What’s Wrong With Donald Trump?

I think there’s an answer. But it’s not age — or, at least, it’s not just age. Mentioned: “White House aides lean on delays and distraction to manage Trump” by Josh Dawsey “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration” by Miles Taylor “What JD Vance Believes” by Ross Douthat Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This audio essay for “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by our supervising editor, Claire Gordon. Fact-checking by Jack McCordick. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin, Michelle Harris, Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Ezra Klein?

  From New York Times Opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:23Ezra Klein?

  You've probably seen the clip by now. Donald Trump is holding a town hall. It's Monday, October 14th in Pennsylvania. He's being asked softball questions by Kristi Noem, the Republican governor of South Dakota. And there's a medical emergency in the crowd. The rally stops for a while. They play Ave Maria while the medics respond.

• 0:55Ezra Klein?

  Then Trump and Noem begin again. Then someone else in the crowd needs medical help. The rally stops again, begins again. Noem is settling back in to ask questions when Trump announces he's had enough.

• 1:08Donald Trump?

  Let's not do any more questions. Let's just listen to music. Let's make it into a music. Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?

• 1:17Ezra Klein?

  What comes next is something I've never seen before. Trump swaying dreamily to his playlist in front of a rally full of people.

• 1:32Ezra Klein?

  For nearly 40 minutes.

• 1:42Ezra Klein?

  It was like he was DJing his own bar mitzvah.

• 1:51Ezra Klein?

  You can look in these clips at the faces of the people around him, like Noem. They really have no idea what to do. There are suddenly backup dancers in a concert that shouldn't exist.

• 2:05Ezra Klein?

  Now, part of me finds Donald Trump's behavior here unusually relatable. You think I want to sit up here talking about politics and war day after day? You don't know the temptation to just once, just for one week, turn this podcast into a drum and bass set, or play some of my favorite Chiasmo songs. But I don't. Of course I don't. It's not what we're doing here. And if I were a presidential candidate in the final weeks of a campaign, I wouldn't do what Trump did because the fallout would be predictable. An avalanche of media coverage asking, "What the hell was that?"

• 2:46Speaker 02

  It does raise the question of why? What was that? What was going on there? Why didn't he want to answer more questions?

• 2:52Speaker 03

  I don't even know how many dozens, hundreds of campaign events I have covered in my career. I have never seen anything like this. I've never seen a candidate do anything like this.

• 3:00Speaker 04

  I think by now I have the experience and discernment to say, with the deepest gravity, last night's Trump Town Hall was banana pants boo-boo bonkers.

• 3:10Ezra Klein?

  I wouldn't do it because of the inevitable attacks that would come from my opponents about this strange behavior I just exhibited on stage. Here's Tim Walz.

• 3:20Speaker 05

  I would not usually encourage you, but we're doing it now. Go watch this guy right now and go watch these rallies or this town hall. He stopped taking questions and stood frozen on stage for 30 minutes while they played his Spotify list to people. It was strange, but if this was your grandfather, you would take the keys away. You would take the keys away.

• 3:42Ezra Klein?

  I don't think Walz has this right. Trump did not freeze up on that stage. He did not lose where he was in the moment. If anything, he was all too present. But Walz is saying something Democrats really want to hear right now.

• 3:59Ezra Klein?

  There are so many Democrats, I think you can imagine that I hear from them all the time, who are furious still about the difference between the way the media treated Joe Biden's age and the way it is treated Donald Trump's age. The diminishment of Biden's capacities led to unrelenting coverage and concern from the media and from Biden's own party that ultimately drove him from the race. Every time he flubbed a name or a place, every time his voice was quiet or thick and clotted, every time a sentence derailed before it reached its intended station, a frenzy over Joe Biden's fitness would rise. But

• 4:39Ezra Klein?

  Donald Trump, at 78, is nearly as old as Joe Biden. He exhibits his own cognitive irregularities. He rambles, and he lies, and makes things up, and seems to get strangely lost in these digressions. His speech is associative and circular. It can read like gibberish on the page. And he goes on these bizarre riffs, like this one, which is somehow about the dangers of electric boats.

• 5:07Donald Trump?

