Transcription
Tonight on All In.
"What would be the price?" He said, "There is no price." I said, "That's nice."
Donald Trump's epic historic corruption in plain sight.
"I think I can say that we're going to do a fly over like no fly over. This is going to lead a group of many, many planes."
Tonight, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan on the president's explosion of personal wealth, his new agenda for American intelligence, and regime change here at home.
Then, Denver voters of all ages, of all races, of all religions, sends a clear message. We will not wait.
The 29-year-old candidate who just shocked the political world in Colorado joins me live. And after a major loss on birthright citizenship, the MAGA plans for a kind of pregnancy test to get into America.
"Can we raise women from America?"
"You have to now think very carefully about who you let into your country."
When All In starts right now. Good evening from New York. I'm Chris Hayes.
As America's 250th birthday nears, as a heat wave bears down on much of the country, powered by climate change, and the price of gas still hovers around four bucks a gallon. Donald Trump, well, he's he's playing with his favorite new toy. Taking a maiden voyage on his new Air Force One. You know, the 747 he accepted from the Qatari government in just flagrant, open violation of the Constitution, which bars foreign gifts like this. And that's not a small trinket. That's the plane with the new paint scheme. So reminiscent of the old Trump Organization aircraft.
"So this was a gift from a a country that's treated us very well. And they're an ally of us over in the Middle East, Qatar. And uh, I went to Boeing. I said, 'Who has the best one?' They said, 'Qatar. There's no, there's never been a plane like it.' So I said, 'I'd like to use it.' And uh, the Amir Tamim, who's a great gentleman, he said, 'No, no, I'd like to make a contribution to the country.'"
You'll be shocked to hear that that's not exactly how it all went down, that it's not just a free gift to the country. Um, first of all, the Qataris tried to sell it for years and no one would buy it. And then, of course, there's the $934 million, almost a billion dollars of your money it appears to have taken for the U.S. government to make the foreign-owned jet suitable for presidential travel. So it cost a billion dollars. Also, except for the fact it's not for future presidents. According to Trump himself, the jet will be transferred to the yet-to-be-created Trump Presidential Library after he leaves office in 2029. Also, it was not a gift. Multiple outlets report at the time that Trump asked Qatar for the plane, which you see there as Trump poses in front of it. And as we just learned from Regime Change, the new book on Trump's second term by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. At some point after Qatar agreed to give Trump the plane, it was announced the aircraft would be a gift, an idea that a senior official would say was generated at the "pus level."
So, he kind of just took the plane and then charged you a billion dollars for it. Money that could have gone to like, I don't know, healthcare premiums. And then he's going to keep it after he's done. I mean, at this point, the corruption is so frequent and so brazen that that he he's shoving our faces in it. He he he I think he's sort of delighting in the transgressive thrill of it all. I'm not just talking about his vanity projects like the ballroom and the reflecting pool and the arch, the weird passport which he appears to think doesn't go to citizens but to immigrants. The restoration of Washington's fountains. Even though a new Washington Post analysis signs that for the past three months, Trump has talked about those projects more than he's talked about healthcare and wages. That stuff's just the tip of the iceberg.
On Tuesday, reporters gained access to nearly a thousand pages of new financial disclosure forms, showing that Trump's reported income soared to more than $2.2 billion last year as he took in more than $1.4 billion from crypto and digital schemes alone. In fact, according to Reuters investigation, Trump and his sons have added at least $2.3 billion to the family fortune from their main crypto ventures, while the investors they've wooed have lost a near identical amount. Think about that. While the investors they wooed lost him out, in other words, a direct transfer of 2.3 billion dollars from those pokes out there into the pockets of the president and his family.
In response, a White House spokesperson said, "All actions by President Trump and his administration are taken in the best interest of the American people." Again, they're playing in our faces, right? Sure. Those aren't investors. Those are benefactors. The president of the United States says that's his business, not yours.
"Mr. President, uh, your financial disclosure shows you had a very lucrative year last year. What message does this send to to average Americans, especially those who may be struggling right now financially?"
"I don't get involved in my personal. We have funds that run my money."
"But you are benefiting."
"I never speak to any of the people that run the money, but they're at big institutions and uh, they invest in whatever they invest."
