‘He Was the Ringmaster in the Demise of His Own Circus’

Not quite five years ago, as Donald Trump emerged unexpectedly as the favorite to win the Republican presidential nomination, I took the train from Washington to New York to meet at Trump Grill in Trump Tower with five of the original Trump biographers.

Who could have known what was to come?

In many ways, though, they did. Wayne Barrett, Harry Hurt III, Gwenda Blair, Tim O’Brien and Michael D’Antonio—authors of books about Trump that were published from the early 1990s to 2015—they … knew. They knew his strengths and his weaknesses, his charisma and his impulsivity, the misogyny and the bigotry, the pathological behaviors, the reasons for them, and what almost always had been the consequences of them—for Trump, but more often, and especially, for the people around him.

During our initial convening that day in Manhattan, and in subsequent conversations—right after the leak of the “Access Hollywood” tape, right after he won, and right before he was inaugurated—they said he’d never accept a loss, that he’d say it was “stolen,” that he’d say it was “rigged.” They said he was “going to plunge the whole country into an authoritarian dynamic.” They said he was “a guy who is playing to a mob.” And no matter what, they said, Trump would retain “a substantial number of Americans who support him, and where he takes them is really quite threatening.” They weren’t clairvoyant—they didn’t think he would win in 2016—but once he did, they had a practically eerily on-the-nose sense of where all this was headed. The roundtables read like warnings.

Barrett, the esteemed dean of the group, died the day before Trump’s inauguration, but O’Brien, Blair, D’Antonio and Hurt told me many times over these last four dizzying and dangerous years that what Trump was doing might have been unprecedented for the country and for the presidency but it wasn’t unprecedented for him. It was indeed all but foretold. Trump the president was the Trump they knew. He was the Trump that was right there all along in the hundreds of pages they wrote.

Now, with Trump set to exit the Oval Office with the fresh stain of a second impeachment and Joe Biden ready to take his place, I wanted to bring the four of them together for one final time. We talked about narcissism and self-loathing and comeuppance and the possibility of a semblance of introspection or personal reckoning, and his father as Dr. Frankenstein, and whether or not they still are not surprised by Trump and the varieties of calamities he wrought. And they again tapped his past to predict his future, sketching a next chapter complicated by legal and financial peril and the disgrace of the end of his tenure in particular—but defined as ever by a deep-seated, moment-to-moment struggle to fight to fill his “bottomless pit of need” while desperately trying to ward off relative irrelevance.

“Revenge,” O’Brien said, “will be part of it.”

“Gasoline on the fire,” said Hurt, “whatever chance he can.”

Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Michael Kruse: In re-reading some of our previous convenings, I was struck by kind of a recurring theme, which is the lack of surprise from all of you. This is who he is, this is how he operates, this is what he does. But I want to re-ask that now, in the waning days of the actual presidency of Donald J. Trump: Is this what you were expecting?

Tim O’Brien: I don’t know that anybody could have anticipated the particulars, but you generally knew based on everything that he’s about that he was going to corrupt the office and incite violence on the streets and introduce grotesque civic discourse into the mix. I don’t think any of the general issues are a surprise, but it’s always the specifics—who he corrupts, how they get corrupted, what the end result is—that are harder to predict but are still consistent with who he is generally.

Gwenda Blair: Surprising? No. Surreal. Yes.

Harry Hurt III: Look, I don’t think, unless you spent considerable time around Donald Trump, you could fathom how completely screwed up he is. Everybody on this panel has spent significant time around him, some voluntarily and some involuntarily. It is hard to describe to somebody the depth and breadth of his psychosis. It’s been finally on display, in graphic manner, in the last few weeks, but it’s been on display for months and months and years. The only surprise is Rudy Giuliani didn’t get better hair dye.

O’Brien: Every story out of the Oval Office is: We didn’t realize that he had the attention span of a child, or how demented he could be about working on behalf of the public interest or his willy-nilly ability to execute people, both literally and figuratively, that he didn’t care for, inside his administration and out. And there was this progressive revealing of who he is to his staff and the country in the way that he revealed himself to all of us as writers at different periods of time.

