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Marc Fisher
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The FRONTLINE Interviews
Marc Fisher
The Washington Post
Marc Fisher is an associate editor and columnist at The Washington Post and the co-author of Trump Revealed: The Definitive Biography of the 45th President.
The following interview was conducted by the Kirk Documentary Group’s Michael Kirk for FRONTLINE on November 20, 2024. It has been edited for clarity and length.
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The Trump Era
How remarkable was it that Donald Trump got elected three weeks ago?
In the scope of American history, it's so remarkable and so unlikely as to be almost unbelievable.In the scope of Donald Trump's life, it's kind of routine.It's basically—the story of his life is massive swings between utter failure and glorious victory.Throughout his business and political career, he has somehow found ways to live up to the book title, <i>The Art of the Comeback, </i>that he used decades ago, even when there's nothing that a rational person taking a look at it would say is going to lead to that conclusion.
And he's always believed deeply in the magic of his own showmanship and marketing ability, and he doesn't care what anyone else thinks as long as they acknowledge that he's the winner.And this time, he didn't have to prove it to anybody; it was decisive.
… Are we living in the Trump era now?We've had the [former President Ronald] Reagan era.Maybe we had the [former President Barack] Obama era.Are we headed into what will be known throughout history as the Trump era?
Well, certainly the culture of the country, this is very much the Trump era.But politically, as far as the direction of the country, as far as its government, not quite, because Donald Trump's impact on the government is primarily limited to his victory over the status quo, his victory over normal political expectations.But as far as changing the actual direction of the country, making it more conservative, or more Trump-like, or more—or great again, or any of the things that he promises to make it, he didn't make much headway in that direction during his first term.There's even less reason to believe that this second term will get there.
Second terms are, historically, often disasters; the public loses interest in a president in the second term, loses patience.This is now the oldest man ever elected president.His energy's down from where it was during his first term.And as he once told me, he's all about the getting and not so much about the doing.
And so, for Donald Trump, having won this election, that's the big part of what he was going for.The actual governing is something he's never really had a whole lot of patience for, and it's not what he's best at.
After Trump’s 2020 Election Loss
Let's go backwards for our first real territory we’ll go into here.Let's go back to January 20, 2021, back when [President Joe] Biden was being inaugurated and Trump was getting on the plane for his last trip—well, not anymore—but what he thought might have been his last trip on Air Force One.… How dire was that moment for Donald Trump, the Donald Trump we know from his life story?
For anyone looking at the Trump presidency, the moment when Trump leaves Washington and heads to Florida, seemingly for four years of exile, maybe a lifetime of exile, it had to be seen almost as devastating as Richard Nixon's departure from the White House.Just the utter bottom.And yet Trump came out, after going through what apparently was a period of feeling terribly sorry for himself, Trump came out of it fighting, came out of it as strong as ever and absolutely determined to vindicate himself, to show that he actually did win the 2020 election, and to get his revenge against Joe Biden and all the other forces that he believed were responsible for depriving him of that second term.
So he never really displayed publicly that sense of defeat because he never accepted the defeat.It's very different from Nixon, who just looked utterly destroyed in those days after he resigned from office.And in Trump's case, he has a gift that very few other people I've met have.That gift is, he doesn't remember or pay attention to the past; he's not really that concerned about the future.He has the gift of always being in the now, always being in the present.And that allows him to slough off the kinds of defeats and disasters that would bring down most people.And it allows him to just say, “I'm about winning this; I'm going to prove that I won it; I'm going to win it back, and I'm going to destroy those who prevailed over me, or claim they prevailed over me.”
… Let's take something like the raid on Mar-a-Lago by the agents looking for classified documents.… Take me there to that raid.What was his response, and what, in the end, was the response of his dearly beloved followers?
The raid on Mar-a-Lago, FBI agents pouring into his private club and going through the most personal rooms in that estate, going into his bathroom, going into his bedroom, going through all of his personal materials, this was the kind of thing that, theoretically, could have been arranged to be done very quietly, but the FBI decided to do it quite publicly.And it was national television coverage.It was tremendous amounts of video and detailed pictures that came out eventually of him stacking boxes of documents taken from the White House and stored in the shower of a bathroom at Mar-a-Lago, the kinds of images that would ordinarily be terribly demeaning to anyone, let alone a former president of the United States.
