Transcripts For CSPAN2 Philip 20240706

Learning. Thank you. Really to share as you. Thank thank you so much for being with us this afternoon. And it is such a delight for me to be able to talk with my colleague and very good friend phil rucker and i am going to start out by telling you a story about phil rucker and i am going to tell this story and so why isnt phil telling this story . Because hes too much of a gentleman to tell this story because it makes me look really bad. Election night 2016. Phil had been out with trump quite a bit and he kept saying, you know, somethings going on out there. And i had written a story over the weekend saying, well, theres this little tiny eye of a needle that donald trump could get through. You know, michigan and parts of it. But i didnt really believe it. So its Election Night. I am supposed to be writing the lead off for the Washington Post. The next day. It is 830 a Election Night and i am 80 inches. Its into america elect its first woman president. So phil shows up at my office and he says karen, did you see what just happened in florida . And i said, phil, get out of here. Im on deadline. Cant you see im writing . Phil comes back a few minutes later, says karen north carolina. And im like, phil, dont bother me. I got to get this story done. Finally, about 9 00 or so, phil comes to the office and he goes pennsylvania, and we need to recalibrate. So phil sits down in my office with me and by 1030, we have too close to call. And by midnight we have trumps victory and had phil not been in my office that afternoon, the front page of the Washington Post the next day would have been blank. I will say, by the way, it is a real tragedy for Washington Post subscribers that parents beautiful piece never saw the light of. She wrote the most spectacular story about the first woman elected president. With all the this and history and and what it means for the country and for hillary clinton, you know, if youve ever visiting washington, just come by. Ive got it saved on my hard drive. Anyway. But so phil went on to write to with our other colleague, carol leonnig, to books that went straight to the bestseller list about the Trump Presidency. And i think that, you know, and they were all full of in credible revelations that made a lot of headlines. But i think what i would like to talk to you about now is sort of what it was like to sort of panic pre trump world and what you learned what you learned about him that explains what were seeing from him now and what were likely to see from him Going Forward since we have already established hes better at predicting things than i am. So so talk about i mean, what as you were covering him over the years, as you were writing the books, did you learn about trump that really sort of strikes you or is he getting worse . Well, ill take the first part of that question about what how to penetrate trump, what you learned doing that. And it was not something that happened sort of overnight or at one moment. It was just this kind of osmosis over months and years of learning about him, of talking to the people around him. It was a constantly evolving cast of characters in the trump orbit, and as every month went on covering the Trump Campaign and then the Trump Presidency, the rolodex got deeper and deeper and deeper because there were just so many figures who would tell you things that that youd youd leave the conversation totally gobsmacked by. And then, you know, youd go back a year or two later and do the sort of deeper excavation thats required for a book like the two that i did with carol. And you learn even more. You didnt know whats going on at the time. And so it was this experience of being both surprised and totally not surprised because we knew this man, we knew his character, we knew what he was all about and what he was trying to do in office as president and, you know, it was this experience where i just had to never make assumptions about what was happening because he would he would always prove them wrong. And so the most important trait, i think, in reporting about trump and then trying to penetrate his orbit is to be open minded, to be open to possibilities, to be open to outcomes that you cant predict while you know what i mean. Lets look at karen and then youll hear me better on the microphone. Find this side of my face across the speakers network. This. Oh, okay. Well, hopefully somebody can fix that. Do we have somebody who knows how to fix things . Watching your own right . Donald trump. Hey. Hello. Yes. So, okay, can can you hear me . Okay . Okay. Yeah. So, phil, doug, youve interviewed trump a lot of times and i was always struck by phils interviewing technique, which was to not ask a lot of questions, to just sort of let him go because it seemed like if you did that he was going to Say Something astonish saying. And so often shocking. Yeah, you know, i always found interviewing him during the campaign and then as president and then actually after he left office, i interviewed him for about 3 hours down at mar a lago with carol for the book. That the best approach for us was to to ask sort of somewhat open ended questions and then see see how he answers and where hell go and kind of, you know, you keep asking follow up questions, tend to steer the conversation. But, you know, he would he would spit out so many things that arent true so that i felt like i would waste all the time trying to fact check him in real time. Its much more valuable as a as a print journalist whos going to then go back and process the interview and look for information and revelations, too, to let the man speak. And he usually reveals something sooner or later when hes in conversation like that. Its a very different