Michael D’Antonio: I was always expecting an element of lethality to Trump’s presidency. I was so disturbed by him when I was dealing with him directly that I was happy that I had a psychotherapist wife who had a lot of colleagues I could consult. And they all kept talking about how depraved he really was and how dangerous he was. And I think it first started to come true when that little girl and her father were dead in the Rio Grande. And I thought, you know, this is the beginning of this. Tim, you mentioned the executions that he’s pursuing, or did pursue, at this rapid pace, so that he was able to kill 13 prisoners between July and today, and the 400,000 who will be dead because of coronavirus, and untold numbers of them died because of his incompetence and his inability to even accommodate other people’s suffering and death.

And I feel like during the process of talking about him far too much, we all were probably thinking, “You know, this is worse than people know.” The mockery that you use to confront him sometimes is appropriate and necessary and then the amount of alarm that you raise seems to go up and up the more damage he does. And now everybody is traumatized by this lunatic. And I think he’s leaving behind this movement that is going to continue that is also really dangerous. So it’s like the inside of his terribly anguished brain is now the reality that we’re all living with. And it’s really, really scary.

Kruse: Before we get to the frightening long tail of the Trump presidency, I’m curious: Is there anything in the last five and a half years since he came down that escalator that you’ve learned—that you didn’t know about him?

O’Brien: I’ve learned nothing about him, but I’ve learned a lot about the country. And I think we had this conversation early on—is there anything about him that surprises us? And I remember, I think, saying that it surprises me what he does to the people around him and the institutions around him. What he’s done to federal institutions, what he’s done to people in his orbit, what he’s done to the party—that is, the ability for him to be able to just steamroll those people and processes and institutions—surprises me. Because he’s this flagrant, demented delinquent, and it shouldn’t be this easy. But I think one of the lessons of that is the reason it was easy for him is that he’s a reflection of a lot of real issues and anxieties and hatreds and divisions in our society that have been papered over, or not, for a long time, and it sort of came into full blossom in his presidency.

Hurt: It’s sort of like Jay Gatsby. It wasn’t Gatsby. It was the foul dust that surrounded him. I happen to think that Fitzgerald was wrong. It was Gatsby and the foul dust. And it’s also Trump and the foul dust.

Blair: I have to say I did learn a lot. I was more than surprised—shocked, stunned, dismayed, and deeply disheartened—by all that it revealed around Trump, for sure.

D’Antonio: Trump, if he showed me anything, it was that he was a more capable autocrat, a more capable authoritarian or fascist, than I would have expected him to be. He was incompetent at governing. And maybe if he were more gifted, more like Mussolini, he would have done more damage. But if you look at how he drew together these disparate communities, so whether it’s the racists or the white nationalists or the Christian nationalists, there seemed to be a lot of people around who were waiting to be called to his side.

And the melding of the religious right with Trump, these were things that I think were bound to happen, should the right guy come along, because Christian nationalists have been building towards this since Jerry Falwell in the 1980s. And their whole notion that we can use him as this broken vessel to advance a Christian state. And this is what Josh Hawley is. It’s what Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio believe. They really don’t have a commitment to a pluralistic, democratic republic. They want a Christian nation. And so now we see Trump was a miserable excuse for a Christian, but so are these folks. What they really are is power-mad, religious fanatics. And so there was somebody in the Senate chamber screaming out to Jesus Christ as he participated in the mob assault on the United States Capitol. This is a more demented element of our country than I think I understood fully. But Trump understood it. I think that he’s also been aiming toward this since he decided that he’s going to be Archie Bunker, he’s going to be the right-wing guy from Queens who’s going to be not so subtly racist and tap into this energy. It’s more evil than I expected, and it found a more receptive and action-oriented population than I think any of us could have imagined.

Kruse: So there’s this idea that you in some sense underestimated him and overestimated us, right? Both those things. This might be a strange question, but I’m wondering if you could go back to rewrite your respective Trump books, would you do them differently?

Blair: I’d be screaming so much louder.

