Filmed October 21, 2025
BILL KRISTOL:
Hi, Bill Kristol here. Welcome back to Conversations. I’m very pleased to be joined again for the third time by Jonathan Karl, author of the new book, Retribution: Donald Trump and the Campaign that Changed America. And the book actually goes into the first two, three months of the administration. So gives us license to talk not just about the campaign, but about the administration. John wrote two excellent earlier books on Trump, after which we had conversations. The first on the Trump first term really on January 6th—Front Row at the Trump Show—I think that was called, right? And then the second in late 2023 on, what would you say, the early part, early and middle part of Trump’s comeback, I guess?
JONATHAN KARL:
Yeah, Trump’s exile. That was really Trump’s exile. Yes.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah. But that conversation and the books stand up well, because you really were prescient in seeing that he could come back, that it was more likely that he would come back probably than a lot of people thought, and that what the character of that comeback would be. And so thanks for joining me and us again here in October of 2025, 9 months into the Trump presidency.
JONATHAN KARL:
Yeah, thanks for having me. I hate to say it, it’s actually, this is book four on Trump.
BILL KRISTOL:
Oh, I forgot.
JONATHAN KARL:
So Front Row at the Trump Show, Betrayal, which was all about 2020 and January 6th—
BILL KRISTOL:
I conflated that with the first one.
JONATHAN KARL:
… and then…Yeah, yeah.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was after that that we did the first conversation. That’s four. So at this rate, I mean, he’s been president for five years, four books. That’s at least two or three more for this term, and then there’ll be the third term, so that’s another three or four books. Yeah.
JONATHAN KARL:
Yeah. This one almost killed me, so I don’t know.
BILL KRISTOL:
Is that right? Think if you’ll do a historical novel or something on some important campaign from the 1870s or whatever.
JONATHAN KARL:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
BILL KRISTOL:
So you have written… well, okay. I was going to say, you’ve written two books. You’ve written three before this one. I really am curious, as you reported the book, and it’s really an excellent read and also based on real reporting, many conversations with Trump himself, many with the people around him and then others. What surprised you? What did you learn or what didn’t you learn in a sense that you hadn’t expected about this last year and a half, I guess, of Trump’s political career?
JONATHAN KARL:
Well, I think first of all, the one thing that separates this book from the others is I also go into some detail, and I think I really wanted to set the kind of historic record for what happened with the Democrats as well. So I really spent a great deal of time tracking the Shakespearean drama surrounding Joe Biden and his demise, Kamala Harris, and that incredibly hopeful start and just kind of disastrous end. So it’s a multi-part play.
And I think probably the most, not just the most important and consequential election of our time, which I think this really was. We always say that that is the case with an election. I think this one really was. But also, frankly, the most interesting and wild campaign of our lifetimes. I think you’d have to go back to 1912 to find something with Teddy Roosevelt running as the Bull Moose to find anything remotely like what we saw here. But I focused on the idea of retribution from the start, so I can’t say this surprised me at all. I think in many ways, my previous book, Tired of Winning, which was really about Trump in exile and the way he’d left the White House as a disgraced pariah within American politics. I mean, there were so few Republicans that really wanted anything to do with him, elected officials at that point, which is why, if you remember when Kevin McCarthy went to visit him after he left, it was such a, “Oh my God, what is Kevin McCarthy doing?” Well, I mean, now you could say, well, Kevin McCarthy was prescient.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, right.
JONATHAN KARL:
I mean, they’re all like, he retook the party and came back even more powerful than he had been the first time. So I guess that’s the single most surprising element. It’s not so much that he managed this incredible comeback, but that he came back so much stronger than he was the first time around.
BILL KRISTOL:
I think that’s such an important point. I mean, and I’m not a big fan of Trump, but I will say, people… In a funny way, he doesn’t get enough credit for the comeback, don’t you think? Just as a pure analytical political success matter. I mean, who’s pulled off something like this? In America, you lose an election, presidential election, you go away typically. You lose followed by January 6th. That’s not much precedent for that, but everyone assumed on January 7th, and I would say I was mostly one of them, that, okay, well, that’s the end. I mean, it’s a comeback and crush everyone in the primaries, win the general election, and now govern, again, what everyone thinks of it, in a strong manner, let’s say, for these first nine months and get on awful lot… bending the system to his will. It’s pretty extraordinary.
JONATHAN KARL:
Yeah, and look, his first term, I mean, that was a victory that nobody saw coming, including Trump, and he didn’t have a plan. It was chaos, it was a lot of activity. But after four years, Trump left office and it was almost like he had never been there. Biden came in, whatever had happened was relatively ephemeral and it was like Trump had, it didn’t seem, any lasting impact on America. That is not the case now. He is doing things now that are, I think in many ways, fundamentally changing not just our politics, but in some ways our culture.
And he’s never been a big legacy guy. He’s so much in the moment. I remember in 2015 trying to convince him to allow me to embed some cameras in the campaign to do kind of like what Clinton did with the war room and have this later thing that would come on after that would document it all. And he had no interest in it. He was like, he’s in the moment, the moment, he doesn’t care about how it’s going to be seen later.
So he’s a little bit more focused on legacy perhaps, but I don’t think that is even the key, the motivating factor here. But he is taking charge in a way that he was unable to do last time and far beyond anything he did last time.
BILL KRISTOL:
And I’m curious about the retribution thing, which you discuss very interestingly in the book, which I think I would say you have a broad understanding of retribution. I mean, part of it is going after, first, Jim Comey or Jack Smith and people who he felt did him wrong and he wanted to get back at and punish. But it’s a much broader version of retribution, isn’t it? Not just these two or three or four or five prosecutions.
JONATHAN KARL:
Yeah, no, it’s much broader and it’s not just trying to annihilate his political enemies, but also to prove wrong those people that were his allies when he first came into office. And he came in, he had no sense of what Washington was like. He brought in Reince Priebus because he felt he needed some guy that understood Washington, although, I mean, frankly, Reince didn’t have a lot of Washington experience either. He had a White House council and Don McGahn later and Pat Cipollone who put on some guardrails about making sure that what the president was doing and what was coming out of the White House was legal. He had a cabinet that had some very distinguished people that had tremendous backgrounds and accomplishments, whether it be Rex Tillerson, who had run Exxon, or Jim Mattis, who had been a four-star Marine general, John Kelly, another four-star Marine. He had people of real accomplishment and who, frankly, reined him in or tried to rein him in, and he hated it at every turn.
