welcome janitors ni i'm the director of the library, which is across the street, and thank

you to our friends at first con for letting us have this event here. we're very grateful for both of you for being here. and congratulations as debut as a number one, the bestseller lists. when you share that with the fabulous. so open book open mine. we're really glad to have everyone here. we're really happy for the people who were able to bring the libraries into their home so we could do both ways. and first, i'd like to start by having my colleague jared here talk about the foundation of the montclair public library foundation. thank you, janet. so we're so happy you're here for another exciting session of open book, open mind. i'm personally excited as i've been following maggie's work over the past few years on the daily podcast in print and on tv. it's an honor to have her here with us in montclair. i'd like to welcome everyone on behalf of the montclair public library foundation or a group of your friends and neighbors. and our mission is to raise

money to fund the offerings that make our library so special, like open book, open mind. the foundation also funds staff development, access to digital resources and other needs that aren't covered by city funding. your donation support initiatives like laptop lending wi fi hotspots for montclair residents without internet access, lifelong learning classes, homework, tutoring and resume help. children's literacy programs, and significant growth in e-book and audiobook collections during the pandemic. in the last five years alone, the foundation has made distributions to the library totaling more than $700,000 to support these initiatives. but we need your help to continue this type of support. so after you enjoy this event, which i know you will, please consider making a donation through our website, montclair, plf dawg gifts of all sizes have an impact. thank you very much and please enjoy the program.

thank you, jared. and thanks to all of you for supporting writers and readers in bookstores and libraries and public libraries in particular, and especially the montclair public library. i just want to do a little housekeeping. we're going to do the questions will be through the index cards that you picked up on the way in. so if you have a question, please write it down and we'll collect it before the conversation starts. and now it is my great pleasure to introduce dave jones. he is. do you prefer david? do you prefer david? i just called you dave. it's either one. he is the co-founder of open book, open mind. and then he had this other little job at the new york times as the assistant managing editor, fine. and he is now co-chair of the advisory committee of open book open mind. so we appreciate his dedication, his generosity. i personally really appreciate his humor, too. so, dave, will you please come

up. thanks. thank you, janet. i guess i have to tell a joke now. i can't tell you how delighted we are to have maggie here. it's quite an honor, and i'm sure you all recognize it, or you wouldn't be here this evening. maggie is a new yorker who lives in brooklyn and is the white house correspondent for the new york times. you figure that one out and she she became a journalist in 1999 just after getting out of sarah lawrence. she worked for the new york post for a while. then she worked for the daily news for a while. then she went back to the new york post for a while, all of during time, during which she got acquainted with mr. trump and then in about 2010, i guess it was, she went to work for politico. and in 2015, just before the

election and 2016, the times stole her. and she's been a correspondent for the times since 2015. she was here in 2016. so this is a return visit, and we appreciate that very much. her book, confident confidence is confidence man, and joe klein said in a recent review of her book that it is notable for the quality of its observations about trump's character. axios said that her book is the one that trump fears the most, and he has already attacked her for the book. and i, joe klein, also said that she was fabulously formidable, an exemplar of her craft. and i will say that i think she's one of the outstanding journalists of her generation. so we're delighted to have maggie here.

this this is maggie. we're also we're also delighted to have returning jon alter, who's in montclair, as a longtime montclair resident who has been here, both as a guest, as an author, and also as a moderator before. and he's going to moderate and have a conversation with maggie and handle the questions. jon, i worked for 28 years with newsweek, 20 years as a columnist, and he is a bestselling new york times author and emmy award winning documentary film director. the co-host of alter family politics on sirius xm and the creator of the old goats substack newsletter. his most recent book is his very best. jimmy carter a life, published in 2020. so, i don't know. i'm glad jon could fit his head in all this all this work he does. and we're delighted to have him

with us again. jon. thank you. welcome to mount claire. maggie thank you. and we're doing this. we're really happy to have you. and i want to is this is the audio? okay. i'm hearing a little bit of echo. okay. that's better. so i want to there's so much to cover. i want to focus mostly on the pre presidency because that's less well understood. and your book covers it all. but you are the, you know, the greatest authority on his pre-presidential life, i think, by far. but before i jump into you know, new york politics and business, just in terms of today's news,

so the january 6th committee issued a subpoena. is there any chance that he will appear? there's a chance and thank you all very much for being here. there is a date for hosting. there is a chance that he will say, yes, i will appear. if you let me testify live and no constraints, no conditions. and i think that the chances that the committee would agree to that are are fairly slim because i think they would fear it would turn into a circus. in reality, it would it would probably be one of the smarter things they could do would be to just let him appear under under penalty of perjury in public. so i wouldn't say it's completely out of the question, but it's at the moment it seems a a ways away. won't they look bad if they say, you know, we issued the subpoena. you answered the subpoena, and now we don't want to do it because it's not going to be live. it wouldn't be the first time

they've done that. so i don't think that would be a huge concern of theirs. and i think that they would point to the fact that he has a rather well-worn history of turning big events like this into something of a spectacle. you remember that debate with biden where biden finally said, why don't you just shut up? and, yes, i do. and he interrupted chris wallace. i think literally a hundred times. it was a lot of the debate. yeah, it was a lot. all right. there was something else that happened recently that really intrigued me. and i'm just interested whether. you shared this. so you write in the book about how he often says things in public, and that's a form of protection for him. like if he had privately sought the help of russia on hillary's emails, it would have been a huge scandal. but by saying in public russia,

