Pool Me Twice, Shame On You

20:41Jon Favreau:Which is why I think he's giving this 60-day immediate license to the Iranians to sell oil and gas, because they're just trying to flood the zone and get prices down as fast as they can. I agree it's an open question about how quickly gas prices come down and whether they come down to where they were and whether that's kind of how people are anchoring this in their mind. Yeah, but gas prices aren't just determined by the amount of oil that Iran lets through the straight. And by the way, it's not as if the straight is back up to where it was before. There's still much less traffic through there.

21:10Jon Favreau:But if you have Iran, I think, immediately saying we are going to close the strait again to say, I think purposely right to whether whatever the the inciting cause to signal that at any moment we can shut this thing down again, that that is our power and we plan to use it. Right. How is that going to give anybody confidence that prices are going to be reliable, that oil will be reliable, that you can count on prices coming down? Trump threatening them, threatening to kill the negotiators. I mean, like, we're just... It's just millennial, you know, locker room talk. Yeah, it's what J.D. Vance called it.

21:40Jon Favreau:Yeah, yeah.

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23:35Jon Favreau:That's HIMSS.com slash crooked for your free online visit. HIMSS.com slash crooked. Prescription required. See website for details and important safety information. Sildenafil is the generic version of Viagra. Viagra is a registered trademark of Viatris Specialty LLC. see HIMSS is not affiliated with or endorsed by Viatris. All right. We briefly discussed this on Friday's pod, but Iran isn't the only war Trump's lost lately. He's also been defeated by the algae in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Turns out Trump's Mar-a-Lago pal who got the no-bid contract for$14 million and counting to renovate the Reflecting Pool, a fellow convicted criminal by the name of John Cafaro.

24:15Have you seen this guy's picture? Incredible. Yes.

24:18Jon Favreau:Yes, I recommend everyone Google right now, John Cafaro, find the photo of him in the 80s wearing the double-breasted suit. Is it a comb over or a hairpiece? I'm clear. I don't know. It looks like he's trying to kill the Aristocats.

24:35Jon Favreau:He pleaded guilty to bribing James Travickin. Yeah, that's who it was. I saw the bribery. Hair on hair violence. Those guys both had amazing sets of hair. Two convictions, campaign finance, bribery. Yeah, this is the guy that got the no-bid contract Shocker. So he didn't do... He looks like when he gets mad, his shirt rolls up. Like, what's that thing called when you have a tuxedo thing? Oh, yeah. The tuxedo front? It looks like it goes and rolls up. That probably happened when he found out about the allergy. So John Kofara didn't do the top-notch work he's known for, and now they have to drain the pool and start from scratch.

25:07The president, per usual, is blaming everyone else, including reporter John Carl of ABC News, quote, dirty cop James Comey, and other alleged vandals, five of whom have apparently been arrested, including a former Olympic canoer who says he was just reaching into the pool to feel the detached liner.

25:24Jon Favreau:Seems like he was up the up the reflecting pool without a paddle, this guy.

25:30Trump threatened the rest of us with a 10 year prison sentence for the destruction or even the attempted destruction of such things, which he said, quote, will be fully enforced. Naturally, Trump got a lot of appropriately skeptical questions on this and the Oval on Monday.

25:44Jon Favreau:here's what he said are the contractors who did the initial work with the reflecting pool are they to blame for the current condition or is it no no we had vandals vandals you know we have a hundred and we have a i think two hundred ninety three hundred foot slit right through it probably a box cutter or a knife of some kind the national guard and police have been all over the mall how would these vandals have gotten so close to do something like that i mean we didn't have we didn't have a lot of them then who would think that somebody would go into a pool and take a knife and start cutting it yeah well let's put it this way when you have a 350 I think it's 350 not 250 a 350 foot slit from one end to the other you think that's proof you know that's what we've been down there today looking for that slip that you mentioned well you'd have to do see the parks department they'll show it to you about this situation as we stood here with you in april when you first revealed the plans i said what in april you showed us pictures of what you were going to do at the pool when you said you had a guy who was going to do it in a week for about a million dollars well it's been two months 16 and a half million yeah okay ready barack hussein obama have you ever heard of him yeah he spent two years and over 100 million dollars i spent two months maybe less and i have a better product now i can't help it if somebody goes in with a knife and starts hacking it up.

27:14And we also have pictures of it. Can you release the photos? At the right time, you'll see it. You'll see it in court. He's so pissed.

27:22Jon Favreau:Find the guy who did the slit. Yeah, is that with a box cutter? Like it's a reflecting pool, Muhammad Atta, just terrorizing. I wonder where someone could have possibly gotten the idea to use a knife to cut the reflecting pool. Might have a clue here. let's watch this will last for at least 50 years and you'll never have a leak it's very strong you couldn't if you had a knife i don't want to give anybody ideas if you had a knife you can't even cut it so strong so powerful powerful rubber powerful rubber not so powerful so i feel like this went from mostly funny to fairly alarming now that they're trying to arrest random scapegoats just because trump can't admit uh he fucked up what do you guys make of this whole situation.

28:08Jon Favreau:So you make a big deal about how you're going to finally fix the pool because Barack Hussein Obama and Joe Biden couldn't do it. You're the only one who has the ability to do it. You do a no bid contract for a guy who is the crony picture in the crony entry of the dictionary. You declare victory. Then all of a sudden the algae is coming back. And so you have your people lie about that. They post pictures saying that it's better, that this is not real. It's perfect. It's perfect. It's perfect. The lie draws more attention to the story. So reporters start covering it. OK, because you hyped it up so much and are lying, the media is making more of an issue of it.

28:41Jon Favreau:So you start blaming saboteurs, even though they don't seem to exist. That generates only more coverage. Now you're arresting random people for for checking out the mess that you've made. Now you've turned what was a silly and ultimately small story about a pool renovation into gross incompetence, corruption and rising fascism. So there's even more coverage. And then declare that the media is obsessed. Why is the media so obsessed with what's happening to the reflecting pool? Well, maybe you said you went and held up a picture about who you were the one that was going to fix it and then turned it into just an example of every aspect of the lying, the lawlessness, the corrupt deals that you're making, the incompetence.

29:24Jon Favreau:You just turned it into a perfect metaphor for everything you've done wrong in this administration. So yeah, people are going to cover i'm still in the mostly funny camp i mean i think jim comey at his house like cultivating sea monkeys in the backyard releasing them into the reflecting pool that's funny like john cafaro having a company called green water services that's fine that's some funny shit too obviously it's bad that they're arresting this random olympian man who was just biking around and accusing of sabotaging like you watch um uh janine piero ranting away on fox about this stuff and we're all used to seeing her you know like six chardonnays deep just kind of like doing a prime time hit and then you remember oh wait this woman can issue a subpoenas that's actually a little scary it's bad but i think all of this will probably go away because obviously this is just algae grows because it's sunny and it's hot in the pool and there's water in it it's what are we talking about it sounds like they just they just did everything wrong they did a bad job is the is the other thing and they spent a lot of money on it also um like none None of these people are going to jail because not like all of this is going to get laughed out of court.

30:27TMZ, TMZ, DC was down there all day today and they have all this footage of people being like arrested, detained. And these people are like you can see on foot on camera. They're just like look. Some of them are just looking down to take pictures and like seven. Like there's like park police. They're all it's complete madness. It is just, it is a lie on the level of like, now we're back to like Sean Spicer and the inaugural crowd. It's like, you know who cut the 300 foot slit in the reflecting pool? Fucking no one. Because that, it just, it did not happen. Because you look at the reflecting pool, there is no slit visible.

