Ezra Klein: In Trump’s first term, there was a huge amount of daily reporting about how his White House was working. "You’ve got Reince Priebus, the establishment Republican. Steve Bannon, the fiery Alt right nationalist Jared Kushner supported Democrats in the past." "The president sharply told his feuding team members quote, work it out. The communications director, the National Security Advisor, the deputy national security advisor. That’s a lot of turnover. That’s a lot of turnover." Trump’s second term has been different. Trump’s staff is selected much more for loyalty. The factional infighting is much less present, and the White House has been doing much more. The balance of coverage is about what they are actually doing in the world, as opposed to what they are doing or saying about each other, but particularly recently around Minneapolis, around Venezuela, around a number of major stories, I’ve wondered, how are decisions being made here? What does a president know? Who tells him if something is going wrong? Who is wielding power and how? And is it on his behalf or on their own? So I want to talk to some reporters who cover the Trump White House day in and day out, and can give me a better picture of how it is functioning internally. Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer are staff writers at The Atlantic. Before that, they were at The Washington Post, where Parker won three Pulitzer prizes. They have covered Trump for many years now, and they have also profiled many of the people around him. And so are kind of uniquely placed to explain how something that at this point, I think is less like a White House and more like a royal court, is actually functioning day to day.

Ezra Klein: Welcome to the show.

Ashley Parker: Thanks for having me.

Michael Scherer: Yeah, thanks for having us.

Ezra Klein: So I want to begin with Donald Trump’s theory of what went wrong in his first term. You wrote of Trump in your big profile of him. He had realized in his exile that at nearly every turn in his first term, someone on his own team. Reince Priebus, John Kelly, James Mattis, Bill Barr, Gary Cohn had blocked him. He needed smart people who would figure out how to let him do everything that he wanted to do, in whatever way he wanted to do it. So let me begin here. To what degree is that actually true about Trump’s first term? Ashley.

Ashley Parker: His first term. You have to keep in mind that it’s stunning to remember, but Donald Trump had never run for any office, any political office. He wakes up. He runs for president, and he wins, right. So he has this kind of ragtag team who has never operated at that level, some of whom had never been really in politics before. Remember Hope Hicks who played a huge role in his first term. The story, the lure was that when he told her, Hope, I’d like you to be part of my campaign. She thought it was a campaign for, she said, which golf course. Is it a marketing campaign for Trump Doral or something at Mar a Lago. And so he ascends to the presidency, and he suddenly has to fill all of these posts with people he doesn’t know he doesn’t trust, many of whom don’t like him, don’t trust him. And privately say he was their 16th choice to be president. And, and a lot of them view themselves as guardrails. They are there. They would argue they are there to teach him how the presidency works and how democracy works and these norms. But in a lot of ways, they really are thwarting what he’s trying to do. In some instances, you have someone famously taking a piece of paper off of his desk so he can’t sign something that they believe is problematic. You have them undermining him by leaking to the media. And you also have them saying, here’s the 10 reasons why you can’t do this. If you do this, I’ll resign this time. And we mentioned this in our piece, but I think it’s illustrative. One person we talked to they said, look, when the president asked for something twice, we have an unofficial rule, which is that we do it, right. And I said, well, why twice. And they said, well, to be fair, he does say a lot of crazy things, but if he says it a second time, we know he’s serious and we know regardless of whether it’s to fire the board of the Kennedy Center and take it over or to potentially march on Greenland if that’s what he wants. We are there to make that happen. And it is such a marked difference.

Ezra Klein: I mean, to what extent, Michael, is that. When does that just reflect good staffing? It’s important for a principal to have staff who will say, hey, that’s a bad idea. And to what extent does that shift into a kind of famously, we are the resistance inside the Trump administration. The reason I ask is because to the extent they set out. In the second term to solve this understanding whether it was a hindrance or in fact, a help to him to be restrained. Seems important.

