Filmed April 22, 2026
BILL KRISTOL:
Hi, I’m Bill Kristol. Welcome back to Conversations. I’m very pleased to be joined again today by an old friend, former colleague at The Bulwark, veteran reporter and commentator and analyst of all things political, AB Stoddard. We’re going to have a conversation about Donald Trump and his psyche, but not just his psyche. How it affects actual policies and what he’s likely to do over the next couple of years. And AB has been such a shrewd student of Donald Trump, Donald Trump’s psychology and soul, if he has one, and psyche, that she’s the perfect guest to discuss this. AB, thanks for joining me today.
AB STODDARD:
It’s great to be with you, Bill. It’s a favorite topic that you and I have indulged in for—
BILL KRISTOL:
We have.
AB STODDARD:
Lo these many years.
BILL KRISTOL:
We have. And people do regard it as an indulgence. I, myself, have at times. Let’s talk about what he’s doing. Let’s talk about the real threats, not psychoanalyze him from afar.
I mean, you made this point repeatedly, and you made it very, very well in the conversation we had almost exactly a year ago, actually, early April 2025, shortly after, a couple of months, three months into Trump’s— this term. And you made the point that his psyche really matters. I’m just going to read a few sentences. You said them. Again, this is early April. A lot of stuff hadn’t happened yet.
And you said, “You find among your friends and family and peers, people who aren’t following this that closely, that they think there are some guardrails that are going to magically appear like airbags in a car accident, that all this nonsense will stop,” but you said that’s not what happens. “It accelerates, and it grows because the more power you give him, the more he’ll take. And the less pushback that he gets, the freer he is. And so I think that what we’ve seen in the last couple of months is that he’s been given permission, and he will take it. That’s the way Trump is. He believes his pathologies create a story for him, that this is what people want. And it creates a permission structure for more destruction on his part.”
Very, I think, prescient because a lot of people were saying then, “Oh, the DOGE stuff, that was pretty crazy.” They told themselves they had to get off to a fast start at first 100 days, but of course it’s going to sort of revert to something more like normalcy or something more like the first term, at least. And you didn’t think that was likely. And you have, I think, very much been proven right. Explain why you thought what you thought a year ago and how your thinking has changed over the last year.
AB STODDARD:
Well, I think it’s important at the outset to say I think that Donald Trump has some kind of a disordered personality. Pete Wehner has been making this case for many, many years in very blunt terms in a way that very few people will even approach.
He wakes up every day with no sense of shame or remorse. He doesn’t regret anything he did the day before, the week before, the month before. And Newt Gingrich said in 2016, and I’ve quoted it in so many columns I should be arrested, that Trump wakes up every day just trying to find a new way to stay on offense. He’s animated by grievance. He can’t tolerate any criticism. He has no empathy, anyway, that’s demonstrable in any way. We knew he was unfit in 2016, and I want to go back to then because it’s different from now. He was a pathological liar. We knew that. We knew he had been accused of sexual assault. We knew he’d gone through six bankruptcies. We knew that he basically started a business. He went into his dad’s business with his dad’s money and was contemptuous of our system. He dismissed the Congress, the courts, the Constitution as these sort of irritating obstacles. He spoke fondly of Putin. He attacked John McCain and said, “I like people who weren’t captured.” He attacked a gold-star family or picked a fight with them. He said a judge that he had to deal with in one of his cases couldn’t be impartial because he was Mexican. He was impulsive. He was erratic. And everybody knew this in 2016. I mean, it was just plain as day. And as I like to say, he couldn’t have gotten hired stocking shelves at a vape shop. That was in 2016.
When we spoke last year, I think I had noted that I expected him to build a very robust kleptocracy for him and his family, which he did right away with crypto schemes and this and that. I expected him to enact the mass deportations and that they might get cruel. And that there would be a spectacle because he loves TV, and he loves spectacle. He’s very obsessed with optics. And that was a promise. I mean, at his convention, people forget this, but there were signs saying “Mass deportations now.”
And I knew that he would not end the war in Ukraine on day one. And I knew that he would pursue his enemies and that he had basically been very blunt about that, that he wanted to put them in tribunals. And there was going to be no end to the torture that he had lined up for James Comey and Clapper and Brennan and Liz Cheney. Everybody.
He’s very animated by that, by revenge, so we knew that was going to happen. He comes in, and I, like I said last year, was very surprised by bringing Elon Musk in as a major governing partner who seemed untouchable and above cabinet secretaries. Whole DOGE thing was extremely chaotic and destructive. And he likely got away with taking this trove of federal data, including, potentially, people’s social security information. Musk is in a fight with other leaders in the AI space. And this is crazy with this, but Donald Trump just gives him completely the open door to do what … He’s rampaging around the government.
Trump is threatening Canada and Greenland. He pays El Salvador to take his deportees to a third-party location. I did not see this coming. And there was just this kind of mania to it all that was more intense even than I had predicted. And I had said, “You elect this guy, we’re in a permanent dictatorship with a madman who is,” … He was only curbing himself in the first term, and you and I spoke about this a lot, because he wanted to get reelected to a second term. But in a second term—
BILL KRISTOL:
And because he was curbed by people who he—
AB STODDARD:
Right. Exactly.
BILL KRISTOL:
… appointed, don’t you think? I mean, the internal guardrails were pretty substantial. The Madisons and the Espers and the Kellys, but of course he learned from that, right? I mean, that’s one of your points.
AB STODDARD:
Right, he was going to only have loyalists. Susie Wiles looks like this person who is somehow setting off the airbags, but I think we’ve learned that that’s not the case. The extent of the tariffs, the destruction of the East Wing, and the sort of takeover of the Kennedy Center and destruction, ultimately, of the Kennedy Center, the invasion of Venezuela, trying to make it a client state, and launching a war with Iran.
Last year, I was concerned about the pace and the acceleration. And obviously this year it’s just so much worse even than doomers like me were predicting.
