Foreign Policy and the Zelenskyy Antipathy

It's twenty twenty six. We upgraded our phones, our cars, even our coffee. So why are we still acting like pleasure is negotiable? At Pink Cherry, it's not They've got hundreds of toys that actually deliver, and whether you know exactly what you like, or you're still figuring it out, there is a wide range to explore. If you'd rather skip the guesswork, their mystery boxes make it easy. They curate a mix for you so you can discover new favorites without overthinking it And they ship discreetly with free shipping on orders over fifty nine dollars, which we love. So go to pinkCherry d. com and use promo code Chelsea to save up to eighty percent off sitewide. Because life is hard, feeling good shouldn't be pinkCherry d. com because everyone deserves pleasure This is a global production Nobody likes her She could never be The first woman president, she could never be. M be an insult to our country. You will feel it in the future. God blessed. You don't know. God blessed. You' God blessed. You don't know. Don't tell us what we're gonna to feel. We're going feel very good. We're gonna feel very good and very strong. We feel inflence. You're right now not in a very good position O your life hs It's going to be pproximately one hundred and seven degrees out And I'm going to go and I'm going to make a really long speech just to show that I can do anything You ever see a guy? Somebody told him he looks great in a bathing suit on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. during the week. We basically have two countries that have have been fighting so long and so hard that they don't know what the fuck they're doing. Do you understand that? Itr Whentia The second Trump presidency is five hundred and twenty nine days old. There are nine hundred and thirty one days remaining. During that time, he's pardoned every january sixth insurrectionist. He's publicly attacked President Zelensky in the Oval Office. He's imposed tariffs, he's reduced tariffs, he's invaded Iran, he's kidnapped the Venezuelan president, He's levied tariffs again plastered the Oval Office in gold. He posted a video which suggested that Gaza could be the Riviera of the Middle East. He said that Gaza should be taken over by his own government, that Canada should be the fifty first state, that UK soldiers didn't do much in Afghanistan or Iraq, that he would reopen alcatraz He told people that they should go and check what's in Fort Knox because he was worried it might all have been stolen. Even this week, he's talked about a threesome with his sons And he posted this. For someone you know been diagnosed with TDS The symptoms can be relentless. Fortunately, I'm doctor Trump and I have a treatment plan. Let's hear what some of my patients have to say I have been suffering for over a decade. And after listening to Dr. Trump I can see some results. Man, I've been suffering for years I really didn't believe that was help out there That was when I came across this video on TV. I really thought I was a lost cause. This was going to affect me for the rest of my life. But after using the treatment plan I can see a difference. I really wasn't sure I could help some of these people. They were so far gone, I wasn't really sure I had no idea how much this was affecting my life My work is slowed down I'm hardly recognizable anymore. I just needed help. couldouldn't eat I couldn't sleep, constantly angry I made everyone miserable around me I feel like I've aged twenty years in the last two years. I've been so concerned I was really starting to worry about my future The treatment is simple. Turn off Fake news Say your prayers and if you ever feel anxious, just have a diet cooke like me and you're gonna to see a remarkable difference in your life. I don't think wild ride two journalists who have reported on Trump every step of the way in this presidency and the last are Maggie Habberman and Jonathan Swann of the New York Times. No one is better connected in the court of King Donald than they. and they've just published a new book Reime Change inside the Imperial presidency of Donald Trump You kind of think you can't be surprised with Trump anymore that after ten years, the stick might have warmn thin And then you read a book like this with your jaw permanently stuck beneath its pages. So in this episode, I'm talking to Maggie and Jonathan about their reporting inside the Imperial N Trump presidency and how the man has changed, how he hasn't, what's been done, what for America and the world in those nine hundred thirty one remaining days is still to come. Welcome to the News agents The news agents Well Maggie Habman and Jonathan San thanks so much for joining us on the News agents. Your book is as extraordinary as perhaps we might expect it to be given the subject matter Both of you are very experienced chroniclers and journalists of Donald Trump, his first presidency and the wider politics surrounding him. Just before we get on to some of the specifics in the book, I just wonder if you could reflect on The difference is in this second term, reporting on him, the politics of reporting on him by comparison to the first. It's almost unrecognizable Um Don It's not to say that Donald Trump has had some profound character change. Of course, he hasn't, and Maggie's covered him for much longer than I have. and we show in the book the roots of a lot of his behaviors and actions But the way he's operating is