Trump's fist topping the arch? New details from Trump's 2nd term - #NewVM2 #Dailyworldnews

In October, he's showing a visitor a model of the ginormous arch he wants to build, and he's asking for what should be on top of it. He said, should it be, he mused, a large replica of his fight, fight, fight fist. So he was seriously thinking of having a giant replica of his fist. He asked someone whether they thought it was a good idea. He also was asking whether it should be bigger than the Lincoln Memorial. We have a scene in the book where he calls the French president Emmanuel Macron to ask him about the Arc de Triomphe. Tell me about your arch, Emmanuel. Do people jump off it, etc.? The point is, he wants to put his physical imprint not just on America, but on the world. So how much is he thinking about legacy? I mean, is that what it is? Enormous. You have a pie chart of his brain. It's a huge slice. A paragraph from this, which to me was kind of just an amazing paragraph. It's page 167. By midway through the year, a picture was emerging of how the Oval Office operated in Trump's second term. It was of a president spending his days at the Resolute desk in a series of rolling bull sessions accompanied by a core group of intimates. These were supplemented by a rotating cast of extras, and on any given day, they could be Republican lawmakers, titans of industry, former pro wrestlers, country musicians, golf royals, crypto bros, or friends of felons seeking pardons. They would enter and exit the frame with some invited to stay for meetings they had no business attending. The conversations ran fast, often straying far from the point or from anything visitors imagined when they arrived at the White House. The president's sentences often began on one topic and ended far away. It's like the opening scene of an opera. I mean, it's like it would be an incredible stage play, just that visual. One of the moments that we describe, and we spoke to somebody who laid out this scene for us, is, you know, Trump having a highly classified briefing in the Oval Office, and then in comes the guy with the stone samples for the Rose Garden. Sure. This was last year. Or Tina. He's always talking about, like, their specific stones. Yeah. Terrazzo. Right. And so these are moments that all sort of collide into each other. There is just this sort of sweeping meeting that takes place all day long, and it means that people are pulled into something, as we say, that probably they shouldn't be listening to. I mean, the stone guy, the paper guy, had essentially walk-in privileges to the Oval, and that's just the way this White House works. But there's an interesting contrast. That's all true, of course, and there's sort of this no delineation, no structure. But what's also true is it's actually a very secretive White House. Much more so than the first administration. But much more so in some ways than even the Biden and Obama administration. I'll give you an example. This Memorandum of Understanding that has just been published to end the war in Iran, the number of people who had seen that document in the White House and U.S. government, microscopic, tiny number of people before it was published. People, you know, you have people in the intelligence community that we talk to who are essentially trying to monitor this White House almost like it's a foreign government. They have no idea what's going on, and there are conversations that are happening within such a small group that's running the government. When you have people like Steve Whitkoff and Jared Kushner, you know, doing business, they're really unstaffed. They don't rely on staff much. They basically are these sort of free agents. Which is, I mean, it's really unheard of from other administrations. Normally, if you're a negotiator, you would have a team of experts in the field traveling with you, going over documents behind the scenes. But that's how you get these. I mean, we have a scene in the book where Steve, so Whitkoff goes to meet Putin alone, which is stunning, right? He's sitting in the room with Vladimir Putin. Steve Whitkoff has no experience in diplomacy. The ambassador's not there. He's a real estate friend of Trump's, and he's suddenly the Russia envoy. Spends three hours with Putin alone. And then we have this scene in the book where he's sitting with Putin in Moscow, and Putin is drawing this doodle of, you know, a three plus two, which is the territorial arrangement, giving territory to Russia, freezing certain territory. And Whitkoff says, can you sign that for me? And Putin signs his signature, and Whitkoff takes it home and gets it framed. But again, it's this, there is a contempt for expertise. There is a contempt for, it's deeper than contempt for the deep state. It's basically anyone who's been doing this for a long time, you're probably, you know, not up to it. Well, it gets to the next paragraph, which I want to just read to people. You say, to the extent he still cared, there's the difference of this term versus the last. To the extent he still cared about polling at all, he was seeing far fewer polls than during his first term. His advisors knew he was not receptive to being briefed on harsh realities. In his second term, unlike his first, he was willing to take breathtaking risks, risks that could throw not only his presidency, but the Republican Party and the entire world into chaos and carnage. More than ever before as president, he was operating on pure gut instinct. Which makes what happened with