His attorneys general, beginning with Sessions, who had been a judge and a US senator, and later Bill Barr, who had already been Attorney General, and these people tried to rein him in and he hated it. He resented it. And now he’s out to prove that he doesn’t need any of that crap and he doesn’t need expertise around him. What the hell? Let’s put Lindsey Halligan in charge of arguably the most important US attorney’s office in the country when it comes to counterterrorism. Who cares? She’s loyal to me. Pam Bondi. I mean, why not? Stetson Law School’s best. Let’s put her in charge of the Justice Department. I mean, at first it was Matt Gaetz even more. But it’s like it’s an effort to show that he was right all along and that all the power should reside right with him because he won.
BILL KRISTOL:
And how much of it, I mean, people like me, concerned about authoritarianism and autocracy and all, how much of it is what you just said, showing he was right and just he loves exercising power? And of course, if you have total loyalists who don’t have independent stature, it’s easier to exercise your own power. They don’t have any basis, they don’t wish to check you, and they have no basis on which to check you, no natural kind of support, you might say, in other areas that would cause senators to say, “Well, wait, Jim Mattis doesn’t seem to be on board with this.” There’s none of that, obviously, with Pete Hegseth or whatever. How much of it is sort of his wish to exercise power and how much of it is a vision of transforming the government and the president and the country in certain ways?
JONATHAN KARL:
I think there is more of a vision and a theory of the case than there was the first time around. But with Donald Trump, it is truly, I mean, the first book was called Front Row at the Trump Show, and I described Trump as the star of the Trump Show. He’s the executive producer of the Trump Show. He’s the chief publicist for the Trump Show. He’s everything. And on one measure, he was an incredibly successful by his own measure, and he became the most famous human being on the planet, and all the attention was focused in a way even beyond where we are now. But, I mean, when he first came in, it was like the focus was on him and on what was going on. And that ultimately, I think, is still where we are now.
But in establishing the idea that he is not just the center of attention, but he’s the one that has to control everything, there is more of a strategy of how he’s trying to reshape the country, but it’s not… You know, Stephen Miller’s got a plan, Steve Bannon on the outside’s got a plan that’s largely consistent, not entirely, but largely consistent with that. And that there is an apparatus and a structure around him that is not trying to control him and prevent him from doing destructive or outlandish things but trying to ensure that he’s able to fundamentally change the country, which is what I think they’re doing.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah. I’m struck by what you’re saying, and I’ve had this thought. The first term and the second term are really two different kettles of fish, right? I mean, he’s the same. He’s a little older and has learned a couple things, but basically, he’s pretty much the same, I think, psychologically and all that. But the guardrails are gone, and that’s partly due to his comeback and the victory and the clean victory, so to speak, for 2016 was a little fluke-ish with the Electoral College and all that, and wins the popular vote and all, and the Republican Congress, full of people who’re loyal to him, not Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan and so forth. So many reasons why the guardrails did so much less guarding of him, you might say.
But I guess I’m struck that other people, I thought you were somewhat rare in this, a lot of people see the continuity, I guess. For them, it’s Trump, and so we’re just going to keep going. He’s on a path. He’s been on that path for a long time. But I don’t know. I think you were struck in the last book that the “retribution presidency” would be very different from the first “showman presidency,” though he’s still a showman, I understand, and in the first term had plenty of retribution too. But the balance of the two is sort of different.
JONATHAN KARL:
And he’s always been aggrieved, and he always complained that he doesn’t get credit, and he’s mistreated. I mean, all of that has been a part of who he’s been since he came on the scenes in the 1980s, and I’ve known him since 1994 is when I first met him. And in many ways, so much of that is what it’s always been. But he’s got a much bigger chip on his shoulder now because of what he actually went through after he left the White House.
I spent a fair amount of time in the book early on kind of getting into the mindset and what was happening as he was facing his first criminal trial in New York. And I was in that courtroom, by the way, at some of the key moments. I was there when his former fixer, Michael Cohen, was on the stand testifying for two days. And Donald Trump had to sit there in that dingy, awful courthouse in New York at 100 Center Street, a place where literally when you walk in, you’re walking past rat traps on the outside of the building. The hallways are dark and dingy, the fluorescent light flickers. There are signs that say, “Hazard,” because they’re still removing asbestos. The elevators work intermittently. It’s just an awful, awful place. And that guy had to go there. He was the President of the United States. He was Donald freaking Trump. And he had to go there four days a week, week after week, and he was compelled to sit there silently in that courtroom. He had to stand up when the judge came in. He had to sit there and listen as Stormy Daniels is describing incredibly embarrassing things, even embarrassing to Donald Trump. He has to sit there while Michael Cohen is saying this horrible stuff.
I mean, he has to sit there and he can’t do anything. He has no choice. And this is happening. Obviously, he ends up being found guilty. Obviously, it was a really screwed up case from the first place. I mean, for people that really wanted to see Donald Trump held accountable, held accountable for pilfering classified information from the White House, held accountable for trying to overturn American democracy in a presidential election, who wanted to see him held accountable. The one place, the one trial that actually happens is about how he accounted for payments he made to a porn star who was… I mean, it’s just a… but that was a searing experience for him.
