This is an edited transcript of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts.
During Trump’s first term, there was a profuse amount of daily reporting about how his White House was working. In part, this was because it was split between multiple factions, each of which was constantly leaking about the others — the result being not a very internally coherent or a smoothly working White House, though a lot of information was being made available about what was happening, why and when.
Trump’s second term has been different. Trump’s staff has been selected much more for its loyalty. The factional infighting is less visible while the White House has been doing so much more.
The balance of coverage is about what they’re actually executing in the world as opposed to what they are doing or saying about each other. But recently, particularly around Minneapolis, Venezuela and 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 their own? So I wanted to talk with some reporters who cover the Trump White House day in and day out and who could 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. They’re uniquely placed to explain how something that, at this point, I think is less like a White House and more like a royal court in its daily functioning — both for Donald Trump and for the rest of us.
Ezra Klein: Ashley Parker, Michael Scherer, welcome to the show.
Michael Scherer: Thanks for having me.
Ashley Parker: Yes, thanks for having us.
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?
Parker: In his first term, you have to keep in mind — 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 that has never operated at that level. Some of them had never been really in politics before.
Remember Hope Hicks, who played a huge role in his first term? The story, the lore, was that when he told her: Hope, I’d like you to be part of my campaign. She said: Which golf course? Is it a marketing campaign for Trump National Doral Golf Club or something at Mar-a-Lago?
So Trump ascends to the presidency, and he suddenly has to fill all of these posts with people he doesn’t know, 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 a lot of them view themselves as guardrails. They would argue they’re 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 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 are the 10 reasons you can’t do this. If you do this, I’ll resign.
This time, one person we talked to said: Look, when the president asks for something twice, we have an unofficial rule, which is that we do it. 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.
Michael, 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. But when does that shift into a kind of, famously: We are the resistance inside the Trump administration?
The reason I ask is because it’s important to understand the extent to which they set out in the second term to solve this and whether it was a hindrance or, in fact, a help to him to be restrained.
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 to really do with government.
He didn’t have a plan from Day 1 about what he wanted to accomplish in terms of remaking the federal government. 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. That is our job — to make sure the systems work as they have worked for decades.
So by that definition, it is good staffing. Now I think there were mistakes Trump made in that first term. We should mention that he created — he likes a gang of rivals, a sort of nasty viper pit of rivals, around him. He had Kellyanne Conway, Jared Kushner, Steve Bannon and Reince Priebus those first few months. Those were all independent power centers who were all fighting against each other. And that was bad staffing. That was a misdesign of his White House.
But I think for the people who came in, 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 the implicit part of your question is: Why has it changed?
Everyone who came in 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.
Parker: And by that metric I would argue that some of the staffing got better in certain ways. A lot of these people, in the first term, were new — if not to government, then certainly to the White House and the executive branch. And the first term’s Stephen Miller, for instance: His famous travel ban executive order 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, in the first term, and he sort of expected the presidency to be like a monarchy. And he was frustrated when he wasn’t king. It turned out that a single senator, John McCain, could tank something he really cared about.
So they all learn 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 — but 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 Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, who will be crucial for what he wants to do.
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, sort of, the destruction of the administrative state, they are much better staffers in that mission.
How do they achieve that? You describe, in one of your pieces, the mission as they’re staffing up for the second term as: “This time, loyalty would be absolute.”
The federal government is a big place. They actually have in 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 into this term with the idea that they’re going to select for loyalty and alignment, how do they do it?
Scherer: So Trump 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.
He has this great litmus test — because of Jan. 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.
We reported that, in the first term, Stephen Miller would go over 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. You 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.
I think you see that in every one of the major cabinet positions. And you see it in those cabinet meetings that Trump has started holding. It’s fealty to the king. It’s very much like a royal court. And they’re all answering to him, not to their own bureaucracies and their own traditions.
That’s just radically different than in 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 in the Justice Department.
He came in this time, he cleaned house, wherever he saw doubt, and literally imposed loyalty tests to replace those people.
Parker: And that loyalty has become easier in certain ways. 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 first term, there was a sense — not just from the people around him and Republicans and voters and world leaders, but from everyone — that this was an aberration and that it was a fever dream.
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 Jan. 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 Ryans, the Mitt Romneys of the world — they left.
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 and in the Republican Party, is that the 2024 campaign — particularly after the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania and then when he eventually wins — the party’s relationship to Trump, the way that people around Trump look at Trump, seemed to change.
I would say that I feel as though Trump gets treated as the grand ayatollah of the Republican Party now, that they treat him almost like a mystic: 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.
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. They treat him as a great man of history.
Scherer: I don’t think that’s correct. It’s not the case that it’s entirely a yes-man White House.
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, sort of ingloriously. Because she was there with him during his time in the wilderness after Jan. 6, because she was able to build the campaign that ended up winning and because she has figured out her relationship with Trump — in a way that I don’t think anyone else who has ever worked with him has at that level — she is able to go to him and say: I don’t think that’s a good idea. And she 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. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t go ahead and do the thing he wanted to do anyway.
One example of this is there was a debate over whether to pardon all the Jan. 6 felons, or just some of them, and whether not to pardon the violent ones. There were people around Trump who were saying to him: I don’t think we should pardon the violent ones, 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, at least at the top, had been 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 to nationalize a city. But there is pushback.
Now the question of when there’s pushback is an interesting one, because Susie does not try to stop him if he’s made up his mind. And that’s different from Reince Priebus or some of the other chiefs of staff.