Michael Scherer: It is good staffing in the traditional sense, and it was good staffing in the first term, in part because Trump also didn’t come into office with a policy plan with an ideology about what really to do with government. He didn’t have a plan from day one about what he wanted to accomplish in terms of remaking the federal government. And so I think a lot of people back then were thinking, well, we’re going to defend the White House, defend the government as it was. Like, that is our job to make sure the systems work as they have worked for decades. And so by that definition, it is good staffing. Now, I think there was mistakes Trump made in that first term. We should mention that he likes a gang of rivals nasty viper pit of rivals around him. And he had Kellyanne Conway and Jared Kushner and Stephen Bannon and Reince Priebus. I mean, those first few months, those were all independent power centers that were all fighting against each other. And that was just that was bad staffing. I mean, that was a design of his White House. But I think for the people who came in that first term who were resisting him, they felt they were defending something that the country wanted, that the country had long established. And I think what you’ve seen, I mean, the implicit part of your question is why has it changed. I mean, everyone who came into the second term knew what Trump wanted to do to the presidency, what he wanted to do to the government. And it was pretty radical. The second time, and he had plans for it that he just wasn’t able to describe. In 2017. And by that metric, I would argue that some of the staffing got better in certain ways. So a lot of these people, the first term were new, if not to government, then certainly to the White House and the executive branch. And the first term, Stephen Miller, for instance, his famous travel ban, executive order, it created chaos at the airports. And a lot of these people spent their four years out of power learning the lessons. And the president, too, he came in the first term, and he expected the presidency genuinely to be like a monarchy. And he was frustrated when he wasn’t king. And it turned out that, a single senator, John McCain, could tank something he really cared about. After seven years of promises to repeal and replace Obamacare, it came down to just one vote. John McCain’s, with all eyes on McCain. He cast his vote with a thumbs down. Republican Leader Mitch McConnell stonefaced his arms crossed in defeat. So they all learned these lessons in the four years out of power, and they spend that time essentially getting bigger, stronger, faster, smarter, more ruthless. And so Stephen Miller when he comes back, and I’m using him as an example. But this applies to a number of people. He now knows how to structure executive orders so that they can better stand up to court challenges. He now knows that if he cares about immigration, it’s not just the Department of Homeland Security where he needs his people and true believers and loyalists. He knows that there are certain positions at the Department of Health and Human Services where he needs people who can implement his policies, or certain people at the State Department in the Western Hemispheres division, who will be crucial for what he wants to do. And so they come back understanding the levers of bureaucracy and government and ways to be creative and push norms and push boundaries in a way they didn’t in the first term. So if you like what they’re doing, which is the destruction of the administrative state, they are much better staffers in that mission.

Ezra Klein: But how do they achieve that? You describe in one of your pieces the mission as their staffing up for the second term is, quote. This time loyalty would be absolute. The federal government is a big place. They actually have on it a number of people who, if you had seen them join in the first term, you would have expected them to be part of this more mainstream Republican establishment that might oppose parts of Trumpism. Think of somebody like Marco Rubio or Doug Burgum. So as they come in to this term with the idea that they’re going to select for loyalty and alignment, how do they do it?

Michael Scherer: He has this great litmus test because of January 6, and the disgrace with which he left the White House, of who stuck around, of who was still willing to be seen with him at his worst moment, of who was still calling him after he’d done what he’d done. And so that was he just had a better, clearer idea of who he could choose from. And he was able then to make clear to all of them who they were working for. We reported that in the first term, Stephen Miller would go to the Department of Homeland Security and say, I think you should do this idea. And everyone would walk out of the room saying, no, we’re not doing that. That’s a crazy idea. This time, if Stephen Miller gets on the phone with them and says, I think you should do this idea have to meet this benchmark of deportations this month. You have to go to Home Depot parking lots to pick people up. Kristi Noem and her deputies are saying, he said, jump. We’re going to jump as high as we can. That’s our role. And I think you see that in every one of the major cabinet positions that every one of them you see in those cabinet meetings that Trump has started holding, it’s fealty to the King. I mean, it’s very much like a royal court. And they are all answering to them, not to their own bureaucracies and their own traditions. And that’s just radically different than the first term, where he was constantly negotiating the interests of each one of these departments, the traditions of the Defense Department, the traditions of Homeland Security the traditions of the lawyers and the Justice Department. He came in this time. He cleaned house wherever he saw doubt and literally imposed loyalty tests to replace those people.