BILL KRISTOL:
No, that’s important. You said, in fact, one more sentence of yours I’ll read. This is, again, April 3rd, 2025. “I think people need not to underestimate the fact that things could be much, much worse in three months or a year,” which, again, was not the conventional wisdom, and I think you’re right. Let’s talk a little bit more specifically about both the psyche and then some of a couple of these areas where I think it’s so evident, the retribution, and I’d say the war in Iran may be the most dramatic as we speak here on April 22nd.
But on the psyche side, what became more pronounced? I mean, he’s got grievances. He’s got narcissism. He’s got megalomania. He’s got a lot of things going on in that psyche this. What strikes you the most?
Well, what strikes you the most? Let’s just put it that way.
AB STODDARD:
Before we get to the war, I mean, I think it’s important to look at this man. It’s really fascinating, in a way, that the best part of his career, the best decade of his life, happened after he turned 70. He entered his father’s business. He had his father’s money. He blew it. He had all these problems. It was just of just he was just on a branding tour for his career.
He gets elected President of the United States. He tries to overturn an election. I mean, steal an election. Overturn the government. I mean, he crawls his way back to power. And he arguably pulls off the greatest political comeback in American history, or he gets to wake up every day thinking that.
The chase has been really energizing him. Imagine the chase is almost 10 years. I mean, because he decides to run for president in 2015, and then he wins. The public takes him back in spite of all of this, and he is the most famous person on the planet. And this is his. This is not Fred Trump’s. This is his. And he now has these two, I think, problems simultaneously. One is the chase is over, and our human mind is obviously wired for the hunt. And when we fulfill our goals, they’re often dissatisfying. And then he’s turning 80. And Donald Trump has really outrun, I think, his sense of mortality for all this time because of his disordered personality. He’s in charge. He has things to vanquish. He has people to undermine and conquer. And all of a sudden, it’s like, wow, he has to turn 80 in June. And he’s in the second year of his term, and the midterm elections are approaching. And traditionally, that’s when the presidential election starts, right after November of this year.
Is he going to be sidelined? I think all of the plaque [inaudible], this branding binge he’s been on with everything he’s trying to have put in his name and build, the ballroom, the arch in front of Arlington Cemetery, all of this I think is of a piece with the war or with the military adventurism going into Venezuela, believing he could replicate that and duplicate it in Iran. It’s a way of trying to cement his state permanently as a dominant figure in history because he knows he’s going to die. And he hasn’t really been wrestling with that. And I think that suddenly he is.
And I see the conduct of the war has been a disaster. We can get into that. But the attacking of the Pope, the depiction of himself as Jesus, this is an escalation, I think, that is coinciding with these things that are bothering him, which is the chase is over. He has to turn 80. He has some visible aging. The ankles are swollen. It indicates something circulatory. He has these hands. Maybe he’s getting something in his hand. It’s always bruised. He’s falling asleep in public. And at most of his public events now, Bill, he’s seated, which was never the case before. He was at podiums. Something is happening that it’s really humbling him. I wouldn’t use that word. I’ll take it back. It’s upsetting him, and it’s on his mind. It’s in his head. He went on a long description recently about how he can’t fall down the stairs.
BILL KRISTOL:
I guess what you’re saying is that in normal people, if I can put it this way, often the notion of mortality makes you more humble or makes you focus on certain—
AB STODDARD:
What matters.
BILL KRISTOL:
What matters. Family goals. Maybe it does sometimes make you want to wrap up some things, that you’re two-thirds of the way through. In him, it does seem to be, I think you suggested, it has increased the sort of narcissism or the megalomania in a really marked way.
Jonathan Karl said in a conversation we had about a year ago, I’m sure he said this in the book, too, that he thought the assassination attempt had also had an effect on Trump in this respect, the mortality side of it. I don’t know if it’s that or if it’s just the age. Certainly, though, I think your stress on the comeback … I mean, it was remarkable. It is one of the most extraordinary … After January 6th, 2021, to come back and dominate his own party or to get away with it, not get convicted after being impeached, come back and win this nomination, win the presidency, I mean, it’s pretty extraordinary. And I guess maybe the combination of the mortality and that success, if you want to call it that, and I guess one has to call it that, that’s pretty striking, I guess, for someone with a psyche that’s already disposed to certain aspects of narcissism and megalomania and all kinds of other things, right?
AB STODDARD:
Also, the lame duckness of it all is very threatening—
BILL KRISTOL:
Well, that’s the other side of it. Yes.
AB STODDARD:
He needs his next conquest. He needs another chase. George Conway and I recommend everyone go back and reread it. Did an exhaustive piece about his psyche in The Atlantic in 2020. And I went back, and I reread it. And he of course has the DSM, the clinical definition of malignant narcissism and sociopathy and everything. And it’s basically, once you have a grandiose sense of self-importance, and when that is threatened, you can really lose touch with reality. I mean, he cannot be irrelevant. This idea of how to create ways in which he remains relevant is, I think, what we’re seeing in a manifestation of new attempts at conquest, drama, storylines, victories, statues, bridges, whatever. I see it really getting to him that he feels that he’s aging, Bill, but that people are going to start to move on.
BILL KRISTOL:
That’s so interesting. It’s a weird combination, maybe it’s not weird, of this sort of narcissism and megalomania, but also a kind of … Maybe desperation’s a little too strong. But anxiety about, as you say, lame duckness, his own age, first of all, and secondly, the fact that he is… Well, he is or is not a lame duck. He is, by normal standards, a lame duck, since this is his second term.
AB STODDARD:
Right. He’s supposed to be.