31:05Reporters have looked even since he just said that. So it didn't happen. It's impossible to do that. 300 feet, that's the size of a football field. someone's going to take a box cutter and cut a slit the size of the football field and no one's going to pay attention to that no one's going to see that they're not going to be seen also even if they did wouldn't cause the algae wouldn't cause the problem also you spend 14 million dollars on a reno that can be undid with a box cutter what kind of renovation is that it's also not

31:36Jon Favreau:a there's chunks of it floating up all over the fucking thing the algae's been growing since last week. It's what everybody said would happen. I just like, obviously, this is very silly. But now we're at the point where they got federal cops patrolling the National Mall to arrest people who are going to point things out that embarrass the dear leader. It is a it is, you know, the ballroom. And now this these are perfect metaphors for what this administration has done. I think it's the kind of thing that will stay stick with people in part because it's also stupid that this is what's taking up the president's time.

32:08Even if no one was paying attention to it, probably still taking up his time.

32:12Jon Favreau:Yeah, well, he's the reason we're all paying attention. He loves the reason we're all focused on this. He drove his ass down to the reflecting pool. This all started with him doing a drive-by at the thing. We're going to build a wall around this thing, too. They're going to have to cover it up. They are. They're going to cover it up so people can't take photos of it the same way they built that giant wall around the renovation of the ballroom because they didn't want embarrassing photos of the ballroom. It's not going to go away. The reflecting pool is just there. It's a big part of the National Mall.

32:34Jon Favreau:It's eight acres big. It's massive. And it is not going to be fixed for a long time. They don't know how to fix it. And look, we know how serious this administration is about punishing people who destroy federal property. It's just something that they have cared about for a long time. Take it very seriously. Take it very, very seriously. Very, very seriously. Every single person who did that on January 6th, completely free, pardoned, commuted. And now they're just arresting random people, which is fascinating. He's also now saying that it's people dumping fertilizer in there. They're dumping first.

33:05Vandals are dumping fertilizer. That's coming. So they got that through the straight. And now here we go. Now they got now they're dumping it in there. Yeah. The Comey thing for those who didn't pay attention is someone there was some vandalism where someone on the lawn did like an 8647 unrelated to the unrelated to the reflecting.

33:22Jon Favreau:Unrelated to 8647 47 in grass. truth about it and so trump thinks that because comey did that with the shells or took a picture of the shells and posted it which he's now also being prosecuted for that someone was inspired by that to to box cut his reflecting pool i i one of the stupidest fucking thing yeah we've covered a lot of stupid stories yeah this is this is going to be a this is a chapter you're going to want to come back to yeah when the trump story is we'll probably forget about it by the end of the trump administration but the reflecting pool this is one of the dumber ones i i don't know that look i think it's going to be in the ballroom category because this is just going to be something for months and months now they got to drain it again it's not like their plan worked the first time they got a better plan this time because apparently the shit they put down on the floor of that reflecting pool didn't work uh it's just so i don't is it the same jag off that's going to be doing the next round is so are they getting a new new no-bid contract blue rubber floating just nuking it with chemicals well it's so funny because when the whole thing started they were like it seems kind of strange he's hiring just like a pool guy he's like nah he's got it well it's also funny that last time we recorded i think the department of interior was just posting fake pictures of the pool as blue and saying everything's great so they thought that was their plan for all they were just going to ai their way through it and i guess now they're like all right the ai stuff didn't work so now we're gonna have to blame some fake vandals and now we're gonna we're not that far away from like the government posting great news everybody gas is down to$11 a gallon.

34:48Jon Favreau:You're all getting more chocolate this week. Your chocolate rations are up. So one renovation that did go well for Trump this week, the brand new Qatari Force One that he'll be flying around in and ultimately taking with him when he leaves the White House as a parting gift. The government won't say how much we all paid to retrofit the new plane, though the Secretary of the Air Force said in a hearing last year that it would probably be less than$400 million. Privately, the Air Force said it would use some of its nuclear modernization funds to pay for upgrading the plane because why do we need those?

35:18And sure enough, a month later, there was an unexplained$900 million transfer from a nuclear account to an unnamed classified project. They are calling the plane project classified, which is why they're not revealing any of the costs. Not that Trump wants you to think this thing was done cheaply. He's actually proud of how much money it cost. Here he is now. This plane was transformed into a flying White House at a level of luxury that nobody's ever seen before. Probably even almost outside of an airplane. Nobody's ever seen anything like this. Nobody's ever seen anything like it.

35:56Jon Favreau:It's nicer than any room outside of an airplane. That's all but a very small set of rooms. There's still another two Air Force Ones on order. This is just what the Pentagon is calling a bridge aircraft. Well, he's going to steal it after. That's why. This is the bridge one because this is the one he takes to go. This is the to go one. You fly to sea. This is the dog bag. This is the one he's going to take with him. How well do you think this one pulls? I mean, I talked to Maggie and Jonathan Swan about this. In their book, they report that Qatar initially wanted to be paid$150 to$200 million for the plane.

36:28Jon Favreau:And then suddenly the plane was a gift. And they report that the idea for making a gift was, quote, generated at the POTUS level. so it's just part of this like ongoing corruption story i think this has really become a monument to the corruption and it really broke through in the moment um and i do think this is a big problem for him politically to the extent that he cares i mean it is a problem for him politically but like one of his superpowers as we all remember is the years of branding on the apprentice and with uh the art of the deal was that he was a brilliant businessman and he was rich and he didn't need this job and he had all the money he wanted this was really a sacrifice was coming into government And this, the plane, the narrative around the corruption has really pierced that narrative.

37:09Jon Favreau:And you would think he would care. But then we watch him do like a rollout of his corrupt gift. Very proud. Where he does remarks and like a staged photo op. You think the Qataris are feeling like they got their money's worth? Yeah, this worked out great for them. You think they give this free airplane and look what they got. They got Iran blowing their shit up and their economy in trouble because of the war in the Middle East that Trump caused. I don't know if they feel like they got a good deal out of this. Sitting there next to JD doing track changes to the fucking document. No, no, no. We can't do that.

37:39Jon Favreau:They're not doing that. They're not doing that. That, that, that, that, that. The, it is like, you know, it's interesting the difference between term one and term two with Trump, right? Because term one, like he felt like he got all the kind, he gets all the prestige and benefits of being president. He loves having that plane. He would do speeches in front of the plane. He loves doing that. And it was always such a bummer to have Trump, you know, garner the prestige of the White House, right? Like he had that power behind him. which he did. And that included Air Force One. It was like, oh, so sad to see Donald Trump representing our country on that plane.

38:12Jon Favreau:And now we're going to have this new version of the plane that looks different. And it's actually his plane that he's taking with him. And so now, whenever he gets off the plane, we're going to have this little symbol of corruption behind him in every shot. And he's going to still use it like he did the old one. But there behind him is the proof that he is the most corrupt leader on earth, maybe the most corrupt, certainly the most corrupt president in American history, right there on the tarmac. What do you guys think of the red, white, and blue? I kind of like it. I like it. Yeah, it looks pretty cool.

38:38Jon Favreau:I mean, the old version, I like the old version too, like the Robin's egg blue on the bottom. And that was also a little piece of history. I mean, that was redesigned by JFK in 1962. He also spent a bunch of time personally with a designer named Raymond Lowy, redesigning the look of Air Force One. And Trump just sort of trashed that as he's trashing the Kennedy Center and renaming that and all these other monuments and institutions. So it's a piece of a puzzle. But yeah, I mean, aesthetically, it's like it's a sick plane. As far as Donald Trump being in charge of any kind of design, I feel like he didn't fuck it up too badly.

