I wonder if you can set up for me the president’s worldview as you first encountered it in the White House. Well, I don’t think Trump has a worldview. I think he has a view that’s based on his business experience. I don’t think he has tried to structure an understanding of the U.S. place in the world in a philosophy. He’s certainly not a Reagan conservative like I am. That doesn’t mean he’s a squishy Democratic liberal either. He’s not anything. He doesn’t have a view. So a lot of people try to describe Trumpism as a philosophy or the Trump doctrine, and there’s really no such thing. I think you used the analogy that he often views foreign affairs like a P&L sheet, but it’s a zero-sum game and that every relationship can include winners and losers. I wonder how that works in international relations. Well, it’s—he does look at things on a transactional basis, and he’s familiar with numbers and dollars and cents and those all factor in, but even beyond that, it’s very hard to see a consistent, long-term approach to any given issue. I’ve described his decisions as an archipelago of dots that are essentially unconnected and which don’t necessarily— even each individual decision doesn’t necessarily come in proportion. That is to say, he may have a huge issue that he’s concerned about, and yet in exchange for some movement on that issue, he may want only something really very small by comparison. So there’s no effort to try and make decisions or trade-offs on a basis of some kind of comparability, that “I will give you X if you give me Y.” Often, the two things are wildly incompatible. And I think that makes it very difficult to have a sustained and consistent U.S. national security policy. I think it sends very confusing signals to both allies and adversaries alike. I understand the analogy of the unconnected dots, but I also feel as though that he has views that he trusts unequivocally, and I wonder how difficult that is when you’re trying to brief him on the history of Korea, for instance, and you feel like at times he’s pushing a button on a movie soundtrack and repeating lines about his analysis of a particular region’s history. Well, he may have positions on certain issues that he repeats over time, but having one position, it’s like a one-note piano concert: You can keep hitting the one note all you want; it still doesn’t turn it into a strategy. I think what you’re suggesting though is that he is very uneducated in world history and not terribly interested in learning to fill in the gaps. Now, you know, no president comes to the job with 360-degree knowledge. It’s just not possible. But every president that I’ve ever seen in action before Trump has understood there are a lot of things out there that they need to learn, and they apply themselves, and they learn them. That doesn’t mean they agree with my recommendations on policy or anybody else’s. They’ll come up with their own decisions; that’s what presidents are for. But Donald Trump just never seemed very interested in learning. And even when we told him certain things over and over again, it never seemed to sink in. For example, he kept asking, why are we in South Korea? And the answer starts in 1945, when the peninsula was divided at the end of the war in the Pacific. Then there’s the Korean War. Then there’s the Cold War. There are a lot of reasons why we’re still in Korea. And we told him several times how that had evolved, but it never stopped him from asking the question. The same question can be applied to Afghanistan and certainly our presence in the region, his questioning of why are we still there? What are we doing? We’re losing. Well, it applies in a lot of cases. And it’s not to say, again, that he doesn’t have a consistent view on something. But that doesn’t mean it’s part of a bigger picture. It means that on this—on this one point, he hasn’t moved that much, although on Afghanistan as an example, he can say one thing one day and something else quite different a few days later. And what bearing did that have on your ability to do your job and advise him? Well, I think much of the bureaucracy, much of the interagency process went on without being informed by presidential decisions, but went on as best one could without really knowing what the president would do. And a lot of this really didn’t necessarily involve huge interagency disagreements. So it wasn’t like the entire policy process or implementation stopped. But it was subject to continuing jerks and bumps in the road whenever the president decided something that seemed completely contrary to the direction we were going in. So as an example there, we decide that we want to support Juan Guaidó and the opposition in Venezuela to overthrow the Maduro regime, and that— that goes along until the president asks whether he should sit down with Maduro. And that throws everything into disarray. Or he decides when a sanction that we’d previously agreed on will actually apply to the Russians, that he doesn’t want to do that. And that’ll send Treasury Secretary [Steve] Mnuchin off into opposition to more sanctions kind of across the board. So it wasn’t simply idiosyncrasies on the president’s part. These had real, palpable effects in our effort to carry out what we thought was the policy he had directed us to carry out. You had observed the failure of the “axis of adults,” and I wonder if you could help me set them up. What did the early advisers underestimate about the president? What mistakes did they make about him? Well, I think to generalize about all of them together is that they were too obvious in thinking they were smarter than Trump, and they were too