BILL KRISTOL:
And maybe we should get right to this because I was going to talk a little more about Iran and about the revenge stuff, but we can come back to that a little. I want to stay on this because you’ve hinted at it. What does this say about him going forward? I mean, does the acceleration continue in general? Does risk-taking get more serious? Does he get chastened? He could still adjust to reality a little bit. The TACO-ing on the tariffs. He’s somewhat responsive to the market, it seems, even in the Iran war, which I think is a case of him sort of slightly megalomaniacally thinking he could do it in Venezuela. “Did it in Venezuela. I can do it in Iran.” He has adjusted a little bit because of oil prices and didn’t go forward with the most grandiose things he could have done or the most extreme bombing, at least yet as we speak on April 22nd, and certainly still seems to think it’s not a good idea to send in ground troops as a certain kind of check your internal guardrail there. But do you think, I mean, leaving aside maybe the particular case, which is fast moving, I mean, do you think this continues to accelerate and chug ahead? Does it get more extreme, both in terms of some policies he might pursue, Cuba, Greenland and stuff, but also then in terms of what it means for the elections in 2026 and 2028. So that’s a lot on the table. Take whichever part of it. Take whatever part you want first and we can go back and forth.
AB STODDARD:
Okay. I can take it. I’m prepared with all my lists, because with Trump, you have to… Look, there was a lot of pushback to his depiction of himself as Jesus, his threats to obliterate a civilization, genocide, and his attack on the Pope. They all came really within days of each other. Trump loves that drama. I mean, on two days after Easter, on Tuesday, April 7th, Trump had the entire world watching clock countdowns on TV because remember maybe, Tucker Carlson was concerned about people having him set off nuclear war. He loves this stuff. So a lot of it is, I think a lot of the Iran war stuff feeds his need for this TV show, but he is obviously getting nervous. And there’s been a lot of leaking, which wasn’t happening for the first year. People are kind of panicking about how incoherent and inconsistent his messaging is.
He’s not had real objectives that were clear at all. He’s flailed around. “It’s over. It’s an excursion. We already won. It’s going to be over soon.” He calls reporters on the regular to sell his progress and then tells them things like a deal is imminent and it’s not true. This is all like I’m trying to explain how erratic his conduct is. His prosecution of the war has been really disturbing to me. And I think to people, serious-minded people. And I don’t know how closely the American public is paying attention, but—
BILL KRISTOL:
No, but his numbers, his popularity, his approval is dropping.
AB STODDARD:
Right. It’s like two-thirds above—
BILL KRISTOL:
Most presidents go to war, and even if it doesn’t go great at first, there’s a rally to the flag. This is the only case I think we know of almost where that hasn’t happened. And it’s the opposite has happened. His numbers have gone down both on the war itself, but also on the economy, which is the gas prices, which is related to the war. Anyway, I do think I’m a little struck that the public, including some of his own supporters, see some of what you’re saying, right?
AB STODDARD:
Right. They do. And he’s starting to know that. So he has really done though really terrible destruction, Bill, to whatever remaining credibility our government had. He irascibly screws over our allies by entering into a unilateral war of choice without warning them or engaging them. And then as a result, he’s so furious that they won’t play ball when he gets panicked in a corner that he’s really doing even more lasting damage to NATO. He has said that, “The Iranians have a new regime president,” that’s in quotes. The president hasn’t changed, and the Ayatollah was killed, and now his son is even more of a hardliners and is in charge. And I think that Donald Trump is confused about the difference between these two things. He told Jonathan Karl of ABC News a few weeks ago when Jonathan asked him about whether or not the Iranians at that point were considering charging a toll at the Straight, if that was okay with Trump. He says, “We might do it together in a joint venture. It’s a beautiful thing.” So what I’m paying attention to as he does this is, and he clearly has exhibited desperation, which I think advantages the Iranians and motivates them to wait him out more. But he continues, we’re recording on April 22. And last night, he sends out these tweets all the time. “Iran is collapsing financially. They want the Strait of Hormuz open immediately. They’re starving for cash, losing $500 million a day, military and police complaining that they’re not getting paid.” And then in capital letters, “SOS.” This is an attempt to sell what he’s doing to the American, to a domestic audience. It’s not an attempt to convince the Iranians. And he’s failing miserably at convincing the American public, particularly members of his coalition because this is the opposite of what he campaigned on for years, that this is a worthy endeavor and that he really is approaching an actual deal.
No one believes any of this. And so these manic messages that he’s sending out, including last night, that don’t worry, they’re demolished. Anyway, I just see it as increasingly disturbing. I think he does want it to end, but he certainly doesn’t look, Bill, like he knows how to end it.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah. It could end anyway, incidentally though, because the Iranians might have an interest in it. And there are a lot of other players who have some interest probably in opening the Strait, the Chinese and so forth. Well, let’s get… Okay, so whatever happens in the war will happen. What about, he’s going to be president for almost three more years, well, I suppose. So where do we go on this? And I’m particularly interested in what you’ve talked about some before and you talked about last time we spoke, which was you’ve been a longtime believer that he isn’t just going to watch the competition to succeed him and preside graciously over a final two years in the White House and so forth. But talk a little bit about that in terms of what he does over those two years, and especially about the elections of 2026, but especially ’28, I guess.
AB STODDARD:
Yeah. Well, he has said things in the past. We know this. This is the last time you’ll have to vote. He has said that Republicans need to “take over the midterm elections” in certain places. His government is working vigorously. And I commend the ProPublica reporting to everybody who’s interested in this topic about what the federal government is doing to sort of meddle in the midterms. His attempts are out in the open to destroy mail-in balloting except for members of the military. They’re trying to create a… I won’t go through all these boring details, but they are making a very, very concerted effort for ’26. Now, that may or may not fail, but I think he’s very interested in not having a Democratic House and going through oversight hearings and investigations. I think he’s not interested in having the hassle of potentially a Democratic majority in the Senate.
So he, on the one hand, is often quick to say when Republicans lose a special election or any… He says, “Well, I wasn’t on the ballot. When Trump’s on the ballot, we win.” So if they have a bad midterm, he’s going to say that. But I think he is going to try to cook it. And he has people around him telling him, “Boss, we absolutely can do that.” Because that’s what people tell Donald Trump, is that they tell him what he wants to hear. And so his government has recently gone in demanding to see ballots in Arizona, Michigan, Georgia. I mean, all sorts of really appalling things are going on. And so that’s what I’m watching for 2026.
