A Close Read of Trump’s 2024 Strategy 58:35

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Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. He's back. By that, I mean Trump, and this month will be a defining one for the 2024 presidential race.

Coming up in a few days, the Iowa caucuses. Then there's the New Hampshire primary. And in between, Donald Trump has a couple court dates to squeeze in, including a damages trial for defaming E. Jean Carroll, the woman he has already been found guilty of sexually assaulting.

In a nutshell, the likely Republican nominee for president is carrying more political and legal baggage than any candidate in American history. So today we offer a close read of Trump's 2024 campaign from his legal woes to his dangerously escalating rhetoric.

I'm joined by New York Times senior political correspondent Maggie Haberman, Vox senior correspondent Ian Millhiser, and chief Washington correspondent for ABC News, Jonathan Karl, who also just published a new book called Tired of Winning, Donald Trump and the End of the Grand Old Party. Before we get to our panel, a question from our expert of the week.

Hi, Alyssa Farrah Griffin here, former Trump White House communications director turned critic of the former president and current Republican host of ABC's The View. The big question I would ask is it's now been nearly 10 years since Trump descended down the Trump Tower gilded escalator, and the media seems to still be grappling with how to cover him. We've seen him steamroll the best of the best journalists at times, rampantly spout conspiracy theories while being platformed by major news outlets.

He's managed to completely shift public sentiment on a number of issues, probably most notably the January 6th insurrection, where now the majority of Republicans see it very differently than they did three years ago. What did the media, if anything, get wrong in its initial coverage of Trump? And how do you cover someone that there is, of course, a vital public interest in covering, but who also violates basic moral, ethical and, of course, editorial standards in his remarks?

Great question. It's a big issue among many when it comes to Donald Trump. Like I said, he's back, so let's dive in. Hey.

Hi, everyone. Good to hear from you. I'm so glad you're here this morning. It's good to be here. Hi, Cara. Great. Thanks for having me. So I know it's a busy morning. Let's start with Trump's priorities going into 2024. What's top of mind for Trump and his campaign team right now? And we'll hear from each of you, starting with Maggie, then Ian, then John.

So their immediate priority is winning the first four early states decisively. What they don't want is to have a dragged out contest. You know, the polling suggests he's going to win no matter what. They just don't want to see one of their rivals try to stay in through March on the hopes that something will happen on the legal front. So their immediate priority is survival, and survival looks like decisive victories. Decisive victories. Ian?

So I can at least speak to what their legal priority is, which is delay. Trump is hoping that the criminal trials don't happen until after the election, because if he is elected president, he can at least order the Justice Department to drop all of the federal prosecutions.

By sheer coincidence, as we are recording this, there is a hearing going on in a U.S. appeals court which concerns whether or not Trump is immune from criminal prosecution for criminal acts he committed during the scope of his official duties.

If you take that theory seriously, it means the president can order the military to assassinate a Supreme Court justice. I don't think there's any chance the courts are going to buy this theory. But what it does accomplish is delay. It allows him to put his federal trial for election theft on pause until this appeal is resolved. That's correct. Jonathan?

I would say just very quickly, certainly to win, win Iowa decisively, win New Hampshire. He's going to win Nevada. They've already kind of, to use his word, rigged it, win South Carolina and then say, you know, I am the nominee.

And absolutely to delay. I would add one more to those two, though. When Trump announced his campaign just a week after Republicans got killed in the midterms, you know, a year ago, November, virtually none of the major Republican figures endorsed him. I mean, he had precious few, you know, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Elise Stefanik and not many others. So the only thing he wants to do right now is to get all of those Republicans

Republican elected officials on the record endorsing him and reestablish himself as the absolute and total ruler of the Republican Party. And that's endorse and not just support, correct? Yes, he sees a big difference between those two things. And you have seen some people kind of dance around that, like Kevin McCarthy. Support the Republican nominee. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, I endorse Donald Trump. That's what he wants. He doesn't want to hear people say that they'll support whoever the nominee is. He wants to hear people endorse him now.

All right, Maggie, give us a brief overview of the charges Trump's facing this year and tell us which are the most concerning to him. He's obviously paying a lot of attention. Sure. So I would put that into two buckets. All of the indictments are concerning to him, but he is facing four criminal...

criminal cases. He's been indicted in four different states. Two of the cases relate, that relate to his efforts to subvert his election loss in 2020. The one is in Georgia, one is at the federal level, and that one includes a charge of conspiracy to defraud the United States.

He has been charged in connection with mishandling reams of classified material that he brought with him from the White House to Mar-a-Lago. And he's been charged with paying hush money to a porn star during the 2016 election in Manhattan.