She’s able to go along. If he makes a decision, she’ll go along with it. She’ll try to make it do as little damage as possible for him.
But I don’t think it’s right to say there are no discussions like that.
Tell me about their relationship.
Scherer: 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 — I think he can become a little more combative. We saw this in the first term, with Hope Hicks, Kellyanne Conway and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who could talk to him more 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 — 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 superstructure 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.
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. I mean, they’re working for the president, but they are executing on her vision.
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 was, has mostly gone away. And that’s just an organizational superstructure that she has 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. So there is a sort of discipline that has been imposed, often very subtly, from her within the government, which, I think, has served the president well.
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, not dissimilar to being a parent. You have different kids, and if I’m messaging something to my 7-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 2½-year-old.
I’m not going to say what age I’m arguing the president is, but all of those women sort of understood Trump, understood what he needed, understood how to present him with information.
Maybe it’s a poll you put in front of him and say: 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.
Because they understand that that’s how he takes in information and understands it. And I think that has been incredibly helpful.
Scherer: Another thing I’ll just mention real quick is that unlike the other chiefs of staff, she has not tried to control the flow of information to the president. And that’s a big shift from those first three or four chiefs of staff in the first term, when they tried to control the paper that was going in the room. They were trying to keep people from knowing exactly who was going to the Oval Office and who was not going to the Oval Office.
Susie does not try to do that. And that complicates the job for —
Parker: For Susie, first and foremost. [Laughs.]
Scherer: Yes, and for others in the White House. But it also, I think, allows the president to feel like he’s not being controlled.
Parker: One more thing on Susie: That Vanity Fair piece Michael mentioned, I assume your listeners know, but Susie gave a bunch of candid interviews to Chris Whipple. They were on the record, and he ended up sort of 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.
I understood why the White House was upset over it and Susie was upset over it. 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 cleareyed. 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 about the court around him — who they are and what their motivations are.
Wiles does not give a lot of interviews. She’s not out in public in the way that Stephen Miller, Marco Rubio or JD Vance are. She’s not spilling all her thoughts on X.
So one interpretation many people, to some degree myself included, had was that she portrayed herself in that piece as a quite enabling chief of staff. There’s this famous quote, I’m paraphrasing it, where she says: You have other chiefs of staff who have these moments where they march into the Oval Office and they tell the president that what they’re trying to do is unconstitutional or wrong and they need to change course, and I don’t have any of those moments.
Given how many things Donald Trump tries to do that are unconstitutional or wrong, it struck me as not a plausible interpretation that no such moments are needed.
You’re sort of portraying her here as a quite strong chief of staff: controlling process, creating structure. I felt like a lot of what was incendiary about that was that she, in some ways, portrayed herself as a somewhat mild chief of staff who just sees her role as helping shape what Trump wants to do.
Scherer: Yes, I think there’s a lot of nuance here.
So the president decides: I’m going to pardon everyone from Jan. 6 — there’s no discussion of it afterward. That’s what happens.
But I’ve talked to people who have talked about meetings with her, during the campaign and afterward, where she often says almost nothing during much of the meeting. And then she’ll say something quietly at the end: I’m not sure that’s a good idea.
You could argue that, obviously, she has allowed things that many people would say are unconstitutional. But I think there’s a different litmus test that she’s using for a lot of these things.
Another example that gets at this is: After the Alex Pretti shooting in Minneapolis, you had, that Saturday, Noem and Miller leading the charge, saying that this was basically a terrorist who was going to assault officers.
Obviously, not true. The president came in and basically reversed his course. Overrules Stephen Miller, puts him in the penalty box. He overrules Noem and sends Tom Homan up to Minneapolis. We now know that almost all the surge of troops there have been pulled out. A very dramatic reversal that happened very quickly.
If you were to ask Susie: Why did that happen? She would say: Well, the president made that decision to do that.
But I think there was a clear set of discussions, engineered by Susie and other people in the White House, to allow for such a dramatic shift to happen. And I don’t know if Reince Priebus or some of the other people who worked for Trump in the first term would have been able to guide that process in the same way.
Let me pick up on something that specific event has made me think a lot about. You mentioned the flow of information to the president. And traditionally, the chief of staff, the National Security Council, the Domestic Policy Council — there are a lot of White House structures that are fundamentally about narrowing, prioritizing and rationalizing the flow of information to the president.
If it’s done badly, the president doesn’t want to hear things they should be hearing. If it’s done well, it means they’re not overwhelmed by too much, because the responsibilities of the presidency are potentially quite vast.
When I listen to Donald Trump talk, how good the information he is getting is not obvious to me. When Stephen Miller lies to me on television, I think Stephen Miller knows he is lying to me. With Trump, I can often not tell, in certain situations, if he has been fed terrible information by the people around him.
I watch these cabinet meetings where his cabinet goes around and prefaces every incredibly sunny report with totalitarian kitsch-style praise of the president. And I think to myself watching this: If Trump is believing any of this, he’s being very ill served, among other things. This is the problem with regimes that work like that.
So does Trump get bad news? Is he getting better information than what we see in those cabinet meetings? Or does he have a bunch of yes men and women around him who tell him what he wants to hear?
Parker: One thing is that Trump himself does not always differentiate between the sources. You may know that an article in The New York Times means one thing and that an article in Breitbart News means something else, and interpret it accordingly.
