President Donald Trump's latest outbursts are a sign of how much his worst excesses are coming to the forefront, and as two prominent insiders told MS NOW, he has created an administration around himself that leaves allies powerless to stop him.
On Tuesday, MS NOW's Nicole Wallace hosted two guests with close past connections to Trump's inner circle: author and reporter Maggie Haberman, who has written extensively about his political career and gotten close access to the president; and Miles Taylor, who worked as a major Homeland Security staffer in the first Trump administration and famously blew the whistle about the internal efforts to rein him in.
Wallace pressed the pair about Trump's recent press ban, which blocked MS NOW, CNN and Politico from accessing the White House for coverage, prompting a lawsuit and a boycott from the full press pool. In response to one particular question, Haberman stressed that even those around Trump with strong political instincts no longer have much influence over his decision-making.
"I don't think anybody can influence Trump particularly strongly," Haberman explained. "One of the reasons that the attention on Natalie Harp is significant is not, you know, because of all the jokes that are made or 'human printer,' etcetera, etcetera. It's because she is emblematic of the kind of presidency that he wants, which is that he wants to do what he wants to do. And people who try to curtail him on the margins, even — which really is what this presidency has been. It's not like term one, where there were tons of people who made their objections known."
Haberman also noted that as Trump's polling and approval numbers enter freefall, he faces a severe "fact-set issue," as few or no people around him are willing to present "negative information."
"I mean, one of the key things that [co-author Jonathan Swan] and I reported in Regime Change was this lead-up to the Iran war and how JD Vance was the only one in these meetings, large meetings... who was arguing with the president about this in pretty direct terms, and it cost him with Trump. Trump was annoyed by it. Maybe people were saying things to him in one-off meetings, but very few people really, really speak up about quote-unquote negative information in front of this president, and less so now than ever."
In response, Taylor noted that even the pushback he witnessed in term one was minimal, and now even that is out the window.
"I think Maggie is right to focus on the people around the president, and I don't say that to self-aggrandize about people in the first term," Taylor said. "Weren't no heroes in the first Trump administration, right? The only people that were left were witnesses and survivors. And all any of us did was the absolute bare minimum you, as a taxpayer, expect us to do. If the president wants to do something illegal or unconstitutional, you say, 'no.' That's it. Trump replaced that set of people who met a bare minimum standard. Again, there was nothing heroic. No one with capes saying, 'Mr. President, you gotta be a better man." It's just, 'don't do illegal things.' Those people are largely gone now."