Now, the one that worries him the most at the moment is the January 6th federal case, because that's the one that seems the likeliest to go forward first. Although I will say if there is a real delay in the federal January 6th case related to all these issues we've been talking about, the presidential immunity question and so forth, the Manhattan hush money case may go forward in March. And, you know, that would...

obviously be ideal for him. It would have him in a courtroom, but that's the case he and his folks are the least worried about. He's very worried about these civil trials, which are playing out this month, one of which is related to E. Jean Carroll, who has said that he raped her and who a jury in a related case found he sexually abused her and defamed her. And a New York civil case brought by the New York Attorney General accusing him of raping

long-term widespread financial fraud and his company have long-term widespread financial fraud and the judge in that case This month is expected it could push into next month that is expected to rule on the damages that case is actually worrying him most and

Because of money. Because money, because his brand, his business, control, all of the above. All of the above. Okay, Ian, in December, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Trump engaged in an insurrection and should therefore be removed from the ballot. The Supreme Court just announced arguments in this case called Trump v. Anderson on February 8th.

You tweeted, inside me there are two wolves, a lawyer who reads the Constitution and finds that it bans Trump from office, and a jaded political analyst who knows there's no fucking chance SCOTUS will save us from Trump and we should all stop living in a fantasy land. So explain, does Colorado have a convincing legal argument and how do you expect SCOTUS will stay unconvinced? Sure.

So broadly speaking, there's three ways that the Supreme Court could resolve this case. The first way, and I think the least likely by far way that they could handle it, is they could just affirm the Colorado Supreme Court. That would be a decision from the United States Supreme Court saying that Trump is disqualified from being on the ballot and presumably would mean that he is removed from the ballot in all 50 states. Mm-hmm.

I don't think that's a likely outcome. I think there are legitimate reasons why the court would want to kick this down the road. And also, you know, we have a six to three Republican supermajority on this on this court. So that outcome very unlikely. The second outcome is that they could definitively rule that Trump gets to stay on the ballot. Not all of the arguments that have been raised in favor of that are valid.

Well, he's raised a lot of silly arguments and a few non silly arguments in favor of so like one of his arguments for example is that the words that the Constitution uses to refer to who can be disqualified from from serving an office is officers of the United States and Trump claims that he is the presidency is not an office that it is not at he is not an office was not an officer of the United States when he was president that strikes me as ridiculous

And there are a number of ridiculous arguments that are made in favor of keeping him on the ballot. And then there's one very good argument that's been made in favor of keeping him on the ballot, at least for now. And the one very good argument is the former president is still entitled to due process. Right. And.

Colorado used a very truncated process to determine whether or not he committed an insurrection. There wasn't full discovery. There wasn't the full ability to control witness, call witnesses. There wasn't the kind of stuff that you would see in, say, a criminal trial. And so the third option would be, and I mean, this is the option I would take if I was on the Supreme Court, is to say what the amount of process that Colorado provided is inadequate. Right.

So for now, he cannot be kicked off the ballot. But if, say, his D.C. criminal trial moves forward and he's convicted, then the Supreme Court could reopen the question and say, now that we've had a fact-finding process with all the process that occurs in a criminal trial, now we can go ahead and answer this question.

Right, but that would delay it. That's, as we talked about, the idea of delay that you spoke about. So, Jonathan, we're recording this conversation on Tuesday, January 9th. Today, right now, a D.C. appeals court is hearing arguments for Trump's claim that the former president is immune to election interference charges. Talk to us through where his immunity claim stands and what's happening today. I know one of the judges asked a question of whether a SEAL Team 6 could...

assassinate someone? What are the stakes here? Yeah, I asked a series of questions because the defense, the claim being made by the Trump legal team is that he's got absolute immunity for anything that could be defined as part of his official duties as president. So another one of the questions, well, let's say he was selling pardons, issuing pardons as part of the official duties of the president. And

And the Trump counsel said, yeah, he would have immunity there because that was within the broadly defined definition of his official duties. It seems to me that this is one that is

likely to go to the Supreme Court as well. Obviously they tried, the special counsel tried to go to the Supreme Court and short circuit this appeals process and say, let's go right to the Supreme Court on the issue of time. That didn't happen. He has the right, assuming that this three judge panel, as it sure sounds like based on the questions, does not agree with this.

He has a right to have an appeal heard by the full district of court of appeals. And he can delay and then that can take some time and then go to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court takes some time. So I think there's some real issue in terms of timing. But the claim is quite bold here. And I think it's actually...

a claim that it's relevant to the Republican primary here. I had asked Nikki Haley whether or not she agrees with this position. Does she believe effectively that the president of the United States is above the law, which is really the claim here. Yes.

And she danced around and didn't give an answer. But I think it's a really important question. This is an incredibly bold claim made by the former president and current Republican frontrunner. But Maggie, not uncommon. He's talked about walking down Fifth Avenue and he was talking about voting. People would still love him, but it's kind of in that genre of I can do whatever I want.

There is a flattening effect that Donald Trump has on both his followers and also that's clearly his worldview about what he should be.

entitled to do. Everything looks flat in the same. So talking about the political impact of his base of support, which is, I mean, I think that was one of the most self-aware things that I've ever heard him say, which is I could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose anybody, turns into some kind of reality of what as a former president or as a president, he should be allowed to do. I think

I think that there is this issue running within the Republican Party where if the only people who are challenging him to that worldview are Chris Christie and a couple of, you know, Adam Kinzinger or Liz Cheney or a couple of people, Mitt Romney, who he has basically helped drum out of the party. Christie is not out of the party, but it's in a different... All of them. He's drummed all of them. And so, you know, it is a very, very minority view. And so...