"But to critics who say to critics who say you're profiting off the presidency, Mr."
"Well, you know why I'm profiting? Because the stock market's going up. Everybody's profiting. If you have a, you have a 401k, how's your 401k done? It's about up 85%. Thank you, President Trump. So, we're all profiting. I'm profiting because I have a lot of money and a lot of cash."
Now, again, this is all, I think, basically intentional. He he likes sort of flagrantly violating while he's saying that he has nothing to do with these stock trades. Uh, his sons who oversee the portfolio are right in the shot and they're going to fly in the train, the plane with him, right? Also, the $2.3 billion, the main source of the guy's revenue this year wasn't the stock market. It was the crypto schemes. But again, he doesn't care, honey, this looks.
As he said in a January interview about his son's many conflicts of interest, "I prohibited them from doing business in my first term, and I got absolutely no credit for it." Trump said, "It's not really true, by the way. I didn't have to do that, and it's really unfair to them." He added, quote, "I found out that nobody cared, and I'm allowed to."
In fact, over the weekend, the New York Times reported on a billion-dollar mining deal that Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik closed with Kazakhstan, in which, oh, surprise, contracts are going to businesses with ties to both men's sons. So, the Lutnik boys and the Trump boys are going to make a mint off of this deal negotiated by the president and the commerce secretary. In fact, the Times found that Trump and Lutnik families have financial ties to at least 14 companies that are actively working with the federal government on critical mining deals. We're just talking about the mining portfolio, including the Kazakhstan project. We're not even talking about the weird drone company and the other federal contracts at DoD that Don Jr. and Eric are running around trying to get. The White House and the Commerce Department reject any suggestion the Trump administration was improperly mixing government actions with family business.
On Tuesday, the Washington Post reported that Donald Trump's beloved White House ballroom was being built under, oh, look at this, a secret $500 million no-bid contract, similar to the ones the administration doled out for the botched reflecting pool job, which, by the way, let's hope this one goes better. White House officials said that they could award the no-bid contract by routing it through the executive residence, which is not bound by competitive bidding requirements.
Also on Tuesday, The Atlantic reported on a new White House effort to grant pardons that are tied to the 250th birthday celebrations, setting off a kind of bidding war for clemency. One prominent white-collar defense attorney told the magazine, quote, "It is general knowledge in our practice that for $2 million, you can have a pardon." The clients come to us and tell us, "I've been told I need to go hire this specific person and then I will get a pardon."
Is the White House selling pardons? I mean, it sounds like it. I don't know. This is the whole game for Donald Trump. Now, as those reporters Maggie Herman and Jonathan Swan suggest throughout Regime Change, U.S. policy is dictated by whoever appeals most directly to Trump in his vanity. Now, a CEO can simply ask for something and it was granted. They write. He would reportedly dictate exact dollar figures to extract from each CEO. And within days, millions of dollars and then tens and hundreds of millions were pouring into Trump's various fundraising accounts. And according to the White House, all this is what Trump voters wanted.
"The story this week, too, about his sons making money off a deal in Kazakhstan. What's the White House's position on all these questions?"
"Well, I think the president said it best. And let's remember, Bill, why Americans elected this president to office because he was an outsider who was tremendously successful in business, built a New York City skyline. Uh, and that's what Americans wanted. They wanted a businessman in office."
Oh, yes. The kind of outsider who is the president of the country and negotiates his mining deals so his sons can make money off it. That kind of outsider. Suck it up. This is what a great businessman looks like, right? That's the White House's message to Americans who are struggling in their daily lives, looking up at this guy and his family swimming like Scrooge McDuck in a sea of corruption and greed that is quite literally unprecedented in American history.
And New York Times White House correspondents Maggie Haverman and Jonathan Swan, the co-authors of the book Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, both join me. Now, I got to say, um, the book is really excellent. And and I'm someone who spends a lot of time covering Trump and thinking about all this. And the last thing in the universe I want to do, frankly, is read a book about Donald Trump. But I read the book and it's really, really quite good and and revealing, uh, genuinely in in in lots of ways. Um, let's just start on this sort of the the the structural conditions that produce this kind of pay-for-play environment which which you kind of document in the book, which is there's no org chart, there's no policy process, no one's routing anything through anyone. It's like it's all kind of, can you get the, can you get the boss on the cell phone and he'll kind of do these sort of Don Corleone-style one-on-one deals. How, how different is this modus operandi, Maggie, than the than than the first term?
