The Atlantic: Trump considers himself invincible, but this image is starting to crack
Trump has no doubt that he will succeed in everything he has undertaken, the US president confirmed this in an interview with The Atlantic. This also applies to the early resolution of the Ukrainian conflict. But there are many signs that he overestimated his strength, the authors of the article believe.
Ashley Parker, Michael Scherer
Donald Trump considers himself invincible. But the first cracks are already appearing in this image.
Trump made an unexpected statement: he had long known about Russia's "true" goal.
Before we start, we'll share information about how to arrange an interview with the current American president.
In normal times, reporters who want to get an official audience with the Commander-in-chief and talk to him first write a detailed application. In it, they outline the objectives of the interview, the range of problems, and all the reasons why the president, for his own good, should talk to these reporters rather than others who are quite suitable, but still worse. This presentation is then sent to White House officials. If the stars in the sky are located favorably, negotiations begin. If officials are sufficiently confident that an interview will somehow help their affairs, they ask the president - sometimes with fear and trepidation — to give it. Sometimes the president agrees.
This happened to us recently. We've gone through this whole process preparing the article you're reading. We submitted an application in which we wrote something like this: since President Donald Trump has won a second term and is now radically rebuilding the country and the world, he can be considered the most important American leader in the 21st century, and we want to tell you in detail how this happened. Just four years ago, it seemed that after the violent rebellion provoked by Trump, he was finished. He was banned or temporarily blocked on social media, rejected by corporate donors, condemned by Republicans, and the whole country was waiting for a new beginning from President Joe Biden. Then there were other blows — indictments, civil cases, and endless denials from people who once worked for Trump.
But despite everything, Trump's second term has been going on for several months now. And we wanted to hear firsthand how he managed to make this one of the most outstanding comebacks in political history, as well as what lessons he learned from all this.
Trump has agreed to meet with us. We were previously promised a meeting and a photo shoot, maybe in the Oval Office, or maybe in Lincoln's bedroom. But then, as it often happens in the White House, everything went awry.
The week our interview was supposed to take place, Trump posted an insulting message on the Truth Social network, calling us by our first names. "Ashley Parker is unable to conduct an honest and impartial interview. She's a radical madwoman of the left, and she's been as terrible as possible the whole time I've known her," he wrote. "At the moment, she doesn't even know that I won the presidential election THREE times." (This last sentence is true, because Ashley Parker really doesn't know that Trump won the presidential election three times.) "Similarly, Michael Scherer never wrote honestly about me, only negative and almost always LIES."
Apparently, when rumors of our meeting spread in Trump's inner circle, someone reminded him of some unpleasant things that we (especially Ashley) had said and written. We still don't know who it was, but we immediately realized the consequences: no photo shoot, no tour of the newly converted Oval Office or Lincoln's bedroom, and definitely no interviews.
But we both wrote about Trump for a long time and knew that his first word is rarely his last. So at 10:45 a.m. on a Saturday morning in late March, we called him on his cell phone. (Don't ask how we got his number. All we can say is that the White House staff has pretty little control over Trump's personal communications.) The president was at his country club in Bedminster, New Jersey. The number that appeared on his screen was unfamiliar, but he answered anyway. "Who's calling?" - he asked.
Despite his attacks on us a few days earlier, the president obviously felt inspired by the week of successes, and was ready to talk about his achievements. While we were talking, the sounds of another conversation could be heard. Perhaps the TV was on in the room.
The president seemed encouraged by everything he had accomplished in the first two months of his second term: he began purging the federal government of its diversity program; he pardoned nearly 1,600 of his supporters who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, including those who beat police officers and were caught on camera; he signed 98 executive orders (26 on the first day of his tenure). He fired independent regulators; he gutted entire departments; he dismissed numerous federal officials; he used the military powers of the 18th century against the "criminal gang from Venezuela." He adjusted duties like a DJ pushing buttons in a booth, he disrupted the rhythm of global trade and caused confusion in financial markets. He got angry at his democratic ally, the leader of Ukraine, for being "ungrateful," and praised the Russian leader, calling him "very smart" and in the blink of an eye turning 180 degrees the American foreign policy doctrine, which is already 80 years old. And for the first time since 1945, he called on NATO countries to prepare for defense on their own, without the protective umbrella of American military power.
He gave power to one of his main political sponsors and the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, to shrink the federal government and manage its operating systems. He destroyed the ethics and anti-corruption architecture created after Watergate, and declared that he, and not the attorney general, is the head of the country's law enforcement agencies. He deprived his political opponents of protection by Secret Service agents and took away their access to classified information. Among them were people whom the Iranians threatened to kill for actions they carried out on Trump's instructions in his first term. He announced his plans to pave part of the Rose Garden, as well as redo the Oval Office, which now has gold trim, gold trophies and gold frames for portraits of former presidents. Now the Oval Office has become like some kind of royal court of the XVIII century, but only the Palm Beach model.
The old enemies begged for mercy. Meta*, whose founder Mark Zuckerberg turned into a passionate petitioner, paid $25 million to settle a civil lawsuit filed by Trump, although many experts considered it groundless. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and owner of The Washington Post, announced that he had banned his authors from defending certain points of view — and arrived at Trump's White House for lunch that evening.
