Michael Bubaro: Welcome back. Today, in the first of a series of episodes evaluating the past year, we begin by turning to three of my colleagues, Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan, and Charlie Savage.

Michael Bubaro: Maggie, Jonathan, Charlie, welcome back. We come to the three of you on the occasion of this presidential term reaching its one-year mark. Always a moment for reflection, perhaps never more so than the extremely eventful first year of Donald Trump's second term. And all three of you covered Trump's first term and then you co-reported a series about what we should all expect from his second term, much of which came to pass. And as it happens, all three of you are now working on books about Trump and his presidency. So, you're thinking big thoughts, or at least we're hoping that you're thinking big thoughts.

Jonathan Swan: Thank you for the encouragement.

Michael Bubaro: You're uniquely positioned, we think, to have this conversation. Hope you agree. So, we wanted to start by asking you for the right big framework for thinking about this first year of Donald Trump's second term. And Jonathan, let me start with you there. Where I start conceptually with Trump is basically where we started with our series in 2023, which is the first big idea that we put out there based on our reporting, based on talking to all the people around Trump was that a second term of Donald Trump would involve extravagant uses of executive power.

Jonathan Swan: In some cases, possibly unprecedented use of executive power. And it became very clear early on that that's exactly what was coming to bear. There were just so many aggressive actions happening at once. It was happening in his immigration actions, in his use of tariffs. We saw it in the way that he attacked civil society, the way that he squeezed universities. We have agencies within the executive branch that either by law or by custom are understood to be independent from executive authority from the president himself. He completely jettisoned that. You have a situation where he is directing the attorney general to prosecute named individuals, something that we haven't seen in this country before. You also had him jawboning the FCC to go after certain media companies. Again, agencies that are either by statute or by norm independent no longer are independent. We've all forgotten Doge now, but that was an extraordinary expression of executive authority. So, it's already a year in a profoundly transformational presidency. And when I think about it, it all comes back to this conception of power that power belongs to Donald Trump and that any checks upon his power are illegitimate and ought to be bulldozed. Maggie, what's the framework you have been using for this first year?

Maggie Haberman: Oh, I agree with everything Jonathan said and I just will add a few things. One is there is this sort of personalization of power where not only targeting his enemies, perceived enemies I should say, for prosecution through the DOJ, but targeting law firms that he felt aggrieved by or some of his own lawyers felt aggrieved by with threats of executive orders or actual executive orders. He is clearly in sort of a he is owed his due phase where he believes he was harmed and he believes that he should have some kind of compensation for that literally in the sense that he wants the DOJ and he openly said this to give him a settlement for some of the investigations into him. He runs this justice department.

Michael Bubaro: Right? He wants the United States Department of Justice, which he oversees, to literally financially compensate him for a previous legal grievance he has.

Maggie Haberman: And and not a small amount, we should say.

Jonathan Swan: No. Well, I mean, the claim was, I think it was $230 million. Usually settlements are not that much, but whatever it is, it will be more than zero. You know, you go back all the way to earlier in the year, a story that Jonathan and I did with Eric Lipton about Trump's frustration about not having the new Air Force Ones that he had commissioned, the planes in term one that are delayed because of all kinds of issues. So instead, he's being the government, I should say, is being gifted a luxury jet that was owned by the once owned by the Qatari royal family. His government found this creative way to have it given to the defense department and then it's just going to be gifted to his presidential library and he says that he doesn't plan to fly it afterwards and some of his own advisers privately say they find that hard to believe. So, you can run the gamut on this of ways in which he sees himself as owed a due. That is the frame through which I am seeing a lot of this.

Michael Bubaro: The personalization of power. Yeah.

Jonathan Swan: I think another element of this that's really important if you sort of think about it under the, you know, reparations for Donald Trump umbrella is in this second term, he's thinking a lot about legacy and building monuments to himself, but the money is being extracted from corporate America. Why are they spending all this money? Well, he's building this big ballroom which will be seen as Donald Trump's ballroom at the White House. Why are corporations donating 5 million, 10 million? They're doing it out of fear. Obviously. I mean, we talked to a lot of people who represent and work at a senior level at different corporations. This is small change for them knowing that this is a president who's perfectly willing to use the federal government to hurt them, help them. And what you're diagnosing here, I think, is kind of fascinating to bring it together with what you said, Maggie. The president is personalizing power, and that becomes self-reinforcing. He personalized revenge. Correct. And what does that do? It ends up encouraging the targets or the avoiding targets of that revenge to then fund the self-immortalization side of the personalization of the presidency. And it becomes a virtuous cycle for him.

