Haberman and Swan REVEAL Trump’s desire to leave ‘IMPRINT ON U.S. HISTORY’

We were just talking about Pete Hegseth and this insane idea that they're going to get rid of General Donahue, and it really harkens back to a scene in the tea room at Mar-a-Lago where loyalty, J6's litmus test, and just an overriding hatred of General Milley for being an independent military voice seemed to shape so much of what we saw there and what we might be seeing today. It's really, it was fascinating listening to your discussion before because it really does relate to these conversations about the cabinet in the tea room at Mar-a-Lago, which is where all these decisions were made in the transition. Very small group of advisors. I'm just going to read it to you because I'm not going to do it justice from memory, but it's about the selection of Pete Hegseth, and it says that the discussion in the tea room turned to the Pentagon. Pete Hegseth, the war veteran and Fox News morning host, was a highly unorthodox choice to manage the Department of Defense with its nearly three million employees and its global web of combatant commands, but he received Trump's highest form of praise that he looked good on television. Nobody's ever been on, looked better on camera than this guy, the president-elect used. He's been so good to me, and the president goes on to praise Hegseth's defense of people who had been accused of war crimes and how Hegseth had been very loyal to them. They then go on to talk about Kristi Noem and others, and they talk about how one person's name comes up, Ryan McCarthy, as an Air Force, sorry, Deputy Secretary of the Air Force, Secretary of Defense, sorry, and he says, no, we can't have Ryan McCarthy. Somebody mentions that he was close to Milley or liked Mark Milley, and Trump's reaction is, we can't have that, you know, can't have even one percent Milley. And there's this crazy other bit, so just so you understand the scene, they're inside the tea room at Mar-a-Lago, and they've got these screens up, and they're just basically doing a slideshow of who Trump's going to pick. That's how they're picking his cabinet, and loyalty is everything. So one of the people's faces that comes up on screen for the national security roles is Robert O'Brien, who served as national security advisor in the first term, you know, and he'd been interviewed for top jobs, and people thought, you know, he could be a position, and Trump scowls when he sees him, and he says, because O'Brien, on January 6th, had said, while he was Trump's national security advisor, he praised Mike Pence, okay, he'd said on that day, I just spoke with Vice President Pence, he's a genuinely fine and decent man, he exhibited courage today as he did at the Capitol on 9-11 as a congressman, I'm proud to serve with him. So here's from the book, he's on screen, they're in the room, Trump says, now Trump's studied O'Brien's face contemptuously, hmm, there's a beauty, he said, you know, he had a problem on January 6th, on January 7th, he was shaking in his boots, shaking, and now something's happened to the guy, I saw him on camera, he was stiff, like he couldn't move, one of Trump's advisors chimed in to say he'd heard O'Brien was in bad health, I knew there was something wrong with him, Trump said, get him off of here, get him off of here, he's another one like Pompeo, just get him off of here. So what became clear to people in that room is that it wasn't enough that you'd praised Trump on TV as O'Brien had done, he had never broken with Trump, he'd praised him, defended him, the fact that he had praised Mike Pence on January 6th was enough to kill his chances of serving in a top national security role. So the reason I think this is important is it just gives you a sense of how these roles were selected, this is how those top roles in the government, in the national security apparatus were selected back in November of 2024. Which is why it's no surprise we end up where we are right now. Yeah, and they select a guy who they hated, who they knew lied to them during the process, I mean Susie Wiles, everybody else knew Hegseth was lying, he was giving incomplete information, but they figured why not, but what's so fascinating about what you're saying here is you have a vice president that called, basically compared Donald Trump to Hitler, you got a vice president that called him cultural heroine, you have other people in the administration that have attacked him, but apparently it is January the 6th that is the defining point of all of this, right? He needs to be pro-rioter. Yeah, you have to have supported the riots and the insurrection. One of the things that we found in our reporting for this book and in real time, but we were able to go deeper here, is just how much, and Joe that is exactly the point that you just raised, vice president Vance, and we write about this, had in a private text exchange compared Trump to Hitler, or at least described him in the same sentence, Marco Rubio obviously had a very extensive primary campaign against the president, but loyalty