You know, he is one of his and John knows this very well, having covered him for a very long time in New York. One of Trump's, you know, hallmark maneuvers is creating his own weather and essentially refusing to accept that anything else is fact. And he has proven remarkably durable in doing that with the GOP.

And this is a really important point in terms of what a second Trump term would look like. Correct. Because he is establishing in the middle of a campaign the view and not getting challenged for it by any of his, as Maggie points out, by anybody in his party, establishing that he believes that a president can do whatever a president, whatever damn well pleases, can break the law and not be held to account.

But Maggie, one of the things he wants to do is to drag it out is because he's got this very complex legal and campaign schedule over the coming months, but he likes to appear in court because it's good for fundraising, shockingly, but it is. What is the thinking here inside? Like, let's use this as a continual Trump's in the news. Is it a good thing to be in the news for?

He's decided that, you know, he's going to try to turn this into a positive as much as possible for the reasons you said. It has a strong fundraising effect with his base. It has a galvanizing, you know, victimhood effect with his base. I also think, Karen, I've been thinking about this a lot for the last couple of days. I think he prefers this to the active campaigning. You know, his advisors had been saying that

A few weeks ago, when I covered a rally of his in New Hampshire, his advisors there were saying he's going to do four days of two rallies a day each week before the two weeks before the Iowa caucuses. That's now down to two days a week with multiple events.

And instead he's going to court. I think this is what he would rather be doing right now. And I think part of it is because he's a control freak. And I think he believes that no one else can do this the way he can, and he'll have done whatever he could to argue on his own behalf. But that is the thinking. I don't think just for a technical note,

If he appears at the E. Jean Carroll trial, which I do think he's going to do, that starts on January 16th, which is the day after the caucuses. I don't expect he will go that day. He's currently scheduled to go straight to New Hampshire. But I do think that he will take a break from the campaign trail. We have never seen anything like this. He enjoys it, is what you're essentially saying. I think he prefers it. I think grievance and victimhood is his preferred state.

And one of the things that was striking about 2020 among many things, but just on a, on a pure campaign level, put aside, put aside COVID and put aside everything else about the Trump presidency is

He doesn't really know how to run from out front. He knows how to run from behind. He knows how to be a challenger. He doesn't really know how to be an incumbent. And so this puts him in his preferred state. But again, it just, it blocks out the news cycles. It blocks out attention that his rivals can get. I think that he has decided he is going to turn what are objectively undesirable circumstances into as much of a positive as he can. And this is a campaign that is, it's indistinguishable from his legal cases. Correct. And it's,

And it's very much... They're being run by... I mean, they're all involved. I mean, you know, his political advisors are...

you know, as aware and involved in what is happening on the legal front as anything else. And he spends more time with his lawyers, with his legal team than he does with his political team. But even when he's with the political team, as Maggie points out, it's about the lawyers. I mean, it's worth noting, this is a guy that is campaigning very little. Yep. I mean, just compare his schedule, right?

with his schedule in 2016 or his schedule in 2020, or more relevantly, compare it to what Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, Chris Christie are doing. I mean, he has spent precious little time in Iowa and he's spent very little time in New Hampshire. And this is somebody who, I mean, and even the rallies that he's holding,

are much smaller venues. I don't doubt his ability to get a crowd. I would never do that. But they're much smaller venues and there are fewer of them. It's like the campaign is...

is really in the courtroom. I mean, Maggie may have a more precise count, but I think he has already, during the civil case, he's already spent 10 days in court, at least 10 days in court in a case where he did not, he was not required, like today, not required to be in court. So, you know, you literally had a situation where he was spending more time in the courtroom than he was in any kind of campaign event. So Ian, why would that be from a strategic perspective? Yeah.

It's a good question. I mean, one point is – I'll just echo what Maggie said that like grievance is his natural state and to the extent that he's shining a light on these trials, he's able to push this narrative that he is being persecuted somehow.

I don't know if this is an intentional calculation on his part or not, but I think the fact that Trump is less visible now than he's been since he came down that escalator in 2015 is benefiting him a lot. Could not agree more with that.

was that whenever Trump was in the news, his poll numbers went down. When people are reminded of Donald Trump and who he is, they tend to not like him. And when he fades into the background and he just becomes like the Republican alternative to whoever the Democrat is, his polling numbers tend to go up. And so whatever is motivating this,

I think in a weird way, the fact that he's less visible has been very good for him. But Jonathan, he still is attacking. He's escalated his attacks on Nikki Haley in the last few days. She seems to be the threat he considers compared to DeSantis. But at the same time, you wrote in your book that you attribute Trump's popularity to his Republican rivals' unwillingness to exploit his weaknesses. I'm leaving Chris Christie out of this.