Ashley Parker: And Ezra, you mentioned Marco Rubio. Someone who seemed very unlikely to serve in a Trump administration. But the world changed between his first and second terms in the sense that in the first term, there was a sense that Trump from not just the people around him and Republicans and voters and world leaders, but from everyone. There was a sense that this was an aberration, and it was a fever dream. And then when Joe Biden, even Joe Biden ran on returning to normalcy. And when Trump retakes power, when he comes back to the White House and doesn’t just come back, but he comes back after January 6, there is a sense that Trump was not the aberration. Perhaps Joe Biden was the aberration. And this is where the country is. This is where the Republican Party is. And if you’re someone like Marco Rubio who wants to be a player in what is essentially the modern Republican Party, it instills, I think, a level of loyalty and a level of fealty. And those people who didn’t like it, the Paul Ryan’s, the Mitt Romneys of the world, they left.

Ezra Klein: You can tell me if this is wrong, but one thing that I have picked up on, talking to people in the Trump White House, in the Republican Party, is that campaign, the 2024 campaign, particularly after the assassination attempt and then when he eventually wins, that the party’s relationship, the way the people around Trump look at Trump seemed to me to change. I would say that I feel like Trump gets treated as the grand ayatollah of the Republican Party now that he’s like that, they treat him almost like a mystic, that maybe what he’s saying doesn’t exactly make sense, but you can’t really question it. You have to figure out what it really means. And it goes to the thing you reported that if he says something twice, they do it that it doesn’t seem to me that anybody around Trump now sees it as in any way their job to restrain him or redirect him, even for his own good, that they treat him as a great man of history figure

Michael Scherer: Yeah, I don’t think that’s correct. It’s not the case that it’s entirely of yes man, White House now. I mean, the person we haven’t yet mentioned, who’s the most important person in this story is Susie Wiles, his chief of staff, who stepped into the role that no one had been able to handle before. Every one of them tried to intervene and stop him from doing stuff. Every one of them burned out, ingloriously. Susie, because she was there with him during his time in the wilderness after January 6, because she was able to build the campaign that ended up winning. And because she’s figured out her relationship with Trump in a way that I don’t think anyone else who’ve ever worked with him at that level is able to go to him and say, I don’t think that’s a good idea or is able to put people in front of him who say, I don’t think that’s a good idea. I don’t think it’s a situation where he is not getting pushback. Now, that doesn’t mean he always listens to her, and that doesn’t mean he doesn’t go ahead and do the thing he wanted to do anyway. I mean, one example of this was there was a debate over whether to pardon all the January 6 felons or just some of them, whether they’re not pardon the violent ones. And there were people around Trump who were saying to him, I don’t think we should pardon the violent the people who were actually beating on police officers and trying to hurt people. He overruled them. But a more recent example is the president said a couple of weeks ago, I think we may have to nationalize elections in 15 places, which is not what his government has, at least at the top, has been currently planning to do. And there were people who went to him after that and said, wait, I don’t think this is what you should be doing. And he hasn’t exactly backed away from it. I mean, it’s a little ambiguous now. It doesn’t mean he’s not going to try and nationalize a city. But there is pushback. Now, the question of when there’s pushback is an interesting one, because Susie does not try and stop him if he’s made up his mind. And that’s different than Reince Priebus or some of the other chiefs of staff. And she’s able to go along. He makes a decision. She’ll go along with it. She’ll try and make it do as little damage as possible for him. But I don’t think it’s right to say there’s no discussions like that.

Ezra Klein: Tell me about their relationship. So, one thing I’ve observed with Trump for a long time is that he is oddly better at taking instruction from women around him than men. I think if a man comes to him who’s working with him and says, no, you’re wrong, sir. This is why I think he can become a little more combative. We saw this in the first term, with Hope, with Kellyanne Conway and some other, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who could talk to him more.