I think it’s very clear, I mean, he set the stage a few times by saying, “Oh, I don’t know why. Even when you’re the best president that ever served in American history ever, the opposite party does better in the midterms. It’s such a mystery.” He’s kind of getting ready for the slaughter, but he— I don’t think is going to take this line down. They can do things like depress the vote in advance in certain swing districts with disinformation, confusing things about where you vote. They can have strange bomb scares or closed roads in certain places in ICE at the precincts. They can—
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah. But that’s… I mean, yeah, I think he could do all that, but that’s more standard, if I could put it this way, authoritarian stuff. I mean, Orban is not a deranged psycho person, so far asone can tell. He’s just an authoritarian, and this is exactly what Orban would do, which does not mean we should not be extremely alarmed that we’re going down an Orbanist or if Trump would like to take us down an Orbanist path, which Hungarians have seemed to have at least for now liberated themselves from to their credit. So I think that’s part of it, as you say, and I think very much worth that warning, but I’m more struck by what you think he might do, and this is driven a little more by psychology, I’d say, than by rational fear of oversight in ’27, ’28, or maybe it’s also rational fear of what people would learn.
But I mean, can he sit in that White House, he can tolerate, as you say, I think a loss in ’26 to some degree, because he can say, “I wasn’t on the ballot.” The House Democrats can try to do it. I think the Senate would be bad for him to lose, but the House Democrats can do some oversight hearings. They’ll mostly ignore them. They won’t testify. They won’t testify honestly. The Justice Department’s not going to enforce any subpoenas. That stuff I think is all within the category of he would much prefer it not happen and will do a lot to put a thumb on the scale that it not happen. But I think what you’ve been so convincing on is how radical he could get in ’27, ’28 when it’s about him.
AB STODDARD:
Yeah, so I was getting to that.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, I just…
AB STODDARD:
I don’t think he has any intention of leaving, Bill. I think that there are two paths for him. He does not want to fall apart in public. And that sense of pride, if we use that word with him, that he is going to make a calculation at some point. Can I serve and walk across stages, make speeches, be as visible as he wants to be, which he really needs. I mean, he needs to be on camera as many days a week as he can. He needs this. So it’s a strange calculation, but I think he will make the calculation that he cannot run again if he’s feeling that he’s aging too quickly for a second term. He has no intention, I believe, of having any kind of successor that’s not in his family. So he’s either going to find a way to try to run for second term or cancel the election or do something very radical, which is not beyond him, or he’ll pass it off.
And I think the only people he trusts are Jared Kushner and Don Jr. And his daughter, I don’t think Eric, the other son. So the kleptocracy, the money that they’re making, the most money he’s ever made in his life is on the Republican Party. He’s not, and Jonathan Last at The Bulwark has made this point a million times. He’s not going to walk away from that. And the two things that soothe his demons temporarily are adulation and money. And so the idea that he’s going to give that up is absolute lunacy. So people say, “Oh, he’s talking to donors about whether Marco Rubio is more compelling and a better successor than J.D. Vance.” Well, I mean, Marco Rubio is a wimp who’s letting Jared Kushner run foreign policy while he’s Secretary of State at home. And he once made fun of Donald Trump’s hands. He’s using Marco Rubio to undermine Vance, and that’s what he’s doing.
He doesn’t intend to have either one of them take over the operation of potentially making kajillions of dollars. So I don’t see him walking off the stage. I don’t see him ceding the spotlight. And if he doesn’t do it himself, if he feels that he can’t, I think the only people that could replace him are the members of his family.
BILL KRISTOL:
It is striking that some of these recent polls—Jonathan wrote about this—show Donald Trump Jr. now second. And of course, that’s not with a Trump endorsement of Donald Trump Jr. He’d have to explain why he’s endorsing his son, why others aren’t up to it. That would be a little complicated. But so I think you’re saying, I mean, there’s both the kind of kleptocracy side of it, which is very important. I think both in the sense he wants to keep on making money, but also he doesn’t want to have what he has made endangered by a new administration coming in and saying, “Actually, you can’t do this with crypto anymore,” and turning over the rocks.
I think one thing that helps him in that, I’ll just put this on the table, you’ve been following student of administrations, not just the Trump psyche. There are now a lot of people who are invested in this. This was not true in 2020. I mean, Bill Barr and Mike Pence, they all wanted to win, I suppose, but they could go back, Mike Pompeo, to the private sector and to think tanks and do their thing, and they didn’t feel like a existential investment in staying in power. I don’t know that that’s true of Kash Patel and Pete Hegseth and all these people. If someone comes in and turns over the rocks of what they’ve been doing, but not just the famous ones, second, third, fourth tier, it’s so pervasive, don’t you think, in this administration that I feel like there’s a lot of people who would go along with an attempt to rewrite the 22nd Amendment, anoint Don Jr., find a reason to postpone the elections.
I mean, stuff that seems pretty radical and beyond the pale right now, but I don’t know. I wonder how much… He would have more ability to make that case, I should think, internally first, and then presumably externally to the Republican Party. I guess that partly depends on his polls and stuff, but than we’ve assumed, I guess is what I would add to the psychological side of it that you’ve focused on. But yeah, can you imagine him, this is an honest question, not a rhetorical one, could he sit in the White House in 2028 while Vance, Rubio, Tucker Carlson and eight other people, six other people, Ron DeSantis, campaign in Iowa and New Hampshire?
AB STODDARD:
And then go to the RNC and hand it off to them?
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah. No, right?
AB STODDARD:
And it’s just people have not been paying attention to this man if they believe that he’s going to do that. And so we just have to grapple with the fact that… Father Time is going to be the decider, but if he is able to get around and maintain some modest level of vigor, performative vigor, he’s going to… And he’s had it for a long time. I mean, he’s a man who comes from good genes and he doesn’t sleep at night. I mean, now he’s falling asleep in public for the first time, but until this happened, he was in pretty remarkable condition, but he’s losing it. He’s saying that his uncle taught the Unabomber at MIT. This is chronologically impossible. He says that his father was born in Germany. I mean, his brain at times is soup and you can hear it when he’s talking. So he is getting worse. And I think that he’s grappling with whether or not it can be him or he has to pass it off to a kid.