Maggie Haberman: Exactly. You also had him, you know, renaming the Kennedy Center, the Trump Kennedy Center, making the Institute of Peace, the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace. In many ways, it's these are things that I can do with the presidency. There's no legal impediment, so I'm going to do them. He wants to rename Dallas/Fort Worth airport the Trump airport. He wants a version of the Arctic triumph, which they call internally the Arctic Trump built. So, that's a big part of this. It's putting his imprint, his physical imprint, on Washington DC. And you guys all screwed me last time. You know, you stole the election, you tried to put me in jail, and I'm back. And guess what? You have to reckon with me now, and I'm just going to rub this in your faces. And one thing about Donald Trump is he knows how to use power aggressively. Correct. And that's the story of this first year is Donald Trump aggressively asserting power and largely succeeding.

Michael Bubaro: And Charlie, what is your framework for thinking about this? We're talking about power and its consolidation. We're talking about the personalization of that power.

Charlie Savage: Right? So, a running theme in what Jonathan Maggie you've been talking about is Trump exercising power until somebody stops him. And Congress right now controlled by a Republican party that is completely in his thrall. Clearly, he's not going to stop him. There will be an election later this year. We'll see if at least one chamber flips. Then there could start to be significant, you know, meaningful oversight investigations. Although we saw that in the first Trump term and the answer to those investigations were stonewalling of subpoenas and such. And so if Congress currently it clearly is going to do nothing and the question arises whether even under Democratic control it can effectively do something that leaves you with the courts.

Michael Bubaro: Right? And the big question being to what extent is this judiciary going to ratify or at least not stand in the way of these extraordinary myriad ways in which he's assuming and exercising powers that were not previously clearly understood to reside in the White House.

Charlie Savage: It's a little hard to talk about this right now because a lot of the litigation over this stuff is unresolved. A lot of people think it is possible that the court may strike down his unilateral imposition of import taxes or tariffs and that may be a big exception to an overall pattern. But from the vantage point right now, for the most part, while he has been stymied initially by lower court judges a lot, when stuff has reached the Supreme Court, it has by and large allowed him to do what he wants to do.

Michael Bubaro: Right. And just to distill what you're saying, the courts, especially the high court, the Supreme Court, has and appears poised to continue to ratify, codify, whatever you want to call it, this expanded power of this presidency, which is much greater than probably any modern presidency. I mean, can I just ask that question, Jonathan? Is there a precedent that you can think of for the exercise of this level of power by the president?

Jonathan Swan: Well, we have lots of precedents of presidents. I mean, of course, everyone references Franklin Roosevelt and him breaking a lot of norms, very aggressive use of executive power with the New Deal programs.

Michael Bubaro: Endorsed by Congress though, big difference.

Jonathan Swan: Definitely. And when you've seen huge abuses in the past, it's generally been in wartime. So, you know, Woodrow Wilson, there were terrible abuses against the press and civil society, unions, obviously Franklin Roosevelt with the internment camps. But again, in non-wartime, we're not in the middle of a great depression. There is no precedent for the breadth of aggressive assertion of executive power and even many of the instances of executive power that we're seeing used right now by Donald Trump.

Jonathan Swan: And I think there's another point that's really important that we haven't talked about yet, which is one reason why I think it's very likely that Donald Trump ends up being the most consequential president of our lifetimes is that it seems to me very unlikely that we go back to the way it was before after this experience. We're in an environment where there's not a huge constituency for a restorationist president for people to say, "Oh, actually, I really hope the next president will voluntarily restrain themselves and exercise prudence and respect the balance of powers." What's far more likely is that if the other side gets in, if Democrats get in, that their voters are going to want to see a president use all of these extravagant powers for their policy desires and policy goals. That is a very appealing thing. And so you you've seen now Trump act unilaterally in all sorts of ways that has now opened up a new panorama for every other leader who follows him. Are we going to see a reaction like we saw post Nixon, you know, where Carter essentially ran on good government restraint and all this sort of stuff?

