Inside Trump World as the Next Chapter Begins

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From “The New York Times,” I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.”

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Today, as Donald Trump prepares to retake the White House, my colleagues, Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, take us inside the final days of his campaign and inside his early planning for a second administration.

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It’s Friday, November 8.

So Maggie and Jonathan, thank you for making time for us from sunny Palm Beach, Florida, where I know you are not basking in the sun, but covering the early hours of President-Elect Donald Trump. I appreciate you making time for us.

Thanks for having us.

Thank you for having us.

And you are there because you were piecing together the final weeks and days of the Trump campaign and now are piecing together Trump’s plan for a second administration. And those are the two sides of the episode that we really want to cover with you today. So let’s start, Jonathan, with what you have learned about that last stretch of the Trump campaign, inside that operation leading up to its victory on Tuesday, and how it may have differed from the way it looked from the outside.

Well, it was sort of an interesting situation, because as reporters who cover Trump — I’ve been covering him for nine years. Maggie’s been covering him even longer than that. But we basically spent all day, every day talking to people in his orbit.

And so it was this very interesting experience of watching a lot of coverage in the last week, which showed sort of a vibe shift, if you want. Trump was out there doing these rallies where it was almost like this absurdist experiment to see how much self-harm he could inflict and get away with. But there was also this other side to it, which was his campaign’s internal data was very consistent.

Tony Fabrizio, his chief pollster, his private polling throughout this campaign consistently showed that Donald Trump would win this election. And there was a real gap between a lot of the public polling and what Tony Fabrizio’s private polling was showing. And so it was this weird, bifurcated situation where rationally they thought they were going to win, because their internal data showed that, but there was this anxiety, worrying inside them, because you never know if your data is right. Everyone’s just making assumptions about modeling and turnout. And the candidate was out there doing and saying things that would sink any normal candidate.

Well, Maggie, how great was the anxiety within the Trump campaign about the first half of what Jonathan just described, the kind of self-harming candidate on stage, in contrast with the second part, the confidence that they felt around their internal polling?

He has been the purest version of himself publicly in the last few months of this race. And really, the biggest moment of anxiety for the campaign came this past Sunday —

archived recording (donald trump)

And a very, very special hello to Pennsylvania. What a great — what a great place.

— when he held a morning rally in Pennsylvania. And —

It was a rambling, meandering, grouchy delivery that was filled with his complaints and his grievances.

He stated that he shouldn’t have left the White House in 2020.

And also was musing about reporters being shot.

And at the end of that rally, before he stopped talking, Susie Wiles, his top campaign advisor, was seen walking — and she never does this or never used to do this when he was campaigning — was seen walking out to the stage and she stood with sunglasses on.

Clearly just looking at him —

— trying to get him to look toward her, basically for the point of let’s wrap it up. And at that point, he didn’t wrap it up entirely, but he did get back on his teleprompter.

The worry was that even though, as it would ultimately turn out, Tony Fabrizio’s data was incredibly on target, it was really, really close to on the number in every single battleground state, it’s hard to predict what can influence voters’ behavior in the final two days in the lead up to Election Day.

And we know, of course, that none of it hurt him. His instinct was right that the internal polling was not going to be taken off track by a wild version of Trump. So now I want you to bring us to the end of this journey, to election night itself, and what it was like inside his Palm Beach headquarters up until the moment, I guess, when he realized that he had won.

So Trump spent election night at Mar-a-Lago. And election days tend to have lots of unverified, anecdotal stuff coming out of different precincts and what have you. And in the afternoon, there were reports coming from lots of different sources that Democratic turnout was through the roof in Philadelphia and Detroit.

So the Trump people were trying to figure out how real was that. They were getting concerned. And clearly, that filtered back to Donald Trump because he started posting on Truth Social about hearing about massive fraud in Philadelphia and Detroit.

But a lot of that anxiety had melted away by about 9 o’clock when the returns were coming in, and it was clear that Kamala Harris was just not getting the kind of numbers that she needed in suburban areas, in states like Texas and Virginia. And the Trump team were assuming, correctly, that her underperformance in those other states was probably going to transfer to the Blue Wall states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. So I would say by about 9:00, 9:30, the Trump campaign was feeling very, very confident of victory.

And, Maggie, what stands out to you about your communications with people in the Trump campaign around this time and your understanding of how Trump is processing what, I suppose, becomes a growing consensus of those around him that he is gonna prevail.