present, is unrecognizable You could break it down in so many different ways. There's The team around him which in the first t, when Maggie and I would talk to many of his top advisors and aides, in private, they had contempt for him. They would mock him behind his back They would make clear that they saw their role as stopping bad things from happening, protecting America, protecting the world from Donald Trump U That was their worldview, That was how they functioned You don't find those people in this administration at the senior level The other thing that's changed in terms of the team is it's shrunk. His circle has shruck and One of the reasons the reporting of this book was so difficult is Most of the U.S government at the very senior level has no earthly idea what's going on, how decisions are being made, what discussions are happening in the Oval Office and the White House situation room So you have this sort of pantomime of transparency every day where Trump's doing kind of open mic night, invites the press in, you know, he'll answer a few questions, or he'll invite the cameras into the cabinet room and it seems like you're getting this rolling reality show. But for anything that actually matters, secrets that they want to keep They're very good at that. So penetrating those rooms became much more difficult In the first t, it was just easier. I think the type of reporting that Maggie and I do, which is to try to show people how decisions are made, how their country is being run That was much easier to do in the first term. and I think one of the reasons that the reaction to the book has been as overwhelming as it has is there just simply hasn't been that much of this type of reporting this term. Frankly, because it's really hard. And I wonder to what extent pereriod, Maggie, and you've known him for such a long time. You reported on him personally for such a long time was the period when the Biden administration and not just the Biden administration, but when he faced prrison Do you think that that has affected him personally? I mean in the book, you report that he says, If I lose, I'm fucked ahead of the election. He calls the Biden administration the Gestapo. Has that affected his personality and mode of governing It certainly has I think it's a little more nuanced than that. it certainly has accentuated certain aspects of his personality and his behaviors, one of which is about vengeance and payback. To be clear, it was not only the Biden administration that prosecuted Donald Trump. He was convicted criminally in a state court in New York on a totally unrelated case, and Trump has tried to smear it all with the brush of Biden was going after me. But what we do show in the book is how this period in the political wilderness, where he was debanked, where he was deplatformed from social media All of this made him something of a and face to assassination attempts, this all made him something of a mystical figure for his followers for his supporters, and frankly for his own team. I was actually thinking about this this morning where when we were reporting this book, we would have people say describe him to us on Trump's team literally as the chosen one and All of that has led into how he is governing now. It was true that He was concerned about going to prison. His advisors were concerned about going to prison. We show in the book how One of them said to us in the course of reporting shortly after one of the indictments, he has to win That was the mentality in June of twenty twenty three. And so what you are seeing now is a president who has defied every odd everybody everybody had who has cowed the Republican partarty. He has turned House Republicans in Congress into you know an appendage of the White House essentially. And he has a presidential immunity decision, which means there are fairly little accountability measures for him and he knows it. So That all combines with how he's governing now. Something that has been talked about a lot and obviously wass written about a lot with regards to the Biden P presidency, perhaps less than it ought to have been Is the president's mental acuity? having seen him over so many years, do you think that he's mentally declining I think he's eighty years old. and I think that you can look at video of him talking now and video of him talking ten years ago, and he seems to be, certainly older.. I will say we met with we're not doctors, we're not diagnosticians, but we did meet with him for an hour long interview in March of this year. And neither of us came away thinking that there was some distinct difference in him other than the fact that, you know he is wearing his age much more visibly than he used to, but certainly not in terms of any kind of a mental decline Jonathan, talking about Biden for a moment somethingomething that really just stood out to me just as a vignette in the book Is it clear decline or not, it's clear, despite the fact that Trump might seem even more harder edged on this side of the Atlantic than before, he retains his ability to charm and too beile. and that included even President Biden in the meeting that he had when he returned to the White House, where Biden actually thought that Trump might be something that he wasn't. Would you just recount that story? because it did seem quite extraordinary to me Yeah, it is a pretty remarkable scene So we have a scene in the book quite early on It's actually chapter one, where