One of the more bizarre scenes that I learned about, this is just … people don’t really believe it, but I swear to God it’s true, I have confirmed up and down, is one morning before he’s going down from Trump Tower to Center Street, he’s meeting with his lawyers up in his apartment, the top of Trump Tower, and when it’s time to go, one of the elevators is out at Trump Tower, and the Secret Service says, “We cannot take the other elevator down. We need to walk.” So he has to walk down 58 flights of stairs. And this is a guy who famously doesn’t exercise at all. I mean, sometimes you see, he sometimes will drive the golf cart onto the green because he doesn’t want to walk onto the green. I mean, I don’t know if I can handle that. I don’t know if my knees would hold out. He does it without stopping because he doesn’t want to show any sign of weakness. He comes down and they’re in the motorcade going down to the courthouse and one member of his team says, “Oh, my God, that was amazing. I can’t believe that.” He’s like, “We should talk about that. I mean, could Joe Biden ever in his wildest dreams ever do that? Let’s talk about it. Look at you, my God.” And he shuts it down. He orders them all to swear to silence. Don’t you ever speak of this ever again. He doesn’t want to admit that one of the elevators was not working in Trump Tower.
BILL KRISTOL:
Oh, my God.
JONATHAN KARL:
But if you go back to that day, and I identify it in the book, he comes out to the cameras like he did every day down at Center Street to talk to the reporters and he begins his remarks by saying, “We’re going to be resting soon.” And he says, “I mean resting the case because I don’t get to rest. I never rest.” But it’s like this horrible experience. This dude has to go through all of this. And while that is going on, working its way through the courts is this immunity case at the Supreme Court. And the immunity decision, which comes after he is found guilty in New York, but is obviously affecting the federal cases, where Trump is given essentially almost blanket immunity for anything that could be remotely tied to his official duties.
He is now facing an election where he has the very real possibility of going to prison for the rest of his life or now, in part thanks to that immunity decision, becoming arguably the most powerful president in American history. I mean, you’re plotting out, that’s the way you’re seeing the world. Those are the stakes. I mean, he’s coming into power. He’s taken names. Even before all this, he’s already declared that retribution is what his election is about, but, I mean, more than ever before I’m going to get that power. And these, excuse me, can I swear?
BILL KRISTOL:
Yes.
JONATHAN KARL:
These fuckers are going to pay for what they did to me.
BILL KRISTOL:
No, that’s so interesting. I guess I’ve got to say, I watched, I read about the trial, I watched little snippets of it, and obviously I was thinking a lot about the politics of it. I didn’t think it was great for the Democrats that this was the one case that went to trial. Maybe we can come back to that in a minute. And Garland, so they ended up with the worst of both worlds. They weren’t aggressive on some of the other stuff and then this is the one that they look like they’re sort of persecuting him. Anyway, whatever, but I hadn’t really focused on how that must have affected him psychologically until I read your book.
JONATHAN KARL:
Day after day. And he’s not allowed to leave, so even during the breaks he has to go to this horrible hold room. I had everybody describe for me exactly the seat where they send out for the crappy food that he likes to eat, but it’s like he’s stuck in that awful building. And you know how he likes to… I mean, he wants gold around him, you know?
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, yeah.
JONATHAN KARL:
And so there are many things that he’s doing and changing that, but I think that you have to look at virtually all of it through the idea of retribution and proving to the world that he was right all along.
BILL KRISTOL:
Do you think the assassination attempts gave him a little more also the sense of destiny and fate and all that or not so much? He’s never been that kind of guy, really. Right? He’s not a deeply religious person, I think we could say, but I don’t know. But sometimes he talks about it a little that way. I wonder if it’s a little sincere. What’s your…
JONATHAN KARL:
Well, when he was shot on Saturday, of course in Butler, I was in Milwaukee getting ready for the convention and then we were all in what we call television special report mode. We’re on nonstop. I’m trying to call people to find out what happened, what was going on. I talked to Dave McCormick who was on the stage with him right after it happened. I reached out, I talked to Bobby Kennedy who had just communicated. All of this stuff was going on. And after the next day, I decide this is kind of a—actually, Monday morning because we’re in total no sleep, covering this incredible event—I decide that I’m going to call Trump. I had his number. Trump likes to talk to people and talk to reporters, but I had not done this before. And I’d known him for a long time.
I talked to him many times, but usually I would call somebody with him and say, “I want to talk to President Trump,” and they would get back to me, but I just decided I’m going to call him, and I certainly don’t think he’s going to answer. He’s just been shot. He’s about to start his convention. He’s trying to pick a vice president, a running mate. And I called him, and I left a voicemail, and I just said, “President Trump, I’m really sorry for what happened in Butler. That was just horrible. I’m glad to hear you’re okay and I’ll see you when you get to Milwaukee.” Boom, that’s it. Of course I didn’t think I would ever hear from him. And I’m sitting a few hours later that afternoon in Milwaukee on the ABC set. The convention has just gaveled in. The news has just broken.
He’s just announced that he’s picked JD Vance as his running mate and Vance is just starting to walk into the hall for the first time to kind of look things over and there’s all this energy and it’s all happening. And I’m there sitting next to David Muir, who is the anchor for ABC. And my phone rings and it’s Trump. And of course, the number’s not blocked, which is weird, too. It says Donald Trump, so I show it to David, so they know that in case we’re going on, I mean, I’m here, but I got to talk. And I ended up talking to him for about 12 minutes, which is an eternity at this moment. I mean, that is a long time. And I repeat my, “How terrible. I’m glad you’re okay, but what’s it like?” But I got to tell you, in that conversation I felt like the guy was really still comprehending the idea that he came that close to death.
You remember the famous Doug Mills, the New York Times reporter, the photograph of the bullet going right by, and you see the bullet. We talked about that bullet, and this is when he was saying that he was going to change the tone and more unity. All that went out the door. I mean, eventually that was all done pretty quickly. It lasted for a couple of days. A couple of critical days, but it didn’t last long. But I do think that it made him think about something he had probably never really thought about, which is his own death.
BILL KRISTOL:
But it made him, after those two days, I think more determined to press aggressively to put his stamp on everything, which could have been the opposite in other people, right?
JONATHAN KARL:
Yeah. Yeah.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah.
JONATHAN KARL:
I mean, his initial reaction was Biden called him and he told me he had a great conversation with Biden, he really appreciated the call. He said he ditched his convention speech. He was now going to emphasize unity. And actually, he kind of did for a few days, which not everybody did in that world. I mean, you remember JD Vance’s first reaction.
BILL KRISTOL:
Right. “They tried to kill him.”
