Donald Trump vs The World with Jonah Bromwich

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1:07And when it comes to checking off coverage, a State Farm agent can help you choose an option that's right for you. Whether you prefer talking in person, on the phone, or using the award-winning app, it's nice knowing you have help finding coverage that best fits your needs. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. One of the things that's funny about Trump is, especially these days, right, I think he is rightly recognized now as a real media savant. That was not something that was always the case. I think that especially during the first time, you'll remember this. People underestimated kind of his ability just to communicate on his own behalf.

1:41And so after court, it's the same as always, right? Like on one hand, it can be a little boring. It can be a little repetitive because it's just grievance after grievance. But the thing that he's really good at is the thing you see other politicians on the left and right being really good at, which is he repeats his message over and over again. So Trump after court every day, no matter what had happened in court, bogus trial, corrupt judge, corrupt prosecutor. He would hit the same talking points again and again, always on message, always extremely consistent. He had cameras kind of right in the hallway so he could get right out of the courtroom where no one could see what was going on, where all this fascinating stuff was going on, where people were talking about this conspiracy that he engaged in during the 2016 election.

2:19And that's why they won the presidency the first time. Get away from that where no one can see it. get right to the cameras, tell them your message. And that's going to resonate at least with the people who are already prone to support Trump. And because the rest of the trial was invisible to the American public, I think that people didn't really come away with an understanding of what was going on inside the court. Welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. Jonah Bromwich is joining us today. He is a reporter for the New York Times covering criminal justice in the New York region.

2:49He's out with a bestselling book, uh dragon on center street new york versus donald j trump i gotta say jonah before you joined i was saying to my staff i love this because it's a crime drama but i know all the players i know all the interests i know all the personalities so i spent a lot of time with these people and uh you do such a wonderful job of describing everything but let's step back for a second and before we dive into the book give us a sense of your background how did you end up reporting from inside the courtroom. Sure, sure. Well, thanks for having me. I am, or I was at that point anyway, the New York Times Metro reporter covering Manhattan State Court.

3:31So we have all these different beats. And the beat that I had, which I took in 2021, just happened to come at a time where Alvin Bragg was running for a Manhattan district attorney, and Cyrus Arvance Jr., his predecessor, had this long-running case against Donald Trump. And so I came into the job as those two things were happening. And a few years later, Vance had gone, Bragg had stepped in, and it was Bragg who actually brought the first case against Trump, the only case ever prosecuted against a president to make it to trial. And so I was just kind of the lucky beat reporter who happened to be covering that institution when Trump went on trial and I got to cover the whole thing.

4:16he's only really lost one case that I'm super aware of. I mean, yes, he got convicted in this, but he won the presidency. He blew it up. But he got nailed during the Trump University situation, didn't he? I mean, that was like one down there on Center Street that he got. Yeah, definitely. He's lost a fair amount of civil cases. He doesn't do overall that well once these things typically go to trial, once there's discovery, once there's a of you know kind of fact finding happening that typically goes against him so but this is the only criminal trial he ever faced and it's a big difference and it did really have the the possibility of really serious punishment and even jail time in this case that he lost so this was kind of apart from some of his other major losses let it why did he let it go to trial why did he let it go to trial why did trump let this case go to trial why didn't he plead guilty well Well, Anthony, I think you can plead out and write a pay a fine or something like that.

5:14Yeah, I mean, you can answer this question just as well as I can. But what we saw during the trial, one of the things that I think has worked really astoundingly well for Trump is never conceding. It's understanding the supremacy of the political kind of in all fields. So even if it's legal, even if it's something that seems as if it shouldn't bear on kind of what he's doing politically, always has political considerations top of mind. And so to plead out to admit guilty, even to these kind of slap on the wrist style felonies where had he pled guilty, he really wouldn't have paid anything more than a fine.

5:46I think it would have been so kind of different from what his supporters suggest of him. It would have changed some of the narratives around his first term in office. Yeah. So there was just no reason to do it. Cohen, never admit defeat, never say you're sorry. And it's a political reason he can flex and say, this was lawfare against me. And this will help galvanize me. And also money raising, right? He was raising, he was sending out one email, one text message. Right, right. A minute asking his constituents for money and they were giving it to him. Okay. I also think it was dispositional, right?