are you listening? and he also projects onto other people things that he's done himself. so i believe it was last week in a speech he went back to his kind of o.j. simpson defense. they planted the evidence at mar a lago and he's never argued this in court, which tells you in a way it's not true. but he he public plea was saying that the fbi had planted evidence on him. but what interested me was the evidence that he used as an example, which was he said like they could plant a book on how do you make a nuclear bomb. it was very specific. it was very specific. and what did you take from that exactly what you did? i mean, there was. when you talk to people in in in trump's orbit, when they deny things because they tend to mirror not not all of them, but but a bunch of people in his

world start to mirror his behaviors and i write about this in the book, but, you know, when you ask a question about what's what happened, you'll often get that or a piece of information. you'll get back. that's not true. who told you that? well, if it's not true, what does it matter who told me? and so there's a there's a degree of, you know, it's not true that they found anything like this for instance, it's already been reported by the washington post that there were there was material related to another country's nuclear capabilities that was found at mar a lago. i don't i don't know if there was only one such document. right. we're talking about 300 individual classified documents. so it was doing the thing that he often does, which is say something in public that at least on the surface appears like it could be some kind of omission. i didn't think that that was necessarily a calculated way of,

you know, ripping off the band-aid and doing it publicly. but it it may very well happen. and it may be that it's about something more than just another country's nuclear. correct capability. and, you know, these these nuclear secrets are worth a lot on the market. if you were to use an intermediate grade to try to sell them, they are i i think the you know, there are a couple of buckets in which you could put the the big thing we don't know about why he had these documents is the why. and there have been a lot of theories that have been tested. you know, knowing him, there are a couple of possibilities. one is what you just described, which is monetizing that requires a level of. competence and and people around him who could execute that that is a little harder to see at the

moment. it's not impossible. and, you know, there are all kinds of people coming in and out of mar a lago. so who knows? one is that he loves trophies. and, you know, if anyone who has ever been to trump tower and goes to his office, gets the tour of his stuff, which includes a giant sneaker that was shaquille o'neal's and, you know, and here's some framed picture of scott walker and me that scott walker sent me and on and on and on. you know, and in the white house, he loved having trophies. the kim jong un letters were trophies. but ultimately, with him, so much of what he does and seeks is about leverage. and having leverage over someone else or something else. other people, other, other, other entities. and i can't discount that either. and i and i don't know what that leverage necessarily is, but everything is about what have i got that you want and what can i use in some way.

so he described you as his psychiatrist. what do you think he meant by that? and and how would you characterize, you know, your relationship? i don't think he meant much. i what he he had this line at the toward the end of one of our interviews, the last interview in september 2021. and and he said, i love being with her. she's like my psychiatrist when he was sort of, you know, mental eating about something. and what i write is that it was a meaningless line, you know, certainly intended to flatter kind of thing. he has said about he has said that about other interviews. he has said it about his twitter feed. the reality is he treats everyone like they are his psychiatrists because he is working everything out in real time all the time. and in terms of relationship, i think that's the wrong word. he's a subject who i cover and i

covered hillary clinton and i covered mike bloomberg and i covered rudy giuliani. and at more of a remove, i covered three presidents. you know, it's just different with him because he interacts with news coverage so differently and he has such a specific fixation on the new york times. and i'm just the person who covers it most often for the times. ben smith made an interesting point that he he argued that he needs you more than you need him. and i think one thing we're talking about this in the green room that i think people who are not journalists don't understand is that getting the access to the principal, you know, whether it's the president or someone, is not all it's cracked up to be. you're right. you don't really need their quotes when you do find something newsworthy. contrary to some -- on on the internet, you put it in the new york times in real time when he

breaks news, which isn't that often. no. and the the. you know, the i think the misunderstanding of the reporter subject relationship is something that i'd like you to straighten out a little bit for people. sure. and i and i appreciate that. and i do understand that the people don't understand it or have misconceptions of it. what you what you said about twitter. you know, i think one of the worst parts about twitter is that a lot of people get not only their news from twitter, these days, but they get their understanding of journalism from twitter and there are a lot of misconceptions about about the profession and about the way journalism works, particularly with donald trump. it's true with any you know, this you have interviewed more people than i ever will, but there are, you know, there's always depending on who you're interviewing, there is always going to be a spectrum of what you're likely to get out of it.