role, by the way, than than our colleagues in Television News would have, because if youre watching a live interview where, you know, lester holt is sitting down with trump, theres sort of a Public Service obligation on his part to fact check the president to say thats just not true or to really pin him down on the details because its a live televised experience for voters. They need to know in real time whats true and whats not true. But as a print reporter, we dont have that obligation because nobodys watching the interview live. Theyre going to be reading a story about it later. They might read a transcript of it, but there are opportunities down the road to add context, to correct the record, to clarify facts, etc. So i always found it was most sort of worthwhile and productive for me to be to let the man talk. And he usually said things he didnt intend to say, or certainly that his advisers didnt want him to say and reveal things that then became that became news. You know, phil, one of the panels yesterday and probably somebody here can remember i cant remember who it was who said it, but somebody said trump broke the media. How well do you think the media did its job in both covering the run up to the Trump Presidency and in covering it, you know, not terribly well. But i think it said theres a nuance to answer to that. First of all, we should all remember that the media is not one sort of conglomerate. Its a bunch of independent news organizations that make their own judgments about coverage that that cover things differently and, you know, so what cnn is doing is not the same as what the Washington Post is doing, which is not the same as what the wall street journal is doing and so on. I think the media generally was were slow in the 2016 campaign to take trump really seriously and to apply the the sort of scrutiny that we expect and that we that we apply for a leading president ial candidate. There was a feeling early on that that he was not very likely to be the republican nominee. But hes this temporary fascination of the moment and somebody whos getting a lot of interest, hes saying outrageous things. Cnn would livestream his rallies. There would be a different tone in the coverage. I mean, i remember early on the Huffington Post refused to even cover him as a politician. They wrote stories about him in the entertainment section of their website. That all changed pretty quickly. You know, im actually proud of the work we did at the Washington Post in the general election and entering the primary to vet his background, to vet his candidacy, to write about his character, to explore for his judgments both in his professional life, the bankruptcies, etc. , and in his personal life. The access Hollywood Video that our colleague David Fahrenthold first revealed to the public. But it was not consistent across the board in the coverage of that campaign. I think the media got a lot better during the presidency and there was a real serious firmness of purpose and rigor to the reporting throughout the presidency, to both what was happening behind the scenes in the oval office and how the president was making decisions, how he was doing things that were capricious, that the sort of consequences of all of that, but also, you know, really serious investigative reporting about his financial dealings about russia, about his entanglements with saudi arabia and other countries, about his family. Those are all important, important lines of reporting. And i think the media, you know, got the tone and the presidency right. I do think, though, that one of the big mistakes that the media made and i think our organization as well, in some ways i felt like trump understood us better in ways than we understood ourselves. And yeah, especially the fact that essentially no matter what he threw across the plate, the media was going to swing at it, which meant that if things were getting a little tough for him and negotiating something with congress or something he knew that all he had to do was tweet something outrageous and everybody would just go skittering off to and we would never sort of just let it go by. I youre exactly right about that. I agree about that. Yeah, he definitely had a lot of shiny objects that distracted us. You know, we i sorry, i was a white house reporter, the White House Bureau chief for all four years of the Trump Presidency. And before trump came to office, we had three white house reporters at the Washington Post who covered president obama the first day of the Trump Presidency. We had have six, and then we had seven because we had to have people working in double shifts. Somebody would have to be in what we called the hot seat where you would literally actually. Parker, our colleague, tells a story. She would like set her alarm for 6 a. M. And not even get out of bed. She just pull the laptop into the bed and look at what he tweeted and she knew it was going to be her job to write. You know, five paragraph news story about whatever outrageous tweet he had that morning because it was a statement from the president of the united states. We couldnt ignore the tweets, but we we did allow ourselves, i think, to get distracted by those moments and and let trump be sort of the executive producer, to be the executive editor, to be the person dictating what the big News Headlines that day. Were going to be based on what he was saying on twitter and that, you know, i think different organizations handled it differently because, you know, some were lucky to have a lot of resources where you could continue reporting on the really important things while still chasing what trump was doing. But, you know, he did he did figure it out. I think i think youre right. Karen, could you