"So, Chris, I think, and thank you for being willing to read the the book despite your feelings about reading a Trump book. We appreciate it. Uh, and thank you. I'm glad you enjoyed it. Uh, it's a little more nuanced than that. There are policy processes. There are inter-agency processes. There are process processes. For instance, and we document this in the book where..."
"...the White House Chief of Staff, the White House Counsel actually tried putting a halt on some of these pardons, just to take one bucket that you were talking about last year, uh, to try to get the process to still work as they had hoped it would."
"People would still find a way to call Trump directly. So, both things are going on. And then that just creates its own incentive structure where if people are going to Trump directly, the people who are recommending don't do that inside the White House can find themselves at odds not just with the president but with whoever is going to him. So that is one form. You have donors, many of whom remember the business community was, you ask about the differences between this term and last term. This term, as we write, is really so unrecognizable in so many ways to the last term. But one way is that the business community, tech leaders, I can go on and on and on. People who were not supportive of Trump or who distanced themselves from him in very, very specific ways during his four years in the political wilderness are doing their best to make up for lost time. And the Trump political team knows it. They know that there is a very high bar now for for money, or I should say a very high floor for how much has to be donated to his political committees to get in his good standing. Uh, people are in private conversations very explicit about it. That, Chris, is before we get to the personal money that the president and his family and some people who work in his government and their families are making, which is a whole other area."
"The on the sort of um the sort of different channels, right, that that that how information routes to him. Um, there is this sense like Bill Py is a great example. We're going to talk about him in the next block. But there's there's these figures, it seems, that that crop up in the book. Laura Loomer is another one where I think I think it's fair to say that no administration that I've ever covered would would that these people would like be getting meetings with the president and certainly not dictating or coming in with a list of people to fire as Laura Loomer did. How, how do you get to him, basically? Is it is it you have his cell phone? Is it that you have a way of of of sort of charming him? Is it that you appeal to his vanity, Jonathan? Like, what, when you sort of list the kind of people that have managed to to effectuate this kind of influence, it's it's quite a crew. It's it's it's a weird category, I guess, is what I'm saying."
"Well, it it's remarkably easy. And that's the more you dig into it is, and we spend a lot of time digging into this, the more that sort of becomes apparent. They're open for business. It's really simple. They've made very clear, the Trump family, that you don't actually have to be so indirect. You can put money directly into the pockets of the Trump family if you're a foreign entity. I mean, the Emiratis did that to the tune of $2 billion. Um, they became a secret silent partner in their crypto business. There's innumerable foreign deals. I think we've only scratched the surface of what we know about. So, you can do it directly. You can do it indirectly. You can hire people that are known to be close to him. Um, and they can route, you know, who again, so much of this is opaque. Uh, and I think it will actually take years to unravel. Uh, I'm not even sure the subpoena power if Democrats do take the House will be sufficient because I do think a lot of these people affiliated with Trump, I think there's a decent likelihood that they don't respond. They're not responsive to subpoenas. So then you have to the Democrats will have to then go to banks or go to other entities and try to do it through a backdoor."
"What Trump is banking on, and he's banked on this throughout his life, is that the public is so cynical that he he sort of flattens everything. Everything's the same. Well, all politicians, you know, do this. Well, the truth is they don't. Uh, it is true that other presidents and their families have benefited financially from the presidency, but we're looking at a scale that is orders of magnitude greater than anything we've ever seen in American history. Um, it's it's astonishing."
"Yeah. I mean, I I think and again, you guys can correct me if I'm wrong. I I think he probably had the best year he's ever had as a businessman last year. I mean, I I doubt that he had another year in the past where he made $2.3 billion. I that that's got to be up up there as as one of the best years in his, you know, his long career. Um, I want to ask this question about about his risk tolerance and and part of the way that he kind of pushes the envelope, which I think is part of the theme of this book."