JONATHAN KARL:
“They tried to kill him. First they tried to impeach him, now they tried to kill him.” But that was not Trump. And I think that actually mattered. I don’t know how you felt, Bill, at that moment, but I thought that the country could have come undone. And that if Trump had come out and said, “Those fucking Democrats tried to kill me and now we’re going to get them,” it was like— I felt it in Milwaukee. I felt the anger. Our team that was on the ground in Butler had people in that crowd going up to them and saying, “You people did this. This is your fault.” And Trump turned that off.
BILL KRISTOL:
That’s interesting. I hadn’t really thought of that. Yeah, you could really have had retributive, to use that term again, violence. Not ordered by anyone, but by individuals, by MAGA and more radical types even. And there wasn’t that much of that really, so yeah. I mean, that instinct of his I’ve got to say— the showman. But, I mean, genuine presence of mind and courage, you’ve got to say, I think to get up there with … I mean, seconds later, right? I mean, 20 seconds, I don’t know how many, but I mean, that’s not nothing. I don’t know. As I say, I’ve been pretty anti-Trump for quite a long time and I looked at that and thought, “Whoa, you got to be impressed.”
I don’t know. A friend of mine texted me and said, “The election’s over.” I’m not sure that’s really true because two months later it’s a different universe and Harris was doing well and she was ahead a couple points in the polls, but I wonder how much it did shape for a certain type of swing voter who had real doubts about the first term and doubts about Trump. But I don’t know, I think it’s—
JONATHAN KARL:
Look, I think it had a huge moment. And I went and I really reconstructed… I spent a lot of time on this, trying to really go minute by minute what was going on in Butler from every point of view I could find. And there was a treasure trove of information that I found. Publicly available but buried and nobody had looked through. And that was interviews with the Secret Service team that had been conducted by the joint house committee, the joint congressional committee that had looked into this. And they released a report that got some attention, but later when they dumped out the raw material, it was just kind of like nobody had really looked through it. And these Secret Service agents, the ones that were with him, the ones you see in that photograph that’s on my book, describing when the bullets are fired, and they basically jump on him and bring him down. And then they need to get him into the SUV to get him to the hospital, but they need to make sure it’s cleared.
They know that the shooter has been taken down, but they don’t know if there’s another shooter, so they have to protect him and keep him covered and take him into the vehicle and he fights them. He fights his own protectors and comes out and does that moment. That moment was incredibly dangerous. Imagine. I mean, now if we can see him, the cameras can see him, a sniper can see him, and he’s at his most vulnerable. So, I think it was an act of defiance. It broke every protocol that the Secret Service goes by to protect a protectee. And it was Trump’s finest hour. I mean, finest moment, I think, by far.
BILL KRISTOL:
No, and I would just say when I worked for Vice President Quayle, and thank God there was nothing like this really with him at all, really. But the instructions… But we went through the scenario, obviously, and a couple of times with the service, and the instructions were very clear. Now, you could ignore the instructions—as Trump did—but were, “you’ve got to let us cover you.” The key, if something happens, we don’t know, as you just said, what else might be happening and we need to make sure you were not exposed. So we will cover you up right away. We’ll jump on, you know, we’ll push you to the ground or wherever, depending where they are, obviously, or to a back room or something. And we will then, if we’re going to a car or to the car or something, we will shield you. I mean, I remember that word.
And this was sort of also telling someone like me, “Don’t get clever about this as the moment for him to step out and say a few words. No, we are getting him out of there with as little risk as possible. So yeah, he would’ve been briefed on this, of course. He may have ignored it, but he knew what they wanted, and he overrode them, so it’s pretty striking.
JONATHAN KARL:
And don’t forget what happened that night, which is Elon Musk endorses him almost immediately after. That’s probably the biggest endorsement we’ve ever seen in presidential politics because it came with, what was it, $238 million. And Bobby Kennedy endorsed him not long after that. And endorsements don’t matter, but I think if any endorsements matter, probably those two did. And it changed the way people… I don’t know. I’ve talked to John Fetterman about this, by the way. He’s another one who, Democrat in Pennsylvania. Obviously now the Republicans’ favorite Democrat, but he talked about how he could tell things changing in Pennsylvania after what happened in Butler.
BILL KRISTOL:
Interesting. Interesting, yeah. I mean, let’s talk a little… We focused on Trump and the book focuses on him and it’s really fascinating, and this conversation has been just fascinating. Psychologically, there are all these other people who are important, and you’ve mentioned two of them, I think, Musk and Kennedy. Neither feature, I bet, much, if at all, in the earlier books. I mean, they were not part of Trump world. It’s interesting thing, for a guy who’s supposed to be so… He’s got a small clique around him and all this. And some of them are like that. Obviously, some of them have been with him five, 10, 20 years and so forth. They had an ability to see how they could move up using him, if you want to think of it that way, but he had an ability to see who could be helpful to him.
And I mean, talk a little bit about their importance both for the campaign, but I’m also thinking of the administration. Musk obviously very important those first three, four months. Kennedy a surprise pick for sector of HHS. Surprise for me that he was confirmed and then we’ll get to maybe Vance… And Vance, the other pick, I guess that’s just those three were all from that window. And then we could talk a little about Miller and Bannon and stuff.
JONATHAN KARL:
Yeah. I mean, the Elon Musk, who, let’s remember, started first of all as mostly a Democrat, supporting Democrats in his life. And I think, by the way, a critical moment for Elon Musk was when Joe Biden holds an EV summit at the White House to highlight the importance of electric vehicles. And he invites Ford and GM and Stellantis and he doesn’t invite Tesla. I mean, in an hour they make more electric vehicles than all the others in their entire history had made. So he had a reason to be pissed off there, but he started as a DeSantis supporter. I mean, he was not a Trump supporter.
BILL KRISTOL:
Right. He hosts DeSantis in that ridiculous Twitter announcement. It kind of got screwed up, right?