obvious in telling their friends in the press, who faithfully repeated that, as if Trump didn’t read The New York Post or The New York Times or some of these publications, or he didn’t hear from Fox News what people were saying about him, or he didn’t listen to MSNBC trumpet that his top advisers thought he was a “blank moron,” in the words of one of them. So this disdain for Trump, I think, communicated itself to him, and it had the impact of making Trump distrustful of all his advisers, even new people who came in, people he didn’t—had not worked with extensively before. And it simply deepened his distrust of anything that he couldn’t see outside of the West Wing in particular. It seems so contrary in many ways to his— I don’t know how to describe it any other way—his almost infatuation with you. You had been sort of a figure in—am I right in saying in the campaign? Certainly in the transition. But that you were someone that was in and out of his orbit, and he was drawn to you and attracted to you. And I’m curious to know how you explain that, how you understood it. Well, I really wasn’t involved in the campaign. I describe in the book, I did meet with him before his last debate with Hillary Clinton, who, with her husband, was a year ahead of me at Yale Law School. So I'd known him[?] for a long time. Not well, but I'd known him for a long time. I talked with him in the transition; I talked with him a number of times after he was inaugurated. And he had watched me on Fox News a lot. And I assumed and believed, based on what he said, that he watched me, he listened to me, and presumably understood what I was saying, so that— that was certainly one of the reasons he felt comfortable in offering me the job. The last debate was just after the Access Hollywood weekend, I think, when the establishment was moving away from him. As you’re witnessing that, what did you think of the moment, of his response to it, certainly with the Clinton accusers? Well, I thought, like most other people, this was finally the end of the Trump campaign. I had thought the end of the Trump campaign was going to come when he said he liked people who did not become prisoners of war in a shot against John McCain. I thought, well, nobody can say that and not suffer damage. And so I was wrong, along with a lot of other people, right on through. But he proved all of the analysts, all of—many of his top advisers wrong and got through that, and obviously won the election. Let me jump back to your time in the White House. You certainly have observed presidents being briefed. I wonder what made these interactions between this president and briefers unique. Well, presidents absorb information in different ways. Some like to read. Some like to hear it verbally. Different people process it different ways. And there’s no one right way; each individual’s entitled to do it the way they want. Trump obviously didn’t read much of anything, and so giving it to him in a verbal form was clearly the right thing to try and do. Every president that I’m aware of, since 1945 anyway, receives daily briefings, sometimes seven days a week, and certainly receives briefings at any other point where it’s important that the information be conveyed. Sometimes it’s by intelligence officials; sometimes it’s by the national security adviser, secretary of defense, secretary of state, whomever has it that it’s important. It’s not just intelligence briefings; it’s briefings on a whole range of things that the president might need to know. But normally, the intelligence briefing has been once a day. That’s why it’s called the “presidential daily brief.” With Trump, briefings rarely took place when he was not in Washington. When he was in Washington, they took place roughly twice a week, sometimes once a week. So that’s a dramatic reduction in the amount of information being conveyed to him. And to me, the hardest thing to understand was in watching the designated intelligence community briefer in the room along with Dan Coats when he was there, director of national intelligence; Gina Haspel, director of the CIA; myself; often Vice President Pence; White House chief of staff from time to time, and sometimes others. But the one intelligence community briefer had to struggle to get out what they wanted to talk about, because often the president would start talking, sometimes about politics, sometimes about hearings he had just watched in Congress. Sometimes something the briefer would say would set him off on a tangent that would consume most of the time allocated for the briefing. And I wish I had kept a stopwatch of how much time briefers spoke in these meetings and how much time he spoke. And I wouldn’t want to try and quantify it, but he spoke a lot. And it recalled for me Lyndon Johnson’s famous comment, “I don’t learn very much when I’m talking.” So the briefings were very frustrating. And I thought on any number of occasions, I’ve got to get this fixed. And I just couldn’t think of a way to do it that would be more effective. There was a practice when I was there—my predecessor H. R. McMaster did it as well— where the director of CIA, director of national intelligence and the briefer would come into my office before going to see the president where we’d talk about the two or three most important things. We’d talk about what to cover in the next briefing and subjects we thought would be priority. But the effort to find a way to convey more information to the president was continuing, ongoing, and I think, to this day, never very successful. I wonder if you can walk me through how the president hears advice, takes advice, and processes that