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President Donald Trump emerges through a pair of handsome wooden doors on the third floor of the White House. On his way down the wide, carpeted staircase, he passes portraits of his predecessors. Nixon is opposite the landing outside the residence. Two flights down, he has swapped the placement of Clinton and Lincoln, moving a massive painting of the latter into the main entrance hall of the mansion. “Lincoln is Lincoln, in all fairness,” he explains. “And I gave Clinton a good space.” But it’s the portrait around the corner that Trump wants to show off.
It’s a giant painting of a photograph—that photograph, the famous image of Trump, his fist raised, blood trickling down his face, after the attempt on his life last July at a rally in Butler, Pa. It hangs across the foyer from a portrait of Obama, in tacit competition. When they bring tours in, everyone wants to look at this one, Trump says, gesturing to the painting of himself, in technicolor defiance. “100 to 1, they prefer that,” he says. “It’s incredible.”
Making his way out to the Rose Garden, he walks up the inclined colonnade toward the Oval Office, describing the other alterations to the decor, both inside and out. His imprint on his workspace is apparent. The molding and mantels have gold accents now, and he has filled the walls with portraits of other presidents in gilded frames. He has hung an early copy of the Declaration of Independence behind a set of blue curtains. The box with a red button that allows Trump to summon Diet Cokes is back in its place on the Resolute desk, behind which stands a new battalion of flags, including one for the U.S. Space Force, the military branch he established. A map of the “Gulf of America,” as Trump has rechristened the Gulf of Mexico, was propped on a stand nearby.
If Trump is making cosmetic changes to the White House, his effect on the presidency goes much deeper. The first 100 days of his second term have been among the most destabilizing in American history, a blitz of power grabs, strategic shifts, and direct attacks that have left opponents, global counterparts, and even many supporters stunned. Trump has launched a battery of orders and memoranda that have hobbled entire government agencies and departments. He has threatened to take Greenland by force, seize control of the Panama Canal, and annex Canada. Weaponizing his control of the Justice Department, he has ordered investigations of political enemies. He has gutted much of the civil service, removing more than a hundred thousand federal workers. He has gone to war with institutions across American life: universities, media outlets, law firms, museums. He pardoned or gave a commutation to every single defendant charged in connection with the Jan. 6 attacks, including those convicted of violent acts and seditious conspiracy. Seeking to remake the global economy, he triggered a trade war by unleashing a sweeping array of tariffs that sent markets plummeting. Embarking on his promised program of mass deportation, he has mobilized agencies across government, from the IRS to the Postal Service, as part of the effort to find, detain, and expel immigrants. He has shipped some of them to foreign countries without due process, citing a wartime provision from the 18th century. His Administration has snatched foreign students off the streets and stripped their visas for engaging in speech he dislikes. He has threatened to send Americans to a notorious prison in El Salvador. Says one senior Administration official: “Our success depends on his ability to shock you.”
What shocks constitutional scholars and civil libertarians is the power Trump is attempting to amass and the impunity with which he is wielding it. Trump has claimed Congress’s constitutional authority over spending and foreign trade, citing a loosely defined emergency. He has asserted control over independent agencies and ignored post-Watergate rules designed to prevent political meddling in law enforcement and investigations. When lower courts have ordered him to slow or reverse potentially illegal moves, he has at times ignored or publicly ridiculed them. In one case, he defied a Supreme Court order. Issuing a ruling in that fight, Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, a Reagan appointee and arguably the most influential conservative jurist outside the high court, said the Administration’s behavior threatens to “reduce the rule of law to lawlessness and tarnish the very values for which Americans of diverse views and persuasions have always stood.”
In an hour-long interview with TIME on April 22, Trump cast the first three months of his term as an unbridled success. “What I’m doing is exactly what I’ve campaigned on,” he says. Which is true, in part. From deportations and tariffs to remaking America’s alliances and attacking diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, Donald John Trump, the 45th and 47th President of the United States, is carrying out pledges to radically reshape America and its role in the world. He didn’t invent most of the problems he is aggressively going after, and supporters say he is doing more than predecessors from both parties to fix them. America’s immigration system has been broken for decades; Trump’s moves have slowed illegal border crossings to a trickle. Throughout the Cold War, U.S. strategists bemoaned military “free-riders” in Europe and East Asia; Trump has triggered previously unimaginable moves by Germany and Japan to spend more on their own, and their neighbors’, collective defense. China used its accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 to launch a multidecade attack on those who sought to do business with them; Trump’s latest tariffs are the most aggressive effort to fight back. “I have solved more problems in the world without asking for or getting credit,” he says.
