The Weekly Sift

Time badgered Trump into answering its questions, producing some very disturbing quotes.

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For some while now there have been reasons to worry about a Trump second term moving America towards authoritarianism: mostly how his first administration ended and the plans various Trump-aligned policy groups have put forward.

Until recently, though, Trump himself had said little to directly validate those worries, beyond occasional threats to “go after” the people he thinks have done him wrong. Mostly that’s because he’s been preoccupied with other topics: complaining about how persecuted he is, lying about Joe Biden and the Biden administration, painting a false rosy picture of how wonderful things were four years ago, and claiming that none of the world’s current problems would exist if he were still president. For the most part, that last point short-circuits any attempt to talk about his future policies: Why should he have to tell us how he would handle Ukraine or Gaza when those problems wouldn’t exist if he were president?

That changed with the publication of Time magazine’s Trump interview and the summary article based on it.

How to interview Trump. Interviewing Donald Trump presents unique challenges, because he won’t simply answer questions. To Trump, a question is an invitation to go on a long ramble which may or may not have anything to do with what he was asked. Along the way he will launch attacks, invent stories, exaggerate, make false insinuations, and sometimes lie outright.

In a live TV interview, this is a journalistic disaster. If you ignore all his false claims, you’re letting him use your platform to spread misinformation to your viewers. But if you challenge him, which false statement do you pick, understanding that you’ll probably never get back to all the others? Meanwhile, he hasn’t answered your question.

Time’s National Politics Reporter Eric Cortellessa took advantage of the print-media format to implement a unique strategy: He let Trump ramble, fact-checked in a separate article, kept returning to his questions, and then wrote a summary article focused on the answers to his questions. If you don’t read the transcript of the interview, you never see all the misinformation.

For example, the interview starts like this:

Let’s start with Day One: January 20, 2025. You have said that you will take a suite of aggressive actions on the border and on immigration—

Donald Trump: Yes.

You have vowed to—

Trump: And on energy. 

Yes, yes. And we’ll come to that, certainly. You have vowed to launch the largest deportation operation in American history. Your advisors say that includes—

Trump: Because we have no choice. I don’t believe this is sustainable for a country, what’s happening to us, with probably 15 million and maybe as many as 20 million by the time Biden’s out. Twenty million people, many of them from jails, many of them from prisons, many of them from mental institutions. I mean, you see what’s going on in Venezuela and other countries. They’re becoming a lot safer.

Well, let’s just talk—so you have said you’re gonna do this massive deportation operation. I want to know specifically how you plan to do that.

Trump: So if you look back into the 1950s, Dwight Eisenhower, he’s not known for that, you know, you don’t think of him that way. Because you see, Ike, but Dwight Eisenhower was very big on illegal immigration not coming into our country. And he did a massive deportation of people. He was doing it for a long time. He got very proficient at it. He was bringing them just to the other side of the border. And they would be back in the country within a matter of days. And then he started bringing them 3,000 miles away—

What’s your plan, sir? 

But what shows up in the summary article is just the eventual answer:

To carry out a deportation operation designed to remove more than 11 million people from the country, Trump told me, he would be willing to build migrant detention camps and deploy the U.S. military, both at the border and inland.

That answer, if you read the transcript, comes wrapped in a lot of fantasies: Trump doesn’t think the camps will be necessary, because the deportation operation will function smoothly and get people out quickly. He expects local police to do most of the work, because so many migrants are criminals that police “know by name”. (The statistics showing that there is no migrant crime wave are “fake news”.) The Posse Comitatus Act (which sharply limits the use of the US military inside the country) won’t constrain him because “these aren’t civilians. … This is an invasion of our country.”

If you accept all of Trump’s fantasies, he seems to be saying that Cortellessa is worrying about nothing: no detention camps, no military involvement, no long delays as courts decide the constitutionality of his plans. He’ll just collect the 15-20 million people he thinks are in the country illegally and ship them out (to somewhere) without incident.