advice. Well, I think, again, different presidents have different styles. There’s no one right style. The only judge is, do your policies prevail and increase the security of the United States. But the National Security Council process is a structured way to bring the different views of the departments and agencies involved together to provide options for the president for a decision, and then to monitor the implementation of the policies that are decided. And you know, there are five levels of meetings that the NSC has: the National Security Council itself, that the president chairs; principals’ meetings, which the national security adviser chairs with Cabinet-level people; deputies’ committee meetings of deputy secretaries; policy committee meetings of assistant secretaries, policy coordination meetings; and then sub-PCCs at the deputy assistant secretary level. So a lot of people will look at that and say, that’s a very structured, bureaucratic, maybe too bureaucratic process. And it’s a legitimate criticism. You can get lost in these meetings if you’re not careful. And that’s really the job of the national security adviser, not to have the process be the La Brea Tar Pit, but to have it work, to bring the options to the president, to get decisions, and to move the implementation forward. I don’t think Trump ever understood how that process worked. I don’t think he liked NSC meetings. I don’t think he liked going to the Situation Room. I think he liked being in the Oval Office. I think he liked having a couple of his people around, sitting in front of him in the desk and kicking the issue around that way. And when, if all the people weren’t in the room, you know, it didn’t bother him. If somebody came in after and tried to get the decision reversed, that didn’t bother him either, and often it worked. So it was—it was a continuing struggle to try to get presidential decisions that were informed, that were consistent with what he said the overall policy was that he wanted, and to make sure that they were carried out. So we had—we tried a whole bunch of different workarounds. Jim Mattis suggested to me before I took the job that he and I and the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, have a breakfast once a week for just the three of us to talk about issues. I thought that was one of the best suggestions that I had, and carried it on, right on through. And we had other informal meetings like that. But the president simply did not want to fit into any kind of structure, nor did he have a preferred structure. It was all, as was described to me, and which I didn’t believe before I took the job, just like at the Trump Organization: “It’s Tuesday morning; what’s going to happen today?,” and then “It’s Wednesday morning; what’s going to happen today?,” and on and on and on. So much there to unpack with you. I’m going to try and go one at a time. You said first that he didn’t like it; he didn’t like the Situation Room; he didn’t like the NSC meetings. What does that mean? What didn’t he like—he didn't like? Well, I think he didn’t like—he didn’t like the room itself. He much preferred the Tank over at the Pentagon. And all I could think to that was, he should have seen the Situation Room during the Bush 43 administration, before it got fixed up. And in fact, I thought it needed to be modernized further and had a project in place that was canceled after I left. But that’s fine. I mean, he didn’t like the number of people who were often in the Situation Room. He thought there were too many. But even when he was there, we couldn’t keep him on a straight trajectory discussing what the issue was. I lay out in the book conversations where we might be there talking about Iran, and we’d end up talking about Africa, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Russia, China, Israel, you name it. And there were times that, in one case, Gina Haspel interrupted something he was saying. And I can’t say what it was that Gina Haspel, the director of the CIA, said, but I know everybody around the table was very happy she interrupted because at least it got us back on track. So more and more, I think we had the discussions in the Oval Office, which, by definition, is less structured, but I think also a place Trump just felt more comfortable. It sounds like it’s a rejection of the structure and the formality. But also is it a rejection of the expertise? I think it’s a reflection that Trump truly believes that massive amounts of information are not required to make national security decisions, and that he can rely on his gut rather than information or advice from the experts. Indulge me in this for just a moment. You do this in the book, but give me a sense of his day, because I was struck by how you and John Kelly start your mornings at the White House and how different that is from his structure. Well, Kelly, like a lot of military people, and me because of force of habit, started early. I would just say, in the world of national security, when you’re 12 hours behind Japan, if you come in at 6:00, like I did, it’s the end of the day in Japan; they’ve had a whole day while you’ve been asleep. And by the way, it’s noon, lunchtime, in Europe, so they’re way ahead of you, too. The morning is the time when you catch up with the rest of the world. Trump usually arrived in the Oval Office about 11:00, 11 a.m. Now, he was up in the residence. I talked to him days he was in Washington maybe two or three times when he was up in the residence. So he was doing work part of that time, but he was also talking to his friends, watching cable news channels, reading newspapers, doing other things. But