39:15Jon Favreau:It looks good. I could have. It's not like the oval. No, I thought it could have. We'll see what the inside looks like. Yeah, we haven't seen the inside yet. I saw a few pictures. I haven't. Oh, I hadn't seen the. I just saw the outside. I think it's just bigger and bigger. But I will say the one. thing that is incredibly ugly is they have instead of the kind of classic american flag on the back on the tail they have a waving american flag oh that's no good cheap paint like it looks tacky and it doesn't fit with the design it does fit with his design yes which is that makes me okay good at least there's some trump on there yeah so instead of having just sort of a classic straight american flag as you would on that's not waving because it's not a fucking flag it's a painting of a flag so you don't need to paint it waving they painted the cheesy waving thing on it which looks like ass i'm surprised he didn't put his fucking name on it i am too because again in the maggie and jonathan's book they talk like there's the scene where caroline levitt walks into the oval office and trump is personally super gluing some little gaudy gold thing onto the mantle piece like he's so personally engaged and invested in this stuff because he's a bored old man he really is just who has no interest in governing yes it's just like why couldn't he go into his interest in using the governing to make money for himself and his friends and to settle old scores and that's it an interior design that's his hobby in golf yeah at least like howard hughes had the decency to lock the door and fill the jars with piss like this guy's just got it's like just a different kind of of of uh kind of old craziness of like putting your name on everything putting gold on everything the question of what does qatar think they got a good deal here is an interesting one because remember in the first term, Qatar was briefly like blockaded by all the other countries in the Gulf.

40:55Jon Favreau:And then ultimately that deal was mediated by Jared Kushner. And interestingly, uh, that mediation happened right around the time when the Qataris, I think finally came in and bailed Jared out for like the 666 park av or whatever real estate deal he had done that went terribly South because they, you know, did the biggest real estate investment in Manhattan history right before the financial crisis. So, um, it's interesting though, Qatar is tiny and super isolated and pisses all its friends off through Al Jazeera and its foreign policy choices. And I think they wanted to get in well with Trump.

41:27Jon Favreau:But then, of course, the Iran stuff kind of complicates the ledger here on whether this worked out well. And look, now they gave a plane to one president. Now the expectation is going to be that every American president gets a plane from Qatar. Here's a plane. Can you do us a favor and stop causing foreign policy disasters that lead to our hotels exploding? That would be great. if you could just we gave you the fucking plane uh we got a we got a rosewood on fire here uh we're trying to convince people that it's awesome and no big deal that we're this close to these to iran and you're kind of influencers aren't doing it we need yeah jesus christ you know yeah the gay people can't hold hands but we got a fucking four seasons going can you help us out trying to build an even taller building Yeah.

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45:25All right. We didn't get a chance last week to talk about the latest with the Bill Pulte saga. Well, surprise, this corrupt moron has now taken over for Tulsi Gabbard as the acting director of national intelligence, a development that both Democrats and Republicans had tried to avoid. As Senator Mark Warner explained to Tommy, the original plan was to immediately confirm Trump's permanent pick for the job, federal prosecutor and former SEC chair Jay Clayton. But Trump got wind of that and announced that he was pulling back Clayton's nomination until Clayton's replacement at SDNY is approved by the Senate, all but ensuring that Pulte gets at least some time on the job.

46:03Why do you guys think that Trump didn't want his own pick? Jay Clayton confirmed as soon as possible. He did pick him.

46:09Jon Favreau:Well, it's hard to be inside of his mind. I think there's two things going on. One is the machinations around FISA and getting the SDNY confirmed, who is a former federal prosecutor, but also his personal lawyer at, I think, Sullivan and Cromwell, I think is where he is. So he sort of wants to get one of his guys in at SDNY. Fine. I think also Bill Pulte can do a lot of damage being DNI for a couple of weeks. Get some good political prosecutions going if he wants. That's what he did when he was going through the mortgage documents and trying to find ways to go after Comey and Tish James and all the rest.

46:48Jon Favreau:So, yeah, let's get it. He gets it, you know, get your fingers into the all the intelligence you want for a couple of weeks. That's valuable. Apparently, someone, a source familiar told CNN just before we recorded that Pulte is going to start carrying out firings, that the deep state firings have begun. And that part of it is to, I guess, get him in there so he can fire a bunch of fucking deep state people. Yeah. So Mark Warner, when I talked to him, was so concerned about Bill Pulte's access to information or being in the job even for a minute that he was basically ready to unanimously just like confirm Clayton by UC, just like push him forward and get it done.

47:21Jon Favreau:I think that Trump's weird gambit here is like he's mad that Republicans told him no about anything. So he's going to just freak out and decide to change the kind of up the ante. I think he genuinely seems to think that he can use the bipartisan desire to pass a very important intelligence collection program as a way to shoehorn in the SAVE Act and get that done. which is their crazy bill to like tackle the made up problem of non-citizen voter registration which doesn't happen but then with respect to Pulte like I think the question is does he want him to root around intelligence information find stuff about his enemies and then refer to the DOJ or do something with it or does Trump just want a purge of DNI employees I don't really get why he couldn't have had Tulsi Gabbard do a poll purge of DNI employees also seems like Jay Clayton would be happy to do that too.

48:14Jay Clayton is not some like, like, yeah, he's better than Bill Pulte, but he's been very loyal to Trump.

48:19Jon Favreau:He's very MAGA. I do think he's a serious person who is, you know, a serious prosecutor, was a, you know, was the SEC. Yeah. You know, so he's like had big jobs and hopefully like bring some relevant experience to this job. Pulte is obviously a clown. Speaking of Tulsi Gabbard, did either of you guys read the insane Washington Post story about the cult she grew up in that maybe still controls her? Wild. wild story yeah it's uh it's one of those things where because it's coming out after she's gone it's like oh well she shouldn't be dni well and she's not but man you kind of the thing that i took away from it is one of the things about tulsi gabbard i think that is it's she's just a puzzle she's just kind of confusing figure her yeah it was like a few more pieces went into place after that story yeah but like it was always like wait she you know she introduces bernie at the convention She used to be seen as on the left.

49:11Jon Favreau:She was anti-war, had this strange refusal to criticize Assad, then goes in this Trump direction. It was all just confusing. She was ideologically confusing. And then you dig into it and there's this collection of memos. First of all, you've never seen anything like it. Just random. There's a collection of memos that seem to be from this figure, this sort of religious leader inside of her life. these kind of like sort of harsh, like insulting directives coming all the time in her direction, what she should say on television, what bills she should introduce, how should she talk about certain issues?

49:45Jon Favreau:They deny that it's him. There's a lot of denials in the thing, but there's also references inside of these memos to his own life that don't refer to anybody else. Also, she said there's like, they matched like what she actually said on TV in the legislation she introduced and they matched exactly to all these memos where this person was telling her to do these things. Yes. And then on top of that, you have this collection of people. It's all this sort of strange bit of it. It's very cultish. It's also very like ham fisted and silly and amateur. They have a collection of people running dummy accounts to comment under articles on Hawaii newspapers about Tulsi and like on Twitter and all the rest.

50:24Jon Favreau:It's just this little kind of ramshackle, small operation. And then at one point, which I thought spoke to the kind of, I don't know what what kind of like master plan they thought they were implementing that that once Trump started running, there's one of the notes that something along the lines of it's a shame you're not running because he's doing what you were going to do. It's like you be president. Are you what are we talking about? I mean, she ran and she thinks apparently thinks the DNI is a platform to run again and this wants to try. And it's apparently a thing that she and Trump had gotten in fights about because, you know, remember when she put out that weird video after getting back to Hiroshima, nuclear annihilation.

51:00Jon Favreau:It was like clearly the context was in the midst of both the Putin Russia talks, but also the Iran negotiations. And Trump, I guess, yelled at her about it. I mean, my reaction to the story was similar to yours. Love it, which is like she's such a bizarre character. And like maybe this helps us understand this fucking weirdo that she was just taking literal direction from a cult leader. I hope it will get her out of politics forever. and that she will not run for president again. Apparently, like, I think, was it Roger Stone or Steve Bannon? One of those guys thinks that she could actually run.

51:29Jon Favreau:But it's fucking, it's crazy. And this person was the director of national intelligence. Like, just sort of speaks to the utter failure of vetting for any of these individuals. Yeah, or the success of the vetting, because it seems like this is who he wants to stack his administration with. You got RFK, conspiracy theorists, kooks. I mean, John Swain, who wrote the story, he said with his Washington Post colleague, Aaron Schaefer, I compared Gabbard's remarks in 32 TV interviews between 2014 and 2016 with the talking points memos intended for them. This is what the cult leader wrote, although he didn't sign his name to them, but they're all from the same person.