So during this period of time, Trump at Mar-a-Lago is joined by people like Elon Musk, a number of his advisors. His family is there. The mood starts to get very jubilant. It is clear to his team that he is almost certain to win, although that would not become clear to the public for a little bit. But the networks still had not called the race.

Right. Always a source of serious tension within Trump world and for Trump himself.

At least in the last two elections, yes. And so eventually, some of his aides started pressuring the networks to call it.

And they did eventually call it.

You know, one thing that was interesting being in the convention center was the big screens were playing FOX.

And as so often happens with FOX, you see some of the hosts almost coaching Trump through the TV.

So you had Kayleigh McEnany, his former press secretary, basically saying how this was a wonderful opportunity for Donald Trump to be a unifier.

So the big question on people’s minds, what’s Trump gonna say? Is he gonna be a unifier? And —

— there were little notes of that. But you know —

He called the media the enemy and sort of went off on digressions, talking about Elon Musk’s rockets.

He basically just went into rally mode.

And he has won. That’s basically the vibe in the Trump orbit is, we have defeated you. We have defeated the media. We have defeated the legal system. And there is a confidence and a swagger, and a “we can basically do what we want” vibe right now.

That’s what you feel when you talk to them. And there’s always been an element of that in Trump’s world. But I would say it’s even more acute now than I’ve ever seen it.

To that point, the world’s reaction to Trump’s victory, at least the elite world of corporate leaders and heads of state, really seemed to bolster that feeling of not just victory, but in the words of these people who reacted to it, like extraordinary victory. And I think it’s worth spending a little bit of time with some of the congratulatory messages that Trump got.

Yeah, one of the most notable was from Bibi Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, who put out this post on X, formerly known as Twitter, gushing about how this is one of history’s greatest comebacks. And it was a picture of himself with Trump that was one of many along those lines.

Right. And that language, Maggie, it doesn’t seem like a normal head of state vocabulary selection. I mean, when a foreign head of state tells you that you have pulled off — and I’m looking at it now — quote, “History’s greatest comeback,” and the next sentence involves the phrase, “historic return.” And as if that were not enough, “huge victory” later on in the same tweet. That seems literally tailor-made to light certain parts of Donald Trump’s brain up.

Yeah, look, it’s certainly true that it was a historic comeback. It is true that we haven’t seen anything like this in US history, given what Trump comes into the office with, which is a criminal conviction, and all sorts of other controversies and how he left office last time. But you are correct that every world leader got the memo in Trump’s first term, and they clearly now know heading into this one, what he likes to hear. And they understand that in order to get favor with him, the conversation has to begin with that.

Right. The result, though, Jonathan, and this just was genuinely fascinating, was a universe of these congratulatory notes that literally seemed like they had been written by the same consultant who had figured out what words should be used across the board, whether it was Volodymyr Zelensky or Jeff Bezos.

I’m not sure you need a consultant. We’re not talking about —

— we’re not talking about a great deal of psychological complexity here. These are sort of like, Mr. Trump, you are amazing. Your victory is so big, the biggest, the greatest, the most historic. I mean, it’s almost like the letters he used to receive from Kim Jong Un.

Yeah, since the election, we’ve heard from several people that Trump is essentially his happiest version of himself.

He is relaxed. These criminal cases against him are about to evaporate in one way or another.

And we’ll talk about that more in just a moment.

He knows that he had a decisive victory. He’s wandering around Mar-a-Lago in a great mood, fielding calls from people, basically like a conquering victor. But very soon will come the part that he likes far less than winning, which is actually governing.

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We’ll be right back.

OK, so, Maggie and Jonathan, let’s turn now to how Trump is thinking about a second term administration and this much harder business of governing. Of course, before you can govern, you have to transition, which is a pretty formal process. You have to staff an entire administration. How is he thinking about that?

From a very 30,000-foot view, Michael. I mean, there are very few cabinet roles that he cares about. Attorney General is the main one. The Secretary of Defense is another. And the CIA Director is another.

Beyond that, he had almost no use for his cabinet in his last term. That’s not gonna change dramatically this time. And there have been a bunch of discussions about names, but he has not wanted to personally engage in them, until postelection.

Why not?

He is superstitious. And he was like this in 2016 as well. He did not want to talk about transition. It’s the same reason all three campaigns ended in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He is all about a rabbit’s foot, essentially. And in his mind, talking about planning a government before you’ve won is bad luck.