In the same way, as a student, if I am writing a research paper, I know that taking something out of an original source textbook is one caliber of information, and that Wikipedia is maybe a good jumping-off point — but something you would never cite. And that Reddit is just a crazy rabbit hole. But Trump is willing to treat those all equally.
If a poll is in his favor, he likes that poll. And you’re right, he gets a lot of information from people for various reasons — because they want him to like them, and he likes them if they show him a poll claiming his approval rating in New York is 70 percent. That’s exciting for him.
He gets information from people like Laura Loomer, who has a direct line to him, who has her own agenda and, potentially, her own clients.
He does not differentiate between that information. I think his lens is quite transactional. He views it as: Is this something I like, or is this something I don’t like?
If it’s something he likes, he will repeat it ad nauseam whether or not it is true. And if it’s something he doesn’t like, he will choose not to accept it as fact and will probably not put it out on Truth Social.
But does Susie Wiles see it as her job, when the president is saying untrue things, to make sure his picture of reality is true?
Scherer: No, absolutely not.
That seems like a problem. [Laughs.]
Scherer: No, because I think you have to understand that the president has a different view of truth. He simply does not prioritize being accurate.
As I was coming over here, I was listening to the president give a press conference about some E.P.A. announcement he just put out, and he was talking about how we’ve had such great job performance over the last year, like no one has ever seen before.
And we know that’s not true. There were less jobs created last year than there were the year before or the year before that. It’s just not true. But the president says those sorts of things, I think, knowing that they’re not true, because he thinks the things he says are made as part of a transaction with whomever he’s speaking to — the American people, usually his voters — and he’s trying to get something from them. So he’s trying to sell something to them.
The president just doesn’t prioritize accuracy in that way.
Parker: That’s a genteel way of putting it. Sure.
But I would also argue he has a long history of bending reality to his will. And that’s tricky because, for instance, we should all say here: He lost the 2020 election. He lost it. But at the same time, he convinced a huge swath of the country that he was the rightful president — in exile at Mar-a-Lago — and that the election was stolen.
So I don’t really know what my macropoint is. I am arguing that there are actual, tangible facts and truth, and I believe in a reality-based world. But for his purposes, Trump is nearly as happy to have those 40 percent of the electorate think he won the election.
I recognize that Donald Trump has a [expletive] relationship to the truth.
And there’s this great book of philosophy called “On Bullshit,” and it says that the [expletive] is different from the liar, because the liar is playing a game against the truth. The liar knows the truth and is calibrating against it.
The [expletive] doesn’t actually care about the truth. I conceive of Trump as a [expletive].
But part of the job of the White House staff is to make sure the president, whatever it is 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 that the people around Trump understand that to be their job.
Scherer: I think that is not a priority of the White House staff.
I think they feel like they need to present reality to the president in a way that would allow him to make good decisions. And I do think there is quite a bit of effort that goes on inside the White House to channel the president.
Another example we could just run through quickly is: There’s been this fight going on in the White House for a couple of months now to get the president to talk about the thing that will help Republicans win the midterms.
There’s a big problem in the polls right now. The American people don’t think their economic situation is getting better. They think he’s spending too much time on foreign policy. They’re not thrilled with the ballroom. They don’t love a lot of the things he likes to focus on. So the staff is trying to get him out to do speeches and things like that.
Trump has been resisting that because he’s simply more interested in other things. So that conversation has been one in which people around the president have been trying to implore him to recognize what is just a fact: The midterms will be worse if Republicans don’t figure out how to get on the right side of affordability and some of this economic messaging. And right now we’re on the wrong side. Your approval rating is bad. That’s just a fact. And the president is kind of negotiating with that.
Now that doesn’t mean when the president speaks publicly, he’s going to say anything negative about the way the economy is going. He’s going to say: It’s the best economy we’ve ever had. He’s going to say: Any poll that shows Republicans are doing badly is obviously false and a lie.
So he’ll say lots of false things publicly, but that doesn’t mean there’s not a private conversation or argument going on behind the scenes.
You describe Susie Wiles as the center of the White House, obviously beyond the president. I was going to move on to Stephen Miller. I want to ask you about a couple of the figures here, and the role they play. But let me actually have you decide in which direction we move. Who is the most influential for us to discuss next?
Parker: I would say Stephen Miller is the right direction. I’m curious what you think, Michael.
Scherer: I think for domestic policy, yes, Stephen Miller. For foreign policy, you may go to Marco.
Let’s talk about Miller. Miller has 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.
You did a great profile of him not long ago. What is his role?
Scherer: Formally, he’s the deputy chief of staff for policy. Informally, I think the president has described him as being at the top of the totem pole. And when he says that, he’s talking about policy.
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 the disruptive executive orders from the first few months. The crackdown on universities. You can just list a lot of the stuff that happened in those first 100 days that caught everybody off guard, and he was writing a lot of those executive orders.
The other role he plays is he’s the sort of accelerant in the White House, the voice that’s always 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.
In that way, he influences a lot of things. Any discussion that’s going on, he’s going to add more fuel to that fire, more kindling. He’s going to go on to say something like: ICE agents have immunity. And suddenly, C.B.P. officers or ICE agents up in Minneapolis feel somehow freer to push the bounds of what is legal in their behavior. And he has accelerated that tension.
I think the most jarring thing he has done was, after the Charlie Kirk murder, giving a speech at his funeral in which he basically described a clash of civilizations, a full-on war for the future of humanity between the left and his side.
Archival clip of Stephen Miller: They cannot imagine what they have awakened. They cannot conceive of the army that they have arisen in all of us. Because we stand for what is good, what is virtuous, what is noble.