he’d come down, and usually the first thing, if it was one of the days for the intelligence briefings, we would try and have a briefing before we got caught up in everything else, or the press of the schedule reduced the length of time available for the meeting, that sort of thing. And then it depended for the rest of the day on what was on the schedule. He spent an awful lot of time in the small dining room off the Oval Office where he had a big-screen TV. Other presidents have as well. But he spent a lot of time in there watching television during the day. And a lot of the meetings took place in the small dining room, kind of on the fly, which was OK with me, too, because sometimes we could just say, “Look, here, we need this signed right away to get authorization to do something,” and he’d sign it and then we’d be done with it whereas otherwise it might just have sat around. But it was very informal. And that was a practice that persisted throughout the time I was there. We informally understand the administration to be what we call a crisis presidency; that he’s jumping in some ways from crisis to crisis and that there’s certainly internal crises happening as well. But I wonder if it felt that way. You’re watching it up close. What did it feel like, and did he mind that sort of pace and that cadence of things tending to blow up? I’m talking about the Russia “hoax,” the investigations, but also, of course, actual— Well, to me, it just felt like continuing chaos; that there was no structure, there was no effort to say what are the priorities here. There were certainly many areas that were just off my radar screen entirely— the Russia hoax, the collusion, the Mueller investigation. That didn’t bother me at all; I was happy not to be much involved in those. But it was a stark contrast to other Republican presidents that had strong chiefs of staff that worked with the president— Jim Baker under Ronald Reagan, kind of the paradigm of that— a White House constantly addressing priorities and trying to move ahead. John Sununu addresses his time as chief of staff with Brent Scowcroft as national security adviser. And I talked to Sununu; I read his memoir. If I had had 10% of the structure that Sununu and Scowcroft had with Bush 41, if I had had 10% of that with Trump, I would have considered myself in heaven. And George W. Bush was also pretty structured in his approach to things. And the reason is that there are so many competing pressures on the president that unless he has adequate time to think about what his decision is, the decisions will be less well informed. It’s not for lack of creativity; it’s to give the president the chance to focus on the priorities that he wants. And when you dispense with structure, you reduce the protections around the presidency and increase the chance that he will make an error. Let me ask you about how he evaluates crisis. Does he use crisis to his advantage? How does he feel about conflict? You certainly detail in the book conflict within the White House. But I’m curious to hear what his comfort level was around crisis and around conflict. Well, I don’t think crisis or conflict or pressure really bothered him. I didn’t detect that it worried him or inhibited his decision making. That really wasn’t the problem. The problem was that decision on a course of action in a crisis was often disconnected with what had happened before that decision or what might follow from it. And so that’s why the inability to think over a sustained period of time how one decision fits into another led us into, I think, more problems than would—we would otherwise have faced. I think the other major problem is the president simply didn’t want to own decisions that he had made. All the time, presidents face outcomes that are not exactly what they thought they might get or hoped they would get from a given decision. And that’s something the president and all his advisers should learn from, to face the next decision. But, but Trump’s reaction when something went wrong was: “I knew I shouldn’t have done that. I got talked into that. I shouldn’t have been talked into it.” And so it made everybody around him reluctant to push too hard in some sense because they began to fear that they would get the blame if things didn’t turn out as predicted and that the blame would fall on them rather than the president. Now, look, every adviser has to justify his or her presence by giving good advice. That’s the—you want people who are going to give good advice. But the president has to recognize that he’s the one making the decisions, and if he doesn’t like the advice, he should get new advisers or find outside advice or something. The trouble with Trump is, he did find outside advice from people like Rudy Giuliani and others outside the administration who were pursuing policies that didn’t necessarily have anything to do with what was on the U.S. national agenda. It sounds as though he’s making decisions with an incredible amount of outside voices and he’s sort of— I don’t know, how would you describe how he makes a decision? What information is he seeking out to do that? I think he feels that in most cases his gut will tell him what to do, and that study and analysis are not going to improve the quality of his decision making. And I think he makes decisions quickly and can change them very quickly, too. And it sometimes can be 180 degrees of what he had decided just a few hours before. And that led to circumstances where things are underway that can’t completely be called back. But it also leads to the recriminations that follow when he could have sat on something, for example, “Well, I