He also gets angry when people bring it up because, in his mind, money being spent on this, time being spent on this is money and time that’s not spent on him winning. So there was this sort of unwritten, unspoken edict in his orbit, which is, we’re gonna do transition preparations, but don’t bring it up with the big guy too much. We’ll keep him a little bit apprised of it, but basically don’t talk about it in his presence.

So there has been a transition operation going on. Howard Lutnick, who runs Cantor Fitzgerald, is a friend of Trump’s, has been running the personnel side of the transition. Linda McMahon, who served in Trump’s administration, wealthy donor, friend of Trump’s, she’s been a cochair, nominally at least, overseeing the policy side of the transition. There has been work going on. There are lists being developed. But no one has spent less time thinking about policy detail and really deep thought about personnel than Donald Trump.

Well, Jonathan, to Maggie’s point, if just a few of these cabinet roles really matter to Trump, and we can assume that those around him, like you just said, are thinking about who might staff those jobs, I wonder if you and, Maggie, you as well, might be prepared to talk about some of the names of the people being considered for these really crucial jobs. If they get them, they will become household names over the next four years.

Well, one person who’s really important, I think, will be really important is John Ratcliffe. He served at the end of Trump’s first term as his director of National Intelligence. Everyone in Trump’s orbit pretty much at the senior level agrees that he will play a significant role in the second term. What that role is, I don’t know. There are people who want him to be Attorney General. He may head up an intelligence agency.

And what should we know about Ratcliffe other than what I know, which is very little — he was a Republican Congressman from Texas — if he’s being considered for these huge jobs?

There are different variations of people in Trump world. And there are people who are willing to go further than others. So when people talk about the final days of the first Trump term, you had him wanting to appoint Jeff Clark as attorney general. Jeff Clark was eager to overturn the election, helping Trump.

John Ratcliffe wasn’t really involved in that and is at least seen — and I want to be clear, I’m talking in relative terms. He’s definitely someone who is loyal to Trump, who Trump likes, who will do things that Trump wants, and absolutely on board with his agenda. But he’s not viewed in the same category as someone who would potentially do more — let’s say, more legally adventurous things. Remember, Jeff Clark got indicted for his efforts. John Ratcliffe was not indicted.

So there are different degrees. And there are people like Kash Patel, who served in his first term. And Trump wanted to make him the deputy CIA director at the end. He’s someone who is regarded in Trump world as someone where if Trump tells him to do something, there’s really not viewed as being much pushback ever.

And then there are others who are more conventional. If you look at some of the economic positions, Trump likes having Wall Street billionaires, rich people in these jobs. He likes credentials. So I think there’s going to be a lot of tensions between hardcore ideologues, people who want to enable some of Trump’s most radical impulses and then the business crowd who he’s attracted to. And I think you’re going to see these really interesting collisions in the next two months between these different camps.

How do we expect some of the tensions that you are beginning to describe between a populist, nativist, right-wing America-first ideology and some of the people who may end up being in the administration, particularly from the business world, who might say, wait a minute? How do you expect those tensions to play out on the policy front? I mean, I think of an issue like immigration and Trump’s promise — we talked to both of you about this — to begin mass deportations as a pretty classic example of something that might bring those tensions to life.

We’ve talked a lot about this, Jonathan and I have. We were talking about this actually earlier today that there is going to be a push-pull between the maximalist agenda that someone like Stephen Miller, his top policy advisor and speechwriter, has pushed for a very long time and that Trump has echoed on the campaign trail for years now, with Trump’s antipathy for what he would call bad headlines, and with business leaders being unhappy, and with the potential ramifications in the stock market, which he considers his pole.

Does he fear, Maggie, that if you start deporting enough immigrants that suddenly the corporate world takes note, says things, and the stock market starts to plunge, because a lot of corporations rely on that labor?

Yeah, I’m not describing strict causation here. But I am saying that there are policies that corporate America favors on immigration, such as a specific type of work visa for people to come work at their companies.

Right. And you don’t even need to get too speculative about this. Like we saw this play out in his first term. To Maggie’s point, you had people like Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, in his ear talking about legal immigration. So he kind of veered from the most hardline positions to less hardline. It’s very hard to predict.

What Trump has said on the campaign trail is he’s gonna do the biggest deportation operation in American history. This is a military-sized scale of operation, building large camps, detaining people. The amount of coercive force required from the state to pull this off is enormous.

That is going to guarantee really tough media coverage, really heart-wrenching images of families who’ve lived here a long time being pulled apart. So there’s going to be this competing impulse of, I promised this, I said I was going to do it, we want to do shock and awe on immigration, ergo, we do it versus people who will tell him about the economic effects of some of this, what it might do to the markets, et cetera.