52:05On 24 occasions out of the 32, Gabbard used language in the memos almost verbatim. so this is like her her entire congressional career she's just going on tv and saying the i mean this is like this is like a right-wing conspiracy but it's real they think of like you know like democrats being controlled by global forces but like here's tulsi gabbard just going on tv introducing legislation that this random cult leader told her to what's funny too is they're

52:31Jon Favreau:trying to now say they're like oh this is just anti-hindu bigotry when i say there's nothing there's nothing hindu going on and then there's the one line that i thought was great is there was some line that was something this was the one that said uh no matter how much you've basically to paraphrase it don't worry no matter how much you fuck up tomorrow i love you and krishna loves you which i did really appreciate there was one memo that i thought was very funny because it was um it was very uh it was about uh some statement she gave i believe after the state of the union and it was actually had some like very good advice which was something along the lines of like hey you just gave a generic boring statement you sound like a politician if you have nothing to say don't say anything but you only have something to say if you're prepared let this let's get this guy in a democratic campaign yeah can't do worse can't do worse than a lot of the guy a lot of consultants we've got going the range of the advice was funny it was like introduce this exact policy and then some emails would be like stop doing the weird eye thing yes and then you know what i read that and i was like oh she does do a weird thing yeah he was onto something there it reminded me there was uh i remember there was uh uh somebody uh when i was uh working for hillary at some point she went to the floor to speak on the Senate floor by some issue.

53:39Jon Favreau:And one of the consultants accidentally replied, all meanting this and send the note to just one person. And the email just said something like, how could you let Hillary go out there looking like shit like that? She was on the reply. No, no, Hillary, the whole staff was. We all got it. I wasn't, that was early in my days. I was not on a small email chain about Hillary. Oh, I didn't know if she was included in the office. No, no, no, I don't think she was. I don't think she was. Because then that person would have been vaporized. Yeah, just sort of. just sort of blipped out of existence. I mean, maybe we all need like a cult leader in our lives giving unvarnished feedback, you know?

54:09Jon Favreau:That is true. That's what Dan's for. That's why we read Message Box. Wait till the memos come out. Yeah, they are. You can subscribe. Speaking of corrupt goons, we should talk about the wild and infuriating New York Times story that sheds new light on why Trump may have freed a convicted fraudster named David Gentile. less than two weeks into a seven-year sentence after Gentile stole over a billion dollars from what the Times calls thousands of mostly mom-and-pop investors. The commutation also meant Gentile no longer had to pay as much as$15.5 million in restitution. Well, apparently, according to Ken Vogel at the Times, a couple of Trump's political appointees killed an early-stage investigation by the office that prosecuted Gentile into how the clemency came about, including, quote, jailhouse communications, where he discussed making over$2 million worth of payments to secure his freedom.

55:06The Times reported that one of the people who communicated with Gentile in prison and, quote, came under scrutiny by investigators was Reverend Frank Mann, a retired Catholic priest from Queens who's friends with Trump and spoke at his inauguration last year. Wild. What do you think? Like, is this the kind of thing Democrats should investigate if they take Congress? Or does this fall into the category of things we can't really do much about because the pardon power is absolute?

55:32Jon Favreau:Oh, we've got it. This is some of the most brazen corruption of the administration. And by the way, like, again, a lot of there's going to be a lot of people that say we shouldn't be looking backwards. But one of the reasons we're going to have to look backwards is that we understand what we need to do to fix it. And I like pardon reform, some kind of constitutional amendment is going to be on the table for how to protect our democracy. So I think we absolutely should be investigating this. One other reason to do it is there is daylight here between Trump and some of the people around Trump. Like if you notice the Caroline Levitt statement in that article says something like the idea that people would be trying to profit off of clemency is like repugnant or something to that effect.

56:08Jon Favreau:And at least cut Trump in. Yeah. Yeah. Let the man get his beak wet. All right. He's got a lot. He's got a lot of renovation. He's got to do a lot of interior decorating. He's got a lot of expenses, a lot of renovation projects. But so there's also apparently in this story, according to this story, after the reports that this retired priest had taken cash, Trump called to find out if it's true because clearly Trump, on his word, had commuted this guy's sentence. And there's one point in the story where it seems as though this former priest accidentally butt-dialed the reporter and left a message while he was talking about meeting with Trump and having lunch with him.

56:43Jon Favreau:So I do think we should be investigating this. I do think there's just an incredible amount of corruption going on around Trump around, uh, related to these pardons and commutations. Wouldn't you love to hear the conversation between Trump and the priest when he asked him if it was him, if he took any money? I mean, Trump is immune from prosecution around pardons, but the people selling pardons are not. So we should absolutely investigate the hell out of it and see if we can bring some of them to justice. And also I think stories like this, where you've got this corrupt guy who, what, defrauded $1.6 billion worth of money from mom and pop investors is how it's described.

57:16Jon Favreau:like this directly connects the corruption to how it's hurting you this is like kind of the exact sweet spot of the messaging um and again my thoughts when i read this my first thought was like oh this is going to end up in a john awesome absolutely probably was already there like a video yeah and then you know you hear about this you hear about this one you read about this uh and then you know again to talk to maggie and jonathan about this but just all the examples of corruption and jonathan swan was like they're like they're very serious journalists right like i'm trying to fuck around and they're just being you know telling me just the facts of the reporting and swan like looks into the camera he's like i think we know about one percent of the corruption stories oh that's actually happening here so just right the avenues for investigative reporting lawsuits congressional oversight like there's a million stories like this that we do not know that we are going to have to try to find out and that's the only way i think that the maga cult will ever realize that this man was taking advantage of them and harming them by the way it doesn't take a leap of faith to believe these stories like oh you think that uh a bunch of criminals people who were convicted of crimes including the president and this and this guy that he's who sentenced he commuted you don't think that he was selling he was in jail and thinking to himself how do i get out well i gotta have donald trump do it who can get to donald trump well someone that maybe i can pay maybe this friend who's a catholic priest whatever like and and the retired catholic priest who just happens to be donald trump's buddy like of course this happened like what are you talking about.

58:45Jon Favreau:By the way, like the story inside of this, like the retired priest cleaned up the gravesite of Trump's parents, then sent the picture. And that's what gets him invited. The whole thing reeks. The whole thing just it's this like, what are we talking about? It is the culture that Donald Trump created when he got to the White House and basically was like, oh, I'm going to just pardon anyone who I want to pardon. And doesn't matter what kind of crime you committed, January 6 rioters, people who defrauded people, whatever it be. Like if you can curry favor with me and you know me and you're connected to me you get a pardon so of course an entire industry is going to spring up of people who sell access to donald trump for pardons because why wouldn't you if you're you're in jail you know you're being in jail for 10 years and then all of a sudden this glimmer of hope opens that if you get this money to some schmuck around trump some lobbyist or consultant around trump that that that you could potentially get out he'll you'll walk away get sam bank and freed now being like he wants a pardon i literally was just gonna say sam bank and free is like openly lobbying Trump for a pardon tomorrow.

59:44He's going to be like, I saw the guy who used the box cutter on the pool.

59:48Jon Favreau:I will bribe you, sir. But also when the president, when the president of the United States takes a plane from the Qatari government or sells half another signal crypto company in a secret deal to an Emirati backed investment firm, everyone around him sees that. And that, you know, approach to governing filters through everyone else. And they're all thinking, how do I get mine? Yeah. I also will say to you that, you know, I think there's sort of this sort of like fatigue and you're like, wow, any one of these scandals would have defined a previous administration. But like Trump, we had we sort of get glamored by the ways in which there's always a new scandal and a new controversy.