Jonathan Swan: I don't know. It's a very different context. It's a very different context than it was back then. And so I think Trump is more likely to have set a precedent that will be followed, perhaps even expanded upon, as hard as that might be to imagine, than it is that will have some sort of restoration to the way it was after Donald Trump.

Michael Bubaro: Right? That Humpty Dumpty doesn't get put back together again.

Maggie Haberman: Totally. And I think Jonathan raises a really important point, which is that in this world we're living in now where both parties, I'm not saying it's taking place exactly the same way or exactly the same levels, but they're radicalized about each other. You know, January 6th was a radicalizing day for Democrats and some Republicans who lived through it in the capital. Trump and his advisers have been radicalized by two assassination attempts, two impeachment efforts, various indictments, all of them getting subpoenaed. Many of his advisers and many people who worked in that White House unable to get jobs after they left. So, everybody is on heightened alert and everybody thinks that their use of power is the right one. If I do it this way, it's because it's for the right cause.

Charlie Savage: If I could jump in just for a second, you know, a lot of my work chronicling executive power going back to the Cheney experiences in the 70s and how that informed the Bush administration and so forth has centered around this idea that executive power acts like a one-way ratchet and that it's easier to make it larger than to roll it back again because whatever one guy does, the next guy takes as a baseline and then innovates further and then that becomes the new baseline. And I think that is a truth about what we see in the growth of executive power, not just under Trump, but under the generations leading up to this moment. So if Jonathan and Maggie are right and there is a Democratic president who also jettisons all this caring about the rule of law and in checks and balances and norms of self-constraint that would fit that pattern. When you say it's appealing, I mean, possibly it's appealing in the moment in the in the crowd yelling at the rally. I think it's profoundly unappealing in terms of a recipe for a country that is not literally go to war with itself.

Michael Bubaro: Because it means that every if if everyone whoever is in power is completely unconstrained and there are no checks and balances and the rule of law means nothing and there are no norms, then it's existential that that side stays in power.

Maggie Haberman: Exactly. And the other side comes in, then that side thinks it's going to go to prison because they just broke all these laws. There has to be a war to prevent the other side from coming in.

Michael Bubaro: It's a government of it's a government in which you have to annihilate your opponents.

Jonathan Swan: Charlie, when I talk to certain people around Trump, that's where they are psychologically right now. That the next election is for all the marbles. They cannot it's it's in it's intolerable the thought of losing power because of that dynamic. I agree with I'm not saying it's appealing to me. I'm saying the the idea of an energetic man of action in the presidency who can click his fingers and make things happen is very appealing and I think we're very naive to think that it's not. So just to end the first half of this really fascinating conversation, can we call it officially a year into this second term that our democracy, our democratic system has fundamentally changed? That we can't with a straight face say based on everything you have all laid out here that we're really talking about three separate but equal branches of government given the consolidation the personalization and the codification of power in this presidency it's obviously absurd to say that we're looking at three equally like look at Congress I mean how could you possibly argue with a straight face that Congress is a separate co-equal branch in the way it's been operating. I mean, it's an absurdity. So, you know, I can't imagine how you could in an intellectually honest way make that case.

Michael Bubaro: And if we're going to ratchet it up, Charlie, if it only goes in one direction, doesn't that mean something fundamental has changed here in the American system of democracy?

Charlie Savage: It's hard to say that this is like a permanent entrenchment of what we saw in the year 2025 is the way it's always going to be going forward. Now I think certainly though the American style system of democracy and checks and balances and separated institutions wielding co-equal control over the government is not how America has functioned in the first year of the Trump second term. And you know the whole system is very sick right now.

Michael Bubaro: Well, when we come back, we're going to talk about how much of this first term and the president's use of power, to my surprise, wonder if it's to yours as well, ended up happening overseas. We'll be right back. Charlie and Maggie and Jonathan, as I said before the break, one of the most surprising qualities of this first year of his second term has been the way that the president has used this consolidated power overseas. And let me just offer a few reminders that you may not even need. He has deployed US bombers to take out Iran's nuclear facilities. He has intervened in the war between Israel and Gaza and successfully pushed for a peace deal that released the hostages there. He has tried to negotiate peace between Russia and Ukraine. He has used special forces to take out Nicholas Maduro. He has threatened to take over Greenland.