… This clearly angered Trump, that he was subject to this kind of treatment by the government that he had just finished being in charge of.And so he saw this as a personal attack.He saw it as an attack on his movement, his followers, but mostly a personal attack.And so he did what Trump does: He decided to fight back.And he immediately, instinctively, portrayed this as a personal attack meant to destroy him by his enemies, not law enforcement coming after someone who had clearly violated the law, but a personal attack against him.
And by portraying it that way to his followers, by presenting himself as a martyr—all of this stuff is happening to him, and he's taking it on behalf of you—and this became really the key theme for the next four years, this idea that everybody from district attorneys to the federal government, the full force of the FBI, judges across the country coming after him for one thing after another—his business, his behavior as president, his behavior in the aftermath of the 2020 election—and they're all coming after him because they want to get you, the American people.They're going after the middle class, and they're doing it through getting Donald Trump.
That became his central message: “I'm taking this attack; I'm taking this assault from the authorities; I'm even taking a bullet”—as eventually happened—“for you.”And it's hard to imagine a more powerful message for people who already saw Trump as something completely outside the political process, as a personality, a force, not just a celebrity but almost a religious figure, somebody who was there to save the country, save the society.There's no storyline that could have better fed that narrative.
It's like Roy Cohn on steroids or something.It’s really, really amazing, actually.It's a whole new Cohn 2.0.
Right.And Trump's lifelong mentality was something given to him by Roy Cohn: that when they come after you, when they attack you, you don't take the attack; you hit back; you hit back harder and harder and harder.So all of these prosecutions, all of these raids, all of these legal manipulations that he saw as intended to bring him down, all of them only fed his presentation of himself as a victim, as a martyr, as someone who is there to take these bullets on behalf of Americans.
Trump’s Support Grows
And from what I can tell, Marc, it seems like it worked, certainly with his base.… But it also seemed to start to have some effect, at least from what I can tell, with those undecided voters, those people who voted for Biden last time, but now they—everybody's worried about their, I guess, personal security.And somehow he manages to turn this and many of the other things that happened to him into a cause that alerts those voters as well.
By and large, Americans don't like when you kick somebody who's down, and while Donald Trump would never admit that he was down, to the rest of the country, he lost the 2020 election, and so, there he was, down.He was in his estate in Florida, not hiding exactly, but certainly not as ever-present in our lives as he had been for the previous four years.
And so not just his base, but this much larger group of Americans who really didn't like Trump—they didn't like his style; they thought his language was too coarse; they thought that he was a bull in a china shop, all of that stuff—nonetheless, they liked that he was an action guy; they liked that he stood up to the powers that be; they liked that he wanted to turn the system upside down.And then the system plays right into that and comes at him, guns blasting.The system comes at him from Georgia and from New York and from Florida and in federal courts and state courts.They're going after his finances; they're going after the documents he has in the bathtub.And all of that is happening while he's already just lost.And I think to a lot of fair-minded people, this looked like an attack that was beyond what was justified.It looked like a political attack—not holding someone to account for their actions.
And that clicks into play or brings into action his marketing instinct, which is exemplified by that mug shot, that unbelievable mug shot.
Right.If there's one skill that Donald Trump has that has served him well in every aspect of his life—personal, business, political—it's the ability to capture the moment, see it for its marketing possibilities, and ride with it as far as you possibly can.
And so, for most people, the day you're being arraigned in court, the day you're being brought into the jail and fingerprinted and mug-shotted, that's a bad day.But for Donald Trump, it was an opportunity, a marketing opportunity.
And so when he sat himself before the camera for what is usually the worst photo in most people's lives, … he had his scowl ready, he had his defiance ready, and he showed it in that mug shot, which was, of course, immediately transformed into a marketing device.It was how he raised contributions; it was how he sold products.He turned every rough moment, every troubled period of that post-presidency into a marketing opportunity and into a way to rebuild his base, and expand it as well.