  I say, what would happen if the boat sank from its weight, and you're in the boat, and you have this tremendously powerful battery, and the battery's now underwater, and there's a shark that's approximately 10 yards over there. By the way, a lot of shark attacks lately. Did you notice that? A lot of shark. I watched some guys justifying it today. Well, they weren't really that angry. They bit off the young lady's leg because of the fact that they were, they were not hungry, but they misunderstood what, who she was. These people are crazy. He said, there's no problem with sharks. They just didn't really understand a young woman swimming. Now, it really got decimated, and other people, too. A lot of shark attacks. So I said, so there's a shark 10 yards away from the boat, 10 yards.

• 5:53Donald Trump?

  Or here, do I get electrocuted if the boat is sinking? Water goes over the battery, the boat is sinking. Do I stay on top of the boat and get electrocuted? Or do I jump over by the shark and not get electrocuted? Because I will tell you, he didn't know the answer. He said, you know, nobody's ever asked me that question.

• 6:10Ezra Klein?

  There is this fury among many Democrats about the past they feel Trump has been given. And I've struggled with this myself. It's not that Donald Trump's age is unknown or that in the media it is uncovered. But I can tell you that even when we do write about it, it doesn't connect in the same way. The media doesn't actually set the agenda the way people sometimes pretend it does. The audience knows what it believes. If you're describing something they don't really feel is true, they read it and they move on. Or they don't read it at all. And I don't think people believe, and to be honest, I don't believe, that the core problem

• 6:52Ezra Klein?

  with Donald Trump's mind is his age. Over four years, we really did watch age change Joe Biden. It made him different than he'd been before. But is that what has happened to Donald Trump? Is he different than he was before? Because I would say Donald Trump in 2024 is like Donald Trump in 2020 and like Donald Trump in 2016. I don't think he's so much changed as he is distilled. But this is where the critics are right. We had the language to talk about what was happening to Joe Biden. Age is a delicate topic, but it's one we know. And so we did talk about it. We spoke about it relentlessly.

• 7:36Ezra Klein?

  But we've never had good language for talking about Donald Trump. We've never had good language for talking about the way he thinks and the way in which it is different from how other people think and talk and act. And so we circle it, we imply it. I don't think it's bias so much as it's confusion. In order to talk about something, you need the words for it. But for me, at least, something clicked watching him up there swaying to that music.

• 8:14Ezra Klein?

  You may have heard of the big five personality traits. Openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism. We all fall somewhere in the spectrum of each of them. I've taken these psychological tests and I score really about as high as you possibly can on conscientiousness and agreeableness. And if we're really being honest here, I'm above average on neuroticism, too. I was talking to a psychologist about this when I was researching this piece. And when I told him that, he told me, "That's a really good combination for being very productive and very anxious." Yeah, sure is.

• 8:58Ezra Klein?

  I mentioned, though, that these traits are spectrums. Some of the newer personality frameworks, they name the other side of the spectrum, too. So to be low on neuroticism is to be high in emotional stability. To be low on extroversion is to be introverted. And to be low on conscientiousness is to be disinhibited. To be very low on conscientiousness is to be very high on disinhibition. And that is Donald Trump. I want to tread carefully here. For years now, there's been a cottage industry of books diagnosing Trump with this or that psychological malady.

• 9:39Ezra Klein?

  And the view that Trump's psychology borders or tips into the pathological, it's not limited to his critics. John Kelly, Trump's second chief of staff, is known to have bought the book, "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President," seeking insight on the man he served. Mick Mulvaney, Trump's third chief of staff, he recommended aides read the book, "A First Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness." He thought it would help them understand the way Trump's strange psychology, maybe even his mental illness, helped make him a powerful and unique leader.

• 10:20Ezra Klein?

  There are strong reasons, though, that we in the media and that psychiatrists in general are careful with this kind of language. There's a rule in psychiatry that you don't diagnose patients you have not directly examined. That rule comes from politics. It is called the Goldwater Rule because they did that to bury Goldwater and got sued and lost. The history of pathologizing political leaders we do not like is not an admirable one. And so I'm not a psychiatrist, and I am saying something much simpler and I think more neutral here. Trump moves through the world without the behavioral inhibition most of us labor under.