BILL KRISTOL:
But he can still talk for quite a while and do his riffs. And they’re a little worse than they were a few years ago and considerably worse maybe than 10 years ago in terms of coherence and level and kind of, as you say, a little soupiness. But they’re not… I don’t know. I think people sometimes overstate how… He’s still pretty impressive in a certain way, certainly for someone who’s almost 80. And he has a lot of stamina. He falls asleep occasionally in public, first couple of minutes. But I was in the first Bush White House and Brent Scowcroft, who was, I suppose, in his late 60s at the time, but worked unbelievably hard. But occasionally it was a joke, Bush would make a joke, he’d doze off at some boring cabinet meeting where they were talking about education policy and he didn’t have… And it wasn’t his thing, for a minute.
So I think people… I’m struck… You mentioned very quickly, you’re shrewd about this. Analyze this for me. I’m struck that he has this whole riff that he likes to say somewhat surprisingly about how, “It’d be a huge story if I slipped or stumbled, coming down from a plane. And so I’m very careful. I take it slow. You know what? I know it’s in my interest here, and I don’t need to be the fastest guy off the plane.”
Well, that tells me… I mean, it’s interesting that he says it in a way, because you think there’s a certain kind of pride that makes you pretend that you’re not worried. Biden was more this way, “I’m as vigorous as anyone. I can jog off that plane and ride my bicycles around Rehoboth and stuff.” But Trump’s saying that shows that he’s thought a lot about this.
I think it very much confirms your point that the mortality and weakness is very much on his mind, but he’s also thought a lot about how to handle it or disguise it. Now, walking slowly down the steps of a plane is not the deepest thinking in the world. And ultimately, it gets trumped by genuine medical developments, obviously. But I was sort of struck by… I think that fits your thesis that he’s very concerned about how he looks, but is also not stupid in a certain way about how you adjust yourself the way many elderly people are, right? If you’re in public, you adjust what you’re doing to what you can do in a way. He’s not crazy about that side. He overestimates other aspects of what he can do but—
AB STODDARD:
Exactly.
BILL KRISTOL:
…the physical side, he’s pretty alert to what seems to be, right?
AB STODDARD:
And that’s why I think he’s having these events. He’s seated at most of the events now, and that he’s seated in the Oval Office all the time. I’ve just noticed a lot of more sitting.
BILL KRISTOL:
Interesting.
AB STODDARD:
And then he said, when he was talking about the potential to fall down the stairs, he said, “It’s not our president. We can’t have it. I’m careful when I walk downstairs, I’m on stairs. I walk very slowly.”
And just what you said, I mean, he’s feeling physically vulnerable when he’s going down those stairs in a way he didn’t… I noticed a big difference, Bill, between the summer of ’24 and now. So a year and a half later, I noticed a difference in his… He was on his feet all the time. He would get tired and slurry, but I think that, again, he could be doing okay right now, but he doesn’t know how he’ll be doing in ’28. So these things can start to accelerate more quickly.
And I think it’s making him feel… I think it’s increasing the mania. That’s what I think. And he doesn’t care. I don’t know, again, how he gets himself another term, but I think in his mind, this is his thing that he built, and no one else is going to have it. And he has convinced himself in spite of serious erosion in his coalition… He is doing everything to break them. They’re against the data centers, their electricity bills are going up, their gas is up, their food is up, their ACA subsidies were canceled. Most of Obamacare recipients are in red states. It’s one thing after another. And the tariffs, I mean, ruining many businesses, the farmers are devastated right now.
It’s amazing how he used to pay attention to that a bit, political popularity. He never talks about those polls anymore. He’s at 33 in, I think AP and 36 in Reuters Ipsos this week. And they’re now polling whether or not he’s losing mental sharpness, and those results are coming out. And he doesn’t seem to care. And I think it’s because he either is so in his head that he’s a messiah who’s come to save us, and he literally is the only leader we could ever have. And so of course he’s going to be able to carry on, and that is not beyond him. Or he’s feeling enough of a vulnerability that he’s making a plan for someone in his family, but he’s not going to hand the keys over to these former establishment senators like Vance or Rubio.
BILL KRISTOL:
No, I think the point about not handing over the keys to former establishment senators feels right to me. And as you say, when you’re Trump, you’re used to getting out of jams. People who say, “Well, how exactly is he going to do it?” He doesn’t know exactly how he’s going to do it, but you know what? That’s not irrational. He’s going to play things by ear. He’ll have to make a decision based of how to stay in power or how to keep the family in power.
AB STODDARD:
Right.
BILL KRISTOL:
He’ll make that decision based on what the economy’s going to look like a year from now. I think if a strong economy and “success” in foreign policy, i.e. no disasters, let’s just call it that, he just runs for a third term, and just dares the court to stop him, wins the first couple of Republican primaries, tries to do that before any case gets to the court. And then what are you going to do? Throw out the voters’ thing here? I mean, the will of the Republican primary election has to be done… Anyway, let individual secretaries of state might try to knock him off the ballot, then he can fight against blue state secretaries of state? I don’t know. I feel like he’s not foolish entirely in not having to decide all this right now. But if he can’t do that, then he gets into more extreme measures of really more coup type things and less third term type things.
AB STODDARD:
Right, right. And people are also underestimating that, that he admires autocrats. And the Orban example, he was very corrupt, but he wasn’t this crazy. And so the idea of canceling elections and just remaining, this is all… In his mind, he has nothing but possibilities. That’s the way his mind works. The sky’s the limit. And so there might even be a scenario where he says, “You know what? I’ve burned it all down and no Republican can win after me and let Vance try.” And Don, Jr. will go off and keep doing crypto schemes in the Middle East.
I don’t know, but he doesn’t intend to have a Republican succeed him and have it go well. That’s not what we’re talking about here. And to your point about the people who could facilitate these things, this is a completely different… The election denier movement has been moved into the government, and people who are left, very few people who are legitimate public servants interested in protecting our elections, they’re not even talking. They just put their head down and they’re not trying to stand up to these people.