want to think about this some more,” and eventually rejected the policy advice. But when he decides quickly and then it goes wrong, he says it’s because he was rushed into it, when in fact he’s the one who calls the pace of the decision making. You wrote in the book about when it’s announced that you’ll be joining the White House that he says you’re doing very well on television, the base loves the announcement, that you’re getting great reviews. And you wrote that he said, “Some of them think you’re the bad cop,” and you replied, “When we play the good cop and the bad cop, the president is always the good cop.” And he says, “We’re both bad cops.” What does that mean? What did he mean by that? Well, I didn’t think he wanted anybody with a reputation as badder than he was. At one point, I said to him that Kim Jong-Un did not deserve another summit meeting with him and said something about Kim Jong-Un that probably shouldn’t be on family television, and the president looked at me and said, “You have a lot of hostility”; said, “Of course, I have more hostility, but you have a lot of hostility.” So whatever the quality was, he always had more of it. Just the hostility or the bad cop, these are not traits that we associate with presidents. So I’m just curious, your initial take on that. Well, I thought it was some indication that he still didn’t fully understand what the president— what that role was because being the good cop means that you’re the person who can say, “My advisers are telling me X, but, Madame Prime Minister, I’m going to give you Y anyway.” That’s being the good cop. And I would have thought he would have enjoyed it. And of course, he does enjoy it; he just doesn’t like to admit that he can’t also be the best bad cop on the beat. Life’s a little bit more fun being the bad cop. It usually is. Let me ask you a little bit about something you raised earlier with Russia and his concerns about legitimacy. You wrote that the Russian meddling was something he could never admit because it would undercut the legitimacy of the election. Help me understand his perspective on the Russia investigation and how that sort of holds him tightly. He believed the Russia investigation was intended to prevent him from becoming president, and then when that failed, to undermine his legitimacy. So it affected his view of the intelligence community, of the law enforcement community. It reinforced the views of those who were telling him the deep state was out to get him, and it made him defensive about his encounters with Putin and Russia policy generally. Now, the administration has taken some strong actions against Russia in the form of sanctions and other measures, but often with Trump kicking and screaming every step of the way before he eventually agreed to it. Because he fears that acknowledging that Russia’s doing something contrary to American national interest gives support to the notion that they tried to interfere in the 2016 elections, 2018, or now in 2020, and that once he admits any interference at all, he’s implicitly acknowledging that perhaps the interference had an impact on the election. Now, I don’t know of any proof that anybody’s put forward that Russian or Chinese or any other interference in 2016 or 2018 actually did have an outcome on the election. So there’s a very clear distinction and I think an important one that he could have taken, saying: “I absolutely oppose any foreign interference in our election, and I’ve directed the government to take all steps necessary to prevent it from happening. But there was no Russia collusion, and I didn’t do anything to encourage it.” I don’t think there’s anything inconsistent there at all. I think it’s a very strong position, in fact. But he simply would not accept that. You raised this idea of his concern about personal relationships with world leaders, and I wonder about you witnessing how he’s personalizing the presidency. I think he has a very difficult time distinguishing between his own interests, whether they’re political or economic, and the interests of the country. I think he believes with respect to foreign leaders, especially authoritarian foreign leaders, if his personal relationship with them is good that relations between the U.S. and that country are good. And that’s just not true. I’m not discounting the importance of personal relationships; they are important. But when you’re dealing with somebody like Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping, they don’t have any trouble distinguishing being able to joke with Donald Trump on the one hand with taking a tough line to defend their respective national interests on the other. And I always felt, watching Trump on the other side of the table from, say, Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent, hard as a rock, very cold-blooded in his approach to advancing Russian national interests, deeply experienced and knowledgeable in all of these issues, Vladimir Putin against Donald Trump on the other side of the table was not a fair fight. We’ve interviewed Steve Bannon a few times, and he’s described the president as an “imperfect instrument,” and I wonder if you can help us understand that perspective. Well, yeah, “imperfect instrument” would be a polite way of putting it. If—in the national security space, if you don’t have a president who thinks over a long term, you’re not going to have effective policies. The key issues that a president confronts can have impacts lasting for decades. And there are no easy decisions that come to the Oval Office. All the easy decisions have already been made at lower levels. So this is—this is a high-stakes