6:22Can you imagine him pleading guilty? Like just saying, yes, I did it. And I'm sorry, I did it. It's interesting. I've seen him lose a few different trials because I also covered these civil trials. And one of the things the judges typically come away with is this guy just cannot, does not express remorse. One of the judges in his New York civil trials said that his lack of remorse bordered on the pathological. So just to think about him coming in and saying, pleading guilty and expressing remorse, it just doesn't seem like something he might even be capable of doing. summer's here and the last thing we all want to be doing is spending hours meal planning or making last-minute grocery runs that's why hello fresh saves me it's the number one meal kit and for a good reason they send fresh ingredients and easy recipes straight to your door like the sun-dried tomato grilled cheese sandoz yes please and this summer they've made it easier with ready-made meals chef crafted dishes ready in just three minutes i've got my eye on the southwest chicken bowl and the creamy Alfredo truffle cavatappi.

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8:22I'm going to write it. When did that happen? That's a great question. The story that really excited me and I thought was useful for people to see is the story, which is the first chapter of the book, as you know, of how we broke the news that Trump had been indicted. I thought it was just a good story. It really showed how journalism worked because it wasn't just kind of a handout from defense lawyers or handout from the prosecutors. It was something we worked really hard to do. And so after that had happened, I had actually written that up just as kind of a straightforward story. And I thought, you know, if the trial proves as compelling as this story of us just breaking the news, the indictment, then I think I have a book on my hands.

9:05And the thing about this trial is that it was the most exciting, the most interesting, the most bizarre thing I've ever really witnessed. So once it started, having Trump in the courtroom there every day, understanding that television cameras weren't going to be able to see this, that I was one of the very few people who was going to be witness to this particular piece of history, a president sitting on trial, confronted by people who would work with him, people who still considered him a friend, and just the kind of tension and spectacular nature of that proceeding. There was no chance that I wasn't going to do a book.

9:39Okay.

9:42I guess, I mean, there's some really interesting characters in here, right? Because let me rephrase it. Does he have good legal counsel? It's a great question. So Trump has for years, for years, kind of run through lawyers. And one of the the things that you see every time that he is represented, particularly in court, is you see these lawyers come out with these very like Trump-like statements. And you say, oh, the client has an enormous amount of control here. It's a great question in this particular trial. He's represented by Todd Blanche, who's now the deputy attorney general, and Emil Bovey, who is up for judgeship, but is also high-ranking official of the Justice Department now.

10:26Now, as state court lawyers, they are dreadful. I mean, they did a bad job in a winnable case in terms of trial. As Trump lawyers, where the political is always the kind of primary objective, they're pretty good. They don't concede anything. They push and delay and attack the judge. And they are good allies to Trump in making the whole thing seem ridiculous and spen up and absurd. And I think that was his highest priority. So insofar as for Trump, sometimes lawyers are simply kind of PR people, people who help him kind of communicate to the public. They did a good job of that. OK, do you think that Trump doesn't matter?

11:07Does it matter? Does he need good lawyers? Is he just now a let me rephrase it. He's now a political icon. And so putting him in jail or harassing Trump is going to cause everybody a problem. Right. Because he's a political icon. And you can't – when you jail political icons, you make them more powerful. Mandela, also Adolf Hitler, Martin Luther King Jr. I'm talking about good and bad political. Is it like – is he post-legal or is he post – Yeah, he still needs good lawyers. He still needs good lawyers. I'll tell you why. Because saying like good and bad lawyers a little bit like saying someone is smart or stupid, it's often like kind of broadly true, but it doesn't fully capture what it is you're trying to say about the person in question.

11:59So one of the things that Blanche and Bogey were really good at is that they were imaginative lawyers. They would take what Trump said, why can't we do this? Why can't we do that? And they would try and put it into practice in the courtroom. That really worked terribly. And you can see in the book specific decisions that they made and why they worked so badly. but it also helped them when they were pushing these cases to be delayed. And one of the reasons that Trump has broad immunity now is because those lawyers appealed and said, you know, we should be offered presidential immunity, that he should be immune for being prosecuted for actions he took while he was in office.

12:34And no one expected that to work. I mean, it's, you know, you can, in hindsight, it makes sense that it would have been effective given the makeup of the Supreme Court, et cetera. But people thought it was preposterous. And yet it delayed his federal trials, which were the much more threatening trials than the one he ultimately faced. And now he has this unbelievable immunity. And the reason that Trump, too, is proceeding the way it's proceeding is because they got this major victory at the Supreme Court. Were Trump not immune from prosecution in the way that he is, this would be a totally different term.

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13:45Trust me, you'll feel the difference in the very first night. Sleep cooler, lounge lighter, stay cozy. All right. He is the king of post-court day performance. Am I wrong? No, you're 100 % right. Tell us a little bit about the post-court day performance of Donald J. Trump. One of the things that's funny about Trump is especially these days, right, because he I think he is rightly recognized now as a real media savant. That was not something that was always the case. I think that especially during the first time, you'll remember this. People underestimated kind of his ability just to communicate on his own behalf.