JONATHAN KARL:
Yeah, yeah, but he dumped all that money, and I think a lot of that money was probably wasted. He was kind of the guy behind the ground game. I mean those million-dollar giveaways. By the way, one interesting thing about those million-dollar giveaways that I talk about in the book, remember he would say, “We’re going to have a lottery and we’re going to give away randomly.” And this would bring people in. They would sign the petition, and they would now be recruited, and somebody would get picked out of a hat and they’d a million dollars. Well, the DA in Philadelphia was saying this is an illegal lottery and therefore we are challenging you. It went to court the day before the election. I mean, too late to make a difference. And the defense from Musk’s lawyers was, “Actually it’s not a lottery— we know who the winner is going to be ahead of time. We’ve already picked somebody out.” So it was all a fraud. I mean, the whole thing was a fraud— but at least didn’t break the lottery law. But his role coming in, I mean, I kind of track… I spent a great deal of time in the book describing what happened after the election and the scene at Mar-a-Lago. And Musk is there on election night and then he never leaves. I mean, it’s astounding. He was there. He was sitting in on the big personnel meetings. So when Trump was interviewing candidates for attorney general, Musk is sitting there. It’s Musk, it’s Lutnick who’s running his transition, it’s Boris Epshteyn who is there. And then the candidates sitting across the desk. It’s just an astounding thing. He’s there when he’s having calls with foreign leaders, his first calls as president-elect, including with Zelensky, by the way. Zelensky has a call right after the election, and Musk is there, and Zelensky has the presence of mind to thank Musk for making the call possible, because Starlink allows him to get out. And then the way he came in, Musk is an incredibly important person and then became pariah almost overnight, which is another truth of Trump world. You can be right there at his side, his most important advisor or aide, or whatever—and Musk is more than any of that—and the next day, you can be sent into exile.
Bobby Kennedy, I spoke to a lot during the campaign. I’ve known Bobby Kennedy for more than 30 years. Full disclosure, I am very good friends with members of his family. I’ve spent a lot of time with him over the years. And I spoke to him at various times over of the campaign, including I called him when I had heard one of my colleagues, Aaron Katersky, had gotten a tip that Bobby was going to endorse Trump, and I was in Chicago for the Democratic convention. I was like, “Oh man, come on. Really? I know there had been speculation, but really? Bobby Kennedy, built his career as environmentalist, is going to endorse Mr. Climate Change as a hoax? This is really going to happen?”
So I called him up and had a pretty… what turned out to be a pretty contentious phone call with him where he wasn’t going to tell me anything, but I was like, “But I hear you’re going to be in Arizona, and this endorsement is going to happen tomorrow in Arizona. You’re going to be on stage with Trump.” He’s like, “I’m not going to…” I said, “So are you in Arizona right now, Bobby?” So he’s not answering anything, but he pivots to saying, “I’m not going anywhere.” So I asked him, “Well, what do you think of the convention here?” Because it was the Wednesday of the convention. It was all going very well. Democrats were energized. And he said, “It’s a coronation,” and he said, “and it’s all… It’s like she went from being the second coming of Christ…” No, “She went to being the worst candidate in the world to being the second coming of Christ, and it’s all your fault. You did this.” He’s talking about me as the media, not really as me personally, I don’t think, and he’s just going off against me.
But anyway, I confirmed it, he was endorsing. Obviously, he endorsed. We speak again a few times over the course of the campaign, including one day, it was Halloween, when he’s again back out in Arizona. I didn’t even know where he was. We had a story that was about to run that said that he was making recommendations for a whole list of people to serve in the Trump White House, should he be, in Trump HHS, and some very controversial picks for surgeon general, et cetera, and I called to see if it’s true and see if he’ll comment, or anything. And he kind of confirms the story to me, but then he starts to, again, go into the rant against the media and against me and against how could this happen. And he said, “You people, you speak about Trump as if he is a Hitler, you call him Hitler, and he’s actually surrounded by some of the very best people, people like the people that I grew up with in my family representing the values. They don’t want wars. They believe in free speech. They care about people.”
He goes into this whole thing, and I say, “First of all, Bobby, just FYI, I’ve never called him Hitler, so that’s not true,” and we went, but I was like… But I didn’t want to debate him with Halloween. There are about to be kids at my door. I’m at home. I’m like, “You know what? I can tell you this, whoever wins, half the country is going to be distraught, and I hope everything works out,” just hang up. He calls me back three minutes later and he says, “I just want to say something you just said. You said, whatever happens, half the country is going to be upset by what happened and be really distraught.” He’s like, “Well, that’s your fault because all the terrible things that you’ve said about Donald Trump.” And again, he’s not saying me specifically, but the media. And he’s again saying, “I’m with these people. These are good people. These are…” Again, the whole thing, the body, the bodies… Anyway, it goes on and it’s very… I’m basically trying to get him off the phone.
We end the call. And I didn’t know this, but a few minutes later, he… I didn’t know it at the time when I was on the phone with him, but I saw that night, he went on stage with Tucker Carlson, and Trump was then… And you know what it was? It was the day that Trump imagined seeing Liz Cheney in front of a firing squad, it was that event, and he’s talking about, “I’m with Trump. He’s surrounded by the people that embody the values of the people who I grew up with.” Jack Kennedy, his father Robert F. Kennedy. It’s just it was a surreal moment, one of many, many surreal moments.
BILL KRISTOL:
Kennedy and Musk always struck me as more problematic in terms of the survival. Kennedy has survived more than I expected. Musk, I think, went pretty much the way I thought. Trump gave more power than I expected in ways that I think—
JONATHAN KARL:
Yeah, it’s lasted longer than a lot of people thought.
BILL KRISTOL:
And I think—
JONATHAN KARL:
Musk was around for a while.
BILL KRISTOL:
And Trump tolerated a certain amount of political pain because of Musk’s agenda, which never had really been Trump’s agenda that much, cutting government in that way and stuff. So I was a little surprised that he let Musk do it, but I think he let him do it until he decided not to let him do it anymore, you know?
JONATHAN KARL:
Right.