So I guess ‘26 is a test case for him. He’s never really… Not a planner, but he has yes men all around saying, “Of course.” And he believes… I genuinely believe, Bill, that he believes that he is some kind of savior and he’s not just trolling people when he… I don’t know how many voters are… Very few Americans are on Truth Social, and I don’t know how many Truth Social posts make it to Instagram and Twitter and stuff, but the ones I see are beyond comprehension. It’s always about how he was brought here by God. And so, I don’t know that he has specifics down, but he certainly believes he is special and he craves that central… All the attention has to be on him.
And I believe that had Hillary Clinton won in 2016, Donald Trump was positioned… He was far more famous for having run, and he would have just sat on Fox three days a week just bashing her. But now? Now that he had this comeback, the idea of just acknowledging the limitations of our system, and you just go off like an old man into the sunset? I just cannot see it.
BILL KRISTOL:
And also, you can be a billionaire all you want and you can be, so to speak, and you can be an ex-president with Secret Service, which gives you a nicer lifestyle, more perks than a typical billionaire. Still, you’re still, at the end of the day, you’re another ex-president or you’re another billionaire. And you’ve got your Mar-a-Lago and you’ve got whatever else you want to buy. But it is not like being President of the United States. It is not like having Air Force One. It is not like having the White House and the entire federal government at your disposal. And I just think, I mean, yeah, why give that up if you don’t have to and if you don’t feel any obligation to? And he clearly doesn’t. I don’t think he feels much obligation to. He may feel he has to, as you say.
We discussed briefly the arch and the ballroom and all. Some people interpret that, it’s possible, I suppose, as kind of, “Well, he understands he’s going out and this is his megalomaniacal way of putting his stamp on everything.”
This is his kind of undemocratic with a small D version of memorials to himself. And he doesn’t know that other people… Deep down, he maybe thinks that other people aren’t going to build memorials to him the way they did to Washington and Lincoln and Roosevelt. So he has to build his own. But some people do interpret it in a way though, as I say, as a step out the door. But maybe not. I don’t know. What do you think?
AB STODDARD:
Well, I mean, he has to hedge for that possibility because he doesn’t know what’s going to happen to his heart and his circulatory system and his brain. And he’s turning 80, but I think he continues to hedge, because he has to grapple without the physical reality.
But the arch is such an autocratic thing. I mean, arches are for victories. We don’t do arches here. Veterans are suing him over it. It’s 250 feet, which the Capitol is 288. The Lincoln Memorial is 99. I mean, this is just so obscene. But the ballroom concerns me because he says, “It’ll be used for inaugurations.”
And then he writes recently that they needed to have a safe and secure, large scale meeting place, bomb shelters, a state-of-the-art hospital and medical facilities, and drone-proof ceiling. And he goes on and lists all these details about how protected it’s going to be, and he says it’s needed right now. And it just gives me a bad feeling about why he wants it so desperately and so soon.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, that’s interesting. And also, he’s got so much invested in that ballroom, The Washington Post edit piece the other day that he’s mentioned it every third day, I think every third day of his second term or of the last year or something like that, and maybe this year. But anyway, it’s on his mind. He interrupts speeches about other topics to discuss it. When he’s at the White House, he’ll point at it out the window or where it allegedly is going to be built, the old East Wing, and interrupt his own remarks to tell people, who are totally on a different topic, about it. It’s possible he just wants that. That’s his legacy. He’ll come back as ex-president in June of 2029 and look at it and say… And accept the thanks of a grateful successor that he built it in sort of the way, if you’re super wealthy, you endow something for 500 million dollars at a hospital or a university, and then you’re treated well when you visit and everyone bows and scrapes to you. But I don’t know, it feels like we’re staged beyond that with Trump, right?
AB STODDARD:
He just isn’t going to be a has been.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, he’s not going to—
AB STODDARD:
I don’t know how we—
BILL KRISTOL:
He wants to be the host in that ballroom. He doesn’t want to be visiting it once as an honored guest, which is sort of what—
AB STODDARD:
He’s the main character. And no, he’s not going to be a gray beard. Okay? That’s not him. And again, I think people have to just accept that Steve Bannon and other people are working furiously to devise ways for him to try to get around… State party chairs will happily put his name on the ballot. Again, I don’t know if it’s canceled the election and just be a dictator or try to go for a third term, because he is going to make the case that his second term was stolen and then non-consecutive and all this garbage.
But somebody just recently asked Sean Hannity about whether or not Trump… “Is Trump going to run again?” And he’s like, “Oh, the rules are different with Trump. There’s no rule…” That’s just the mentality in Trump world from the top down, which is like, “We don’t do rules, we don’t honor systems.”
So that’s very scary for people right now. It’s a very difficult time in this country, and they are counting the months until he leaves, really believing this will end soon. And any health episode could hasten that. But we are dealing with someone who’s going to have to… He is aging visibly and will age more, and that’s a reality. But in his mind, he has a messiah complex, and he doesn’t acknowledge limitations or systems. He’s contemptuous of them.
BILL KRISTOL:
I hadn’t noticed the Hannity thing… I mean, Hannity for all of his, what everyone thinks of him, is not crazy. I mean, he’s a much more kind of sane and just opportunistic version of a Trump supporter than some of them. And for him to say that… And he talks to Trump some, so that suggests to me that if he thinks it’s quite possible that Trump will do this, it’s not like Bannon who’s got a huge investment in it necessarily.
AB STODDARD:
But Bill, in the New York Times reporting about J.D. Vance cultivating all these donors from maybe 10 days ago, I noted that he is circumspect. He will not answer their questions directly when they ask if he’s going to run. And that in the reporting, it says that he and Susie Wiles had a discussion shortly after the inauguration that unlike Mike Pence, and Mike Pence raised his own money knowing Trump would run again—
BILL KRISTOL:
Right.
