Washington Week with The Atlantic

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Is President Trump's shock and awe campaign already over?

In just his second week back in office, Trump is on the defensive and casting blame widely after a terrible tragedy in the air over Washington and a chaotic week in politics, next.

Good evening and welcome to Washington Week.

It was, of course, a tragedy when an Army helicopter collided with a passenger jet Wednesday night over the Potomac.

In situations like this one, it has traditionally been the role of a president to publicly mourn the dead, promise a full and transparent investigation, and withhold judgment about the cause of the accident, all while calming the public.

President Trump, of course, reads from a different playbook.

Tonight, I'll discuss the aftermath of the crash, as well as the frenetic week that was with Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times, Mark Leibovich is my colleague and a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Ali Vitali is the host of Way Too Early on MSNBC.

And Nancy Youssef is a national security correspondent for The Wall Street Journal.

Thank you all for being here.

I want to start by playing a brief clip of Donald Trump talking about the crash, if we could.

REPORTER: Do you have a plan to go visit the site or meet with any of the first responders?

DONALD TRUMP, U.S. President: I have a plan to visit, not the site, because, you tell me, what's the site?

The water?

You want me to go swimming?

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I just want to note, in watching that and absorbing that previous presidents might have said something anodyne in response to a question like that, you know, when the time is right, I will go to the site and thank the first responders and I'll stand with the families of the victims and that would be that, but this is a politician with very, very different instincts.

Peter, is this -- is his response, and he's been nonstop responding to the crash for two days, is this -- does this hark back to the chaotic days of Trump 1?

PETER BAKER, Chief White House Correspondent, The New York Times: Yes.

Well, Donald Trump is nothing like anodyne.

He's nothing like any other president.

We've seen that before.

Maybe after four years, we had kind of forgotten a little bit because we didn't see him every day in the same way.

But you're right.

He is his own kind of leader.

He doesn't do the empathy thing.

He doesn't do the feel your pain thing.

He's not a Bill Clinton or a Ronald Reagan after challenge or any of that kind of stuff.

And we saw that last time during COVID in particular.

Remember, day after day, he got out there and rather than talking about the human suffering of thousands of people dying per day, he went on the attack against Democrats, against his own scientists, against China, the World Health Organization, all of those.

Essentially, that's what he did again this week with the air crash, instead of coming out and saying this is a time for all of us to pull together and figure out what happened, he instantly, within minutes, goes from the hour of anguish to really an hour of anger and aggression.

In which he not only goes after his opponents, he name checks them, Obama, Biden, Buttigieg.

He talks about diversity as if that had anything to do with this crash without any evidence whatsoever.

That's how he rolls.

And he is not going to change because the conventions of Washington don't approve.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Why does he do it this way?

NANCY YOUSSEF, National Security Correspondent, The Wall Street Journal: I don't know, other than, I can tell you the impact though, in some place at the Pentagon, which of course was shocked over what happened.

We had the names of the three crew who were on the Black Hawk, and for the first time in the 20 years that I've been around the building, a family chose not to release the name of their loved one, asked the military to not release it.

It turns out it was the woman on that helicopter.

Now, I can't tell you their reasons, but I can tell you that depending on it, it had an effect.

You started to hear people talk if I'm a woman or a minority pilot, or people can assume that I'm only here because of diversity.

Someone sent me a list of every crash that's been involved, involving any kind of military vehicle, and said to me, count the women.

That's the kind of reaction that it's creating within the building that, that people are going to be judged not by their merits and certainly a pilot is -- the merits are right there.

There's no -- a plane doesn't know your race or gender.

And now we're having questions around whether a pilot will be judged on their flight hours, on their performance because of this kind of discourse.

ALI VITALI, Host, MSNBC's Way Too Early: As if that spotlight wasn't already there, right?

It's what makes these attacks about DEI and diversity and inclusion so sharp is the people who are nonwhite and non-male know that those biases are already ingrained for some Americans and this only underscores and builds upon them.

You're right that there's a cost to the mis and disinformation that Trump has put forward.

We saw it during the Hurricane Helene response, when he talked about FEMA.

And FEMA workers were endangered on the ground in some situations because of conspiracy theories pushed by the president.

In situations like this, it's the NTSB, the National Transportation Safety Board that actually makes the announcements about potential things that could have gone wrong in plane crash scenarios.

Trump broke with decades of precedent about that and just put forward conspiracies and conjecture.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Mark, hold your point for one minute.

I want you to react to video of precisely what Ali's talking about, Donald Trump kind of freestyling on possible causes of the accident.

Just watch this for one minute.

DONALD TRUMP: You could have slowed down the helicopter substantially.

You could have stopped the helicopter.

You could have gone up, you could have gone down.

You could have gone straight up, straight down.

You could have turned, you could have done a million different maneuvers.

For some reason, it just kept going and then made a slight turn at the very end and there was -- by that time, it was too late.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Mark, I want to hear you on the DEI overlay of this whole controversy and on basically everything that's happening in Washington these days because it's been a preoccupation of the Trump administration for the first 11 days of its time in office.