Trump has benefited from an enfeebled Democratic Party and compliant congressional Republicans who have abdicated legislative powers and long-held beliefs, whether out of cowardice or a desire to ride his coattails. There has been little meaningful or sustained backlash from the public. The civil-society leaders and corporate titans with the most political capital have largely acquiesced to Trump’s rule, choosing supplicancy over solidarity. The capitulation has only emboldened him.
It’s possible that Trump, 100 days in, is at the peak of his power. A resistance—if not one that resembles the first-term Resistance—is stirring to life. Trump’s protectionist policies threaten a recession of his own making; businesses big and small face the imminent threat of closure as they cut workers, close production lines, and try to stay afloat in the face of disruptions to supply chains and revenue of a scale not seen since the pandemic. Universities have found greater courage in the face of Trump’s threats to their multibillion-dollar research budgets. Communities that rely on immigrant labor have bristled at the uptick in deportations. With consumer confidence at its lowest level in three years and inflation expected to climb as a consequence of the trade war, even meek Republicans have raised complaints about the impact of some of Trump’s moves on their political future. Polling finds that a larger share of Americans now live in fear of their government and Trump’s approval rating has slipped to 40%, according to a Pew survey, lower at this early stage in his term than that of any other recent President.
The self-declared mission of Trump and his top aides in his first 100 days has been to overwhelm opposition everywhere through this barrage of moves on all fronts. “He has ceded absolutely nothing to the bureaucracy—zero,” says White House chief of staff Susie Wiles. “Everything he wants to do or thinks is important for the country, we have figured out a way.” Even the most experienced government hands are struggling to keep track of every norm-breaking change in Washington, let alone where it will leave the country and the world. Trump’s top aides say he is only getting started. “He had four years to think about what he wanted to do,” says Wiles, “and now he wants it executed on.”
Trump’s early clemency for the rioters who had attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, set the tone for his relationship with Congress. His aides had been wrestling with which defendants should be pardoned or have their sentences commuted. Some worried that freeing all of them, including criminals convicted of violence or seditious conspiracy, would backfire. But on his first day in office, upon arriving at the White House from his inaugural ceremony, Trump settled the debate. "I don't want to talk about this anymore,” he said, according to two senior officials who were present. “Just do them all.”
Under Trump, Republican majorities in Congress have ceded power to a Chief Executive many are too timid to confront. Aided by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Trump gutted congressionally authorized government departments, from the U.S. Agency for International Development to the U.S. Agency for Global Media. He ordered the dismantling of the Department of Education, setting up a legal fight over an agency established through Congress in the 1970s. Trump withheld federal dollars from programs targeted in his Executive Orders, triggering lawsuits. In March, as Trump was preparing to roll out his tariffs, House Republican leadership slipped language into a stopgap funding bill to prevent any member of Congress from challenging the national emergency Trump has declared to implement them. “The President of the United States has the right, and arguably, I think, the responsibility, to deal with other nations who are engaging in unfair trade practices,” Speaker Mike Johnson tells TIME in an interview.
Trump’s blunt-force approach to his nominally co-equal partners in the Legislative Branch was on display in a meeting with House Republicans in April. Settling into the Cabinet room, members of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus were prepared to buck a budget framework the Senate GOP had devised, blocking progress on a key agenda item. Trump was having none of it. The President walked in, flanked by top aides and Johnson, and proceeded to lecture the holdouts for nearly 45 minutes, according to two people in the meeting. “This is what I want,” Trump said. Representative Chip Roy interjected. “Mr. President, I hear you,” the Texas Congressman said. “But at the end of the day, I don’t trust this process. The Senate has screwed us over before.” Trump cut him off. “Don’t be a ball buster, OK?” The next morning, Roy voted to advance the measure, along with all but two other House Republicans. Roy’s office declined to comment.
The message from the President went out across his party: Don’t cross me. Even after he lost in 2020, Trump’s stalwart allies won primaries thanks to his backing, solidifying his hold on the GOP and turning it once and for all into an instrument of his agenda. Now much of the party are true believers in the MAGA creed and most of the rest have accepted that going along with the program is a career requirement. “They understand that President Trump is the most powerful force in politics in the modern era,” Speaker Johnson explains. “Everybody wants to be on this train—and not in front of it.”
