Donald Trump’s Imperial Birthday Spectacle

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1:08Quince dot com slash political scene. Do you know what the hottest live stream in Washington is right now? No. What? There is a live stream that an enterprising soul set up, I believe, who lives in the Watergate apartment buildings, anxiously, 24 hours a day, waiting for the takedown of the Donald Trump name for the Kennedy Center. And you can literally, and not only is it a live stream that's just been positioned there waiting because there's a court-ordered deadline of the 12th to take down the name from the Kennedy Center, but when we tuned in last night, there are people talking, like they're having a sort of a Trump-Kennedy Center talk-a-thon on the live stream.

1:49That is genius. I mean, honestly, the best thing about this period is the sense of humor. You know, they just keep coming up with one thing after another. Well, because don't you want to, like, if you knew it was coming down, thousands of people are going to go there. How could you miss it? I think that I like the idea of the chisel cam, just waiting for them to capture that moment.

2:13Welcome to The Political Scene from The New Yorker, a weekly discussion about the big questions in American politics. I'm Susan Glasser, and I'm joined by my colleagues Jane Mayer and Evan Osnos. Hey, Jane. Hey, Susan. Hey, Evan. Hey, Evan. Good morning, guys.

2:31All right. So something a little bit different this week. Donald Trump, Donald John Trump, was born on June 14, 1946, at Jamaica Hospital in Queens. That means that as of this Sunday, he will be turning 80 years old, the second president only in American history after the last one to turn 80. How are we marking this? For the second year in a row, Donald Trump has turned his birthday into an imperial presidential spectacle involving millions of dollars in expense and huge deployments of U.S. personnel. The military parade for his 79th birthday cost up to$45 million. This Sunday, he will be hosting a UFC fight on the South Lawn of the White House.

3:23This is a spectacle fit for a Roman Empire. Vassois of the National Mall, even the Lincoln Memorial will be involved in this. According to court papers, the cost already has run to more than$60 million. dollars. Donald Trump celebrating his birthday. He says, by the way, I should say this is part of America's 250th anniversary special. But I think it's really one of those moments that's worth stepping back and marking here. It's not just that Donald Trump is a longtime fan of boxing, you know, strength. He's strong. They're strong. Big men beating each other up. This actually goes all the way back to Trump hosting Mike Tyson fights.

4:08He even once climbed into the ring himself fighting the CEO of the WWE, Vince McMahon, back in 2007. Remarkable in retrospect because he's now president of the United States. This is the WWE. Donald Trump may have to get his hands dirty himself. I'm told you. You may have to go and say to get involved here. Hey, look at this! Donald Trump! Donald Trump! Donald Trump! Oh, my God! The hostile takeover of Donald Trump on Vince McMahon has happened at WrestleMania 23. Hostile takeover, I heard. That seems pretty fitting, actually. It does seem fitting. And look, you know, it's like Donald Trump, the master brander, turning his birthday into a carnival supposedly celebrating strength, performative displays of masculinity.

5:03And yet at the moment, right, we want to have a conversation on his 80th birthday about a moment in which Donald Trump, the fighter, appears to be very much in decline. He's grown, as we all know, increasingly erratic in recent weeks, been caught falling asleep at countless public appearances, posting late night social media tirades of 50 messages. On top of that, and perhaps more importantly, he's someone who's losing his political vitality day by day. And recent ABC Ipsos poll found 59 % of Americans, 59 % believe that Donald Trump does not have the mental sharpness it takes to lead the country.

5:47His approval ratings are also at an all-time low. So here we have our happy birthday, Mr. President special edition of the political scene. And, you know, it's a serious topic. We want to talk about what this means for our democracy and for the future of the Trump presidency. By August of his final year in office, he will hit the all-time record for oldest president beating Joe Biden. So let's start, Evan, with pointing out a few examples of what we've been seeing from the president lately. Yeah, I think it's worth pointing out here that just as a statistical matter, we now know, thanks to the good people at the Pew Research Center, that of the 186 leaders serving worldwide, Trump now ranks number seven seen in age.

6:42And the oldest, as every listener knows, is the president of Cameroon, who's 93. There's the king of Saudi Arabia. The reason I mention all this is that we are now entering a pantheon, shall we say, of leaders that tend to be in countries. It is no accident that they tend to be in countries that do not have flourishing democracies, because that's how you get to stay in office for so long, kind of looking at the map. It struck me we're looking at this kind of senescent crescent in a way. There's just no other way. Can we trademark that for you? I feel like that's one of your better phrases here.