Iran, it makes sense. Yes. I mean, and we really describe that in great detail in the book, just about the lead up to the Iran war. Talk about what you've learned, because it's not as if, you know, we played endless montages of him saying, oh, nobody briefed me on that. Nobody suggested that. He was briefed. It's not true. I mean, a couple of things are the case. Number one, he was always more hawkish about Iran than members of his own team. Now, we do not see a world where he would have gone to war against Iran in term one, but he has always been different about Iran. That's why there was the Soleimani strike in 2020, which many people around him did not agree with, not think was a good idea, thought it was too big a risk. Now, he was much more aligned with Benjamin Netanyahu than members of his own team wanted to see, and yet the evidence was there throughout 2024 and then afterwards. He was informed of the options. There was really no one on his team who thought this was a great idea. The person who really was very vocal about it with the president was J.D. Vance, and it cost J.D. Vance with the president, but the president was informed of various scenarios of what could happen and downsides by Dan Cain, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, one of which was munitions depletion, one of which was the possibility that the Strait of Hormuz would have been closed. And the president's own secretary of state and CIA director examined these scenarios about regime change that Benjamin Netanyahu had portrayed in this remarkable meeting in the Situation Room to President Trump on February 11th, and one of them said it was farcical. The other said, I think we can say this on air is bullshit, was of Marco Rubio's quote. The president knew all of this, and he still wanted to go ahead and try this. You ask yourself the question, how do we get into a situation where we have dangerously low supplies of critical long-range munitions? This is a national crisis, national emergency, actually, in terms of our supplies of interceptors, missile interceptors, long-range weapons. Well, if you're Donald Trump and you have a gut instinct that this war's going to be over like that, those questions become, who cares? You asked the president if there had ever been an American president as powerful as him. You're kind of setting a nice layup right there. He brought out a list of historical figures. This is from the book. Alexander the Great, the Caesars, William the Conqueror. They didn't have airplanes, right? You couldn't travel around. This is the president talking. Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Tamerlane, Napoleon, he said with relish, Hitler, Mao, Stalin. These leaders maintained power through fear, he said. Who would ever do a thing like that, right? Trump lingered on the document's central argument that each leader, however fearsome in his day, had no global reach. Their power was local, but his was not. It's remarkable. So we asked the question because, number one, the war against Iran had started just a few weeks earlier. And number two, he had been boasting publicly about how no other president would do the things that he had done. And he had said to Tucker Carlson, at some point, I'm the most powerful president that ever lived. I'm paraphrasing. So we put the question to him about how he sees it. I think both of us found it one of the most astonishing moments we've ever had with Trump because he hands us this document and he says it was written by a historian. And the opening line says, you know, Donald Trump is the most powerful man who's ever existed on the planet. And it goes on to compare him to all those people you named, some of the great monsters of history, you know, the most ruthless dictators and conquerors of history. And there was no moral dimension to it. The only point was power. And the point was he has power, but it was something he wanted us to understand a slightly more subtle point, which was in the document, which was, it's not just that I control the US military and the most powerful economy in the world, the most powerful technology in the world, it's that I'm willing to use the power. And that was the assessment. And it was very interesting because he was relishing that company. And one thing that we've been toying with in our reporting and sort of trying to understand as we go through this book is just to try to understand why is this term so different from the last term? And there are many reasons for that. But one of them is Trump himself is far less reactive to domestic politics. Like his aides are trying to get him interested in the midterm elections. He's not looking at polls in the way he used to. Not the way he used to. It's not totally binary. He really doesn't care that much. It's small stuff. He, again, essentially told this. I mean, it was handed to us. By the way, the historian he's talking about is the golf caddy. Former golf caddy. For Gary Player. A couple of other details I just want to get in. You go in to talk to him on the 13th day of the Iran war. What's on his desk? What is he pouring over? So when we walk in, he's holding these pictures of maple trees. And he starts talking about how he's installing maple trees around the White House complex. I'm good at buying trees. I'm good at buying trees. Then he wants us to look at his ballroom designs, which he shows lots of people. And he starts talking about the columns. And one side is in honor of Athens. Another is Rome. This is what he's focused on.