• 11:03Ezra Klein?

  And when I say that, I am describing both what is wrong with Donald Trump and what is right with him. Something I have learned as I've gotten older is that every person's strengths are also their weaknesses. This inhibition is the engine of Trump's success. It is a strength. It is what makes him magnetic and compelling on a stage. It is what allows him to say things other people would not say, to make arguments they would not make, to try strategies they would not try. It's easy to forget that in 2016 Jeb Bush seemed likely to win the Republican nomination, perhaps to win the White House.

• 11:45Ezra Klein?

  Much of the top talent in the Republican Party had worked for a Bush in some form or another. And yes, plenty of Republicans thought, often privately, that George W. Bush's presidency had been a failure. They thought the Iraq War had been a mistake. But you could not succeed as a Republican unless you tread carefully around that. Or so went the thinking of almost everyone back then. And then someone proved it completely wrong.

• 12:14Donald Trump?

  George Bush made a mistake. We can make mistakes, but that one was a beauty. We should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East. But so you still think he should be impeached? I think it's my turn, isn't it? You do whatever you want. You call it whatever you want. I want to tell you, they lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none, and they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass destruction.

• 12:41Ezra Klein?

  Let me state what everybody knows. There are many things politicians believe they do not say. The norms of politics, the norms of simple politeness suppress much that people feel, and not just politicians. There are vast swaths of political opinion that you're not really supposed to talk about. A lot of people believe that immigrants are bad and dangerous and that we shouldn't have so many of them in this country. That free trade is ripping this country off and it's a fault of these corrupt idiots in Washington lining their own pockets. That China isn't our ally or our partner, it's our enemy. And that the great threat to America comes from within, that other Americans are disloyal,

• 13:26Ezra Klein?

  that they are the enemy, and that the power of the state should be turned against them. It's not that no one else in politics held these views before Donald Trump. But for the most part, it's not how they spoke about them. That was the part of the system that Trump exploited, the market failure he saw. The lie that just because politicians didn't talk this way, voters didn't feel this way. One of Trump's verbal tics is to say, "Many people are saying..." But it's often the opposite. He's saying what many people want somebody to be saying. He's saying what many people might be saying in private, but often are not saying in public.

• 14:10Ezra Klein?

  One argument that Trump supporters make is you don't get Trump's honesty without his outrageousness. You don't get a leader who can break the mold by supporting a person who conforms to the mold. Here's Kellyanne Conway at the 2024 Republican National Convention.

• 14:27Speaker 06

  How often do we hear, "I want Trump's policies without Trump's personality"? Well, good luck with that.

• 14:37Speaker 06

  We don't get those policies without that personality.

• 14:42Ezra Klein?

  And she's right. You certainly don't get his politics without his personality. How many people must want to do what Trump has done? How many millionaires and billionaires and celebrities must have thought to themselves, "I'd be a good president. I'm smarter and more charismatic and better on a stage and wiser than these idiots up there." Forget them. How many times have you felt insulted or wronged by someone and wanted to just unload on them in public? To go all out in annihilating your tormentor in every way you could? How many times in your work or your life have you believed something other people didn't believe?

• 15:26Ezra Klein?

  Something they thought was wrong or impolite or outdated or ridiculous? And you bit your tongue. You didn't want to say it and be laughed at, mocked, dismissed, punished. But we hold ourselves back. Most of us do. And so when I say this, I mean it. What Donald Trump has done is remarkable. It is historic. It is unique in the entire history of American politics. To run as an outsider to a political party, to then capture that political party totally, break its fundamental consensus, slander its previous standard bearers, to then become

• 16:09Ezra Klein?

  president, having never held elected office or served in the military, and do that while saying things and doing things that until you, everybody believed you could not do or say in politics. To achieve something unique, you must yourself be unique. Donald Trump is unique. Over the years, I have interviewed I don't know how many politicians. And talking to them, it's different than talking to really anybody else. It's why I don't just fill this show with them. Politicians are inhibited. Before anything comes out of their mouth, they are running their response through this internal piece of software. Some of them are really good at it.