1:00:24Jon Favreau:But this is all this is Republicans in Congress, because if the reason it got to this point, the reason we have this level of corruption is because there have been multiple scandals, which if they had marched to the podium and say, this stops today, it could have stopped. And they chose not to. They are responsible for this. They are the ones that are enabling this every day. Yeah. The corrective for this in the Constitution is, of course, impeachment. And, you know, there's obviously going to be a question if Democrats take Congress back to impeach Trump, because it's obviously not going to go anywhere.

1:00:55There's part of me that thinks like you just do it as a matter of fact, like, hey, look at all this corruption, if Republicans actually voted to convict, part of what we want to do is get some of this money back for the American people that he stole from the American treasury and from the American people. We don't expect Republicans to actually vote for this, but we want to go on record and realize that like, this is the president committed a bunch of crimes, stole a bunch of money from people. Like you have to make a big deal of it. I don't know. I'm still thinking about it. Like I don't, it is hard to go down that path because it takes up a lot of oxygen.

1:01:23But again, when someone, when a president does kind of this kind of thing, when he abuses the pardon power when he is this corrupt, when he's stealing from the American people, the remedy in the Constitution is to impeach the guy. And if you don't do that, then, you know.

1:01:35Jon Favreau:Yeah. And by the way, both impeachments were vehicles to educate the country. We learned a lot in those. Boy, did it work. Well, well, the hearing, you know, the and then even the January 6th hearings that came later, I think were really important. No, they did not work because here we are. But I do think like at a certain point, yes, I, there will be a strategic argument against it. I get that, but like, man, have we done a lot of overthinking about strategy to end up in this place too. Yeah. All right. Now you guys get to hear when we come back more about all of Trump's machinations in the second term, when Tommy talks to Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, right after this.

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1:03:45Jon Favreau:You know that song that goes, every rose has its thorn? That basically describes every June. When it comes to the Supreme Court, summer is just starting, but the Supreme Court term is ending, which means we're waiting for some massively consequential and possibly devastating Supreme Court decisions on birthright citizenship, trans athletes, and absentee ballots. I'm Leah Littman and along with my co-hosts and fellow law professors Melissa Murray and Kate Shaw we'll break down every opinion and what it means on strict scrutiny new episodes of strict scrutiny drop every Monday and keep an eye on your feed for emergency episodes when the big opinions come out watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts

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1:05:25Jon Favreau:Today, I am thrilled to be joined by the authors of the new book, Regime Change Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, Maggie Heberman, Jonathan Swan. Great to see you both. Thank you. Thanks for having us. Thank you for doing this. So first of all, congrats on the book and for getting this thing into the world. I know a staggering amount of work went into this book. I think you have over a thousand interviews. That is remarkable. And And the result is just this incredible page turner that provides a level of insight into how Donald Trump operates and how this administration works that I just haven't found everywhere else.

1:06:02Jon Favreau:And I'm a I'm a total sicko. And I follow this for a living and I follow these people for a living. And I was learning a lot. And I know you both are sickos who follow every move of this president. Maggie, I know you had the good fortune of getting to know him back in New York a long time ago. So you guys know the subject as well as anyone. So my first question is just a general one, which is for both of you, what's the top line takeaway for you in terms of what you think has changed from Trump 1.0 to Trump 2.0? And then after that, I was hoping you both could just sort of tell us about the experience of bringing this reporting to Donald Trump and having to interview him about it.

1:06:38Jon Favreau:Why don't we start with you, Maggie? Sure. So one of the things that we tried to convey in this book, and I think we did, Tommy, is that this is just a fundamentally different term than Trump won. This is a very different presidency. This is not 2017 anymore. This is not people who this president had never met before serving not just throughout this administration but in his White House. This is a group of people who are deeply aligned with him, who had spent many, many years thinking of some of them, not all of them, but thinking about how they could use the levers of power for a specific agenda.

1:07:12Jon Favreau:Trump himself has been thinking about various aspects of this presidency, one of which he's been very open about, which is retribution. And you are seeing a president wield power in a way that is fundamentally changing the way people look at America around the globe. the way Americans interact with their president. And certainly not in our lifetime that we've seen this. I'm not sure there has been something like this. And we tried to show additionally to his unique qualities, never admitting defeat, never having any shame, refusing to be thrown out of the arena, the various factors outside of his control that added to that.

1:07:54Jon Favreau:But he is coming back to Washington with a very, very different climate. It was a completely cowed Republican Congress, cowed tech leaders, cowed donors, law firms who were facing threats of executive orders, media companies that were concerned about being targeted by the government. And he has very happily wielded that power. I agree with everything Maggie said. And it's really hard to emphasize sufficiently how different this is from term one. It's almost unrecognizable in the way he's operating as president. And I'll just give you one kind of other way to think about it, which is in term one, he was quite reactive to domestic politics.

1:08:45The polls were down. He would be reactive to that stock market. What's it doing today? uh what did he last see on tv and i still think that's a lens through which people are viewing him this term i still see a lot of kind of commentary that kind of analyzes him through that term look it's not binary it's not black and white it's not to say he doesn't care at all about those things in the midterms but he cares far less um donald trump this term we picked this up pretty early in our reporting and it became very evident when we sat down finally across from him, he views himself and is trying to create this for himself as a capital G great man of history, as a sort of Napoleonic figure.

1:09:33And he literally handed us this two-page document when we were there with him in the Oval Office, which he said was written by a historian, and it compared him to what he described as the quote unquote top 10. Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, the Caesars, the Caesars. So, and, you know, I'm not sure that most American presidents would be happy about being included in that company. He was relishing this comparison. It wasn't a moral comparison. There was actually very, almost no mention of morality or values in this document. It was purely comparing them on the metric of power.

1:10:17And the assertion that this quote unquote historian made was that Donald Trump is the most powerful man who's ever existed on the planet because he's in charge of the United States, the most powerful military that's ever existed, most powerful technology that's ever existed, but that he's also that he's willing to use that power. And as peculiar as the source of this information was. It actually turned out not to be a historian. It was Gary Player, the golfer's former caddy. But setting that aside, the thesis actually was not so dissimilar to the reporting that we had been doing, which is this is a president now who is willing to take enormous risks, enormous risks on the global stage, whether it be going in and snatching a sovereign head of state out of his bedroom in his pajamas without even talking to Congress, whether it be starting a new war in the Middle East without even talking to Congress, starting a trade war against the whole world, which he did last April.

1:11:19He wants to put his imprint on the world and this country and build monuments to himself. And he's far less concerned about whatever the latest polls are or the midterm elections or the future of the Republican Party than he is making Donald Trump a capital G great man of history.

1:11:38Jon Favreau:Wow. Gary Player's caddy. What a, okay. Hot start, guys. This is, that's an amazing anecdote. Okay. So there's so much I want to ask you about. I personally think for me, the corruption has been the most shocking part of the second term. We could go down the list. There's the stock trades. There's the people trading on the Maduro operation on Kelshi. There's the secret half a billion dollar sale of the crypto business to the Emirati backed firm. There's the Pardons, there's the Qatari jet, the list literally goes on and on. But I want to focus on the jet for a minute, because you report in the book that Qatar initially wanted to be paid between 150 to$200 million for the plane.

1:12:15Jon Favreau:But then suddenly the plane was a gift. And you said the idea for making it a gift was, quote, generated at the POTUS level. And I was wondering if you could unpack what that means a little bit, And then just your sense of Trump's general mindset about using his office to make money and how that mindset has sort of extended or not to his family, his staff and the people around him. So working backwards on that one, Tommy, on the Qatari jet, and that was really the first neon sign example of what we saw with this president outside of the crypto business, which, you know, came into existence in 2024 during the campaign.