"He's one hundred percent a great person," the president told us about Bezos. —And Zuckerberg is great."
We asked Trump why, in his opinion, the billionaire class prostrates itself before him. "I don't know, it's probably just a higher level of respect," he replied. "They probably didn't know me at first, but now they do."
"I mean, you saw what happened to the law firm yesterday," Trump said. They were referring to one of the most prestigious firms in the country, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, whose CEO came to the Oval Office a few days earlier and begged to cancel the presidential decree, which could destroy his business. Trump issued this decree partly due to the fact that a former partner of this firm worked in the Manhattan prosecutor's office in 2021 and led an investigation into the business practices of the Trump Organization. That same week, the Ivy League University, which was threatened with withdrawing $400 million in federal funding, agreed to review its Middle East studies programs at the request of the Trump administration, as well as making other significant concessions. "You saw yesterday what happened to Columbia University. What do you think about this law firm? Didn't that shock you?" Trump asked us.
Yes, all of this is shocking, and much of it is simply unprecedented. Legal scholars cite comparisons with Franklin Roosevelt at the initial stage of the New Deal, when Congress allowed him to violate the norms and significantly expanded his presidential powers.
As always, Trump was hunting for a deal. If he likes our material, the president said, he might even meet with us again.
"Tell the people at The Atlantic that if they wrote good stories and truthful articles, the magazine would be popular," he said. Perhaps the magazine could risk its popularity, he suggested, because its owner is Lauren Powell Jobs, and she supports it for commercial reasons. But that doesn't guarantee anything, Trump warned. "You know, at some point they give up," he said, speaking about media owners in general and, as we suspected, specifically about Bezos. "At some point they say, that's enough." He laughed softly.
He wasn't just thinking about media moguls. He also seemed to be referring to law firms, universities, broadcast networks, information technology giants, artists, scientists, military leaders, civil servants, moderate Republicans–all those people and all those institutions that he hoped would eventually inevitably bend to his will.
We asked the president if his second term was any different from his first. He said it was different. "The first time, I had two tasks— to run the country and survive; all these dishonest guys were against me," he said. "And for the second time, I rule the country and the world."
For several weeks, we've been hearing from people inside and outside the White House that the president is enjoying himself more now than he did the first time. "For the first time in the first few weeks, the mood was such that I just wanted to blow up this place," lobbyist and ally of the president Brian Ballard told us. "This time he blows it up with a sparkle in his eyes."
When we told Trump about this observation on the phone, he agreed. "I'm having a lot of fun considering what I'm doing," he said. "And I'm doing very serious business."
Link
The fact that Trump is now able to set off explosions again is amazing, given the depth of his fall. So much had happened so quickly that the improbability of his return had receded into the background. Perhaps no one in American history can boast of such an amazing political resurrection as Donald Trump.
In the last days of his first term, Trump's rating was weak, at 34%. A few weeks earlier, he had watched on TV how the participants in the riot he had provoked had taken over the Capitol. Polls showed that a clear majority of Americans considered him responsible for this attack. The House of Representatives has just impeached him for the second time, and he has become the only president to suffer such dishonor. Although the Senate failed to secure the two-thirds majority required for conviction, seven Republican senators voted to sentence him. This is the maximum number of members of the president's party in history who voted for impeachment.
His favorite social media platforms, Twitter and Facebook, have banned him or effectively silenced him. Instagram* and YouTube did the same. In an attempt to restore direct communication with his subscribers, he launched a blog "From the office of Donald Trump." But he was not popular, and after a few weeks they forgot about him.
Major corporations have announced that they are refusing political donations to officials who supported Trump's election lies. Deutsche Bank and Signature Bank have decided to end business ties with Trump and his companies. The most painful thing for the president was that the Association of Professional Golfers postponed its planned 2022 championship from Trump's course in Bedminster. Former members of his own cabinet and staff, that is, the people he hired, declared him an "idiot" (Rex Tillerson, Secretary of State), "a man more dangerous than one can imagine" (James Mattis, Secretary of Defense), "the most depraved man I have ever met" (John Kelly, White House Chief of Staff) and the "laughing fool" (John Bolton, National Security Adviser). Even his old allies were abandoning him now. Kevin McCarthy, the Republican minority leader in the House of Representatives, discussed forcing Trump to resign. On the evening when the uprising began, Senator Lindsey Graham, who turns like a weather vane towards those who hold power in the Republican Party, turned away from Trump for the first time in four years. "Don't count on me," Graham said in the Senate. "I've had enough." Rupert Murdoch, who was chairman of Fox Corporation at the time, sent an email to the former head of Fox Broadcasting, in which he stated: "We want to make Trump a nobody." Since the letter was from Murdoch himself, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon recently called it a "papal bull."
On the morning of Joe Biden's inauguration, Trump was a dozen kilometers southeast of the site of the celebration at the Andrews military base, preparing to leave for Florida. (Trump was the first president since Andrew Johnson in 1869 to boycott his successor's inauguration.) Standing in front of a small crowd in his dark coat, which offered little protection from the cold, the former and future president seemed small and insignificant.