Is that... He's attacking her and yet she refuses to bite, I guess. Yeah, I mean, she does little, you know, mild attacks and she has this line that she uses...

um almost consistency uh that marco rubio uh talked about um you know barack obama in that debate uh in new hampshire uh four years ago um i mean you know chaos rightly or wrongly chaos follows him i mean it's like it's like robotic and it's over and over and over again same cadence same exact words she's decided that's the line that she will use and then if trump hits her as he has in the

over the last few days, she will respond to the hits. But she says, I am not, you know, I'm not going to hate him. I'm not, I'm just not going to attack him. But if he's, if he lies about me, I will call it out. It's like, it's lying about her. That's, that's crossing the red line. But, but, you know, I think when you look back over the course of this primary, he is

seeming to be like the presumptive nominee, certainly the overwhelming frontrunner, even though nobody has actually voted yet, this was not inevitable.

When he announced that campaign in November of 2022, as I mentioned, Republican officeholders, Republican leaders were standing back. That might not have mattered. But the polls, there was a poll in the middle of December 2022 in the Wall Street Journal that had Ron DeSantis well over 50% and Donald Trump in the 30s.

And I think he benefited greatly from a number of things, but one of the things that helped him turn this around is that nobody laid a glove on him. Right. For months. I mean, Nikki Haley couldn't even come up with the chaos line until fairly recently. And I would actually take that a step further. Not only would...

Nobody lay a glove on him, but the one person who Trump was attacking very vocally beginning in February or so, actually, I think even before that of 2023, which was Ron DeSantis, would not fight back. And I remember calling a DeSantis advisor that month and asking, is there ever going to be a response to any of this? And the person made clear that that was not...

the inclination was to, you know, they were going to ignore Trump and stay the course, right? Because no one's ever tried that before. Yeah, it was a total replay of 2016. Right. Right. So let me ask you and your colleagues, Jonathan Swan and Shane Goldmacher, reported how Trump has used

fear and favor to almost entirely subjugate the elected class of the Republican Party. Again, as you noted, he has close to 100 House Republicans. DeSantis has five. Haley has one. Talk about this idea to sway this group of people to secure the nominations. What's the strategy?

Sure. So it's been a couple of years long project. And it's been a lengthy project that took some time because he was a pariah when he left Washington. But he was less of a pariah than I think that it seemed, if you think about the fact that Kevin McCarthy went down to Mar-a-Lago within two weeks to try to get Trump not to attack Washington.

uh, house incumbents. And then a few months later, Rick Scott, then the head of the NRSC, the, the senatorial campaign arm went down to Mar-a-Lago to give Trump some brand new award that the committee had come up with, um, you know, basically for the same goal. And so his potency with the voters was still pretty clear. And it was from there that they started working their way back. There are a couple of advisors who had been helping him with this, Brian Jack, uh, key among them. But the reality is this is the kind of, um,

political work that Trump actually likes doing. He likes making phone calls. He likes, you know, working people. He's been doing this for decades. But there is also the threat. There is also the threat of I will run somebody against you. I will attack you. I will do X, Y, Z. We have seen that he had been attacking Josh Hawley for not endorsing him recently. He's still attacking Ted Cruz for not backing him. And so,

it has been a strategy to make him look inevitable so nobody will even try to come against him and the endorsements have been a big piece of that.

I think another factor here, and this does get overlooked, is the way he used the trappings of the presidency to woo lawmakers over a very long period of time. He would give people rides on Air Force One. He would invite them to the White House. He'd invite them to Camp David. These are things that President Obama often didn't do. These are things that President Biden often doesn't do. And they work because people are easily swayed by things like this. Right.

And all of those chits kind of helped him as he rolled into this period of time. Then there's people like Henry McMaster, the governor of South Carolina, who literally owes his seat to Trump because Trump appointed Nikki Haley to the U.N. ambassador role and that bumped up McMaster.

You owe me. Things like that all accrue in Trump's favor. If you put that all together and it has added up to what we see. So, Ian, Trump has also made efforts to sway state Republican rules to secure the party nomination. Let's talk a little bit about that strategy because he's going to try to influence through legal means in this regard. This is in Nevada, in California, all kinds of things.

Yeah. So the biggest thing that I worry about at the state level is, you know, you may remember back in 2020, there were all these stories about there was a rando official in Michigan who tried not to certify the results of the election. And almost all Republicans in state level positions did the right thing and said, look, Joe Biden won and I don't like it, but it's my job to stamp this paper saying that that he won. So I'm going to stamp this paper.

But I think the most concerning thing about Trump trying to put his people in place throughout the Republican Party but certainly at the state level is that you could potentially wind up in a situation where you have a close – whether it's a primary result or a close general election result in say Nevada.

And Trump hopes that there will be a state-level official somewhere in Nevada who can just not certify that result. And then I guess there would have to be litigation and there just aren't a lot of precedents for state officials refusing to perform the ministerial task of saying that the winner of the election was in fact the winner of the election.