Michael Scherer: Frankly, sometimes Susie has talked about her own relationship with her father, who some of this came out in that Vanity Fair piece last year. But her father was an alcoholic. She had to negotiate around someone she could not control as a child. And she’s not saying that Trump is an alcoholic, but she’s saying that their personalities are not totally dissimilar. And I think she is very good at offering the president something that he needs, which is structure around him that makes sense, a process around him that makes sense, a super structure that can actually execute on what he wants to do. And in exchange for that, she has the ability to say to him, this is why I don’t think this is a good idea. This is why I don’t think that’s a good idea. And I think they’ve formed a very tight bond. And I think the other thing that Susie has brought to the White House is it’s not everybody, but 60-70 percent, of the senior people in the White House are Susie people. They work for her. And I mean, they’re working for the president, but they are executing on her vision. And so that tension you had in the first term, where you had seven camps or five camps or four camps that were constantly warring, often through leaks to the press with each other about how terrible the other one has mostly gone away. And that’s just an organizational superstructure that she’s imposed. The last thing I’ll say about her is that I think she’s been very good at keeping people in line. There’s a way in which if you step out and this has happened with cabinet level people, other senior officials, when they mess up, they hear it from Susie. And so there is of discipline that’s been imposed, often very subtly, from her within the government, which I think has served the president well.

Ashley Parker: And to Michael’s point, I hadn’t quite thought of it that way. But I think you’re exactly right that a lot of these women who are in very senior, powerful positions have been able to say things to Trump in a way he wouldn’t accept from other people. And I think it’s their ability, frankly, to not dissimilar to being a parent. You have different kids. And if I’m messaging something to my seven year-old and I want her to do something or hear me, I do it differently than I do to my 14-year-old or my 2 and 1/2 year old. I’m not going to say what age I’m arguing the president is, but all of those women understood Trump, understood what he needed, understood how to present him information. Maybe it’s a poll you put in front of him, right. And say, look, look at this map of the country. Look at these states. You need to win and look where they are. On the overturning of abortion. And because they understand that that’s how he takes in information and understands it. And I think that’s been incredibly helpful. Another thing I just mentioned real quick is that unlike the other chiefs of staff, she has not tried to control the information flow to the president. And that’s a big shift from those first four, three or four chiefs of staff in the first term where they tried to control the paper that was going in the room. They were trying to keep people from not from knowing exactly who was going into the Oval Office and who was not going in the Oval Office. Susie does not try to do that, and that complicates the job for us. Well, for Susie, first and foremost. And for others in the White House. But it also, I think, allows the president to feel like he’s not being controlled. And one more thing on Susie is that Vanity Fair piece Michael mentioned. I assume your listeners know but it was Susie gave a bunch of candid interviews to Chris Whipple, and they were on the record, and he ended up taking as journalists do, the most interesting and sometimes incendiary parts and publishing it in a very long Vanity Fair piece that got a ton of attention. And I understood why the White House was upset over it, and Susie was upset over it. But to me, as I was reading it, and because I think there were some observations she made and things she said quite candidly that you wouldn’t necessarily want in the public domain. But as I read that, I thought this is what makes her a good chief of staff. She’s incredibly clear eyed, right. She knows who’s who. She knows when there’s been a mistake. She sees the angle. This person is always playing and she’s aware of it. So I think she’s very savvy and smart of sort of the court around him and who they are and what their motivations are.

Ezra Klein: Miller often. He’s been described to me, and I sometimes describe him as seeming like the prime minister of the administration. He seems like the person running policy. What is his role?

Michael Scherer: So I mean, formally, he’s a deputy chief of staff informally. I think the president’s described him as being at the top of the totem pole. And when he says that he’s talking about policy, and that means he’s involved in all the foreign policy discussions or almost all of them, he’s involved in basically leading the immigration policy discussion. He was deeply involved in many of disruptive executive orders from the first few months, the crackdown on universities. You just list off a lot of the stuff that happened in those first 100 days that caught everybody off guard. He was driving a lot of that. He was writing a lot of those executive orders. And then I think the other role he plays he is the voice. He’s the accelerant in the White House. The voice. It’s always like adding more fuel to whatever fire is happening and saying, we have to go harder, we have to go tougher. We have to do more of this. We can’t give up. We can’t surrender. We have to push through this stuff. And so in that way, he influences a lot of things. In our profile, we described him as the pulsing id of a president who is already almost pure id. And I think that’s just another way of seeing him is that accelerant.

