Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
One of the curiosities in this trial is that on
many days I would stand waiting online inches from the
New York Times. Is Maggie Haberman. Now, the Times feels
very possessive about this story, and Maggie Haberman most of all,
feels that this is her story, so she doesn't look
at me. I mean literally, it's as though I don't exist.
(00:27):
This has been going on since I wrote Fire and Fury,
but this was even more pronounced because it literally inches away.
But that's the New York Times.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Nice, let's do it.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
I'm Michael Wolf. Welcome to Fire and Fury the Podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
I'm James Truman, a fellow media veteran, and every time
I have a question about Trump, I call Michael Well.
I take Michael out for lunch. Michael, I think lunch
is out daily and this and has grown tired of
answering the same questions. So hopefully with this podcast we
can answer all the questions in one place. Michael, I
know you went to the Trump trial every day. What
(01:16):
was the finale like?
Speaker 1 (01:17):
So there's a five week, almost six week trial on
the Democrats' home turf. Donald Trump is captive there, so
what do the Democrats do. They do nothing until the
last week of the trial. Then, finally getting it together,
they send out Robert de Niro, an eighty year old
(01:38):
man to defend an eighty one year old man whose
major liability, of course is his age. But then the
other thing is de Niro shows up and he's wearing
a mask, so he gets there. I understand that the
Trumpers got worried that this was going to happen, could
not believe their luck. The Trump people move the Maga
(01:59):
people into the park where den Yiro is going to speak.
He comes in with the mask, and then there's a
chance that goes up. Hey Bob four years too late,
Hey Bob, COVID's over, and then four more years, COVID
four more years. And then he goes into kind of
righteous democratic talk, and then a car alarm goes off.
(02:22):
It must be ten yards away, and there's a whole
thing about downtown and around the courthouse that it really
feels kind of like nineteen eighties New York. And then
this turned out to be a nineteen eighties car alarm.
It didn't go off, it just like every four seconds
it started gong. I thought, well, that's the Democratic campaign.
(02:45):
This is the worst thing that could happen to a
presidential campaign, beyond the worst thing, and the Democrats don't
take advantage of this.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
So take us inside the courthouse. Mostly what I've read
is that it was very cold and often very dull.
What was it like? Really?
Speaker 1 (02:59):
It was actual, very cold and very dull, but also
very exciting, quite dramatic. I think you got closer to
the real Donald Trump than I've seen, and I've been
close to the real Donald Trump. All of the people
around Donald Trump, David Pecker, obviously, Michael Cohne, even Stormy Daniels,
(03:21):
everybody's a grifter, and Trump, clearly at the center of
this is the grifter in chief.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
Did you get any sense of how Trump himself reacted
to the Stormy Daniels testimony. It was so graphic.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
He was pissed off. This is all directed at his lawyers.
How could you not have stopped this? Delay this? And
I think it came down to the Stormy Daniels thing.
There's something about that interaction which I think really freaks
him out. He's denied something which, given the layers and
(03:55):
layers of detail that this trial provided, is undeniable. Steve
always said that he gets to deny it, probably because
it didn't happen, because there was probably, in Steve Bannon's
version of this, a failure to launch on Donald Trump's part.
So technically he is correct. I don't know if that's
(04:16):
true at all, but that was always Bannon's view. But
the fact was, you could have a lot of Stormy
Daniels if you are a certain kind of guy with
Trump aspired to be a rat pack kind of guy
that came with the territory. That was proof of who
you are, and that was I guess a reward too.
Why do you earn money to get more girls? And
(04:37):
the idea that would be turned on its head into
something that you could not brag about share with the
locker room talk, and that this would now go to
literally indicting him and diminishing him in every possible way.
I think that was not just painful to him, but
(04:58):
I think confused. The times changed and they changed underneath him,
at least in Manhattan, and he was resentful. Roger Ales
used to say, my people, and I guess by that
he meant the Fox audience or the right wing audience.
He said, they live in nineteen sixty five, and that's
(05:19):
what we program for. That's the sensibility we are speaking to,
and I think in many respects that is exactly the
wavelength that Trump is on. I asked Ils about this.