And we'd have to figure out what happens when, you know, those systems break down. There are two things there. I mean, one is the general election. And, you know, this was the effort to run...

all these Secretary of State candidates in 2022, which failed. You know, Fincham in Arizona, you had the candidate in Michigan, you had a candidate in Nevada. These, he had obviously his effort to try to beat Raffensperger in Georgia. Those failed, but right underneath that level, you do have the Republican Party apparatus that would do whatever Trump demanded in those states. But

But then there's the question of the primary, which is what one thing that they have done very effectively is have gone through state by state to try to establish the rules for allocating delegates in a way that makes it virtually impossible for somebody to overthrow Trump in the Republican primary. They've done that in Nevada, the way they've, they've set up this system, which has a, uh,

caucus and a primary. The delegates will be awarded through the caucus, which is controlled entirely by the Trump forces. They're doing it in California in terms of how delegates will be allocated. And state by state, what they're doing is making more of these states winner take all. So Trump can win a simple majority and take all the delegates and nobody can kind of try to

And Maggie, also the other day I was struck when Elise Stesmanek, who clearly wants to be vice president, said that she may or may not certify. It goes to the federal level. That was a pretty strikingly overlooked statement that I think we may be hearing more of from a number of Republicans. But I do think that it

raises the question less than a year from the certification of the next election, what this is all going to look like if Donald Trump loses from his allies. You know, I think...

There are a few people who are as willing to jump in front of whatever Donald Trump wants the same way that Elise Stefanik is. But I do think that it underscores the hold he has on the House Republican leadership right now. That has implications for certification in 2025. It has implications for policy right now when you are going to see congressional leaders trying to forge bills that involve compromise and Trump might want to extract...

you know, other concessions that are politically helpful to him, like on the border. So I just think that his squeeze on the party raises all kinds of questions, but certainly whether people are going to go ahead and try to buck results again and try to, you know, buck up against an election loss again is one. We'll be back in a minute. So let me, I want to play a clip for you all. This is Trump's keynote speech at CPAC in March, 2023.

In 2016, I declared, I am your voice. Today, I add, I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution. I am your retribution.

Well, this is a bad version of, say, Sylvester Stallone in any one of the movies he's had. Jonathan, I'll start with you because your book, you call this a turning point for the 2024 Trump campaign. Explain what this moment tells us. Well, it defines Trump's 2024 campaign. This is a campaign of retribution. And it was a turning point. You can actually track it almost precisely here.

uh, to when he started his dominance of, of the primary where the polls, uh, you know, turned decisively in his favor and against any of, of, of his potential rivals. Uh, his, uh, first campaign announcement in November of 2022 was, was kind of a warmed over policy speech. It was very, it was a dull speech as I was there at Mar-a-Lago when he gave it. And I saw people literally trying to leave the room, um,

after he had made his news. Yeah, it was enervated. It was Fox cut out of it. I mean, it was a really dull speech. He mostly teleprompter Trump and his advisors that said, stick to the policy, don't talk about 2020. And he did. And it got him nothing. So when he came up with this, and Steve Bannon was a big part of pushing for this

this idea of a campaign built on retribution. Bannon called that his come retribution speech, which as I reported in the book, Bannon explained to me, come retribution is a term that comes from the Confederate plan to assassinate, kidnap and assassinate Abraham Lincoln. Those were the Confederate Secret Service code words for that plan. And this is how he refers to this speech, the come retribution speech. But that's what it's all about. And what's

disturbing, is that his supporters really responded to it. I mean, that's what- So it worked.

It worked. And, you know, a couple months later, he gave his first campaign rally out in the, you know, out in the States. It was in Waco, Texas. And he, you know, he again, it's about retribution. It's also a movie trope too. It's this idea of a movie trope or a romantic version of gangsters and stuff like that. Ian, does the criminal charges help that in terms of that image?

I mean, I think, well, let's talk about what the broad picture is, what's going on, not just the criminal trials, not just the disqualification out of Colorado. All of this is about a fundamental question, which is, did this man commit such a severe crime against the Constitution that we need to excise him from our politics altogether?

You know, that is the question here. Does the Constitution have a right to defend itself against Donald Trump? And if you listen to that speech, I mean, there is well, I'm about to use a very loaded word here. But there's been a huge academic debate over the last eight years or so about whether or not we can use the F word fascism to describe what Trump is doing.

And I mean, I will let the academics have this debate, but we are talking about someone who is running on an ultra nationalist platform, someone who is appealing to a sort of fake nostalgia about the past, who's dividing the world up to into in groups and out groups, who is threatening retribution against the out groups and who is, you

you know, who has used political violence or who has called on his supporters to use political violence in order to elevate him. So without using the F word, I will simply say that

There is a reason why many people believe that that is the sort of thing that needs to be excised from our politics altogether, because it is fundamentally hostile to the notion that we have constitutional government in which power exchanges hands frequently through democratic means. Right. So, Maggie, this is you just mentioned that he's running this campaign more like 2016, where he's the underdog and anti-establishment. But it's more than that. He's it's

taken what Ian was just talking about, a decidedly fascist turn. In December, he said, and other, and worse, Trump said immigrants were, quote, poisoning the blood of our country. Sounds a lot like Hitler. Trump said he's unaware of the connection. It's a very clear connection, and obviously Biden underscored it in a recent speech.