Before boarding the number one flight for the last time and heading to Mar-a-Lago, Trump spoke with the audience who had come to say goodbye. "We will come back in one form or another," he said. It was a very modest statement from a man who had previously possessed such enormous weight.
Few people believed him. It looked like he didn't believe it himself. The Trump era has come to an end.
As soon as he arrived in a luxurious exile in his Elbe, he began planning a return. Trump missed the press, those ever—chattering reporters who follow every president. One day he tried to collect them, but he was told that the press pool did not exist. However, it turned out that the lack of attention in the first months and the lack of access to social media was a real boon. The uncertainty imposed on Trump gave him the time and clarity he needed to plan his return.
To understand how Trump rose from the political ashes and how he prepared to wield power in his second term, we interviewed dozens of senior advisers, senior aides, allies, opponents, and confidants. Many of our interlocutors agreed to the conversation only on condition of anonymity in order to be more open and not anger the president. Their stories demonstrate that Trump's time spent in the political wilderness is crucial to understanding how he currently exercises his power.
He had been in Palm Beach for a week when the opportunity presented itself. Trump heard that Kevin McCarthy was coming to South Florida to raise funds. Although they had repeatedly quarreled after the Capitol riot, Trump invited McCarthy to Mar-a-Lago. Even before the meeting began, news of it was leaked to the New York Times, causing a political upheaval. Did the Republican leaders, who seemed determined to expel Trump, support him again? When Trump and McCarthy met, the former president asked the minority leader who had warned The New York Times.
"I know who leaked the information — it's you," McCarthy replied, as several informed sources told us.
"It's good for both of us," Trump retorted.
They were both right. McCarthy has already come to the conclusion that in order for Republicans to regain control of the House of Representatives in the 2022 midterm elections, as well as to ensure his chairmanship, it is necessary to unite the party, which should include Trump and his Make America Great Again movement, or MAGA. After the meeting, each posted the same photo: both smiling in the midst of the lush splendor of Mar-a-Lago. Trump has taken his first step towards political revenge.
It is a truism that Trump has never been guided by the traditional rules of politics. He was always convinced of his own genius, of his inner instinct. But today it is more evident than ever. The last four years have turned him into a Nietzschean cliche. Exile, multiple charges, a 34—count conviction, repeated encounters with hired killers-all this combined to convince him that he was immune to challenges that would destroy anyone. These years have also strengthened his salesman's instinct, which tells him that he can bend reality to his will, turning facts into "fake news," making the unthinkable not only imaginable, but also real, renaming the Gulf of Mexico into the American Gulf, making people believe that he is selling, contrary to what they see with my own eyes. This is the key lesson Trump and his aides learned from the 2020 election, from the events of January 6. The real estate mogul, who named buildings everywhere from Turkey to Uruguay, sold "the world's best steaks," "the finest" wine and "fantastic" mattresses, mastered the alchemy of perception. Reality, according to Trump, can be changed. Covering Trump's activities over the past four years, we have repeatedly been surprised that all the so-called vampire hunters — Democrats, anti-Trump activists, Republican opponents, prosecutors, judges, critics from the media, who failed to drive a stake directly into his heart, only intensified it. This brings us to the second lesson: Trump and his team realized that they can act almost with impunity, supporting disputes and scandals that would destroy almost any other president. The only prerequisite is not to show weakness.
Even now, Trump, who calls himself a "very positive thinker," does not want to admit that his second rise to power was a renaissance. To say that he was reborn is to admit that there was a crash.
While preparing the material for this article, we asked Trump supporter and former Breitbart News editor Rahim Kassam to explain how the president managed to bend the country and the world to his will. Over a lunch of baked oysters, duck confit, and potatoes fried in beef suet at Butterworth's restaurant, which has become MAGA's new attraction on Capitol Hill, he responded rudely but eloquently.: "He didn't bend them to his will. He gave them cancer."
When we interviewed Trump at the end of March, his ratings looked stable and his political support base seemed unshakeable. One department after another obeyed him—"obeyed in advance," as authoritarianism researcher Timothy Snyder said. Trump carried out his program with almost no resistance, even from the Democrats. But in the following days and weeks, the patina of infallibility began to crack. At the insistence of Elon Musk's team from the Department of Public Administration Efficiency, the most important employees began to be fired and then rehired. The embarrassing (and possibly illegal) operation by the security forces, during which the editor of this magazine was included in the Signal group chat, where plans for the next strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen were discussed, created the impression of incompetence of the administration and recalled the chaotic clowning of Trump's first term. The president imposed his duties randomly, dealing blow after blow to the stock market, which is why even some people loyal to him publicly questioned his actions. His approval ratings on economic issues, which have long been a mainstay of Trump's support in polls, have turned negative. It probably happens when a feeling of invincibility turns into arrogance. Or maybe it was just another Trump setback from which he had to recover— some combination of the magician Houdini and the resurrected Lazarus?
Trump's advisers like to tell the story that happened on November 5, 2024, on election day. It was just before the TV channels reported that the election results in Wisconsin, and therefore throughout the country, were leaning in his favor. Trump and his aides were preparing for a trip to the West Palm Beach Convention Center, where he was scheduled to deliver a victory speech. His entire team of senior assistants gathered in his office at Mar-a-Lago. Without addressing anyone in particular, but as if just thinking out loud, Trump said: "You know, they made a big mistake. They could have gotten rid of us by now. But we're really just getting started."