He said, Trump is Vegas in nineteen sixty five, so.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
He's more often powers than James Bond nineteen sixties. Yeah,
You've written in your book quite often about Trump's fears
of being humiliated. I'm just going to read a small
passage because I'd like to know how you think the
trial impacted him. Almost everything he does is about trying
to avoid humiliation, said Bannon. And he's close to it
all the time. He's drawn to it. Caught red handed,
(05:53):
he'll stare you down. He's psychologically gifted. His father humiliated him.
That humiliation broke Trump's brother, but he learned to withstand it.
But that's the Russian roulette he's playing, waiting for the
humiliation that will break him. Was this the humiliation that
could break him?
Speaker 1 (06:08):
I don't think it will break him. I think that's
his accomplishment. There may be these things that would humiliate
absolutely every other human being on earth, but not Donald Trump.
And that's his accomplishment because whatever it is, he can
deny deny, deny the undeniable. And that's really interesting if
(06:29):
you think about it. It requires this amount of shamelessness
on one hand, and absolute kind of boldness.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
Thinking about Giuliani this morning, Essentially in his latest chapter
with Trump, he's doing some imitation of Trump, some version
of Trump's crazy, and it's wholly unsuccessful. It's been a
disaster for him. What is it, aside from luck that
allows Trump to float and Juliani to think?
Speaker 1 (06:58):
Really good question. It's not just Giuliani, it's virtually everybody else.
I mean, I would like the answer to this, and
I don't know the answer to this. Trump does this
thing which is completely preposterous and gets away with it.
Everybody else tries this thing and certainly never measures up
to Trump, and often, as in the case with Rudy,
(07:20):
it's a personal catastrophe. So what is this? And it
may be that Rudy doesn't really believe what Rudy is
forced to do and Trump actually believes, which I think
is an important aspect of this, the whole election denial
everybody is well, of course Trump lost, and of course
(07:43):
he must know this.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
Now.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
I've spent a fair amount of time with Trump on
this issue, because it's one of the issues that he
comes back to again and again and again, and I
come away always thinking he believes it. He believes this
was stolen from him. He believes he now despite that
there is no logical, no empirical basis on which to
(08:06):
base that belief none whatsoever. There is always someone to
come in and tell him what he wants to hear.
But the truth is that he, despite all of the evidence,
continued to believe this, and has continued to believe this
over many years now, so that he has really converted
(08:27):
this into an entire ecosystem where everyone around him is
forced to believe this, and maybe I don't know, maybe
they come to believe it in some ways too. The
Trump enterprise is really about converting reality. He really occupies
a different reality than the rest of us.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
If he were to get in again, I mean, what's
the play for people who would want to be in
his cabinet to work for him? What's in it for them?
Speaker 1 (08:55):
We know and everyone else should know that the chances
of emerging out from under Donald Trump ahead of where
you began instead of in dire straits are slim. Everybody
ends up in dire straits. And I think Rudy, we
should now elevate him to one of the classic characters
(09:16):
around Donald Trump. You will be destroyed. And let's look
at the Republican Party. Let's look at how everyone continued
not to distance himself but to try to get closer
to Donald Trump. You now have a vice presidential race
of certainly a dozen people, probably actually a dozen and
a half people actively doing whatever he wants in order
(09:41):
to prove their worthiness as a potential vice president. So
I think we're looking at a situation in which everyone
will crowd in around him again.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
So two things happened after the trial, right. One was
he started fundraising big time. He went to the UFC match,
and then, having tried to fall the say it of
TikTok when he's president, he started posting on TikTok. How
is that the response to the trials verdict?
Speaker 1 (10:06):
So the verdict comes down, and it comes down as
hard as it possibly can come down. Yeah, and it
hits him. This is a big blow. He's staggered, and
the people around him realize we're in a new land.