"And and it struck out to me. There's a little nugget there about Matt Gaetz when he nominates Matt Gaetz to be attorney general. And he kind of knows this is maybe not gonna fly. I think you say in the book, it's sort of had a 30% chance. But what it is is like it's kind of a like, what can I get away with? How, just how, how like can I push through a guy who's investigated by the ethics committee for possible um sex trafficking crime uh with with an underage girl? Is that going to work? And it doesn't. He cuts his losses. But Maggie, it struck me as like a very illustrative episode of how he sort of see literally probes what he can get away with."
"There's two parts to that episode in the book that I I think were very revealing in our reporting, Chris, but I think you are overall you are correct. Uh, that the takeaway is, and I'll get to the reveals in a second. The takeaway is that he is stretching the bounds as far as he can because he believes he can get away with almost anything. And there is a reason that he believes that, Chris. The interregnum period made him almost a a mystical figure with his supporters. He has presidential immunity, as do all former presidents and future presidents, thanks to a Supreme Court ruling. We don't quite know what the bounds of that looks like, but it's probably pretty much in the president's favor. He walks around saying things like, 'I'm immune. I'm immune.' He's not under investigation. He's got not just an allied House Republican group. They they act as if they're another arm of the executive branch for the most part, at least in the House, a little less so in the Senate, but again, only a little bit less. So, he does not have much fear of any kind of recourse. This administration has seized pockets of independents across the executive branch. They fired a bunch of inspectors general without notifying Congress. They have been able to do all of this and there has been no civic response or unhappiness about it. And until there is, he's going to continue. So with Matt Gaetz, Matt Gaetz lasted eight days. Matt Gaetz was under investigation by the House Ethics Committee, as you said. Uh, they pulled him because Trump knew that this wasn't going to work. But it also meant that they were not going to pull the next person who became a problematic potential nominee, and that was Pete Hegseth. And they used all of their capital, their extended orbit of supporters, and they ran what several people described to us in reporting for this book as essentially a playbook dictated by what happened around Brett Kavanaugh in 2018. And every, every single uh, you know, door was closed. There was total symmetry among all Republicans. The one person who really made any kind of noise at the time was Senator Joni Ernst, and she found herself facing a primary threat. She found her divorce uh records information being talked about on Twitter, and she's no longer going to be in office next year. So..."
"...that was the lesson that he and his world took about how to wield power, and that is the story throughout this book."
"There's there's a detail that I don't know how much I I've seen a few of the interviews you guys have done. Obviously, the the book has been incredibly successful. You've done interviews. I don't know how much you've talked about the bathroom carpeting, but it's to me just like the most insane detail in the whole book. So Jonathan, we have to we have to talk about that. We just, we're going to take a quick break and then we're going to come back and we have to talk about the carpeting in the bathroom. Just don't go anywhere."
"Herman and Jonathan Swan, authors of the new book Regime Change, are back with us. Jonathan, I'm reading from an excerpt here that um new carpet was laid in the bathroom on inauguration day. As before, Trump's preference for a fully carpeted bathroom had posed a challenge for the resident staff during his first term. The portion nearest the shower would often be soaked through. The staff was never quite sure why, but they worried about mold growing underneath. I've never in my life encountered carpeting in the bathroom, but this apparently is a is a real Donald Trump must-have."
"Yes, it it was important to him to have a fully carpeted bathroom. And the staff's sol resident staff's solution to the the damp problem or the mold potential mold problem was to get essentially a small piece of carpet and overlay it as if it was a bath mat on top of the of the other carpet in front of the shower and then substitute and rotate that uh carpeting. Um, so we do have some details from inside the residence, um, including some disputes and tensions between the president and the first lady over the interior decorating and renovating. But that was a detail that for one reason or other seems to have stuck with people."
"Yes. Well, I think it's it's it's it's really quite memorable just because you don't you don't encounter encounter that a lot. Let's talk a little about Bill Py, um, who is uh, as of now, the acting national director of intelligence in the United States of America. He oversees all intelligence operations. He he is one of these people that I I seems to have managed to kind of ingratiate himself into Trump by essentially always being there to cultivate Trump's most sort of vindictive worst impulses. Is that a a fair characterization, Jonathan, to to to how Py has sort of gotten to where he is?"