When you were watching this, Marc, you know him about as well as anybody—you've written a biography of him; you've followed him very closely—how much of the old Trump is in residence while this is all happening?Are you seeing that, or is there a new, highly evolved version that's on the shelf?
If there's one thing I can be pretty sure of, it's that Donald Trump doesn't change.Whether you believe the psychiatrists who have diagnosed him with narcissistic personality disorder or you think that's just a bunch of hokum, in either event, you can see that this is someone whose way of getting wins in his life has really not changed since he was in his 20s.1
In fact, I was once interviewing him about this, and he said, "No, it's not my 20s."He said, "I haven't changed in any important way since I was seven years old."And I think we see that even now as he starts this second term, as he's gone through all of this turmoil, the instincts are the same.He's maybe lost a little bit of energy.Maybe the vim isn't quite what it used to be, but the vinegar is everything it's always been.
And so he is out there calling names, insulting people, mowing down anybody who gets in his way who he thinks is out to do him dastardly.And he is the same guy he has always been.
I think people who latch on to the way his language has changed or the pace of his speech and say, “Oh, he's deteriorating,” and all of that, I think they're missing the central point, which is that his tactics and his overall view of life as a competition that you have to brutally win, that hasn't changed an iota.
Trump Challenges Biden
Let's go to the spring of 2023, and he's running against Joe Biden and, I gather, enjoying himself.
Yeah.Donald Trump's four years out of office were basically a period of rehearsing and then going after Joe Biden and everything he stood for because Biden was the one he blamed most for whatever humiliation there was in his loss that he never accepted.So Biden was the target; Biden was the enemy.And for Trump, winning meant humiliating Joe Biden, presenting him to the public as a loser, presenting him to the public as incompetent, demented, physically incapable of doing the job.It helped him, of course, that Biden was deteriorating before our eyes.And so there was at least enough truth to his message that Trump was taken perhaps more seriously than he might have otherwise been as he went after the guy who had vanquished him.
… For most people, when you go too far, you pay a price.Trump learned early on that if you go too far enough, you don't have to pay a price.And so, for Trump, there's always this, "What can I do next?"It's a ratcheting up that's constant.There's no—he's never held to account like the boy who cried wolf.He cries wolf and bigger animals and huger animals, and he keeps going.
And it would seem ridiculous coming out of the mouth of almost anyone else, but he manages to sell it because people know him as the P. T. Barnum of our age.They know him as a guy who, of course his language is inflammatory, and of course he exaggerates, but there's always a germ of truth there, and he's saying the things that we would love to say if we had permission to do it.And so there's a kind of admiration that people have for him, even as they find his language coarse and his ideas perhaps not quite rational.
Then, as Joe Biden would call him, the Lord Almighty delivers Joe Biden to Donald Trump in a debate, and the rest is history.
Yeah.One, if you're looking for proof that the new Trump is really the old Trump, it happened in that debate, where Biden was way off his game.And that was clear to everybody, including Trump.And Trump, rather than going in and destroying Biden, he kind of stepped back and let it happen.And that's the kind of move that Trump always took great pride in, having that flexibility, like a great boxer, knowing when to go in for the kill, knowing when to hold back and let the other guy exhaust himself.That is classic Trump, and he pulled it off brilliantly.
He had to know in that moment that this was the turning point.He probably was thinking, this is me wrapping up a victory.What he wasn't counting on was that Joe Biden would not be his final opponent in the race, and that was something that really did throw Trump for a loop.He really wanted that bit of vengeance to run against Joe Biden and to beat Joe Biden.He didn't want to run against <i>a</i> Democrat and beat <i>a</i> Democrat.It was really personal.
The First Assassination Attempt
… Something else happens, and that's the assassination attempt.A near miss, they say.… How does Trump make that fateful, horrible moment something that helps him immeasurably?
Trump's reaction to being shot, however superficially, is one of the stranger moments in his career.He obviously was shaken.Anyone would be.He had the courage and gumption to just stand up, fist up, “Fight, fight, fight.”That's pure instinct.That's where you see the magic of Trump's ability to communicate his marketing mastery.You see that in its rawest form there.In a flash, he knows exactly what to do.
