‘He’s Still Standing and Everyone Else Is Exhausted’: Our Insiders on How Trump Has Changed
(35+ paragraphs of complaining and Pearl Clutching, not posting all of it. KEK)
To the journalists who have studied Donald Trump longest, the second transition looks a whole lot different from eight years ago.
He’s at the Peak of His Power’ POLITICO
So, if some of these nominees are rejected by the Senate, will Trump consider it a loss, or will there be a way in which he casts it as a loss for those senators who’ve gotten in the way?
Kyle Cheney: There were all these threats from the sort of online MAGA right that anyone who votes against the Trump nominee will get primary threats. And I don’t think some of these senators take that too seriously, for the reasons we discussed. I’m curious about the notion of political capital, and the traditional sense that normally you’d say, “Does Trump want to spend all his political capital ramming through Matt Gaetz?” I don’t think Trump thinks about political capital that way. I think the only people who do would be the ones who have elections to worry about, which Trump never will again. And so I think that it’s just not the sort of normal opening to a presidency that we would see where someone says, “What do you want to spend your first 100 days thinking about?”
Based on what you’ve all seen and heard throughout the campaign, but especially in the last few weeks since the election, what do you think will be different about the second Trump term relative to the first Trump term?
Meridith McGraw: I’ve been so struck by how many familiar faces are coming back into the fold. It’s been a pretty consistent cast of characters, and there’s some new major roles that have stepped onto the stage, but a lot of the supporting actors are still there. I think in this White House, again, the biggest difference is just going to be that Trump knows how all of this works, and the people around him know how government operates and how to get things done, and Trump just has a greater awareness of who to call and what levers to pull to enact his agenda this time.
Anita Kumar: I agree on the first part. It’s the same people I covered with you, Meridith, all those years ago. I just keep thinking about how it felt like he didn’t have anyone or anything in place eight years ago, and he kind of just took the RNC and just moved a lot of those people in — Sean Spicer being the first press secretary and all that sort of stuff. And now it feels like that’s not really happening, because he has his own team in the RNC now. I do think, though, that people [shouldn’t be] surprised about what he’s doing and what he’s going to do on Day One. He did the same thing last time, just that nobody really believed him. He’s kind of outlined the things he’s going to do. And I think we should take him at his word, because he did push through, or he tried to push through, the things that he said he would on immigration and other things…
https://archive.is/yZ9UV