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COMMENTARY ... 2ND TRUMP TERM! PETER BAKER FRONTLINE: Trump's Comeback: Peter Baker (interview) PLAY YOUTUBE VIDEO Original article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfCMaduJgLA Peter Burgess COMMENTARY I like commentary by Peter Baker ... and this is no exception. Here ... I respect what Peter Baker is describing, but do not entirely agree. In my world view, the United States has not been 'liked' very much in all of the Post WWII era. In the eight decades since the end of WWII, nations have 'played nice' with the United States simply because it was in their national interest. Essentially, post 1945 the United States had all the wealth and every other country was flat broke. Few people in the United States have any knowledge of the international wealth transfers that took place during World War II and in the early post war years. While Lend-Lease during WWII was a valuable tool to help win the war it also served to enrich the United States at the expense of 'benficiary' countries like the UK. I find it interesting and alarming that the USA is now using 'Lend'Lease' as a financing vehicle 'in support' of the war in Ukraine! I wonder why? Peter Baker is a better global commentator than most in his profession ... and I agree with a lot of what is in this presentation. In its totality, I think that this presentation is far too optimistic. I just turned 85 years old and my experience has been that the United States had 'stiffed' every nation that it has interacted with since I was 5 in 1945. Mostly the USA got away with it, but in 1985 ... 80 years on, from 1945 ... the world has had enough ... and the election and behavior of the new President Donald J. Trump is the last straw and there will be substantial repercussions! As an English schoolboy in the 1950s I learned history from 'British' perspective. As an adult from 1960 to the present I have been exposed to the real world and to a great extent the massive decline in Biritsh influence around the world. It is not a comfortable experience ... but nobody cares about that! The United States has been able to call a lot of 'economic shots' in the past few decades ... essentially five decades. But in the last two decades this power has declined substantially while the power of China has increased. In my view, most of what Trump has on his agenda will accelerate the decline of the USA in a way that will come as a surprise to most Americans, and certainly most of the Americans I talk with! I think things will get ugly quite quickly. Peter Burgess
Trump's Comeback: Peter Baker (interview) \| FRONTLINE FRONTLINE PBS \| Official Jan 23, 2025 3.02M subscribers ... 60,294 views ... 1.5K likes PBS is an American public broadcast service. Wikipedia #Interviews #Politics Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times. He previously spent 20 years reporting for The Washington Post. Baker is the co-author, with Susan Glasser, of The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017–2021. 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. This interview is being published as part of FRONTLINE’s Transparency Project, an effort to open up the source material behind our documentaries. Explore the transcript of this interview, and others, on the FRONTLINE website: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/in... #Politics #Interviews Subscribe on YouTube: / pbsfrontline Instagram: / frontlinepbs Twitter: / frontlinepbs Facebook: / frontline FRONTLINE is produced at GBH in Boston and airs nationwide on PBS. FRONTLINE is produced at GBH in Boston and is broadcast nationwide on PBS. Funding for FRONTLINE is provided through the support of PBS viewers and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Additional support for FRONTLINE is provided by the Abrams Foundation, Park Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, and the FRONTLINE Journalism Fund, with major support from Jon and Jo Ann Hagler on behalf of the Jon L. Hagler Foundation, and additional support from the Charina Endowment Fund and from Koo and Patricia Yuen. Support for 'Trump’s Comeback' is provided by the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation. Transcript 0:08 How remarkable, Peter, was it that he was elected again? Yeah. Any way you look at it, whether you like Donald Trump or don't like Donald Trump, you have to be struck by his ability to come back from this. This has to be one of the most remarkable political comebacks in American history: indicted, impeached, convicted, tried to overturn an election. All of the setbacks he had, all of the flaws, all of the disadvantages, all of the weaknesses, and yet he managed not only to win the presidency again four years after being turned out, he did it with stronger support than he had ever before. He won the popular vote for the first time in three tries. He won a stronger Electoral College vote than he had the first time in 2016 when he won. 1:01 And I think he demonstrated, obviously, that he is one of the most formidable political figures of our time. For those who thought he might just be an anomaly, for those who thought he might just be an aberration in American history, a fluke who won in 2016, who wouldn't last more than four years, he's proved them wrong. He turns out to be one of the most transformative figures of the modern America era. How important is it to understand his life story in order to understand what he just did? Yeah, I don't think you can understand Trump's politics and his presidential career without understanding his history in business, in entertainment, his life story in New York, his father and the family that he grew up in. This is somebody who has spent a lifetime feeling aggrieved—aggrieved by