How Trump Has Changed, With Maggie Haberman

24:55You are richer. If you are Donald Trump and you have spent your whole life talking about wealth and measuring success through wealth, and you are now wealthier, liquid-wise assets than you have ever been from an industry that you regulate from a company that was created during your campaign that your sons are running with the sons of your special envoy. It's a sentence that it's really would have been unimaginable not that long ago. And you're doing it and Republicans in Congress say nothing. And the Senate say almost nothing. And voters have only started to care about some of it in polling I'm seeing.

25:36And I honestly think the main reason is less the money made, although I do think that that is a factor. It's that they can see visual signs with all of the monuments and all of the literally blasting through longstanding buildings or structures like the East Wing, planning to build an arch, putting down drapes so people can't see your construction projects and so forth. Symbols are a lot easier for voters to understand. And voters tend to think all politicians are corrupt, but this is different than anything we have ever seen in the U.S. system. But if you're him, you have been this kind of walking moral hazard.

26:13Your company almost sank in 1991. People don't understand how close to ruin he was when his casinos were overleveraged. It was across his properties. It wasn't just there. You come back through a variety of reasons, but partly because the banks decided it was worth staying with you and your father helped you. You become a reality TV star. You win the presidency after never having run for city council before. You are indicted four times. Your opponents keep doing things that are pretty self-harmful. Joe Biden has a pretty non-spectacular last two years at minimum of his term. You are shot at, you survive.

27:00You have taken on this mystical quality with your, not just your followers, but with your advisors who refer to him, or then anyway, would refer to him as the chosen one. Only semi-joking in some cases. And you believe everything works out for you, which is literally what he said to Tucker Carlson. You know why the Iran war is going to work out? Things are going to work out because they always do. And so you believe that your reality is better than what experts have been telling you. He thinks the economy's boring. He literally will tell advisors he finds this boring to talk about. He wants to talk about immigrants, you know, committing rapes or murdering people or committing crimes.

27:40And he's going to do what he wants to do. And he is, look, he obviously doesn't want to be impeached again. But when you have to say again, unimpeached, it's stuff's mattering as much, sort of, I think, to some extent in his head. It's also not even the first again. Well, that's exactly correct. It would be again three. And so again, well, again, two, I guess. He's already told people that he's going to pardon everyone who has come within a certain radius of the Oval Office. And he has an immunity ruling from the Supreme Court that it's still not entirely clear what would qualify as a presidential act where he has no criminal exposure.

28:12But I suspect it would be most of them if it was pressed. So if you were him, this moment could be very bad for other Republicans, but he's not that worried for himself. Let me ask you about the corruption to mention of this. So when you talk to Republicans off the record, often they will admit they know that we are dealing with a level of corruption that is majestic in its grandeur, that is like nothing we've really seen before. It's not even a debatable point when you talk to them off the record. Not a debatable point. One thing I hear people say all the time in the media, elsewhere, just voters, Democrats, is any one of these stories would have consumed Washington at another time, would have sunk another presidency.

29:00You think of Travelgate and pig futures in the Clinton administration. You think of the Trump cabinet member who had to resign, I think it was Andy Price. Tom Price. Tom Price for, what was it, taking charter jets? He was using jets. We We have referenced that in the book, actually. Yeah. Yeah. Why is it that stories that would have consumed Washington, even would have been a problem for members of the Trump administration another time, seem to slide off of him? There's great reporting being done at the New York Times, at the New Yorker, at other places. We know a lot. We have numbers now that we didn't used to have.

29:36But why has he been able to flood the zone on corruption and then escape the consequences it would have attached to another administration? Well, I would break that down a little bit. So what you're describing in terms of consequences from what you just ticked through was primarily the consequences of a news cycle, the consequences of public information. and number one i think that at this point if you are a journalist and you get into journalism and the expectation that what you write is going to force an outcome and that that is your end you're going to be disappointed very very often because it is a totally different media landscape because this choose your own adventure partisanship really actually allows people to just hear what they want to hear number one number two we don't have subpoena powers right we can only write up to what we know.