1:12:48Jon Favreau:That alone was a norm that was completely shattered. We've not seen a president do something like that before. It speaks to a mindset that is across this government. It is certainly clear for this president, and it is clear for members of his family that they feel like they gave up a lot. I mean, they openly say this. We gave up a lot because Trump ran. We were under investigation. We lost lots of money. We lost, you know, golf tournaments at our clubs and so forth. And there's no laws prohibiting this, and there's nothing that stops this. And Trump openly said this to some of our colleagues earlier this year, actually.

1:13:25Jon Favreau:And he also said, you know, nobody cared that he was trying to adhere to some guidelines. There were people who cared. It just didn't violate laws. And presidents are exempt, as most people know, from ethics laws in a different way. So this jet was initially described by—we actually, I think, were the first people to write about the fact that they were thinking about this jet. But suddenly there was this memo, this joint memo from the DOJ and the White House Council. And it was that there was nothing that was going to prohibit the government from accepting this jet and then it being transferred over to the Trump library.

1:14:04Jon Favreau:It is true there have been times in the history of this country when the Defense Department has accepted gifts, right, in the forms of plane or aircraft or whatever. Not usually quite like this. And yes, this was an older jet that the Qatari royal family had used. It was not brand new. They, according to our reporting, did initially want to sell it. And then it suddenly became a gift. And generated at the POTUS level, in our understanding, was it was conversations that people close to the president were having with counterparts elsewhere as to how to acquire this. I think there is still a lot to be learned about how it happened.

1:14:43Jon Favreau:But remember, the president described this as a free jet, that no taxpayer money would go to it. In fact, it has cost several hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer upgrades to make it safe for presidents. It's just got delivered in recent days. So that was one example that made clear that we were just in a very, very different world. It took months of reporting by The Wall Street Journal to uncover that secret sale of a 49 % stake in the Trump crypto company that they have with the Whitcoff family. to, I think it was an Emirati royal-backed company, royal family-backed company. There are other deals that the Trump family is engaged in.

1:15:24And again, the posture has been, nothing prohibits this, we're allowed to.

1:15:28Jon Favreau:It's so blatant and on a scale we have just never seen before. There have obviously been accusations of self-dealing from presidents in the past. This is unlike anything that I can recall seeing and really being written about in modern history at any rate. And I do think that the public is starting to pick up on it. That is puncturing something that he had been able to hang on to for a long time, which was the sense that, you know, he is a successful businessman. He didn't gain anything from this. There is a recurring theme and it's hard to ignore. Yeah. And Jonathan, I mean, staying on this corruption piece, we've heard about the ballroom.

1:16:09Jon Favreau:We've heard about the arc to Trump, the PAC fundraising. You guys do a bunch of reporting on the Trump Presidential Library Fund. In fact, you report that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick personally donated$25 million to the Trump Presidential Library Fund and that this donation came after reports about Lutnick's kids maybe making money off of administration policy in a way that was deemed unsavory in the press. I'd love to hear more about that. And then also, can you talk about, you know, it sounds like Eric Trump is leading a very aggressive effort to raise money that includes individuals like Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, sovereign wealth funds in the Gulf, just sort of blatant conflicts of interest.

1:16:49I'd love to hear more about it. People around Trump have described to us that they want to raise$2 billion for his presidential library. And if you've seen it, it's essentially a tower that looks like the Freedom Tower. that sort of towers above the Miami skyline. In no way is it a presidential library. And you've seen like the montage of you go in there and there's like a gold statue of Donald Trump and restaurants and God knows what else. So the reason we found out about the Howard Lutnick example is in the Oval Office, Trump brings it up. There was something that Howard Lutnick said, and Trump said, this is in front of a group of people, based something to the effect of the only reason i put up with howard's bullshit is he gave me 25 million dollars um and you know how trump just the way he talks and you know and other times you say you know howard's so great i just asked him for the money and he immediately gave it to me or some version of that but what we also found is that um people around trump eric trump and others have been approaching and discussing with Gulf monarchies funding this library.

1:18:00And often the trail heads back to the Gulf. Correct. You know, this is what makes a lot of this so remarkable is you have an administration that is conducting foreign policy dealing with the Gulf. I mean, selling chips, highly advanced chips to the Emirates at the same time as the Emirates putting$2 billion into the Trump and Whitcoff family crypto business. You have the Qatari jet, the Trump family business doing all kinds of deals in the Middle East, and then the business of state. It's just one giant playground, really, with no borders between... Let's just say it's very hard sometimes to delineate the borders between official business and private business.

1:18:51And so it's almost impossible to cover because I truly think we only know 1%, maybe 5 % of what's going on. And this is a story that our colleagues have done phenomenal reporting on, people like Eric Lipton, The Wall Street Journal and others. We've done our modest part of it that we've tried to contribute in this book. But my Lord, I don't think we really have a concept of the breadth and depth of this yet. I really don't.

1:19:21Jon Favreau:No. And one thing, Tommy, that I would just add is the figure$2 billion, it's double to a presidential library that I think you might be familiar with. And our understanding from our reporting is that that's not a coincidence. President Trump has never stopped being very focused on President Obama. But he was also, in our reporting, found delighted that President Biden is having a very hard time fundraising. And that just made him want to do more. But to Jonathan's point, the models that they have for this library, it's a hotel, is how it's conceived. And they are also still planning on taking this Qatari jet with them.

1:20:05Jon Favreau:I don't know what that looks like for Air Force One for another president in two and a half years. But Jonathan is right that there is a lot more to be learned here. We don't pretend to think we have covered the waterfront. Yeah, I mean, the crypto transactions alone are, you know, you can't possibly follow who is buying Trump coin or Melania coin on any given day. I mean, the opportunities for corruption are just staggering. Maggie, one thing that reading the book really helped me understand in a new way was just how chaotic the management of the country and then Trump's own time when he's in the Oval Office really is.

1:20:41Jon Favreau:You describe Trump's time in the Oval Office not really as a day that is structured with meetings, but more like kind of a rolling bull session with some advisors, whoever's in town visiting. You guys report on the scene where like there's some poor NSC goons in the corner trying to get sign off on a classified program. On the other side of the office, someone's on speakerphone from Mar-a-Lago. The fucking decorator walks in with like rug samples or something. That blows up the whole conversation. The pavers for the Rose Garden. Sorry, the pavers for the Rose Garden. Tell us about, like, paint us a picture of what it's like inside the Oval Office and how decisions are getting made.

1:21:15Jon Favreau:Yeah, look, I mean, we describe, as you say, this setting. We're describing sort of an average day, right? And you could take any given moment over the course of the last 17 months, whatever, 17 and a half months, and one meeting collides into the next. And Trump often invites people in to take part in other meetings. You know, one example of that in the book is the meeting where Laura Loomer is listing people at the NSC and elsewhere in the government who she is telling the president are against him. And Scott Perry, the congressman, comes in for a separately scheduled meeting, and then they start talking.

1:21:54Jon Favreau:And so there are constant scenes like this, and it has just become very familiar to everybody in Trump's world. It's how he functioned at Mar-a-Lago. It's how he functioned at Trump Tower. Some of this was the case in term one. It is much more expansive now. In terms of how the government is being managed, what was really striking to us, and we do describe this in the reporting in the book, is just how small the group of people running this government is. There's a handful of people. And at their agencies, at the State Department, at the Pentagon, at the CIA, at ODNI, you can go down the list.

1:22:34Jon Favreau:And if they are not, people leading those agencies are not in the room with the president, if they're not in the Oval Office, they often don't know what's going on. You know, one of the things that we talk about a lot is the fact that this administration makes a show of transparency, but they actually are quite good at keeping secrets when they want to and prefer it. There is a great deal that is kept secret, so much so that in the lead up to the Iran war on February 28th, the Energy Secretary and the Treasury Secretary had not been part of most of the meetings, the two people who would be impacted by a global energy crisis the most in this government were not part of it because this government is also very paranoid and worried about leaks.