BILL KRISTOL:
Kennedy, we will see, but the others really are in a whole different category, the Millers and Vances and Voughts. They are the confident… Let’s call them the confidence apparatchiks who work for Trump, then there’s the huge swath of loyalists who were there entirely to carry out Trump’s wishes. But I guess you’ve studied him, so… You reported so much on him and know him a bit, know his world so well. I’m always amused, maybe I’m wrong though, tell me I’m wrong, they say, “Well, Hegseth decided this,” or, “Pam Bondi and Patel put out this statement, and then Trump…” I feel like none of these things is… Trump is… He’s not micromanaging, but he doesn’t care about the details. But nothing serious or important happens without Trump’s not just okay, but I think often order. Do you agree with that?
The most sense to me, since this was… I remember this one, I went out a little bit when they were saying Hegseth has invited the senior officers, the general and flag officers, to Quantico, and Trump is, “Oh, jeez. Really? I didn’t know about that.” And then, “I don’t know, I guess maybe I’ll go,” and I said, “This is ludicrous. There’s zero chance that Donald Trump isn’t going to speak and hog the spotlight there, and there’s zero chance that he didn’t know about it ahead of time and probably figure out that this was what he wanted to do ahead of time.” But maybe I’m overstating Trump’s string pulling here. I’m just curious how that works in your mind in Trump world.
JONATHAN KARL:
I think you’re largely but not entirely correct. So, certainly, the big steps that have happened out of DOJ… Trump is fully on board and, in many cases, directing these. Jim Comey doesn’t get indicted if Trump himself doesn’t say, “I’m going to put Lindsey Halligan in at the Eastern District of Virginia. Tish James…” I mean, He knows exactly that it’s coming. He might not know the line by line… He doesn’t know the line by line that’s in the indictment himself. He probably isn’t too up to speed on the details of the John Bolton case, but he absolutely made it abundantly clear, this is what he wants, and he wants more of it. He’s not a detail guy, he’s not a micromanager, he’s not Jimmy Carter, but he is directing that stuff, both through the leadership of describing the mission and in the down and dirty of what’s happening.
With Hegseth, I think it’s a little bit different. I think that a lot of… Hegseth’s a little bit lost over there at the Pentagon. I don’t know specifically, frankly, you’re giving me an idea that I want to go and get further the story on that, what role, if any, Trump had in summoning the generals back, but it may have been a hair-brained idea that Hegseth himself came up with thinking that it would please Trump. I do know that all the petty stuff that Hegseth has done at the Pentagon in terms of the press… First, the getting rid of, kicking CNN and NBC out of their workspace because, apparently, there isn’t much space over in the Pentagon, the largest office building in the world. It doesn’t have a little closet that these guys can work out of. And then this latest thing, asking the press to sign a pledge, and all of that.
I don’t know exactly how much Trump himself, Hegseth may have had private conversations, I don’t know, but I do know this, the senior staff at the White House think that what Hegseth has done is not productive, and they’re annoyed by it. They were annoyed by the earlier stuff with the office space. They’re not there to tell him what not to do, especially when it comes to beating up the press. They’re not actively trying to stop any of it, but they’re annoyed by it, and it’s not the way the White House press operation has operated, which has had its share of issues, of course, when it comes to dealing with the press. So I think—
BILL KRISTOL:
Interesting.
JONATHAN KARL:
…Hegseth may be a little bit more on his own.
BILL KRISTOL:
Doing his… Certainly doesn’t fire the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs without Trump’s—
JONATHAN KARL:
That’s for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
BILL KRISTOL:
… approval and stuff. What about Miller? I’m very curious. I didn’t know Trump well at all. I met him a couple of times in New York, and then he called me in 2015 to tell me that I wouldn’t… though I’d been in editorial saying, on the one hand, the Republican candidates could learn from Trump. That’s mid-2015, shortly after he announced. But he’s hit a chord, but on the other hand, we could, of course, never support him. He said, “You’ll come around, Bill.” He gave me one of those… He’s kind of charming, and it was a five-minute phone call.
JONATHAN KARL:
Yeah, yeah. Of course.
BILL KRISTOL:
I didn’t really know him. And the phone rings and it’s Donald Trump. I thought it was a joke. I thought it was someone who was playing. I did literally thought one of my colleagues, one of the smart alecks at The Weekly Standard who was just pulling my leg and stuff, but it was him. But I knew a little over the years. I knew the immigration issue a little bit, and he was never active on that issue. He never cared about it. He hired plenty of immigrants, legal and illegal and undocumented, for various building projects. He married immigrants. He figured out quickly as a candidate that that was gold for him, both the border and then what was happening in Europe spilled over here in 2015, the micro crisis, the emigration crisis there.
Anyway, I’ve always assumed it was opportunistic though, and he doesn’t wake up each morning thinking about this, the degree to which Miller has driven, and with Trump’s approval, I take it, that as a really central theme, maybe the central theme, I don’t know, of the first nine months, the visibility of ICE, “We’re going to get the National Guard in there. We’re going to fight fights with governors and with courts to get them in there. We’re going to spend some political capital on that.” Well, I don’t know what’s behind that. Has that surprised you? Has he come to believe it? Does he think it’s key to his political agenda? Does he really want to have 5 million people deported by the end of his term? I don’t know, I guess I’ve underestimated this potency of that issue, I feel like, not just in the political realm, but for him and his administration personally, I think.
JONATHAN KARL:
One thing that Trump has had a very good sense of for his decade now as a politician is he does have a sense of where his supporters are. And going back to the first term, immigration was a politically potent term issue for him. It was the whole, ” We’re going to build the wall,” and then he came up with the idea of Mexico paying for it. Look, the idea of keeping the immigrants out was a very key part of his success in 2015 and 2016, but he didn’t do the mass deportations, he didn’t do all of that stuff, although he did talk at times like he was going to do that. He talked about Eisenhower and Operation Wetback, and all of that. Remember that all? And so, it was something, but he’s obviously gone much further. But I think the political potency of that issue, whether he believes or not…
He also championed the victims of violence by illegal immigrants, and he would do all these very emotional events where he’d bring in these people that had gone through just horrible experiences where a loved one, a husband, a father, a daughter, had been murdered by somebody in the country illegally. And he would bring the families around right there in the cabinet room, and the events would go on and on and on. And he played that up a lot. So it’s always been something that has been potent. But then, the experience under Biden where, as bad as illegal immigration had been, it was a total and complete disaster and capitulation on the issue, and utterly mismanaged by Biden. I think it again became the—inflation and the economy, for sure—but immigration was the issue that his people care about the most. So I think he’s absolutely a true believer on this stuff now, and he’s going to push it just about as far as Stephen Miller wants him to push it.
