![]() ![]() ![]() Michael D’Antonio: I was always expecting an element of lethality to Trump’s presidency. And there was this progressive revealing of who he is to his staff and the country in the way that he revealed himself to all of us as writers at different periods of time. O’Brien: Every story out of the Oval Office is: We didn’t realize that he had the attention span of a child, or how demented he could be about working on behalf of the public interest or his willy-nilly ability to execute people, both literally and figuratively, that he didn’t care for, inside his administration and out. The only surprise is Rudy Giuliani didn’t get better hair dye. It’s been finally on display, in graphic manner, in the last few weeks, but it’s been on display for months and months and years. It is hard to describe to somebody the depth and breadth of his psychosis. Everybody on this panel has spent significant time around him, some voluntarily and some involuntarily. Harry Hurt III: Look, I don’t think, unless you spent considerable time around Donald Trump, you could fathom how completely screwed up he is. ![]() I don’t think any of the general issues are a surprise, but it’s always the specifics-who he corrupts, how they get corrupted, what the end result is-that are harder to predict but are still consistent with who he is generally. Tim O’Brien: I don’t know that anybody could have anticipated the particulars, but you generally knew based on everything that he’s about that he was going to corrupt the office and incite violence on the streets and introduce grotesque civic discourse into the mix. ![]() But I want to re-ask that now, in the waning days of the actual presidency of Donald J. This is who he is, this is how he operates, this is what he does. Michael Kruse: In re-reading some of our previous convenings, I was struck by kind of a recurring theme, which is the lack of surprise from all of you. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length. “Gasoline on the fire,” said Hurt, “whatever chance he can.” “Revenge,” O’Brien said, “will be part of it.” And they again tapped his past to predict his future, sketching a next chapter complicated by legal and financial peril and the disgrace of the end of his tenure in particular-but defined as ever by a deep-seated, moment-to-moment struggle to fight to fill his “bottomless pit of need” while desperately trying to ward off relative irrelevance. Frankenstein, and whether or not they still are not surprised by Trump and the varieties of calamities he wrought. We talked about narcissism and self-loathing and comeuppance and the possibility of a semblance of introspection or personal reckoning, and his father as Dr. Now, with Trump set to exit the Oval Office with the fresh stain of a second impeachment and Joe Biden ready to take his place, I wanted to bring the four of them together for one final time. He was the Trump that was right there all along in the hundreds of pages they wrote. Trump the president was the Trump they knew. The roundtables read like warnings.īarrett, the esteemed dean of the group, died the day before Trump’s inauguration, but O’Brien, Blair, D’Antonio and Hurt told me many times over these last four dizzying and dangerous years that what Trump was doing might have been unprecedented for the country and for the presidency but it wasn’t unprecedented for him. They knew his strengths and his weaknesses, his charisma and his impulsivity, the misogyny and the bigotry, the pathological behaviors, the reasons for them, and what almost always had been the consequences of them-for Trump, but more often, and especially, for the people around him.ĭuring our initial convening that day in Manhattan, and in subsequent conversations- right after the leak of the “Access Hollywood” tape, right after he won, and right before he was inaugurated-they said he’d never accept a loss, that he’d say it was “stolen,” that he’d say it was “rigged.” They said he was “going to plunge the whole country into an authoritarian dynamic.” They said he was “a guy who is playing to a mob.” And no matter what, they said, Trump would retain “a substantial number of Americans who support him, and where he takes them is really quite threatening.” They weren’t clairvoyant-they didn’t think he would win in 2016-but once he did, they had a practically eerily on-the-nose sense of where all this was headed. Wayne Barrett, Harry Hurt III, Gwenda Blair, Tim O’Brien and Michael D’Antonio-authors of books about Trump that were published from the early 1990s to 2015-they … knew. ![]()
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