Chapter 1: What insights do we gain about the dynamics of Trump's White House?
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In Trump's first term, there was a huge amount of daily reporting about how his White House was working. In part, this was because his White House was split between a series of factions, each of which was constantly leaking about the other factions.
Chapter 2: How does Trump's decision-making differ from his first term?
The result was maybe not a very internally coherent or smoothly working White House, but there was a lot of information about what was happening and why and when. Trump's second term has been different. Trump's staff is selected much more for loyalty. The factional infighting is much less present. And the White House has been doing much more.
The balance of coverage is about what they are actually doing in the world, as opposed to what they are doing or saying about each other. But particularly recently, around Minneapolis, around Venezuela, around a number of major stories, I've wondered... How are decisions being made here? What does the president know? Who tells him if something is going wrong? Who is wielding power and how?
And is it on his behalf or on their own? So I want to talk to some reporters who cover the Trump White House day in and day out and can give me a better picture of how it is functioning internally. Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer are staff writers at The Atlantic. Before that, they were at The Washington Post, where Parker won three Pulitzer Prizes.
They have covered Trump for many years now, and they have also profiled many of the people around him. And so we're kind of uniquely placed to explain how something that at this point I think is less like a White House and more like a royal court works. is actually functioning day to day. How it is functioning for Donald Trump and how it's functioning for the rest of us.
As always, my email is reclineshow at nytimes.com.
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Chapter 3: What role does loyalty play in Trump's staffing choices?
Ashley Parker, Michael Scherer, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me.
Yeah, thanks for having us.
So I want to begin with Donald Trump's theory of what went wrong in his first term. You read of Trump in your big profile of him. He had realized in his exile that at nearly every turn in his first term, someone on his own team, Reince Priebus, John Kelly, James Mattis, Bill Barr, Gary Cohn, had blocked him.
He needed smart people who would figure out how to let him do everything that he wanted to do in whatever way he wanted to do it. So let me begin here. To what degree is that actually true about Trump's first term, Ashley?
In his first term, you have to keep in mind, it's stunning to remember, but Donald Trump had never run for any office, any political office. He wakes up, he runs for president, and he wins. So he has this kind of ragtag team who has never operated at that level. some of whom had never been really in politics before. Remember Hope Hicks, you know, who played a huge role in his first term.
The story, the lore was that when he told her, Hope, I'd like you to be part of my campaign, she said, which golf course, right? Is it a marketing campaign for Trump Doral or something at Mar-a-Lago? And so he ascends to the presidency and he suddenly has to fill all of these posts with
with people he doesn't know, doesn't trust, many of whom don't like him, don't trust him, and, you know, privately say he was their 16th choice to be president. And a lot of them view themselves as guardrails. They are there, you know, they would argue they are there to teach him how the presidency works and how democracy works and these norms.
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Chapter 4: How is Stephen Miller influencing Trump's policies?
But in a lot of ways, they really are followers thwarting what he's trying to do. In some instances, you have someone famously taking a piece of paper off of his desk so he can't sign something that they believe is problematic. You have them undermining him by leaking to the media. And you also have them saying, you know, here's the 10 reasons why you can't do this. If you do this, I'll resign.
This time, and we mentioned this in our piece, but I think it's illustrative, one person we talked to, they said, look, when the president asks for something twice, we have an unofficial rule, which is that we do it. And I said, well, why twice? And they said, well, to be fair, he does say a lot of crazy things. But if he says it a second time, we know he's serious.
And we know regardless of whether it's, you know, to fire the board of the Kennedy Center and take it over or to potentially march on Greenland, if that's what he wants, we are there to make that happen. And it is such a marked difference.
I mean, to what extent, Michael, is that when does that just reflect good staffing? It's important for a principal to have staff who will say, hey, that's a bad idea. And to what extent does that shift into a kind of famously, you know, we are the resistance inside the Trump administration? The reason I ask is because to the extent they set out in the second term to solve this,
Understanding whether it was a hindrance or, in fact, a help to him to be restrained seems important.
It is good staffing in the traditional sense, and it was good staffing in the first term in part because Trump also didn't come into office with a policy plan, with an ideology about what really to do with government. He didn't have a plan from day one about what he wanted to accomplish in terms of remaking the federal government.
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Chapter 5: What impact does Susie Wiles have as Trump's chief of staff?
And so I think a lot of people back then were thinking, well, we're going to— defend the White House, defend the government as it was. Like, that is our job, to make sure the systems work as they have worked for decades. And so by that definition, it is good staffing. Now, I think there was mistakes Trump made in that first term.
You know, we should mention that, like, he likes a gang of rivals, you know, sort of nasty viper pit of rivals around him. And And he had Kellyanne Conway and Jared Kushner and Stephen Bannon and Reince Priebus. I mean, those first few months, those were all independent power centers that were all fighting against each other. And that was bad staffing.
I mean, that was a misdesign of his White House. But I think for the people who came in in that first term who were resisting him, they felt they were defending something that that the country wanted, that the country had long established. And I think the implicit part of your question is, why has it changed?
I mean, everyone who came into the second term knew what Trump wanted to do to the presidency, what he wanted to do to the government. And it was pretty radical the second time. And he had plans for it that he just wasn't able to describe, you know, in 2017.
And by that metric, I would argue that some of the staffing got better in certain ways, right? So a lot of these people, the first term, were new, if not to government, then certainly to the White House and the executive branch. And, you know, the first term, Stephen Miller, for instance, his famous travel ban executive order, it created chaos at the airports.