7:18Senescent crescent. But actually, my point is that it's not about the age. It's about the behavior. It's about the clear fact that his conduct, his cognitive function, his behavior is declining. And we did a show back in December in which we talked about him getting older. And since then, guys, we have to note that some of the most dramatic indicators have happened. And it was shortly after that, in fact, that he sent this completely bananas letter to the prime minister of Norway saying, because I didn't get the Nobel Prize, I may have to go after Greenland. You know, he's threatened to annihilate civilization in Iran and so on and so on.

7:56So we're now at the point where, in a way, it would be delinquent for us to say we've already talked about Donald Trump getting older. Part of the I think the job is to be vigilant and to say, no, let's inventory, let's catalog the things that have happened because they are getting weirder. OK, so speaking of cataloging, let's play a quick clip, Jane, and then we can talk about it from just this week. Donald Trump had a strong opinion about the latest economic news. You can serve Mr. President about the latest inflation number which came out this morning. Could that be? No, I love it. The numbers were great.

8:32You know what I really love? I love the inflation. You know why? Jane, that is a remarkable clip, especially because there's multiple recent examples of Donald Trump saying things that you can't imagine any president recently. Now, not the kind of inflammatory stuff where we've been used to Donald Trump for the last 10 years, but gaffes that even Trump in his first term wouldn't have made, saying that it doesn't matter that Americans are suffering. He doesn't care not only about inflation. He doesn't care about the economy. He doesn't care about their personal well-being, essentially. What do you make of episodes like this happening with such frequency?

9:07I think it's hard not to see that he seems to be living in a kind of fantasy land. and that he is surrounded by people who do not want to pop the bubble of his happiness at inflation and his not caring about Americans' economic distress. And I think for me, the exchange recently that really was telling was when he essentially threw a tantrum and walked out of an interview with Kristen Welker of Meet the Press. And it was a planned interview. It was supposed to last a good chunk of time. When she started questioning him in a way that he found too challenging, he became incandescent with rage. But you've never presented evidence that it was rigged.

9:58Let's keep talking about it. I want to talk about Todd Lynch. You have more evidence. There's more evidence than ever presented. Let's talk about it. Your elections in this country were like a third world country. Your elections are crooked and you're crooked and Mr. Press is crooked. And so is ABC and CBS and CNN. You're one-sided crooked networks. Let's call it quits because I've had enough. Thank you, darling. Have a good time. Mr. President, let's please. I traveled all the way to Wisconsin. He stood up, walked off. I know from people at NBC, it threw them off. They had planned their whole Sunday show around the long interview.

10:36They were left with nothing but this show of this flair of temper. And I think you can learn a lot from this. First of all, I want to say that he's living in a world where he is not challenged on the facts and he actually can't handle the truth when it's given to him, when he's confronted with it. And that's what Kristen Welker did. I also think it's worth noting just if we're going through this, Kristen Welker is a consummate professional. Yeah. But she also happens to be a black woman reporter. And Trump has a pattern here that is unavoidable to see, which is of completely disrespecting female reporters and especially black female reporters.

11:21And there we are seeing it again. And then finally, I think the other thing that I take from this moment right now is looking at the lack of self-control that he is exhibiting. I think any sane person has to worry that he is the man who's got his finger on the nuclear button. button. I think it demands some interest in the chain of command and how huge decisions involving war and peace are made, and particularly nuclear war, because we're looking at someone who seems to be, in some ways, moving backwards towards a second childhood. You know, it's interesting, Evan, I'd love to get your take on this, because obviously Trump is erratic, he's combative, he's angry, as Jane pointed out.

12:07But it's also true, As you mentioned, he's been going after black female reporters since the beginning of his time in public office. In fact, it was one of the signature moves of his first term in office when he was challenged. He would pick a face in the crowd of the reporters surrounding him and go after that person. So what is your view about how we as journalists approach this? Because obviously Trump appears, certainly physically he appears to be aging. I thought it was remarkable. In his recent checkup, Donald Trump was examined by 22 different medical specialists. That's remarkable. That's twice as many as his previous checkups at Walter Reed.

12:51And yet, it's not obvious, you know, which part is Donald Trump, the out-of-control, erratic, combative, angry, immature, toddler-in-chief. That was the title of a book my friend Dan Desner wrote about Donald Trump in the first term. So how do we as journalists observing this tell people what they need to know, but at the same time, we can't pretend to really know which part is aging and which part is Donald Trump? Well, one of the things that Jane is right to point out is that what we're seeing is a pattern here that needs to be described clearly, which is disinhibition. This idea that he is increasingly unbound, either psychologically or personally, but also politically.