the elites, aggrieved by the Manhattan 2:02 developers who looked down their nose at him, aggrieved by the intellectuals who looked down their nose at him, aggrieved by the political figures who thought he was kind of a clown at first and then a dangerous demagogue later on. All of these people at various points underestimated Donald Trump. And from his point of view, winning this election, whatever he wants to do with the presidency now, is about vindication. It's about proving his critics wrong. It's about showing that he is strong and he cannot be beaten. To Trump, there's nothing more important than being a winner. He refuses to accept, even when he does lose. He finds some excuse, he finds some lie, he finds some conspiracy theory to explain any time he has any setback. It's never his fault. It's always somebody else's fault. For him, winning is everything. His father said it to him 100 times or more: You have to be a killer. And that's what Donald Trump aspires to be. People talk about the Reagan era, the Obama era. 3:06 Are we living in the Trump era? We are definitely living in the Trump era, and it is longer than the Reagan era or the Obama era, arguably, because even while Biden was president, Trump was still there on the scene dominating the conversation, driving events, influencing the course of the country. So really, he's going to have a place at the top of the American political stage for 12 years, unlike any president since FDR. Now, we don't know how this next four years will go. Obviously it could end in very different ways. But this is a very long time for a single politician to be at the top of the political structure. … What was he doing in the months that he was in Mar-a-Lago, maybe before McCarthy comes, but also afterwards, pre- raid, pre the raid that finds the documents. 4:06 Or maybe even go beyond that if you want. But what is he doing? Is he planning? Is he thinking? He doesn't strike me as a structural—he's not reading Socrates or Plato. What's he doing? Yeah, he's not reading about Lincoln. It's really interesting: All the presidents I've covered other than Trump, when they had bad moments, and sometimes they had very bad moments, they read Lincoln, right? George W. Bush, I think, read 16, 18 books about Lincoln at one point during the Iraq War. I think it was a way of comforting and looking for inspiration. Trump isn't like that. Trump doesn't look to history for inspiration. He doesn't read. He doesn't look at his predecessors for ideas. Trump is all about Trump. … He was once asked on Meet the Press, 'Why do you think you won the 2020 election when all the people around you told you you didn't, not just Democrats but fellow Republicans, your own staff, your own adviser, your own attorney general? Why? Who were you listening to?' He says, 'I was listening to myself.' And that is a true statement about Donald Trump. He listens only to himself. So in those first months when he gets back to Mar-a-Lago after leaving the White House, 5:08 he's really kind of sulking a little bit. He is deeply unhappy about losing the election, refuses to admit it, refuses to acknowledge it. Still looking for a path forward. Trying to figure out what is still possible. And in fact, he sees, during these months immediately after the White House, author after author after author, including my wife and me, including other authors you wouldn't necessarily have expected him to give time to, because he needs to talk, and he needs to spin history, and he needs to define himself, and he needs to convince himself that he's still important. And he would set up these interviews in a very fascinating way. You would show up at Mar-a-Lago at 5:00 p.m.. That was the time he preferred, because that's the evening hour when his paid members started showing up at the club for dinner. And he would have these interviews with authors in the public space, 6:03 in the living room, essentially, of his club, where the guests came through. And he would interrupt the interview to say, “Hey, So-and-So, I'm here. Look who I'm here with. I'm here with the famous reporter from NBC or the famous reporter from So-and-So,” to validate himself, to show how important he still was, even though he had lost the election. And then he would finish the interview, and he would come down to the patio for dinner, and the crowd would stand and give him a standing ovation, which he loved. Night after night, a standing ovation from his guests, from his paid members. And that's how he kind of got through the pain of this moment, the rejection of this moment, the repudiation of this moment, by having people stand and applaud and tell him he was still great. Then the raid at Mar-a-Lago. How did he react to that moment? The raid—we really shouldn't call it a raid. It was a search, right? 7:03 It was a search by FBI agents according to a court-authorized warrant. Now, he wants to portray this event as an outrageous intrusion on his privacy, but in fact, what happened was the thing that happens every day in our judicial system in which investigators show up to a judge and they say, “We think we have evidence that merits a search,” and the judge gives an evaluation according to the rules in the Constitution and says yes or no. So he is shocked by this, though. He is shocked by this search. He still sees himself as a quasi-president. He is offended that they are taking action against him when he had gone so far to stiff-arm them on these documents that he shouldn't have had, and he had made every effort to hide these documents from the authorities. 