• 16:54Ezra Klein?

  Pete Buttigieg, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama. The software is so fast and efficient as to be almost seamless. The politicians we sense to be inauthentic, it's often that the software is slower and buggier. You can see the seams, you can watch the calculations happening in real time. But what that software is doing in all these cases is inhibiting. It is running their words through a filter of what they shouldn't say, given who they are and what they are doing and the weight their words carry. If your words move markets and launch missiles, you choose them carefully.

• 17:37Ezra Klein?

  But there is something undeniably electric about watching someone unchained from the bundle of inhibitions the rest of us carry around. Watching someone just say it. There's something even aspirational about it. What if I was without fear, without doubt? And if I can't be without fear, if I can't be without doubt, what if I could at least be led by somebody who was, protected by somebody who was, fought for by somebody who was? It is Donald Trump's absence of inhibition that makes him a great entertainer. It is Trump's absence of inhibition that makes him feel to so many like not a politician.

• 18:21Ezra Klein?

  The fact that he was already the US president notwithstanding. It is why the people who want to be like him, the mini Trumps, the Ron DeSantis's and Blake Masters's and Ted Cruz's, they can't really pull it off. Because what makes Trump Trump isn't his views on immigration, though they are part of it. It's this manic charisma born of his disinhibition. It is his great strength. It is also his terrible flaw. Sometimes Trump's disinhibition gets you a willingness to call a failed presidency a failed presidency, to call a lie that took us to war, a lie. But sometimes it gets you this.

• 19:04Donald Trump?

  Somebody should run against John McCain, who has been, you know, in my opinion, not so hot. And I supported him. I supported him for president. I raised a million dollars for him. It's a lot of money. I supported him. He lost. He let us down. But, you know, he lost. So I never liked him as much after that because I don't like the losers. But Frank, Frank, let me get to him. He hit me. He's not a war hero. He's a war hero. He's a war hero. He's a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren't captured, okay? I hate to tell you. Do you agree with that? He's a war hero because he was captured. Okay? You can have, and I believe perhaps he's a war hero, but, but right now, he's said some very bad things about a lot of people.

• 19:45Ezra Klein?

  Trump's disinhibition is yoked to a malignancy at his core. I do believe he's a narcissist. If Putin praises him, he's going to praise Putin. If John McCain mocks him, he's going to mock John McCain. Donald Trump doesn't see beyond himself and what he thinks and what he wants and how he's feeling. He doesn't listen to other people. He does not take correction or direction. Wisdom. Wisdom is the ability to learn from experience, to learn from others. But Donald Trump doesn't really learn. He once told a biographer, "When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I'm basically the same.

• 20:28Ezra Klein?

  The temperament is not that different." And you know what? I believe him totally when he says that. In 2018, Donald Trump told The Washington Post, quote, "I have a gut and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else's brain can ever tell me."

• 20:46Ezra Klein?

  Imagine going through life, truly believing that, truly acting like that. And then imagine that, in so many ways, it has worked for you. It has made you rich and famous and powerful beyond your wildest dreams. What would that do to you? What does that do to a person with a mind like Donald Trump's? Here is the question Democrats have floundered in answering this year. If Donald Trump is really so dangerous, then how come the consequences of his presidency weren't worse? There is this gap between the unfit, unsound, unworthy man Democrats describe and the

• 21:29Ezra Klein?

  memories that most Americans have of his presidency, at least before the pandemic. If Donald Trump is so bad, why were things so good? Why were they at least okay? There is an answer to this question. It's that as president, Trump was surrounded by inhibitors. In 2020, the political scientist Daniel Dresner published a book entitled "The Toddler in Chief." The core of the book was over 1,000 instances Dresner collected, in which Trump is described by those around him in terms befitting an impetuous child. These quotes about Trump abound. They're given on the record sometimes, on background other times.

• 22:13Ezra Klein?

  They're given to various biographers and reporters. Some of them are later disputed, as the staffer realizes the consequences of what they have said, but there are reams and reams of them. For every one I offer here, I could give you a dozen more. In 2017, his deputy chief of staff, Katie Walsh, described working with President Trump as, quote, "trying to figure out what a child wants." Steve Bannon, Trump's chief strategist, said, quote, "I'm sick of being a wet nurse for a 71-year-old." James Mattis, Trump's first secretary of defense, and John Kelly, later Trump's chief of staff, they often described themselves like babysitters.