talk a little bit about the difference between writing a book and being a day to day journalist . Because i know that when a number of these books have come out about the Trump Presidency, and im specifically thinking of, say, Maggie Haberman book or our colleague Bob Woodwards book, and people would say, if you knew about this, yeah, months ago when he was still in office, why didnt you tell us then . Why did you wait for the book . So could you talk a little bit about kind of how you get information in for a book . What kinds of can additions people put on that information and to talk to you . And also the way they talk to you when youre writing the book versus when youre writing for a story thats going to be on the web in an hour. Im im glad you asked the question because it is a totally different process. I mean, the that the goal for a journalist like us in writing a book is the same as our goal in writing a story for the Washington Post. Its to uncover new information, to set it in an important context, to help people understand what happened and why, and kind of have that full picture. But the process is very different when carol and i decided to do our first book on trump, a very stable genius, we met with marty baron, who was the executive editor of the Washington Post at the time, to go over our book live and to just kind of have a gut check conversation with him about what the standard would be for how we do this independent reporting, which would be for our book and not for the paper. And he said, look, i understand youre going to be doing a deeper excavation of scenes of moments. Youre going to be talking to people and gathering dialog and notes and looking at diaries and all of that. But he said, if you come across information and reporting the book that the public needs to know now, you know, information that shapes a current debate or that that is of such sort of high Public Service value, you have an obligation to bring it to the Washington Post right away. And so that was our kind of rubric as we went about doing the book reporting. And there were a couple moments where we learned things in the course of reporting the book that that we felt met, that standard and came to our editors at the post and were able to turn it into a story for the post without saving it for the book. But most of the things that are in the book, in my books and i think its the same for maggie and bob and everyone else whos a journalist whos been writing books like this. There are details that you learn in conversations that are are specifically for the book. Youll sit down with a source under the terms that the information be embargoed until you write the fuller book, because theyre telling you what really happened for the benefit of history. Theyre not trying to do sort of a quick and dirty drive by, you know, interview that can shape the news cycle. 48 hours from now. Theyre theyre trying to contribute to the broader historical context, and theyre recounting conversations and sharing dialog and going through diaries and all of that. And so its a different the ground rules are a little bit different when youre reporting for the book. And i think thats why you learn new things in books. I mean, one example i cant say the name because a lot of the interviews we did for the book were on the condition that people share everything they know without being identified by name. But there was one really important person in the Trump Administration who, as a day to day newspaper reporter, i had no access to like i would have wanted to interview this person, but he just never participated in interviews with reporters, didnt talk to the press, but for the book, invited carol and me over to his house. And we sat for 9 hours. He pulled out all of his black notebooks where he had taken kind of diary notes every day through the presidency of what happened, who was on the phone calls, what time the calls happened, what was said. All of his memories from these key moments and just went through day by day by day, his diary. And we got through it 9 hours. And i had to cut it short because i had a little puppy that i had to get to at home and he had to go pee. And i couldnt wait any longer. And then we came back another day, a month later, and did like another 7 hours of it. This person never would have talked to us for a newspaper story, but for a book, for history, you know, felt a kind of Public Service obligation to share what he knew and to share, you know, literally everything from his diaries. So now trump is running again. He for now at least, is out there by himself and looks like he will soon be joined by what nikki haley, ron desantis right now is, you know, leading him in some polls, although hes doing sort of a florida rose garden strategy. And what is your sense of what this environment, how well trump is going to be able to function in this environment versus the first time he ran because hes got a not a great Midterm Election behind him. Hes basically lost the house, the senate and the president save for the Republican Party. Or are republicans done with him . You know, its a good question. I dont think republicans are done with trump, but i think hes going to have a much rougher experience in this campaign than in 2016 and for several reasons. I mean, one, theres no surprise, like we all know, his act, weve seen it now for six years. You know, there was this element of like excitement and surprise when he burst on the scene in 2015. Thats just not going to be there this time around. Hes also, you know, hes a little older and i think more tired. Weve not seen him campaigning very much at all. I dont know if hes going to be, you know, as vigorous a force on the political scene as he was in 