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Since his election victory, Donald Trump has given two major, lengthy interviews about his intentions for his second term in the presidency and one can't help but notice that the version of Trump that we are seeing is a much different one, at least in some key respects, than the one we saw during the campaign.
Trump's constrained demeanor and the content of what he is saying are all quite striking. It is a very calm, sober, focused and one might even say thoughtful Trump that we are seeing. And what he is saying aligns in many cases with how he is saying it: it's a more cogent and consistent Trump, one who has a clearly defined worldview on many issues accompanied by an obvious desire to be less polarizing and alarming to those who did not vote for him, one might even say a more moderated and serious Trump. That doesn't mean he's compromising on every or even most issue – though he is on some – only that he's avoiding gratuitous flailing. We'll look at this ethos but more so at the substance of what he is saying as perhaps a window into what the second term will be.
A More Moderate Side
One of the many reasons why I think that the media campaign and the Democratic Party campaign to make people afraid of Donald Trump’s character, to depict him as Adolf Hitler, to claim that he's a white supremacist seeking to impose a Nazi dictatorship on the United States, failed – and there were many – but one of the reasons it definitely failed was because it's easy to do that to somebody that the public doesn't know where fearmongering has space to grow. However, for someone who is known to the American public – and he was very well known to the public before 2016 when he first ran and, after, basically dominated our political lives over the last eight years, being president for four years. Americans already know Donald Trump so well that they really don't need the media to try to fill in the gap for them. They have their own perceptions of who he is, how he conducts himself, of how he acts in power. So, the media just was unable to scare people who weren't already scared of Trump based on what they had seen. That's why I have to say Donald Trump as a character has been pretty consistent. I don't think he's been aligned at all with the caricature that has been manufactured for him by the media outlets most hostile to him. He has been fairly consistent in his behavior, his character and how he responds to certain events – and I say that as somebody who lived in New York City for a long time, beginning in the early 1990s, when Trump was a larger-than-life figure, all the way back then, and people had a good understanding of who he was then, he was very much in the media.
That's why I think these two major post-election interviews that he did, one with “Meet the Press” and Kristen Welker, the host of that program about two weeks ago, two weekends ago, and then today, a new one that was published with Time Magazine after it named him Person of the Year and put him on the cover, obviously much to his delight. It's actually quite striking because there are some palpable changes in the way he speaks and the tone he's using to speak in what I think is the remarkable cogency of how he's articulating his views. There's no rambling, there's not a lot of stopping and starting. He's being more articulate than usual and I think that's one of his failures as a politician. He has a great amount of charisma, he's hilarious to most people who are willing to see it, he draws a lot of attention to himself and he understands instinctively how to communicate with people, but I don't think he's a great order at all. A lot of times in debates or interviews, you kind of almost have to know what he's trying to say to really understand it because he just doesn't fully articulate. I think a lot of that has changed.
It is possible, I think one might even say likely, that the two attempts to take his life, particularly the first one that came about a centimeter away from blowing his head off would have to change even the most fixed-in-own-ways person. By all accounts, people close to Trump speaking off the record, or on the record, say they noticed visible changes in Trump in what he values and how he speaks after those incidents. No matter how cynical you are, in general, about Donald Trump, I think it'd be very hard to reject that out of hand. In fact, it would be much more surprising to me, if someone didn't change after two incidents like that, particularly the first one. But it's also the case that, if you look at these interviews, it just seems a different Donald Trump. It's the same Donald Trump in a lot of ways. I'm not saying there's a radical transformation or departure from what he's always been, but it seems like it's a much more content Donald Trump, a much more secure Donald Trump. Someone who no longer is desperate to win the election because, remember, winning the election was really his only way out of staying out of prison. Not only did he win this time, but there's no one questioning his win, no one claiming it's illegitimate, and no one claiming it's because of Putin. It was a pretty sweeping victory. We knew he was going to win almost by eleven o’clock at night, certainly confirmed by one in the morning, which is pretty early for American politics. It was a pretty sweeping vindication of who he insists he's been and what he's been.
I think this is appearing in interviews and one of the things substantively that is appearing as well is that he is clearly attempting to be less provocative. He's not only avoiding making statements that may play into the worst smears about him or his character, but he's going out of his way to try to be reassuring in a way that I find convincing because it does seem to me more consistent with his worldview than what one might do during a campaign. That's true of all politicians.