• 22:55Ezra Klein?

  They made a pact to never be overseas at the same time, lest Trump do something truly deranged before they could stop him. Here's a title of a 2017 article in Politico. "White House Aides Lean on Delays and Distraction to Manage Trump." The first paragraph reads, quote, "As White House Chief of Staff, Reince Priebus mused to associates that telling President Donald Trump no was usually not an effective strategy, telling him next week was often the better idea." In 2018, The New York Times published a bombshell op-ed by an anonymous member of the Trump administration who said he, a Republican, was part of an internal resistance

• 23:39Ezra Klein?

  to Donald Trump, in which, quote, "Many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations." End quote. That author later revealed himself to be Miles Taylor, the Chief of Staff of the Department of Homeland Security. In a 2020 interview with ABC, Taylor described the lengths he and others took to shield America, to shield their own staff, from the commander in chief's whims and rages.

• 24:11Speaker 07

  The president at the time would get into these phone rants with us, the secretary and myself, about Jerry Brown and how frustrated he was with Jerry Brown and later Gavin Newsom because they didn't support him. And he didn't feel like he had a base of supporters in California. So as wildfires were burning down houses in the state, the president basically said to us, "I don't care. These people haven't done enough to deserve it. Cut off the money." In fact, that phone call that I referenced with FEMA officials, the secretary and I were so concerned because we didn't want our senior leadership to be exposed to how undisciplined and tumultuous the White House was, because it made it harder for them to do their jobs. So after that call, FEMA officials said, "What do we do? The president has just told us to cut off money to people whose homes are burning down."

• 24:56Speaker 07

  Our answer was, "We're not going to do it. Don't worry, we'll go back to the president." But then, George, months after it, again in January 2019, the president said he wanted to do it.

• 25:06Ezra Klein?

  The Trump administration was rife with this sort of thing. In 2019, a senior national security official told CNN's Jake Tapper, quote, "Everyone at this point ignores what the president says and just does their job. The American people should take some measure of confidence in that."

• 25:26Ezra Klein?

  During his presidency, Trump repeatedly proposed firing Patriot missiles at suspected drug labs in Mexico. He mused about launching nuclear weapons at other countries, and, in one very strange case, at a hurricane. He talked often and insistently about his desire to turn the machinery of the government against his domestic political enemies. He talked often about pulling out of NATO. He mused about the efficacy of untested or dangerous treatments for COVID. In 2020, during the protests following George Floyd's murder, Trump raged at his staff, demanding they turn the full force of the military against the protesters.

• 26:08Ezra Klein?

  Here's Mark Esper, who served as Trump's Secretary of Defense, on 60 Minutes.

• 26:13Speaker 08

  I thought that we're at a different spot now. He's going to finally give a direct order to deploy paratroopers into the streets of Washington DC, and I'm thinking with weapons and bayonets. And this would be horrible.

• 26:28Speaker 09

  What specifically was he suggesting that the US military should do to these protesters?

• 26:34Speaker 08

  He says, "Can't you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something." And he's suggesting that that's what we should do, that we should bring in the troops and shoot the protesters.

• 26:44Ezra Klein?

  After Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, he refused to admit that loss, perhaps refused to even believe in that loss. I'm personally persuaded by the reporting that he'd come to believe very weird theories, both of fraud, and that he could be reinstated as president. And yes, there is a part of all of us that resists believing in our own defeat. How many politicians who have been voted out of office would have preferred to ignore those results, to claim fraud and cling to power? Not all of them, certainly. Most of the people who serve in politics, on some of them are patriots.

• 27:25Ezra Klein?

  They understand that the peaceful transition of power is sacred, and that their ambition is comparatively profane. But even the politicians who are not patriots recognize the likely outcome of fighting the results of a fair election: dishonor, defeat, possible prosecution.

• 27:45Ezra Klein?