And I paint it that way as if it's a deliberate act, because I think it is.I think he had that thought: What do I do now?How do I present myself?Just as he's worried about his hair before he goes out in a public meeting, he was thinking about, what is the image I present here?So that's kind of masterful.
But then it doesn't seem to have a deep emotional impact on him.In the days and weeks following the assassination attempt, you don't see him thinking deeply about the role of guns in America or violence in our political rhetoric or how raw our culture has become.You hear none of that.You wouldn't really expect to; that's not his style.But it is interesting that there was nothing contemplative.And what there was was classic Trump: marketing.You saw that picture being marketed to raise money for the campaign.You saw 1,001 memes being developed and spread virally across the country to show just what a hero, what a martyr Donald Trump is.You get this message from him and from the campaign that he took this bullet for you.They're coming after you, and they're doing it through him, by trying to get him, so deepening this martyrdom message that he developed over the previous years.
All of this is very calculated and classically Trump, but interesting and perhaps sad that there wasn't even in this terribly awful attempt on his life, there wasn't that moment of reflection.There wasn't that attempt to say, who are we?Why does this kind of thing happen in our country?What am I as a leader going to do about it?That just never happened.
Even if you leave the politics of it aside or its meaning vis-à-vis the electorate or the presidency or America or whatever you want to take it to, just even as a man, the human being, where's the emotion?Where's the self-reflection?Where's the fear, the terror, the I'm going into the fetal position for a little while here, folks, and I'll see you after I've been to a spa in Monterrey or something.
It's a remarkable non-reaction in a way, and it tells us a lot about who he really is.For more than half a century, people have been looking for who is the real man behind the public presentation of Donald Trump.And the answer is, what you see is what you get.What you see is what he really is.And there's not someone who's sitting down later and exhaling and contemplating how close he came to dying or how—or what this means about this strange pursuit that he's devoted the latter part of his life to, leading a country.There's none of that.
Can you make the calculation, or would you make the calculation—I don't know that I could; I don't know that anybody could—how that impacted undecided voters?
I think the assassination attempt fed into a sense that was already building from, almost from the moment he left office in January of 2021, that despite Jan. 6, despite the loss of the election, despite the chaos and failures of his first term, there was something about Trump that the country still craved—and that was someone who was willing to blow it all up, who recognizes that both parties have failed to address basic elemental changes in American society that made people's lives worse.Whether it was shipping jobs overseas or gutting downtowns or kids not being able to stay in the communities where their parents were, these are basic things that get down to where we live and what kind of work we do.You couldn't get any more basic.And all of those things seemed to be going off the rails.And here comes the guy who says, “I have the independence because I'm rich; I have the power because I've claimed it; I've shown my success in one field after another; and I have the audacity to go out there and shake things up and turn them upside down.”That's tremendously appealing, even to people who don't like Donald Trump and never did.
And so for that crowd, some of them are Obama Trump voters, some of them are non-voters, some of them are people who kind of rock back and forth, and for a lot of those people, the post-presidential Trump, the guy who is under attack from the legal system, the guy who takes a bullet, this is someone who just keeps on getting up and keeps on going and says he's doing it for us.And well, maybe he is, because he keeps on going.
And of course, everyone sees that he's a huge ego and that it's all about him and all of that, but nonetheless, the message is appealing.The character is appealing because the character says we're still Americans; we're still can-do people; we're still able to turn this thing around.And what we need to do is throw the bums out and turn things upside down, and who better to blow it up than this guy?
Running Against Kamala Harris
So then onto the stage comes Kamala Harris, Vice President Kamala Harris.How does Trump's life experience shape how he responds to the change in the race?
Trump has a long history of personalizing his battles, personalizing his business achievements, his competitions in every stage of his life.And so he'd spent four years personalizing, “This is about Donald Trump versus Joe Biden.”And then things change and along comes Kamala Harris, who is very much not Joe Biden.She's a different generation, a different ethnic background, a different race, a different energy, a different mentality.