14:22No question. And so after court, it's the same as always. Right. Like on one hand, it can be a little boring. It can be a little repetitive because it's just grievance after grievance. But the thing that he's really good at is the thing you see other politicians on the left and right being really good at, which is he repeats his message over and over again. And so Trump after court every day, no matter what had happened in court, bogus trial, corrupt judge, corrupt prosecutor. He would hit the same talking points again and again. And so if you were liable at all. Right. And he didn't go into what had happened in court that day.

14:56It's not as if he. The hell in a handbasket. Exactly. Exactly. So it was just like it was it was consistently the same monologue, sometimes angrier, sometimes with a stack of legal papers showing that this lawyer and that lawyer and a third lawyer thought the case was ridiculous. But always on message, always extremely consistent. And he had cameras kind of right in the hallway so he could get right out of the courtroom where no one could see what was going on, where all this fascinating stuff was going on, where people were talking about this conspiracy that he engaged in during the 2016 election.

15:27and that's why he won the presidency the first time. Get away from that where no one can see it. Get right to the cameras. Tell them your message. And that's going to resonate at least with the people who are already prone to support Trump. And because the rest of the trial was invisible to the American public, I think that people didn't really come away with an understanding of what was going on inside the courtroom.

15:50Okay, this is not in your book, but I sort of got this from your book. Okay. And I'm going to try to glean it for you. And then I want you to react to it. Okay. There's a likability to Donald Trump. Even for the people that say they don't like him, he has a personableness style on camera. Am I wrong about that? Because every thing in the book, you pointing out that he's winning lots of hearts and minds. They're sympathetic to him. Trump is extremely personable. So if that's what we mean by likability, like I completely agree. I remember I was working in the New York Times. I was on our breaking news desk when he was running in 2016.

16:36And he came in to speak to, you know, the op-ed people and a bunch of top newsroom people. And it was on the record. And I was helping to transcribe it because I was a pretty young reporter at that point. And, you know, the New York Times was tough on Trump in that term. And there were a lot of people whose politics in the room certainly did not match his. And the big takeaway that I remember having is he went into the room, he started talking. Within seconds, everyone was laughing. You know, he really put people at ease. People enjoy being around him. So, yeah, I think there is a basic kind of personable nature to how he is certainly in private.

17:11And many, many people have said that. I think that's true.

17:17I mean, what was your experience of that? You would know firsthand. I'll tell you this story. I was on the 16th floor waiting for him to go to a meeting. It was May of 2016. He came off the elevator. He goes, oh, oh, where's the money guy? Oh, now everything's going to be okay. I'm going to get to the presidency. I finally got the money in the room. And it was very funny. You know what I mean? And Rona was there as assistant, and he was like calling me the money guy. You know what he's like, you know? Yeah, yeah. And I always tell people, don't underestimate the personal charm. He charmed the living daylights out of Elon Musk.

18:01Elon Musk said that he loved him as much as a non-gay guy, as much as a straight guy can love another man. It's funny that you bring up Rona. So Rona Graff is Trump's longtime assistant, and she testified at the trial. And she loves him. She absolutely loves him. And that was something that I'd seen. I covered the trial of his company in New York a few years earlier. There was a lot of people like Ronagraph who had worked for Trump for a long time. And these people love him. They love him. And they see him as this kind of larger than life, this kind of not just a boss, but an icon. And these are very kind of New York folks.

18:35And that was really striking for me to see it, even in that first trial, to understand that these people who love Trump, not because of his politics per se, but because they had worked for him and they enjoyed doing so. And that kind of flew in the face. I am not a fan of him as president. I have spoken my piece there, but he did get to the presidency for a reason. He has this arm. I think one of the things I got from your book, Jonah, was that, you know, he may be winning points on trial and losing points on trial. Of course, we all know the end of the case. He loses the case, but he's winning in the court of public opinion.

19:14Yeah. Obviously, because he goes on to the presidency. And of course, the judge has to give him a zero time in jail. So give us a few things that you clean from your observation during those days, one short year ago, that enables him to win in the court of public opinion. Sure. Well, I think that this one of the reasons I wrote this book is because I see this trial as kind of a perfect narrative about Donald Trump versus institutions and particularly institutions that concern the rule of law. Right. Because you have Donald Trump facing the Manhattan District Attorney and this judge, Juan Mershon.