So, let's look at Time Magazine, released today, and there you see him on the cover. The article reads:
For 97 years, the editors of TIME have been picking the Person of the Year: the individual who, for better or for worse, did the most to shape the world and the headlines over the past 12 months. In many years, that choice is a difficult one. In 2024, it was not. (TIME. December 12, 2024)
It's hard to argue with that. I don't really care who Time chooses, I'm more interested in the interview. But given what they said, I think it's very, very difficult to argue there was anybody who shaped political culture or political life, not just in the United States, but through the democratic world more than Donald Trump did over this past year. The fact that he came back from being impeached twice, from being indicted four times and then he rolled to victory in the GOP nomination against a lot of credible opponents – well-funded, credible opponents. He brought a lot of other people to his side. Clearly, he's reshaped political life in the United States in ways that no one else can compare and even, therefore, globally agree that the U.S. is still the largest, most powerful country in the world.
The magazine published a transcript with Trump, a pretty lengthy, detailed transcript and I want to give you a sense of what I mean when I said all the things I said about how Trump appears to me. As you know, during the campaign, an ad that the Trump campaign ran and ran and ran and ran over and over and over that was quite effective, was one that focused not so much on the issue of transgender people. It was really more focused on something Kamala Harris had said in 2019 when responding to a questionnaire by the ACLU and running for office, where she said in response to the ACLU question that she does support having U.S. government funding the sex reassignment surgery and another treatment, even to people who are in prison or who are illegally detained. I don't really think the reason why that ad works so well, showing Kamala Harris saying that and concluding with that famous phrase, therefore, “Kamala is for they/them, Trump is for you.” I don't even think the reason it resonated so much is because people think much about that issue, whether the government should pay for sex reassignment surgeries or treatments for prisoners and illegal detainees. I think that became a proxy for trying to say, look at how out of touch the Democrats are with your lives, that's the reason that you're suffering under their government, they don't care about you at all. They have these lofty radical issues and factions that they please, but they don't think about things that you're going through and that's what the commercial is about – not let's go stop the evil of transgenderism but more you need people in Washington who care about you and your lives. And so, I thought it was so interesting what Trump said when he was asked about this issue in general, but also the specific issue of whether the first ever member of Congress who is transgender, Sarah McBride, who was elected from the state of Delaware in the Democratic Party, should be able to use the women's bathroom. That has become a controversy in Washington among some people, and they asked him about that as well. I think his answer was surprising, at least to me. It's what I would expect him to say, I guess what was surprising was that he's just willing to say it, even if it means alienating a lot of people who are on his side, especially on this issue. So here was the exchange:
Can I shift to the transgender issue? Obviously, sort of a major issue during the campaign. In 2016, you said that transgender people could use whatever bathroom they chose. Do you still feel that way?
I don’t want to get into the bathroom issue. Because it's a very small number of people we're talking about, and it's ripped apart our country, so they'll have to settle whatever the law finally agrees.
But on that note, there’s a big fight on this in Congress now. The incoming trans member from Delaware, Sarah McBride, says we should all be focused on more important issues. Do you agree?
I do agree with that. On that – absolutely. As I was saying, it's a small number of people. (TIME December 12, 2024)
So, what he's saying is: look, this issue of transgender people using the bathroom is not an issue we should be focused on.
As I said, I know there are a lot of conservatives, a lot of Trump supporters who disagree with that, who think that is an issue on which we should be focused. There are a lot of people who are focused on that issue, which is what I think is so notable about the fact that Trump didn't choose to demagogue this issue, he didn't choose to exploit the polarization in genders. In fact, he said, yeah, I agree with the newly elected trans member of Congress when she says we shouldn’t be focused on the question of which bathroom people use, but instead on far more important issues facing the country.
Here is Donald Trump in 2016. I think it's really worth remembering that when Trump announced he was running, he was extremely emphatic on the issue of immigration but Trump has never been a hard-core conservative on any social issues to put that mildly, and it's pretty easy to understand why. He's been a Manhattan billionaire for his entire adult life, he was a star in Hollywood on his own show. Obviously, he's coming into contact with gay people all the time, constantly, in Manhattan, in Hollywood. He himself is on his third marriage. Those three women to whom he was married, were not the only women with whom he has had sex. He doesn't live a life focused on this, he never cared about social issues before and he's giving checks to the Democratic Party. What motivated him was immigration, trade and economics. That clearly was what gave him the most passion but obviously, during a campaign, you have to focus on the things that will get your votes. I always knew that Trump's heart is not in social issues. And you saw him quite calculatedly in this election afraid of what the abortion issue could do to his campaign and backing off a lot of hard-core pro-life stances that were once the requirement of the Republican Party, including saying he doesn't believe in a national abortion ban.