with donald trump, you you're guaranteed that it's it's not going to be truthful throughout much of it. it is not necessarily going to be coherent throughout much of it because he talks like this. and so they, you know, going in and interviewing someone is not and making sure that they're, you know, talking to you. i will cover him. whether he's talking to me or not, i don't need his permission to cover him. and he's never actually understood that he he just fundamental he doesn't understand what journalists do, which is puts him in a in that same category. the way that i approached these interviews was they offered me the first one and i literally thought and they offered everybody basically who was doing a book, a first, an interview, almost everybody, because that's just how he is. and he kind of can't help himself, including michael wolff, who wrote the, you know,

the sort of most -- initial book portrait of the trump white house. and when they when they offered it to me, at first i thought, i'm really not going to get this is i'm not going to get anything out of this. and then when i went down there, he was actually he said much more because i was talking to him about new york and the post than i had expected him to. so then i sought two subsequent interviews, one of which yielded, you know, not a ton. and then the second the third one yielded a little more. but it is, as you say, you know, you're talking to somebody who often who often doesn't tell the truth. and then you know, a print interview is different than a television interview. you know, you're trying to ask questions and get information. and it's not a moment for television. so i thought it was great that

in the middle of the book, you have, you know, his responses to some of your fact checking questions and some of the you know, the questions that you raise about parts of his past. but my problem with it is that he lies every time he opens his mouth. you know, he lies easily as he breathes. so what does any of that actually worth? journalistic what's the value? i mean, i think this is the question that we struggle with daily, right. i mean, he's he's now a former president. he's not donald trump, the developer. i think the time for people and i've thought about this a lot in the process of writing this book, there's been a lot of criticism of 2016 campaign coverage. and i think some of it is valid. i think some of it is less. so i don't think that the overall portrait of donald trump in 2016 was flattering from the coverage. i think in the aggregate it was i think voters had a pretty clear sense of who this guy was. i think there could have been

more on his business ties. i personally think that was a big underexplored area, given that we just never had a president with these kinds of entanglements, particularly foreign entanglements, where i think there is a significant criticism of the media in terms of giving weight to his words is the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, when he is doing all of this mythmaking about himself and building this artifice brick by brick of himself as this massively successful tycoon, you know, commensurate with with, you know, jack welch and all of these other people who trump tried to pretend he was at the same level as. and often, you know, despite the fact that people knew that he didn't tell the truth, a lot of the time, his statements just went unchecked in some cases for years. and that, i think, is a problem now, he's a former president and he's got enormous sway in the republican party. still. and at least when it comes to a book about his life, he's still the only person who can answer some of these questions.

so i feel the need to go to him. the you know, my overall take on i and i'm wondering whether this is yours as well, is that just when you think he's touched bottom, he crashes through the floor. so so do you see because you have this you've been covering him for more than 20 years. do you do you see the same progression in that? you know, you think that things have gotten as bad as they are and then you find out something else that's even worse. i've never just i've never seen somebody who's desire to test the limits of transgressive behavior is so intense, as with him and so every time you i think think you put it very well, every time you think that there is he's hit a limit, you know, there is there is no limit. and i think the january six, 2021 really showed that coupled with you know, a few months

later, he starts fomenting this idea that his supporter, mike lindell, was spreading, that he was going to get reinstated to the white house. so, i mean, but that's as you know, it's it's silly because there's no such mechanism, but there are supporters of his out there who don't realize that. and so it is something that is very dangerous to be engaging in and encouraging conservative writers to to spread, which is what he was doing in 2021. and when i reported this in real time that he was saying this, i got a lot of blowback from people who said we should ignore him. i don't think you can ignore that at this point. i think we've seen the impact of that kind of language from him on his when we should have ignored him. to your point is, is when he was on the way up and i'm as guilty of this as any new york journalist, i would go over to trump tower and interview him because he was always available. he was and he knew that we were you know, we needed copy, copy

for yourselves, for tv. and he would feed the tv crew. yep. i remember i went over there with an nbc crew at one point he had food for them. they loved it. you know, so he understood he might not understand journalism, but he when he ran for president, he was the most experienced. no question, candidate in the thing that counts the most, which is the media. and being on television, there is absolutely no question that his dexterity with being on tv was a huge value for him, and it gave him an enormous edge over everybody else. and he as much as he, you know, hates parts of the media, he he loves it and needs it. and that was just a contrast to every other person with the possible exact exception of mike huckabee, who he was running against at various points in that cycle. there was just nobody else who enjoyed it the way he did and who doesn't. i would put it slightly differently to jonathan.

he doesn't experience news coverage the way anyone else i've ever covered does, you know, stories that would humiliate other people or they'd be embarrassed to have out there. he revels in, you know, that famous new york post front page that was allegedly said by marla maples and wasn't actually the best sex i ever had in in 1990, he loved it. he you know, he he was delighted by it. most people would be cringing at that. one of the great things you do is over and over again, you give the back story of that. so, you know, you figure out that the the editor at the new york post who basically concocts that whole thing out of nothing, that without unpacking all of the too many of those stories, i'm interested in his kind of mentors, the people that he modeled his behavior on. we know his reverence for his father, who was arrested in a ku klux klan demonstration in in