Trump goes to Washington after this incredibly brutal campaign where he's know said everything you could possibly say about Biden, the worst president ever de you know, full of dementia and incompetent and what have you. He shows up to the White House and they're sitting by the fireplace And Trump basically starts telling Biden what a great job he's done. As president And you know, you're so popular in Pennsylvania, Joe and he starts to try to almost kind of recruit Biden onto his side, you know, say, Oh, they were so rough to you. the democ you, it was so terrible what they did to you, taking the nomination away from you. And he was trying to baake Biden into criticizing Kamala Harris. He obviously didn't take a. Youre write that he even suggests that he would have won if the it might have won if if the if the Demons hadn't taken the nomination from him. He said to Biden, we might not be doing this if they hadn't taken it from you. You know, you're very popular in Pennsylvania I mean, he was laying it on thick. and then he he even expressed sympathy about he said it's terrible what they did to your son Hunter which, you know, is sort of your head almost explodes. You know, the Trump Trump and his allies were obviously central to over many years of U going after Hunter Biden and the quote unquote Biden crime family and all the rest of it. So And he said, you know, he basically intimated to Biden that You know, anything I can do to help, you know, let me know. So I think it was I mean, I think it was quite a bewildering experience. Biden fell for it Well, he did and he didn't. So he definitely was in the moment a bit offset by that. And some of his allies thought that he was being naive, you know, Trump tell it when he told him how nice Trump was He also pardoned his son, not that long after that meeting. So clearly pretty quickly and based on our reporting, onnce Trump started to actually announce some of the people that he was that were going to be running the FBI and the DOJ Biden pretty clearly saw where this was all headed. And so he pardons his son and of course just shortly before Trump took office, he pardoned other family members. So You know It's more nuanced. It's not quite. he was you know, totally bambooled, but in the moment, I mean, Trp look Trump can be many people have described this as, people who can't stand Trump describe being charmed by him Um It was funny. Tucker Carlson, who I'm sure familiar to your viewers over in the in the UK, but he describes he's described this publicly as almost a spell. And I know what he's talking about. I'm not endorsing any supernatural explanation, but I know what he's talking about because you enter Trump's world, and it's a world that Trump has created. It's a reality that he's created and You know, so many people have described to me the experience of sitting with Trump over a meal or in the oval offffice visitors and he'll just He'll be telling stories that are divorced from reality. You know I You know, he was begging on his knees like a dog crying and I told him, you know, whatever. And you sort of have to make a decision in those moments. Am I going to you know intrude and sort of insert reality into that bubble? Or am I just gonna kind of let it all wash over me and just experience the flow of Trump? And if you want to stay in his company for more than, you know, fifteen, twenty minutes, you have to make the latter decision and that creates its own ecosystem and that's the world that Trump lives in Okay, Jonathan spoke about how the of Trump, the number of advis is much smaller than it used to be, that's constricted quite a lot Who is it in these, you know, first, eighteen months, two years of the second term Who is it that he does listen to now It's a very small group, as Jonathan said, but it really does depend on which issue we're talking about. And it can change. And that group of about a half dozen people expand a little bit depending on what the subject matter is, if it's economic issues, it can include Scott Besscent, the Treasury secretary and often does. But it's a tiny group. The person who he will almost always listen to. it doesn't mean that he is always going to do what he wants, but who we will often listen to is Stephven Miller. And we describe his his but also his homeomeland seecurity advisor and those dual headed descript roles, and titles don't really accurately describe the scope of Miller's power within this government. He is somebody who the major cabinet level appointees understand they either have to be willing to work with or fear crossing. And that includes the seecretary of war, the attorney general, and who also used to be the deputy attorney general. I could go on and on the DHS secretary Miller has a vision for governance. Miller has a vision for what the U. S. government should look like. And Miller has a very, very hard line view on immigration, much harder line than Donald Trump himself But what Miller is able to do is tell Trump I can get something done quickly. And often he does. And because of the way the U. S. system is set up, particularly in its current iteration where Congress is essentially acting as a supplicant It takes a while for courts to catch up if they have disagreements. Other times they sign off on what they're doing. So Stephen Miller is who he listens to quite a bit. Suzie Wiles, the White House Chief of staff, Still is someone he listens to he will depending on the issue, listen