Here is Trump in 2016, addressing kind of briefly when asked the question of trans people in bathrooms:
Video. Donald Trump. NBC News. April 21, 2016.
That's something we talked about last week. That it is true that, for a long time, the trans issue was never anything that anybody bothered with. It only became a source of controversy when it got pushed into areas that were predictably designed to provoke a lot of conflicts, one involving trans women in sports, biological males who transition to women in women's sports, and especially the question of administering treatment to children, to preadolescence to stop their puberty or give them hormones, cross-sex hormones, as we talked about that last week. I think Trump is very representative of most people: this is not the issue that's driving me. Live and let live. This is not something that he newly unveiled. It's something he's been saying for a long time.
During the campaign, Trump did talk about trans issues and I remember seeing the first time he did it. He basically said in a kind of ironic way: “Wow, you mention the trans issue, people go wild, I don't know why people care about this so much, but they do. Every time I mentioned it in my rally, they go insane.” So, being a politician wanting to win, he definitely did raise it and talk about it. But even when he saw the benefit, it was bringing it to him politically he never quite understood why this was something so important to other people, since it wasn't to him. Here's one example, at a rally in June of 2023:
Video. Donald Trump. Newsmax. June 10, 2023.
He was basically mocking the audience that gave him a standing ovation. He said, yeah, “I talk about tax cuts and the economy, well, yeah, okay, I care about that a little. But if you mention trans…” I mean, the audience there in North Carolina where he was speaking, gave him a standing ovation, a prolonged applause. So Trump is obviously subtly, at least being confounded by, if not criticizing the audience for prioritizing this issue to such an extent because he does not. There you see in this article today where they basically ask him about whether he agrees that this is not the issue that we should be focused on. He said, yeah, this is in fact a tiny number of people. And he even went on to say, look, I mean, what the majority wants matters, but so do minority rights. And I want to make sure we're treating everybody justly and fairly not only was there no hostility to trans people, but there was also compassion and empathy towards them of the kind you saw in that clip going all the way back to 2016 – and I think that is who Trump consistently is.
Another thing that I found very interesting in this article is that there's a lot of confusion among some people on what exactly Trump wants in Ukraine. In part because so many people whom he's chosen for very key positions in the foreign policy part of his administration are people who have been critical of Joe Biden for not having done more, not having done more and sooner, including allowing American long-range missiles to be used to bomb Russia, which is what Joe Biden just about three weeks ago announced he would do. And so the reporter asked him the following:
… the question people want to know is, Would you abandon Ukraine?
And I had a meeting recently with a group of people from the government, where they come in and brief me, and I'm not speaking out of turn, the numbers of dead soldiers that have been killed in the last month are numbers that are staggering, both Russians and Ukrainians, and the amounts are fairly equal. You know, I know they like to say they weren't, but they're fairly equal, but the numbers of dead young soldiers lying on fields all over the place are staggering. It's crazy what's taking place. It's crazy. I disagree very vehemently with sending missiles hundreds of miles into Russia. Why are we doing that? We're just escalating this war and making it worse. That should not have been allowed to be done. (TIME. December 12, 2024)
I know there are people in both parties who disagree with Trump on this saying “I don't want to escalate this war,” “It's crazy to allow the Ukrainians to use American missiles and probably personnel to shoot deep inside Russia, bomb deep inside Russia. Why are we doing that?” He's speaking kind of from the heart in terms of what he really thinks. I've made this point actually once before, a couple of months ago when I was on Fox, I think it was with Laura Ingraham. She had played a clip of Trump talking about the war in Ukraine and he was basically saying what he said there, which was like “this war has ended the lives of hundreds of thousands of human beings, young people. What is the point of this, the sense of all this bloodshed?” And I remarked that it's very rare to hear a politician talking about war in that way. That is the only way, or at least the primary way to talk about war. That is war. It's spilling blood, it's ending people's lives, it's extinguishing their existence – young people who don't even want to be in the war, and don't know why they're there. It doesn't mean war is always unjustified. It means that one of the reasons why it should be an absolute last resort, only done when absolutely necessary, which is not the case for this war is because, as he often puts it, so many people are bleeding and dying and losing their lives and it's tragic. Most people in Washington in both parties talk about it as a geostrategic issue. “We can't let Russia expand.” They almost never talk about the human cost of war, in part because it doesn't really come to American soil. We haven't had a war where people are drafted since Vietnam. And so most people in the United States see war as kind of a game, as an abstract issue. It's not fought on our soil, and it's not fought with most of their families. But when Trump talks about it, he talks about it always in this very humanistic way, which is why I also do believe that, at least to some extent, there's authenticity to his desire to avoid war. Along with, as I talked about before, what is an obvious fear of nuclear weapons, which he talks about a lot.