8:01 He told them through his lawyers that he had given them all back when he hadn't. He told people on his staff to take actions to hide this from the authorities, from government officials. And then suddenly, there are the FBI agents with the force that they just always bring to any kind of an event like this, and I think it was a shock for him. But for Trump, it's also an opportunity, right? For Trump, it's also an opportunity, because Trump loves nothing more than being a victim. That's part of his political appeal. And the search of his home at Mar-a-Lago allowed him to say, “See? It's all a witch hunt. I told you they are persecuting me.” Never mind that he had actively tried to impede the government from retrieving documents that he wasn't entitled to. It was the very fact that they searched his estate that was the offensive act, and he used that to reconnect with his base and say, “Look at what's happening here. 9:05 This is a terrible country when they're coming after me, your favorite president. And if they're coming after me, it's because they really want to come after you.” And he connects this event with the grievance and resentments of a lot of the people who support him over the years. Some articles we read suggest that Fox and others, who had been kind of laying back and just watching whatever happens and the cobwebs grow and the dust settle on the desktops, suddenly they had something that they could do, and even his rivals come to his side—Trump once again turning dross into gold. Yeah, Trump always manages to turn his bad moments into strong moments, it seems like. A lot of Republicans were shocked at what he did with those classified documents. And it was such an open-and-shut example of something that would have gotten anybody else in a lot of trouble. 10:08 And you can make arguments about some of the other issues that they come after him over the years. Was the hush money case really something that would be prosecuted? We've never actually prosecuted a former president for trying to overturn an election. But mishandling classified documents and then obstructing the agents who come to retrieve them? That's something that people understand. And so that's why it was actually a very dangerous moment for Trump, because this one had the potential of breaking out of the crowd that doesn't like Trump to begin with and actually offending Republicans, who he would need if he ever wanted to make a comeback. And so that's why it was important for him to recast that event, to redefine it, to tell the story in a different way. And the story became not that he was obstructing justice and refusing to turn over documents that he shouldn't have had and endangering national security by having these classified documents in in a room 11:01 in a public club where anybody, in theory, might have come across them. Instead, the story became, “They're out to get me. This is a dictatorship. This is an authoritarian move. This is my opponent persecuting me for political and partisan reasons.” Now, never mind President Biden had nothing to do with it, as far as we know; there's no evidence to suggest that Biden had anything to do with this action. But Trump made it out to be a case of Biden, his political enemy, persecuting him, former President Trump. And as time goes by, the criminal cases seem to be the final nail in the coffin, all of those things coming forward. He's found guilty. He comes outside in this sort of huff and issues statements about the ultimate verdict and tells Americans, the American people that they will render the ultimate verdict. It's almost like a campaign moment, like he couldn't have scripted it any better if he'd wanted to. 12:05 Trump waged the first months of his comeback campaign from the courthouse steps, right? Rather than rallies and parades and all the normal things that candidates do when they're running for president, he's campaigning right outside the courtroom where he is being tried for felony crimes or being indicted for yet another case. And what would have destroyed any other politician's career, what would have of course sidelined any thoughts of a comeback for some other former president, seemed to only strengthen him and embolden him. Rather than being tarnished by indictment after indictment after indictment, he turned the tables on his adversaries and made it out to be a political plus. And Republicans, who were ready to be done with him—they didn't particularly want to have him come back— found themselves either motivated to come to his defense 13:04 because they thought it was excess or felt compelled to do it because their voters thought it was. We've talked many times, Peter, about all of the elements, what he learned from his father, Roy Cohn, from the bankruptcies, reality TV. He writes a book—or sort of wrote a book—called The Art of the Comeback. How did what he was doing, how much of it comes from his life? Yeah, Trump has been down before. He filed bankruptcy for his company six different times. He was slapped down by regulators and authorities. He had failed business after failed business, and yet he mastered the art of presenting himself as a success, right? 14:02 So what he is doing here in this interregnum, between the time he lost the White House and the time he's going to run again, he's trying to rewrite the history, to rewrite the history of his political career the way he rewrote the history of his business career. He wasn't that big a success, arguably, until he got on to The Apprentice Well, in effect, what he tried to do from Mar-a-Lago in this four years was accomplish the same goal, right … to turn failure into success, to turn defeat into victory. And instead of a discredited, shamed loser who is swept away from the political scene by the voters, he becomes the apostle of comeback and the apostle of payback. 