Ashley Parker

I can remember him talking to dreamers.

And then the sheriffs get brought into the Oval Office.

Right.

And he has a totally different message.

But when you look, you know, and again, I did not cover Barack Obama's presidency nearly as closely as I covered the Trump one.

But my sense was that Obama ran his White House to sort of like the constitutional law professor that he once was.

If he was doing something on trade, he would want to hear all different inputs in a very structured way.

Right.

from economic experts, et cetera, et cetera, all of the relevant people, synthesize all of that very granular information and make a decision, right?

When you look at some of Trump's trade things, which sometimes are announced, like much in his administration, in the middle of the night on Truth Social that may not have been vetted by anyone, you know, it's tariffs against French champagne because I am angry at Macron.

agree or disagree that that's a good way to lead a country, you don't need a rigorous policy process for that, especially if the next day you're going to undo all of those tariffs because something else has changed.

Like a science project diorama, right?

It's like, here's how dinosaurs went extinct.

The asteroid, you know, like it's that.

This next one is a little bit of a cop-out, but I'm going to recommend an author and say any book by her, Anne Pachette.

I will just read anything she writes.

She just does wonderful, beautiful books.

modern fiction.

And since we're talking about Trump, my husband, Mike, I mainly only read modern nonfiction, like what you see at the front table of an independent bookstore.

But my husband, Mike Bender, who's also a New York Times reporter, he wrote a Trump campaign book called Frankly, We Did Win This Election, the inside story of how Trump lost.