2015. And i also think the media is on to him. I mean, cnn is probably not going to be like live broadcasting his rallies all the time. You know, news organizations are going to are going to treat him with a lot more scrutiny from the very beginning. They already are and have been. And, you know, the polling if the pollings, any indication theres a real hunger among Republican Voters for somebody else to consider. There was a poll last week in New Hampshire that had ron desantis as the runaway, you know, first choice pick from voters there. This is New Hampshire. Its a state trump won by a Pretty Healthy margin in the 2016 primaries and a real kind of bastion of support for him in that primary process. And they want ron desantis, not trump. And i think that just tells you trumps going to have a little bit of difficulty having that the same kind of support and momentum he had in 2016. And do you take seriously the possibility that if hes not doing well in a republican primary, he might just go and run as an independent. I dont know. He could. I ill tell you what, i think i have a hard time picturing him, you know, fully endorsing the republican nominee, doing the rally with the arms held high and being a complete team player. Thats just not in Donald Trumps dna. Its got to be about trump. I think if hes not the nominee, hes probably not going to want to see another republican be the star and be the nominee. So i dont know if that means he runs as an independent or he sticks it out or he just refuses to endorse or what sort of form that that resistance might take. And he could surprise us, by the way, like i said earlier, be open to possibilities. He could be a totally normal republican, you know, endorsing the person who beat that. Thats not celebrating and raising money for him and campaigning for him. But i dont think thats whats going to happen. So well see. And what about i mean, the other thing that was the first time he ran there were what, 16, 17 in the republic guns on the debate stage, or they had to split them up. They had to have a kids table this time around, if there is another big field of candidates, is he equipped to do what he did last time, which is i, i, i dont know if everybody knows, but, you know, the republican primaries operate on different rules. They have a lot of states where its winner take all. So you can win 20 of the vote and get all the delegates, which is basically how trump got most republicans in the 2016 primary voted for somebody else. Does he potentially benefit from that . Again, if theres a big republican field, he certainly could. Its important that you pointed that out, karen, because, you know, most of those states and 2016, he was getting 30, 35 of the vote. I mean, he was not he did not have a majority support among Republican Voters in in his path to the nomination. He ended up getting that support by being the nominee. And republicans came home to him. But he he was a minority candidate and he could benefit from that again this time, if the field is large, i suspect the field wont be quite as large by the time the primaries roll around. You might have a situation where, you know, eight or ten republicans declare some interest in running and go through some of the debates and the process this summer and fall. But by the time the caucuses and primaries begin, its a much smaller field. I, i think republicans know the lesson from 2016, which is that too big of a field to trump let trump win with 30 odd percent of the vote and would probably not want to see that happen again. But i dont actually know who who ends up setting that stepping down for, you know, what could be like for the good of the party necessarily. But i think a lot of them will run early on. I mean, haley pompeo or pence, tim scott is doing a big exploratory trip. Asa hutchinson and you think of this crowd looks the most interesting right now. Its its hard to say. I, i find ron desantis very interesting because hes been hes the governor of a big state and is doing some pretty controversial things on education, on social issues. His handling of the pandemic was very controversial at the time and yet has pretty high popularity in florida and a lot of support from donors. And hes the biggest wildcard, i think, in this race. He has the capacity to be the leading republican candidate, and yet hes completely untested on a national stage. We dont know what hes like in a debate. We dont really know how hell deal with the retail politicking, politicking requirements in iowa and New Hampshire. I mean, hes really untested, but has the most potential, i think, and the others are a little bit more familiar. So what, though, has trump left in the Republican Party . Because there are so many sort of little its like that movie alien where you have like the mother alien explodes and then all the baby aliens come out. I mean, there are so many sort of trump style people in elected office now. I mean, its like the whole house of representatives. I mean, you look at what it took for Kevin Mccarthy to barely become speaker. I mean, is there any way the republic and party sort of puts all of this back together and resembles the Republican Party that most of us grew up with . First of all, i cant erase that image of the mother alien exploding. Thats quite a picture. And i would say there would be there would be more children, aliens, if like like we dont, for example, have a governor, carrie lake, and we dont have a governor. Im forgetting the guys name in pennsylvania. Who is the trump candidate who lost there . I mean, there are a lot of trump candidates mastriano who who lost in november because they were so out there, so alien, as you might put it. But that said, yeah, this is trumps