30:34In the past, investigations would have been done by the inspectors general. He's fired inspectors general at the start of his term. They would have been done by Congress on a bipartisan level. Everything is tribal now, like beyond anything we have seen in the past. It was pretty bad before in terms of partisanship. The House GOP acts like an arm of the Trump administration. The Republican House members and some senators, they still look at him as a celebrity. Yes, there is obviously a fear factor. He has shown he is willing to destroy their careers and really humiliate them. But the way that they, grown men, you know, he'll take chocolate bars out of the, what they call the chum closet that has the presidential merch or whatever.

31:16And he'll like throw them. It's like Hershey bars. And these are house members who are like, Ooh, me. They love, you know, they love being on Air Force One with him. And And a House member gushing that he knew his first name? Yes, correct. It's, this celebrity is talking to me, not this president, this celebrity. I watched The Apprentice. I knew Donald Trump. So that's one reason why. The other is he has been investigated since almost the second he stepped, actually, literally the second he stepped into office in 2017. So I think there is a flattening effect with the public in terms of their expectation.

31:51At a certain point, it all becomes one Trump would smear it that way, witch hunt. Explaining to people that there is new information is, I think, a challenge for journalists across the board. All of that occurs in his favor. There is not one single reason why. And I don't think there will ever be another politician who will have this same experience as he does. But we'll see. Do you think that changes if Democrats get subpoena power? No, I don't. Because I think that if you are Donald Trump and you can pardon everyone around you, and you can instruct your entire government not to respond to subpoenas with anything timely and only do it once the final stop in a court challenge makes you.

32:31Trump's whole thing is waiting people out. And we have seen this over and over and over again. So there are a number of members of his government, and I talked about how radicalized they all are, who do believe that they are going to be not just subpoenaed, but prosecuted. And I'm not just talking about when the House flips. I'm talking about under a Democratic presidency. They genuinely believe, and I'm not endorsing this view, I'm just saying this is their perspective, We are going to be indicted by an illegitimate junta of the Democrats at some point. They are going to come after us when we are out of power.

33:07So we are going to do everything we can. That is entirely the mindset. They have the same hunted mentality that he does. I just think that people who think that the House is going to flip and this is going to look like it did in 2019, I'm struggling to see that. I could be wrong. But what happens when they issue contempt of Congress subpoenas and they send them to Attorney General Todd Blanche? Does he rush to start an investigation? Like, I just don't know what this looks like. A Democratic strategist said to me in 2016, right after Trump won, that the entire country was about to finally understand how much of our system is norms and not laws.

33:43And fundamentally, I still come back to that every time. If you have somebody who is willing to violate every norm by, I mean, I'm really every norm. I don't think I can think of one that he, I'm sure there's something, but it's hard to go down the list and find something that is still firmly in place. we have a president who cheered when robert muller died he cheered when rob reiner was killed by his own son according to prosecutors he is making a ton of money and they're very blase about it you know they will say there's no corruption here as they continue doing what they're doing they're about to start trying to monetize his true social posts for advance notice it's a recipe can you talk through that for a minute because that's the true social uh the i know it's like it's hard to describe because i remember they're trying to monetize rapid trading correct on true social but can you explain how yes what they're trying to do is sell for very very high dollar amounts i think it's like a hundred thousand dollars advance notification of trump's truth posts because they can move markets and do move markets it seems even if it's not violating a law for Trump because presidents are actually not held to the same ethical standards and laws and regulations as their staff.

35:05I mean, how does this not become something else? Well, it goes to something, I think, in what you were just talking about, which is, I think the deep answer to the question we were just discussing is Republicans. It's the fundamental answer. On some level, right? Like in other administrations, even your co-partisans on something like this would say no now arguably republicans did that a bit on the irs fund it was i mean that was so brazen that it was a little hard not to have problems with it and i actually i don't even remember if had the judge already raised questions about that once they did did that give them cover i don't even remember but yes i mean this was this was you're taking taxpayer money and doing this it's the taxpayer a lot of how not just accountability, but investigation worked in Washington, was it either the other side was in power, so they were able to structure investigation and that the agencies were run more professionally, the Department of Justice run more independently.