BILL KRISTOL:
And he’s not spooked by whatever alleged political reaction there is, or it’s going to be a little bit—
JONATHAN KARL:
Every once in a while, you get a little bit of a sense. He hears from some of his business buddies, “We need workers,” and then he… But then, he gets steered back. He listens to Bannon in a lot. Don’t underestimate Bannon.
BILL KRISTOL:
Sorry, we probably should let you go about 10 minutes. I was just going to ask about Bannon, who is a major figure in your book, and I think underrated. Do you agree with this? By the—
JONATHAN KARL:
I totally, yes.
BILL KRISTOL:
…press corps in general as a figure, as an influencer of Trump. And so, say a word about your relationship with Bannon, if you want, but also just about Bannon’s importance in the campaign, but also in the administration.
JONATHAN KARL:
Don’t forget that Bannon was obviously there as the Chief Strategist, had a falling out with Trump, took him a while to come back, but he… When the election in 2020 happened, Bannon was beating the drums of the efforts to overturn that election.
BILL KRISTOL:
Right.
JONATHAN KARL:
And you got to remember that, on January 6th, when the January 6th committee subpoenaed those phone records, and there were so few documented calls they had because, of course, they only had the White House switchboard and whatnot, but the calls that we know happened were with Steve Bannon. Bannon talked to him on January 5th, which is what the day when he talked about it’s going to be wild, all of that. He talked to him on January 6th, before Trump spoke to Mike Pence. And when January 6th happens, Bannon is with him stronger than he has ever been with him. He stands by him when everybody else is fleeing, and Bannon… then the January 6th committee subpoenas him, he defies it. He goes to prison effectively for Donald Trump. That’s the way Bannon portrays it, and that’s the way Trump sees it. This guy could have talked, but he went to prison. So he’s really proved himself to Trump in a way that very few have.
And Navarro, you could say the same thing about, but Navarro isn’t like the central ideological force behind MAGA that in many ways Bannon is. Bannon channels those Trump supporters, and he channels Trump. Trump doesn’t always listen to him. Bannon is an isolationist in many ways. He was adamantly opposed to the strikes on Iran. Trump went in a different direction. Bannon is a true populist. He wants to raise taxes on the wealthy.
He wants to clamp down on not just immigrants at the border, but on H1B Visas. Trump doesn’t always listen to him but he is somebody that I think if you really want to understand what’s going on with Trump, listen for a little while to Bannon’s War Room podcast. I mean, you’ll get a sense. Bannon speaks to the true Trump-faithful, to the foot soldiers of the MAGA movement and to Trump himself.
One story I have in the book is about a scene that is quite remarkable that takes place just before Zelensky comes to town in February to Washington, February of this year. And Trump is meeting with his entire national security team. It’s Monday of that week. That meeting was a Friday, and he’s got them all there. Vance is there, Hegseth is there, Mike Volz, who was then the National Security Advisor is there, Rubio is there, Witkoff is there, Scott Bessent is there. They’re all there because the Europeans are circling the wagons trying to convince Trump he’s got to be on board. He’s got to continue to support Ukraine.
They’ve come up with this idea of the minerals deal where Ukraine will provide a share of its natural resources to repay all of this stuff and it’s all going on and the national security team is there. They’re ready to do this. Sign the deal, and they’re going to support Zelensky.
Well, Trump knows that Bannon doesn’t like any of this stuff. He wants basically just to cut Ukraine off. So he asks Mike Waltz to get Steve Bannon on the phone. And Mike Waltz calls Bannon. Bannon’s on… His podcast is, by the way, four hours a day, two hours in the morning, two hours in the late afternoon. And so he’s on his show and he texts him, he says, “I’m on. I’ll call you in two hours when I’m done.” And sends it to voicemail. And then Trump calls because I guess Waltz says… Trump calls him, and Bannon has to take the call. So he goes to a commercial break. He leaves the show, the guest he was interviewing, and suddenly the anchor when he comes back. And for the next half hour, Bannon is on Trump’s speakerphone, on his iPhone talking to the entire national security team about Ukraine.
And he starts referring to Zelensky as “that punk,” “that punk Zelensky.” “If you do this mineral deal, he’s going to want security guarantees. You can’t trust that punk.” And he’s really ramping Trump up. And that sets the stage for what happens at the end of the week, which, of course, is that breakdown in everything, and that Oval Office confrontation, Zelensky getting kicked out of the White House, no minerals deal signed. And that’s Bannon having more influence than the combined influence of the vice president, the national security advisor, the secretary of state, the special envoy, the secretary of treasury. It’s Bannon on the phone.
BILL KRISTOL:
That’s an amazing story and very interesting. And Bannon, no, Bannon’s underrated in the sense that he thought it through. I don’t like it, but I knew him a tiny bit back in 2013, ’14 when he told me, “We’re going to replace you guys as the conservative, as the establishment of the right.”
JONATHAN KARL:
Breitbart, Yeah.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah. But I mean, he went, “The Weekly Standard conservative is finished. We’re going to be the ascendent ones.” And I said, “Well, we’ll see.” And he was right, I guess. What about, one final thing… What about Vance? I mean, Carville when I had him on this program maybe a month or two ago, was pretty—he doesn’t like Vance—but he was pretty complimentary in the sense that he thought Vance was doing a pretty good job of establishing himself as the heir and managing so much one could tell, the relationship with Trump well and stuff. Insight on that?
