — and Trump is even doing that in his own speeches — he seems to have a real carve-out for one particular person.

And I know Trump has attacked him a few times recently, but Mamdani — he’s very good. Apparently, in their first meeting, Mamdani was referring to the crossover of voters who were Trump voters at his own rallies. Mamdani has been quite smart.

The Trump-Mamdani meetings reflect what I thought was the funniest part of your book, which is Trump’s tendency to be incredibly conciliatory and friendly when he meets one-on-one with people whom he has been slandering, whom his administration might be entirely persecuting. But for somebody who is so brash and aggressive, he’s a bit of a pussycat one-on-one.

He does not like one-on-one interpersonal, direct conflict. This has been a constant in his life. Sometimes he does it intentionally just to make the person be off guard. But with Mamdani, he seems to genuinely like him, so for whatever that’s worth.

Do you feel Trump has changed with age or that age is slowing him in meaningful ways?

I mean, define “meaningful.” When I watch him on television from even 10 years ago — I was watching his R.N.C. address in 2016 recently, and it’s a pretty jarring comparison to how his words flow now. He speaks much slower, he’s telling the same stories a lot. The weave is getting wide, as Joe Rogan would say. That’s definitely true.

I will say that Jonathan and I spent an hour with him in the Oval Office on March 16 of this year for a fact-check interview for the book. We didn’t notice anything meaningfully different. What we did notice is that he seemed like what Steve Bannon describes as “pure Trump.”

There was just much more focus on payback, much more focus on what he wants to be focused on. Very obsessed with the renovation projects. You know, it’s Day 17 of the war, and he’s telling us: Here’s my models of the ballroom — and so forth.

It was like he didn’t have a care in the world. But I don’t subscribe to this dementia conversation. I don’t think Trump is some fundamentally different human being. I just don’t. But I think he is much more himself, which is a product of age in general.

There was a sense — maybe the better way to put it is that there was a thread on particularly lefty social media six or eight months ago around the strange bruising people were seeing.

Oh, that is weird. I mean, yes.

The ankle swelling — that he was quite sick.

In terms of physical health, he has chronic venous insufficiency syndrome, disease, whatever it’s called. That means that the blood is not going to his heart properly. So that’s not a good thing.

On his first medical report in 2018, he had a calcium score of, I think, 133. That suggests some level of heart disease. They have not put out a calcium score since.

He was very sick with Covid in 2020, and we still don’t know the extent of that. I reported some on that from information we got well after he was out of office. But we don’t know what we don’t know, and his health notes read as if he’s written part of them.

He goes to the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center with more frequency, and they release less information. He got imaging — we don’t even know what they were. He can’t tell us. He says he was treated by 22 specialists. What? Twenty-two — I don’t even know what that could be.

And the bruising thing, the explanation has never made sense. It’s always been handshaking, aspirin. It could be that 80-year-olds have thinner skin.

He’s clearly not the picture of great physical health. But I don’t know what that means.

What I generally know of what it means is that electing 80-year-olds is a bit of a gamble. I mean, electing anybody is a gamble. You don’t know how somebody’s health is going to be, but you can guess where it’s going when they’re older.

How much of his time actually goes into the renovation now?

A lot. If you looked at a chart of his mind share — this I will say about getting into his mind: Seventy percent of it would be on his renovations.

It’s a legacy thing, but I always think of legacy with him as different than the way we usually use the word “legacy.” It’s not: What am I leaving behind for the world? It’s: What am I leaving behind so the world can’t kick me off the world — or deplatform me or take my name off buildings in Manhattan or take away my Bronx leased golf course or debank me.

It’s: What can I do that cannot be taken away?

Yeah — how can I create monuments to myself?

Correct. I mean, literally. He literally said that when Ed O’Keefe from CBS asked him. He noticed the arch — which he’s calling the Arc de Trump design on the Resolute Desk — I don’t know if it was the Resolute, but I think it was back then.

Ed said: What is that? And Trump is like: It’s an arch.

Archival clip of Trump: It’s going to be built, an arc.

Ed O’Keefe: For who?

Trump: Take a look at the location.

O’Keefe: Yeah, I know where it is, but who is it for?

Trump: Me.

And he was quite clear about it. There was no further conversation.

The Kennedy Center, the ballroom — I can go on and on, but they are all monuments to himself.