Now Trump is trying to do the same thing with the federal government. Enter Musk’s DOGE. Claiming to root out waste, fraud, and abuse, Musk’s team has taken control of independent federal agencies and inflicted crippling cuts. About 75,000 federal employees accepted Musk’s offer of deferred buyouts. DOGE has all but demolished agencies like USAID, and is trying to do the same to others, like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Sometimes it has been messy. When DOGE agents tried to take over the U.S. Institute of Peace, a nonprofit created by Congress, the organization refused to let them in. The DOGE team came back with the FBI and D.C. police.
DOGE has also consolidated data from across government on individual Americans—pulling together for the first time in one place everything from Social Security numbers to student loan data to annual income. Those files have then been used to advance the White House’s objectives. The IRS struck an agreement with the Department of Homeland Security to provide taxpayer data to help identify targets for deportation. A spokesperson for DOGE did not respond to requests for comment. Wiles says the operation has been the sharpest weapon in Trump’s fight to grab control of government powers. “Had we not done that, even with the discomfort it caused,” she adds, “then we would leave here in four years having cut the federal bureaucracy by 0.18%.”
Louis DeJoy was among the federal officials who learned a hard lesson about power in the new Trump era. The former CEO of a logistics company and a Trump megadonor, DeJoy was tapped to become Postmaster General in 2020. Hired to retool an agency on the brink of insolvency, he cut billions of dollars in contracts and embarked on a 10-year plan to centralize the U.S. Postal Service’s delivery network. But in March, he became embroiled in a struggle between Musk, who wants to privatize the Postal Service, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who was maneuvering to fold it into his department. Meanwhile, officials from U.S. Customs and Border Protection had asked the USPS to supply data to help its project of tracking migrants, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.
On March 10, Musk dispatched two young former Tesla staffers to the USPS to embed inside the agency, nominally to cut costs. When DeJoy refused to give the DOGE officials access to sensitive USPS servers that contain the mailing addresses of every American, the aides complained to Musk, who then complained to Trump, the sources tell TIME. Sergio Gor, Trump’s director of personnel, called DeJoy and USPS board members, saying the President wanted him out, according to two sources familiar with the matter, and suggesting to DeJoy that Trump and Musk could make life uncomfortable for him. When it became clear the problem could only escalate, DeJoy, who had already announced plans to retire, resigned to take the target off the agency’s back. Gor did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
With Congress and the Executive Branch now largely compliant, it has fallen to the courts to determine the outer limits of Trump’s power. More than 100 cases have already been brought challenging him. And an administrative error by the Trump team in its aggressive program to deport undocumented migrants has turned into an incipient constitutional crisis.
In July 2024, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele had invited then Florida Representative Matt Gaetz and other lawmakers on a diplomatic visit. During a dinner at his lakefront compound, Bukele made an offer: he was willing to imprison migrants Trump wanted to deport in El Salvador’s famously harsh prison, the Terrorism Confinement Center, known as CECOT. The next day, Bukele gave the U.S. delegation a tour of the facility, the largest prison in Latin America. “The conditions had zapped the inhabitants of any will to fight,” Gaetz recalls. “It’s tough to see the state of the human condition drained of hope.”
Gaetz pitched the plan to deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who pitched the plan to Trump, a senior administration source tells TIME. Trump instructed Secretary of State Marco Rubio to travel to El Salvador to strike an arrangement with Bukele, the source says. A deal was quietly sealed in February. “One of the reasons I like it is because it would be much less expensive than our prison system, and I think it would actually be a greater deterrent,” Trump says.
Days later, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a rarely used wartime law from the 18th century, to deport 238 alleged Venezuelan gang members to CECOT without giving them the chance to claim they had been detained in error or to profess their innocence in immigration court. U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg ordered the Trump Administration to turn the planes around. The Administration ignored the order, Boasberg said, and the President lashed out, calling for the judge’s impeachment. In response, Chief Justice John Roberts issued a rare public rebuke of Trump.
The conflict only grew when the Administration admitted that it had “mistakenly” flown a Maryland sheet-metal apprentice, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, to El Salvador as part of the deportations. “When I first heard of the situation, I was not happy,” Trump says. “Then I found out that he was a person who was an MS-13 member.” The man’s lawyers dispute that and other allegations. The Supreme Court ordered the Administration to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release from CECOT, but it has refused to bring him back.