1:23:17Jon Favreau:And that's also why you see the Situation Room used the way it is so often. Yeah, and it's probably not going to be helped by your book because we're all reading about the big freakout about, you know, everyone wondering about your sourcing, which I will not ask you to comment on. But Jonathan, related to the kind of management question is just the picture you paint of how Trump gets information. For example, you guys report that Trump was kind of largely oblivious about this massive fight within MAGA that has erupted over US support for Israel. And that anecdote really shocked me because, I mean, it seemed like everyone was talking about and reporting on it.

1:23:51Jon Favreau:And usually he has a pretty good, you know, sort of antenna for the base. And it made me wonder about his information diet, generally, which you guys, I think, describe as information from Fox News and then positive news printed out by a staffer named Natalie Harp. Can you tell folks who Natalie Harp is and sort of more about this information diet and whether does any news break through to Donald Trump that is like factual but bad for him at this point? Yeah, it's not quite as black and white as that, but it's not far off what you just described. Natalie Harp is a young woman who has worked for Donald Trump for a few years, used to be an anchor on OAN, which is a far-right network.

1:24:37One story that Maggie and I broke, and it's mentioned in the book, she's basically the most devoted, let's say, to Donald Trump, more than anyone we've ever seen. She writes him these, she has written him numerous letters that she's left for him, including one that says, you are all that matters to me or some version of that. Raised the eyebrows of the Secret Service during the campaign. Mine too, mine are up. Some of these letters that were left in some of his private quarters. And she's just totally devoted to him. In Oval Office meetings, she sits on the chair, the side of the room with her laptop open.

1:25:15And Trump, they call her the human printer. So Trump basically just says, Natalie, get me this. Or he's, you know, Google this. We have a scene in the book where during the trade war, lead up to the Liberation Day where he declares a trade war against the whole world, where he's just not believing the deficit numbers that Howard Lutnick is giving him. And he says, Natalie, Google me the real numbers. So she's furiously Googling. And of course, the real numbers don't exist because what Secretary Lutnick had given him were actually the real numbers. So that's who she is. His information diet has constricted.

1:25:53There's no question. In term one, he was scrolling Twitter a lot more, which just gave him much more exposure to just random things that were coming across the transom. He still does watch MSNBC, as you've noticed, when he rages against Joe Scarborough and Mika, and he'll still watch CNN. But it's really Fox all the time. and that whole world of the Manosphere podcast, he exploited that to his advantage very effectively during the campaign, but it wasn't like he was ever a consumer of it. Donald Trump doesn't sit there listening to Theo Vaughn and Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson's podcast. They might as well not exist.

1:26:37He'll occasionally hear, oh, yeah, Joe Rogan's been criticizing you, but he's not tuned into that. He's just watching Fox and hearing largely from people who support him. You know, the patio at Mar-a-Lago is full of flatterers who are coming by you. Great job. You're doing an amazing job, Mr. President. And his staff are people who largely believe in him, like him, not people like the first term who thought that he was dangerous or somebody that needed to be reined in. That's just not the dynamic at all. So and then he's got, you know, outside people like Boris Epstein, who's his personal lawyer and enforcer who, you know, he is so positive to Trump that Trump even jokes about it.

1:27:20You know, he'll tell aides like, oh, I get indicted and Boris tells me it's the best news ever. So that's, I mean, that's the environment. You know, presidents always exist in a bubble, but this is a really thick bubble. This is an almost impenetrable bubble that Donald Trump exists in.

1:27:36Jon Favreau:He's also much less willing to believe the bad news is the other piece, frankly. I mean, people will bring him information and say things like, you know, we've always heard him say some version of, you know, to Jonathan's point about, you know, bring me the real numbers. Those poll numbers are fake. You know, the real ones are, you know, Trafalgar or whatever, something that he considers to be more in line with how he sees the world. But it is harder for people who are trying to tell him that actually there are other things happening to get through to him that way. And just one addition to Jonathan's point about how often Fox is on.

1:28:17Jon Favreau:Fox is far less critical just in the main of him than it was at various points in term one. Not, you know, Fox was obviously not MSNBC, but he received more criticism on certain shows than he does at all now. And that has an impact, too. So that sort of brings me to my next question about the lowest moment. It wasn't a moment. It was the lowest several months, which was their handling of the Epstein files and mishandling of the Epstein files. I just want to get your read on how and why you think they mishandled it so badly. Is this because there's no good answers? Trump was really good friends with Jeffrey Epstein.

1:28:58Jon Favreau:He was for decades. He was a total creep at the time. Maybe like there's not a great, great way to spin that. Did they misread the politics and not listen to the more online people like J.D. Vance who are warning them? And then relatedly, I mean, you guys have these incredible scenes in the situation room where Trump's team is trying to figure out how to do damage control for him. But the story keeps getting worse. You know, we see the doodle that is in the Wall Street Journal that he put into the birthday book for Jeffrey Epstein. Did anyone you talk to say to you like, you know what, it was personally pretty upsetting and demoralizing to learn that this guy we work for was actually part of this cabal that we had promised to take down during the campaign?

1:29:39Well, I think at the start of all of this, the first thing to understand is that from a staff point of view, you're limited in what you can do when the person you're working for, the president, wants it all to disappear. He wanted this whole thing to disappear. I mean, he didn't want transparency, didn't want all this stuff to come out. And he would get snappy when people brought it up in his presence. So what the staff did was they had these conversations largely away from Donald Trump. They had them in the Situation Room for secrecy. You know, as you know, Tommy, from your time in the – this is one of the most guarded rooms in the government as a national security command center, essentially, that they turned into a sort of Jeffrey Epstein crisis response center.

1:30:29and these are the top officials in the government sitting around the table trying to craft a PR strategy. What was evident to his staff very early on was that, A, Donald Trump's name was all over these files. I mean, the New York Times, we found more than 38 ,000 references to Trump and his family and places like Mar-a-Lago in these files. But it was also just a sense of not knowing really what was out there and not being able to have these candid conversations with Trump. I do think one thing you said is true, which is early on, senior people on his team underestimated the political salience of this issue.

1:31:12And remember, for a lot of them who've gone through all kinds of scandal and crisis with Donald Trump, from their point of view, this is just another one why would we why would this be different from you know access hollywood or you know go down the list but it was and and it was very frustrating to trump himself because he's so used to telling his base think this do this and it shall be done and this was this issue where perhaps because some of his own people had helped you know whip up uh the the hysteria and conspiracy about Epstein, the base just wasn't listening. The base just refused to kind of take direction on that.

1:31:53And it just hung around. And one thing we obtained in our reporting for the book is private focus group research that Trump's team did this year, not last year, this year, almost a full year after they first tried to start dealing with the Epstein thing. Epstein was still cutting through in these focus groups to an alarming extent for Trump's team. So, you know, all these meetings happened, but it was a turning point, I think we can now say, with some level of confidence. Last summer is when Trump's political fortunes really started to decline. And one of Trump's advisers compared to Biden's decision to withdraw from Afghanistan as sort of the moment in the Biden admin when you start to see, you know, it's not dissimilar with Epstein.

1:32:38And it's still a problem, even to this day, politically.

1:32:41Jon Favreau:Maggie, you know, you guys have reported on a bunch of folks have reported on Trump enjoying to compare and publicly rank Rubio versus J.D. Vance. But you guys write that even early on, like back in 2021, I think that Trump's aides noticed he had more personal chemistry with Marco Rubio than Vance. Now, Vance obviously wages a pretty effective charm campaign. He goes from calling him, you know, comparing him to Hitler to getting on the ticket. You write that Trump was impressed by Vance's intellect and good looks. I'm going to take issue with the part of that, but whatever. Is this an endlessly fun parlor game and way to torture these guys?

1:33:17Jon Favreau:Or is he really trying to kind of constantly focus group and figure out the future of MAGA? How do you view it? A couple of things. But one is you mentioned the J.D. Vance criticism of Trump and the Hitler comment, which I think was made in a text exchange with someone. It's not like Marco Rubio was exactly subtle about Donald Trump. They ran against each other. There was a whole, you know, genitalia adjacent whatever on the primary debate stage. It wasn't very adjacent. Oh, sorry. It was just genitalia. Sorry. It was a literal dick measuring contest at a rally. I'm just going to leave it there with you, Tommy.