And so, for Trump, the challenge is, how am I going to make this a competition that I can win?And the answer is, I'm going to make her Joe Biden.I'm going to go out there and persuade people that she is part of the Joe Biden machine.It's the Biden-Harris administration.It's what <i>she</i> did at the border.It's what <i>she</i> did in Afghanistan.And even though she's the vice president, which is about as powerless a position as we've ever come up with in this government structure, he manages to link her to Biden so powerfully that she ends up not being able to escape it.And that's the lot of all vice presidents who run for higher office.That's why virtually none of them have ever won.But he proves to be pretty adept at making that connection in the voters' minds.
Does he understand something about the American left that people in the American left don't understand, especially things like identity politics that he tags her with and makes her almost a schoolmarm of transgender and woke vocabulary, etc.?
Trump has always loved a great advertising slogan, and his ad people came up with one of the best in this campaign: “Kamala Harris is for they/them; Donald Trump is for you.”It doesn't get any clearer than that.
And whatever—you could argue, and Democrats will for years, about whether Harris should have responded, but she let it lie, and she let it fester.And it did, because it tapped into something elemental about American politics, which is, people don't like to be told what to do.And Donald Trump gets that, because Trump doesn't like to be told what to do.
So along come the Democrats, steered by the left extreme of their party and campus academics and so on who have kind of spent the years, recent years inventing a new language and telling people that you're not a good person if you don't adopt their language.And whether that's language about pronouns or transgender people or pregnant persons or Latinx or all of the various different turns of phrase that have become fashionable on the left, Trump instinctively knew people don't want to hear it.They probably haven't heard about it.They certainly don't want to be told what to say, and they certainly don't want to be reprimanded or cancelled if they say the wrong thing.
And so all of that—even if it doesn't directly affect many voters—when they hear about it, they're instinctively offended by it, and Trump knew to tap into that.
… The sort of final thing on this territory of how he's running and what he's running for or against, how much of it is a revenge campaign?How much of it is retribution, do you think?What's fueling him?Is that also in the tank?
That's at the center.The idea of revenge against Joe Biden and the Democrats and the Democratic forces around the country that are coming after him—lawyers and judges and courts and FBI and so on—all of that, combined, he sees as a force that is against Trump, as he would put it.And if you're against Trump, you're in for it.
So he spent all that time he had sitting and stewing at Mar-a-Lago putting together a message that was basic and simple, like his messages always are, which is: They're against Trump; therefore they're against you.They presented me as a loser; I'm not going to stand for that.And so when we go out and win, we're going to win together, and we're going to do it by tearing them down and putting them in their place.
And so it's about revenge.It's about retribution.It's about promising to blow up the Justice Department and get rid of the civil servants and clean the house and clean out the people who are against Trump, because being against Trump is being against you.
Trump Wins the 2024 Election
What is election night like for Donald Trump, the Donald Trump we know, the Donald Trump you know better than anybody?
I think election night was sweet revenge for Donald Trump—not as sweet as it could have been, because he really wanted to beat Joe Biden, and the Democrats, tricky as they are, deprived him of that opportunity.So he ends up beating someone he sees as a lesser opponent.But he'll take it because he'll always take the win.
And so he's out there saying, “OK, I've got it.This is sweet.”And what I don't think he was thinking about is, what are my plans for America?How am I going to really turn this country around?How am I going to improve people's lives and lower prices and all of that?He's thinking—if he's thinking about the next day, he's thinking about, how do I get back at these people?Now that I have the reins of power again, how do I destroy them?
He once told me that he sued people who wrote critical books about him.He sued having zero expectation that he would win in court.He knew that the cases were legally lousy.He said, "I sue them to destroy them, to make them spend so much money that they are ruined by it."And that, I think, is the kind of thought that he had on election night, if he was looking to the future at all.It's how can I now get these people?
We haven't talked about what some people have told us was a strong motivator for him getting back up on the stage and going through all those shenanigans all the way through, but he was still up there every night in front of the arenas for long and tedious moments, from what I gather, some of them pretty exciting, too, I guess.And that was to try to beat the raps; he was going to win to keep himself out of jail.
Did Trump run a third time just to keep himself out of prison?Did he run so that his felony convictions would not result in doing time?I don't think so.I think he clearly feared that outcome, but I think he's driven more by just the larger belief that your value in life is determined by whether you win, and winning is what it's all about.