Hurt: I wouldn’t change a single word, to tell you the truth. He is by far the greatest self-promoter in the history of American capitalism. And look, the guy got himself elected president, and Tim can tell you, there is no there there financially. So that is an act of self-promotion, but I keep coming back to, in my mind, for some reason, to the helicopter crash that killed his three executives from Atlantic City. And he claimed that he was going to be on that helicopter, which was a complete bald-faced lie. He had other meetings scheduled in New York that day, and it wreaked havoc in the morale of the Trump Organization at that time. Because they couldn’t even believe that, but it just shows that he will stop at nothing and that the deaths of other people are of no consequence to him, except to the extent he can manipulate them to his own advantage and gain. I don’t think that’s changed a bit. And so I wouldn’t change a word. Someone I met the other night was asking me, “Well, you should write another chapter to your book or a sequel to your book.” No thank you.

Blair: If I had known Tony Schwartz’s true role in The Art of the Deal, that would have made a big difference to me when I was working on my book. If I had understood how fabricated that was, that would’ve made a very significant difference—how that founding myth was so riddled with at best exaggeration, sometimes lies. It was actually like a blueprint for what he did later, where he did all of these really grift-y, terrible things, where he cheated people, he lied to them, he shorted them—he brags about it. I don’t think I really grasped then what that book said. It was celebrated that he was such a clever guy, that he had done all these clever run-arounds.

O’Brien: “The Apprentice” [was] the same way—this gloss put on this incompetent, damaged man, that he was an entrepreneurial guru and a deal-maker, et cetera, et cetera. And then he took that to social when he ran for president. He’s had these different media where he’s had either people knowingly facilitate these lies that he’s telling about himself—whether it’s in books and then on TV or buying into the lie and living with it because it gives them a greater sense of themselves. I mean, that explains a lot of his political traction with people and his fans for “The Apprentice” and the people who loved The Art of the Deal. I think even more than Art of the Deal, I really think it’s easy to underestimate how much “The Apprentice” secured him the presidency.

Blair: Absolutely.

O’Brien: His traction with millions of people who saw him as someone who he actually isn’t.

Kruse: Michael, your book came at a different time than the other three here, right in the run-up to his run and in the aftermath of “The Apprentice.” You put it into the context of this sort of culture of narcissism and within entertainment and its perverse power that has developed in our culture broadly. Is there something that you would tweak in that sort of equation you put together in your book?

D’Antonio: No, I don’t think I would. I have such a debt of gratitude to Wayne and Gwenda and Tim and Harry. I think together we created a pretty accurate picture of who this person was. But, you know, in the time that we all published our books, I think we published what the industry would tolerate from us, whether it’s a publisher afraid of being sued or editors afraid of going too far out on a limb. So I think I wouldn’t change much of anything. What I would change is some of the early commentary I offered. I wasn’t ready to declare him a racist until mid-2017 or so. And I wish I had done that. I wish I had been more upfront about just how deranged he really is and had more confidence in my own judgment. I was playing by the old rules, you know, the rules that say you listen to someone and think very carefully and withhold judgment until you’re absolutely certain. But certainly by the time Charlottesville came along I was saying that clearly he’s a racist and was kind of annoyed with myself that I hadn’t done it earlier.

O’Brien: I wouldn’t even change what I wrote to avoid the lawsuit because what I wrote was accurate. And it was the only way to write it. And I think we were careful, with the New York Times’ lawyers and my publisher’s lawyers, around how all that was characterized and phrased. It was overwhelmingly fair to him. But I think my book portrays someone who’s damaged and farcical and self-deluded, but the world he came out of, in Queens, and the extent of his flirtations or courting of white nationalists and how predatory he is towards women—that’s also there in the books. He’s unfaithful to his wives and he’s a constant skirt chaser, but the sort of overt and constant and dangerous predatory nature to it—I think I would have wanted to explore more of that, for sure, now because it’s come into such full blossom. And it might not have had he not become president.