Ezra Klein: I recognize that Donald Trump has a bullshitters relationship to the truth. And I mean that in there’s this great philosophical, this great book of philosophy called "On Bullshit." And it says that the bullshitter is different than the liar because the liar is playing a game against the truth. The liar knows the truth and is calibrating against it. The bullshitter doesn’t actually care about the truth. I conceive of Trump as a bullshitter, but part of the job of the White House staff is to make sure the president, whatever it he is saying in public, knows what is true and what is not true. And it does not sound to me like what you are telling me, is it. The people around Trump understand that to be their job.

Michael Scherer: I think that is not a priority of the White House staff. I think they feel like they need to present to the president reality in a way that would allow him to make good decisions. And the president has a different view of truth. I mean, he simply does not prioritize being accurate. He thinks the things he says are made as part of a transaction with whoever he’s speaking to the American people, usually his voters, in which he’s trying to get something from them. So he’s trying to sell something to them. So I don’t think there’s the president just doesn’t prioritize accuracy in that way. I mean, that’s like a genteel way of putting it. But sure, I mean, I would also argue he has a long history, legitimately of bending reality to his will. And, and that’s tricky because for instance, we should all say here he lost the 2020 election. He just he lost it. But at the same time, he convinced a huge swath of the country that he is the right that he was the rightful president, in exile at Mar a Lago and that the election was stolen. And so, I don’t really know what my macro point is, because I am arguing that there’s actual tangible facts and truth, and I believe in a reality based world. But for his purposes, he is nearly as happy to have those 40% of the electorate think he won the election.

Ezra Klein: One thing I often wonder about Donald Trump, both because of what I see and then what I hear is whether he is busy. He seems to have a lot more time than most people I know to watch TV, to watch his underlings on TV. They are performing the way they are at hearings and on cable news, in part because they think the president might see them. He is answering random phone calls from people like you, sometimes without even knowing who’s going to be on the other end of the line. He gives very, very long interviews and a lot of them. How does Trump spend his time? What does his schedule look like?

Michael Scherer: He wakes up late. Obama would start work very early in the Oval Office and work until dinnertime and then go back to the residence. Trump comes down later in the morning. I think on an average day he’s in front of live cameras. If he’s at the White House, I don’t one to three hours in a day. And I think the rest of the time is much more freeform. I don’t think that structure, that drive towards efficiency and structure is something that interests him. I think what interests him is how much he can get out of every day, what transaction he can have and what he gets out of each transaction. I think it’s the reason he’s been so interested in foreign policy is an enormous amount of power when it comes to foreign policy. So he can get on the phone with all kinds of world leaders, and he loves talking to anybody. I mean, he really has no problem taking phone calls from just about anybody talking to the new mayor of New York in a friendly way, talking to try and settle wars and corners of the world like Don from Queens, a consummate talk radio caller or host. It’s a very good medium for him, frankly. He plays a lot of golf on the weekends. But you’re right, it’s much more of like a rolling conversation than it is a meaningful policy debate in the traditional sense.

Ezra Klein: Final question. What are three books you’d recommend to the audience? And Ashley, why don’t we begin with you?

Ashley Parker: So I’m going to say "The Secret History" by Donna Tartt, which is just fantastic. This next one is a little bit of a cop out, but I’m going to recommend an author and say any book by her. Ann Patchett And I will just read anything she writes. She just does wonderful, beautiful modern fiction. And since we’re talking about Trump and I am married to him, my husband, Mike Bender, who’s also a New York Times reporter, he wrote a Trump campaign book called "Frankly, We Did Win This Election: the Inside Story of How Trump Lost" But I would recommend it because it’s great. I’m biased, but because one of the things he does is he talks about the front row Joes and he has these vignettes on Trump supporters. And if you want to understand really who his base is and why they stick with him, this is the book to do it.

Michael Scherer: "An Image of My Name Enters America" which is a book of essays, personal essays by Lucy Ives. "Palimpsest" by Gore Vidal came out a while ago. It’s about as good a memoir of DC as I’ve read. And then the last book is a book I read a long time ago, but I always recommend it to people because I think it’s like the best example of literary nonfiction I’ve ever read. It’s a book called "Blood" by Douglas Starr. It’s actually a history of blood. It takes something that’s a part of all of our lives and tells it to you in a narrative that is pretty remarkable.

Ezra Klein: Ashley Parker, Michael Scherer, thank you very much.

Ashley Parker: Thank you.

Michael Scherer: Thank you.