13:31I mean, he is now surrounded so thoroughly, so insulated. There's an interaction between his behavior and the people around him. So you've seen that most recently with the promotion of Bill Pulte, the acting director of national intelligence, somebody who is thoroughly unfit for that position. And that has occasioned some good reporting on kind of who is actually around Trump right now. And he's spending more and more time with people like Boris Epstein, his personal counsel, his executive assistant, Natalie Harp. I mean, these are people who are not of the, shall we say, experience and caliber that he even had in the first term.

14:12So he is receding into more and more, to use your words, Susan, imperial seclusion. And this is very characteristic of somebody who is now raging when he encounters the occasional brush with reality. And I think that's the kind of pattern that reporters need to identify, even if it can feel as if this is an extension, but a really important amplification of a pattern that goes back many years. I mean, I totally agree. But I think it's a very difficult challenge for reporters because we need to have data. We need to have evidence to write what we write and facts to check. And the problem is we've got doctor's reports that seem inadequate.

14:58And I think, if anything, we've learned from Biden's recent example that you really don't get the full picture from Walter Reed's medical reports. I mean, it was astounding to me that Biden has stage four prostate cancer and nobody knew it. But, you know, there is missing information in the medical reports, I feel, at this point. And we also don't have reliable witnesses around the president because they cover up for him and they are beholden to him. And that is, I mean, it's not that they're different. That is partly the job of being an aide to the president is to make him look good. And I think we've learned that you only see what they want you to see, really.

15:45And even that, though, we are seeing beginning to see some snippets that the White House is unable to control, which are really interesting. I mean, again and again now, we've seen Trump falling asleep in public. Yeah, no, I'm glad you brought that up, Jane, because I think it's right that, you know, we can't interpose our medical judgment that we don't have. We can't, you know, sort of speculating is very difficult when aging is so intertwined with who the person is to begin with. But we have some really objective, you know, sort of metrics here, it seems to me, for where Trump is different from the first term and that falling asleep in public.

16:25If Donald Trump is most worried about being seen as not strong, not, you know, the macho man who hosts UFC fighters on his lawn, but weak, you know, why did he attack Joe Biden as sleepy Joe for all those years? it's pretty clear that if he could control himself from falling asleep in the middle of cabinet meetings, in the middle of, you know, there's a dispute. But, you know, it seemed to a lot of people who observed some footage that he fell asleep in the middle of the Knicks game the other night at the Madison Square Garden, which is a pretty exciting venue in which to fall asleep in. You know, that suggests the makeup on now both hands covering up bruises very poorly.

17:09Again, not something we saw, the difficulty walking. When he goes up and down the stairs, he's clutching those railings like, you know, it's his life wrapped at sea. These are kind of objective metrics that it is important to point out, even if we don't have the right context for them, right? Yeah, I think that's part of the job here is that, and what I do tend to also focus on, on the actual behaviors. I mean, it is notable when he's starting to propose ideas that even Donald Trump of a few years ago would have found to be kind of politically unimaginable. I mean, take the slush fund. Even Mitch McConnell is saying this thing is utterly stupid, morally wrong, as he puts it.

17:52So you're both surrounded by people who won't tell you no, you are increasingly disinhibited. There was this incredible moment when Marco Rubio was appearing before a House committee the other day. You are literally talking about issues of war and peace, and Donald Trump is sleeping right next to you. No, he's not. If Donald Trump cannot stay awake at these important meetings where the cameras are rolling, imagine what he's like when the cameras are not there. So I'm going to ask you, have you been at classified meetings where Donald Trump has fallen asleep or had trouble staying awake? I've never been at any meeting.

18:29And the things you're showing me now, he was not falling asleep. And so you're lying again. You're lying consistently to Congress. This is literally my favorite clip of the last few weeks because I feel like it is the essence of Trump 2.0. And here's where I think it's so fascinating is that this came up in a foreign affairs meeting. And the reason why that's so significant is Ted Lieu was right. This is now a matter of national security. Right, Jane? I mean, we're right to be talking about Donald Trump's physical and cognitive functioning in the context of America's foreign affairs and national security.

19:11I have to say this is one of the things that caused me to go back and do a little research, which was it reminded me of the famous scene from the Marx Brothers where one of the Marx Brothers says, who are you going to believe, your own eyes or me? And Margaret Dumont sort of looks flustered and doesn't know which to believe. But, I mean, we are getting Marx Brothers-level denial here of the reality we all see, but they're telling you not to believe your own eyes. Trump keeps falling asleep. And, you know, we all see it. And I guess that that is the job of the reporter is to keep saying, roll the camera and explain for the world what we see.