Kruse: The revelations through the last five and a half years of the extent to which he is damaged and is dangerous—fair to say these revelations would not have happened had he not been elected president. So, I’m curious: Do you think November 8, 2016, will in the end be the best thing that ever happen to Donald Trump, or the worst?

O’Brien: Both. It’s both the best and the worst. He’s such an egomaniac and so needy for the spotlight that he got the biggest platform in the world in the presidency to fill his need for attention, constant attention, and the media spotlight. And because he’s that damaged and needy he courts these things but then he gets exposed for who he is. And I think he’s permanently sullied his family’s name with at least half the population of the United States, if not more, and it’s historically dark things that they’re going to be associated with—an insurrection, programmatic racism, thuggery, and a real, I think, defaming of the presidency, unlike any other president. And I don’t think he foresaw that. It’s always interesting to me there’s still this ongoing narrative you sometimes see in the press around him about, well, you know, what’s the strategy here, what’s his strategic thinking here? Donald Trump is not a strategic thinker. It’s just the wrong way to even think about what motivates him. He’s just Mr. Id. And he’s constantly trying to get gratification. He doesn’t care about the consequences. And then they blow up all around him. And so his election as president was both, I think, the best and the worst thing that ever happened to him.

Hurt: I agree with Tim. And you could get Shakespearian and say he had a tragic flaw, but I’ve said over and over again, through the course of these last four years, that the only person that can really bring Donald Trump down is Donald Trump himself. And if you think of all the attacks on him and all the things that were exposed and all the people that left and so forth, ultimately what happened on January 6 is what brought Trump down, in my view, forever and ever. And he perpetrated that entirely himself. I mean, he was the ringmaster—the ring master in the demise of his own circus.

Blair: And he enjoyed it!

Hurt: I don’t think he’s partying right now, but he did enjoy it in real time.

D’Antonio: This is a guy who’s had the seeds of suicide in him forever. This is the flip side of narcissism and grandiosity. On the one side of it is grandiosity, but on the other side is self-loathing, and I feel like this is a person who’s so grandiose that the signal he took from surviving the first impeachment was to do more. It’s like, “Well, they didn’t stop me that time. That means that I’m going to have to push this even further to see if the next thing I do actually kills me.” And certainly, politically and historically, he’s killed himself. This is a person whose name will be synonymous with betrayal and anti-democratic, anti-American thinking. What’s so amazing is here’s this guy who literally hugged the flag and talked about traitors and treason and enemies of the people and we’ve never had a public figure who’s been more of an enemy of America than Donald Trump. So, as Tim said, it’s both the greatest thing that ever happened to him because he was seeking that gratification, but it was the absolute worst thing too, because he could have gone off into the sunset as a person half the world believed was as rich as he said he was and give his children this empire of businesses to take over. And now so much of it is ruined. I think of him as almost like a disgraced televangelist, and he might be able to rebuild some following in his cult and take their meager donations on a month-by-month basis. But who the hell wants to play golf at a Trump golf course or stay in a Trump hotel now? Only the most tone-deaf, ignorant person wants any association with that name.

Kruse: What I’m hearing is something close to a consensus that he’s all done, that there is no Trumpian comeback. Is this actually the line that has been crossed from which he cannot come back?

O’Brien: I think it depends on what world you’re talking about. I think there’s Trump as a media presence, Trump as a political presence, and Trump as a business presence, and he’s always been a cartoon figure in the business community. And I don’t think he has any real interest in running the family businesses anymore anyway. I think he’s going to leave that to Eric, and if they survive the multiple investigations targeting all of them and the havoc that Covid is wreaking on every industry they inhabit, they’ll have some sort of an operation they can trade off.

The other two, I think, are more consequential. He wants to buy a media company, or start one, I think, and I think they’ll get a lot of buzz around that, but I think he’ll have trouble raising financing for that now to make it happen. And because he is such an abysmal operator, I don’t think he’ll spend much time, the kind of time he’d need to make that work. And that might be very buzzy for a year or two and then run off the rails.