Jonathan Swan: This was a lot of emphasis not on America. I think the problem with the list you just laid out, Michael, is that it contains very conventional expressions of, you know, presidential power in an area where there is a lot of leeway, you know, in terms of the ability to conduct foreign policy. So, it is completely conventional for a president to try to negotiate the end to a war in any part of the world. Where we get into really, to use the word again, extravagant uses of power is in the areas that Charlie has been reporting on so much, which is declaring just because Donald Trump says so that people who are transporting cocaine on boats are armed combatants and terrorists and therefore I won't arrest them, I will just blow them up and kill them. Or, you know, sending Delta Force in to remove a foreign sovereign. Those are the areas where he's really testing things in a lot of the other areas that you mentioned. I think it's quite conventional the way that he's using power.

Michael Bubaro: That's very helpful that distinction. I mean, Charlie, since Jonathan brings it up and dismisses much of my list as conventional, but zeros in,

Charlie Savage: I would throw bombing Iran into the list of things that are across the line, but certainly negotiating peace deals is not.

Michael Bubaro: And when you say cross the line, describe what you mean and why it matters because presidents of the United States have always, as Jonathan has said, exercised an extraordinary amount of discretion when it comes to the use of the US military. Well, presidents of both parties going back have carved out for themselves an ability to use American military force abroad unilaterally without going to Congress under certain circumstances. The circumstances are basically incidences where there's a national interest in the anticipated scope, duration, nature of the hostilities fall short of war in the constitutional sense. So, one-off air strikes, peacekeeping operations, small-scale interventions. Bombing Iran was seen as across the line because it created such a risk of a major regional conflagration that the anticipated risk that it could lead to a full-scale war meant Congress needed to be involved from the beginning if we were going to cross that line.

Charlie Savage: The boat strikes and the Venezuela Maduro operation certainly in that category. Trump is assuming for himself the power to essentially order the summary extrajudicial executions of people who had always been treated as criminal suspects and the crime they are suspected of committing not even a capital offense that is drug trafficking.

Michael Bubaro: Mhm.

Charlie Savage: He's done so through a sort of conjuring into existence legal realities, you know, realities in quotation marks. I determine that there is an legal formal state of armed conflict with a secret list of drug cartels and criminal gangs and that therefore the people on boats suspected of smuggling narcotics for them are not criminals. They are combatants and therefore it is lawful for me to direct the US military to kill them summarily. I mean that's an extraordinary thing. No one thinks that outside of the government that there is actually an armed conflict, but who's going to challenge him inside the government? Clearly, the military is not, especially because their Jag core has been gutted by Secretary of Defense Pete Hex.

Michael Bubaro: Jag core are the lawyers in the military who might issue opinions saying don't do that. Whose purpose is to provide legal advice to military commanders about obeying the law. And the law says militaries are not allowed to target civilians even if they are suspected of crimes if they pose no imminent threat. That is murder and peace time. That is a war crime in an armed conflict. Nevertheless, the military is doing what Trump is telling them to do. And now with the raid into Venezuela, using ground troops on the sovereign soil of another country in a place where they killed 80 people and effectuated regime change. And he says he can do that too in this case under the guise of being a law enforcement operation. So they can combat drug smugglers by saying that's not a law enforcement investigation, that's war. And then they can send troops in to the foreign territory of another country without congressional authorization by saying that's not war, that is just a law enforcement operation. It's just an extraordinary set of events. It is a demonstration of the theme we were talking about in the first half of this of you can just do stuff and especially if you've hired the right lawyers who are not going to raise objections but are going to find ways to produce a piece of paper with some words on it that says yes you can do what you want to do who's going to stop you.