15:01 That’s so fascinating. Let's go to Biden for a minute. He's running against Joe Biden, who a lot of people know is—and maybe you did, too—kind of wobbly. Forget his policies—just physically and in other ways wobbly. How much was Trump enjoying running against Biden? Trump had the Biden campaign all figured out: Sleepy Joe; he's senile; he's not really there; he's being run by the liberal extremists around him. He knew what he wanted to do with Joe Biden, and he had a pretty good strategy worked out. So when he shows up for the debate in June and he discovers that Biden is performing in just the way that he had actually said he would, I think even Trump was surprised at how bad Biden was. 16:01 But it turned out to be actually kind of a setback for Trump because if Biden wasn't going to be his opponent, he didn't know what to do. He actually had figured it out with Biden and didn't know what to do with any other contender. So he wanted to run against Biden. And even throughout the fall, after Biden dropped out, you could hear him at his rallies express kind of like this regret, this almost remorse that Biden had dropped out. And he kept talking about Biden all the time as if Biden was still the candidate—Joe this, Joe that. He wanted to run against Biden because he knew how he would handle that. And Biden could be the old guy. Biden could be the guy who's suffering from dementia. That meant that Trump himself wouldn't have to answer questions about his own age and wouldn't be seen as the old man in the race because the other guy was seen as an older man in the race. When Elon Musk appears at his door bearing gifts, 17:00 what are the implications of these two unique American characters forming an alliance at that moment? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The arrival of Elon Musk in Trump's orbit is really one of the most stunning and most fascinating moments of the year. Here's the richest guy on the planet, a quirky guy, a guy who has just bought Twitter and converted it into something more of a conservative platform, and he's becoming increasingly a critic of what he sees as an overly woke, overly liberal society. And in Trump, he sees a vehicle to a whole new level, right? It's one thing to be the richest guy on the planet, but it's another thing to be the benefactor and patron of a president of the United States. 18:08 And for Trump, you know, Trump has always reveled in the ideas that people of great means would respect him. It's the reason he picked Rex Tillerson, the head of ExxonMobil, to be his secretary of state, even though he didn't know him. The idea that the head of one of the most extraordinary companies in the world, ExxonMobil, would work for him was too hard to resist. And so the idea that Elon Musk, the richest guy on the planet, would want to be in his corner was irresistible. And they're both fellow travelers when it comes to conspiracy theories. They're both people who see dark forces out there aiming to get them. They're both people who traffic in untrue, outlandish, even sometimes seemingly unhinged ideas that they promote on social media. 19:02 So there is a connection there between these guys, even though they're of different age and different backgrounds and different generations, and they form a bond that is pretty remarkable. But I think if you had seen at any other point in history, if you had seen at any other point in American history the richest guy in the country so publicly promote a presidential candidate, that would have been a detriment in the past. That would have been seen as a drawback. That would have been seen as a vulnerability. Who wants to take a guy who seems to be in the pocket of an American oligarch in effect and put him in the presidency? It did not have that effect. Elon became kind of his own sort of cult hero in the MAGA world. And you figure it helped? Well, on balance, it probably did help, right? It gave Trump access to a lot of money. He was having a hard time raising money in a lot of other quarters. 20:05 Musk spent a lot of time in Pennsylvania, the state that everybody believes meant the most. And I think that Musk, his mastery of social media, his ability to pump out a lot of memes and a lot of themes that were pro-Trump and anti-Harris had to have made some difference. Harris is in. Just a brief snapshot of who's the Trump we see on the trail with Harris out there, the whole new zeitgeist, completely rebirth apparently of the Democratic Party for a while, $1.5 billion or something. Yeah, Trump is caught off guard by Kamala Harris' sudden emergence as the Democratic nominee. He wasn't expecting a run against her, and he didn't know what to do about running against her. I mean, she was all of a sudden getting crowds that were like his crowds—huge, large, enthusiastic, energized. 21:06 And he was jealous. He hated the idea that anybody else could get crowds like he did, and he didn't know how to take that on. So he resorts to some of the old playbook. The first thing he does is he talks about race, talks about her race. “She's not really Black; she's Indian. Why is she suddenly Black?”