to JD Vance He likes Marco Rubio a lot. But again He is listening to himself more often than not these days. It is a presidency being run on Trump's pure gut very frequently It's twenty twenty six. We upgraded our phones, our cars, even our coffee. So why are we still acting like pleasure is negotiable? At Pink Cherry, it's not. They've got hundreds of toys that actually deliver and whether you know exactly what you like, or you're still figuring it out, there is a wide range to explore If you'd rather skip the guesswork, their mystery boxes make it easy. They curate a mix for you so you can discover new favorites without overthinking it They ship discreetly with free shipping on orders over fifty nine dollars, which we love. So go to pinkCherry. com and use promo code Chelsea to save up to eighty percent off sitewide. Because life is hard, feeling good shouldn't be pinkchherry dot com because everyone deserves pleasure taking some of the issues which have defined his his second term so far in turn, all of which you have extensive reporting on. Obviously one of the only issues that Trump set himself to deal with was Ukraine. And again, remarkable reporting and quotes in your book. I mean but not least you report on a meeting with Trump, Marco Rubio, Keith Kellogg, his envoy and others, where Trump can really only focus rather than the issue at hand, you report on how much he loathes Zelensky. At one point, you write, He says I'm not a big fan of Ukraine. except their women And then he says he likes the minerals deil because he sees it as a way of extracting wealth from Ukraine. They owe us they need toay repay us. And Scott Besscent personally you write, is scathing about Zelensky saying, I've dealt with this little fucker. he's tricky. he's like the special needs child for the Europeans. He's acting like Mr. Bean on cracks This is a remarkable account. What explains in your mind the antipathy for Zelensky personally and the sort of way that they talk about and deal with this issue I think at the core is I think the most important point besides, you know Some of it's a personality issue, and there's no question about that. But I think there's something deeper which is Trump respects power. He respects force and in that relationship You know, the people Trump has most contempt for are the middle powers, the small powers, the ones that don't aren't completely syycophantic to him. I mean, he obviously has great regard for Viictor Orbn whatever no one would describe Hungary as a great force. But for the middle powers and the smaller powers that are not totally sycophantic and deferential to Trump and don't have know enormous militaries and are somewhat reliant on the U. S, Trump has contempt for them. And he's always respected Putin, had an affinity for Putin We describe in the book a pretty remarkable, you know We have reporting in the book about phone calls that he had with Vladimir Persjian and Zelenssky. He was his first phone call with Zelenssky since he last was in office and we report in the book and Its it's a study in contrasts. you know, in the Putin call, it's two peers.s Talk and deusion is a peer He is excited about the prospect of getting to a peace deal so they can conduct business together so that U. S. companies can invest in Russia again. You know, he wanted to do some kind of a grand bargain. When he's talking to Zelenssky, he's talking to an irritant as as sort of an obstacle to what he wants to do, which is, you know, get back to business with Russia. So you know, the call is laden with frustration. It actually opens with an especially cruel greeting Trump ster Zelensky is a sort of sarcastic joke. I just spoke to your best friend, Vladimir Putin you know, so and then he basically tells Lenssky, you've got no cards, you know, You need to you know, essentially make a deal and compromise. and what that means is give up, you know, large chunks of land and deal with with Putin Almost erasing the fact that Putin was the aggressor that Putin invaded There's no moral dimension really to that equation. It's just a power dynamic and Trump you know, favors the large power. Has he I mean, obviously as I said, he set himself, he said that he would fix it on day one. He then went back on that and said he was ent wasn't being literal. But obviously, by definition, the war has now been going on since longer than the First World War. It's not resolved. Has he lost interest in it now, do you think There's no question. Trump definitely has lost interest in it. I mean, he would like to obviously solve it, but he doesn't have the patience for sustained diplomatic engagement. You also saw that by the way with Iran You know, he empowered Steve Witcooff, his envoy last year to negotiate with the Iranians You know, he only gave that a couple of months. As you know, from the Obama administration experience, nuclear diplomacy and all of its complexities takes a long time to do in any sort of detail and rigor. And within a few months, Netanyahu came back and told him, you know, we're going in and Trump didn't stop him. didnn't use any of his leverage and ended up joining it. Well, I was going to ask you about that But you write in the book Maggie that Tucker Carlson warned Trump You reporting that the only thing that could wreck your presidency is war with Iran. and Trump responded by saying, We're not doing that What change for the president, do you think? Trump is very good and we write about