36:07And so they responded to investigation and responded to subpoenas. And that creates a structure of and a sequencing of information coming out and possible consequences and people being hauled before Congress and each one is a new news story. And that's how you get the connection of like a congressional operation and like media coverage that people understand is a scandal. Yes. Well, that is true. I mean, that's how it works. And Republicans just are not going to do that. No, they're not. You know, the closest that they have come would have been. And I am really stretching the word closest here.

36:44So just roll with me for a second before you say this is absolutely not at all parallel, because I'm not saying it is, but the closest would have been some of what they were doing around Epstein. But of course, that took a detour into the Clintons and all kinds of other stuff. And by that, I just mean James Comer's committee initially, which was filing a subpoena to Pam Bondi that the administration was not happy with. And then they slow rolled that. But no, there's no analog. I mean, if you look back at the last real effort that attempted to be moderately bipartisan, it would have been the J6 committee and the select committee that was investigating what happened in the lead up to the January 6th riot at the Capitol and Trump's efforts to overturn the election.

37:25But even that devolved into partisan politics. And so there you have it. It was striking to me how small of a role Congress played in this book. Well, there's a couple of reasons. It's a good it's a it's a point. But the reality is that Congress plays a supplicant role. We did talk about that. We how incredibly unusual it is historically. There's just, there has not been a relationship like this between a House Speaker and a President that I can think of, where it's literally give me my marching orders this way. That is not about policy. It's about just whatever you want it to be. But the reality is there is no legislative agenda, as you said.

38:01There was the one big beautiful bill, and we did talk about that, and we do get into what went into that. But this administration knew that it was never going to be able to do much legislatively. But this again goes to me to this question, of what is actually being built here versus what is just kind of collapsing or being like left alone on even a lot of these issues. Okay. So the big, beautiful bill did pass. It's a big change. And, you know, as the actual changes to Medicaid and food stamps and other things roll out, I think we have a lot of political upheaval around that. And there will be more focus and there will be more coverage and interest.

38:38I agree with that. Look, their trade agenda got gutted. They could have gone to Republicans in Congress to get more power on tariffs. They chose not to do that. That's true. Would Republicans in Congress keep them from ever changing the filibuster? I don't know. They've been kind of tough on that, but they've also nicked it around the edges a little. A little. Immigration. They have done a tremendous amount of immigration. I think of everything you can look at, they have done the most on immigration. What they have not done is changed the laws. Well, because that takes time. I mean, this isn't complicated.

39:10But it also means that another administration can. I understand that. But they also assume that's going to happen regardless. I mean, I think that just to try to explain the mindset here, the person who spent the most time, and I'm glad you brought up immigration, the person who has spent the most time thinking about a Trump 2.0 and not just from the perspective of immigration, but obviously that's his driving issue and defining issue is Stephen Miller. And he spent four years focused on not just what he wanted to do differently this time. You know, the initial Muslim ban was a disaster and a court-challenged disaster, and it was poorly written and so forth in 2017, and it created mass chaos on flights and so forth.

39:51Stephen Miller spent four years looking at how far the law could go on a number of things, what was in the executive branch's control, what could be claimed as an executive branch power, which they've done a lot. And they've gotten caught in courts on this, as you know, and that's sort of part of what you're saying, I think, is if you don't want to have a big court fight, go work through the actual process. They would rather have a big court fight because if you go through the process, it's going to move slowly. And their gamble is that they can win much of the time, not every time. The trade agenda was a calamity for a variety of reasons, but it wasn't just because they didn't go to Congress.

40:26It was because the formula made no goddamn sense. But Doge is another example. Doge is a great example. To do what they wanted to do, you actually need to do civil service reform. And they've done a little bit of that, but it's not civil service reform. Yeah, you would have to go and change the laws. Yes. But that's not, again, this actually gets to a different problem. There isn't a they, actually. They don't all work in harmony, even though they collectively want the same thing, which is crush the left, expand our power, focus on a specific set of issues. And we've gone over many of them on this show.