—this bizarre formulation that he comes up with. He doesn't know a whole lot else what to say about her because she hasn't actually got a record of her own that he can hit at, so he basically tries to make her Biden redux. Everything he was attacking Biden for, he would attack her for. Now, he couldn't attack her on age; she was 20 years younger than him almost, and obviously vibrant and in full possession of her faculties, unlike the two older guys who have been running up until that point. So he's looking for ways to tie her to Biden, tie her to inflation, tie her to immigration, tie her to transgender rights, 22:03 which is an issue that I think played very strongly in his base. And I think he struggled for a while. He didn't do well in the debate. He didn't know how to handle her. She got the better of him, I think, by almost everybody's estimation except for his, because he hadn't figured it out yet. So it took him a while to get his rhythm back. Do you think Trump understands something about the American left that we don't understand? His views on the left might tie in with a lot of other people's views on the left that ended up being Trump supporters? I think what he understood was the power of appealing to people on the left who might not have been as comfortable 23:03 with some of the culture war issues that their leadership had become comfortable with. I think transgender is really the underappreciated issue of this campaign. It's really fascinating in a way. Of all the major issues facing the United States—the economy and immigration and economics and climate change and wars overseas—how many transgender athletes are really out there trying to get on teams with girls? You would think this is a huge epidemic problem by the way the Republicans were talking about it. But it didn't matter that it, frankly, isn't that big an issue because they made it into a touchstone of are you with us, or are you with them? The most successful ad Trump ran probably had the kicker of “Kamala is for they/them; Trump is for you,” right, 24:02 mocking her for being with the pronoun crowd, part of this PC, woke, overly liberal crowd that cared more about whether prisoners should get transgender surgery than cared about the price of eggs and milk at the grocery store. And the Democrats never figured out how to answer that. They never came up with an effective response. They almost didn't respond at all. They basically sort of left it unaddressed and assumed that people would see through it as just demagoguery. But in fact, I think it connected to a lot of their own voters, a lot of people who voted for Democrats. … Let's go to the victory. It's election night. Your thoughts? Yeah, election night. You know, it's fascinating. The polls have stayed relatively stable for weeks, and people were looking at a very small movement to see if we could detect momentum one way or the other. By the time Election Day came, a lot of Republicans were actually feeling kind of dubious that he could win, 25:05 and a lot of Democrats were feeling kind of positive that she would. But it turned out to be the opposite. Throughout the night, county after county, state after state, as you watched these results come in, they were all moving in one direction. Even in places that voted for Democrats, they were six to eight points more for Trump than they had been four years earlier, so you could see the trendlines as the evening played on. And there was never a moment on election night that you had the sense that Harris was actually in the game. It was falling like dominoes for Trump, one after the other, until he had won not just one, not just two, but all seven of the battleground states. His father taught him about winners and losers, right? We sure know about that. What's that inauguration that's coming up here in January, what's it going to mean to him? 26:03 This inauguration is the ultimate vindication for Donald Trump. This to him is proof positive that he is life's greatest winner; that you, in fact, should never count him down; that, in fact, he's never actually lost in his own mind, but that this inauguration proves that he is the most, the best, the biggest, all of these superlatives that he likes to use time and time again. And it's a chance for him to revel in the discomfort of his enemies. He will be on stage, and he will be taking the oath of office, and they will be out of power. And he has the last laugh as far as he's concerned. When he visits Biden last week—you've watched this happen many times now. It's what used to make Dan Rather cry when he talked about the peaceful transfer of power. What did you see when you saw that? I saw two very uncomfortable men trying to pretend something was not true. 27:09 Now, every meeting like that after an election is fraught with some degree of that. Bush hosted Obama; Clinton hosted Bush. These are people who didn't want the other guy to win. But I don't think ever has it been as personal or fraught as the meeting between Biden and Trump. Biden had called him a threat to democracy, had called him a threat to the country, a liar, a cheat, all these other things, and believes he is a terrible human being and had not stopped believing that just because the voters went the other direction. And Trump, for his part, had called Biden senile and demented and the worst president in the history of the world and a crook. He referred to his own family as the “Biden Crime Family” time and time again. And here they were now, sitting side by side, with a fire in the fireplace behind them, 28:03 shaking hands and pretending to be civil with each other. And it was extraordinary to see that. It was really quite a surreal moment, I think, even in the history of that White House. Does it reveal something about America, Peter? I think it reveals something about Joe Biden. Joe Biden was determined to follow the protocols and traditions and norms of American democracy, even if it hurt. And he was going to demonstrate, through the power of his modeling, why it matters. And he was going to do for Trump what Trump didn't do for him, right? Trump didn't have him to the White House when Biden won. Quite the opposite. And Biden wanted to be the gracious, outgoing president. He wanted to be somebody who did it the way it should be done, and in so doing, in a way, that was kind of an implied jab at Trump, of course, because Trump didn't do it the way it was supposed to be done. What is the Trump that we know so well—you know so well, and we know, thanks