1925, gives you some idea of what fred trump was like. but let's talk about some of the others. roy cohn, what did he learn from roy cohn? so roy cohn becomes trump's lawyer in 1973, when trump and his father and their business are being sued by the justice department for racially discriminatory housing practices. and cohn tells trump, fight like hell and trump learns a couple of things. one is that you can use the court system interchangeably with public relations. you can shout as loud as possible and try to keep whoever is challenging you at bay for a while. that way, you can threaten and intimidate and menace, even if you settle, you won't say you're settling. and most specifically, what he learned is that the role of a lawyer could be turned into something almost like a mafia don, like just something completely different than than what lawyers are supposed to do. a longtime trump friend has said

to me on several occasions. trump likes lawyers who are willing to do anything. well, did he turned himself into a mafia don? i mean, he gave six apartments in trump tower to the mistress of a big mobster, and he flew john gotti's top lieutenant on his helicopter to atlantic city and then later claimed he didn't know the guy. so and he never keeps records like a mob boss, right? no email, no, no. no reference, no notes, no record. i mean, look, i think that it's there's a there's a wannabe quality about it with trump. but there are there are certainly. and rogue one among royce roy cohn's clients were mobsters. and then you know, the mafia was deep into the concrete industry in new york city, which was the material that trump chose to build trump tower with. and then he had interactions with with mafia linked folks when he was doing his casino

projects, you know, at minimum, trump has no problem with it at at most i would say he he's he gravitates toward that. and he certainly adopts those kinds of behaviors in giving. and michael cohen talks about this all the time. you know that trump sort of speaks in a code and gives gives you a sense of what he wants you to do without openly saying it. so we know that he adopted this character, john barron, then he named his son barron. you know, we'd pretend to be this other guy on the phone, but i learned from your book i had never heard of vinnie before. who was vinnie? what was that about? so vinnie was the name of someone who called. this is a complicated story. trump was in the middle of trying to get a tax abatement for trump tower and the the the housing commissioner in new york city who worked for ed koch and ed koch was not a donald trump

fan. he he he encouraged tony goldman, this commissioner. and this is actually an important story in a couple of ways, encourages tony goldman, the commissioner, to reject the tax abatement. trump ends up going to court. he ultimately wins. it takes years in the interim, tony lightman gets a call at his home. one morning from someone who identifies himself as vinnie. and vinnie is very upset that mr. trump is not getting his tax abatement. and there's a there's a threat in this, goldman reports this to officials. he is given a security detail. it was, i think, the next day i don't have the book in front me. the next day, trump himself claims he, too, got a threatening call, which was so surprising and and that call became known many years later when the fbi files were undone. there's no hard proof of who called trump, but there is widespread skepticism for people

around tony goldman that that it was trump himself. the way this story ends is that trump gets the tax abatement. eventually he wins in court. and it's the details are a little dense, but ultimately, gladman, who has two children and a bad weight problem, gets a call from trump, inviting him to lunch and trump ultimately offers him a job and goldman takes it. and ed koch almost fell over when he found out that goldman was going to go work for trump. and i would argue that that was one of the very earliest examples, at least that i know of, of trump threatening someone and then them giving it right, bending them to his will, sending them to as well. and he told them he'd only hire them if he lost weight. so he had to his way. it was one of the conditions sort of like saying to larry king on the air, you've got bad breath and scooting away from

him. all right. so other people that he might've behavior from george steinbrenner similar so steinbrenner was this sort of avatar of hypermasculinity in the 1980s when the aids era was beginning and trump trump was terrified of aids and talked about it all the time. and after shaking hands with men, would, you know, call people, call reporters and say is blah, blah, gay? i just shook hands with them. and from start, you know, steinbrenner was this, you know, big, tough guy who had, you know, is also a child of privilege like trump and who had a healthy dose of of self-regard like trump and trump hung around him and hung around his crew. you know, he had he had friends like like a man named bill fugazi, who also was friends with roy cohn. lee iacocca. there was this crew. and trump wanted to be like them and found himself emulating this

hypermasculinity. steinbrenner was famous for firing his managers, except he wasn't doing it by play acting when trump trump, who really doesn't like firing people directly when he's doing the apprentice, starts with you're fired. and it was pretty widely seen as an homage to steinbrenner, and that changed that show changed everything for him. i think most people are pretty familiar with that, but they're not familiar. many people with a man named meade esparza, who was he and what did trump learn from him? maria esposito was the brooklyn democratic party boss. when machine boss politics ruled everything in new york city. and trump's father, fred, was very close to meade and in that helped them hardwire all kinds of projects in brooklyn. and meade had enormous clout all over the city. and when trump first came into

office and meade was was meade was ruthless. he was a criminal. he did not believe that rules and regulations applied. he, you know, to him, he made judges, he made district attorneys and and when trump came into office, you know, he would he would talk about a figure who sounded very much like me and aides had no idea who he was talking about because most of his officials who work for him in the white house weren't from new york, but he would talk about meade swinging i think he described it as people thought it was a baseball bat. it was a cane and he told me this story in one of our interviews about meade esposito swinging his cane at people and he said meade ruled with an iron fist. and meade is one of the people who helped inform trump's idea of two things. one of how a political operator functions and rules, which is just top down. and the other is that meade fit

trump's idea of strength and a lot of trump's idea of strength is informed by violence, violence and forms, which makes you strong. that, in turn informs what makes a good boss and meade very much falls into that category. he it's almost like he is almost like a tammany hall correct kind of idea. 101 there is a nod to washington direct line. yeah. so there's also, you know is display amicable, most despicable qualities the cruelty was also in evidence. tell us what happened after the helicopter crash and what he said about the deceased executives. so a bunch of trump executives died in a helicopter crash in new jersey, i think it was on their way back from a meeting at trump tower.

