By Isaac Chotiner
Donald Trump will begin the third year of his Presidency amid a level of chaos that appears unprecedented, even for him. After hasty announcements (and partial walkbacks) of troop withdrawals, with markets jittery and Cabinet members departing, and with the government shut down over his request for border-wall funding, the President is reported to be especially isolated and volatile. But is Trump actually any different than he was when he began his Presidency? And how might his behavior in the next two years differ from what we have seen from him so far?
To discuss these questions, I spoke by phone with Michael Kranish, an investigative reporter at the Washington Post, and the co-author (with Marc Fisher) of “Trump Revealed,” which was published in August of 2016 and features hours of interviews with Trump.
An edited and condensed version of our conversation follows.
We are entering 2019 with this narrative that we are now seeing Trump unleashed. Do you think that narrative is accurate?
If you understand Trump’s life before he became President, it’s all of a piece. People who know him and have known him for many years aren’t surprised by the way he has acted. I am reminded that he wrote, before he became President, that his aim as a kid was to be “the toughest kid in the neighborhood . . . mouthing off to everybody while backing down to no one.” So that has been his personality from the beginning. He was a catcher in Little League and liked to taunt people from that position. In many ways, Twitter is being a catcher all over again. He has crouched into the same position that he was as a Little League ballplayer in Queens. So I do see a continuum with Trump.
Does that imply that he is further down the continuum, or do you mean that he is the same?
Well, the issues and the job are different, of course. But when you look at earlier decades of his life—his business life and even his childhood—the personality that he has displayed as President is in many ways what he displayed earlier. He said that it was hard to have many friends, and he often relied on family and often fired people. Many of the things we see today are what he has done throughout his life.
One of the observations I made in writing about him was where he got his animus toward government. And where that came from, to a degree, was when he and his father were sued, in 1973, by the federal government for alleged racial bias at their housing projects. He thought that was unfair at the time, and he told us when we were writing the biography that he still thought that was unfair.
He found when he was a developer in New York that he had to work with government in certain ways. So, he says, he developed various techniques that meant using influence to get things done. You see how he has carried some of that technique over to today.
One thing you hear from people who dislike the President is that he is “getting worse,” by which, I think, they mean that he is angrier or losing his grip in some way. I think that this is comforting for some people because it makes them think that the Presidency is on the verge of falling apart, and he might resign or something. Do you think that he seems angrier or different?
Well, certainly, during the campaign he would use Twitter just as he does now. You can certainly see in some of the tweets that there is a frenetic early-morning nature to them. Sometimes they are filled with anger. Clearly, he is very angry about the Mueller investigation.
I did a story about nine months into the Trump Presidency where I interviewed one of Trump’s very closest friends, Tom Barrack. And the headline on the story was “He’s better than this.” Barrack was concerned—stunned, he told me—at some of the things Trump has done. So, yes, a lot of the way he has acted has been surprising and sometimes disappointing to his friends and supporters.
Trump said his friend, the boxer Mike Tyson, had told him that everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. Trump believes that when you are hit, you hit back a hundred times harder. That is one lesson taught to him by his former attorney Roy Cohn. Now what we are seeing is that Trump has been hit harder than he had expected. Republicans lost the House. We will have the report by Robert Mueller. Starting with the Democratic takeover of the House this week, he is going to have a new set of circumstances where he is going to have to invoke his dealmaking abilities that he talked about during the campaign to a much higher degree. He is capable of doing this on occasion. He did sign the judicial-reform bill. That’s perhaps an example of, if he puts his mind to it, what could happen. The question is whether he spends the next two years trying to make deals and get things accomplished, or does he use this as two years to run against the Democrats and set himself up for reëlection. Or can he do both at the same time?
The way you phrased that implies that there are options open to him and he can decide which he wants rather than that his character is pretty firmly set as one thing—that, perhaps, we know what he is going to be and there is no alternative to that.
Well, here’s the thing: as he was developing his political ideology, he changed his party registration seven times. So, the idea that he is so set in his ways that he will only do one predictable thing is not really borne out by his history prior to becoming President. He was a Democrat, he was a Republican, he was Reform Party, he was an Independent. His ideology is that he wanted to win. So now he is faced with a new set of circumstances, and what I am asking here—I don’t know what will happen—is whether he will revert to form and try to find some way to come up with a winning piece of legislation. He has, in the past, changed his points of view. He was pro abortion rights and was anti abortion rights. The list goes on and on. It’s very unusual to see someone elected President who doesn’t come from a pretty strong political-ideological place.
Maybe what I am saying is not that he is too ideological to change, and not that he wouldn’t like to make deals. But rather that there are aspects of his character—the way that he talks about immigrants and minority groups and women, or the way that he angrily tweets and personally insults people—that are pretty set. And, because they are set, that makes bipartisan compromise impossible, because of the heightened polarized atmosphere with him as the leader of the country.
That’s what we are going to find out in the next two years. He has Democrats controlling the House, so it’s a very different circumstance. Is he going to adjust to that circumstance, is he going to change? That is not a question I can answer. I can just say that, in the past, when the political landscape has changed, he has basically walked away from one party and into the arms of the other. I am not suggesting he is suddenly going to be liberal. But if there is a changed set of circumstances, there is a question about whether he might try to make deals. So far, he has punched back at Democrats, and you usually don’t insult the people you are trying to compromise with.
There was some sense, early on, that Trump might be the type of guy who would listen to the last person who whispered in his ear. It seems like that is not really true, and that he has some stable, long-standing beliefs, like on trade, and is hard to deter. Has that surprised you?
Early on in his career, in the mid-eighties, he basically said the world is laughing at us and started complaining about trade deals. He has been consistent on that. He is still saying the same thing. Early on, he was surrounded by people he viewed as more moderate, and they were able to dissuade him from initiating a trade war with China. And he is deeply influenced by certain advisers. He is now surrounded by people who are more conservative and in favor of a trade war and so forth.
When he was surrounded by more moderate figures, I know that there were some things that he was dissuaded from, but it still seems like, fundamentally, his Presidency has been pretty unleashed. Are you surprised that it is hard to convince him of things that he might not know about, or to talk to him about them?
I am not surprised that he has a point of view that can be, on the one hand, subject to the last person he talked to, and, on the other hand, so set in stone that he might not listen to advice even from highly respected business leaders and so forth. In his business career, he would often use his leverage to get his way when things seemed to be totally turned against him. He is often in this position, including when he filed six corporate bankruptcies, where he seemed at a point of no return. People know he wrote a book called “The Art of the Deal.” They may not remember his next book was called “The Art of the Comeback,” because he had gone down so far.
It’s like “The Godfather” and “The Godfather Part II.” You have to look at them together rather than at just one of them.
I am not as familiar with “Godfather” and “Godfather II,” so I will leave that comparison to you. But, in this instance, he had not previously worked in government. His experience was in business, where he could use his leverage and power to convince banks to “take a haircut” or lessen the amount that he owed them. On the one hand, as President, he has great leverage. On the other hand, he has lost some leverage, and Republicans no longer control the House.
What is one thing that has surprised you about his Presidency?
I was surprised he didn’t try to use his initial leverage to get an infrastructure deal. That is something that all the aides I knew talked about, that could be done right out of the box, and would be visible all across the country. Why thatdidn’t happen is still a mystery to a number of people very supportive of that.
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