I think it’s harder to say where he’s going to be politically. I think Mitch McConnell is going to want to freeze him out and the traditional establishment conservative hierarchy in the Republican party will want to push him out, but they’re going to have to deal with this insurgent, populist base that he’s a figurehead for. And I think he’ll still be somebody who can throw sand in the machinery around electoral politics, Republicans, backing candidates he likes, doing fundraisers for them, doing rallies. But I think January 6 altered the map around all of those things. Because how much his psychological damage and neediness and pathology could be visited onto the country in the way that it was, I think, unwound a lot of scenarios that were different prior to that.

Kruse: So, in five years, in 50 years, what will the legacy of Donald Trump be, and of his presidency, but of the man himself more than anything?

Hurt: In 50 years, he’s the worst president the United States of America has ever had. Period. Everybody else is playing for second. And in five years, as Tim said, you know, it’s, it’ll be interesting to see this sort of dribble-out, especially on the political side. And remember, as we were talking earlier, this base is not going to go away, and he’s going to continue to antagonize them and throw gasoline on the fire whatever chance he can. I mean, it’s basically all he’s got left. How successful he’ll be, it’s TBD. The invertebrate Republicans, as George Will called them, will they get some spine? Will they indeed banish him from the party?

Blair: There’s an awful lot of people that still are going to follow Trump’s lead on who to vote for in a primary in 2022. And he could—he can—gum up the works a lot. I don’t know what happens to Lara Trump … Don Trump Jr. … I don’t know if there’s a next generation of Trumps.

D’Antonio: I sort of feel like there is a next generation, that all of them are committed now to politics and to their own acquisition of power. But you know, what we seem to be talking about is this idea of Trumpism versus the Republican Party, and what’s the future for both. And I think for Trumpism, there’s obviously this dangerous fringe, and they’re very attached to Donald Jr. I think they’re very attached to Lara, maybe not so much to Ivanka and Jared, because they came from New York and still seem to be flirting with that old identity, but why wouldn’t there be this battle for what actually is going to be the Republican Party?

Kruse: Within this sorting of the Republican party, what for Donald Trump in particular, in your mind, would be the worst form of comeuppance. I’m thinking here of Roy Cohn, a guy who got away with everything until the very end, when the consequences caught up with him. What do those kinds of consequences, or could those kinds of consequences, look like for Trump?

D’Antonio: Anybody else immediately think prison?

Blair: Yeah.

Hurt: Look, we all know that he did all the stuff he’s accused of, OK? He’s guilty. He’s guilty in particular, you know, in terms of criminal liability, the whole empire is a tax fraud that was started by Fred Trump. And the piece in the Times—I think it was October 2018—which has still never been refuted—the documents that they got make that case. And all the stuff that he did—he did it—so it’s a matter of marshaling the proof and getting judges and juries simply to see the evidence. I think that, unfortunately, can be extended and put off for so many years, and I’m talking, like, eight or 10, even if stuff was initiated by the state of New York or Cy Vance next month. It’s more likely that Trump is going to die of cheeseburger consumption than die in jail, unfortunately.

Kruse: If this keeps going, as you say, eight to 10 years of sort of legal back and forth—I mean, potentially the first hour of the Biden presidency, focus will shift back to the Trump presidency—so if attention is what he wanted ...

O’Brien: The most dangerous investigation, I think, right now facing him is Cy Vance’s in New York. And I think there are real possible criminal consequences from that, and it’s going to be up to Cy Vance to decide how aggressive he is around all that. Apart from whatever happens to him criminally, I also think the other penalty for him is just being ignored. Because he’s gone through these different parts of his life where he’s been out on the tundra, cold and ignored and lonely. He’s lonely all the time. I think he’s a very lonely person generally. In the ’90s, the mid- to late ’90s, before “The Apprentice” came along in the early 2000s, he was this punchline to jokes about the excesses of the 1980s and this kind of media curiosity who appeared occasionally on Howard Stern’s show. And then he got re-baked through “The Apprentice,” and then “The Apprentice” started to drop off the landscape, and he was at risk of being forgotten again. And then he ran for president. And now for him to wind up sitting down at Mar-a-Lago, playing golf and kvetching and screaming at television screens, and occasionally venturing out to do road shows and support some candidates—I think without this constant feed of attention and interest he’s going to unspool inside himself because he needs it so much. And I think that’s another possible penalty that could emerge.