matter every time we talk to him. And it’s not just being an imperfect instrument; it’s an unwillingness to understand this broader context and the possibility that not doing so means you’re making decisions that at a micro level really don’t make that much difference, but combined over a period of time can dramatically undercut U.S. security. Let me ask you if we can move over to COVID for a moment, because we’ve talked a lot about the president’s worldview, and I wonder what that bearing is on how he handles this crisis. I think there’s no question that in the first several months of 2020, January-February, when staff on the NSC and the Centers for Disease Control were raising red flags about what was happening in China, the president was determined not to hear any bad news. He was determined not to hear anything bad about Xi Jinping. He was determined not to believe the Chinese were covering up what was going on in China with the disease, engaging in disinformation. He did not want to hear that the Chinese economy might be adversely affected in a way that could undercut the trade deal. And most important of all, he didn’t want to hear anything that implied that there might be risk to the U.S. economy, which he saw as his ticket to reelection. So I think this, notwithstanding a few actions that he took, like some restrictions on entry from China, this unwillingness to think about the implications meant there was no strategic planning going on. We lost two-plus months when actions might have been taken that would have alleviated the shortages in testing capability, hospital capability, that might have accelerated work on the vaccine, because that would have meant acknowledging we were facing a severe threat. And he simply did not want to do that. To this day, you still cannot describe what our strategy is to respond to the coronavirus pandemic. And by the way, that doesn’t mean you can’t list on a piece of paper things that are being done, different parts of government, different state and federal responses. But a list of things being done is still not a strategy. And that I think has led us to—whether we’re in a second wave or it’s still the first wave, but it’s— we’re not succeeding in conquering the disease. You know how he processes expertise and guidance on this from the experts. What worries you about his approach to some of those advisers? Well, it’s not so much the rejection of expert advice; it’s the ad hoc nature of how he looks at things. So if there’s a problem with respirators in New York hospitals, you put Jared [Kushner] on respirators in New York hospitals. Well, OK, great. But what’s that doing toward what a president does? A president … has got to be at the strategic level, not at the desk officer level. And it’s hard to resist because people are problem solvers, but you have to keep in mind what the president’s basic function is, and that was just not something he focused on. If anything, I think his tendency is to turn between different sets of advisers. So at one point we shut the economy down because that’s what the medical advisers said, and then the economic advisers said, “My God, you shut the economy down; this is not a good thing.” You know, the fact, there’s an old cliché that wars are too important to be left to the generals, and I think the same applies in the case of a pandemic. It’s too important to be left to the doctors. It is a very complex social phenomenon that we’re dealing with, and a lot of variables have to be taken into account. The way you do that is through a structured learning and decision-making process to try and assign weights to the different variables and come up with a strategy. That isn’t even close to what he did. When he calls it the “Wuhan virus,” when he tries to kind of square blame on China, what does that tell you about the strategy he’s employing or considering? It shows he knows he’s in trouble, and he’s trying to blame it on somebody else. I don’t think that’s a racist response. People talk about Rocky Mountain spotted fever; is that a bad thing? Look, it started in Wuhan, as best we can tell. But I think that his current approach of attacking China on a number of grounds, imposing sanctions because of the things they’re doing in Hong Kong or the repression of the Uighurs is a temporary election-related response. He didn’t want to hear anything bad about China for the first three months; now the pandemic is a full-scale problem for him, and it must have been China’s fault. It was certainly not Donald Trump’s fault; you can bet on that. And as a conservative, what I worry about is that because so many of his decisions are driven by political factors, not by arguments on the policy merits, if he wins on November the 3rd, he could easily have a conversation with Xi Jinping on November the 4th and say, “Let’s get past all this Hong Kong and Uighur business; let’s get back to the trade deal.” That brings us to a very important question to this interview, which is, what has he learned throughout this first term? How has he changed? How will that affect how he potentially walks in on Nov. 4? I don’t think he’s changed at all, and I don’t think he’s going to change. For all the criticisms that people make of him and, for example, short attention span is one of them, when it comes to his reelection, his attention span is infinite. But once that’s achieved, then you have to wonder what comes next. And because he doesn’t base decisions on philosophy or strategy, one person’s good— guess is as good as another what he’s going to do next. And that worries me, because the political constraint, while not 100% effective in the