Asked if he had requested Bukele to turn Abrego Garcia over, Trump said he hadn’t. “I haven’t been asked to ask him by my attorneys,” he says. “Nobody asked me to ask him that question, except you.” As for the political outcry over his refusal to return a man mistakenly sent to a foreign prison without due process, Trump says he believes it will accrue to his advantage: “I think this is another men in women’s sports thing for the Democrats.”
Soon it wasn’t just immigrants who allegedly came to the U.S. illegally who were targeted. On March 25, Rumeysa Ozturk, a Ph.D. student at Tufts University, left her apartment to go to an Iftar dinner with friends. On the sidewalk, she was abducted by six plainclothes ICE officials and taken to a facility in central Louisiana. An immigration judge has denied her bond, while the government has yet to produce evidence of her alleged activities in support of Hamas or charge her with a crime. A DHS official has cited an op-ed she co-wrote with four other students last spring criticizing Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as a reason for her arrest. Trump says he is “not aware” of her case, but would consider asking the Justice Department to release any evidence they have against Ozturk. “I would have no trouble with it,” he says.
Trump always claimed without evidence that his four criminal indictments were the result of opponents’ using law enforcement for political ends. As President, he has openly wielded his control over the Justice Department’s prosecutors and the FBI’s investigators to target his perceived enemies. On April 9, he issued a memorandum directing the Justice Department to investigate Christopher Krebs, the former top cybersecurity official in Trump’s first term, who said there was no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election. Another directive ordered the DOJ to scrutinize former Trump Homeland Security official Miles Taylor, who authored an anonymous New York Times op-ed in 2018 that was harshly critical of the President.
Trump has also weakened internal checks on his power. In January, he fired the Inspectors General of 17 different agencies, gutting a watchdog system implemented after Watergate to guard against mismanagement and abuses of power. He replaced experienced prosecutors with loyalists. For his new U.S. Attorney for New Jersey, Trump picked Alina Habba, his former personal lawyer. In Washington, the nation’s largest and most important U.S. Attorney’s office, Trump tapped Ed Martin, a 2020 “Stop the Steal” organizer who had never been a prosecutor and who demoted the lawyers who brought cases against Jan. 6 rioters.
In his interview with TIME, Trump says he will always comply with the courts. But even legal scholars with an expansive view of executive authority have grown alarmed. The Administration has refused to spend money that Congress and the courts had told them to. Trump signed Executive Orders to remove individuals suspected of ties to foreign terrorist organizations.
Jack Goldsmith, a conservative Harvard Law professor who served in the George W. Bush Administration, argues that Trump’s “tsunami of legally questionable Executive Orders” and proclamations are part of a “scheme to rethink constitutional constraints” that has led to a “dangerous power struggle between the Trump administration and the federal judiciary.”
“Well,” Trump said, scanning a news story on his phone in the cabin of his private plane. “Look at that.” It was Dec. 14, and the President-elect was returning from the Army-Navy football game in Annapolis, Md., when he read that ABC had agreed to pay $15 million toward his presidential library to settle a defamation lawsuit against anchor George Stephanopoulos. Aides burst into a round of applause. The settlement was part of a broader strategy. Trump believed that if ABC would cave, so too would other companies worried about getting on his bad side, according to three sources familiar with his thinking.
Trump tasked his incoming White House counsel David Warrington, staff secretary Will Scharf, and top policy adviser Stephen Miller to craft Executive Orders targeting other perceived corporate enemies. “That was the first break in the dam,” explains a source close to Trump. The message, the source says, would be: “Look, either we come after you, we shut you down, or you’re going to help me out.”
The Administration soon shot off letters to top law firms that represented Trump foes and universities known for progressive social activism, especially anti-Israel protests. Paul Weiss, Kirkland & Ellis, Skadden Arps, and other white-shoe firms quickly agreed to provide hundreds of millions in pro-bono work for Trump in exchange for relief from his attacks. “I’ve gotta be doing something right, because I’ve had a lot of law firms give me a lot of money,” the President tells TIME.