two things happened afterwards. one was that somehow an item got placed. i believe it was on page six, suggesting that trump himself was supposed to be on this helicopter, which nobody believed because it was a least at least helicopter. and he didn't like to fly those himself. roger stone has insisted it really was true. so do it. that what you will and the the widows and and one other girlfriend, her fiance, say there were three people involved of the the dead men were really aghast at this suggestion that trump himself was somehow in danger and he later on started to blame his his financial woes at the casinos on one of those debt executives. and he says to one of his officials, his name was jack o'donnell. you know, he's dead. what does it matter what i say about him now? and that really stayed with jack o'donnell, who actually wrote his own.

but there is a, you know, a chronic in all of these descriptions from people who have been around him for a very long time. just a chronic disregard for other people's feelings, emotions, you know, decency in times of stress. so you say that he actually doesn't have that many moves and he uses them over and over again, in part because he understands the value of repetition, you know, which is very important in and especially democratic politicians are terrible at repeating things. in the case of both obama and clinton, it was because it bored them to say the same thing over and over again. but that made them less effective. so that is kind of an overall move that he has repetition. but then there are some specific moves. and i wanted to go over them and see if you could give us an example of each. so the first one you mentioned is the counter attack. so that is, you know, hillary

clinton calls him a puppet of putin, no puppet here. the puppet. it's all just going right back at you with some form of projection. so strongest defenses, no offense. yes. or you write a story and he starts tweeting. you know, that's a good example, right? the quick lie. in one of our interviews, i asked him what he was doing during the january 6th attack, which at that point was not part of the the actual, you know, under oath public record, because house select committee hearings hadn't started. and he immediately said that he wasn't watching television, that, you know, he and that he rarely had the tv on so that would be a good example the shift of. i mean there are so many on those. you know, it's it's my campaign managers fault that i'm losing i threatening to sue his campaign

manager because the poll numbers are bad. you know, finding finding some aid to to shoulder whatever crisis is going on. nothing is ever his fault. the distraction. well, that one is, you know. there's a there's a there's a bunch in that in that category. but for instance. and this one, you know, people that these photos showed up organically. but when he was in the middle of a lot of questions right after the republican national convention in 2017 or 2016, sorry about it, about russia and about his comments about russia. and this was after the email hacks of the dnc and suddenly these nude pictures of melania trump show up on the front page of the new york post from a decade earlier. and donald trump, who does not like when people write about his

life unless he wants to control it, appeared to have no problem with this. so that was a distraction. the outburst of rage. well, that's i mean, i, i can lose count on that one. i mean, you can see that you can see that one all the time. but it is there is the screaming at people to get them in line is something that he has done throughout his life. and people in the white house when he was when he had just won, somebody who had worked for him years ago said to me, he is a screamer and people in the white house are going to have a really hard time with this. and indeed, they did. so the performative anger sometimes is not genuine those. so i will give you a for instance, some of the tweets and you'll ask me for a specific one. and i can't right now, but some of the tweets that are all caps that we would all describe as him fuming. he would be laughing as he was sending them. it's a good example, just for the headlines.

claim, huh? well, let's see. obama tapped my phone would be a good example of that one in 2017 with no evidence other than some breitbart story that he was reading but knew he would get a headline out of it. right. or one that just got blown apart today. he said that pelosi didn't do anything to protect the capitol. yes. video came out today of her trying to, you know, get the national guard there and, you know, in the middle and middle of the day, in january sixth. and trump, of course, is doing nothing. so. i think you call it in decisiveness masked by compensatory lunge. so so when he couldn't i mean, this is going to sound hard to believe, but he really couldn't after november 3rd, in 2020, when he lost. he could not decide what course

of action to follow when it became clear that he was not going to be able to stay in office anymore and he was quizzing everybody, including the valet who brought him his diet cokes. you know, what do you think i should do? and then after he doesn't get what he wants from anybody and and it becomes clear that he's not quite ready to pull the trigger on this proposed government intervention that mike flynn, the former national security advisor, is telling him he should do. he sees seizing the voting cracks like in a fascist regime in italy. yes. using executive orders to do so, he suddenly seizes on january six and throws all of his energy into it. and i would put that as an example. why do you think so little stick it to him? why is he the ultimate teflon president? i think a couple of things. i think the fact that he was part of the popcorn fabric for so long and part of this does relate to the apprentice, which

you mentioned, not entirely, but what became clear in 16 was that voters felt very his voters felt very bonded to him in ways that they really didn't with previous candidates. there was this huge desire to win, and voters were willing to overlook a lot. and then they got in the habit of overlooking all kinds of things and i just think that the partizan divide is so hardened that there was half the country is now not interested in forgiving him much if he's the nominee again. i do think there are aspects of the republican party that have grown sick of him. i do. and i think we will start to see more of that in the coming months, because i think there are a lot of candidates who are going to run. i don't think it's that nothing sticks to him. i think especially beginning of 2022, this issue with the documents and i do think that he was taking on some water in relation to that. now i think it's baked in, but i think with him there is so much

and i do think during the presidency everything was sort of treated as if it was a four alarm fire and not everything was a four alarm fire. there were a number of them. but when everything is a is an emergency, then then voters start to feel like nothing is. so what do you think was the most blown out of proportion and harmful to the democrats by making too much of it i think that. i think that the i'm trying to think how to say this carefully the i mean i think a couple of things kids in cages huge deal and really you know and a humanitarian crisis. every single tweet that he did not a huge deal did not all need to be treated as if they were they were all the same, you know, every every every gaffe he made every nonsensical answer he