national security area, did help serve—avoid what I would have considered a number of bad decisions. And if that guardrail, if that constraint is eliminated or removed because he has been successfully reelected, I don’t know what’s going to guide his decisions. Ambassador, do you know what has motivated him to enter politics? We’ve talked about several different statesmen throughout this conversation and certainly senior advisers who have spent their careers and their lives devoted to public service. Why is he sitting just across from this hotel in that Oval? What is that fire? Well, I think that’s, you know, he likes being a winner; he doesn’t like being a loser. Being president is being the biggest winner of all. So what is he concerned about as the election draws near? He’s concerned about being a loser. And if he’s—if he thinks that at some point that he’s in trouble, and I think there’s a lot of evidence that he does think that, which is why he has suggested delaying the election, he will try and find a way to prevent that from happening or blame it on somebody else, because it certainly wasn’t his fault if he loses. That would make him a loser, and we know that he’s not. It’s also, the only silver lining in this cloud is that I think fears of authoritarianism in Trump are somewhat overstated. To be a real authoritarian, you have to want to do something. You do have to have a philosophy, and he doesn’t have a philosophy. You are watching that Lafayette Square moment from home. Do you watch it live when he walks across the park? And I wonder what you’re sort of seeing, and especially what you’re seeing with those advisers that are joining him in that moment. Well, I thought that had all the mark of a relatively impromptu decision. I don’t know what went into the thinking of it, but it looked like the search for a great photo opportunity, and I think that’s exactly what it was. I don’t think it was connected to a larger strategy. I felt badly for some of the people who were in that march. I’ve been asked what I would do, and I’ve said I probably would have gone along; how am I going to say no? And then I would have felt very badly about it later. But that’s an effect Trump has on people. You find yourself, if you’re not careful, justifying things he’s done that if you were an observer you would have criticized. And that’s one of the factors in my own case that led to resignation, and I think led to resignations, or firings ultimately, in many other cases as well. Is that, do you think, the equation that Secretary of State Pompeo and Attorney General [William] Barr are also sort of contemplating and are being pulled? Well, I think everybody’s got to make their own decision. It’s—you can have a political agenda of your own if you think tying yourself to Trump is the ticket to success. If you’re thinking of running for the presidency in 2024, then you can make that calculation. But you have to take the sour with the sweet if that’s in fact what you’re doing. You mentioned Jared Kushner earlier, and something that I took away from the book was that I was surprised and it sounds like you were also surprised at how many issues the president relies on him to handle. Can you give us an assessment of what role Jared Kushner plays in this White House? Well, pretty much any role that he wants. And that’s part of the problem, because that’s the behavior of a dilettante. And whatever else you want to say about decisions that the president has to make, this is not a place for dilettantes to do on-the-job training. And the risk, again, of a decision that’s poorly informed, not well thought out, and not carefully monitored after it’s made are very high. He sounds like a shadow secretary of state. Well, you should ask Mike Pompeo that question. OK, so I just have one last thing for you which is, we’ve obviously been focused on the president, but part of this film also is the Biden side of the film, and I wonder if I can ask you a quick question about Joe Biden and what perhaps worries you about a Joe Biden presidency, the issue of Ukraine under a Biden presidency. I just wonder if you can help us understand that. Well, I’m not going to vote for Trump, but I’m not going to vote for Biden either. I’ll write in a name in November. But I think Biden’s presidency, from my perspective, will be, at best, the Obama presidency. And I think that the pressure of the left wing of the Democratic Party in the national security area will move him dramatically in the wrong direction. So it’s not a happy November prospect for me. Do you think there is work to be done to repair the country’s trust level and credibility after this time period we’re in? Well, I think Obama did a lot of damage to the country in many respects from the liberal side of the spectrum. He had distinct isolationist tendencies, and he reduced America’s presence in the world. That’s one thing I wanted to try and reverse. Now, there’s been a mixed record in that regard with Trump on substance. I think his personal performance has caused damage to the United States. And I think the important point for our—for foreigners, whether they’re friends or adversaries, is that Trump is an anomaly. He is a mistake in the constitutional system, and the likelihood of him being repeated I think is really quite small. That has nothing to do with the substance of the policies. It has to do with the credibility of the United States, the legitimacy of its actions around the world, that sort of thing, which Trump’s behavior has damaged. But after one term, I think that can be corrected without too much difficulty. Two terms would worry me a great deal more.