Universities followed. Columbia University agreed to overhaul its protest policies and change its Middle Eastern Studies curriculum to avoid Trump’s cutting $400 million of federal funding. CBS’s leadership is reportedly considering a settlement after Trump filed a $20 billion lawsuit against 60 Minutes. Trump has taken over the Kennedy Center for the Arts and ordered the Smithsonian to change its exhibits.
Trump is weakening the structures necessary for organized opposition, critics say. The more fragmented the country, the less its people can mount meaningful resistance; and the less citizens can make leaders responsive to their will, the less they become agents of their collective fate, they say. “At some point we have to understand the game,” Connecticut Democratic Senator Chris Murphy says. “His attempt to bully states, municipalities, not-for-profit universities, journalists, law firms, and corporations into pledges of loyalty—this is all part of a plan to seize power.”
Trump’s onetime Svengali, Steve Bannon, who remains close to the President, doesn’t disagree: “He is on a jihad to reform them first by bringing them to heel.”
Foreign leaders are used to that kind of treatment, but even they weren’t expecting Trump’s trade war. To explain his approach to tariffs, Trump favors a metaphor—the U.S. as the world’s department store. “I am this giant store,” he tells TIME. “It’s a giant, beautiful store, and everybody wants to go shopping there. And on behalf of the American people, I own the store, and I set prices, and I’ll say, If you want to shop here, this is what you have to pay.”
If the government’s setting prices sounds distinctly un-American, if not outright communist, Trump’s own allies in the GOP warned him about the dangers of unleashing the barrage of punitive duties on foreign imports, which ran from a 10% baseline up to 145%. When Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, a libertarian, texted him a disquisition urging a retreat from tariffs, he says Trump shot back curtly: “TARIFFS ARE GREAT!”
The markets disagreed. Within a week of “Liberation Day,” economists across the U.S. government and at the Federal Reserve were seeing alarming signs. It wasn’t the precipitous drop in the S&P 500 that worried them. It was the market in U.S. Treasuries, which were tanking too. Normally when stocks sell off, investors shift their assets into the safe haven of U.S. government bonds, which offer a guaranteed payoff down the road. But now investors were parking their money in the Japanese yen and the Swiss franc instead. Worse, those who were looking to buy U.S. bonds from people who already owned them were having trouble agreeing on what they were worth. “The markets were not working as they normally do,” says one observer at the Federal Reserve. “This was extreme stress.”
In the face of a bond-market disarray, two of Trump’s top aides intervened. On Apr. 9, when one of Trump’s most loyal advisers, the trade hawk Peter Navarro, was occupied in another meeting, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick went into the Oval Office to make a plea to Trump: pause some of the tariffs. “Scott and I both agreed it was the right thing to do, and in the end, [Trump] said that makes sense,” Lutnick recalls. The two Cabinet heads stayed until Trump posted on Truth Social that he would temporarily lift reciprocal tariffs for 90 days. The markets immediately bounced back, though not to their pre–”Liberation Day” levels.
Trump tells TIME that he’s still convinced tariffs are necessary. “The bond market was getting the yips, but I wasn’t,” he says, adding that he would consider it a “total victory” if the U.S. still has tariffs as high as 50% on foreign imports a year from now. Trump says China’s President Xi Jinping has called him, and that his Administration is in active talks with the Chinese to strike a deal. Lutnick and another senior Administration official confirmed the talks, which Beijing disputes. “I don’t think that’s a sign of weakness on his behalf,” Trump says of Xi, adding that he expects to have a full slate of deals announced over the next three to four weeks. “”There’s a number at which they will feel comfortable,” Trump says. “But you can’t let them make a trillion dollars on us.”
Trump’s foreign transactionalism goes beyond tariffs. He has threatened an armed confrontation and economic warfare with Denmark, a NATO ally, to take over Greenland. He has said he wants to take back the Panama Canal even if it results in a military engagement against guerilla fighters. He’s also proposed displacing Palestinians from Gaza to turn it into a seaside vacation destination, what he calls “the Riviera of the Middle East.”
In some of these moves, one can discern tactical or strategic goals: Greenland has mineral resources the U.S. could use and is key for the growing competition in the Arctic. But others see more personal aims. Upon taking office, Trump paid homage to his expansionist designs by borrowing a painting of President James Polk from the House of Representatives and hanging it prominently in the Oval Office. A champion of manifest destiny, Polk oversaw the largest expansion of U.S. territory in history, acquiring Oregon, Texas, California, and most of the American Southwest. Asked if he’d like to be remembered for having expanded American territory as President himself, Trump says: “I wouldn’t mind.”