40:59But Russ Vogt actually understands how government works. Elon Musk did not. He just came in and started punching through walls. In some cases, literally, physical aspects were impacted by how he handles things. That is different also than how Stephen Miller wants to handle certain things. And so that creates its own internal crash. Then add Congress to that as a layer, it's hard to see.

41:42I'm Wena Liu. I write the game Connections, one of the puzzles from New York Times games, and I love horror movies. I love my dog, and I love trying to trick you. I'm Sam Mazursky, and I create the game Spelling Bee and Letterboxd on a daily basis. and I have this thing called chromesthesia. I see color when I'm listening to music. I'm Tracy Bennett. I get to pick the wordle word every day, which is not as easy as it sounds. A fun fact about me is that I am descended from a witch who was put on trial in Salem. Wow. Amazing. And I'm Joel Fagliano. I create your daily mini crossword. I've been making these puzzles for the times for over 10 years now, which is like 3 ,000 minis.

42:22I am begging the universe for any new five-letter word. New York Times games are made by people, like the ones you just heard from. Go to nytimes.com slash games to start playing today. What's everyone's fastest mini time? Four seconds. No. What? I'll go find it. I have my screenshot somewhere. Has there been a shift in who holds power on the court in the last year? Yes, but it can change quite rapidly. Marco Rubio had a lot of capital with Trump for a long time. I think still does, but he is really not that involved in the Iran issue. Because Trump doesn't want him or because he doesn't want to be near it?

43:02I think it's more the latter, honestly. I think that Trump would welcome his involvement more. And he may get more involved now, but he's been talking about it a little bit more. But I think that Rubio, if you strapped him to a polygraph, this is not where he wants things to be. Susie Wiles is still hugely influential. Stephen Miller, despite these stories about how he was getting his wings clipped and whatever after Rene Good and Alex Preddy were killed in Minnesota, that was vastly overstated. The showy displays of, you know, rappelling into a building in Chicago from a Blackhawk, which I still can't really believe happened last year, but they have stopped the great displays of force.

43:43They are still using force, but it's not, you know, these ice drives the same way. it's the traffic stops. That's what the latest shootings were about. Stephen Miller has taken down his arrest number for undocumented immigrants from last year. It was 3 ,000 a day last year. Now it's 2 ,000 a day. And he's back to pushing people. And he's very, very aggressive on these calls. So Miller still has power because Miller can also tell Trump, I can get you what you want very quickly, which is also, again, why they don't go to Congress. They want to act unilaterally. Trump wants to act unilaterally and he just wants to do what he wants.

44:15Hegseth is still actually pretty powerful with Trump. Radcliffe is on certain issues. But the person who is most powerful is Trump, period. Hegseth is powerful with Trump. Trump listens to him? He listens to him on certain issues. Hegseth has figured out how to have conversations. Look, Hegseth, if there was anyone who was in favor of Iran, it was Hegseth. But I don't think he fully envisioned it going this way either. Hegseth often shows up for these briefings with Trump, with Dan Kane. He has figured out how to handle these discussions so that he is turning to somebody who actually has better tactical understanding.

44:48But Trump does listen to him. And he likes him. The former general who. The former general who is now the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but whose style is very different than Trump's last choice for chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which was Mark Milley, who would get into these sort of grab Trump by the lapels arguments. He did see his job as telling Trump which way to go. Cain has told people he doesn't see that as his job. Hegseth is a diehard Trumper. Not MAGA. Trumper. And so that buys you a lot of cash internally. Yeah. So that was my question with him. Is he somebody who Trump enjoys as a yes man or who Trump listens to for strategic advice?

45:22More the former than the latter. But the strategic advice is also channeled through these joint conversations with Hegseth. But he does listen to him and he likes him. You know, he's good on TV. He's tough. He doesn't take crap, et cetera, et cetera. And he is a devotee. What have the people in the inner circle learned about how to brief Trump? That's a good question. This is, it sits around the edge of a lot of the stories in your book of people bringing in poster boards, right? Well, that's still faulty. That's one person. But yes, I understand. But I've heard from other people around the briefing books that they're very visual.

