Donald Trump
Hutchinson hire a new lawyer (to replace her Trump-issued lawyer) and connected her with Representative Liz Cheney to arrange her explosive testimony. “So, real talk: He’s definitely off,” Farah Griffin said. “And if he wasn’t the former leader of the free world and didn’t try to do a coup, I’d almost feel bad for him.” (Hutchinson declined to comment.)
More complicated for the former leader and failed coup-doer: Among the pretend witnesses was the real Ivanka Trump, who, in recorded testimony, said that after Election Day, she looked not to her father, who talked about a rigged election, but to then–Attorney General Bill Barr, whom she described as someone “I respect.” And in Barr’s respectable opinion, her father’s fraud story was “bullshit.” In a statement, the former president said his daughter was not a credible source. “Ivanka Trump was not involved in looking at, or studying, Election results,” he wrote on Truth Social, the social-media platform he launched to fulfill his compulsive need to tweet after Twitter permanently banned him “due to the risk of further incitement of violence” in the wake of the insurrection. “She had long since checked out and was, in my opinion, only trying to be respectful to Bill Barr and his position as Attorney General (he sucked!).” The statement landed with a minor shock, proof that Trump’s post-insurrection, postpresidency alienation from his inner circle was near total. Not even Ivanka was safe from his public ridicule.
When I raised the subject of the testimony, Trump paused. “Well, I think she wanted to be nice and respectful,” he said. “She’s a very high-quality person, and I don’t think she wanted to hurt anybody’s feelings. I thought that Barr was weak and pathetic, and I think that she doesn’t want to hurt somebody’s feelings.” It came across like he was trying to convince himself of what he said. “I’m not even sure she knew what my feelings were. He didn’t want to be impeached, so he didn’t do his job in order to not get impeached,” he added, channeling his daughter channeling himself. “I don’t think she knew that.”
Has he talked to her about it since? “I’d rather not say. I’d rather not say,” he said. “But she’s a good person, and she doesn’t want to hurt people’s feelings. She has respect for everybody, and there’s something very nice about that, actually.” Did he think she took after him in that respect? “No,” he said, with a laugh. “I don’t think so. We’re a little different in that regard.”
Trump has a hard time expressing his emotions about his daughter, so I asked another former adviser to translate for me. “He’s just trying to protect her and also himself,” this person said, which they thought was usually the case, even if the way Trump worded things left people thinking he meant something completely different. “It’s similar to when he would suggest they”—Ivanka and Jared Kushner—“move back to New York. He didn’t want them to, and it wasn’t a dig; it really was him trying to think of them.” Emphasis on trying. Future political endeavors, this person said, would likely feature less of the couple. “I think their involvement would resemble their November 2015 to January 2016 involvement. ‘Supportive family members’ on occasion, but not involved in any decisions or process day-to-day.”
Abruptly, Trump changed the subject in the most Trumpian of ways. “Did you see Alaska, and did you see Las Vegas? I’ll tell ya, the enthusiasm and the crowds are bigger than they’ve ever been,” he said. “The enthusiasm is greater than it’s ever been.” It does not seem a wholly conscious choice when he does this but like a feature that activates when he is nervous or uncomfortable and zaps him, like magic, into command as The Donald again, which is maybe why he is unable to resist this sudden shift in affect even when it could only make things worse.
When I asked if the insurrection had embarrassed him, he disputed the premise that it was committed on his behalf. “They did it on their own behalf,” he said. He disputed, too, that the insurrectionists were armed. “I don’t think one person in the Capitol had a weapon, not one weapon,” he said. And he disputed my characterization of a swarm of hats charging the Capitol. “And other hats. And other hats. Not just hats. Other hats,” he said. “There were a lot of people there that a lot of other people don’t want to talk about, but they’re also one of the largest crowds I’ve ever spoken to, when I made the speech—peacefully, it should be known as peacefully and patriotically—but when I made the speech, it was one of the largest crowds I’ve ever spoken to.” He threw in a distinction between his crowd, which he said did not go to the Capitol, and the insurrectionists. “Nobody ever talks about that,” he said, but he didn’t want to talk about it much either. He returned to the point of all of this: “I don’t think I’ve ever spoken in front of a larger crowd.”
For Trump, there has always been safety in performing for an audience. Amid the investigations in the run-up to 2024, that might mean something more literal. “A lot of people are saying, ‘You’ve got to announce so you’re protected. It’s a witch hunt, they’re trying to do this to you again. You’ve got to do it before the grand jury meets with Lindsey Graham in the Georgia case,’” the former adviser said. The Fulton County DA issued Graham a subpoena for his testimony regarding two phone calls he placed to the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, amid Trump’s campaign to pressure him to find more votes and overturn the results of the election. Graham said he had filed to “quash the subpoena” on July 13, but the former adviser said that, in private, everyone is spooked. “Grand juries leak. It’s not like you could say, ‘Well, he’s got six months before they make a decision about prosecuting him in Fulton County.’ That’s a criminal case. That’s the big thing he’s worried about because of the tape.”
Others may have sought to impose distance—or the appearance of distance— between themselves and Trump, but Graham has kept up his schedule of frequent golf outings with him, traveling to Florida and now New Jersey for the purpose. The former adviser described Graham’s constant presence around Trump as an effort to stay aware of his thinking. That is the only way to have any chance of influencing him. “Graham feels like if you just let him do what he wants, then it doesn’t happen out of the blue in the dead of night. The takeaway was he’s not gonna last five months without announcing.”
Trump swears that shielding himself from prosecution is not among his reasons for running for president because he is not at any risk of being prosecuted. “Well, I did nothing wrong, so I don’t see that,” he said. “I did absolutely nothing wrong. I had a perfect phone call in Georgia, so I’m not concerned with it.” He was also not concerned with inquiries by Letitia James, he said, referring to her as “a racist attorney general in New York.”
He was looking forward while everybody else was looking back. Presumably, I said, he wouldn’t be asking his former vicepresident to join his 2024 campaign? “Presumably, as you said … Nobody ever voted for a vice-president,” he said. “I’m not bored. I’m very busy with everything, actually. Amazingly busy.” But, he admitted, “nothing compares to getting things done that you can’t do from any other position other than president. I made America great again, and I may have to do it again.”