AB STODDARD:
… Trump is supposedly “term limited” out of another run, and Vance and Wiles decided that Vance should not raise his own money on the side. That is obviously clearly a threat to Trump. And so what are we talking about? Why are people treating it like it’s possible? Because it’s possible.
BILL KRISTOL:
No, that’s interest—
AB STODDARD:
The hats, the caps are not there to just troll people. Now, we could sit here and say they’re doing all of this to make him feel good. He just doesn’t want to feel like a lame duck so they have to just keep pretending the whole time that it’s viable. But I do think it’s an intention on his behalf.
BILL KRISTOL:
No, and even that says a lot. I mean, if one thinks of an [inaudible], if one spends a lot of time trying to reassure someone—well, an elderly someone—that he can still do A, B, or C and if that person then… I mean, it either it reassures him or it doesn’t. Maybe he’s just happy to have people say it and he doesn’t really, knows deep, deep, deep down, he won’t do it. But a lot of times when people say it to you enough, you decide, okay, I think I can do it.
AB STODDARD:
Oh, yeah.
BILL KRISTOL:
It’s like the 91-year-old CEO somewhere and everyone’s telling him, “You’re doing great. And yeah, there’s a little bit of, some people, some of the stock price has gone down a bit, but don’t worry, it’s all going to come back and it’s just this temporary thing.” And, “Okay, I guess I’ll stay here.” I mean, I think that’s the more, you’re right. It’s funny how much people want to resist that I would say. Don’t you find that? I mean, I don’t know.
AB STODDARD:
I think that, look, we’ve been through this incredible, I don’t even want to say rollercoaster because to me it’s just been all a nightmare. Like, no ups, just downs with this person for 10 years, now more. And people just really want to believe that there’s going to be a post-Trump, we have to go back to a system. We have to go back to not entirely the old way. Of course, everything’s changed, but that there will be some kind of revert to the norm and that, yes, the Republican Party has changed, and sure, but we will certainly go back to it’s time to… We’re going to keep with term limited presidents and maybe after this we’ll really get serious about not having an older one because after Biden and Trump, you know… I really think that people just want to hope for that. They want to believe it’s coming, and I don’t think we know what’s coming.
BILL KRISTOL:
No, that’s so important. Two quick questions, just the things that might, minor… Well, things that would corroborate what you’ve been saying, I think. I feel like the part and power is still underappreciated as a tool that Trump has just been willing to use utterly shamelessly. And again, if one thinks through the implications of that and assume the courts aren’t willing to challenge it, he sets up a situation where an awful lot of people are willing to do an awful lot of things for him over the next two years, right?
AB STODDARD:
Right, and that’s a good point that you made. The grift is like a spiderweb and it exists and is tangled throughout the entire government. And these people, I mean, they’re not going to… Kristi Noem is still in the government. I mean, Corey Lewandowski, all these people, these people are not going to go back to the country club in some wonderful little country lawyer position in town and with the respect of their, no, they got in on this. They potentially committed crimes. They’re making so much money and they’ve been promised pardons. And so yes, that greases is the path for all sorts of unthinkable things. He’s openly selling pardons to outside people, but the people who are the foundation of the government and do him favors and do some real dirty work. I mean, apply pressure here and there, rat on people, threaten people, all the drama that’s going on behind the scenes, as you can imagine. They’ve all been promised pardons and they’re in deep and they can’t get out. So what are they going to not do?
BILL KRISTOL:
Yes. That’s an important point. Final one I wanted to ask about is I occasionally make the mistake if assuming we’re in normal times. And when I make that mistake occasionally, I think, okay, he’s learned the Middle East, the Iran thing he knows at some level was a mistake and a mess. He’s hinted at that when he blames Hegseth for it and stuff. And so maybe he goes back to a more, you know, in the first term, which was pretty wary of too many foreign interventions, wants to look like a tough guy, wants to be the center of the world stage and all that, but basically doesn’t do things that he thinks are very risky.
But I don’t know. I think that may have been true in the first term, and also he was stopped from doing certain things or dissuaded by Madison and others. But I wonder now if Iran peters out, let’s just say it fails, but doesn’t fail spectacularly in the sense you get the Strait reopened and we withdraw and it’s no one serious thinks it was a good thing for the US, but he’s got his supporters saying it was and he doesn’t get officially rebuked by the Congress or anything. They don’t invoke war powers. I suppose that’s a possible outcome, is a possible outcome.
I don’t know. I once thought, okay, he goes back to deportations and grift and cultural wars and transgender, but I now think, don’t you think he does do something with Cuba or Greenland? I think that he tells himself, “Well, that was a mistake because it’s not the Western hemisphere, but Venezuela is great, so why wouldn’t Cuba be great?” Plus, a lot of people want, Cuba is a bad regime and people want to liberate that.
Then the Greenland thing is nuts, but I mean, there are some people who will sign onto something. It helps against Russia or China thing or something. I don’t know. I guess I now think… And I think that’s a ’26 issue. I feel like if in September we’re slogging along with D plus nine in the generic ballot and Trump at 36, I don’t know, maybe he does go for a liberation of Cuba or for the dramatic absorption of… expansion of the US with Greenland, do you think?
AB STODDARD:
I think we might see it sooner. Look, this is a man who clearly wants to wrap up the Iran excursion, and if you are the government of Cuba or Denmark, you have to be at the ready right now because you said this week, and I wholeheartedly agree that wouldn’t it… The Venezuela thing made him feel so good, he thought he could do this again in Iran. He really, for the first time is enjoying the video game part of it. They send him these clips and it’s very Mission Impossible and it’s very exciting and things blowing up, and so he tells people that he built the military and he brags about the level of destruction in Iran. He thinks it went on a little too quickly. He’s a little upset about this confusion about who they should talk to. He thought it was going to be really quick, but I imagine that the way out of Iran is to change the story and Trump is famous for that.
I would imagine he would immediately go in to something else with Cuba or Greenland to change the topic, and where he will tell himself, because this is what he tells himself, that it will be easy and it’ll be spectacular and it’ll be impressive. He’ll say that he solved another whatever, he’ll make up a new storyline because that’s what he does. So that’s his MO. I think it would happen very soon.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yikes.