to you, so well? 29:06 … What is he doing with Dr. Oz and all the Fox anchors and Tulsi Gabbard and Matt Gaetz? What the heck is going on, Peter? Well, there are two things I think going on here. One is that Trump learned from his first term that personnel is everything. And when he won in 2016, he didn't know anybody in politics; he didn't know anybody in government. And so he picks a bunch of people that he never had met, didn't spend any time with, and in too many cases, from his point of view, turned out to be not aligned with him when it came to his agenda or doing things that these people thought were unwise or in many cases illegal. And he became frustrated that, time and time again, the people around him were the ones who were actually resisting some of the things he wanted to do and say. 30:00 And in fact, we interviewed a top Trump aide who said that he viewed his job as throwing sand in the gears. They were trying to slow things down, maybe stop Trump from doing things that he thought, again, were illegal or unwise or dangerous, but meant that Trump found himself stymied by his own people. He wasn't going to have that happen a second time. He wasn't going to do that this time. This time he knew: no establishment Republicans who hadn't kowtowed to him; no senior military guys who weren't on his side. He was going to pick the loyalists. The number one quality for any of these positions was going to be loyalty to him. Period. Full stop. The second thing he's doing is he's testing Washington. He is pushing the system to see how far he can go. He is pushing, particularly the Republicans of the Senate, to see how far they will defer to him. He is throwing out people who would never be confirmed in any other time, never be confirmed by any other Senate, Republican or Democrat, people who are vastly different than the traditional nominees for these positions, 31:06 people who don't even believe in the departments that they're now being assigned to run, who'd like to blow them up. The idea that you're going to put in charge of the Department of Justice somebody who was under investigation by the Department of Justice for sex trafficking not that long ago, even though they didn't file charges against him, would have been unthinkable. In Washington, it used to be that if you simply didn't pay the taxes on your nanny, that would be enough to scuttle you as a Cabinet officer. Here, Trump is trying to put in people who have far more controversial aspects to their records. And he's daring Washington; he's daring the Senate; he's daring his fellow Republicans to stop him. And he's trying to see how far he can go. How much are you willing to eat? Are you really going to be deferential to me or not? I'm in charge. I'm the winner. You need to back down. And it's not enough for him to say, “You have to accept this nominee that you might not find qualified.” 32:00 It's that he's telling the Senate, “You should recess so that I can appoint these without your confirmation.” And that, in effect, would rewrite the balance of power that the Founders created more than two centuries ago. He's saying that you ought to be able to put in place a Cabinet without bothering with Senate confirmation, which would be a drastic change in the checks and balances of our system. And the Republicans didn't automatically say no; they say, “Well, maybe. Maybe we'll think about it; we'll see what happens,” which is what he wants. He wants them to back down. He wants them to have to prove their loyalty to him. … Back in the old days, Jan. 6, 2021, when Eastman and others were his advisers, they didn't have the juice to do whatever it was he wanted to do. Who's helping him do this now? Who's there? Is there a brain trust, or is this really fully formed from the mind of the Donald Trump we know? 33:00 I think this is less 4D chess than it is animal instinct, right? I think it's about dominance. It's about “I'm establishing I am the king beast here in the jungle, and you will defer to me. You will bow down to me.” He is—it's all about instinct, I think, with him. Now, he has people around him who are explaining the niceties of how recess appointments work and what he might be able to do under the Constitution and this and that, sort of the same people who kind of came up with the Project 2025 and so forth. There's conservative intellectuals who have been getting ready for this moment for four years, so he has a few people around him who are able to kind of help him with the tactics. But the broader strategy, the broader approach here, that's all Trump. That's all Trump's effort at dominance. And he does not want a second term in which he has to share power with other branches of government. He wants the other branches of government to defer to him. So last question: How does all this come from his life story? 34:04 Remember that Trump had never spent a day in public office or the military before becoming president. His entire career up till that point, into his 60s, had been running a family organization with no shareholders, no board of directors, no other person he had to answer to other than himself. If he snapped his fingers, it happened. He was the boss. And that's what he thought government would be. And his first term actually showed it wasn't like that. That's not the way government works. That's not ever been the way it works, and he was frustrated by that. And I think he's coming back the second time determined to make government more answerable to him, to assert his authority, to dominate the scene, to make the United States government, in effect, like the Trump Organization so that if he snaps his fingers, he's going to be able to get done what he wants to get done.

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