And to those trying to incite violence against us, those trying to foment hatred against us, what do you have? You have nothing. You are nothing. You are wickedness. You are jealousy. You are envy. You are hatred. You are nothing. You can build nothing. You can produce nothing. You can create nothing.
We are the ones who build. We are the ones who create. We are the ones who lift up humanity.
You thought you could kill Charlie Kirk? You have made him immortal.
Scherer: It was like a “call to war” speech. And I think he brings that attitude to the whole conversation inside the government.
Parker: In our profile, we described him as the pulsing id of a president who is already almost pure id.
One of the first ways we, the nation, collectively glimpsed it was during “Signalgate,” where our boss, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, is inadvertently added to a private Signal chain of Trump’s top, top, top people discussing a bombing campaign in Yemen.
This is fascinating, for a number of reasons, for what it reveals, including the sheer sloppiness of adding a journalist to a private Signal chain with essentially classified information.
But to me, even then, even before I started reporting on Stephen Miller and came to understand the true scope of his power and influence, was that in that debate, you have the vice president and Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, and all of these top people going back and forth. Stephen Miller is in that chain, technically the lowest on the totem pole. He’s not elected. He’s not Senate confirmed. He’s not a cabinet official.
And at one point, Stephen Miller weighs in, and — I’m paraphrasing a bit here — he essentially says: Look, as I understand it, the president gave the green light to go bomb Yemen.
And then everyone’s just like: Oh, OK. Let’s do it.
And they do it. And when we were talking to people in the White House, it became clear that a directive from Stephen Miller is viewed as a directive from Donald Trump himself.
You described Miller as the pulsing id of a presidency that is already pretty heavily id. But what feels very different about Miller and Trump is that Trump feels loose and intuitive. Miller feels highly, highly ideological — and highly structured. To the extent he’s an id, he’s an organizationally very capable one.
What is his theory of this state of wielding power, of the administrative role he has?
Scherer: I think it’s more developed than the president’s. I don’t think the president is a very ideological person. I don’t think he reads Claremont Institute papers or has a very sophisticated view of the drift of the Constitution over the last 30 years and what needs to be fixed. He knows what he wants to do, and I think Miller’s role then is to fill in a lot of those blanks.
And he has operationalized a lot of what the emerging institutional MAGA world has started to argue in the last five years, which is basically an argument that says that the way the government has been behaving over the last 20, 30 years is way outside of what the Constitution was intended to do and that we have to correct for that by doing things that for most observers in Washington, definitely for Democrats, looks extraconstitutional.
What a gentle word.
[All chuckle.]
Scherer: To do things that dramatically expand the power of the executive branch involves the executive branch and the federal government and things that conservatives for decades never wanted the federal government to be involved in — university speech codes and private businesses.
One thing I just want to add here is that the president, I think, kind of adores Miller, sees him as very useful, has definitely hugged him and empowered him. It’s also true that the president has held Miller at an ironic distance at times.
You’ve seen this in the Oval Office. He’ll joke about how we don’t really want Stephen to say everything he believes ——
Archival clip of Donald Trump: I want to thank Stephen Miller, who is right back in the audience right there. I love watching him on television. I would love to have him come up and explain his true feelings. Maybe not his truest feelings. That might be going a little too far.
Or we reported in this story an anecdote from the debate prep in 2024 in which they’re talking about immigration, and Miller was speaking about what the answer on immigration should be, and the president — I’m paraphrasing — said something like: Well, if you had your way, Stephen, everybody in this country would look like you.
And Miller answered: That’s correct.
Parker: And then went back to debating immigration. He asserts that’s correct, and then went back to his debate.
But his broader view of government is a sort of maximalist view. It is to push and push and push until you get any blowback. And then to push again even harder in maybe a slightly more creative way or a slightly tweaked way.
But he got a lot of attention for something he said to Jake Tapper.
And this was in the aftermath of the toppling of Maduro in Venezuela, as it looked like the United States might be interested in taking Greenland by force.
And Stephen Miller’s view — he was articulating a foreign policy view, but I think it can be applied to government, the bureaucracy, the administrative state — was that he basically just said:
Archival clip of Stephen Miller: You can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.
And we are going to do that unconstrained by laws and the Constitution and societal niceties and norms. We are going to do what we want to do until, essentially, we are all but physically stopped from doing that.
Do they believe this particular strategy is working? We were talking about this a little bit earlier. Donald Trump is unpopular. He’s quite unpopular at this point. Republicans are getting routed in elections that are, in any respect, competitive all over the country. They are underperforming in elections that are not competitive.
The White House walks with a lot of swagger. But if you were to judge it by most normal ways of thinking about a White House: How much legislation is getting passed? How many consequential rules are being finalized? How’s the president’s polling? How do the Republicans look in the midterm elections?
This strategy of relentlessly smashing through the Overton window is not moving the country. It’s mobilizing opposition.
Scherer: I think there’s an enormous concern in the Republican Party right now and inside the White House about the way things are going. And I think we do have the beginnings of a recalibration. I don’t think it will be a recalibration that changes much, and I don’t think it’s one that most Americans will probably notice.
But to go back to the Pretti shooting: That policy of having roving bands of Customs and Border Protection agents militarized, going into American cities and breaking windows of cars and crashing into protesters and shooting people was one that was directly driven by Stephen Miller. And when a guy got shot in a way that anyone who watched that video was horrified by, or should be horrified by, Miller was put in the penalty box. That’s what happened a couple of weeks ago.