JONATHAN KARL:
So I describe in the book, I’ve got a fair amount on Vance in the book, and I described the scene when he’s at the Republican convention and he comes out. And if you go back and look at that again, Vance was not impressive at the convention. He had never really been in a situation like that, and he’s a little awkward. He gives a speech that basically kind of bores the crowd. And the emotional high point is when he introduces his mother, which was a genuine emotional high point, but it was…
And then he had a rocky start. All the stuff that he had said about “childless cat ladies” and everything had come up and he had a whole bunch of other stumbles. I think that Vance has grown tremendously since that. He’s a much more capable speaker. If you watch it, just take a look at the speech he gave out in San Diego at the Marine base out in California over the weekend. He does know how to play to Trump. He never ever, ever—kind of like Mike Pence for every day until the beginning of January of 2021—he’s never crossways with him. And if he is, he gets right back to where Trump would want him to be. But Trump has taken to sometimes publicly quizzing people. I mean, in front of others, but obviously not in front of the cameras. If he’s on the plane, he’ll go around, he’ll just ask people, “So what do you think JD or Marco? JD or Marco, who do you think?”
So Trump’s going to play those two against each other until he finally decides that he’s ready to pass the baton. When that will be? God only knows. How it’ll be? God only knows. But Trump’s going to toy with him. But he’s definitely managed to gain Trump’s confidence in a way that, let’s face it, Pence never did. I mean, Pence was always there. He was the loyal soldier, but Trump never really, I don’t think confided him or sought his advice. I mean, they had their lunches. So I think Vance is much more part of the operation than the previous vice president. So maybe at the very least, he won’t have a crowd sent after him calling for his execution at the end.
BILL KRISTOL:
It was striking. I’ll let you go in a sec, but on that “Signal Gate” text, the chain… I mean, Vance is— and we didn’t have that when I was in the White House, we didn’t have Signal, we didn’t even have real texting. We barely had email or didn’t really have email at the kind of primitive version. But he’s sort of like one of the staff, but a senior one of the staff, which is both more powerful and less powerful than a typical vice president, I would say, in the sense that more powerful because the vice presidents often are just out of it and kind of get told about stuff by White House staff, that happened occasionally with us, but also less powerful because he’s not really deferred to.
In fact, Steve Miller, if I recall correctly, sort of says, “Well, I think that the president decided this.” Vance is kind of saying, “I don’t know. Maybe we shouldn’t do this.” And Steve Miller seems to be the enforcer in a way of the Trump decision in that particular call. I mean—
JONATHAN KARL:
By the way, the day before Zelensky arrived in February—so it was Thursday—there was another meeting, this one without Bannon on the phone, and they’re kind of doing one more talking about the minerals deal that they’re going to get Zelensky to sign or that they’re talking about getting Zelensky to sign.
And somebody points out in the meeting that the White House counsel hasn’t looked at it. Now usually when— and by the way, this is very typical. The White House counsel, many of our listeners here may not know. The guy’s name is Dave Warrington. I mean, he is a much less central player than any White House counsel I have seen, and he hadn’t seen the agreement and he’s not in the meeting.
And usually, my God. I mean, are you kidding me? Of course, White House counsel is going to be doing the legal review and whatnot. So Vance suggests that Usha, the second lady of the United States, his wife could take a look at it. She’s around. And Trump’s like, “Oh, that’s a great idea. Let’s do that.”
So Usha Vance, who has a Yale law degree and is very smart and a very accomplished lawyer, but not on the national security team and not part of the White House Counsel’s Office actually did the White House legal review of that agreement.
BILL KRISTOL:
Amazing. It’s a good note to end on, I suppose. I mean, well, what do you think though? Nine months from now, what— will we be having a very different conversation, a similar conversation, more of the same, accelerating, decelerating? Any reversion to the mean-ish normalcy or forging ahead on this path? Do you have a sense?
JONATHAN KARL:
We have a great unknown out there. The real question of how does this end? We are only at day 220-something, whatever it is. And we have 1,100-and-whatever-it-is days left. And I am not one of these that thinks that Trump is going to run again. I think he’s just playing with people. And I do think that he’s… And he has told people, “Look, I’m done when this is over.” But what I cannot figure out is, how does he take the foot off the gas? How does he anoint, endorse, say, “Okay, JD it’s you, Marco, it’s you?” Or if he doesn’t, how does he tolerate a situation where those two are going around the country—or others—campaigning, and he’s a lame duck president back in Washington? How does he attend a convention that is not about him? How does that happen?
I mean, Bill, you’ve watched White Houses with a lame duck president. Nobody cares. I mean, I covered Obama in 2015 and 2016, mostly by being nowhere near the White House. And I was out on the campaign trail with the chief White House correspondent. But when I was around, I mean, the attention is all on what’s going to come next.
How does that happen? I don’t know. But no, I don’t see any deceleration. And Trump, one thing you have to say about him— The level of energy is just something that you just can’t fathom for a guy in his now, late 70s.
He doesn’t sleep much. I know this because over the course of the campaign, I would talk to him every few days and some stretches. And I found usually the best time was someone’s call him at 10 o’clock at night. I mean, I could have called him later than that or call at 7:00 in the morning. On a few occasions, I called him before 7:00 because I wanted to ask him something before I went on Good Morning America. He’s up.
I mean, he might be watching TV. He might be taking other calls. I don’t know what, but I mean, the guy does not seem to rest. So we’ll see. 220-whatever-it-is, a lot more to go.
BILL KRISTOL:
Seems like a lot more than 220-something, but yes.
JONATHAN KARL:
It does.
BILL KRISTOL:
Well, he’s a consequential president. The dominant figure in American politics for the last decade. I mean, just unquestionably, I’m not even… Dominant is understatement, right?
JONATHAN KARL:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Nothing like it.
BILL KRISTOL:
Nothing like it. Good words to end on. John Karl thanks so much for taking the time today. Really a terrific book. People should read it. They should go back and look at the earlier books, which stand up well in the sense that you had an early sense, I think, of his skills and also his other characteristics you might say, but the energy, the determination, the radicalness in a way of what he was willing to do and we’re seeing it now and playing out nine months into the Trump second term.
So thank you for joining me today and I really appreciate it. And congratulations.
JONATHAN KARL:
Great. Thanks a lot.
BILL KRISTOL:
Congratulations on the book. Stay well on the book tour. And thank you all for joining us in Conversations.