And Trump, this is something he obsesses over privately. He’s said this a million times to people, which is he doesn’t want to be Herbert Hoover. He always talks — he’s got Herbert Hoover in his head.

Should we just establish for everybody who wants to think they know who Herbert Hoover is, but maybe forgot? President of the United States during the period where the Great Depression begins.

Right.

One thing, Michael, too, that’s an unknown to the points that Jonathan was making about why we can’t tell which competing impulse wins out at the end of the day with him on certain policies or personnel. He’s not running for re-election. He is constitutionally barred from seeking another term.

Does that free him to revert to the person who claimed to want to make peace? Or does that free him to finish this pro-revenge agenda that he’s been talking about for several years now. And we will find out in short order.

Or both.

Correct, that’s right.

Well, you guys are — you’re teeing up what I’d hoped would be our next subject when it comes to policy, which is retribution. We’ve talked to both of you and our colleague, Charlie Savage, a lot about this in episodes we did preparing our listeners for what a second Trump term would look like.

And we returned again and again to Trump’s plans to use the Department of Justice to investigate, perhaps even prosecute his enemies, including Democratic members of Congress, Hillary Clinton, James Comey, the list goes on and on. How quickly, depending on who is in various positions of his administration, do you suspect that a campaign of retribution might begin after this administration begins?

Michael, he’s already beginning to try to go after, legally, news organizations.

Really?

Yeah, they’re suing CBS for, I think, it’s $10 billion. They already have a suit against ABC News that started many months ago. So that will be one tactic. I think you’re going to see various aspects of attempts at retribution, certainly against the media, in the coming weeks.

And part of what they’ve talked about this campaign is removing pockets of independence from the executive branch and that includes the agencies that regulate the news media. So what does that mean? We’ll find out.

But it’s not exactly a mystery. He has been threatening the licenses of networks for months and months and months and months and months. There’s also other tactics which are not necessarily using the government, but you could expect investigations, leak investigations, DOJ, subpoenaing reporters’ phones as they did last time.

That’s why the attorney general appointment is so important, because the way he uses DOJ will at least, in part, be shaped by who occupies that position. Does he appoint, as he promised, a special prosecutor to go after Joe Biden’s family? I don’t know, he said he’d do it. Promises made, promises kept. All of those things are possibilities that not only are foreseeable, but are foreseen, where we have reported all of this stuff extensively for the last two years.

Maggie, it feels worth noting, since we’re talking about the appointment of someone like the attorney general, that the United States Senate has a role in confirming such positions. And that Republicans just won control of the US Senate from Democrats, and I suspect by the end, may have a healthy enough margin of around 54 Republicans in the Senate, that most of these appointments would sail through. Do you suspect that there’s anyone the Trump administration would put up for Senate confirmation that this Senate wouldn’t confirm?

There are, Michael. And it’s going to depend on how wide their margin is. If they end up with 53 seats, that’s still going to make it hard to get through some of the most controversial potential choices, like Kash Patel. The reason for that is that there are a couple of senators still, Republican senators or senators who vote with the Republicans, who would object to somebody who’s incredibly controversial, who wouldn’t just rubber stamp, necessarily anyway. So somebody like Susan Collins —

It would take three of them.

Correct — or Lisa Murkowski, or the incoming senator from Utah, people like that could end up deciding, actually, this is a bridge too far, I’m going to object. They tend not to be fully aligned with Trump. However, the likelihood is that he will still just put those people in the White House in nonconfirmed jobs, in advisory roles.

To Maggie’s point, I was talking to someone who’s close to Trump, and they were speculating to me that the White House becomes the home for the unconfirmable. So if you have been indicted one too many times and whatever, the White House might be the place for you. And one story that didn’t actually get a lot of attention, I think it’s one of the most important stories that Maggie, me, and Charlie Savage wrote this whole cycle.

I read it.

I’m glad you read it. Basically, people close to Trump, chiefly his top legal advisor, Boris Epshteyn, effectively want to do away with the security clearance process, or at least the FBI’s involvement in it. So when you need to get a top-level security clearance, there is FBI background checks and the National Security intelligence apparatus is involved. Well, in Trump’s world, that is the evil deep state.

So there was a memo written that we reported on, that Boris Epshteyn advocated for, that suggested moving that process outside of government and effectively having private investigators doing it at the behest of the Trump people. Trump could, on his first day, issue an executive order with a list of names, 200 people, these people hereby have security clearances. And this could have real national security implications if they follow through on this.