this in the book at telling people what they want to hear, depending on what the audience is. You know, He knows where Tucker Carlson stands. He knows where other intervention skeptics stand Trump himself. And again, this it's much more nuanced than the online portrait of Trump is being puppeteered by Benjamin Netanyahu, or that something dramatic changed Trump has always been more hawkish on Iran than most of his team. and that was true in term one, and it was true now. And frankly, that only became hardened in these years between his two presidencies when Iran was threatening to kill him, threatening to kill going after a number of his advisors who were part of his Iran policy in his first term, who were involved in the successful strike against General Soalimani, of which Trump is very proud, by the way. And many of his advisors told him, donon't do it. He did it. The world didn't end, but certainly it upped the risk. Trumpet was fascinated by the Israeli military pager attacks against Hezbollah, even as he described them as you know, weird or distressing or you know horrific. He was fascinated. and that showed up in our reporting repeatedly. He was very impressed by the Israeli military's performance in the twelve D War last year And at a certain point, Trump likes success and he likes being with the winner And last year, Netanyahoo was somebody who was taking risks that in Trump's mind, we werere ending well The other piece of it is that Trump did use his leverage in a very specific way with Netanyahu, and we write about this extensively in the book in the fall to get a ceasefire with Gaza But all of this led to this feeling for Trump of you know He said to us that he sees Netanyahu as a good wartime partner because he's not afraid of war By the time we got to early this year Trump truly believed that going into Iran was going to be quick It was right after the Venezuela strike where they seized Maduro which was a very effective military operation, whatever anybody thinks about what was done diplomatically or in terms of international aspects of it Trump thought The Iran regime was a paper tiger He thought that he could dominate. He thought that they would fall quickly and this was going to be done. And If you convince yourself that that's the case then you make decisions based on that. And obviously, that has not held up. But For anybody who wanted to see it, was always more sympathetic to what Netanyahu was saying than his team wanted to acknowledge. Although I mean, as you write, a lot of his advisers did advise him that it was a bad idea, not just Carslon with whom has now fallen out, Rubio saying that is bullshit. CIA director saying it's a farcical plan. But Trump will lear along with it anyway. Do you think that he regrets it now Well, two things. There's no question based on our reporting that he regrets it in the sense that this can't end and he can't figure out how to get out and this MOU has turned into its own paddle of trying to get up of the creek they're in The only person on Trump's team who was vocal in these rooms with Trump about not doing this was Vance, and it costed him with Trump. Trump got very irritated with his vice president There's no one on Trump's senior team who thought this was a good idea. The closest you would find was Pete Hexf. But nobody really grabbed Trump by the Lapels and said, don't do this. They offered specific critiques that were fairly muted Dan Kaine his chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is in the same role that Mark Milly was in in Term one, but Mark Milly was adamantly opposed to various things that Trump wanted to do and would argue with him very, very vociferously. That is not Dan Kanain's approach. He will lay out could happen, but at the end of the day, he was not a strong advocate in one way or another. And they all made clear in that final go, no go meeting We will back whatever you want to do, Mr. President. And there's a reason for that. He is the president. It is on him. But as you say, does he regret it now? This is not what he wants to be dealing with, even if he doesn't really care much about the midterms right now, which he doesn't in all of our reporting this is just something being described as failure and that bothers him immensely Jonathan when he's assessing his presiden so far or this second term, obviously clearly What has happened with Iran the fact he can't extricate himself, is it? as Maggie was saying bothers him What are the other things that he feels have not gone according to plan. I mean I wonder whether, you know, if you could talk a little bit about his attitude towards Epstein and the Epstein scandal and also of course Liberation Day. I mean, in your reporting, he's clearly absolutely incensed by it. I mean, he says to Howard Lutnickk the treasury seecretary used to be a killer Howard and now you've got your beautiful wife and your big house and you're just soft and you're a pussy. You know what you are? You're a pussy. I mean, this is a member of his cabinet that he's blaming for this inmbroliio and fiasco Well, I think there's quite a few things that again, if he was honest, he would he would say didn't go as he wanted them to go. I mean, one of them has been immigration enforcement. He clearly didn't like the PR and the press around the killings of these protesters in Minnesota That's notough to say that he thinks the whole immigration mission has been a failed. dont think he thinks