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Chapter 6: How do cabinet members navigate their roles in Trump's administration?
And a lot of these people spent their four years out of power working. learning the lessons. And the president, too, he came in in the first term and he sort of expected the presidency to kind of be like a monarchy. Right. And he was frustrated when he wasn't king. And it turned out that, you know, a single senator, John McCain, could tank something he really cared about.
So they all learn these lessons in the four years out of power. And they spend that time essentially getting bigger, stronger, faster, smarter, more ruthless. And so Stephen Miller, when he comes back — and I'm using him as an example, but this applies to a number of people — he now knows how to structure executive orders so that they can better stand up to court challenges.
He now knows that if he cares about immigration, it's not just the Department of Homeland Security where he needs his people and true believers and loyalists. He knows that there are certain positions at the Department of Health and Human Services —
where he needs people who can implement his policies or certain people at the State Department, you know, in the Western Hemispheres Division who will be crucial for what he wants to do. And so they come back understanding the levers of bureaucracy and government and ways to be creative and push norms and push boundaries in a way they didn't in the first term.
So if you like what they're doing, which is sort of the destruction of the administrative state, they are much better staffers in that mission.
So how do they achieve that? You describe in one of your pieces the mission as they are staffing up for the second term is, quote, this time loyalty would be absolute. The federal government's a big place.
They actually have on it a number of people who, if you had seen them join in the first term, you would have expected them to be part of this more mainstream Republican establishment that might oppose parts of Trumpism. Think of somebody like Marco Rubio or Doug Burgum.
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Chapter 7: What are the implications of Trump's transactional approach to leadership?
So as they come in to this term with the idea that they're going to select for loyalty and alignment, how do they do it?
Yeah. He just had a better, clearer idea of who he could choose from. And he was able then to make clear to all of them who they were working for.
I mean, he has this great litmus test because of January 6th and the disgrace with which he left the White House of who stuck around, of who was still willing to be seen with him at his worst moment, of who was still calling him after he'd done what he'd done.
We reported that in the first term, Stephen Miller would go over to the Department of Homeland Security and say, I think you should do this idea, and everyone would walk out of the room saying, no, we're not doing that. That's a crazy idea.
This time, if Stephen Miller gets on the phone with them and says, I think you should do this idea, you have to meet this benchmark of deportations this month. You have to go to Home Depot parking lots to pick people up. Kristi Noem and her deputies are sort of saying, he said, jump. We're going to jump as high as we can. That's our role. And I think you see that in every one of the
major cabinet positions. You see in those cabinet meetings that Trump has started holding, it's fealty to the king. I mean, it's very much like a royal court, and they are all answering to them, not to their own bureaucracies and their own traditions.
And that's just radically different than the first term, where he was constantly negotiating the interests of each one of these departments, the traditions of the Defense Department, the traditions of Homeland Security, the traditions of the lawyers in the Justice Department.
He came in this time, he cleaned house, wherever he saw doubt, and literally imposed loyalty tests to replace those people.
And that loyalty has become easier in certain ways.
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Chapter 8: How does Trump prioritize his time compared to past presidents?
You know, Ezra, you mentioned Marco Rubio, right? Someone who seemed very unlikely to serve in a Trump administration. But the world changed between his first and second terms in the sense that in the first term, not just the people around him and Republicans and voters and world leaders, but from everyone, there was a sense that this was an aberration and it was a fever dream.
Even Joe Biden ran on returning to normalcy, right? And when Trump retakes power, when he comes back to the White House, and doesn't just come back, but he comes back after January 6th, there is a sense that Trump was not the aberration. Perhaps Joe Biden was the aberration. And this is where the country is. This is where the Republican Party is. And if you're someone like Marco Rubio,
who wants to be a player in what is essentially the modern Republican Party, it instills, I think, a level of loyalty and a level of fealty. And those people who didn't like it, the Paul Ryans, the Mitt Romneys of the world, they left.
You can tell me if this is wrong, but one thing that I have picked up on talking to people in the Trump White House, in the Republican Party, is that that campaign, the 2024 campaign, particularly after the assassination attempt and then when he eventually wins, that the party's relationship, the way that people around Trump look at Trump seem to me to change.
I would say that I feel like Trump gets treated as the grand Ayatollah of the Republican Party now, that they treat him almost like a mystic, that maybe what he's saying doesn't exactly make sense, but you can't really question it. You have to figure out what it really means. And it goes to the thing you reported that if he says something twice, they do it, that it doesn't seem to me
that anybody around Trump now sees it as in any way their job to restrain him or redirect him, even for his own good, that they treat him as like a great man of history figure.
Yeah, I don't think that's correct. It's not the case that it's entirely a sort of yes-man White House. Now, the person we haven't yet mentioned who's the most important person in this story is Susie Wiles, his chief of staff, who stepped into the role that no one had been able to handle before, right? Every one of them tried to intervene and stop him from doing stuff.
Every one of them burned out sort of ingloriously because she was there with him during his time in the wilderness after January 6th, because she was able to build the campaign that ended up winning, and because she's figured out her relationship with Trump in a way that I don't think anyone else who's ever worked with him at that level has.
Susie is able to go to him and say, I don't think that's a good idea, is able to put people in front of him who say, I don't think that's a good idea. I don't think it's a situation where he is not getting pushback. Now, that doesn't mean he always listens to her. That doesn't mean he doesn't, you know, go ahead and do the thing he wanted to do anyway.
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