How do you look at this? Because it's more than underdog. It's something else. Well, I didn't say it's the only way that he's writing. I'm just saying that that is what you saw as a contrast. There's obviously a lot more going on. In fact, when he made the retribution comment...

Shane Goldmacher and I wrote a story about how if he wins another term, it would be a term of spite. It was very clear where this is headed. And in fact, what I was struck by at the time, Kara, when he made the retribution comment was just how much it galvanized his base, but how silent a lot of Democrats were about what he was saying. And I remember asking a Democratic strategist, why is no one commenting on this? And

And the person said, oh, isn't this more of the same of what he always says? You know, they're coming at me because I'm in the way. I mean, so I know that the White House is currently trying to focus on what Trump is saying. And Trump's rhetoric is obviously escalating. But it's been heading this way all year. And I think reporters have done a pretty good job of highlighting it. In terms of, you know, the specifics of the poisoning, the blood comment, I'm

He said a version of it in 2016, but not like this. He didn't say poisoning the blood. He just said immigrants are poisoning the country. It was in a September 2016 speech. Trump was described as having a book of Hitler's speeches by his bedside table in the 1980s given to him as a gift. Marie Brenner, who was there before all of us on the Trump beat, reported on this during the course of the Donald Trump and Ivana Trump divorce.

Trump, you know, claimed he hadn't read them. If you're told several times that poisoning the blood is echoing fascist rhetoric and echoing rhetoric that Hitler used, most people would stop doing it. He has doubled down, much to the chagrin of some of his aides, but...

but they're all still there and he keeps doing it. What does it portend? It portends a very ugly 2024. That's what it portends. What it means if he comes back into power, he is proposing an incredibly radical immigration policy. Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage, and I in this series that we've been doing for many months about what a Trump 2025 entrance to power again would look like wrote about it. They're talking about

mass detention camps ahead of deportations, you know, among other things. He won't rule out family separation again, which was a policy that was so widely denounced that he finally backed off of it. So, you know, I don't think it's a surprise. I think that he is...

I think he is getting applause from an increasingly radicalized base for saying things like this. And silence from everybody else, silence from his own party. And his opponents don't like it, so he's going to lean into it more. So, Jonathan, you've reported on Trump's long interest in Hitler. How do you think this plays out? It's a dicey person to be using.

It really is tough. And I will try to withhold any kind of, you know, kind of trying to figure out the why. But the fact of it is really well established. I mean, it is a longstanding obsession with Adolf Hitler.

And listen to the way he talks about President Xi of China. You know, I say he's smart. I mean, what do you mean? The guy rules 1.4 billion people with an iron fist. You think that's not smart? I mean, he admires the strongman. Right, he has talked about that. Of course, history's ultimate strongman is Adolf Hitler. Right. So from all your perspectives, does Trump conviction matter?

do anything to the race? Ian, first, what does the conviction do to the race between Trump and Biden? Let's assume that's the race.

It's a good question. I am so cautious after the eight the last eight years of U.S. politics about making any predictions, because, you know, if you had told me in 2015 that a former game show host who is on camera admitting to committing sexual assault would become president of the United States, I would have said, no, that's ridiculous. So my instinct is it's got to matter.

Like, it's got to matter if not in the sense that Republican voters will say, well, we don't want someone with a felony conviction to be president. It's got to matter in the sense that maybe some of them will say, we don't think a guy with a felony conviction can beat Joe Biden, so maybe we should pick someone else. But –

I have predicted sanity and been surprised by insanity so many times in the last eight years that I hesitate to make a prediction even about this. All right, Jonathan, then Maggie.

So I'll say, aside from what a conviction does, what a trial does, I think we should consider. The ABC News investigative team has done some remarkable reporting about what some of Trump's closest allies have told the special counsel under oath. And it's really, really damning. So when we have an actual trial and people like Mark Meadows,

Dan Scavino, Molly Michael, the secretary that sat right outside his office, when they take the stand and under oath explain what Trump was doing after the election and in the period leading up to January 6th, I don't know. Will it make a difference? Yeah.

Hard to say given all that's happened, but that is something different. These are people who did not cooperate and testify before the January 6th committee. These are people who will be in a courtroom testifying to Donald Trump's behavior under oath, and it is not a pretty picture. And it may have a different impact than Maggie writing about it or me writing about it. This is in court, his people talking about what he did and what he didn't do. Maggie?

Yeah, I agree with Jonathan. I mean, you know, Trump is going to try to use a trial...

as a propaganda tool. I mean, he will, because there won't be cameras in a federal courtroom, he will go and he'll go to a presser, you know, outside of court, and he'll try to reprise the strategy that he has used when he's been arraigned several times over the course of the last year. But the information that will be coming from within that trial is going to be a parade of current and in some cases, former and in some cases, current advisors to him,

um describing a number of incidents under penalty of perjury uh that are are just not a good fact set for him and so i i don't think any uh candidate wants to be convicted uh ahead of an election i just don't and so as much as donald trump has managed to upend political conventions um it's hard to see this one is one i don't think that most of trump's advisors

think it's especially helpful to him if he is convicted. I, they're not, you know, they're not delusional. Um,

I do think that if there is going to be a year where there are turns of the screw that we can't foresee yet, to Ian's point, I think this would be it. But what's your instinct? Because you and I have talked a lot about this, and you were always like, no, that's not going to happen, and it tends to happen the way you tell me, and I'm like, I cannot believe that, Maggie Haberman. Which one are we talking about now? All of them. But this instinct on the conviction.