45:54Oh, totally. Tell me what people have learned about how you briefed Donald Trump. Trump is very visual, as you said. And this was a big facet of term one, too. Now they all submit to it. I think they resisted it, the government, because it was so unusual to them in term one. But he really doesn't like long briefing books. He doesn't really read them. He wants to be shown how things look. That is how he absorbs them. People describe him, they'll say he's a TV guy, and they tend to think of it as him on the set of The Apprentice. But it's actually really how he absorbs the world is through TV. And so he likes to see how things look.

46:30Just having a dry recitation of facts and discussions with him doesn't work very well. But even when it was visuals in term one, the quality of the information was fairly reliable. There's a much bigger fight now about the quality of the information. Whether you include essentially raw intelligence, whether you tell him reports that are unverified, whether it is just a different type of discussion. The amount that he relies on a sense of how things are either playing visually, right? There are moments in the book that I've heard about too, where he sees what it's looking like when the Israelis are doing something.

47:08Now he wants to be involved. Or the flip, right? Where he is being shown possible cabinet appointees and they give him little montages of them on cable news. There is something very deep about Trump's – he doesn't just apprehend the world visually. He is somewhat a master of creating visuals for the world. 100%, yes. You know, Hegseth is one of many people he sort of cast into his administration. He was an innovator in this. I mean, I think you have to see Mamdani as having like a different version of this, a kind of visual mastery of the world. I just had Morris Katz on the show. They very much found Graham Plattner and cast him in a very particular position.

47:52But again, this operates on the edges of the book, but I'd be curious to hear you bring it to the center of the stage, which is what has it meant to have this administration that both makes internal decisions through spectacle and then communicates through spectacle that judges visually and acts visually? It becomes a self-reinforcing feedback loop sometimes, right? Right. I mean, so when you were talking about Hegseth, we have a bit in the book about how he got very into these videos of the boat strikes and they would be privately described as Hegseth's snuff films. But, you know, he would want to have some sent to Trump because he knew Trump would want to see them.

48:36Trump is a master of the attention economy, which is what I was thinking about when you were talking about Mamdani. I think that that is part of the attention economy is creating a visual and is getting something that will grab people. Mamdani was exceptionally good at that in his campaign and still is, honestly. I mean, when I look at his social media, just as mayor, it is actually quite striking how much of it still comes into my feed, even if I'm not looking for it, even if I'm not looking at his thing. But it becomes a way to tell yourself that your view of reality is what's happening. So, for instance, we have a scene in the book where Stephen Miller comes into, it was really an important moment.

49:15He comes into the Oval Office, and he's got these pictures of this kid from Doge whose name online was Big Balls. That's what he was known as, and his actual name is Ed something. But he had been beaten up, and he's got these photos that Stephen Miller had gotten from his wife who had been working with Musk at Doge. that then fires up something that Trump's been wanting to do forever, which is send National Guard into DC. It isn't just about seeing visuals that, you know, reaffirm your point. It is basically that your world is no competing viewpoints and that everything is just going in through the eyes.

49:52And it stops you from thinking the same way. Because part of, I mean, this is my opinion now, I'm getting a little inside his head, which I try not to do because it's not a very worthwhile endeavor. But I do think that when people are consuming their own content that way, so much of consumption of visuals is about you react, you react. And so it's just a constant reaction. And that is what they try doing with these videos that Stephen Chung does when he's trolling. You know, the White House communications director, who's a big UFC guy, for instance, they set these videos of these strikes, like the actual video game music and dynamics.

50:29Or, and I thought this was a fascinating detail in the book, to the music of artists who are going to protest. Correct. Who are going to say, how dare you use my music in this way? And then that's another news cycle for them. Correct. One of the things that Kushner used to tell people in the White House last time was that he would describe what he called Trump rules. And one of them was controversy elevates message. And so there's no quicker way to do that. But it's also a way to say, I'm not going to follow your rules. What did you make of the Trump-Mamdani meetings? I was so not surprised and it went exactly as I thought it was going to in all seriousness.