was being redefined with this question about what you thought about January 6th, did you think the 2020 election was stolen, and what we wanted to show people is just how in real time those conversations were playing out. And with Hegseth, I just want to make one more point, people in Trump's government had huge concerns about Hegseth, but they had already pulled one nominee in Matt Gaetz, and they were not going to do it again because they believed that they were not going to be able to get anything through if they showed any sense of weakness, and they hammered, they and their allies, hammered Joni Ernst, the one real holdout at the time, to back Hegseth. She's now not going to be in office again next year. And so what has that brought them? What it's brought them is Signalgate, which they will all say inside the White House, was the first thing that really got them off their rhythm early on, where a guy is bragging about military operations that are about to launch, the Iran war, and now, of course, this controversy with General Donahue. You've got a guy who's incompetent to be running the Pentagon, and he's causing damage to Donald Trump day in and day out. And what is the litmus test going to be? You have to be pro-corruption, pro-people who have committed federal offenses, pro-rioters. You have to look at January 6th and see it the way they do instead of the way it is. That's pretty scary. I want to go through some of the other themes of the book and why they're important. You go into deep detail about the takeover of the arts, this dramatic situation with the Smithsonian, and then I want to get to tech titans. But why the art and culture, the incursion into art and culture, why does that play into the themes that you're putting together in this book? So one of the things that we were really struck by last year was how early on Trump and his advisors and allies wanted to leave their imprint on what art Americans can see, on what defines U.S. history. And there was this executive order, I think it was March of last year, that was essentially dictating what could be shown at the Smithsonian, which is this massive, very revered, congressionally funded network of museums all around Washington. And there's a number of museums and research libraries and so forth. This was deeply impactful within the Smithsonian Central itself. It is led by the first ever Black Secretary Lonnie Bunch. He was the co-founder or founder of the African American Museum several years ago. It was one of his definitive works. And this was about how slavery is talked about. This was about how U.S. history is talked about. And it really is shaping the culture for many, many years forward with the possible threat of losing funding. And so we got very deep inside these Board of Regents meetings, one of which involved the cancellation or the future cancellation of an Amy Sherald exhibit. Amy Sherald is a renowned artist. She had done a portrait of Michelle Obama, and she had an exhibit that was supposed to be coming to Washington. And it featured several paintings, but one was a Statue of Liberty as a trans woman. And we got inside this meeting on June 9th, where the vice president and, much more aggressively, Carlos Jimenez, a congressman from Florida, were demanding the head of the National Portrait Gallery, where this was going to be shown, should be fired. Someone at one point, J.D. Vance leaves the room, and one of his young aides sits next to or near John Roberts, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, who presides over these meetings. And he holds up an iPad, and he flips through it, and he says, this is also going to be a problem. He points to that image and says, this is not what Americans want to see. And this became a huge flashpoint at the Smithsonian. Amy Sherald ultimately pulled her exhibit because she didn't want any sense that there was artistic control over it. It does define how you are seeing Trump and the White House try to put an imprint on all aspects of American life. But please add on to anything. Yeah, I mean, he was literally just holding up that image. And Jonathan, yeah. Sorry. Yeah, I'm sorry. Go ahead. But I just wanted to put in there also, you guys tell this story of the firing of the woman in charge of portraits being fired because Donald Trump found his portrait unflattering. That's right. But in this meeting, so the famous Amy Sherald painting that was on the cover of The New Yorker, transforming liberty, the Statue of Liberty depicted as a trans woman. You have like a 30 year old, 30 something year old JD Vanstaffer holding it up on an iPad. Just picture that. You've got Lonnie Bunch. You've got the chief justice of the Supreme Court. They're in this revered room. He's holding it up on his iPad. And he said, this is not what Americans want to see. And of course, Amy Sherald canceled the show because she didn't want to have interference in that in her exhibition. But this sent shockwaves through the art world. But we managed to just find out exactly what happened behind the scenes.