The Art of Return
He had been on the edge of a precipice before. After the real estate downturn in the early 1990s, Trump was on the verge of financial collapse. His almost complete bankruptcy and subsequent revival led to the writing of the book "The Art of Return" in 1997. For his political advisers in exile, this book has become a desktop.
The first pages list Trump's "Top Ten Tips for Returning." When we recently met with one of his advisers, this man recited some of the rules from this list by heart. "Rule 1 is to play golf," this man told us. —Rule 9: pay in kind." (Rule 10—always have a prenuptial agreement—turned out to be less applicable to politics.)
To prepare for his return, Trump needed the right people. While in exile, he realized that at almost every stage of his first term, someone from his team-Reince Priebus, John Kelly, James Mattis, Bill Barr, Gary Cohn—put obstacles in his way. Trump needed smart people who knew how to give him the opportunity to do whatever he wanted to do and how he wanted to do it. His first key appointee was a political apparatchik who impressed the ex-president with her retrospective analysis of the 2020 elections. Biden won the election that year, returning five key states to the Democratic camp — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin (along with one electoral district in Nebraska). One of the few bright spots for Trump in 2020 was Florida, where he increased the number of supporters compared to 2016. After the election, Trump started asking his allies: What did he do right in Florida and what didn't he do in the rest of the country?
Susie Wiles, who led Trump's campaign in this state in 2016 and 2020, knows the answer. Wiles is the daughter of legendary National Football League commentator Pat Summerall. She is an experienced campaign organizer (it was Wiles who drew up the plan and schedule for Ronald Reagan's presidential campaign in 1980), and over the past three decades she has managed to establish extensive contacts in Florida. After each campaign that Wiles conducts, she compiles a "work done" report, recording what has produced results and what has not. During a dinner with Trump on the terrace of the house at Mar-a-Lago in early 2021, she presented the "Florida Memorandum." Soon after, he hired her to lead his political activities, which eventually became the 2024 election campaign.
Wiles saw that in 2020, Trump was held back by the fact that he did not take full control of the Republican Party in his first term. Part of Trump's leverage lay in his ability to endorse and support candidates in the Republican primaries. And he was determined to do it again. "When I support someone, they win," Trump told us over the phone. — But even when I support someone in the general election, they mostly win. It's important." (Now, when Trump calls for putting pressure on a Republican colleague on an issue or about voting, they are almost always grateful for his support in the past and feel they owe him their place.)
The process of evaluating potential candidates, which Wiles carried out together with James Blair, who is now deputy chief of staff at the White House, and Brian Jack, who became a congressman from Georgia, included an analysis of how they had spoken about Trump in the past. "The main point was their loyalty and political viability," one adviser told us. — We were looking for the following. What did he say on January 6th? What did he say about Trump's remarks about women? How did he vote?" Trump was assembling a coalition of people loyal to him, which he did not do actively enough during his first term.
Wiles had extensive experience in managing strong personalities. But colleagues say that one of the main reasons why Wiles has been working successfully with Trump (she is now chief of staff at the White House) is that she never tries to manage him. She doesn't think she can control him, as some former high-ranking advisers have tried to do, and she usually doesn't give advice until she's asked to. According to Wiles, her main role is to set up processes that help ensure Trump's success, and then follow his instructions, whatever they may be.
At first, Trump's expulsion from major social networks, as well as the reluctance of leading media outlets, including Fox News, to cover his activities in detail, seemed like a disaster. But Trump turned to far-right platforms and to activists who continued to support him. Taylor Budovich, who works as deputy chief of staff at the White House, collaborated with MAGA opinion leaders to avoid bans on Twitter and Facebook*, they posted posts in support of Trump on social networks; Budovich forced Trump to sign such a post, and then sent the signed message back to the opinion leader. This authority almost invariably posted a post signed by Trump, providing him access and growing his audience — and at the same time strengthening Trump's voice. At the same time, an entire video ecosystem has grown up around Trump. Streaming platforms such as the Right Side Broadcasting Network began covering his events instead of cable networks that refused to do so.
"The fact that he was blocked gave an impetus to the strengthening of people like me, because the president's supporters were watching my notes, trying to find out what he was saying," one of the opinion leaders of the MAGA movement told us. "It had a negative impact on the comments that deprived him of his voice, so we all got a voice."
Meanwhile, Trump continued to spread the lie that he had won the 2020 election and that January 6th was an ordinary Wednesday. The usual political logic suggested that this was a bad strategy. But Trump's arrogance, as always, remained his strong suit. By repeating something many times, he gradually created the impression that what he said was true, at least for his supporters.
Not so long ago, we were sitting at Steve Bannon's house near Capitol Hill, where he is recording his podcast War Room, asking him about Trump's refusal to recognize the results of the 2020 election, as well as his denials about the events of January 6. "Our reality is that we won, and that January 6th was a rebirth," Bannon said, referring to a conspiracy theory that the crowd on Ellipse Avenue that day was incited by FBI agents.