gave not all the same, you know, congratulating on winning his election when he'd been told not to. that's it. that's important. his praise. xi jinping. that's important. but everything just became, you know, one big thing. and i think it became harder for people to see what was. so there was a crying wolf problem. and i know that's crying wolf, but it's just crying outrage when at the same volume every time it's not wolf because there's always something there. so it's just the volume. the anti-trump conservative writer david french wrote recently about what he calls the exhausted majority. i saw that, and which i thought was an interesting line. so it was part of it that he just wears everybody out. yes. and and absorbed roy cohn's lesson that he articulated to william safire, which is that he brings out the worst in his enemies and gets them to defeat themselves. and i think is something to that. so if you were breaking down his

manipulative powers of sensing people's weaknesses and then exploiting, is that is that his superpower that he has he has this ability to have sort of an x-ray vision of what somebody is, weaknesses. i think it's one of them. i think the fact that he has an ability to to pick up on other people's insecurities is one of them. and i think his shamelessness is another. i think his shamelessness has been a huge edge in politics. and i think that's it for him. and i think the fact and certainly in his in his business life and i think the fact that he is really really hyper focused on sort of the darkness of human emotions, you know, he is he is really, really attuned to bad things people will do.

and tries to sort of play off of that. and he is aware of that. other people experience shame and he tries to press that, too. and there's a power and shamelessness correct a big one. i mean, he has really used it to great effect for himself. and how transferable is it? and we see desantis is trying to go to his playbook they're probably going to have a pretty bloody primary. how do you think his imitators will do? i think not that well. i think that, you know, including that i'm not convinced that there's going to be a desantis trump primary or not. i'm not i mean, i think because i think that everybody talks about wanting to, you know, they'll be the ones to take him on. and it's actually pretty unpleasant for everybody who does. and so stepping into that meat grinder is is more challenging than it looks. well, in private, he says of desantis that he's whiny, fat

and a phony. so that gives us some, i think, the warm material is definitely fanciful as well. and i don't and i don't think that. you know, desantis is in the middle of dealing with a hurricane and dealing with the natural disasters. obviously very different for any governor. and we have seen a a tempering by desantis of some of the things that, you know, he appeared with biden. he is he been less combative, but he has had more he has had moments prior to hurricane and where he has seemed less than ready for prime time. and so i think that there's a very long history of republican donors and members of the media anointing someone as the next whatever. and it doesn't always come out that way. scott walker, tim pawlenty. i mean, yeah, i mean, i can go down the list. and so we don't know yet. i've wasted a lot of time covering those people and

research. so did i. i mean, to be clear, i count myself among those reporters who who have done that. but you think that trump's heart really isn't in 2024. why? because i think that a couple of things. i think that i think he's really consumed by these investigations. i think that the the documents investigate in particular is really scaring him. i think that the press accounts by cnn, the new york times, washington post are showing patterns of behavior that i think are alarming. some of his own advisers that he's aware doj is paying attention to. i mean, the the main proof that he is worried is that he spent a $3 million upfront retainer on a lawyer whose advice he has completely ceased to listen to us. but he was worried enough that he hired the guy. and i got calls from people who worked for trump in the 1990s who said donald has never paid all that big a retainer. that tells you all you need to know. a lot of times it doesn't pay at all. well, that's that's why this was so surprising surprising.

so and he just doesn't seem animated by the rallies, the way he once did. they're really long, not a lot of new material. and so we'll see. i mean, maybe he'll get into it if he does become a candidate. i do think he has backed himself into a corner where he has to run, because i think the investigation wins, you know, oddly compel him forward. but we'll see. so if you had to bet, would you say that he will be the nominee? i i'm not falling for that one again. no, i. i think that if he runs, he remains the overwhelming favorite to be the nominee. but that is obviously absent outcomes. and these investigations and i just don't know what that looks like. does he actually believe in anything beyond his himself? he has a couple of core in like impulses on issues like trade or, you know, other countries ripping us off, you know, more broadly on alliances.

but he's willing to sublimate those if there's some other reason to, you know. mcconnell, i remember, was telling people during the transition in 2016, i mean, he was clearly just kind of stunned by this, just that he this guy has no way you would he would say this guy has no idea what he believes in. and i and i think to your point, he does know what he believes. and he believes in himself. and what's good for him. and so that can look like different things in different moments. and do you do you ever get the sense that he is untethered from reality, or do you think it's all, you know, connected to his alternative universe in some way that you can kind of track how it makes a certain amount of sense in his aren't those the same things? i mean, he's that he's untethered to reality and also there's sort of like the same thing to me is creating his own reality. i guess. but you're saying is he doing it

knowingly and he's trying to bring you along or is it all instinctive? sometimes it's instinctive. sometimes knows. i mean, one of the things about him that people came to realize over time working in the white house was, you know, he's not strategic at all. he can't do long term planning. but he is very calculating. and in a given moment. and so, you know, it's more of what your second option is, which is that he's he is trying to create this reality and get you to buy into it more often than not. now i think then sometimes he ends up really believing what he's saying. so i couldn't tell you if he actually believes what he's saying about the election or not. i have no idea. i don't know that it matters. but so since he's not strategic, what is his timeline? is it just the next news cycle? is it a week? is it a month? it's it is literally, you know, an hour, hour by hour, basically. i mean, it it is he is he is existing in the now always. i'm almost ready to get your