But they also realize that a Trump thing is beginning
now as soon as this happens, and it's a process,
(10:29):
the process by which he can turn catastrophic defeat into
absolute victory. So he leaves the court and shortly then
goes out to the hallway to start talking again, which
is already remarkable. You've just been convicted of thirty four
felony counts, and suddenly there you are in front of
(10:53):
the cameras justifying this and continuing your battle in public,
being the same guy you were before the conviction. And
the people with Trump observed this that as soon as
he hits his mark, as soon as he starts with
his lines, the trial is rigged. The real jury is
November fifth. All of this he begins the process of
(11:14):
reinflating was a kind of funny bit that he talks,
and then they go out where the SUVs are waiting
in the caravan to go uptown. So he gives the speech,
and by the time they're out waiting for the caravan,
he says to somebody, you know, I'm hearing from everybody.
That's the best speech I've ever given. Now. One of
the people there then said to me, that's interesting because
(11:36):
we were with him and he hadn't heard from anybody.
And then he goes uptown and then he immediately goes
to a fundraiser somewhere on the upper east side of
dinner with a whole bunch of billionaires. He just continues on.
Then the fundraising starts too. There's a url that they
had ready didn't matter what happened in court, lose, hung jury, victory,
(11:58):
It didn't matter. Now. In fact, they've probably raised more
because of the guilty verdict. And that's immediately brought to
him as the online thing starts to spend and the
money it starts to come in. And he has a
particular affinity for these online fundraising things because he sees
them and compares them always to speaking about living in
(12:19):
another time. The Jerry Lewis telethon, and then of course
the next day they hadn't had anything planned, and that's
one of the interesting things. They really don't plan this stuff.
Nobody really was saying, look, what if you are convicted,
how are we going to handle this? Nobody did this
because you're not allowed to say that to Donald Trump.
(12:40):
You're not allowed to say, hey, the news might be bad, right,
but then the news is bad, And so then that
was okay, Well, we have to get out front, and
we also have to put him out front, because that's
what keeps him going. Any sense that he's put in
a position where he's going to be offstage is a
danger place for him to be. On stage. He's in
(13:02):
the role. He's Donald Trump. And so I think it
was eleven o'clock they went out, they did that news
conference in Trump Tower. He was completely incoherent. It was
like head scratching except for the first few moments, and
then he got the lines it's rigged. It's you know,
the real jury, same old stuff. And curiously that's what
(13:23):
got the headlines. Trump says trial is rigged, when you
could argue that the real headline should have been presidential candidate.
Totally incoherent, and then he goes to the UFC fight.
He's always showing up at a UFC fight because that's
his audience. Although there's a kind of curious thing is
the UFC is now owned by William Morrison Devor, which
(13:47):
is run by Ari Emmanuel, who was Trump's agent in
setting up the apprentice. Ari Emanuel, whose brother is Ram Emmanuel, and.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
They're you know, mega democrats.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
Democrats is arguably in some sense responsible for Donald Trump.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
So what you're saying that Trump only really lives on stage.
That's where he comes to life. If he got sent
to jail, that is surely the furthest off stage you
can be. Does he contemplate that? Do you contemplate that?
Speaker 1 (14:17):
I think it's almost impossible for Donald Trump to go
to jail. I know that there's some calculations in the
Trump world about actually what it would cost to jail him.
With his vast Secret Service security detail, you know, he
would be the most caoseted prisoner in the history of prisons.
They'd have to build a prison for him, and I
(14:39):
guess he'd get, you know, the fast food. There'd be
a vast fast food buffet every day. But I think
that if he did go to jail, he would figure
out a way to make that his stage. And I
think that there's a great deal of fear on the
part of people of the system that might jail him,
(15:00):
or that might try to jail him. That would be
the effect that they would make him even more famous.
Jail would become an extraordinary platform for him. James and
I will be right back after the break.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
The day before the verdict, I was walking up Fifth
Avenue and I walked past Trump Tower, and in that moment,
these two stretched limousines with kind of royal crests on
the side, followed by a tricked out dodge ram, huge
speakers blaring kid rock sort of squealed in front of
Trump Tower. People I think they're mostly tourists, jumped out
with their phones. It was this huge moment, and I
(15:47):
looked over the road and there's an area that's cordoned
off for a pool of cameramen. So I went over
to talk to them. They was just sitting there eating sandwiches,
ignoring the spectacle, and I said, what's going on here? Said,
oh man, it's just bullshit. They come up around every
hour to fake the presidential arrival of Trump, and everyone
jumps and takes pictures. Trump is never in the limousine.