  Trump did not care. He was unrestrained by those inhibitions. He tried in every possible way he could to overturn the election. He called state election officials and demanded they find votes for him that did not exist. Here is Trump threatening Brad Raffensperger, Georgia's Secretary of State, in a phone call that later leaked.

• 28:07Speaker 10

  The ballots are corrupt and you're gonna find that they are, which is totally illegal. It's more illegal for you than it is for them because you know what they did and you're not reporting it. That's a criminal, that's a criminal offense. And you know, you can't let that happen. That's a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer. That's a big risk. But they are shredding ballots, in my opinion, based on what I've heard. And they are removing machinery and they're moving it as fast as they can, both of which are criminal fines and you can't let it happen and you are letting it happen. You know, I mean, I'm notifying you that you're letting it happen. So, look, all I want to do is this.

• 28:52Speaker 10

  I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have.

• 29:02Ezra Klein?

  And it didn't end there, with state after state refusing to bend its results to Trump's whims or beliefs. Trump then demanded his Vice President, Mike Pence, refuse to certify the election. Pence certified it anyway. When a mob stormed the Capitol chanting in part, "Hang Mike Pence",

• 29:27Ezra Klein?

  Trump did nothing. He watched it on television. Even now, knowing everything we know about that day, the people who died, the people who were injured. How close we might have come to a massacre in the halls of Congress. Here is how Trump describes it.

• 29:46Donald Trump?

  The Vice President, I disagree with him on what he did. I totally disagreed with him on what he did. Very importantly, you had hundreds of thousands of people come to Washington. They didn't come because of me. They came because of the election. They thought the election was a rigged election, and that's why they came. Some of those people went down to the Capitol. I said peacefully and patriotically, nothing done wrong at all, nothing done wrong. And action was taken, strong action. Ashley Babbitt was killed. Nobody was killed. There were no guns down there. We didn't have guns. The others had guns, but we didn't have guns.

• 30:22Ezra Klein?

  What is remarkable to me about Trump's answer, which Trump just gave last week at a Univision Town Hall, is it, it doesn't even serve his interests. He needs to reassure people about this. And that's the problem with lacking the restraint that most of us have. That restraint helps us act strategically, carefully. When I described the way politicians calculate their answers earlier, I wasn't insulting them. There is a reason they do that. When J.D. Vance showed up at the vice presidential debate as a kinder, gentler, more accommodating version of himself, all that anger and contempt sanded off, he did that for a reason.

• 31:07Ezra Klein?

  He inhibited himself to achieve his goals. But Trump has no ability to do the same. That's why he lost the debate with Harris so decisively. When he is pressured, when he is emotional, he can't stop himself. He can't inhibit himself. Here he is on Fox and Friends, being lobbed an easy question, a softball, about making nice with Nikki Haley, whose help he could really use right now, whose help has been offered to him.

• 31:36Speaker 11

  She wants to help. She said, if he calls me, I'm there. You guys used to be tight. In the last 18 days, will you call her and say, come out with me?

• 31:45Donald Trump?

  Yeah, I'll do what I have to do. But let me just tell you, Nikki Haley and I fought. And I beat her by fifty, sixty, ninety points. I beat her in her own state by numbers that nobody's ever been beaten by. I beat Nikki badly. I beat everyone else too badly.

• 32:02Ezra Klein?

  Look, if you want to see Trump lose the 2024 election, that answer is perfect. But if you want to see him win it, which he does, which his staff does, that answer is insane. The man cannot help himself. He is missing the part of his mind that tells him what not to say, what not to do. He may be cunning and intuitive. He may know how to work a room and command a crowd. He may know how to spy the weakness in another person and dominate them. But he cannot control himself.

• 32:41Ezra Klein?

  The best argument you can make about Trump's first term is that there was a constructive tension between his disinhibition and the constraints of the staff and the bureaucracy and the institutions that surrounded him. Yes, some of his ideas were bad and dangerous and unconstitutional, but they mostly didn't happen. They were stopped by his aides, by the so-called deep state, by the courts, by civil society. And the way he pushed, the way he didn't constrain himself to what other presidents would have done or said, maybe that led to changes that at least if you agree with him, were positive. Changes that wouldn't have happened under another president.