Jonathan Swan: Jonathan what may unify these interventions if anything and I'm going to be a little bit provocative here is that for now they have seemed to turn out pretty well for the United States. And let me just give you some examples. When we think about the president's approach to foreign affairs this entire past year, it ends with a NATO that's paying more than ever for its own defense, which therefore puts less burden on the US Treasury. The United States is now feared by Latin American leaders who have major problems with drug cartels. And we're seeing that those governments, look at Mexico for example, it turns out, can do a heck of a lot more to fight those cartels when they feel threatened by Donald Trump. So just reckon with that for a minute that as legally dubious as some of these actions have been, they do appear to serve the US national interest. Well, I don't find this difficult to reckon with at all. And this is kind of the point I was getting at earlier, which is that just because something is unlawful or at least legally contested doesn't mean that it's not appealing or doesn't get some good for America. So the two major military operations that he has authorized in Iran and in Venezuela resulted in no American service members dying. I mean, whatever you think about the operation to get rid of Maduro, whether you think it was wise, it was an astonishing display of military prowess. And if you're Donald Trump and you pull off such spectacular military successes and then get the reinforcement of the praise and the fear,

Jonathan Swan: It's self-reinforcing. And that's why you see him now saying, "Well, what about Greenland? What about Cuba? What about a regime change in Iran? Is he just going to continue to get lucky in all these circumstances? We don't know. We're still very early in the presidency. But what I would say to your point about, you know, looking at this holistically, it's true that the Europeans are now spending more on their defense. Donald Trump has managed to get them to do something that other presidents have not, and he should be credited for that. But what's also true, if you're looking at this with cold, clear eyes, is that America's traditional allies will not go back to the way they were in terms of trusting America and the nature of those alliances that predated at least the second Trump presidency because they can always know that America could go back to this point. Even if we do get some restorationist type figure who's saying NATO's, you know, everyone needs to hold hands, they've now had this lived experience of an American president that says we're going to take this territory and, you know, to hell with you. You're just going to have to live with it. So, it's very hard to make long-term assessments about the American national interest right now, a year into the Donald Trump presidency. There are going to be areas where Donald Trump's approach to power extracts positive things for America. There are also going to potentially be costs.

Michael Bubaro: And maybe even very significant costs to the way that he's acting on the global stage. Maggie, to bring it back to the domestic front for a moment, one of the riddles of the second term is that this is a president, and I looking at you because you literally wrote a biography of him, who deeply craves approval and affirmation. And yet polling shows that voters approval of him on a wide variety of key issues from the economy to immigration to some of his overseas interventions has been on the decline throughout this first year of his second term. And the question to me anyway is why is this second term being defined by a disconnect on what's important to him and what's important to the voters who put him into this office, especially for someone who has been defined by the desire for affirmation.

Maggie Haberman: Sure. This has come up a lot. I mean, the simple answer, and we hear this from multiple people close to the president, is he just sort of doesn't care the same way. I mean, he is just going to do what he wants. We talked about the reparations era of Donald Trump, not just for self, but just sort of for life, for everything. You know, he felt like he didn't get to enjoy his presidency the first time because of the Russia investigation and impeachments and so forth and so on. And now he feels like he is just going to do what he wants. And he is not on the ballot again himself. And so unless there is a direct impact to him, he doesn't care. And yes, he's not getting the media coverage that he wants. That is true, at least in the mainstream media. But he is getting a lot of lavish praise from quarters like Fox News, which actually wasn't this all-in for him in term one. He has business leaders sort of tripping over themselves. Um, and he's being to praise him and to give him money and to tell him everything he's doing is fantastic. And the thing that I I did want to say about foreign policy that's the through line with him. He's never been as engaged on domestic policy as he has been captivated by being seen as a player on the global stage going back 40 years. I mean if you go back and you look at everything he was doing in the 80s it was trying to be seen as an expert on nuclear physics or somebody who you know might be able to get Reagan's ear or somebody who could meet with Gorbachev and so he's now being recognized that way.