The Trump we saw in the 2024 campaign had a little less energy than we'd seen previously.He did rallies, but he didn't do as many of them.He told stories, but they were the old stories mostly.He attacked his opponent, but his opponent wasn't really someone he cared as much about because it wasn't the person who had beaten him.So there's a slightly diminished aspect to Trump in this 2024 campaign.And people would start walking out of the rallies.They get bored.The rallies go on, the speeches go on for hours, and often by the end, the place is half empty.
So it's not the excitement of 2016.It's a different version of that Trump.And I think he, in the end, wasn't really as driven to win against Harris as he was to have won against Biden.Some of the spirit was knocked out of him by Biden's withdrawal.
So when those two men shake hands in the Oval Office last week, imagine, help us—you know him—what's that like for Donald Trump?
When Trump accepted the invitation that he never gave to Joe Biden, and Biden welcomes him into the White House for a discussion about the transition, and Biden is being as gracious as can be, and Trump immediately goes into what I see as kind of Trump-big-boy mode.When he leans forward, sits at the edge of his chair, holds his hands together, adopts a very serious voice, his voice deepens, and his head drops down a little bit, and he starts nodding, it's the pose that he would always have when he was meeting with foreign leaders who knew far more about their relationships with America than he knew about our relationship with their country.This is Trump trying to pass himself off as the informed, expert leader.
And so, in his moment of victory, now he's on the vanquished turf in the White House, and you might expect that he would show almost a little victory dance, something, something exciting.Instead, he gets super serious and faux serious, and you can see that there's a certain level of respect that he has for Joe Biden even though—so he's not going to slam him before the cameras in that moment.He'll talk about how politics is tough.He'll make excuses for some of his behavior—not exactly ordinary Donald Trump behavior.He—I would never want to use the word “humility” in the same paragraph as Trump, but this is as close as he ever gets. …
At the inauguration, we've followed him—you've followed his winners-and-losers prescription from his father.Does that enter his conscious mind at the inauguration as he walks up to swear the oath and then give the speech?
Of course we don't know how the next four years will play out, but it's a pretty good bet that the inauguration of Donald Trump's second term, his comeback term, is about as big a victory moment as he's going to get in the rest of his political career and perhaps his life.This is the ultimate vindication.There's only one American president who ever got that chance before, to lose and then come back, Grover Cleveland.And here's Trump about as triumphant as it gets.
You might expect for most presidents, most politicians, that this would be a time for a little bit of humility, a little bit of, you know, “We've been through a lot together, and here's the limited time we have left, and here's what we're going to do, and here's how we're going to change the country,” and so on.But that's not Trump's style, and that's not how he motivates himself or his followers.He motivates through grievance and fear and agitation and denunciation of the other and denunciation of the enemy.
And so all of that has worked for him so well for so long that he can't possibly drop that.That's who he is.That's who he's been taught to be by his father; by Roy Cohn, his mentor; by so many years of experience with loss and failure.… That's who he is for the country that he says he's going to make great again, but he's kind of already accomplished what he wanted.He's won again.
Does he know something about Americans that we don't know about Americans?Is there something about his victory that indicates he knows something we don't know about America?
Trump doesn't know a whole lot about American history.He tends—he's not a reader.He's not someone who has invested in understanding the successes and failures of his predecessors.But what he does get is something about the base instincts that drive most people, and he thinks of himself as someone who has real insight into ordinary people, people who have led lives wholly different from his own.And what he thinks he understands about them, and perhaps he does, is that they want respect; they want to win; they want their family to look up to them; and they want to win the honor and respect of their community.Those are pretty basic American values, perhaps basic human values, and he gets that, and he is able to shunt everything else away and focus in on just that simple message.That's what he's trying to get for himself, and therefore, he figures, everybody else wants that, too.
And so the fate of other people has never been his highest concern.It's more the fate of Donald Trump.But inasmuch as he sees himself as a proxy for everybody else in the country, he's able to successfully send that message, that I will fight for every one of you by fighting for myself.
What we're seeing in the transition now, how much does that reflect what we're going to see in the presidency for four years?