What does it mean when you say that? What does it mean: “Miller was put in the penalty box”?
Scherer: It means Tom Homan — who had sort of been on the outs inside the White House when it came to immigration policy, who had been warring with Kristi Noem — was put in charge.
Homan is not someone who is going to stop arresting and deporting people, but he is a much more by-the-book type of guy: Let’s do it. Let’s arrest people at jails. Let’s arrest people with the cooperation of local officials. Let’s de-escalate the situation.
And Miller, if you look at what he was saying in those days immediately after Homan goes to Minneapolis, he was looking for cover. He puts out a statement earlier that week where he says something like: Well, it looks like C.B.P. didn’t follow their own policies. And we’re looking into that.
He was trying to distance himself from this thing that he had pushed for.
Parker: But again, to Michael’s point, both things can be true. There is in some areas a bit of a recalibration, but the reason that recalibration will not be felt in a super-meaningful way by the country is because only Stephen Miller makes Homan look like an immigration squish. By any other metric, we could be here doing a podcast about how Tom Homan is so extreme and far right on immigration.
What is JD Vance’s role?
Scherer: I think Vance is sort of a hybrid, as all vice presidents are. He’s one step removed from the core structures. He doesn’t have any direct brief.
But he is a part of the senior strategy meetings. He is in the room. He was on the Signal chat when they were talking about what’s going to happen next. So he has a political role where he’s out and about carrying the president’s message to the country, increasingly carrying a message that, hopefully, serves him well, is his hope for his own political future. He sees himself as someone who is trying to bring an ideological, intellectual order to what the president has brought to the country. He’s trying to be the glue that connects Trump’s whims and interests and desires to some theory of governance and theory of what the country should be doing.
And the last thing he does is he’s kind of a troll. He’s like a chief troll for the White House. Like Stephen Miller, he’s out there a lot, pushing the bounds, owning the libs, getting in fights on Twitter. Things like that.
Your point about him being a chief ideologue — is that how Trump sees him? How has their relationship evolved over the course of the administration?
Parker: One thing that has helped their relationship — not even in the administration but just going back to how he ended up becoming Trump’s choice to be vice president — is there is a group of mainly young men around JD Vance, including Donald Trump’s oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., with whom he is sort of legitimately friends.
And these guys, a lot of them young men, came up under Steve Bannon. They were there with the president in the first term and were part of the faction that was actually legitimately loyal to Donald Trump. So he’s part of this coterie, this crew. JD Vance was also very close to Charlie Kirk.
And so he comes with his MAGA, Trump bona fides, after you get over the stuff he said about Trump previously, which he has claimed he has evolved and he understands more clearly. So in that way, Trump trusts him.
Scherer: I haven’t heard much tension between Vance and Trump. I don’t think there’s tension. I think they get along fine. I think Vance is busy. I think he’s doing stuff to help the president.
I think the unspoken tension that is there is that Vance clearly is the next guy up in 2028. And it’s not clear if Trump is going to be there for him. We just don’t know how that’s going to play out. It’s not clear that Trump sees Vance as his clear successor at this point. And so I think that’s an undercurrent of tension there.
Parker: Yes, Trump has so far at least thrown a jump ball between Vance and Rubio, which should surprise no one who knows Trump’s flair for the dramatic. Of course, he would not anoint an obvious successor.
Rubio, to me, has been one of the more surprising stories in the administration. He is considered for vice president — doesn’t get it. Gets secretary of state, which is, of course, a tremendous job.
Early on, there were a lot of memes about him looking uncomfortable at different events. He becomes national security adviser, as well as secretary of state.
Tell me about Rubio’s arc here — his role, his powers, his relationship — with Trump?
Parker: I’ll speak to one turning point early that I think gets missed. Because you’re right: Many of us are old enough to remember “Little Marco” in 2016 running against Trump and being sort of viscerally appalled by everything Donald Trump stands for and represents.
Archival clip of Marco Rubio: I will never stop until we keep a con man from taking over the party of Reagan and the conservative movement.
So he’s not an obvious choice to be in Trump’s administration in any way, shape or form.
And he gets in, and it’s interesting to see what he’s going to do. And early on — this is during the DOGE era and the best friendship with Elon Musk era — Musk is annoying, to put it mildly, a lot of these cabinet secretaries because he is going in with a sledgehammer. He is doing things that are not helpful at their agencies.
And keep in mind, he decimates U.S.A.I.D. — for which Rubio had been arguing for more funding during the Biden administration. And Rubio had enough, and in this private cabinet meeting, he just goes head-to-head with Elon Musk and really stands up to him and goes after him and says: What you’re saying is [expletive], essentially, and you are hurting things — and there are a few other cabinet secretaries, Sean Duffy among them, who also take part in this.
But someone told Michael and me afterward that, in Trump’s eyes, in estimation, that was a real turning point. And again, even though there aren’t the warring factions this time that there were in the first term, this is someone who likes a cage fight — I believe we are actually having a cage fight, or something close to it, on Trump’s birthday as part of “America 250,” on the lawn of the White House — and to see Marco Rubio stand up for himself in such a strong way, I think, helped Trump just mentally say: Oh, this isn’t Little Marco anymore.
That’s one of the first times when Rubio really rises in his power in the administration.