• 33:27Ezra Klein?

  Tariffs on China, a sharp drop in border crossings, NATO allies spending more on defense. But now the people around Trump have spent four years plotting to dismantle everything that stopped Trump the first time. That's what Project 2025 and the nearly 20,000 resumes reportedly vetted is really all about. That's what Trump's inner circle is spending its time and energy doing. Don Jr. told The Wall Street Journal, quote, "We want people who are actually going to follow the president, the duly elected president, not act as sort of unelected officials that know better because they don't know better." End quote. He went on to say that, quote,

• 34:12Ezra Klein?

  "We're doing a lot with vetting. My job is to prevent those guys." I've heard this from a number of people preparing for a second Trump term. Personnel was a problem in the first. Vetting for loyalty is now the answer. Don Jr. was one of the people who reportedly persuaded Trump to pick J.D. Vance. Back in May, before Vance was chosen, but when he was known to be under consideration, when he was clearly running for the job, he sat down with my colleague Ross Douthat, who asked him an interesting question. When, Ross asked, did Vance decide that he actually liked Donald Trump? Vance said that it was when he first met Trump in 2021. And Trump told him this story about being deceived

• 34:56Ezra Klein?

  by his generals, about troop levels in the Middle East. Vance said that the conversation made him realize Trump was deeper than he'd been given credit for. And Vance realized, quote, "I was deeply offended by this. Talk about a threat to democracy, the generals not listening to the President of the United States about matters like troop deployment." Vance is one of many now who have made it their mission to see that Trump's future orders are carried out, no matter their content. If Trump was constrained by others in his first term, Vance wants to make sure the same does not happen in his second term. And Vance has been arguing this for some time.

• 35:38Ezra Klein?

  Here he is in 2021, again arguing that the true threat to democracy isn't Trump trying to overturn elections, or Trump doing dangerous things in office, but Trump's will being frustrated by the bureaucracy around him.

• 35:52Speaker 12

  The administrative state controls everything, right? So to the point that like when Donald Trump wins, he can't even sometimes get his people in core positions of authority in the administrative state. It's like, well, do we have a constitutional republic? The founding fathers actually created a very powerful chief executive, a very powerful president, but if he can't even fire the people in his own administration, like, is this really a successful republic?

• 36:15Ezra Klein?

  The thing to see here is that Trump supporters want to have it both ways. They point to what didn't happen in his first term as proof that the same or worse will not happen in his second term. But they themselves are trying to remove everything that stopped Trump's worst impulses from becoming geopolitical or constitutional crises. Here, for instance, is Vance speaking at the vice presidential debate.

• 36:41Speaker 12

  Remember, he said that on January the 6th, the protesters ought to protest peacefully. And on January the 20th, what happened? Joe Biden became the president, Donald Trump left the White House, and now, of course, unfortunately, we have all of the negative policies that have come from the Harris-Biden administration.

• 36:58Ezra Klein?

  Fine, but then here at the All In Conference is Vance describing what would have been different if he'd been the vice president on January 6th.

• 37:07Speaker 12

  Do I think that Mike Pence could have played a better role? Yes, but I, again, the two premises that I take issue on is, one, Pence was not asked to overturn the election. He couldn't have. But two, the reason- He was asked to not certify it, sure. So would you have certified it last year for the third? Again, I would have asked the states to submit alternative slates of electors and let the country have the debate about what actually matters and what kind of an election that we had. You wouldn't have certified it, to be clear. I would have asked the states to submit alternative slates of electors. That's what I would have done again.

• 37:38Ezra Klein?

  I am not here to tell you that Donald Trump's age is not a problem. He would be, upon his inauguration, the oldest president ever to assume the office. Recently, he's begun canceling scheduled interviews, his staff apparently citing exhaustion. And we know that aging can make disinhibition worse.

• 38:00Ezra Klein?

  The August 2020 edition of the Journal of Psychology and Aging, maybe you read it, was entirely devoted to research on how the ability to control our behavior appears in many studies to decline as we get older. It's hard, for me at least, not to think of that research when I read that Trump's rallies have stretched to an average of 82 minutes, up from about 45 minutes in 2016. Trump's ability to energetically ramble on a stage is often used as evidence of his continued vigor. I think it's the opposite. I think his inability to stop rambling on a stage is evidence that what little capacity he once had to control himself is weakening.