Jonathan Swan: Fascinating. And he is living in a very very isolated information bubble and it doesn't seem to bother him at all. If it starts to, we'll see. But he's content that he's getting all the praise he needs. I mean Jonathan it just feels like and this is what's useful about pausing at a year mark and having this conversation is that if MAGAism Trumpism was always a transaction between the president and the electorate it feels like his place in this transaction is kind of over. Oh, I see it so differently. I I don't think it's a transaction at all. I think Donald Trump is a, you know, we misuse the word charisma, but actual charisma historically understood, the ability to have an emotional connection with someone. That's the heart of the Donald Trump movement. And to me, the big question is when Donald Trump leaves the scene and a more conventional politician comes in, and let's face it, every one of the people that we're discussing as potential successes to him from JD Vance on down are not Donald Trump on this. Can that person glue together this impossible coalition which includes Lindsey Graham and Tucker Carlson? People who despise each other, who diametrically opposed on key issues, Donald Trump glues them together through an almost sort of supernatural, whatever you want to call it, but like can a more conventional politician glue together that coalition? Like I'm very skeptical. So the more that voters view Donald Trump as, "Yeah, I I still kind of like him at some gut level, but he's disappointed me on issue X, issue Y, issue Z." The victim or the person who bears the costs of that is less likely to be Donald Trump than it is to be JD Vance or whoever succeeds him.

Michael Bubaro: Well, we have three more years to figure out who will emerge as the political heir to Donald Trump, Jonathan. So, let's table that for the moment. I want to ask the three of you a bit of a curveball. I'm curious what specific moment of this past year stands out to you. Not necessarily in the classic it was the most important moment sense, but because for you it was the most revealing and embodying of this second term so far. For me, it really was about the initial handling in the summer of the Jeffrey Epstein files, documents, material, whatever you want to call it. Why?

Jonathan Swan: This is another example of Trump personalizing his presidency in the sense that for him, he was never that obsessed with the Jeffrey Epstein matter. I mean, he did talk about it in 2015 in the context of Bill Clinton and so forth, but he was never somebody who made this his lifeblood. Whereas it has been a driving force for a lot of his supporters. And there was just this fundamental disconnect between himself and aspects of his base on this. And this was the first time, at least for me, that we really saw that.

Michael Bubaro: Charlie,

Charlie Savage: Well, I spent so much time writing about Venezuela and the boat strikes. I'll I'll pick in September when he's got some people in the Oval Office for a completely unrelated issue and he suddenly just kind of casually remarks, "By the way, we blew some people out of the water this morning. You're going to be hearing more about that." And then a few minutes later posts on his Truth Social social media platform what any administration would treat as highly classified footage of this attack.

Michael Bubaro: And using this entirely personalized medium truthsocial.com to put out this extremely official important footage was striking. No other president would have done that at all but certainly no other president would have done it the public presentation of it in that way. Jonathan, what about you?

Jonathan Swan: [sighs]

Jonathan Swan: There are sort of two moments. I know that's not the rule, but um.

Maggie Haberman: Oh, I didn't know we could do that. I would have done that.

Jonathan Swan: The first.

Michael Bubaro: You're violating norms.

Jonathan Swan: Exactly. Norms, not laws. They're both images actually. Video. The first was the tech billionaires on the dis at the inauguration. Because if we accept that AI is potentially as transformative, if not more transformative than the great breakthroughs of the last century, Donald Trump has taken America in a very different direction in terms of unleashing AI, giving these guys basically everything they want. If you think about what are the things that he does that are going to outlast him, that's going to be one of them.

Michael Bubaro: This could be the most lastingly transformational.

Jonathan Swan: It could. Besides the the way he's changed the presidency, the other one is the assassination of Charlie Kirk. It was a horrifying moment. I can't get that video out of my head. I talked to Charlie Kirk the day before he was assassinated. You know, someone that I dealt with a lot. While Charlie's death was a horrible tragedy, it was also an opportunity for the Trump administration to do what many of them have wanted to do, including Donald Trump, which is use government power to crush the left, to dismantle the left, to go after the institutional left, the major groups on the left. If we do see in the next 12 months efforts by the Justice Department to dismantle, prosecute the left's big groups, this horrible assassination could be a real catalyst of that story.

Michael Bubaro: I want to end this conversation by asking the three of you to briefly look ahead to the rest of the term and what is left for him to do after doing so much in these past 365 or so days. What's actually left for him to do after everything he has done? Maggie.

Maggie Haberman: Well, let's just take his revenge tour specifically in the form of prosecutions he wants to see. He has gotten frustrated that courts have stymied him, that the Justice Department at times has stymied him, that career prosecutors have quit and said that they're not going to go ahead with things. It reminds me very much, frankly, of the leadup to, you know, January 6, 2021, when he was looking for anyone who would give him what he wanted. He always likes, as one of his friends said to me, lawyers who will do anything. The reality is he really likes fill-in-lank who will do anything, you know, if he asks them to. And so no one has been convicted, no one has been put in jail.