But this reality simply does not correspond to reality, we pointed out to Bannon.
"But here's the interesting thing,— Bannon said. — Who won this dispute? I think we won."
"Get ready!"
The first televised hearing of the special Committee of the House of Representatives on the events of January 6 was scheduled for early June 2022. It was supposed to be a spectacle reminding the audience of the horrors of the rebellion and highlighting the guilt of the former president. The Trump team at Mar-a-Lago was desperate to divert attention from the hearings. At one point, someone suggested an audacious ploy: Trump should announce a few minutes before the start of the hearing that he will fight for the presidency in 2024.
Trump's response was revealing. "I'm not ready for this," he said. "We're not ready for that right now."
"At first, everyone thought: he's not just thinking about it, he's seriously thinking about how he wants to do it," one of his advisers told us. "He's not going to use this just as a trick to gain momentum. He wants to win."
Soon, Trump began to quietly emphasize that he was serious. "Be prepared," he told the people who worked with him during his first term. — Get ready! Get ready! We're going back! Get ready!"
However, when Trump really launched his campaign in November 2022, it didn't start very promisingly. Even his most dedicated advisers admit that the announcement made during a 60-minute speech at Mar-a-Lago was unfortunate.
Surprisingly, very few political reporters from major publications were present. It seemed that the mainstream media still did not believe that Trump could become a competitive candidate again. Moreover, some members of the Trump family did not bother to attend the event. Trump's speech dragged on, and even Fox News turned off the broadcast, switching, as Bannon put it, to a "C-level panel" and then returning to the broadcast in the last minutes of the speech.
The Trump campaign was struggling to gain momentum. Tony Fabrizio, a longtime organizer of Trump polls, told us that even a few months later, in early 2023, getting sponsors to participate in the first big event of the special committee for political action "was like pulling teeth." His team said that although Trump was already an official presidential candidate, they still had trouble booking seats for him, even on shows like Fox & Friends.
Trump's advisers said that the first turning point came in February 2023. A Norfolk Southern train carrying dangerous chemicals derailed in the village of East Palestine, Ohio, near the Pennsylvania border. Tons of toxic chemicals were poured onto the ground. Sitting at his campaign headquarters in West Palm Beach, the Trump team watched as Joe Biden's press secretary could not answer a question about the president's plans to help residents. Shortly after, Susie Wiles received a call from Trump's eldest son, Don, who said his father should just come there in person. When Wiles announced Don's proposal to Trump, who was sitting in the living room of Mar-a-Lago, his response was unequivocal. "It's a great idea," he enthused. "When can we go?"
Trump's visit to East Palestine and the footage of him buying food for rescuers at McDonald's had a powerful impact. "They just reminded everyone that people still like this guy," one of the advisers told us. "He's still attractive." Almost two years have passed, but Trump's visit continued to elicit responses. "People live their lives and don't want to go into politics," a woman from the swing state of Pennsylvania told our colleague George Packer before the election last fall. "All they know is that Trump was here, that he bought everyone food at McDonald's, and Biden hadn't been there for over a year."
The uncertain start of the campaign deprived Trump of media attention, but his team had time to plan. Trump's former advisers took advantage of the fact that they had been out of power for several years and created their own groups and organizations — America First Legal, America First Policy Institute, Center for Renewing America to prepare for the second Trump administration.
"People who were true believers knew that Trump was going to run again and win," Caroline Rehn, a former fundraiser for Trump, told us. She added that supporters of Trump's policy "sat there and prepared decrees for four years."
This time, being in the shadows, the Trump team managed to develop a new electoral strategy. By that time, Trump had alienated a significant portion of voters, and was less popular among some demographic groups than in previous elections. Common sense dictated that the ongoing criminal investigations and court proceedings would only strengthen this anti-Trump sentiment. The managers from his staff decided that the best tactic was to turn this problem into an advantage. Chris Lacivita, who co-led the campaign with Susie Wiles and a veteran who was wounded during the Gulf War in 1991, began exhorting young employees using the Marine Corps slogan: "Grit your teeth."
The call to let Trump be Trump, which contradicted the instincts of most of the first-term staff, was outlined in a memorandum that James Blair and the chief expert of the campaign headquarters, Tim Saler, sent to Wiles in early 2024. He became known at headquarters as the "gender memorandum." "Instead of saying, 'Look, we're two points lower among suburban white women than we were between 2016 and 2020,' and 'How do we get those points back?' We need to do the opposite," an adviser familiar with the contents of the memorandum told us. - What if we say: "We have risen by 8 points among men without higher education. What if we go up to 12?""
This strategy had the advantage of allowing Trump to remain himself while attracting these people. At a time when the Democratic Party often seemed like an amalgam of East Coast elites, grumpy whiners, and far-left activists, Trump offered a populism tired of condemnations that condemned no one.
We were told that Trump thought of himself like this: "Why should I distance myself from my people? He loves me."
"It made me stronger"
On Friday, May 31, 2024, the day after Trump was convicted on 34 counts in a New York court, the treasurer of Make America Great Again Inc. which has become the main super committee supporting the former president, called his boss, Taylor Budovich, to tell him the good news. They received a large money transfer worth a record $15 million. This call caused a stir because the bank needed to know the name of the donor to approve the transfer, but no one knew who it was.