… Unlike his first term, this next four years is not leading to the next victory.This was the last victory, unless he decides he wants to change our entire system of government and overthrow some of the basic tenets of the Constitution.But if we take him at his word and he's settling in for his final term as president, there's no next victory to build toward.And my fear is that without that as a driving force, Trump will not be as driven, as interested, as engaged as he was the first time around, that he's—he'll have a certain amount of drive that's devoted to getting back at his enemies, going after the Democrats, going after the media, going after the individuals who brought charges against him, going after his enemies in Congress and so on.That will entertain him and drive him for some time, but as far as great achievements on the world stage, elemental changes in the American economic system, efforts to reorder society, to rebuild the middle class, it's not clear to me why he would suddenly gain energy devoted to those causes.
And so the danger is that he would devote himself largely to these personal vendettas and much less so to the crying needs of a country that elected him because it was in pain.
[Producer Vanessa Fica] I have one follow-up question, if you don't mind.We're in the middle of the transition, and although the transition, the bulk of it will have already happened by the time this story airs, but how does that reflect what his second term will be like, or how is that kind of like a foreshadowing of what this will be like?
Trump's transition into this second term tells us two important things.First of all, it says that he is not campaigning anymore.If you think back to when he was president or in the buildup to when he first became president, he was out there every day.We saw him all the time.We saw him talking to reporters, answering questions, making speeches, holding even post-election rallies.We've seen none of that this time around.He issues statements.He appoints people; he nominates people.But it's all done distantly.It's all done online.
And so I think we're seeing that, because he doesn't need to campaign anymore, maybe not going to campaign anymore.That seems like a possible elemental shift.
And then the other thing we learned about this second term is the people he's going to surround himself with—and that is in some ways more of the same, but bigger.So we're seeing in Donald Trump's choices of people to run the various departments of government a willingness and eagerness to ratchet up the crazy, ratchet up the shaking up of the system, ratchet up the turning things upside down, bringing in lots of people from TV, lots of people who are household faces, lots of people who are known for their extremism or their ability to kind of rile people up and gin up the outrage machine and gin up the grievance machine.And so there's very little of his first-term effort to mollify the traditional forces in his party and in the government.Instead, he's just going for it, and part of that is just his lifelong habit of strategy, of constantly raising the stakes.You liked it when I was a little bit shaking things up; try a lot shaking things up.
And then part of it is just his belief that the show must always excite, and the show must always be new.And so now he's letting into the show some performers who will steal some of the spotlight, and that's something he wasn't really willing to do the first time around.So will he tolerate that?Will any of these people last more than a few months?That remains to be seen.But the very fact that they've been appointed to Cabinet positions tells us that Trump is willing to spice up the show in some new ways because he needs to have people still coming along with him.
We haven't heard about authoritarianism.We haven't heard about moves that are being made, that's it for democracy if Trump gets elected.Is that not something we shouldn't worry about?
Certainly there are a great many people who worry that Trump, by purpose or accident, will so diminish the power of the establishment to run our democracy, to run fair elections, to run the mechanics of government that this will undermine our status as a democracy, and it's conceivable that he will have that impact in some way or another.But I think you have to weigh that against two key facts about Trump:First is, he's not very good at this.The first term taught us that, although he had lots of notions about what the government should be doing or shouldn't be doing, he didn't know enough about the government to get those into play.So yeah, he built part of a wall but never really kind of figured out how to get that project moving in a big way.He wanted to deport a lot of people, but never really got that off the ground.
And so will he suddenly be better?Has he surrounded himself with suddenly more competent people?Well, no.He's surrounded himself with people who are—who he liked how they looked on TV, some of whom have really excellent hair, but he hasn't really brought in a group of people who know the government inside out and can immediately begin making it work in the direction that he prefers. …And the other thing we've learned about Trump, as he dives into this second term, is that he is perhaps somewhat diminished in energy and perhaps doesn't have the same drive that he did when he was running for office, or even when he was holding office in that first term.And so I don't know that he would ever ask himself this question, but the question we could ask about him is, OK, what is he doing it for now?We knew what he was doing it for when he ran for office.We knew what he was doing it for in that first term.What is he doing it for now?And in his mind, it's always been, you do things for the next victory.What is that next victory?
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