• 38:43Ezra Klein?

  And what else are we to make of riffs like this one?

• 38:46Donald Trump?

  But Arnold Palmer was all man. And I say that in all due respect to women, and I love women, but this guy, this guy, this is a guy that was all man. This man was strong and tough. And I refuse to say it, but when he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there, they said, oh, my God. That's unbelievable.

• 39:16Ezra Klein?

  In, come on, the final weeks of a campaign? But Trump's age is not what worries me most. This was not a man possessed of much restraint in 2016 or 2020 either. What has changed even more than Donald Trump are the people and the institutions around him. The leader of the House Republicans is Mike Johnson, not Paul Ryan. Mitch McConnell is stepping down from Senate leadership. And while I do not consider McConnell a profile in courage, his successor will be more in need of Trump's patronage than he was. Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, for all their flaws, they're out, while Don Jr. and Laura Trump are in.

• 40:01Ezra Klein?

  J.D. Vance wormed his way onto the ticket by promising to do what Mike Pence would not. Elon Musk is doing everything in his power to buy influence, centrality even, in another Trump administration. The Supreme Court has given Trump immunity from prosecution for official presidential actions. Republicans have spent four years plotting to take control of the administrative state, to stock it with loyalists who would never, ever do anything to impede Trump, and turn the entire machinery of the government to Donald Trump's whims. Donald Trump is not cognitively fit to be president.

• 40:42Ezra Klein?

  The presidency requires an occupant able to act strategically and carefully. That Trump is not such a person is obvious if you watch the man. And so for years, his supporters have said, "Don't watch the man. Don't listen to what he says. Look at the results." But those results reflected the power and ability of others to check Donald Trump, to inhibit him when he could not inhibit himself. It is not just a man who is now unfit. It is the people and the institutions that surround him. Here is one difference between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

• 41:23Ezra Klein?

  The people who work most closely with Joe Biden, his top staff, his cabinet appointees, they have always said he is up to the job of the presidency. Fit cognitively, fit morally. The people who worked most closely with Donald Trump, many of his cabinet secretaries, many of them now say he is not, that he never was.

• 41:46Speaker 08

  I think that whoever we elect in 2024 has to meet a number of criteria. Number one, they have to put country over self. Number two, they have to serve with integrity, with principles. Number three, they have to be able to work with other people. They have to be able to unify the country and lead. And President Trump just doesn't meet that for me.

• 42:09Speaker 13

  I'm not going to vote for him. I did vote for him in 2016. I looked at the alternatives and concluded that it was worth voting for him, considering the alternative being Hillary Clinton. But after 17 months of serving in the White House, I cannot, in good conscience, do that again.

• 42:27Speaker 14

  I saw firsthand how unfit Donald Trump is to serve as president again because of his unwillingness to call off the mob that day and his refusal to this day to accept the results of the 2020 election.

• 42:38Speaker 15

  And between me and my former running mate, I cannot endorse President Trump's continuing assertion that I should have set aside my oath to support and defend the Constitution and acted in a way that would have overturned the election.

• 42:53Speaker 16

  The Republican Party today is, in my view, completely unrecognizable from what it was 10, 12 years ago. It's been completely warped and tarnished in Donald Trump's image, and he has essentially elected a body of enablers in both the House and the Senate to do his bidding.

• 43:10Ezra Klein?

  But to admit the obvious is to be excommunicated. It is to go from being one of Trump's amazing hires to one of his deranged enemies, a loser, someone he fired. And so he is now surrounded by yes-men and enablers, by opportunists and scam artists, by ideologues and foot soldiers. What we saw on that stage in Pennsylvania, as Trump DJed, was not Donald Trump, frozen, paralyzed, uncertain. It was the people around him, frozen, paralyzed, uncertain. Donald Trump knew exactly where he was. He was doing exactly what he wanted to do.

• 43:55Ezra Klein?

  But there was no one there, or no one left, who could stop him.