Republican Party, and i think its going to be trumps Republican Party until somebody takes him on and defeats him. And so that could happen a year from now. But but it is trumps party and hes got a hold on it. If even as you see, you know, key figures trying to kind of step away from him a little bit are are willing to stand up to him in ways they might not have a year ago. So i would love to sort of open this up to questions if if yes, sir. Im going to repeat the question, by the way, just so we can get the question recorded that im supposed to do that. Right . Okay. So im curious, when you when your book was released, books of lots happened since then. And its sort of this Treasure Chest of things that you could continue to write about if you were to do another book. Now, where would you pick up whats what what would you feel is important to put out there that hasnt that you havent captured yet . This is where if you were to write book number three and im sure your publishers would love you to where would you pick up and where would you go from there . So there is no book number three right now. My publisher, our publisher i think would love us to do book number three. But i dont think carol and i are were were kind of done with mar a lago for the moment. But you know what . Thats the natural the natural next step. I think, would be would be this president ial campaign. I think wed want to see kind of how the next year goes for trump if he ends up being the nominee, then it becomes a really interesting story and you know that that would be probably the next part of the book. Our second book, i alone can fix it, ended with the end of the presidency and him returning tomorrow. Lago and joe biden being sworn into office. And so, you know, i would say, obviously, it would pick up in january of 2021, but trump hasnt really done a whole lot in the last two years. Hes hes golfed and talked with a lot of people and hes on true social. But hes theres nothing not much of consequence thats going on with him. And it does feel like this campaign could be a period of consequence and would be the next president is going to be the litigation that is sort of the investigations. Yeah. Yeah. Well, i mean, now well i, i wish for example, wed had the the january six house investigation already taken place for her book because a lot of new information came out through that investigation, through the power of subpoena, through some of the interviews with those trump figures. You know, i think the mar a lago documents investigation, which, you know, were covering pretty closely at the post, has been quite interesting. I mean, theres a lot there, but its stuff happening sort of around trump as opposed to what he himself is doing as the main character. And what do you think the Justice Department goes . I guess thats a hard thing to predict here. Its really hard to predict. You know, the the there are multiple investigations, right . Theres the january 6th and fake electors investigation. And then theres the classified documents that were found at mar a lago and on the classified documents, i would say the government, the Justice Department was moving quite fast through the fall, you know, identifying key witnesses as subpoenaing information. And they seem to be building towards a potential indictment in the early part of this year. Our understanding from from the reporting that our colleagues have done at the post on this is that things have slowed down a little bit, in part because of the classified documents that were found in bidens homes and offices and pences access to jimmy carter right now is looking through his sock drawer just make sure. Well, its its serious. And quails golf bag. Yeah hes the national the National Archives has asked every living president , past president and past Vice President to search their records for any documents with classified markings to make sure theres nothing else out there. But what happened with trump is sort of next level. I mean, he not only had a huge trove of documents that he was sitting on after leaving the white house, but he resisted the subpoena. I mean, he refused to hand them over. When asked by the National Archives, which is why the fbi raided mar a lago in august of last year. So his case is is much more extreme beneath everyones i dont know if its going to result in an indictment. It certainly looks like the Justice Department was moving in that direction in the last couple of months. But the biden and pence things really do complicate that politically, at least. Yes, maam. And i will go to you right after that. Okay . Okay. Now, please. Thank you. Thank you both. Given what you know now, do you think trump was lying to counsel on . Does counsel asking the media is terrible ceremonial gardening off the seem to have gone to very wealthy private island and replacing it and then shooting that dog. Oh no no no no memoir immediate family or any number of trumps previous confidants since been dragged into jail for brain. Who do you think would be a loss to bill thomas . Stick principles. So who destroy still have around him . Who does he talked to . Who counts as his confidants since jared and ivanka have, jovanka seems to have moved on and everybody else seems to be headed for jail. So. You know, so he has other he has other adult children. Don jr, you might have heard of him. Hes still very politically active and, you know, very much in his fathers circle. Trump does have a staff around him. Theres a woman named susie wiles whos been a top sort of republican operative, strategist in florida for many years, who is helping sort of put together the chess pieces for a president ial campaign with trump at the moment. There are other staffers as well who