"Oh, there's there's no question. I mean, we we have scenes in the book where so Bill Py um was uh squired around Mar-a-Lago during the transition by Roger Stone. And I'm sure your viewers are familiar with Roger Stone. Um, he he was uh he's the heir of a a home building fortune. Um, and uh he, you know, got this job at this very little little known agency, the Federal um F Housing Finance um Agency. But what he would do was he would get these massive foam boards um printed out, blown up, and he would lug them around and take them into the Oval Office or take them to Trump's golf courses, and they would have images of Trump's enemies on them. And Py basically discovered within that agency a way to give Trump an opportunity to go after his enemies. So, for example, we have a scene in the book of of Py showing Trump a a foam board that had this giant blow-up of Lisa Cook's head, the uh Federal Reserve Bank Governor that Trump tried to fire. And over the top it just said 'Fraudster.' Right? That's the sort of level of material that he's putting in front of Trump. But Trump, of course, you know, loves it in many cases. Um, so now that he's in in there at DNI, I mean, I think Trump said today he can he can declassify anything he wants while he's there in this temporary job. He's obviously, there's been murmurings that he's going to try to do something with related to the 2020 election. Hard to imagine what that might be. That's that's absolutely his his role in Trump's mind as as hatchet man."
"Maggie, you guys write about the the the constrained information environment um and and how, you know, the president's not getting a lot of there's not a lot of broad inputs um coming into him."
"Mhm."
"I guess my question to you is, do you think one of two things? Does he not care anymore about essentially what we might call quaintly public opinion? Or does he not actually have connections to public opinion? It's a bit of both, Chris. One of the things that was shocking to us as we were reporting out this book is is two things. One is how he may get that way. It's, you know, it's not that he doesn't care at all about the midterms, but he certainly doesn't care much. Uh, he may decide he's going to care eventually, but this is just not something that he's been focused on at all uh in any major way. We keep, you know, he he will do his endorsements, but it's mostly to keep track of his own win tally. We keep hearing about how he's about to go do a bunch of events. It's We're still waiting for that to happen with any kind of regular cadence. Maybe it will in the fall. It hasn't yet. And he gave a very revealing quote last year about how he was proud uh that Republicans didn't do well on the ticket when he wasn't on it as well. So, that tells you something about the mindset. Number two, we got hold of private polling uh from his own internal pollster that get circulated memos to you know, a group of about a dozen people in his world. There was one poll that showed in December that and it was shortly after Trump gave what was billed as a, you know, it was going to be a speech about affordability, and instead Trump spent much of the time mocking the word affordability, describing it as a Democratic hoax. It was very clear that Trump was in trouble with voters as of December on the core issue that he had won on twice, which was affordability, and that he was going to make voters' lives better. And there was a line in the in the memo about how, and I'm paraphrasing, but that unless the White House and the president and the GOP were honest with the public, the word was honest about the affordability crisis and how to fix it, it was going to be a very tough fall this coming year. So, that was really striking. But it's not that his advisers don't know it or don't tell him. He's so unreceptive to bad news. So, there's always all of this strategizing about how to get through to him. And his his outside inputs are very limited now. Most of his news comes from Natalie. Information comes from Natalie Harp, this aide who's referred to as the human printer, who sits on the side of the Oval Office in almost every meeting. Uh, and who is a supplier of of all kinds of uh good news stories to him. Most of his information on television comes from Fox News, which is far less critical of him in this term overall than it was in term one. Uh, most of his information comes from calls that where he reaches out to some ally or, you know, and Jonathan and I write about this, the Mar-a-Lago patio where he goes and people tell him how fabulous he is or they stand and applaud him when he walks in. So..."
"...he's not out there talking to voters. He's not doing rallies. He is doing these gaggles that you see on screen right there. He is doing relatively few sit-down interviews, uh, long form, and, you know, he is creating his own reality."
"Maggie Herman, Jonathan Swan, uh, the book is called Regime Change. Really is a, it's it's really, really interesting. I I feel like I got some real insight uh into this even after these 11 years of my one precious life covering this man. Thank you so much for your time. Appreciate it."
"Thanks, Chris. Thanks, Chris."
Still to come, a 29-year-old Democratic socialist just unseated an incumbent Democrat who had been in Congress literally longer than she has been.