So from the MAGA point of view, this is a hostile interview that results in a slanted article. But my own point of view is similar to Cortellessa’s: Trump’s plans often don’t go smoothly, and when they get blocked, he doesn’t calmly accept defeat. Take, for example, his Mexican wall: When Congress wouldn’t fund it, he shut down the government. And when that didn’t work, he declared a state of emergency that allowed him to take money from the defense budget. How far he’s willing to go when things don’t work out is a question well worth asking.

The answers. Contellessa’s summary of his interview continues:

He would let red states monitor women’s pregnancies and prosecute those who violate abortion bans. He would, at his personal discretion, withhold funds appropriated by Congress, according to top advisers. He would be willing to fire a U.S. Attorney who doesn’t carry out his order to prosecute someone, breaking with a tradition of independent law enforcement that dates from America’s founding. He is weighing pardons for every one of his supporters accused of attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, more than 800 of whom have pleaded guilty or been convicted by a jury. He might not come to the aid of an attacked ally in Europe or Asia if he felt that country wasn’t paying enough for its own defense. He would gut the U.S. civil service, deploy the National Guard to American cities as he sees fit, close the White House pandemic-preparedness office, and staff his Administration with acolytes who back his false assertion that the 2020 election was stolen.

Each one of those sentences is the result of a back-and-forth similar to the one about migrant detention camps. Trump was especially cagey about abortion, saying that it wasn’t a federal matter any more, now that the Supreme Court has moved it to the states. He refused to discuss the possibility of vetoing a federal abortion ban, saying that it wouldn’t happen because it would need 60 votes to pass the Senate. (Contellessa doesn’t raise the possibility that a Republican Senate majority might do away with the filibuster precisely so that it could ban abortion.)

Contellessa then focused in on whether there was anything states couldn’t do, and Trump’s reluctant answer was no. Monitor women’s pregnancies to make sure they weren’t getting abortions? “I think they might do that. Again, you’ll have to speak to the individual states.” He dodged an issue he will have to address: how the federal government regulates the abortion drug mifepristone. He said he would have a statement out about that in the next week, but in the follow-up two weeks later that statement hadn’t appeared. (It still hasn’t.) And he refused to say how he planned to vote on Florida’s upcoming referendum about its six-week abortion ban.

His comment on being a dictator only on his first day? A joke. (Nobody has a sense of humor any more.) And Trump denied that he would seek to change the two-term limit. “I wouldn’t be in favor of it at all. I intend to serve four years and do a great job.”

He sees “a definite anti-white feeling in this country” that is “very unfair”.

Transactional government. Something Contellessa didn’t cover is Trump’s very wide-open notion of transactional government. Thursday (after the Time interview) the WaPo published an article about his meeting with oil executives at Mar-a-Lago.

As Donald Trump sat with some of the country’s top oil executives at his Mar-a-Lago Club last month, one executive complained about how they continued to face burdensome environmental regulations despite spending $400 million to lobby the Biden administration in the last year.

Trump’s response stunned several of the executives in the room overlooking the ocean: You all are wealthy enough, he said, that you should raise $1 billion to return me to the White House. At the dinner, he vowed to immediately reverse dozens of President Biden’s environmental rules and policies and stop new ones from being enacted, according to people with knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation.

Giving $1 billion would be a “deal,” Trump said, because of the taxation and regulation they would avoid thanks to him

This is far from the only example. In March, Trump abruptly reversed himself on banning TikTok. The change happened shortly after a meeting with Jeff Yass, a Trump donor who owns billions in TikTok-related stock. During his first administration, Amazon lost a valuable defense contract because Trump thought Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post wasn’t covering him favorably enough.

Summing up. It’s easy to take these issues one-by-one and feel like they wouldn’t be that big a deal. He’ll tell the Justice Department who to prosecute. He’ll deport at least 11 million people, some of whom have been in the country for decades. Ukraine may fall, leaving NATO countries to wonder whether the US will support them against Russia. He’ll establish that committing violence in his name is OK; you can count on a pardon. The civil service will lose its independence, making the federal government one big political machine. He’ll use emergency powers to circumvent Congress’ power of the purse. Companies that want a break on regulations just need to do something in return.

Now picture it all happening at once. The America we’re describing is a very different and much darker place than any we have lived in so far.