AB STODDARD:
I don’t know when he can close up this Iran mess because I do, like I said, I believe the Iranians are, I think they’re incentivized to drag their feet and really make us feel the pain and the jet fuel prices and the fertilizer and the whole thing, really. But I think that the next conquests are on the deck, I would think.
BILL KRISTOL:
And with Hegseth at Defense, I mean, and we don’t know about the military, the uniform military presumably would, Greenland, that would be insane, and that would be something in the military. And what is the justification for the use of force there? I think serious military people would have to think about resigning and really objecting. But Cuba maybe is a little more Venezuela-like. But yeah, I wonder, this is what’s hard to tell from the outside, how much control does he have over his own government to do these things?
But I think people like me have thought a bit, not too much honestly, but friends of mine would say, who thought, well, look, I mean, the Justice Department’s a pretty big place and has a real culture and a real history. You can’t just take that over and start having them prosecute enemies. I mean, there’s going to be big resistance. There has been resistance. And lots of people have tried to resist and have been fired. Others have retired and resigned, but he’s got enough of people on board and enough new people coming in, young MAGA lawyers that there he is going after, as you say, various states and various people and now civil rights organizations and Blanche is happy to do it. And Bondi got forced out, but it didn’t hurt, didn’t slow it down. If anything, I’d say maybe the opposite.
Military defense is a little different. I mean, it’s considerably different. The military has a kind of institutional weight that lawyers at Defense don’t have and probably it’s a little harder to penetrate. How much has Hegseth been able to do though in 15 months in terms of promotions and rewards and punishments and firings, how much more you could do? I think that’s a very big question. It’s very hard to get visibility into. The military also has a very big culture of obeying civilian orders, which is good. We spent a lot of time inculcating that in the US military, but I don’t know. I really think that’s one of the big for me…DHS and ICE is dangerous. God knows the Justice Department stuff is very dangerous, but I think military is really the biggest one. And I think I don’t feel like I have a real visibility or confidence into where that might go. I mean, what is your sense of that?
AB STODDARD:
This is the part where I say such conspiratorial, scary stuff that you never asked me back. As for the DOJ, the mode, the MO of Trump is to just sue and lose in court later. Write the executive, he did that as a businessman. And then as a president, he writes these ridiculous executive orders and they’re just press releases. They’re just for the TV show. It doesn’t matter if they fail later. So it’s just—
BILL KRISTOL:
But the lawsuits do intimidate people and intimidate other people.
AB STODDARD:
Exactly.
BILL KRISTOL:
No one wants to give the, other side of that, right? Yeah.
AB STODDARD:
So even if all of those attempts at prosecution fail, and some of them have really failed already in embarrassing ways, he wants to impoverish and intimidate people so they have to pay those legal bills. So that’s on track. Reversing the convictions of January 6th-ers and firing a bunch of generals who could later stand up and oppose you on grounds, moral grounds, grounds of that they swore an oath to the Constitution. And that makes me a little worried about what is going on there, what’s going on? He can conduct these military exercises, these kinetic operations, excursions, incursions, wars without having to fire all these generals and the top brass that he has.
So there are people, Hegseth was asked recently, “Why did you do this?” He said, “At the pleasure of the president.”
There’s people getting taken out for a reason, and he wanted to declare martial law and seize voting machines in 2020. So I just don’t think that people should comfort themselves that they have not seen the worst yet. And why? It’s one thing to pardon some… I don’t know, what is he doing? This idea that he has to have people that are super loyal and are ready to do anything without objections, whether it’s militias, that part makes me very concerned. This cleansing of the Pentagon, of people, the most upstanding non-sycophants of the utmost integrity and serious experience of people that we need has just really scared me.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yikes. What else have we, what have we not covered here? I think we’ve gotten, I hope we’ve got people thinking, but yeah, go ahead.
AB STODDARD:
I made a little list of things that I want people to remember because they can’t, of the things he’s gotten away with. And remember when he attacks the Pope and everything, he has gotten away with, as I said, the Access Hollywood tape, attacking Gold Star families, sexual assault accusations and an adjudication of sexual abuse in court, six bankruptcies, two impeachments, 34 convictions, January 6th. He colluded with Russia. There was no legal definition of conspiracy, but he colluded, obstructed justice in the Mueller probe. He took Putin’s side against our own government and intelligence community at Helsinki. That’s a limited list, it’s not a full list.
So when people say, “Oh, and he’s going to calm down now,” because he depicted himself as Jesus on the Orthodox Easter and threatened genocide. And all those good people in Congress told him to stop fighting with the Pope. I mean, Donald Trump has gotten away with things. It’s just the unimaginable. He gets away with it.
There’s no governor on his head when he’s concocting these schemes. I think it’s important people just try to tell themselves like, “He’s been chasing now,” and that’s not the case. It’s a mountain of stuff he continues to get away with. And each time he does, it makes him feel more powerful, and exceptional and different because no one else could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose one vote. That’s in his head. He knows what would ruin other political careers. He knows what would be on it, but he continues to be able to do whatever he wants, and the people around him are way too afraid in Congress and now sometimes on the courts to oppose him. So when I see him, I see someone who just doesn’t face limits that people are hoping that he does.
BILL KRISTOL:
That’s very well said, very interesting conversation really, and thought-provoking and chilling, but important. I really think, and I really thank you for doing this because a lot of people talk about his psychology, a lot of the very interestingly and intelligently, but I think you’ve really tied the psychological side to the practical side, to what effect it could have on what he does both in foreign policy, obviously in domestic policy in using the organs, the levers of power of government, and ultimately maybe in ’27, ’28, in terms of our actual democratic system. So really an interesting conversation, AB, and thank you for taking the time to do it.
AB STODDARD:
So cheerful. Thank you, Bill. It was wonderful to be with you as always.
BILL KRISTOL:
Great to be with you and thank you all for joining us on Conversations.