Shortly after, the treasurer called back. "I'm so sorry," he told Budovich. "I misunderstood him. It's not $15 million, it's $50 million."
"Don't apologize!" Budovich said. (As a result, it turned out that the donation was made by Timothy Mellon, the heir to Mellon's banking fortune.)
Democrats suggested that Trump's court cases would neutralize him politically. "A convicted criminal aspires to become president," Biden said. But all these scandals and disputes that could have sunk another candidate turned into just background noise. "As for the court cases, there are simply too many of them, and this is one of Trump's superpowers. He never breaks the law a little bit; he does it everywhere," Sarah Longwell, a former Republican who works as a political strategist and regularly polls target groups, told us. — And as a result, there are so many court cases that for voters it's just white noise. They can't tell one from the other."
Democratic voters were still outraged. Trump's supporters continued to believe his claims that all criminal investigations and hearings in the January 6 case were a "witch hunt." But for the small number of voters who could decide the outcome of the election, the Democrats' arguments that Trump was a threat to democracy were too far removed from their more pressing concerns, such as food prices. As time passed, Trump continued to rewrite history, turning the rebels into "patriots," and the events of January 6 became a conditional abstraction for many of these voters.
"If you said, 'What is January 6th?' it would sound like, 'What is it? A date game? Or a history test?" — an adviser familiar with the contents of the gender memo told us, telling us about the conclusions of the election headquarters based on the results of the analysis of voters' opinions.
The charges brought against Trump actually turned out to be a real gift for him. This did not surprise his advisers. A year earlier, in the spring of 2023, when Trump was accused of secretly paying a porn star for silence, his support level in the polls in the Republican primaries rose by 10 points in a month to more than 50 percent. And he didn't come down anymore. MAGA Inc. reported that it had raised only about $600,000 in the first three months of 2023; but within three months of the indictment, the company had raised almost $13 million. "The Democrats just played into our hands," Fabrizio, the poll organizer, told us.
For Trump's voters, these cases have become an energy boost. They put his opponents in a difficult position in the Republican primaries, because they had to defend Trump from "judicial wars", because otherwise they could well be accused of supporting the positions of the Democrats. So even at the time when these opponents were campaigning against his nomination, they were actually campaigning for him.
During his 2016 election campaign, Trump ignored the traditional fundraising scheme, increasing the distrust of donors. But during his exile, he began to enjoy fundraising. Trump asked the consultants to give him more time for meetings and conversations with major donors. He wrote personal notes and regularly invited wealthy supporters and potential sponsors to his Mar-a-Lago for lunch. According to Trump's allies, he judged generosity not by the amount of the check written, but by the ratio of the amount of the check and the donor's capital. He liked to put pressure on sponsors to bet on him—and watch them get embarrassed by turning him down. Sometimes he was harsh, telling them how Kamala Harris, becoming president, would take away their fortunes.
("If I hadn't become president, you would have been fucked," he told oil executives at Maro—a-Lago immediately after the election. — Take a look at your profit and loss statements. Do you understand what would happen to you if she became president? What's wrong with you?")
The Supreme Court's decision in July 2024 to challenge Trump's federal charge of election interference in 2020 gave him and his allies an additional boost. The Trump v. United States case addressed the issue of the president's legal responsibility, but Trump's allies focused on what definition the court gave to the office of the president itself, suggesting that all the powers of the executive branch belong to this individual. "Unlike everyone else," the court wrote, "the president is a branch of government." Trump's prosecution simultaneously gave strength and popularity to his candidacy, and then in his second term gave him more executive power. For Democrats, there is a painful irony in this.
When we talked with Trump, we asked him if he thought the criminal prosecutions had made him stronger. "It may shock you, but yes," he said. — It usually knocks you down. The next day you don't even live. You announce your resignation and come back to "fight for your good name," as everyone says. You know, 'fight for your name, go back to your family.'"
He made a pause. "Yes, it made me stronger, it made me much stronger."
In the final months of the campaign, Democratic strategists working for Vice President Harris focused on seven swing states. Trump, on the contrary, told aides that he would like to invest resources in attracting voters even in those states where he was already confident of victory.
"We don't want anyone to know-it's a surprise—but I think we can win by the votes," Trump told his advisers. "We have to hurry up and score more points."
During breaks between events, his team called groups of voters in the "red states" (with a predominance of Republican supporters, — approx. InoSMI), and then handed him the phone. "This is your favorite president, Donald Trump," he would say, and then move on to brief comments. They called from cars, from an airplane, 10 times a day. Thus, bypassing the old media, Trump directly established contact with thousands of voters.
"If there was anyone else awake in any state in America, Donald Trump would have found a way to reach them," Chris Lacivita told us.
In 2016, Trump was so upset that Hillary Clinton beat him in the polls that he falsely stated: "I won by the votes of the voters, if you subtract the millions of people who voted illegally." Eight years later, he didn't have to pretend. As dawn broke in Palm Beach after election night, Trump enjoyed the fullness of his victory. All seven swing states were in favor of him, and he had a very strong result in the polls, thanks to which he eventually won. He called several of his assistants around four in the morning. "You won't believe it," Trump exulted, according to one of them. — 20 foreign leaders have already called me. They all want to kiss my ass."