I guess one of the surprises to me about Rubio’s ascendance is, if you think about the way Trump described MAGA, if you think about the way the ideologists around Trump described MAGA, one of its primary differentiators from the Republican Party before it is that it is nonadventurous in foreign policy. It’s borderline isolationist. It’s “America First.” It’s not concerned with all these niceties.
And he would have described Rubio as representing a much more traditionalist Republican foreign policy. It’s not crazy that you would have Rubio there as representing a somewhat different view.
The consolidation of power under Rubio seems pretty distinctive. That Rubio drove a lot of the Venezuela policy — that represents a longtime Rubio obsession — seems distinctive.
Why have they put so much under someone who didn’t seem like a natural fit for this administration?
Scherer: I remember being in Rubio’s office in 2013, I think, doing an interview with him about why we needed comprehensive legal immigration reform and a path to citizenship.
[Chuckles.] We all remember those days.
Scherer: So Rubio has really taken a journey. And I don’t think it’s entirely craven on his part. I think he evolved independent of Trump, after Trump won in 2016, after he lost that primary election.
Rubio has come to be much more of a nationalist. I think, in important ways, he has come to the Trump view on a lot of this stuff. Internally, when it comes to Russia, he is the hawk in these discussions. He’s the one sitting next to Witkoff, saying: Wait, we don’t really want to trust Putin on all this stuff. This is not a guy to be trusted.
He is very much driving, as you said, this hemispheric view that the president came into his second term with, in this idea that the U.S. needs to project its power south. And he has long pushed for, basically, a change in the regime in Cuba. I think he has pushed Venezuela as a steppingstone to that.
The other thing I think about Rubio, is in a similar way to Susie — and they’re very close, they know each other from Florida. I think if Susie had gotten to choose, Rubio would have been the vice president, not JD Vance.
Rubio understands how to advise the president into getting him what he thinks he wants while also trying to help him avoid pitfalls, and he has earned the president’s trust during that process. But he’s also very deferential. He’s not the guy saying: No, you can’t do this — slamming the table. That’s not his role in this process.
Parker: One thing that I think is misunderstood about Trump, but that has allowed Rubio to have a big influence in foreign policy, is that Trump is not the pure, say, Rand Paul isolationist that a lot of his base hoped he would be or understood him to be.
Trump ran on a promise to end forever wars — the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan — and using American boys and girls to export democratic values abroad. But he is open to what we can now say is the [expletive]-around-and-find-out doctrine. Before that, it was what I thought of as the one-and-done doctrine, in which he was actually quite open to short, kinetic bursts of force — what in his world looks like a badass video game strike on Iran.
And even what happened in Venezuela — and we may see the secondary- and third-level consequences — it was a wild success for the American military. It was a quick, precise extraction of a president who everyone agreed was a “bad guy.”
And so he is open to those sorts of foreign policy adventurism in a way.
One thing that seems true to me about the Trump White House is that there are, even at the high levels, people who give orders and people who take orders.
We were talking about Stephen Miller a minute ago. Stephen Miller is clearly somebody who gives orders. Rubio seems to me — you can tell me if this is wrong — like he is in the listens to Trump but gives orders role. He’s very, very powerful.
Some of the other boldfaced names in that orbit — Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard — are they in the gives orders or are they in the takes orders category?
Scherer: Well, I think they’re very different. Hegseth had a very rough first year. And when we interviewed Trump last spring, Trump was talking about Hegseth as like a kid who’s trying to do well but who just hasn’t figured it out yet. That was the tone of the conversation.
I think Trump likes Hegseth on TV. He likes the aggression from Hegseth, the sort of anti-woke reformism, the machismo that Hegseth is trying to bring to the Pentagon. But I don’t think Hegseth is much of a senior adviser on this stuff. I think Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is probably more in Trump’s ear when it comes to those things. But Hegseth has earned his place as a cabinet member in good standing.
Tulsi Gabbard is different. She really lost her place early on. She ends up at an agency, the director of national intelligence, that the president has been skeptical of. It’s a post-Sept. 11 agency that others in government have said: We’re not really sure it’s the right structure.
She had some missteps last year, and because of her tensions with the C.I.A., she’s been cut out of a lot of these national security discussions. She’s off doing investigations of election technology in Puerto Rico or showing up in Fulton County. So I wouldn’t put her in that same top tier, although she is trying to win her way back into the president’s good graces.
I want to know the way you do that, which is by — the way at least Gabbard is currently doing it, as I understand it — really going hard in backing up Trump in various conspiracies. As the director of national intelligence, the way you can win back the president is bad information and supporting it? As a strategy, it seems very revealing to me.
Parker: Or look at Pam Bondi’s recent hearing. She is trying to win her way back into the president’s good graces by just sort of going hard at Democrats and all of his rivals.
Archival clip of Pam Bondi: Have you apologized to President Trump? Have you apologized to President Trump? All of you who participated in those impeachment hearings against Donald Trump? You all should be apologizing ——
Parker: Then at one point during that hearing, as a sort of non sequitur, talking about how great the Dow was:
Archival clip of Bondi: The Dow! The Dow, right now, is over — the Dow is over $50,000 —
I don’t know why you’re laughing. You’re a great stock trader as I hear, Raskin.
[Audience laughs softly.]
The Dow is over 50,000 right now!
Parker: Trying to turn a House Oversight Committee into what we just discussed is a Trump cabinet meeting: And I’m just going to praise the president. That is how they do it.
Scherer: The president’s fundamental characteristic is that he’s transactional in everything he does. In every interaction he has, in all the macro ways he lives his life, he’s always trading to get some benefit for himself.