He may more likely be remembered for having broken with decades of foreign policy embraced by Republican and Democratic Presidents, alienating NATO allies, and siding with Russia in its war with Ukraine. In his interview with TIME, Trump blamed Kyiv for initiating the war. “I think what caused the war to start was when they started talking about joining NATO,” the President says. The negotiated peace he is pursuing would hand Vladimir Putin some 20% of Ukrainian territory. “Crimea will stay with Russia,” Trump says.
The President prides himself on having mobilized Europeans to contribute more to their security and for advancing peace between Israel and some Arab neighbors in his first term. He hopes to make further progress on this last front on a planned trip to the Middle East. “Saudi Arabia will go into the Abraham accords,” he predicts. “That will happen.” He feels more confident, more ambitious, less encumbered by guardrails than he did in his first term as Commander in Chief. “Last time I was fighting for survival,” he tells TIME. “This time I’m fighting for the world.”
Trump is not the first President who has expanded presidential power. Franklin Roosevelt summoned wartime authorities to institute rationing and price controls, forcibly incarcerated 120,000 Japanese Americans in internment camps, and tried to pack the Supreme Court with ideologically aligned judges. George W. Bush restructured the national-security apparatus after Sept. 11, handing the government extraordinary powers to surveil everyday Americans and detained al-Qaeda suspects at extrajudicial black sites abroad. Both those Presidents were dealing with attacks on the U.S. Trump’s second-term presidency is unlike anything his predecessors attempted.
Trump’s approach to power looks like that of foreign leaders like Viktor Orban of Hungary and Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, argues Steven Levitsky, a Harvard University scholar. Those strongmen have won legitimate elections but then stacked the democratic decks in their favor by rewarding allies, punishing adversaries, crippling the media and civil society, and turning the state into an instrument of their own agenda and political preservation. “This is actually much faster, much more thoroughgoing than what we saw the first 100 days in Venezuela or Turkey or Hungary,” he tells TIME. “What worries me most has been how slow U.S. society has responded.”
Some institutions are fighting back. Law firms Perkins Coie and WilmerHale won restraining orders from a federal judge. Harvard University refused to acquiesce. After Trump tried to shut down the U.S. Agency for Global Media, as well as the media outlets it oversees, including Voice of America and Radio Liberty, several brought suits to stay afloat. The Supreme Court has already intervened in several cases. But their capacity to constrain Trump is limited if he defies their orders. “The courts can't save us alone,” says Levitsky. “The judicial process is slow, and a lot can get broken in the meantime."
Opponents have howled about the threat Trump poses to the Republic for long enough that for many it’s easy to dismiss the talk of constitutional crisis. Yet the President himself stokes fears of a slippery slope to strongman rule with his blanket assertions of power, his disregard for democratic guardrails, and his talk of running for a third term, despite the 22nd Amendment’s prohibition. “There are some loopholes that have been discussed,” Trump says, “But I don’t believe in loopholes.”
Toward the end of the interview, TIME asks Trump whether he agrees with John Adams, a founder whose portrait he has framed in gold on his wall, who said the American republic was “a government of laws, not of men.” The President pauses to think it through. “I wouldn’t agree with it 100%,” he says. “We are a government where men are involved in the process of law, and ideally, you’re going to have honest men like me.”
Once the tape recorder stops rolling, Trump offers a tour through his private spaces beyond the Oval. Framed copies of magazines with his face on the cover line the walls. He passes into the dining room, where he watched and did nothing as the Jan. 6 attack unfolded. A gold remote control and two boxes of Tic Tacs sit on the table. On the threshold above the door hangs the boxing belt that Zelensky left behind after their contentious meeting in late February. He leads his guests into his study, which aides have dubbed “the Merch Room.” There are two white breakfronts filled with MAGA memorabilia: hats of differing colors and varieties, gold Trump-branded sneakers, white Trump golf shirts, Trump coffee-table books, towels with his Trump 45/47 logo on them, and challenge coins featuring the Trump family crest inside the seal of the President of the United States. It may not be the traditional image of American presidential power, but it is his.
—With reporting by Alex Altman, Massimo Calabresi, Sam Jacobs, and Nik Popli/Washington, and Leslie Dickstein and Simmone Shah/New York