51:03But Trump's own team is a little jarred by how much he enjoys talking to Mamdani and how as much as Republicans are trying to talk about how, you know, socialists are communists and Trump is even doing that in his own speeches. but he seems to have a real carve out for one particular person. And I know he's attacked him a few times recently, Mamdani, but Mamdani is, he's very good. I mean, apparently in their first meeting, Mamdani was referring to the crossover of voters that were Trump voters at his own rallies. Mamdani has been quite smart. The Trump-Mamdani meetings, they reflect what I thought was the funniest part of your book, which is Trump's tendency to be incredibly conciliatory and friendly when he meets one-on-one with people who he has been slandering, who his administration might be entirely persecuting.

51:56But for somebody who is so brash and aggressive, he's a bit of a pussycat one-on-one. He does not like one-on-one interpersonal direct conflict. This has been a constant in his life. Sometimes he does it intentionally. just to sort of make the person be off guard. But with Mamdani, he seems to genuinely like him. So, or whatever that's worth. Do you feel Trump has changed with age? Or the age is selling him in meaningful ways? I mean, define meaningful. When I watch him on television from even 10 years ago, I mean, I was watching his RNC address in 2016 recently, and it's a pretty jarring comparison to just how his words flow now.

52:41He speaks much slower. He's telling the same stories a lot. The weave is getting wide, as Joe Rogan would say. That's definitely true. I will say that Jonathan and I spent an hour with him in the Oval Office on March 16th of this year for a fact check interview for the book. We didn't notice anything meaningfully different. What we did notice is that he seemed like what Steve Bannon describes as pure Trump. There was just much more focus on payback, much more focus on what he wants to be focused on. Very obsessed with the renovation projects. Very. And, you know, here's the models. It's day 17 of the war.

53:12Here's my models of the ballroom and so forth. It was like he didn't have a care in the world. But I don't subscribe to this dementia conversation. I don't think Trump is some fundamentally different human being. I just don't. But I think he is much more himself, which is a product of age in general. There was a sense, maybe the better way to put it is that there was a thread on particularly lefty social media six, eight months ago around the sort of strange bruising people were seeing. That is weird. I mean, yes. The sort of the ankle swelling that he was quite sick. In terms of physical health, he has chronic venous insufficiency syndrome, disease, whatever it's called.

53:51That means that the blood is not going to his heart properly. So that's not a good thing. On his first medical report in 2018, he had a calcium score of, I think, 133. That suggests some level of heart disease. They have not put out a calcium score since he was very sick with COVID in 2020. And we still don't know the extent of that. I mean, I reported some on that from information we got well after he was out of office. But we don't know what we don't know. And his health notes read as if he's written part of them. So, you know, he goes to Walter Reed with more frequency and they release less information.

54:24He got imaging. We don't even know what they were. He can't tell us. He says he was treated by 22 specialists. What? 22? I don't know what that could be. And the bruising thing, the explanation has never made sense. It's always been handshaking, aspirin. It could be that 80-year-olds have thinner skin, but he's clearly not the picture of great physical health. But I don't know what that means. Because, you know, what I generally know what it means is that electing 80-year-olds is a bit of a gamble, right? I mean, electing anybody isn't a gamble. You don't know how somebody's health is going to be, but you can guess where it's going when they're older.

54:56How much of his time actually goes into the renovation now? A lot. If you looked at like a chart of his mindshare, like this I will say about getting into his mind, like 70 % of it would be on his renovations. It's a legacy thing, but it's – I always think of legacy with him different than the way we usually use the word legacy. See, it's not what am I leaving behind for the world? It's what am I leaving behind so the world can't kick me off the world or deplatform me or take my name off buildings in Manhattan or take away my Bronx leased golf course, you know, or debank me. It's what can I do that cannot be taken away?

55:34Yeah. How can I create monuments to myself? Correct. I mean, literally, I mean, he literally said that when Ed O 'Keefe from CBS asked him, he noticed the arch, which he's calling the arc to Trump. design on the Resolute desk. And he asked her on the desk. I don't know if it was the Resolute. I think it was back by then. Ed said, what is that? And Trump's like, it's an arch. And I said, but who's it for? And Trump said me. And he was quite clear about it. There was no further conversation. The Kennedy Center, the ballroom, you know, I mean, I can go on and on, but it is all monuments. Can you tell the Macron story with the arch?