are around him. But to karens point, you know, a lot of their close confidants around trump, even at the end of the presidency and even in his first postpresident ial year in 2021, are gone. Some of the staff, the young staffers who moved down to mar a lago to work for him after leaving the white house are no longer on the payroll, have have left the trump orbit. So theres a real its sort of a constant churn in his world. I will say, you know, hes someone who keeps all these people on speed dial and he calls folks up all the time for advice, whether they work for him or not. And you see a lot of instances where people who who drifted for a couple of years are suddenly back in the orbit and then theyre out and then theyre in. And he likes to to have it in flux like that. But he is i think, going to need to assemble a new team for this campaign because so many of the people who helped get him elected president in 2016 are just not around, dont want to be with him, dont want to associate even his own daughter, doesnt want to associate with him politically anymore. And youve got to wonder who would be where he could get elected again. I mean, who would be in the white house in the second trump term . I mean, these guys apparently were the ateam before. So, i mean, honestly, i its not a joke. I think you could have like secretary of state state rick grenell, you could have theyre all kinds of people who who you know, early on in the trump years would have been seen as as not at that level, could end up at that level now, because because theyve been so loyal to him for so many years and because there arent. A lot of other people around for those roles. Remember when trump got elected, he went looking for stature. He found rex tillerson, a longtime ceo of exxonmobil, to be the secretary of state. He, steve mnuchin, was a pretty serious person to be the treasury secretary. He had he found john kelly to be at the white house chief of staff. And i think figures of that stature are just not around trump at this time. Yeah, george. Yeah, i dont know about that. Secretary of the treasury, mike lindell, you heard it here first. No, i, phil and i early on and it was like the first weeks of the Trump Presidency, we wrote a story about, believe it or not, trump was picking cabinet members. According to what they looked like and he like didnt want john. He didnt want john because he didnt like his mustache. Yeah, so and he likes nikki haley for the United Nations because he thought she looked international and he seriously and he he was into mitt romney for a moment because he thought he looked the part for secretary. It was central casting. We had a lot of fun with that. We did have a lot of fun with that story and it got a lot of attention. Yes, sir. Im interested in your opinion on the current lawsuit. Its taken the current lawsuit against bob woodward. You you know, you sue somebody because the thing you were telling them for one book, they put in another book. I mean, it strikes me im not a lawyer and this is not a legal analysis, but i will say it seems pretty ridiculous and, you know, Bob Woodwards affair, a fair reporter he tape recorded his interviews. He asked permission to do so. He does that with all of his interviews and its all on tape. So i dont know what trump is is trying to hide from or sue over, but hes our thing. Sues about a lot of things. Yeah. So so do we have any other questions . Yes, maam. Well, what do you think is going to happen with the other lawsuits that are coming from the georgia, new york and whatever he had, the other lawsuits there, theres georgia. Theres new york state, theres new york city, the the d. A. So the latest from georgia is that the grand jury has put together their report and we expect it will be released publicly at some point soon. We know exactly when and the district in Fulton County fanni willis is has indicated that there could be charges. Its not clear who she is going to charge or indict. Rather, if trump would be among them, i would assume trump would be. But we dont know that. And we dont know if itll include like Rudy Giuliani or who the other defendants might be. But she does she has indicated that she plans to take action. And that report come out, you know, sometime over the next several weeks or months. That should be before spring. And that report end up detailing a lot of what was happening in the fake elector scheme and the Pressure Campaign on georgia. I will add though that most of that most of those revelations are probably things that the house jan Six Committee has already found because she she was interviewing the grand jury in georgia was interviewing a lot of the same people about a lot of the same subjects. So im not sure there are going to be some big kind of smoking gun revelations that we dont know about already. But there should be some charges and those are state charges. So thats a state investigation at a separate from what the Justice Department is doing at the federal level. Yes, maam. Thank you. Asked you reach out to me. Do you think that trump is getting worse . Hes deteriorating . Yeah. That was my original question that you never answered. Do you think he do you think trump is deteriorated . Do you think hes sort of getting worse . I, i would leave that to the Mental Health professionals. I will add that many many of them have publicly commented on this matter. And i think, in fact, theres that kind of trade association for Mental Health professionals has weighed in as well. You know, clearly they think he has some issues, but i dont i its not my place to comment on that. Ill all i all i can say is, you know, when you when you interview him and, hes going on and on there. There are moments where youre