Some time later, Trump addressed his supporters in the living room at Mar-a-Lago. "During his first term, people said, 'Yes, he won, but he doesn't have a mandate,'" Trump said, addressing the crowd. "They can't say that anymore."
Transfer of power
The people who worked with Trump in his first term are used to playing a kind of parlor game. What would have happened, they asked, if we, the human props, hadn't been there to correct the president's mistakes, explain to him everything he didn't know or understand, dissuade him from the most destructive impulses, and slow them down?
During his first term, he faced resistance and obstruction from all branches of government: the courts, Democrats, Republicans in the House of Representatives and the Senate, who sometimes treated him like an underachieving student. The contempt was mutual. "Paul Ryan was a stupid man," Trump told us in March, talking about the former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives. —Mitch... Mitch wasn't any better." He was referring to Mitch McConnell, the former Republican leader in the Senate, who has recently been at the epicenter of resistance to Trump in the Grand Old Party. InoSMI). But the most stubborn resistance was from the executive branch. Sometimes his chief of staff and the White House lawyer refused to follow his orders. Trump became enraged when "his" Justice department, led by Jeff Sessions and Rod Rosenstein, launched an independent investigation into whether the Russians influenced the 2016 election and whether the Trump campaign colluded with them.
This time it was different because he had gained more experience. "When I've done this before, I've never been able to do it, you know? — He said. "I didn't know the people in Washington."
Five days before the inauguration, at 8 a.m. on January 15, Trump posted an inflammatory post on Social Truth. There he told which people he would not take into his new administration. This list includes everyone who has ever worked for him. "Americans for Lack of Prosperity (led by Charles Koch), "Dumb as a Cork" John Bolton, "Bird Brain" Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, the treacherous warmonger Dick Cheney, and his daughter, the psychopath Liz." He also included everyone "who suffered from Trump obsession syndrome." For those who Trump staffed the administration in his second term, this message was a doctrine: this time, loyalty must be absolute.
In 2016, there were few experienced Republicans on Trump's staff, and therefore the bench of prospective loyalists was short. His new team also used key figures from the transition period — cabinet ministers, advisers from the West Wing — to reassure the skeptical Republican Party that Trump was one of them. This led to a dysfunctional dichotomy in which the mild-mannered traditional Republican from Wisconsin, Reince Priebus, and the revolutionary Steve Bannon, obsessed with dismantling the administrative state, were given top positions in the West Wing [of the White House]. Rival camps represented by fire-breathing MAGA supporters, creatures from the establishment swamp, "Javanki" (Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner) and globalists ruthlessly leaked information to the media and tried to cut each other to pieces. Trump was surrounded by the stench of chaos, which prevented the administration from implementing its political program.
But by 2024, Trump had effectively absorbed the party, and he didn't need to recruit traditional Republicans, if there were any left. Cliff Sims, who served as a public relations assistant in the White House during Trump's first term and then went to work for the Director of National Intelligence, helped the transition team recruit staff for the second term. The formula for staffing the administration this time was simple, Sims told us. Don't hire anyone who wasn't committed to the election agenda last time.
"I knew that Stephen Miller would eventually be in charge of political activities, and immigration would be his top priority," Sims told us, referring to Trump's senior domestic policy adviser, who is known to be a tough fighter against immigration. "So I just asked him, 'Who do you need? Who should prepare the Ministry of Internal Security? Who should prepare the Immigration and Customs service? Which of your team will become a rock star? Let's get them moving." "It's the same with trading. Sims called Jamison Greer, who was chief of staff to the U.S. Trade Representative during Trump's first term and took over the position himself in the second. He asked Greer who could become Trump's "trade killer and duty enforcer." And he was like, I was sitting here hoping that someone would call and tell me about it, I already have a list," Sims told us.
Since a rich harvest of unequivocally loyal employees was harvested during the transition period to Trump's second term, it became easier to do everything the way Trump wants. In the first term, presidential decrees drafted by the MAGA faction were sometimes pushed through without proper legal review in an attempt to prevent the militant faction from destroying these documents. For this reason, these decrees could easily be challenged in court. This time, the process of preparing the decrees has become more orderly.
Trump's aides and advisers now also have a better understanding of the mechanics of government. They learned, for example, that immigration policy is handled not only by the Department of Homeland Security, and that dedicated people in important positions at the Ministry of Health and Human Services are also needed to curb the flow of immigrants across the southern border. When it came to the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs at the State Department, they knew for sure that they needed strong supporters of the "Make America Great Again" movement in key positions. Such knowledge will now be used to address personnel appointments in dozens of departments.
When Trump's cabinet appointees ran into trouble in the Senate, Trump and his team were determined to test their new power. "It was like, 'you'll eat your breakfast and you'll like it,'" an experienced Republican Party apparatchik told us. The first major test took place during the confirmation hearing for former Fox News anchor Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense.