Can you tell the Macron story with the arch?

I’m going to F this up a little bit, but in a meeting one of the things he was musing about was what should go on top of the arch. It was like: Should he put a gold version of the fight, fight, fight fist from Butler up there?

But he calls French President Emmanuel Macron in the middle of another meeting and starts asking him about the Arc de Triomphe in France, asking: What’s it like? And: Does it have a visitor’s desk? Do people jump off it?

This was the conversation that he was interested in, and he’s still talking about this kind of thing — but calls up a foreign leader to inquire about what his arch to himself should look like.

Speaking of the other side of legacy — the more traditional way we would talk about legacy — does he have things he still wants to achieve politically?

It’s a really good question. I could answer that pretty clearly in 2019 and 2020 — there were things that he still wanted to achieve. If there are things that he wants to achieve beyond just sort of not being Herbert Hoover, as he would say — meaning, with a giant global crisis — not really.

Look, he has resumed his trade war, as you said. I think he’d like to achieve getting out of Iran. I think he would like to figure out an end to the war that he started. But that’s not an achievement. That’s a reaction to his own behavior, as we had started this episode.

There are people around him who would like to see some form of comprehensive immigration reform, to your question about legislation. They’re thinking: That’s something that we can work on with Democrats.

Boy, do I have a hard time seeing Democrats wanting to give him some kind of a political win that way, especially when it would be, I suspect, a bill they would find less than palatable, as they have almost every single other bill involving anything related to immigration with him.

Maybe another way of asking this is: Are there actual policy issues his mind is gravitating toward in the way it does toward the renovation?

No, I know what you’re asking ——

And the answer is no?

I mean, that could change. They could be having conversations we’re not aware of. But certainly not in anything that we have heard.

If anything, what he spent the last year and a half focused on as Top Issues 1, 2 and 3 were retribution, were these bullying campaigns across various industries and aspects of civil society — where he was pretty successful for a time.

The law firms won. The courts caught up with him. But media — he’s done pretty well, I would say, in terms of his attacks on the media — not through the government levers but through lawsuits.

But renovations are really a huge part of it. The degree of mind share on these projects is vast. He is vastly less interested in and reactive to domestic politics this time — just beyond.

And one of the things that we started seeing in 2024, and we get into this in the book — it relates to the mystical quality. He sees himself as big, on a level that I think people really don’t understand.

It was quite clear when we were sitting with him — and we write about that in the epilogue of the book — but he is playing for history, capital-G great man of history — to be remembered by one name, to have left a mark on the world that is just different than a typical president, or what he would say is a normal president.

That doesn’t involve the boring work of trying to pass a bill. That doesn’t involve the boring work of going to Iowa to talk about X, Y, Z, although his numbers are not great in Iowa now, either. This is fundamentally less interesting to him.

Immigration, very interesting to him. I think that if he could find some way that did not involve legislation to even further change the immigration system and claim credit for that, he would.

He may still end up trying to do something legislatively. It wouldn’t surprise me at all. I just don’t see it going very far. But who knows? I’m willing to be surprised.

But no, there is no room in the tank for: Here is how we are going to map out X, Y, Z.

They are in survival mode politically to a degree that I kind of can’t express.

I think that’s a good place to end. Always our final question: What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?

OK. So I’m reading Charlie Savage’s “Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency,” which was a very, very good look at how, particularly, Dick Cheney expanded executive power under George W. Bush post-Sept. 11.

I am reading Belle Burden’s “Strangers,” because a book that is that everywhere, I sort of feel compelled to have some sense of.

I haven’t read it yet. Is it good?

It’s interesting. It’s well written. It’s definitely propulsive.

It’s an interesting choice to write about such wealth in this moment. That was a little hard to get through because there are many people who go through divorces who don’t quite have the same resources.

Keith McNally’s “I Regret Almost Everything.”

Oh, that book has been fun.

It’s actually fantastic. But I’ve had to cycle out of that one for news and for other reasons.

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Mary Marge Locker and Julie Beer. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Johnny Simon. Our recording engineer is Johnny Simon. Cinematography by Marina King. Video editing by Dani Dillon, Steph Khoury and Jan Kobal. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin and Emma Kehlbeck. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Shows is Annie-Rose Strasser. Transcript editing by Kate Wilkinson and Marlaine Glicksman.

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