The way that manifests in the White House is that it functions more like a royal court would. You have the courtiers who come to the parties and try to please the king in various ways. And the president is constantly asking to be pleased.
That is from the cabinet level more so than from the White House staff, because the White House staff works for Susie. It’s a different structure. But the cabinet level, a lot of these people are constantly trying to figure out every day how to please the king and what they can do to please him.
Part of that is performing “owning the liberals” in a TV interview or a hearing or announcing some new initiative for him. Part of that is delivering these policy things. Part of that is doing the things that Trump knows the Department of Justice or the director of national intelligence would never have done in the first term because they’re way outside the bounds of what’s normal.
That’s the system he’s built up. Those long cabinet meetings that you described are the performative part of the whole structure. That’s the public version of it, but that’s happening all the time. Cabinet members are constantly just hanging out at the White House so they can be around the guy, just so they can get face time. Because if he’s thinking of you, that’s good for you.
Barack Obama ran a government like a corporation. He wanted to be efficient, he wanted to be effective, he wanted all the rules to be followed, he wanted a process, and everyone was playing their part. But it was not about pleasing him.
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.
People 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. Some people have described to me Trump just seeming to have time to talk.
You talked about Obama running the White House like a corporation, famously saying: I wear the same two colors of suits, so I’m never thinking about what I have to wear. He treated his time like an incredibly precious resource. The idea that he’d be just channel flipping was unthinkable.
How does Trump spend his time? What does his schedule look like? We’ve talked about things laddering up to him, but it’s sometimes not obvious to me how actually inside these policy debates and processes he is compared with recent previous presidents.
Scherer: He wakes up late. Obama would start work very early in the Oval Office and work until dinnertime, and then he’d 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 know, one to three hours in a day. That’s a lot of time to be just talking on the record to somebody or doing something like that.
I think the rest of the time is much more free-form. I don’t think that drive toward 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 has been so interested in foreign policy. He has an enormous amount of power when it comes to foreign policy. He can get on the phone with all kinds of world leaders, and he loves talking to anybody.
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 to settle wars in corners of the world.
Parker: It’s sort of like Don from Queens — a consummate talk radio caller or host. It’s a very good medium for him, frankly. People say he’s incredibly compelling on the phone.
He plays a lot of golf on the weekends. He goes to his private clubs — Mar-a-Lago in the winter, Bedminster sometimes when it’s nicer — where he holds court.
And he loves a lot of inputs. But you’re right: It’s much more of a rolling conversation than it is a meaningful policy debate in the traditional sense. That’s absolutely true.
I am not the president. I do a podcast. I do some columns. I feel like I have trouble fitting phone calls into my day. I’m not communicative in the way I’d like to be.
I hear about this, and I watch some of this, and I wonder how he is not more aggressively scheduled, given all the things that, in theory in another White House, would ultimately come up to him.
And I feel like it sometimes leaves me with only a couple of options. Either those things are not coming up to him — so he doesn’t know about as much as Barack Obama or Joe Biden or George W. Bush did — or he’s trusting his people more. If something gets bad enough, they bring it to him, but the level at which something gets brought to him is very different.
Or he’s not sitting and presiding over things. In the way that Bill Clinton or Obama or Biden really wanted to see their advisers arguing things out in front of them and reading the briefing book, he doesn’t care. Something gets brought to him.
Another possibility is I’m just not seeing where in his time this happens — whether they’re having more late-night calls or the decisions are made in a different way. But it can’t all fit. He can’t be both loose and in front of cameras for one to three hours a day — and doing the level of oversight that I think his predecessors did.
So what is pushed out here?
Scherer: All presidents have done this differently. I’ve heard, especially since the last election, quite a bit of criticism from people who work for Biden about how little they engaged with him when they were in the White House. And he had basically built a structure there at the end of his term where he would weigh in on things, but he wasn’t at the center of most of the discussions going on.
And that may have hurt the Biden administration. You’re describing a president who serves the government, who serves the White House, and I think Trump is sort of the reverse of that. He is a president who is served by the White House and the government around him.
The other thing is, he has always loved being on the phone with lots of people. I mean, going back to his time in New York, he would get on the phone with reporters all the time, get on the phone with friends all the time.
I talked to Bobby Kennedy Jr., the H.H.S. secretary, and he said he gets phone calls really late at night from the president. So I think the president is doing work late at night, and he’ll just call up cabinet members or advisers late at night to talk through things.
The other thing the president has, which we haven’t talked about, is his own little superstructure inside the White House of aides who basically just work with him, who just provide him information, who are channeling people to him outside the structure that Susie has created. And so I think he’s operating in that world, as well, and that includes contact with lots of his friends, contact with business executives, contact with donors.
I mean, the amount of time he has spent in this first year on planning events for the “America 250” celebration — a new ballroom, redoing the Kennedy Center, fixing golf courses — you could just go on and on — redoing the Oval Office, putting signs up on the Rose Garden colonnade — he’s spending all this time doing stuff that no president has ever spent time doing, but he loves it, and that’s what he chooses to do.
Parker: Reasonable people can argue that they would prefer their president to spend that time differently.
As Michael was saying, Trump can get incredibly in the weeds. We have had people say to us, when he was redesigning the Oval Office, that he is the one who is looking at the different shades of gold inlay and which one should go here and which type of chandelier. And a meeting at Mar-a-Lago being stopped because he notices out his window that a tree is bending the wrong way.
