Who Has the Power in Trump’s White House?

Produced by Jack McCordick

Who Has the Power in Trump’s White House?

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.

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.

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........

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