1:33:57Jon Favreau:So I think that a couple of things. One, as you know very well, the second that somebody who is in office and is term limited, which the president is, despite all of the conversation around this, once they endorse somebody, they stop being quite as relevant and their lame duck status starts to increase. Donald Trump is not exactly somebody who is going to disappear quietly into that good night, as we've been saying throughout this episode, number one. So he's in no rush for that because he sees this as his party and his movement for a variety of reasons. I do think it is fun for him. I do think he enjoys it.

1:34:33Jon Favreau:As long as he has been in politics, he has done this. He did this with Mike Pence and Newt Gingrich and Chris Christie in 2016. immediately in the lead up to when he announced that it was Pence. He was still leaving the idea open that it might be Chris Christie still, which he'd already offered it to Pence. So yes, there is the game aspect of it. It's hard to look at the existing fundamentals of the modern Republican Party and the MAGA movement and not see how J.D. Vance is still very much the prohibitive front runner. Now, obviously lots can change. But I also don't think that Donald Trump is going to completely defy reality if that's where it's going.

1:35:17Jon Favreau:But again, these predictions are not worth a whole lot. I do think we will continue to see much more of this going forward. But it's totally – on an interpersonal level, it's just – it's totally bizarre. I mean we have a lot of this in the book. But we have a scene in the book where Rupert Murdoch comes to the White House for dinner. Yes. Sitting on the same table as Trump in the Blue Room of the White House. and J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio are at the table. And Trump right there with the both of them at the table asks Rupert Murdoch to assess each of them. And Murdoch gives Marco Rubio a much more hearty endorsement than Vance.

1:35:58I mean, this is what Trump is subjecting his vice president to. I think the only thing we can be confident of is that he's not going to make it comfortable or easy for him. He's just going to keep doing this. It's just who he is.

1:36:12Jon Favreau:Yeah, I think the quotes you have is Murdoch says, I think JD has the potential to be great. And of Rubio, he says Marco is brilliant. So yeah, that'd be tough to hear. Right. Jonathan, I track the Trump foreign policy closely. I just find it particularly interesting. And since the beginning, I've been trying to understand the emergence of Steve Whitcoff, who for listeners is like Trump's real estate and golf buddy turned diplomatic envoy for everything. This anecdote from the book blew my mind. So you have this scene where Whitcoff is, I believe, in Moscow meeting with Vladimir Putin. The anecdote goes like this.

1:36:45Jon Favreau:What are you drawing, sir? Whitcoff asked. Putin held up a piece of paper in thick, looping pen strokes. It said three plus two, which is shorthand for the territorial framework that Whitcoff had discussed with him. Three obelisks Russia would keep outright and two where the fighting would freeze in place. Quote, can you can you sign that for me and I can take it home? Whitcoff asked. Putin signed the drawing and Wyckoff brought it home where he had it framed in black with taupe mats. So two questions for listeners. Like basically what Wyckoff is asking to be framed there is a piece of paper that would memorialize an agreement that would be capitulation for the Ukrainians.

1:37:22Jon Favreau:And I think a lot of people would argue validates Putin's decision to invade Ukraine, which led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. Why would Wyckoff want that in your view? And then more importantly, like, what do you make of Whitcoff's emergence and his motivations? Because by all accounts, he seems like a very nice man, one who seemingly is in over his head, understandably, by the way. I think anyone would be in his position. But also, it's hard not to see his son's role at World Liberty Financial, the crypto business, and worry about conflicts of interest and corruption. So Steve Whitcoff has no, before this term, had no diplomatic experience, full stop.

1:37:57No foreign policy experience, full stop. There is a commonality at the most senior levels of Trump world, which is a contempt for subject matter expertise and subject matter experts. Jared Kushner would often to others speak with contempt about people who've worked on Middle East deals forever. And there's a feeling from these guys, there always has been, that they have fresh ideas, fresh answers, private sector thinking. You've heard all of this before. Trump, again, Trump feels comfortable with Witkoff, saw him as a dealmaker, thought that he could bring home a quick deal with Putin. Trump thought it would be very easy to end this war.

1:38:41When he was saying 24 hours, it actually, in Trump's mind, I don't think was that much of a rhetorical flourish. I think he genuinely thought he could end this conflict very quickly. and has been quite frustrated that Witkoff hasn't been able to bring home a deal. Witkoff, from what we can gather from his colleagues, views the conflict. There's not really a sense of Putin as a villain and an aggressor and Ukraine as a victim. We have a scene in the book where Trump is, with his inner circle in the Oval Office, supposedly going to hash out the Russia-Ukraine policy. And Keith Kellogg, who was his original envoy, is dutifully giving this presentation, which he spent all this time on.

1:39:27Unbeknownst to Kellogg, Trump already had a back channel set up with Witkoff. He hadn't told Kellogg about that. He's doing this presentation. And during the presentation, Trump is interrupting him by saying things like, the only good thing about Ukraine is the women. They keep winning Miss Universe. um zelinski's terrible he's destroyed his country so the animus when the animus comes out it's almost never against putin it's almost always against ukraine and and zelinski and i think whitkov saw his his job as bringing this conflict to an end but really viewed those leaders on on a on a flat plane without really making moral distinctions i mean we have another line in the book where he tells Putin that Russia's good at a lot of things, but they're really bad at PR, as if the Kremlin's main problem was a PR problem.

1:40:20So that's the mindset. And he goes and meets with Putin on his own. He really doesn't use staff like someone in that role would normally use staff. And as a result, there have been times where I think there's been miscommunication and misunderstandings. And it turns out diplomacy is complicated and this conflict was not easy to resolve. And in fact, it's still raging on many 24 hours after the initial 24 hours when he was going to solve it.

1:40:52Jon Favreau:Right. Well, I think down the road, maybe we'll learn more about this, whether there's a corruption piece of this to the Wyckoff story. But listen, you guys have given me a lot of time on an unbelievably busy week. The book, again, is Regime Change Inside the Imperial presidency of Donald Trump. I cannot recommend it highly enough to our audience who are desperate to try to understand Donald Trump, the man, this administration, the decision-making process, and also just to, I think, even read things that we knew again, but in a way that puts together the whole scene and helps you understand all the different motivations and people involved.

1:41:25Jon Favreau:It's an extraordinary piece of work. So congratulations to both of you for getting this thing done and out into the world and for talking with me today. Jonathan, Maggie, Thank you so much. Thanks, Tommy. Thanks so much.

1:41:42That's our show for today. Thanks to Maggie and Jonathan for coming on. Everybody check out Regime Change. Dan and I will be back with a new show on Friday. Pod Save America is a Crooked Media production. Our show is produced by Austin Fisher, Saul Rubin, McKenna Roberts, and Farrah Safari with Ree Cherlin, Elijah Cohn, and Adrian Hill. Our team includes Matt DeGroat, Ben Hethcote, Jordan Cantor, Charlotte Landis, Carol Pellaviv, David Tolles, Mia Kelman, Ryan Young, and Naomi Single. Our staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.

1:42:11Jon Favreau:You know that song that goes, every rose has its thorn? That basically describes every June. When it comes to the Supreme Court, summer is just starting, but the Supreme Court term is ending, which means we're waiting for some massively consequential and possibly devastating Supreme Court decisions on birthright citizenship, trans athletes, and absentee ballots. I'm Leah Littman, and along with my co-hosts and fellow law professors, Melissa Murray and Kate Shaw, we'll break down every opinion and what it means on strict scrutiny. New episodes of strict scrutiny drop every Monday, and keep an eye on your feed for emergency episodes when the big opinions come out.

1:42:44Jon Favreau:Watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

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