Kruse: He was the president, and a very important president, even if he wasn’t a good president. Have we gotten to the point where he will never be forgotten—he will always be important?

O’Brien: But that’s the kind of attention he doesn’t care about. I don’t think he cares about history books, really, or the legacy of his office. I mean, he may a little bit, but what he really cares about is what’s right in front of him right now, not how he’s remembered after he’s dead.

Hurt: He needs the constant reaffirmation over and over again. One of Ivana’s assistants told me back in the day, and it applied to both of them, she said in her Queens accent, “Publicity is like a drug for them.” He needs his shot of heroin every day, and last week’s shot ain’t gonna do it. And, you know, he doesn’t read anyway, so what the hell does he care? The Trump library? That’s going to be a very small building.

Blair: I think the criminal stuff, I think that and what is he going to be using for money? I mean, he raised a bunch of money this last bit of time that seems to be relatively open for him to use like he wants, but it was several hundred million dollars.

O’Brien: At least $207 million.

Blair: Not chump change. Not at all. But he’s looking at big debts. The golf clubs, the hotels, all of that. Where’s the revenue stream?

D’Antonio: I think that you can think about 35 million hardcore subscribers to a Trump online TV outlet that charges $5.99 a month. So what’s 35 million times six bucks a month? That’s every month. I’ve always been amazed by how much he values streams of small bits of revenue. You know, the rents on a single apartment, I think, mattered to him in the old days. And I think that’s the way he’s thinking about it. Of course, that’ll taper off. Maybe that’ll last a couple years, but if you do that for a couple of years, you get to the point where you’re a very old man. I don’t think he cares about his kids. I think the legacy financially is not really in his mind. So maybe, as we’ve been saying about his need for constant attention and also the fact that he’s not a strategic thinker, is that it’s just going to be every day, you know, how many donations came in this week for this fundraiser that I’m doing or for this appeal, and how many people are tuning in? Maybe he’s part owner of Newsmax. Newsmax is in Palm Beach. So I just think this is there’s a lot of options for him to make money, appeal to his base, keep those fires warm, and that he doesn’t really care much beyond the day-to-day.

Kruse: Is that enough to keep him going, though? We often cite the legal issues looming as an existential threat. We cite the hundreds of millions of dollars of debt that are coming due as an existential crisis. But I wonder if the actual existential crisis is the diminishment of the quality of the drug that he’s getting—the attention he’s been getting. Is a lesser amount of that enough, or does he only need so much to just sort of carry on from day to day, fighting skirmishes with new foils, old foils?

O’Brien: He’s a bottomless pit of need. And he needs to replenish it every single day and would love it if he could just be in front of a geyser of attention if he could. And I think thimblefuls of attention won’t be enough for him.

Blair: And I’m also wondering: What Michael just was suggesting—that’s a lot of work.

D’Antonio: And he’s lazy.

Hurt: I think Michael’s right on that. I mean, he can just sit around and watch it roll in and it may peter out after a while, but I think that the two existential threats are the denial of the publicity drug, number one, and then the second thing is the entire thing is fruit of a poison tree. With the exception of TV—future TV revenues and “The Apprentice” stuff—all the real estate, the bygone casinos, all that stuff is a fruit of the poison tree that started with [his father] Fred Trump. And if Cy Vance can make a dent in that, then it’s going to be paralytic.

Kruse: Harry brought up Fred—you can’t really talk about Donald without talking about Fred. And I’m wondering at this point what you think Fred Trump would think of Donald Trump. Would he be proud? Ashamed? Amazed? Aghast? What is the ghost of Fred Trump thinking right now as his son leaves the Oval Office?

Hurt: Until January 5 he probably was in certain ways OK with it. But January 6 it was just too much. And I think he’d be pissed off.

D’Antonio: On many levels Fred hated Donald. And I think that Donald knew that his father hated him.