19:51And I think that this case, which is about this kind of conspiracy to win the 2016 election by burying three separate stories over the span of more than a year, is really compelling, is really interesting. But the Manhattan District Attorney, Alvin Bragg, and the judge, Juan Mershon, did not speak in public like Donald Trump. They did not present their brag to not present the case to the American people. Mershon never really defended himself in public in any way other than through writing, which, you know, let's be honest, how many people are reading judicial opinions coming out of New York state court.

20:26And so one of the things that to me that this trial showed was not just the dominance of Trump himself as a media figure, but the dominance of the ways in which he communicates the the the cable sound by the tweet or true social post. he was able to explain his case against these institutions far far better than the institutions were able to present a case against him and that's not saying they didn't have a strong case i i think this manhattan case is much more interesting much more compelling and would be more compelling to americans than they even understand it but it was so successfully understood to be stormy daniels hush money a simple story of false business records rather than this more complex story of this conspiracy to win the 2016 election.

21:11And so to me, the lesson really is that the institutions, if they want to be strong, if they want to be resilient in this era, they need to learn to communicate on their own behalf. They need to learn to speak, maybe not exactly the way that Donald Trump speaks, but find an audience that will listen to them so they can explain where they're coming from, why institutions do what they do and institutional players do what they do. How do you want the book to remember? Okay, so it's a legal thriller. It's a political postmortem. There's a historical writing here. I mean, this is, someone's going to read your book in 20 years.

21:49They'd be writing about the era of Donald Trump. What are they going to find in this book? Well, they're going to find the best, by far, kind of chronicle of this trial. This trial that was the biggest news in the world and then suddenly disappeared. So they're going to find, I think, kind of a front row seat to a trial that was immensely historically important. They're also going to find two things in flux, a history of kind of media and politics overlapping as institutions in this era kind of struggled to figure out how to deal with the Internet, how to deal with social media and how to deal with these kind of insurgent figures like Donald Trump.

22:26They'll also find Donald Trump that they they will understand more as a historical figure. I think one of the ways I tried to write about him in this book was less about the immediate political. I didn't want to talk about, oh, this policy, that policy or this choice or that choice. I wanted people to understand him as this remarkable media figure. And that means understanding they came out of not just the tabloid era, as is often discussed, but the magazine era. This was a guy who in the 80s and 90s, when he was coming up as a businessman, had a gift for winning magazine covers, had a gift for polarizing people, rode those magazine covers almost to the kind of the brink of failure, but then instead got The Apprentice, became a reality television star, and then rode the social media internet to political power.

23:12I think that Trump's kind of history in media shows the way that our politics has changed and our culture has changed. And one of the reasons that the law is less empowered now is because institutions have failed to keep up. So I hope that someone finds a really compelling kind of time capsule of this kind of transformational moment for all these different entities, all these different institutions. It's just an amazing, it's an amazing, interesting time to live. And I think this trial, which is really the kind of hinge between Trump one and Trump two, some of the kind of the malfeasance of the original campaign, catching up with him during the third campaign for president and then kind of failing whatsoever to make political impact.

23:55I think that's a really important moment. And people will just kind of find that all in this book. Okay, so we're at the point in the podcast. This is all great content. I love it, and the book is awesome. And just reminding people, the title is Dragon on Center Street, New York versus Donald A. Trump. We're down to the five words. This is my last bit of the podcast. I'm going to read you five words. You're going to tell me a word or two or a sentence. If I say New York, you say what? the best it's a lot of fun to be here actually i love new york i'm never i'm i'm never leaving new york okay don't even want paying the taxes power i said the word power attention what about justice

24:42the law dragon chaos okay and what about trump i said the word trump Dominance. What's next for you, Jonah? I'm going to stay at The New York Times, which is where I am now. Right now, I cover kind of the collision of the political and the rule of law. So federal law enforcement in New York and the way that Trump is affecting it, the way that White House is affecting it, some of the major cases that we expect to come out of the White House in the coming months and years. And if I see another great story, if I see another kind of great chronicle of our time that I think not only could be kind of a thrilling story, very readable story, but also something that tells us about the moment we're living in.

25:29Hopefully I'll read another book. All right, well, listen, the book is awesome. Again, I'll read it again. The title is Dragon on Center Street, New York versus Donald J. Trump. Thank you, Jonah Bromwich. You wrote a great book and want people to go out there and buy it. So thank you for joining us today on Open Book. Thanks, Anthony. Really appreciate it. Every minute your finance team spends wrestling with data is a minute lost. Insight Software's AI-powered insights instantly move you from complexity to clarity. Automated analysis, real-time reporting, strategic recommendations, all at your fingertips.