that at all. And in fact, they've had great success at Seal in the border. Epstein was something he just didn't want to deal with. He wanted it to disappear and he would get moreore and more enraged as his base just sort of refused to move on So his team had to, I mean, what we have in the book, pretty extraordinary series of meetings over the summer in the White House situation rooom You know, usually a room is focus on national security, the most sensitive conversations in the government. they turned it into a sort of epsteine crisis response center. and the most senior people in the government sat around the table without Trump trying to figure out how to spein their way out of the crisis. Trump just didn't want to hear about it, D didn't want to do anything with it. Liberation Day was really interesting because I think Trump, this was sort of the fulfillment of a forty year Dream some respects. You know Trump has been talking for forty years about how America's being ripped off and foreign countries are taking advantage of America. He talked about tariffs. He didn't really have a deep economic theory of the case. But you know he teed up this date of april second last year as the day Liberation of course typically Trumpian hyperbole, the day when America would It liberate itself from you all these foreigners ripping us off It turned out to be a calamity And he took the bond market almost to the point of catastrophe. I mean, they almost boombarkets almost melted down and his aides had to Latnic andesccent had to almost leadlead with him to pull back from the brink. So he did. He paused it and we ended up getting sort of a messy series of bilateral deals I still think because Trump you know, based on our reporting U because Trump operates so much in the zone of the power of positive thinking U I don't believe he would even privately concede that this was a failure From all accounts he tells people that we're getting r America iss getting richer The stuff he says publicly about how America is getting richer than ever through the tariffs, he says the same thing privately. Either he's the world's best actor and Never Breaks character or he's convinced himself of that Obviously America is now heading into this two hundred and fiftieth anniversary weekend. There is two years still to go more than of this second term. Mark, what do you think the remaining two years of the term have in store for the United States and the world becausecause obviously you know typically in that period, the next presidential cycle will begin, the spotlight will move away. I can't imagine of all presidents that he would accept that lying down. There's no question that he's going to make life very hard for whoever is running for president. Obviously, his vice president would be chief among them and we have extensive reporting in the book about how he's already begun that process of making things very uncomfortable for JD Vance, who both Jonathan and I still think is the leading candidate to be the nominee for the Republican nomination, just for a variety of reasons. But Trump's not going to make that easy, as you say, there's a separate question, which is what happens governmentally. And normally when you have a midterm cycle with an unpopular lame duck president You can see how it is going to play out. You know there is going to be oversight. You know that things are going to grind to something of a halt all of that will be true. I can't even see how they get a spending bill done under these circumstances. and I think it'll be very difficult. But The broader question is what happens with oversight because there's a if Democrats take the House, which most polls indicate they will We haven't seen before a government. and again, we don't know this will happen, but there are reasons to believe it will justust doesn't respond to subpoenas at all. Now The House members can subpoena the Trump sons, they can subpoa Howard Lutnik' sons, Ste Wcoff's sons. they're not in government But there are still slow walk tactics that I anticipate will get used. And the only recourse that everybody would have would be criminal referrals to the DOJ. And somehow neither of us thinks that the Trump DOJ is going to be eager to prosecute that kind of a case and Trump has openly said and we report this in the book that he's going to you know, pardon anybody who comes within a two hundred and fifty feet. he says different numbers, two hundred feet, twenty five feet, some radius around the oval offffice Most people who we've spoken to in our reporting are counting on those pardons in the government. So I look forward and it just toward the future and it just looks like a black hole. I have no idea what's coming. And one final thing. He told you, Maggie, right at the end There's only one thing you can say about me that anybody believes and you know what that is Essentially I won every fucking time Is that how he wants to go down in history, do you think I think more than that, I think that he wants to be seen you as one of history's capapital G great men. He made that very clear in that interview too, but for that part, I hope people will buy the book and read it Maggie Heayman, Jonathan Span, so grateful for your time. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks for having us It's twenty twenty six. We upgraded our phones, our cars, even our coffee. So why are we still acting like pleasure is negotiable? At Pink Cherry, it's not.