Hurt: His self-loathing emanates from that. Right.

D’Antonio: And if you see the arc of Fred’s life, he actually was a pretty conventional person. He got in with the political machine in Brooklyn and Queens. He had aspirations to sort of join that crowd of establishment people and this stink bomb of a son, I think, would have appalled him. So he might’ve been proud that he became president—Fred’s position looking over Donald’s shoulder in the Oval Office from behind him always struck me as an indicator of Donald’s wound. I think he would have seen the end of this as just appalling and he would be saying to Donald, “Look, all you had to do was do the normal thing between the election and January 20. And you would’ve been OK. You know, sure, the Democrats and everybody on that side would have hated you, but you would have gone down in history as a president. Now you’re going down in history as America’s first would-be fascist who rallied these people to violence.” And I think Fred would have hated it.

Blair: In a way, Donald expected being president to be kind of like being Brooklyn borough president. Fred figured his way around local Democratic politics in New York City, and those guys could be bought, and Donald saw that. He got a really good education in how to handle politics at a city level. And he thought that that was what it was going to be like in the White House, that you could buy people off and you could stick in your people and you could run it just like this kind of mafia thing, that you could do that, because he had seen it happen in New York—but that wasn’t how it worked because actually people at the federal level actually had way bigger responsibilities and responsibilities not just to him. And it just didn’t work that way. But I think Fred had given him that template. And how Fred would have viewed Donald’s performance—I think Fred’s hair would have been on fire the whole time. Because he would’ve seen what was going on. And he was the one person that Donald couldn’t successfully lie to.

Kruse: No part of Fred Trump would be looking down and saying, “Damn. I taught you to be a killer, I taught you to be a king, and hell if you didn’t become a president and run roughshod and do it your way, do it exactly how you wanted to do it.”

O’Brien: Fred is Dr. Frankenstein, and Donald is the monster, and I think Fred would have been alternately horrified and amazed. He unleashed this person on the world and, and I think Fred’s influence is a huge part of it, but Donald also is in and of himself a very twisted, chaotic piece of work. And Fred then shaped that, I think, on his potter’s wheel of his intense demands as a parent and this ruthless, binary view of the world as a businessman and a political operator, and Donald absorbed all that and then spit it out in such huge forms that I can’t imagine Fred would’ve ever thought, “Yeah, this kid’ll end up in the Oval Office.” So certainly he would be amazed by that. But I think he’d also be appalled by a lot of things around this. When Donald’s life began falling apart in the early ’90s, his parents were supportive of him, but they also were appalled by his affairs. And they liked Ivana and they were disgusted that he was cheating on her and they let him know that and told him to start to get his house in order. And in that way they were conventional people that I think would have been shocked that he had sparked a violent siege of the Capitol in the seat of the Republic.

Kruse: Is he capable of some sort of honest personal reckoning ...?

Hurt: No.

Blair: No.

D’Antonio: No.

O’Brien: No way.

Kruse: So there is no ...

Hurt: No.

O’Brien: No.

Blair: No.

Hurt: Next question.

Kruse: What was, or is, his fatal flaw?

Hurt: Well, I mean, you know, in the Greek terms, it’d be hubris, wouldn’t it?

O’Brien: He’s got narcissistic personality disorder. He ticks off every box one would want to tick off around that.

Blair: He’s an amazing salesman. He sold himself to America. And he sold himself to himself. Which means he has no ability whatsoever to do any introspection, to have any insight into himself. He can’t. It’s like rules of gravity. He can’t do it. It’s not possible. That’s not within his capabilities. He sold himself to America and to himself. He did a brilliant job, but this was the end of that road.

D’Antonio: Donald can’t see the truth about himself. He can’t see the truth about the country or about other people. He’s just lost in this bullshit of his own creation. And I don’t think that he has any ability to get out of it. I think if you were to somehow see daylight, it might blind him forever. So he’s fully committed to it, and this is who he was from the very beginning. I mean, if you look at who he was in New York, when he first arrived, going around in this limousine driven by a guy who’s packing heat and he’s making sure everybody knows it.

