The reaction
to the former president
throwing his hat into
the ring has been really interesting.
You see even Murdoch newspapers.
Yes.
That's an excuse.
This is a New York Post. Do you see that?
You can barely see it
because it only says
Florida man makes announcement.
So
boy, how things have changed.
Let's bring in now
CNN political analyst
and senior political correspondent
for The New York Times, Maggie Haberman.
She's also the author of Confidence Me
in the Making of Donald Trump
and the Breaking of America.
This
says everything.
There is nobody who knows
better than Rupert Murdoch
that the way to upset
Donald Trump is not to say his name.
And so it isn't just
that he is not the full front page
that he is the banner on the bottom.
It's that he's identified as Florida man,
and they're not trumpeting him.
There is a move away from Trump.
I don't want to overstate this.
He is still the frontrunner.
He is still the establishment.
He is still a former president.
But there are a number of people
in the Republican Party
who are going to start making clear
that they think he is really bad
for the party
in ways that I think they couldn't
quite articulate the same way
in, say, 20, 16,
because he didn't have a record.
January six hadn't happened.
We haven't seen all the election
denialism over the last 20 months.
And so I think all of that
becomes a compelling factor.
Is it weird to say like what it was?
Was it overnight?
Because if you're just at home watching,
you're like, well, wait.
These people have been behind
Donald Trump forever. Don's right.
It feels like overnight.
It feels like overnight, right.
That there's been this shift.
Was it Tuesday?
I think it was largely Tuesday. Yeah.
I mean, I think that if the Republicans
had had the night
that they were forecasting
in all of these polls,
that turned out not to be right.
You know,
then I think you would have seen people
saying, well, you know,
Trump succeeded,
know a lot of the candidates
that he backed,
particularly in the Senate.
This is a slate of candidates
that he largely either encouraged
or actually recruited
in the case of Herschel Walker.
Now, you know, there's a long way to go.
Lindsey Graham was down there
with Trump this weekend at Mar a Lago,
or at least in Florida, urging him
not to run.
Lindsey Graham then
last night puts out a tweet about,
you know,
what an incredible speech
this was,
because there's often this habit
where people who are critical of Trump
then publicly praise him lavishly
so that they can get
back on his good side.
And so we haven't done
seeing that dynamic yet.
But there's definitely a shift.
What about Trump himself, though?
Because watching that speech last night,
we watched it together
that versus Trump in 2016.
Big difference.
It was a pretty subdued.
And what I would say
wasn't a difference was the grievance
the sort of violent conflicts
attitude that we have seen him
say over and over again
and claiming
that he finished things
that he didn't finish
when he was president
making statements
about how his presidency went
in ways that it didn't go.
There was a sort of playing the old hits
sense of this.
So in that way it was a lot like 2016.
But I agree with you.
This is not somebody who seemed like he's
raring to go again.
This is not somebody.
Now, some of that might have been Caitlyn
because they knew that
networks would not take him live
if he was yelling,
if he was talking about the 2020 election
over and over again.
I think there was a real effort
to keep him from doing that
so the cameras would stay on him.
And then as the cameras went off,
you saw him sort of slide away from that.
He doesn't seem happy.
He just seems angry.
It felt like the colorized version
of your favorite movie, like,
why on earth did they do this?
I mean, just the reaction
from all of us,
because believe it or not,
we all text each other right?
It was that.
It was there was an energy
that was not there.
And the reaction from people that I,
you know,
were texting me in the room with saying,
this is so low energy.
What happened?
I mean, it feels like a movie.
Like I've seen this before
and I really don't want to see it again.
It was so low energy
that Jeb Bush called it
low energy on Twitter, which was
which was one of the knife
twists that we saw
from a bunch of people last night.
But it was and part of that, Don,
is because it was a
it was a speech,
it was a teleprompter speech.
And he never does
well with the teleprompter speech.
He always has.
Maggie,
I think it was something beyond that.
I agree with you
that it was something beyond that.
But I think that when that is the set up,
that is always a recipe
for not doing well for him.
Look, I've been saying for months.
You know, his heart is not in this.
And I do think that you saw that
last night.
He really wants to be president again.
He wants the power of the office.
He wants the protection
from investigations.
I don't think he wants to go
do the work for two more years.
This is the earliest that he has declared
a presidential candidacy
in the last three
that we have seen him run.
And this is a long time
He clearly wants to be Grover Cleveland.
But there are so many differences
in terms of defying history.
The only a you know,
former president who's done
this Democrat,
but also won the popular vote,
I think, like every time.
And I just wonder, you've said, Maggie,
there is nothing
you could learn about Trump
that would surprise you.
That's quite literally true.
Didn't even so nothing
last night surprised you?
No, I because that
last night was again,
it was a litany of things
that we've actually heard him
say over and over again.
I mean, I think part of why
people were not so roused by the speech
is that it felt very familiar,
you know,
and then particularly
when he gets to the part about
he literally said, I'm a victim.
He was talking about
the investigations into him.
And I was
that was the one thing
I wasn't surprised.
But I was struck by it
because that is something
you're going to hear over and over again.
He went
head on into the investigations into him,
and he brought up the Kim Jong un letter
he said is
under investigation, is taking to Mar
a Lago.
That really stood out to me
because he's literally
under investigation for that.
The other thing, though, is about
what's happening
with Ukraine in the background.
I remember
the other reason
that he was the first
and first in management of Ukraine.
And he came out and said
Russia fired the missile.
That's not true.
Ivanka Trump put out a statement saying
that she's not going to be involved.
She said she supports her father,
she loves him.
She said she's not going to be involved
in politics this time around.
Were you surprised by that?
What do you make of that?
I wasn't surprised by that.
I know that, you know,
she I think has
look, the Trumps in general as a family
to varying degrees like press coverage.
She is much more like her
father than than frankly,
you know, some of her
other siblings in that respect.
And so I think she wanted a news story
about what she was doing.
But I do think that she
had a pretty hard time
at the end of the administration.
You know,
she was there on January
six with her father.
She was
widely credited
with by people who were there
with being one of the people who got him
to eventually
tell the rioters
at the Capitol to go home.
And I think that she felt
sort of burned by the experience.
Now, you know,
we've never really seen the history
before where you have individual
staff members
putting out their own statements
about what they're going to do.
But it is a reminder
that he is going into this campaign
in a different way than he was last time.
Just you know, earlier
this morning, Axios
reported, Jonathan Swan,
that Steve Schwarzman,
the CEO of Blackstone,
is not going to be with Trump.
Steve Schwarzman is one of the few donors
Trump had left.
So that is actually a
we kept wondering, what's he going to do?
What is Schwarzman going to do?
Now, we know
that we now are leaving here.
Just real quickly,
I have to ask you for something.
Please follow up on this.
It struck me when you said
his heart is not in it
and maybe it's a very simple answer.
Is it just because he can't help himself?
But why needs the attention?
It needs the protection
of the investigations
and very much misses
the power that the office had.
It's really that simple.