There's some sense, but I didn't think Republicans say January 6th was a tourist visit now. I mean, a lot of them are sort of discounting it.

Yeah, listen, I think that what I would say that two things are true. I think that you can, I think that Donald Trump is among the most regenerative figures we have ever seen in public life in this country. And so I don't think that you can ever say he's done, that's it. You know, while he's still on the scene. But do I think that Democrats are

confident in the polling they have that a majority of the country views the events of January 6th very negatively. I think that's true. And I think that even though it is not an overwhelming majority of Trump's voters who would switch if he's convicted, it's enough that it could swing

you know, a couple of key battleground states. This is going to be a close election. It will, you know, what is, what is the way that the system is set up? Biden could win the popular vote overwhelmingly again. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote overwhelmingly in 2016. But these races are fought, you know, among a couple of tens of thousand voters in a handful of states. Yeah. So two more questions. In a very short sentence, what would a Trump candidate

What does a 2025 administration look like? I know it's I'm trying not to be reductive, but I think each of you, I'd like to get how you see a Trump 2025 presidency. Let's start, Ian. So I guess if I've got to reduce it to one sentence, I would say the adults will not be in the room.

The dynamic we saw in the first Trump presidency is that you had a mixture of normie Republicans and MAGA Republicans staffing his administration, and often the more normie Republicans did play a role, not necessarily.

in, you know, if anything, they radicalize some of his policy ambitions. But the sort of, you know, retribution agenda that Trump is talking about now, they sometimes did a decent job of quelling or at least delaying and dragging out. Those folks are not going to be in the room. I think the lesson that Trump learned from his first term and from him not getting a second term is

is that he needs to appoint loyalists. He needs to appoint loyalists specifically to the judiciary, which raises its own problems. And so in a second term, I think we are just not going to have the same like... Right. So essentially more cowbell, and by that I mean Sidney Powell types. Jonathan? Lawless, I think is the word that I would use. I think that

The lead up to January 6th was the end of the first, if there is a second, the first Trump term. I think that that's where it begins, but it goes from there for the reasons that Ian said and consider first and foremost, the lawyers around him. I mean, I think that the people that issued perhaps the most important restraint around him were the lawyers, the White House Counsel's Office, Don McGahn in the first few years,

Uh, Pat Cipollone in the end, uh, Jeff Sessions refusing to, to, to fire the special counsel, uh, in the first and, and Bill Barr in the end, refusing to go along with, uh, with using the department of justice as, as a, as an instrument of his effort to overturn the election. So I think that he will make sure that he, he finally gets his Roy Cohns, uh, as he likes to say, uh, in those positions. Uh,

And I think that, you know, not only the adults won't be in the room, but they won't be in the cabinet. It's hard for me to believe that he won't, you

you know, really stretched the Vacancies Act, which allows him to appoint acting cabinet secretaries and other top officials. So he doesn't have to get them approved. Yes, without approval. And the Vacancies Act has limitations. It's not something you can just willy-nilly put whoever you want in for any period of time. They have to be able to have Senate confirmation. There's a limit how many days they can serve, all that. But

What is a Congress going to do? What are the courts going to do? What are you going to do as a big thing? That's my guy. Kash Patel is my Secretary of Defense. Screw you, Senate. Yeah, Kid Rock for State Department. Right, something like that. So, Maggie, very quickly. Yeah.

I don't have a ton to add. I agree with everything that Ian and Jonathan said. I mean, I would urge people to read the series that Jonathan Swan and Charlie Savage and I have been doing. That's what I think a 2025 administration, Trump administration would look like. I think it would look a lot like his ideal is the 2020 he didn't have. You know, he was starting to make 2020 look like this. He was...

He had appointed a loyalist, Johnny McEntee, to do a purge of the administration of people who were not perceived as loyal to him or loyal to his agenda. And that was put on hold because of COVID. They attempted the Schedule F executive order to change the civil service policy.

And that also didn't work just because of a variety of factors that year. They will do that again. I think it is going to look as much like the Trump org as people worried it might in 2017. And it didn't for a variety of reasons, but one of which is that Donald Trump didn't understand anything about the federal government.

And he's not very interested in much of the federal government. But there are a few key areas he is. Intel community, DOJ, DOD. Those are pretty significant. So that's my high concept. Yes, and it's a terrific series that you're working on. So in closing, I'm going to ask about the media. So I got a final question from someone else. It's a new thing we're doing on the show. Actually, in the case is a normie, as Ian calls it.

which is a funny word. So let me play it for you.