questions. he's got them. you've got them over there. yeah. let's, let's, let's get your questions. i mean, i. also. good. i can. oh, actually before we go these i want to go to race. the question of race. so you, you know, one of your big scoops came out a few months ago is in the book is that he was flushing documents down the toilet. but there's another toilet story in your book. there's a lot of donald trump toilet stories, but just wanted to tell the one that really goes to his racial animus. so when he when he was first in the oval office, he would he would show people what he would call his secret bathroom of the oval office. and he would claim that he had

renovated the entire space down to the toilet, which was not true, according to officials think they just customarily replace the toilet seat anytime there's a new president. but he would he would show he would show this space and and he would say, you understand what i'm talking about. and it was a very strange remark and, you know, open to interpretation. but, you know, one guest who heard it interpreted as not wanting to use his black predecessor's bathroom and, you know, there's there is just there is a lot of that with him over a very long period of time. there was a i have reporting in the book about how the first time the first executive, the first person to work on the executive floor at trump tower was black, was in 1986, as if this was innovative. and it was the it actually was the woman who had been working as an assistant to the person we talked about before, tony goldman and trump's assistant, a woman named norma federer, was

all aflutter that, you know, we've had a black person on the executive floor and then it was deemed that she was she was so pretty, she would fit right in. but it's you know, it's just it just it it is it is a reminder of a couple of things, but one of which is actually that as much new york city is seen as a progressive beacon there are aspects of it that really are not. i mean, some of the big public things like birtherism was pretty thoroughly racist. but there detail other details you have like i didn't know that he had a girlfriend before or just before melania fell, overlapping with her, overlapping with melania half-blood father was, white mother was black and he said he told say about her he met her parents and he told her that she got her beauty from her mom and her brains from her dad at the white side and so let's let's

look at some of these questions from all of you. what do you think motivates the children? do you think that they are politically ambitious? i think i think don jr certainly is. ivanka, yes, but i would be quite frankly, be very surprised if she actually ever ran for office, given what it entails. i don't think eric trump is at all politically ambitious. so this question is. sort of about his style. in an interview. you know, what's the feel you get from him when you're sitting right across from him? is he is he charismatic in person? is he does he try to bully you? is a charming you? yes. you know, i mean, he all of it he can be all of those things. i have interviewed him when he has been charming, which he was in the first interview i did for this book, and he was in salesman mode.

and then i've interviewed him, you know, at other times, particularly one very memorable one in the white house in 2017 where, you know, we walked in and he had his hands jammed in his armpits and he's sitting behind the resolute desk and he's rolling very heavy with like 8 to 10 aides sitting around the this is not normal to do in an oval office meeting with reporters. and so there are there are times when he tries to menace and intimidate and he doesn't. it just depends. and do you think it depends on his mood or is there calc correlation? oh, is he is thinking it through a little bit like what do i want to try to do today in this interview? so that one was was that that one was definitely calculating. the second interview that i went to for the book, he was in a terrible mood and i found out later that he had been wandering around his property at mar a lago, like pointing out messed up plaster and various spots. and he was angry at how the club looked. and so that one was pretty organic.

so. this kind of goes to the reality question, but and it's, you know, it was the subject of today's hearing. how much do you think he accepts he lost the election? i don't think he accepts that at all. whether whether whether he knows on some level that he did. i think he did at one point. i don't know if he does now, but he certainly doesn't accept it right. but i mean, there's a lot of testimony that he would say to people, how did i lose to this? oh, no. and i of reporting on that in the book, i mean, he was it seemed pretty clear to people right after immediately after the election that he knew that he had lost. he would say to one eight, i thought we had it. you know, he seemed almost apologetic. some of them. i think he was clear that that it was over. and then he decided it wasn't. how do you explain his relationship with putin?

i can't i don't you know, i mean, there's the obvious. he he has admires strongmen and there is the obvious. he has been fascinated by russia for 40 years. but beyond that, i can't begin to explain it. i just want to go back to the question i just asked you about the election, because i think it's a kind of a deeper psychological question than it might appear on the surface that. okay. he you know, he agreed that he lost immediately after the election, but never accepted it. did he then internalize it like, do you think this is in ways no longer fake on his part? oh, yeah. i don't know whether he actually believes this. i mean, i think it's very possible that he is convinced himself that he really did win because he's he's very good at i mean, you know, he he he has said to people a version of the same idea over many years, which

goes to the repetition point, which is that if you say something often, often enough, people believe it and it becomes true. that's true of himself, too. that's joseph goebbels. i know. i know. i know, i know. i know. the heritage on it. but by the way, you mentioned the mein kampf. that ivana trump said that he had mein kampf and somebody else said he gave him a book of hitler's. it was the speeches, speech and his bedside table. what do you make of that? i don't think he read them, but i think that he but i think that he had a fascination with with hitler for a while. and i don't. you know, i hitler is not somebody who who who most people in in mainstream america admire. so. okay, this is about you. how many hours do you sleep? a night? not enough. thank you for asking.