One of the reasons why this was so interesting – that he so adamantly said he opposes the use of long-range missiles in Ukraine – is that a lot of people who are going to be in his cabinet and who are supporters of his have said the exact opposite. Just a couple of weeks ago, General Keith Kellogg was on Fox News, and here's what he had to say on that same exact issue.
Video. Keith Kellogg. Fox News. November 27, 2024.
That's Trump’s former national security adviser and that is the representative view of the establishment wing of the Republican Party, people like Marco Rubio, Elise Stefanik and others whom he's chosen, whose criticism of the Biden policy toward Ukraine is not that we've gotten too involved, that we've fueled that war, that we've risked escalation too much, but that we haven't done it enough. And so, for Trump to just come out and say “This is crazy, to send that kind of missiles there,” I think is indicative of why I say we need to wait to see what the Trump administration is and not judge based on the people he's choosing because it seems a very engaged Trump, a very determined Trump to make sure that this time his policies are the ones who end up shaping his administration and not people who are supposed to work for him.
TIME Magazine also asked Trump about the war in Israel and Gaza and here's what Trump had to say about that.
You mentioned the Palestinian people. In your first term, your administration put forward the most comprehensive plan for a two-state solution in a long time. Do you still support that plan?
I support a plan of peace, and it can take different forms.
Do you still support a two-state solution?
I support whatever solution we can do to get peace. There are other ideas other than two states, but I support whatever, whatever is necessary to get not just peace, but a lasting peace.
The real question at the heart of this, sir, is, do you want to get a two-state deal done, outlined in your Peace to Prosperity deal that you put forward, or are you willing to let Israel annex the West Bank?
So what I want is a deal where there's going to be peace and where the killing stops.
Would you tell Israel—that Bibi tried last time and you stopped him. Would you do it again this time?
We’ll see what happens. Yeah, I did. I stopped him.
…
Do you trust Netanyahu?
I don’t trust anybody.
(TIME. December 12, 2024)
That is not the answer that most of the people who are working for Trump, whom he's chosen, would give. None of them is saying, in fact, oh yeah, we want peace. They're saying we want to unleash the Israelis even further and we'll see what happens in the administration. That's the area where I am least optimistic and hopeful, given the people who funded Trump's campaign and who he surrounded himself with. But I do think Trump prides himself on ending wars. And there again you're seeing his view that the priority has to be ending wars. He has no reason at this point, unlike two months ago, to say things he doesn't believe because he's never going to face the electorate again.
When Trump was on “Meet the Press,” one of the issues he was asked about was whether he would allow RFK Jr. to ban childhood vaccines, or to otherwise codify the idea that vaccines cause autism and here's what Trump said about that.
Video. Donald Trump. NBC News. December 8, 2024.
So, here he's saying, look, I'm not asserting that childhood vaccines cause autism, but I do want to know why autism has skyrocketed. She keeps saying scientists say it's because we identify it better as if he's just supposed to swallow that and say, well, there's no longer any need to research, like, do all scientists think that? Is it possible scientists are wrong like they were in so many instances with COVID? And this is a very, again, reasonable, non-dogmatic way of looking at it. I want to study these causes. I want to work with drug companies. If somebody wants to ban all toddler vaccines like the polio one, that's going to be pretty difficult for them to get me to do. So, again, you're seeing this kind of image of Trump that if you were to believe what you've been hearing about him for the last year, you would not recognize this person.