Republican Senator Joni Ernst from Iowa questioned Hegseth's qualifications. Ernst is the first female combat veteran to serve in the Senate. And Hegseth had previously said that women should not serve in combat positions. Ernst is also a victim of sexual assault, and Hegseth has been accused of sexual assault and other offenses, including alcohol abuse (Hegseth denies the charges). But when Ernst publicly stated that she might not support Hegseth's candidacy, Trump's allies began to act. They wrote that rejecting Hegset's approval was unacceptable. There was a clear consensus. And since Matt Goetz had already been forced to withdraw from the nomination at Trump's initiative for the post of attorney general, the loss of another important candidate could demonstrate the president's weakness. Even the most controversial and scandalous candidates had to be pushed through — Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Robert Kennedy Jr. and Cash Patel.
They decided to use Ernst's example to warn other senators what to expect if they fall out of line. An article with scathing criticism of her appeared on the Breitbart News website. Bannon and company ruthlessly beat her in their podcast War Room; and influential young conservative activist Charlie Kirk and his team from NGO Turning Point USA threatened to send additional resources to Iowa to oppose her re-election in 2026. "Ernst's desire to put an end to Pete Hegseth," Kirk wrote in early December on the social network X, "is a direct attempt to weaken the president and his constituents. Pete Hegseth is the red line. If you vote against him, a primary election will follow."
The Trump team knew that as soon as the most famous MAGA figures launched their offensive, they would be followed by influential second-tier people. Ernst appealed to Trump's allies, begging them to stop their attacks. But they did not back down, and Ernst voted to approve Hegseth.
Bill Cassidy, a Republican senator and doctor from Louisiana, also briefly found himself in a hot frying pan when he unsuccessfully tried to get Kennedy, a vaccine critic who distorted scientific conclusions, confirmed as head of the Department of Health. (Trump's supporters also considered Cassidy a problem because he voted to put the president on trial for his role in the January 6 uprising.)
Cassidy eventually supported Kennedy's appointment, although he argued that his decision had nothing to do with his re-election prospects in 2026. Subsequently, during general conversations about the midterm elections, Cassidy's team sought Trump's support in the upcoming primaries of the Grand Old Party. Trump asked the aide to tell Cassidy that he would "think about it." (The Trump adviser told us that at the moment, the president and Cassidy had reached an "unstable detente.")
Business leaders complied much faster. After the election, they gathered at Mar-a-Lago.
During a dinner with Silicon Valley tycoons, Trump sometimes played a video recording of the song "Justice for All," performed by the prison choir of participants in the events of January 6, singing about the star-spangled flag. Their performance was interspersed with footage of Trump reading the words of the oath. One Trump adviser gloated about how embarrassed information technology billionaires were when "Justice for All" sounded. They looked around in confusion, looking for clues, and then inevitably got up and put their hand to their hearts.
"This troll is strong," the advisor told us.
On Thursday before the inauguration, a friend of Trump's was sitting with him at Mar-a-Lago when the former and future president showed him his phone with a list of recent calls.
"Look who called in the last hour,— Trump boasted, and then scrolled through the list, which included Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Tiger Woods. Apart from Woods, everyone else has been a Trump critic in the past and tried to stay away from him eight years ago.
Shock and awe
The beginning of a new presidency is a complex and confusing event. But Trump and his team spent this time outside the office, preparing for his return. Longwell, a strategist and opponent of MAGA, told us, repeating what our colleague David Frum warned four years ago: that Trump's second—term team's attacks on the federal bureaucracy are similar to "the actions of velociraptors (a genus of predatory dinosaurs). InoSMI), who have learned how to use door handles." The first day of his second term, the result of seven days of careful planning, was filled with "shock and awe," according to the Trump team. "We have implemented all the decrees on immigration and the border," the adviser told us. — If we stopped there, everyone would immediately start talking about what bad people we are — expelling people from our country. But immediately after he signed these decrees on the border, bam — a pardon for the participants in the events of January 6." The adviser explained that there were numerous speeches by Trump that day and the inaugural balls in the evening, and therefore the media had to choose what to cover: either the pardon of the participants in the speeches on January 6, or the decrees on immigration. "Such hectic activity," the adviser told us, "was planned in advance to overwhelm everyone."
"We kind of put everyone in a barrel, turned it around, everyone's head is spinning, and this is beneficial to us," said another adviser.
In his first term, Trump put forward the idea of buying Greenland, talking about it casually and casually as an intriguing and very unusual purchase of real estate. But now, before taking office, he said that Canada should become the 51st American state, threatened to return the Panama Canal and promised to gain control of Greenland "one way or another." He expanded on this idea during his inaugural address, speaking of "predestined destiny," the 19th—century idea that the United States had a divinely ordained right to rule North America.
"This time it sounds like this: hey, fuck you, Greenland is ours!" Bannon told us.
He added that much of what Trump put forward in his first term as provocative ideas, trolling or empty reflections has now turned into a real opportunity, and the president understands that he is really able to do it. "It's all doable," Bannon told us. "When you come back from a non—existence in which you had scanty chances, you clearly feel that you can do anything."
Instagram Facebook and Meta's activities are banned in Russia as extremist
** Listed as a terrorist and extremist in Russia