Michael Bubaro: So that work is unfinished.

Maggie Haberman: For him.

Michael Bubaro: Yes. And he has made quite clear vocally to people around him that that work is unfinished.

Michael Bubaro: Mhm. Jonathan,

Jonathan Swan: Donald Trump, I'm not saying he has a fully developed framework for this, but I think at an instinctive level, he's quite sympathetic to the notion of dividing the world up into spheres of influence. Meaning America is the hegemon in the western hemisphere and America has complete domination over its own neighborhood. You know, Venezuela is the 51st state, Canada is the 52nd state, you know, go down the list. But that potentially also leaves room for China to take Taiwan, for Russia to obviously they are going to get a large amount of land out of whatever final arrangement happens in in this war. It'll be interesting to see how that evolves and obviously the center of that conversation is Donald Trump's relationship with Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin and what concessions he makes to them, how much room he gives them to exert their own domination over their neighborhoods.

Michael Bubaro: Okay. So, putting enemies behind bars, reorganizing the entire global order. Charlie, do you have anything to add to what you think might happen here? To add one more thing to the table, I would point to immigration enforcement as an unfinished business that is already becoming escalatory. Trump very quickly managed to close the border. But what has marked both his promises and what his base elected him to do and what he's now doing as aggressively as he can is the interior enforcement. Mass sweeps aimed at purging the country of many millions of people who are here without documentation. As we are seeing in places right now like Minneapolis.

Charlie Savage: But the bottom line is there are millions of people here that people like Steven Miller do not want to be here and finding them and taking them into custody and pushing them through the deportation hearing process in a way that dramatically escalates the number of people per year who are removed from the country is a achievement that it remains promised and yet undone. So what all this seems to add up to is an increased amount of tensions at home and the use and the willingness to use hard power in the streets of American cities, especially Democratic cities, both ICE agents in masks, acting very aggressively and then backed by the threat of and sometimes the reality of federal troops in the streets of American cities to protect and enhance that effort. It seems very incendiary.

Michael Bubaro: Right? Yeah, I mean, as we sit here right now, it really does feel like the country is on edge. We're in this very precarious moment where you've got Donald Trump's assertion of power using the military, using ICE in cities in a very in-your-face way and a resistance movement that is building up steam on the left. And it just seems like that collision is inevitable in a way that is much more dramatic than we've seen so far. Well, Jonathan, Charlie, Maggie, thank you very much once again. Appreciate it.

Jonathan Swan: Thank you, Michael.

Maggie Haberman: Thank you. Thanks, Michael.

Michael Bubaro: Over the weekend, President Trump once again used his power in previously unimaginable ways. His justice department opened a criminal investigation into Minnesota's Democratic leaders, including the state's governor, Tim Walls, and the mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Fry. Both of whom have criticized Trump's immigration crackdown in the state. The investigation will focus on allegations that both officials conspired to block federal immigration officials from doing their job. In a statement, Governor Walls called the investigation a quote dangerous authoritarian tactic. We'll be right back.

Michael Bubaro: Here's what else you need to know today. Over the weekend, President Trump threatened in a social media post to slap major new tariffs on European countries that oppose his plan to acquire Greenland. That drew outrage from European leaders who said the threats amounted to economic warfare against longtime allies. But Trump showed little sign of backing down. On Sunday, in a moment of bracing candor, Trump told the leader of Norway that he no longer felt any obligation to pursue a peaceful takeover of Greenland because he said he was upset about not winning the Nobel Peace Prize. And Spanish officials are investigating the cause of a high-speed train crash that killed at least 40 people. It was Spain's deadliest railroad accident in more than a decade. The crash occurred when the two rear cars of one train derailed and crossed into the path of another train. The resulting collision hurled some passengers hundreds of feet from the train.

Michael Bubaro: Today's episode was produced by Rob Zipco, Alex Stern, Austa Churbatty, and Mary Wilson with help from Jessica Chung. It was edited by Rachel Quester. Contains music by Alicia, Diane Wong, and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Bavaro. See you tomorrow.