If you are somebody who is an agent of a foreign power and you want to have access to the most sensitive secrets in the US government, being vetted by some two-bit outside firm instead of the FBI is a good way to slip through the net. So again, we didn’t report that decision has been made, but it’s being discussed. And if they do follow through on it, it could allow people who are not just controversial, but actually may have real malicious intent into the top levels of government.

That’s right.

Maggie, while we are on the subject of those with problematic pasts, I think a lot of our listeners are going to be extremely curious about what exactly happens to all of the federal and local cases against Donald Trump. In the first half of our conversation here today, you began to hint at the idea that Trump sees his re-election as a victory over those cases.

But just technically, mechanically, how does the president start to dispatch with these cases? And when do we start to see them go away? Do they start to go away even before he’s president as a kind of anticipatory issue? Or does his attorney general, if and when confirmed, start to just systematically destroy them?

A year and a half ago, Donald Trump, after his myriad of indictments, was telling people that if he won, these cases are all going to go away. And what we know now is that Jack Smith, the special counsel who indicted him twice, has started having conversations about how to unwind these cases, because there is an Office of Legal Counsel memo from the Justice Department that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted.

And so while he was indicted before this, this still raises all of these complications. So whether it is Jack Smith withdrawing the indictments or whether it’s the ultimate attorney general doing it, we don’t know. But those cases are not going to continue, almost certainly.

There is the New York case, which he’s been convicted in. And there’s going to be a ruling next week about whether the Supreme Court’s decision, granting broad immunity to presidential acts, actually counted in that case. He’s currently scheduled to be sentenced criminally in that case on November 26. I think the chances that a newly-elected president is going to be sentenced to prison are close to zero. So we’ll see what that looks like.

In other words, a local judge, not under any strict federal legal guidance about prosecuting a sitting president — that would just apply, it seems, to federal cases — might, out of deference to that kind of a legal guidance, just say, I can’t do this.

Yes. It’s really hard to see that case resulting in much at this point. And that will hold true for the prosecution in Georgia, as well, where Trump has been indicted.

I mean, Jonathan, in a way, the fate of those cases that Maggie just outlined is a reminder — as if we needed another. It’s become very clear in this conversation — of just how sweeping a victory this second term election of Trump really is. I mean, we’ve talked about how, with Nate Cohn, this is a political realignment. We talked with Peter Baker for yesterday’s episode about how this may end up becoming a policy realignment on all kinds of issues — trade, immigration.

But in the way that you two are describing what’s happening, especially with these legal cases, among other things, it’s also a profound personal vindication of the man himself. I mean, just absorbing what you are saying, Maggie. He will have wiped out any legal repercussions for behavior that in the eyes of very well-respected prosecutors, both locally and federally, were criminal.

He has all but defeated any form of accountability.

Yes, correct.

What is the form of accountability now? The Supreme Court has ruled that a president is immune for official acts, which may have a very broad meaning. There’s no universe in which this composition of Congress impeaches Donald Trump for anything.

Congressional oversight, particularly if Republicans take the House, there will be really very little oversight. The news media, in the eyes of many Americans, is discredited. More than half the country have tuned out the mainstream media. We’re now in little information silos. So it’s almost impossible to overstate how much Donald Trump has defeated the system and how favorable the current composition of the system is for Donald Trump.

Well, to both of you, we are extremely grateful for your time when you’re this exhausted after the election. So thank you very much.

Thank you, Michael.

Thanks for having us.

On Thursday afternoon, after we spoke with Maggie and Jonathan, Trump named the first member of his administration, appointing Susie Wiles as his White House Chief of Staff. Wiles, a longtime Republican operative, oversaw Trump’s 2024 campaign and would become the first woman to ever hold the title of White House Chief of Staff.

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We’ll be right back.

Here’s what else you need to know today.

On Thursday, President Biden addressed the outcome of an election in which his former opponent prevailed and his vice president was defeated.

Biden, eager to move beyond the divisions of the campaign, issued a national call for both unity and civility.

Remember, you can catch a new episode of “The Interview” right here tomorrow. This week, Lulu speaks with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi about the outcome of the election and what’s next for Democrats.

Today’s episode was produced by Mary Wilson, Alex Stern, and Rob Szypko. It was edited by Michael Benoist and Rachel Quester, contains original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, and Sophia Lanman, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

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That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you on Monday.