like, ha and it just makes you think. Sure. So yes, sir. It seems like the release of the tax returns after waiting so many years to have that big explosive time long expected gap. Yeah, that the release of the tax returns was not as thrilling as a lot of people expected it to be. Yeah, you know, i we were waiting for years to see those tax returns. Right. And we just got is it five years or six years that came out through the house committee, which frankly, its important for the public to see those like its a good thing that those documents have been have been shared. Its sort of a standard that every president ial candidate has met through history when theyre running for office as part of the public vetting process that trump didnt do. But it wasnt surprising in part because of good investigative reporting by our friends at the New York Times who had revealed prior to this release that trump didnt pay any taxes in some of those years and some of the other schemes that are documented in the report. So when the returns actually came out, it didnt tell us a whole lot new that we didnt already know. But the reason we knew it was because of really good investigative reporting. And, you know, the imperative for trump to reveal his taxes is was even higher because hes the only president , at least the only president in modern history who continued to operate a business while he was president. He didnt put it in blind trust. He didnt sell it. He you know, there was there was a lot of things that he was doing. I mean, continuing to make money off of and often intersecting with his role as president. Yeah. And he came from a very complicated well, he runs a very complicated business with many different revenue streams, some of them international. I mean, there was a real theres a genuine reason for the public to have wanted to see those returns and to scrub his financial backing. And who would have interest in him being elected president before that election. So anybody else. Yes, they are. They say, of course, running for president. And i gather all of the contributions they put into the campaign for you guys. And when the election was over, that person was allowed to take all of that. So people say hes still running after all this money. So so she was asking about what happens to all the money that you raise when you are for president. The president is not allowed to just keep that money, but there are sort porous because it does sort of fund your travel or fund your or importantly, in the case of donald trump, you know, millions of dollars that have been donated to the Republican National committee the last several years have gone to paying for his lawyers to pay for his legal defenses. And in all of these investigations that were talking about, i mean, its a huge expense. And so in that way, trump is is profiting off of it. But its not like he can pocket the money. Its money that can then be spent to serve him. So whether its his staff or his travel, as karen notes, or his personal lawyers who are defending him. And by the way, when i first got to washington, ive been covering washington since the 1980s, and members of congress who retired and i forgot what year they changed the law. But members of congress who retire and could just take whatever money was left, stick it in their pocket. You saw a lot of retirements the year before that law. The new law came into place. Well, we just have another couple minutes, so but i think we can get in another couple of questions. Yes, sir . Any thoughts or projections . No accountability. Thoughts or predictions on accountability . No. Well, do you by accountability, do you mean will donald trump be in an orange jumpsuit behind bars. We are not in the predictions business, but i have i have. I have im not predicting i have a hard time seeing that. But but i do think there will be charges i think people will be indicted over fake electors and potentially over their classified documents. But i think beyond that, just the general concept of accountability. I think trump has sort of turned it on its head. I mean, im going to say George Santos probably had a lot of issues before donald trump. But i do think that it was the sort of, you know, the boldness with which donald trump did a lot of the things he did. Just sort of he actually prospered politically by being outrageous, saying, you know, im not releasing. Tax returns or whatever. Im, you know, that i do think that may have become a model for a lot of politicians Going Forward. I think thats right. So i think we have time for one more. Yes, maam. In the list of potential republican candidates, you mentioned this. Can you say a little more . Asa hutchinson. Asa hutchinson just left office. He was the governor for two terms in arkansas, a republican governor who its funny, you know, 20 years ago, he was considered one of like the hard right rabble rousers in the house of representative. Today, hes considered like an establishment chamber of commerce republic and a governor. But he has been, you know, toying with the idea of running for president. Hes not quite as advanced in that process as nikki haley or mike pompeo or mike pence. But i it certainly looks like hes interested in that and very well may give it a go. He i think he filled fills and occupies a similar space to Glenn Youngkin that governor of virginia right now, you know, an executive leader, somebody whos a little bit more business oriented, not not the bomb thrower, sort of trump republican, but rather like a restoration of like an old Republican Party. So well see if he can build a following on that. I dont know if hes actually going to run, but hes certainly is in the mix. Andy read light is flashing at me, which says our time is