so maybe tonight's the night. this questioner wants to know if you have any management tips. no, i am not who you come to for that. it sounds like you. do you think trump is evil? that's a really hard question to answer. i think that he is is comfortable enough with behavior that is evil. and i think that that's that's probably about as far as i can assess that. i'll answer it. yes. so you kind of address this, but let's go back at a little bit. this is how scared he is right now about his legal troubles and the questioner makes a very interesting point that maybe his malignant narcissist ism is, you know, is clear narcissistic

personnel, a disorder that says that he's a better president than anybody. with the possible exception of abraham lincoln. but might that actually prevent him from feeling more vulnerable or does that not actually work? that is the narcissism, not help guard him against feeling he really understands legal problems. i would just put them in a very different category than almost any other. it is the thing that he has been most acutely attuned to all of his life and he has spent a very long time trying to cultivate prosecutors. going back to robert morgenthau, a great figure of integrity. i was disturbed to hear that he was as close to trump as he was and and it is one of the reasons i think the trump felt kind of comfortable that nothing bad was going to happen to trump, but he i, i just think that he experiences legal issues on a

different level. so it was he not that scared of the new york da's investigation? cy vance was investigating and alvin bragg basically dropped it. i mean, he's now he was active. he was very about it. he was. and then he didn't get charged. and so, you know, it'll be very problematic for his company when this trial takes place, because there are charges against his company and an allen weisselberg cfo who pleaded guilty a couple of months ago is going to testify. but trump himself wasn't criminally charged. and that really has become how he looks at all of these things. i mean, as unhappy as he was with the tish james civil suit, the new york attorney general. it's still a civil suit. right. and that's the thing that they bear in mind. how about fannie willis and georgia? you know, that that one makes them nervous. yeah. i mean, you know, he's he he is facing a lot of legal problems.

he is legal problems are threats. he is acutely aware of threats. and so that is why he gets up. so a lot of democrats think, well, how are we skate? he'll always maybe he will figure out how to get away with it like he was. i mean, was different when he was president that the sitting president was going to get indicted and, you know, the the expectations around mueller became a little too great, not not by mueller. i think mueller was very, you know, sort narrowly focused on his work. but i think there were there were folks who had high hopes that that was going to end his presidency before, its expiration date, and that was just not likely. at any point because of the justice department opinion on indicting a sitting president. but now he is facing serious investigations. you know, somebody he called, he called someone very close to him at the time. not anymore.

two days after the capitol riot and said, as he is wont to do about everything to pull test how everything is playing out. what do you think? i like? and the person said, i think you've made a real mess. and i think this is the first time he is facing several simultaneous messes. but the the the people who took to the january 6th committee, they really haven't been before the grand jury. i mean, we would know if they had their lawyers would have. which grand jury are you talking about in the january 6th case? i'm not talking. you're talking about the justice department jurors. i guess some of them happen. i mean, you know, today, short pence's chief of staff was back before the grand jury. so, i mean, some of them have been. but i don't i mean, is cassidy hutchinson in front of the grand jury? i believe she has been interviewed. i don't know if she's going before the grand jury investigators. i don't know if it's before. so if you again, i hate it when people ask us to get into the predictions business but you have fun but you know more than everybody else so you can make

without making a prediction you can assess the odds more easily. so do you think he'll be indicted on the documents case, and do you think he'll be indicted on the january six case? i don't know if he will be indicted on either, but i think that the documents case presents a clearer threat because it's just a a clearer case. you know, even though he is. and for those of you who watched the january six hearing today, bennie thompson, the chairman, said this over and over again, that, you know, trump was at the center of everything. and i think they've really tried showing that he's the one person who had visibility into all these different activities. my understanding is that the justice department still doesn't feel like it has a clear sense of how to make that kind of case. so i know you're not a pollster and you don't spend a huge amount of time talking to voters, but why do you think he's had such staying power?

and 17 million people voted for him the last time time. so i think that i don't really know how to answer that other than the fact that i think that he. he has been very successful in activating a lot of people who either haven't voted before or who have felt somehow left out of the process. and then i think there's a third issue, which is i think there's a really worthwhile study that wouldn't you know, we wouldn't do. but i think that pollsters should do is of why so many people are open to, you know, a sort of a type of strongman and leader in this country. and i would be curious to hear what comes back. the subtitle of your book is the making of trump and the breaking of america. how do you explain the latter part of it? what did he do to break this country? i think that he did not create

and you would know this far better than i do. but i think that he did not create the partizanship that has cleaved the country into for a while, but he fueled it and. he exacerbated it, and he benefited from it. and he exported and i write about this, that one of his guiding ethos is, you know, he he he clearly expressed in the late 1980s, in new york city during a a terrible case, violence in which teenagers of color were arrested. and he took out an ad calling for the death penalty for them them that he clearly hate as a civic good. and i think he exported that to washington and i think he has exported it to his party. and i think that that has had a massive trickle effect. i think that's a good, if

depressing place to. and that's all. everybody, thanks for coming. thank you so much. thank you all. thank.

i'm honored to be here tonight sharing the stage with commissioner bill bratton and ms.. o'donnell family. fellow rafael manguel. it is great to see so many of our friends in the audience,

including mrs.