Here's one particularly good example. I think this not only surprised a lot of his supporters but even angered them. He was asked about whether he would really intend to deport every single person illegally in the country, all 11 million, including the so-called Dreamers, the people who came here very, very young, who have studied here, who went to school here, who have integrated into the society. She asked him, would you even deport them? And here's what he said about that.
Video. Donald Trump. NBC News. December 8, 2024.
So again, here's the person we were supposed to believe hates all Brown people, wants them all extinguished and wants them gone and sent to concentration camps and here he's asked about dreamers – and again, I know this made a lot of supporters of Donald Trump angry, who don't think anyone in the country, including Dreamers, should be able to stay – and he said, “Yeah, I want them to stay. Of course they have to stay. We need to get something worked out.” He even criticized Joe Biden and the Democrats, for not having done it when they had full power.
I have to say this again: all of this is very cogent. Do you see how easy it is to understand, to listen to him, to follow the logical train of thought that he is asking us to travel with him on? It's a very relaxed Trump. It's not that hyper-combative defense of Trump. And again, I think that comes from the security of having just won an election that nobody can challenge the legitimacy of. Remember when he ran in 2016, it was instantly delegitimized as the byproduct of Russian interference. No one could do that this time, and so he's just extremely secure when he's talking to anybody and that makes him, I think, a more effective communicator and a more effective speaker. I know I'm being pretty positive and I'm praising a lot of aspects of what I see of Trump and this is just what I'm seeing and I'm showing you the reasons.
One of the superpowers of Trump has always been that he is extremely funny and so often the things he said that were funny and clearly intended as jokes, the media just could not comprehend or intend it humorously. A lot of times they purposely distorted it, other times they simply were confused. I think the time that I really became radicalized when it came to media lying about not just Russiagate but Trump in 2016 was that time he stood at a press conference and was asked about Russia – they were obsessed with Russia and Russian hacking into the DNC – and he said, “I don't know about that, but Russia, if you're listening, maybe you can find Hillary Clinton's deleted emails, the ones that she had deleted.” Trump was obviously making a joke. Hey, you want to know about Russian hacking? Maybe the Russians can find Hillary Clinton's emails! And they decided to pretend that Trump was standing up in front of the world and earnestly placing a request to the Kremlin about what they should go hack. And they took that as proof that he obviously was in collusion with Putin in the Kremlin since he was specifically requesting that they go hack in a way that was politically advantageous for him. The stupidity of this was so self-evident. If Trump was in collusion with the Kremlin, why would he stand in front of cameras and submit his hacking requests to them? It was such an obvious joke and they decided to take it seriously and it made them look like idiots – like deranged, hysterical idiots.
Trump is still funny. And I want to show you this one clip just to underscore that while he does seem to be sort of more sober and serious communicator, it's also the case that he has retained that, especially that kind of bitter, sardonic humor that comes from certain kinds of resentments. Here's what he said when he talked about the first debate he did with Joe Biden.
Video. Donald Trump. NBC News. December 8, 2024.
So, he says, yeah, I mean, it's one thing to debate one person, just Joe Biden. That's pretty easy, he said, but to debate three people, actually that's pretty easy too, to be honest.
Again, I think that I don't have any reason to believe this is a contrived Trump. What is most striking to me is the engagement and focus and confidence he shows now, because I think that's what was missing more than anything in the first term. I don't think he was that focused, he was not engaged, he was more focused on the vendettas he had, with Russiagate and the like, and he just allowed all these other people to do policy in a way that contradicted not only what he ran on, but what I think is his worldview.
I am still skeptical of whether that will change in the second term, despite how many people close to Trump insist it will, that he's aware of that, that they're aware that that's the priority. But this Trump, someone very clearly focused on policy, speaking about it in an informed way, feeling strongly about it, but not so strongly that it becomes just this inflexible obsession, but still not compromising on the core worldview. That's a Trump that I think has the best chance to correct that fundamental problem that happened in his first administration when he simply didn't know enough or cared enough, wasn't competent enough and was more focused on criticisms of himself. This Trump, I think, has the best chance of actually being a Trump that can align his actual worldview and ideology, regardless of whether it appeared in the campaign, with what administration policy actually is. It remains to be seen, but this is what we have to go on. And I think it's very interesting how he appeared in both interviews.