Hi, Alyssa Farrah Griffin here. It's now been nearly 10 years since Trump descended down the Trump Tower gilded escalator, and the media seems to still be grappling with how to cover him. We've seen him steamroll the best of the best journalists at times, rampantly spout conspiracy theories while being platformed by major news outlets. He's managed to completely shift public sentiment on a number of issues, probably most notably the January 6th insurrection, where now the majority of Republicans see it very differently than they did three years ago.

What did the media, if anything, get wrong in its initial coverage of Trump? And how do you cover someone that there is, of course, a vital public interest in covering, but who also violates basic moral, ethical and, of course, editorial standards in his remarks? All right, let's start. This is a great question, I think. Let's do Ian first, Jonathan, and we'll finish with Maggie.

So I feel like you can't raise this question without me bringing up Hillary Clinton's emails. Like, don't hyper fixate on a trivial story again. That's a good idea for all reporters in any circumstance. But beyond that, I think that a lot of us have learned the wrong lesson from 2016. You know, this goes back to a point I made earlier about how the less visible Trump is, the more that he benefits from it.

You know, his rallies, which, you know, as Jonathan Maggie mentioned, are happening less often now, are getting less coverage. You know, there's less cameras on him. And I'm not sure that that is a good thing. I'm not sure that that helps voters make intelligent choices when they don't see the substantial sensationalist scenes of Trump being Donald Trump.

Because, you know, again, like the pattern we've seen is that when people are reminded who this guy is, they remember who this guy is and they don't like it. So more Trump. More Trump. More Trump is the counterintuitive advice I am giving. Jonathan?

So I think that going back to ancient history, there was a clear problem in 2015 when he first announced, which was kind of blanket coverage of him, but not much critical coverage, not much investigative coverage. Because frankly, I think a lot of reporters and a lot of news organizations didn't take him seriously. I mean, you go to that announcement at Trump Tower.

And it was like not the regular political teams that covered them, frankly, you know? Um, so I, there was very little that the typical, you know, we're going to look at every candidate, the American bridge, the, uh, the, the, the left wing, um, organization, uh, founded in part by David Brock, um, had a book, which I still have in my, in my shelf at the office, um,

um, about, it was the opposition research on all the potential Republican candidates or like 18 different candidates. Donald Trump wasn't a chapter in that book. You know, nobody, nobody thought, uh, that he was really, you know, a viable candidate. Ariana Huffington was putting him in the entertainment section. Yeah. Yeah. Um, but, but, uh, uh,

I think that there was also a, and again, I hate, I hate questions about like the media writ large because there's many words, diverse world, the media world. But I think that there was some play, uh, taking the bait in the early days of, of the Trump white house of acting like the way he was defining the media, which is the opposition party. Um, and, um, it allowed Trump to portray, uh,

real journalists as simply just another you know political arm against him and You know, I I think that was a problem, but I totally agree now I think there is actually a problem of undercover in Trump I mean that the legal issues are covered the trials are covered but covering the kind of stuff that Maggie and Jonathan are doing Is is is it critically important? What would it look like if this guy got back to the White House? That's not that is not gotten sufficient coverage

outside of the great work of Maggie Haberman. Thanks, Jonathan. Finish it up, because you do get to be the subject of him sometimes. He does call you out more than many. How do you look at this? I'm going to go with a counterintuitive take, other than I agree with Jonathan about 2015. And I say that as somebody who declined to accept their exclusive that he was going to announce, because I didn't believe he was going to announce. And so that goes to the question of somebody who doesn't, you know, who...

says lots of things that are not true. He had feigned it running repeatedly and I didn't want to get used. But I'm going to make a counterintuitive argument, which is that voters had a lot of information about Donald Trump in 2016. We reported extensively on the ban of a religion that he proposed on the Muslim ban. We reported extensively on Access Hollywood. We reported extensively on

any number of racist statements that he was making. We reported about birtherism. We reported about, I think, the area that didn't get enough coverage was his business interests. But I think that voters had a lot of information about Donald Trump, and they did what they want. So I actually think that, you

You know how to cover trump is going to be an ongoing source of discussion I actually think the media is doing pretty well with it I think if we weren't covering legal cases this way we'd be getting attacked for that. Um, and so I sort of think that um, there's been a lot of You know attempted working of the refs by donald trump's critics And I think what there's been less of is a consistent message against donald trump from those critics. So, um

I think my counterintuitive take is I think the media is generally doing pretty well. I do think there could be more coverage. I agree with Jonathan of what a Trump term will look like. I think that's vitally important. But at a certain point, I would really encourage people to read George Packer's story in The Atlantic about the media and Trump. It was one of the best things that I've seen written. And the final line is that it's up to voters. And I would hope that people...

would remember that because at the end of the day, that is actually how people are elected in this country is the voters, not the media. Oh, excellent. And Maggie, I appreciate it. And all of you, Ian, Jonathan, thank you so much. Of course, this is going to be going on for a while. So get ready. Gird your loins. Gird your loins. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Great. Thank you. Thanks, Cara.

Today's show was produced by Naeem Araza, Kateri Yochum, Megan Cunane, and Megan Burney. Special thanks to Kate Gallagher. Our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rick Kwan. And our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following this show, you get our endorsement. If not, off to court you go. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, actually. Search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow.

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