19:55He's falling asleep in front of us. OK, if he falls asleep at the UFC fight now, that's that's going to be a real scandal. We're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we're going to talk about what Donald Trump's aging means as far as his political vitality, because this is the political scene from The New Yorker.

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20:42Okay, so Donald Trump is the third American president born in the summer of 1946. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Donald Trump, all three of them born in that summer, in the immediate aftermath of World War II. He is vying to become the oldest president in U.S. history. America seems trapped in some ways in a kind of gerontocratic loop, if you could call it that. And, you know, we have an aging political class in Congress. We have a sclerotic and increasingly broken political system. And, you know, I guess the question is, you look at the poll numbers, And clearly Biden suffered greatly with the public from the idea that he was just simply too old to carry out the job at a certain point.

21:31And it looks to me like something similar is now happening with Donald Trump. And in addition to the qualms about his policies and the concerns about inflation and the economy and the war in the Middle East that he launched and seems to have no way to get out of that, there is a changing view of Trump that in part is influenced by his age. But I'm curious, I want to throw that to both of you as well. Evan, do you think that we're seeing a kind of a structural shift that Americans are saying to both Biden and Trump? No, we don't want to have a president in his 80s. It's an experiment. We've tried it.

22:09We don't want it. Yeah, you're actually starting to see it's, you know, just this tiny traces of it. But believe it or not, this Congress, guys, is actually a tiny bit younger than the last few that came in. I mean, we're talking small differences here. I think the House of Representatives is now like the median age is 57.4, I read, instead of 58.4. The reason why that's meaningful is that is a sign of the fact that the public is registering its discontent. There are older members of Congress that are, shall we say, exiting the stage. Now, we talk occasionally on this show about why people stay so so goddamn long to pardon my French here.

22:47I mean, it's I think there's a kind of luxurious momentum to being senior in Congress and nobody wants to give that up. But you're seeing in example after example now that Trump is just running up against what the limits of what the system would accept. Just the most recent, you know, his preferred candidate in the Iowa governor's primary lost. Congress has registered its discontent about funding the ballroom. There are ways in which he is just seems to be running out of political vitality. And the public is making that clear. It got me thinking about how old is Donald Trump really? And I went back to see what was happening the year that he was born.

23:26That was the year that the bikini became part of the world. There were no two-piece bathing suits before until that year. I mean, honestly, it's incredible how much has changed. And the world that he grew up in has really in many ways disappeared. And so it's not just a number, really. It's about the ability of the most powerful leader in the world to cope with a very fast-changing world and to make the best decisions. And I think there's a growing sense that he is out of touch. And so statements like saying, I love inflation or I don't care about the economic welfare of the American public, these things, they seem as if he's lost the pulse in some ways.

24:14And by the way, Jane, it's hilarious that you did that because I also went down the historical rabbit hole. Although what I did is I spent about an hour yesterday reading the entire New York Times from the day that Trump was born, June 14th, 1946. And interestingly, you said the point about, yeah, most things have changed. Most things have changed. However, certain elements of American politics actually are evergreen. And one of them is that presidential administrations, when there's inflation and they get in trouble with the American public, they feel very defensive. And in The New York Times on June 14th, 1946, there was one very outraged Chester Bowles, who was President Harry Truman's director of economic stabilization after World War II.

25:04And guess what? He was really pissed off and spinning like mad because of the rising cost of living spiking after the war. He said the effect of these recent price increases on the economy had been, quote, dangerously distorted and exaggerated by, quote, defeatist and inflationist in an effort to cripple price controls. And he did concede in a statement on the trend of the cost of living in recent months that the administration's wage price policy might need some adjustments. And the bottom line is, you know, in American politics, you are in big trouble. And Harry Truman was in big trouble. His comeback in the next election was, you know, one for the ages.

25:50But Harry Truman was in big trouble with American voters at the time that Donald Trump was born because prices and inflation were surging at the end of the World War. Donald Trump is a lot angrier than Chester Bowles. Let's be honest about that. I think Chester Bowles was known as a masterful smoothie. Exactly. So that's why his statement struck me. But there are some perennials in politics, spinning politicians, spinning bad news defensively. That goes on forever. But I do think it's worth drawing attention to the fact that to your point that he is temperamentally different, there is this growing sense in D.C.

26:32I think you guys would agree with this, that he's stuck. He's kind of checkmated on a number of fronts. And, you know, there was one operative who was quoted in Politico today saying he does not like being put in a box. And here's the key point. When you put him in a box, Donald Trump's going to blow the box up. And I think it's worth just marking this on the calendar because there has been we've talked a bit in the past about how his solution to problems is to escalate. And I think, all kidding aside, the more frantic and disinhibited and insulated he becomes, his solution is going to be to go big.