A few weeks after winning the election, President-elect Donald J. Trump found himself face-to-face with Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland, a rising star in the Democratic Party, as the two men made their way through the bowels of Northwest Stadium in Landover, Md., to watch the annual Army-Navy game.
The governor greeted him effusively.
“Mr. President, welcome back to Maryland, sir, welcome back to Maryland!” Mr. Moore said. “Great to see you, great to see you, great to have you back here.”
“You’re a good-looking guy,” Mr. Trump observed.
“We are very, very anxious to be able to work closely with you,” the governor added. Then he mentioned the ongoing efforts to rebuild the Francis Scott Key Bridge outside Baltimore, which had collapsed that March.
This chummy encounter was captured on camera for a documentary series called “Art of the Surge,” now streaming on Fox Nation, which provides a rare behind-the-scenes look at the adulatory environment in which Mr. Trump has moved since regaining power. The series gives a sense of how much he is enveloped by people eager to stroke his ego and get in his good graces — including some unexpected figures, according to advance episodes viewed by The New York Times.
At one point, inside the V.I.P. box at the football game, Brian Grazer, a top Hollywood producer, gets his photo taken with the president-elect and confides to those in the room that he cast his ballot for the Republican.
Mr. Grazer tells the group that when he told some women he knows that he planned to vote for Mr. Trump, his decision was met with shock — it was almost as if he were “getting canceled.”
“All the women looked in and go, ‘You mean, you’re not voting for Kamala?’ And I go, ‘I just can’t do that,’” he explains. “And then, one of them leaned in further, and said, ‘Are you voting for Trump?’ And I said, ‘I am.’ I swear!” (Reached this week by The Times, Mr. Grazer said that he was at the game because his son attends West Point. Asked what made him want to vote for Mr. Trump, he said: “As a centrist, it was because I could feel and see Biden’s deterioration and the lack of direction in the Democratic Party at that time.”)
This scene in the film also briefly shows Speaker Mike Johnson; Senator John Thune, the incoming majority leader; and Vice President-elect JD Vance sitting with Mr. Trump in the V.I.P. box to discuss how they can get around a politically difficult vote to raise the debt ceiling once he is in office.
“The debt ceiling vote doesn’t really matter,” Mr. Johnson says. “It’s not even really a blockade on spending. It never has been.”
Mr. Thune adds, “I’ve been approached by a few Democrats about getting rid of it.”
Mr. Trump nods along, but what he seems most interested in is making sure everyone around him is having a good time. “Bring a couple of Cokes over,” he shouts. “For the guys.”
A few days later, he would tank a spending bill and demand that Republicans add a debt-limit increase, throwing the negotiations into total chaos.
The documentary series was made by the television producer Justin Wells, 42, who once worked as a producer for Tucker Carlson when he was a Fox News host. Mr. Wells was granted an unusual level of access to Mr. Trump over the last year. He spent much of the 2024 campaign filming Mr. Trump and those around him and released that footage on social media during the fall as Season 1 of “Art of the Surge.” He subsequently spent election night by Mr. Trump’s side and stuck around through the transition. More recently, he has been filming inside the West Wing.
“I make no qualms that it’s friendly to Trump,” Mr. Wells said of the docuseries in an interview this week. “But this is him being more real than usual. The same with his team.” (He said that Mr. Trump’s team had no creative control over the series.)
The version of Mr. Trump who appears in the series is a bit different from the one on display in news conferences, onstage at his rallies or on social media. He comes across as more of a foul-mouthed, backslapping party boss with a pragmatic bent.
In one scene, Tulsi Gabbard is shown speaking to Mr. Trump as she gets her hair and makeup done before what would be a bruising confirmation hearing to be director of national intelligence. As strands of her hair are pulled through a flatiron, she tells the president on speakerphone that she is worried some Republicans may go wobbly on her.
“Todd Young from Indiana, he’s a question mark,” Ms. Gabbard says. “OK, well, you let me know,” Mr. Trump says. “Go and have a good time,” he adds breezily. (Mr. Young voted to confirm her.)
The series provides a glimpse of people in Mr. Trump’s orbit who are omnipresent but seldom seen or heard from by the public. That includes Natalie Harp, the young aide known as “the human printer” because she tails Mr. Trump with a portable printer so she can hand him information in hard copy, as he prefers.
In one scene, she gives a demonstration. “OK, so we’re going to print a copy of ‘The Snake,’” she says, referring to the anti-immigration poem Mr. Trump often reads at rallies. Dumping various pieces of equipment onto a tabletop, she starts to rapidly plug them together, explaining, “It goes faster if you plug in the generator. You don’t need the generator, but I like to do it just in the interest of speed.”
“She’s constantly with him,” Mr. Wells said, adding: “The way he often delivers messages to people is, she’ll print stuff, give it to him, he’ll write a note on it with a Sharpie, she’ll take a picture of the printout or screen grab and then text it to the person he wants to reach.”
The documentary depicts Mr. Trump surrounded by a constant, rolling circus of unexpected characters. The actor Sylvester Stallone and President Javier Milei of Argentina are shown hitting it off at Mar-a-Lago, the president’s club and residence in Florida, as they wait to see Mr. Trump. One of his former wives, Marla Maples, is filmed introducing herself to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s young children. (“I don’t know if you’ve met my daughter, Tiffany? I’m the former wife of the president, and it’s so good to see all of you.”)
Mr. Wells films Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump hanging out with Elon Musk at Mar-a-Lago on election night, when his partnership with Mr. Trump was still in early bloom. “It’s been great to see you all over this,” she tells Mr. Musk. “We really have gratitude. Have you had fun with it?”
Scenes showing Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk bonding are particularly striking, given their jarring breakup on Thursday. One particularly long sequence shows Mr. Trump and his posse traveling to South Texas to watch Mr. Musk launch a rocket. Mr. Trump seems in awe of what Mr. Musk has built as he shows him around the facility.
“I was around them intimately and closely for so many hours, both when they’re together and independent of each other,” Mr. Wells said. He said he felt that the two billionaires had a “genuine” connection. “Even just watching the way Trump would tap him on the shoulder, it was like he was his nephew, or almost like a son,” he said. “There was a realness to it.”
So he said he was just as shocked as anyone, if not more, by how fast they fell out.
“Frankly,” Mr. Wells said, “I’m mind-blown at what’s transpired.”
Shawn McCreesh is a White House reporter for The Times covering the Trump administration.
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