Again, would perhaps most voters prefer he take that level of passion and attention to detail to figuring out what’s going on in Minneapolis? Absolutely, potentially. But he does have that capacity for what he cares about, and what he cares about is often not the policy weeds.
Does that lead to a deficit in what he knows about inside his own administration? And here I don’t mean: Is he reading in the way that Obama or Clinton would have on policy?
The administration is a series of very, very, very major projects going on — tariffs and Venezuela and ICE and C.B.P. enforcement — and things that are transformational and disruptive and in some cases violent, and in all cases consequential. The way that many presidents would handle a series of things like that is they would want to be on top of that process and have constant updates coming to them.
I guess what I am getting at here is: This seems like it is a much less structured policy process than we are used to.
Parker: Correct.
So is what is suffering in that what the president knows? Or is it that the president actually doesn’t want to know more than he does, and the way things bubble up to him is more associative and precise than it would have been another time?
Parker: It’s a president who governs in rules on sort of raw, visceral, gut instinct.
Michael said he’s very transactional. A way I view it that I think is helpful in understanding him and explaining his contradictory impulses is that he is someone who is always trying to win the minute, the hour, the day. He is trying to win over and woo the person directly in front of him, which can send him at times careering.
I can remember him talking to Dreamers and then the sheriffs get brought into the Oval Office, and he has a totally different message.
Again, I did not cover Barack Obama’s presidency nearly as closely as I have covered Trump’s, but my sense was that Obama ran his White House, too, sort of like the constitutional law professor that he once was. If he was doing something on trade, he would want to hear all different inputs in a very structured way, from economic experts, all of the relevant people, synthesize all of that very granular information and make a decision.
When you look at some of Trump’s trade things, which sometimes are announced, like much in his administration, in the middle of the night on Truth Social and that may not have been vetted by anyone, it’s just: Tariffs against French champagne because I am angry at Macron.
Agree or disagree that’s a good way to lead a country, you don’t need a rigorous policy process for that, especially if the next day you’re going to undo all of those tariffs because something else has changed.
Scherer: There was a line in the Obama White House that they would say a lot: Any question that ultimately makes it to the president has no easy answer and that all the easy answers were already made below him.
I don’t think there are many questions that make it to Trump that Trump doesn’t think are easy to answer. I don’t think he’s spending a lot of time — to Ashley’s point about gut instinct — I think he gets a presentation and is like: OK, we’re going to do that. He doesn’t need to read the source material, he doesn’t need to go back through the history of things.
Bill Pulte, who is the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, will come into the Oval Office with poster boards. I’ve been in the Oval Office in the first term and seen briefing documents for Trump about a policy that are basically like 100 words on a page, bullet-point things that are not detailed. It’s like: Here are the five sentences you need to know about this before you make a decision. Not: Here are the 500 pages you need to know.
Parker: Yes — like a science project diorama. It’s like: Here’s how dinosaurs went extinct. The asteroid — like, it’s that.
Scherer: Whereas Obama, if you’re comparing him, was really in the weeds of economic theory. And I mean, you did health care reform. Obama understood that bill.
I don’t think Trump has the same level of understanding of the “big, beautiful bill.” He knows there’s no tax on tips, but he doesn’t know exactly what the SALT compromise was coming out of it.
Parker: He knows it’s big and beautiful.
Scherer: Yeah.
I think that’s the place to end. Always our final question: What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?
Ashley, why don’t we begin with you?
Parker: So I am going to say “The Secret History” by Donna Tartt, which is just fantastic. Classic.
This next one is a little bit of a cop-out, but I’m going to recommend an author and say any book by Ann Patchett. I will just read anything she writes. She just does wonderful, beautiful, modern fiction.
I mainly only read modern nonfiction, like what you see at the front table at the independent bookstore. And since we’re talking about Trump, my husband, Mike Bender, who’s also a New York Times reporter, wrote a Trump campaign book, “Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost.” I would recommend it because it’s great — I’m biased — but also because one of the things he does is he talks about the Front Row Joes, and he has these vignettes on Trump’s supporters. And if you want to really understand who Trump’s base is and why they stick with him, this is the book to do it.
So those are my three.
Michael?
Scherer: If I had a fourth, I’d put Bender’s book there.
Parker: Thank you.
Scherer: “An Image of My Name Enters America,” which is a book of personal essays by Lucy Ives. I read it last year, and I had so much fun. It was the most fun I’ve had reading a book in a long time. There are essays about pregnancy, about unicorns and being a young girl, about love, about growing up.
Parker: You’re such a feminist.
Scherer: Yeah. “Palimpsest” by Gore Vidal. It came out a while ago. I just read it recently. I can’t believe I’ve been in D.C. so long and not read it. It’s hilarious. It’s totally R-rated and often inappropriate and often very vicious and about as good a memoir of D.C. as I’ve read.
The last book is a book I read a long time ago, but I always recommend it to people because I think it’s 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, which is not something I would ever have thought I wanted to read. It starts with a blood transfusion in 17th-century France, between a madman and a calf, and then it takes you through how blood revolutionized how we fight wars and the AIDS crisis. It takes something that’s a part of all of our lives and tells it to you in a narrative that is pretty remarkable.
Ashley Parker, Michael Scherer, thank you very much.
Scherer: Thank you.
Parker: Thank you for thinking of us.
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This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Aman Sahota and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Transcript editing by Andrea Gutierrez, Filipa Pajevic and Marlaine Glicksman.
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