56:08I'm going to F this up a little bit. But in a meeting, he calls. So one of the things he was musing about was like what should go on top of the arch and it was like should he put a version a gold version like the fight fight fight fist from Butler up there but he calls Macron in the middle of another meeting and starts asking him about the Arc de Triomphe in France and you know what's it like and and how many people you know does it have a visitor's desk do people jump off of it I mean this was the conversation that he was interested in and he's still talking about this kind of thing but calls up a foreign leader to inquire about what his arch to himself should look like.

56:43Speaking of the other side of legacy, the more traditional way we would talk about legacy, does he have things he still wants to achieve politically? It's a really good question. I could answer that pretty clearly in 2019 and 2020, there were things that he still wanted to achieve. If there are things that he wants to achieve beyond just sort of not being Herbert Hoover, as he would say, meaning with a giant global crisis, not really. I mean, look, he's resumed his trade war, as you said. I think he'd like to achieve getting out of Iran. I think he would like to figure out an end to the war that he started.

57:19But that's not an achievement. That's a reaction to his own behavior as we started this episode with. There are people around him who would like to see some form of comprehensive immigration reform, to your question about legislation. That's something that we can work with Democrats on. Boy, do I have a hard time seeing Democrats wanting to give him some kind of a political win that way, especially when it would be, I suspect, a bill they would find less than palatable, as they have almost every single other bill involving anything related to immigration with him. Maybe another way of asking this is, are there actual policy issues his mind is gravitating towards in the way it does towards the renovation?

57:57No, I know what you're asking. Yeah, no. And the answer's no, right? Yeah, I mean, that could change. They could be having conversations we're not aware of. But certainly not in anything that we have heard. I mean, if anything, what he spent the last year and a half focused on, you know, as issues top one, two, and three were retribution, were these bullying campaigns across various industries and aspects of civil society, where he was pretty successful for a time. The law firms won. The courts caught up with him. But media, he's done pretty well, I would say, in terms of his attacks on the media, not through the government levers, but through lawsuits.

58:33But renovations is really a huge part of it. the degree of mindshare on these projects is vast. He is vastly less interested in and reactive to domestic politics this time, just beyond. And one of the things that we started seeing in 2024, and we get into this, this relates to the, in the book, it relates to the mystical quality. He sees himself as big on a level that I think people really don't understand. And it was quite clear when we were sitting with him, and we write about that in the epilogue of the book, but he is playing for history, capital G, great man of history, to be remembered, to be remembered by one name, to have left a mark on the world that is just different than a typical president or what he would say is a normal president.

59:20That doesn't involve the boring work of trying to pass a bill. That doesn't involve the boring work of going to Iowa to talk about XYZ, although his numbers are not great in Iowa now either. I mean, this is fundamentally less interesting to him. Immigration, very interesting to him. I think that if he could find some way to even further change the immigration system and claim credit for that, he would. It did not involve legislation. He may still end up trying to do something legislatively. It wouldn't surprise me at all. I just don't see it going very far. But who knows? I'm willing to be surprised.

59:51But no, there is not room in the tank for, here is how we are going to map out X, Y, Z. They are in survival mode politically to a degree that I kind of can't express. I think that's a good place to end. Also, final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience? Okay. So I'm reading Charlie Savage's Takeover, The Return of the Imperial Presidency, which was a very, very good look at how particularly Dick Cheney expanded executive power under W. Bush post-9-11. I am reading Bell Burden's Strangers because a book that is that everywhere. I sort of feel compelled to have some sense of.

1:00:31I haven't read it yet. Is it good? It's interesting. It's interesting. It's well-written. It's definitely propulsive. It's an interesting choice to write about such wealth in this moment. That was a little hard to get through because there are many people who go through divorces who don't quite have the same resources. And then Keith McNally's I Regret Everything. Oh, that book has been fun. It's actually fantastic. But I've had to cycle out of that one for news and for other reasons. Maggie Haberman, thank you very much. That's right. Thanks for having me.

1:01:22Thank you.