O’Brien: With the DJT license plate on the limo.

D’Antonio: And embroidered on his cuffs. He’s really a deformed and deranged person who couldn’t see anything clearly let alone himself other than how to get power.

O’Brien: He’s got this very cinematic sense of himself. He wanted to be a movie producer, but Fred drew him back into the company. He thinks in terms of writing his own script and directing his own movie and producing it and casting himself in it all the time. And that’s the reality bubble that he occupies. And that’s why he’s obsessed with celebrity and clings to his own celebrity as a real value. And he’s rewriting the world around him all the time to be whatever he thinks it should be so it comports with the idea he has of himself, which is not, obviously, in touch with reality or decency.

Kruse: So what is the ending that he is going to at least try to write here? This is not an appropriate ending for the life he has scripted, to just sort of fade away at Mar-a-Lago. Judging from what you know, all that you know about his past, what is the endgame for him? What will he try to write as an appropriate ending for the epic arc, epic life story of Donald Trump?

O’Brien: Revenge will be part of it. Revenge against the party, revenge against naysayers ...

D’Antonio: Maybe against all of us.

Blair: The placeholder is going to be that he’s running for the presidency in 2024. That at least lets him leave the White House in his mind as a contender and not as a failure. But then after that? Cy Vance is going to be writing that future, I think.

Kruse: Let me ask just one more thing. You were all people who wrote some of the very first books about Donald Trump. There will be many books to come, one way or another, and attempts at serious biography, from birth to death. What is your advice for these people who will be doing this work in years or decades to come?

Hurt: I’ll say the same thing I told Michael, as I’m sure he vividly remembers, at the American Hotel in Sag Harbor: Don’t do it.

D’Antonio: I do remember that. I would probably encourage people to do whatever they can do to stay a little bit above the minutiae of each day and each moment, to try and see the connections between him and the people who followed him or enabled him, to see kind of the big picture as much as possible, and then dip into the day-to-day in order to illustrate it. Because just like Steve Bannon said—the strategy was to flood the zone with shit. That’s what Donald has always done. There’s just been this fire hose of activity and things to try and get your mind around, and the key thing is to just look at the pattern, just to see the pattern and its impact on others.

O’Brien: Especially given that a core weapon he used was disinformation and propaganda and denying of fact patterns and the truth. Writers do a real service to the public, I think, in following the fact pattern and accuracy, especially because it’s under siege. And that’s really where anybody writing about him, especially now, there’s going to be this pressure cooker of “alternative facts,” to quote Kellyanne Conway, and garbage being strewed around them to distract them from what the truth of who he is and what his presidency represents. And I think that’s going to be key to hold onto.

Blair: Don’t trust anybody. Don’t trust any sources the first time through. Because everybody wants to save their skin.

Kruse: Anything else? Anything else that I didn’t ask that you think we should be thinking about, grappling with here, as we hurdle toward, finally, the transition of power?

Blair: This isn’t him, but what happens to somewhere between 35 and 70 million people who currently are just having the bends—and not just them—from the addictive nature of being in this era, the constant flood of information or disinformation, the constant distraction and all that this era, that his presidency, threw at us. I think that that’s how we, how the media, how the country, begins to adjust to a different notion of reality, of truth, of responsibility, of governance, of criminality, everything. How can we grow, develop some better way to respond, and take it in and absorb this—in the midst of a pandemic, by the way? The idea that he still dominated the front pages, still dominated our attention, as almost 400,000 people have died. The reality that over the last 10 months, he has still been the biggest story—it’s shameful.

O’Brien: The fact that he could bungle the response to this epic pandemic and then incite a siege at the Capitol and still retain the kind of magnetism he has for the people who support him says something very dark and disturbing about what this country is about that we still haven’t come to terms with. And it existed before he became president—a window that opened up very widely because of this presidency—and it’s not going away. And we’ve got a lot of hard work to do that involves more than just figuring out Donald Trump. It’s really figuring out where our institutions are broken, and where our communities are broken, so we are able to get past this in a constructive way. Because we’re in a very bad place right now.