He actually goes in another entrance. So it was this
(16:10):
kind of stage craft, and you could imagine that on
a small screen. It kind of worked. And that juxtaposition
of the limousines and then the dodge ram thirty five
hundred seemed to be Trump's thing that he has this
self given imperial grandeur, you know, followed by this very
Daytona idea of masculinity, and someone had understood that and
(16:31):
staged this hourly arrival of the cavalcade. Should one be impressed.
I mean, it was ludicrous, but it was brilliant.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
That's Donald Trump. You can't take your eyes off of him.
There's a point, a kind of fantastic point in Stormy
Daniel's book. They're together in Lake Tahoe, and among the
topics she says that she brought up is his hair.
Now that's interesting because nobody brings up Trump's hair, this
(17:01):
most obvious thing in the world. Nobody brings it up.
But in two thousand and six she brought it up,
and he said, according to her, well you know, I
started this and people come to expect me to have it,
and it's a little ridiculous, but it really makes me
stand out. And I thought, that's a level of self
(17:21):
awareness that I never thought Donald Trump would have. But
it also explains a lot in the world in which
we know that the problem with media is endless clutter.
He breaks through because he looks so memorable, or you
could say ridiculous. That's also relevant next to Joe Biden,
(17:43):
who is invisible because he's just gray. Biden might win
this race if somebody would just go out and get
him a pair of really dark black rimmed glasses, something
to break through, something so you could see the guy. Yeah,
but there's Trump looking like this, so that you just
can't take your eyes off of him. You don't want
(18:04):
to take your eyes off of him sitting in court.
Literally everybody focused on Trump. I think part of it
is will he break? But then there's also this visual thing,
this big, hulking guy with this ridiculous hair in this
orange face.
Speaker 2 (18:21):
So the media at the trial, what was the composition
of the media turnout?
Speaker 1 (18:25):
It seemed to me that every MSNBC anchor put in
an appearance, sometimes an extended appearance, and the MSNBC ratings
have been fantastic, leaving CNN in the dust. So I
think the left has finally gotten what it wants, which
is this revenge, a real kind of re litigation of
(18:47):
twenty sixteen. So we New Yorkers perhaps this is true,
for no one else could feel this sense of vindication,
and that has produced enormous ratings for msn.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
Did any of the media coverage get it right in
your mind? Or are they just sticking to their pre
existing positions?
Speaker 1 (19:06):
Yeah? No, in my mind. One of the problems. In
part of the nature of the Trump phenomenon is that
the media never gets it right. Yeah, because this story
is just not about politics. The political media has to
make it about politics because that's the thing that it understands.
This is not a political phenomenon, it's a fan phenomenon.
Speaker 2 (19:26):
What's going to happen in the next seven days. What
are we looking at, What are the events that might unfold.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
We're waiting for the Supreme Court to rule. That will
happen before the end of the month, but we don't
know the day on this immunity thing, which is fascinating,
and I think that will again shift the whole orientation
and the whole Trump meaning. If the Supreme Court, and
it's Donald Trump's Supreme Court declares that he is immune,
(19:53):
that he is effectively above the law, and they'll do
that in the context of actually putting all press above
the law, but specifically to do it for Donald Trump.
I think that again calls for an adjustment of how
we think about this march to the White House again.
(20:14):
Then the other thing that's coming up, of course, the debate.
So I know that the Trump people are beginning the
whole idea of debate prep. Now what prep? There's debate
prep and that officials have to do this that political act.
And then there's the fact that he can't be prepped.
So that's just one of those other contradictions at the
(20:36):
heart of Trump Land.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
Who does it full to at this point to try
and prep them for debate? Who does he listen to?
Speaker 1 (20:42):
He doesn't listen to anybody, Okay, but they'll invent a
structure around this as though it's a normal campaign and
a normal candidate, and then he will ignore this.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
Yes, would he have memorized any statistics, any numbers?
Speaker 1 (20:58):
No, And that that's because he doesn't have to because
he can make them up. Why would you have to
memorize statistics?
Speaker 2 (21:10):
So wrap, Michael, Thank you.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
James, Fire and Fury. The podcast is hosted and executive
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(21:33):
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