But going to this, it's -- what is the political utility for Donald Trump of going out and behaving like a radio D.J.

on drive time radio talking about aviation accidents or just sitting around a bar, YouTube commenter?

What is the impulse?

What is the effect?

MARK LEIBOVICH, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: I mean look That's not what we're used to a president of the United States doing.

And you can talk all about DEI or Donald Trump's style or what have you.

I mean, the fact is, 60 or, you know, a lot of people died not far from where we're sitting, tragically.

It's a fairly uncontroversial human response to just sort of sit with it, you know, try to heal.

I mean, every single president in history that I can tell who has been through something like this plays - - you know, goes by the same playbook.

And I was reading some, you know, one of the morning tip sheets today.

And said, well, that's the usual boring response.

But this is Donald Trump's style.

I don't think this is about style.

I don't think it's about DEI.

I think it's about -- I don't know.

I mean, I think it's just who he is.

And, look, it mimics a lot of his behavior in the first term in both campaigns.

I mean, this, in some ways, is democracy at work because everyone knows what this guy was and this is perfectly predictable.

People voted for it.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

What does it do to him politically?

I mean, this is the question.

Now that we're in the, we're in it now, we're in the Trump administration, we're in the second term, obviously for the lead up, it was all speculative and theoretical.

But does this do political damage to him with anyone that he cares about, or is this just part of the show that people actually are drawn to?

MARK LEIBOVICH: I mean, it could -- look, his approval ratings could tick down.

I mean, it started out at a pretty, you know, robust number for him.

I mean, the fact is, though, I mean, when you think about checks and balances, when you think about things that could potentially be a consequence for his actions, there is very little.

I mean, he basically owns both chambers of Congress.

You know, the Supreme Court's obviously sympathetic.

He doesn't have to run for reelection.

His cabinet, his staff, Republican Party, I mean, he owns all of that.

So, it's basically a consequence free environment.

You know, maybe does -- do approval ratings move the needle?

I mean, do congressional Republicans worry about them being too aligned for this in a way that makes them vulnerable?

But, ultimately, look, Donald Trump will do what he can get away with.

And whether a few points on his approval ratings are going to move the needle on this is unclear.

PETER BAKER: And the thing is, by tomorrow, or next week, we will have been on -- maybe even later tonight, we will be on to the next controversy, the next scandal, the next outrage, the next provocative thing he's done, maybe things that will be popular, maybe they won't, and we won't be talking about this because we'll be talking about the next thing, and the next thing, and the next thing.

What we've seen of the Gatling gun approach to governing is that he hits so many targets all at once that you can't really focus too long on any individual one for any opposition to build up.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: It's pretty smart.

PETER BAKER: It's working for him in a lot of ways because he has put everybody on the defensive.

Everybody who's he sees as his enemies are on the defensive, whether it be the FBI, whether it be the Democrats, whether it be the DEI offices, whether it be anybody.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Look, the DEI offices are on the defensive, but let me push back a little bit.

The OMB, that memo freezing all government, you know, essentially, that would seem -- they seem to acknowledge that that was a mistake and that put him back on the defensive for the first time.

PETER BAKER: And then the first time you saw Democrats really kind of rise up again, that they'd been deflated and demoralized.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Or woke up.

PETER BAKER: Woke up.

That's not really a verb we're allowed to use anymore.

But, suddenly, you started hearing them say, whoa, wait a second, this is outrageous.

And you hadn't really heard them with much volume saying that in the previous few weeks.

ALI VITALI: Well, except when he pardoned all of the January 6th insurrectionists, they rightly came out infuriated by that.

But I think this is the problem.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: That kind of went away so quickly, the whole cycle.

ALI VITALI: I think a lot of the press (ph), though, right, because of what you're saying, because this is the person that we all know Donald Trump is, whether he is President Donald Trump or he is private citizen former President Donald Trump.

He is brash, he is unempathetic, and you don't expect him to change.

How many of us were mocked for the original stories we did almost ten years ago now about, will there be a change in presidential tone?

I mean, clearly, that tone change never came, and, thankfully, none of us were holding our breath.

But I do think that for Democrats, they've had a strategy of, well, we don't want to jump at everything.

We only want to highlight what's important.

But when it looks like potentially getting rid of USAID, when it looks like folding up various government agencies, when it's pausing programs that Americans rely on in their day to day life, pardoning January 6th rioters, not showing empathy and pivoting to diversity and conspiracy after a tragic plane crash, how do you choose what's important enough to swing back on and what's not important enough for Silas (ph).

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Let me ask one more question on the DEI issue, because this is an issue, obviously put aside the particular Trump framing of it.

It's not an issue that's a particularly popular set of programs with a large swath of America.

There's a general feeling that after 2020, things went too far.

There are -- the Democrats themselves don't seem to be too eager to go defend these programs as they were.

Is this just, at the end of the day, just very smart politics on Donald Trump to find a villain with a easy to remember acronym, DEI, and it stands for a lot of things, including some obvious racial resentment and all the rest of the ugly things that might be also percolating here?

NANCY YOUSSEF: But also during the campaign, when he would say things, like we're going to stop transgender women from being a part of women's sports, that was one of the loudest applause lines he would get during the campaign.

It is something that really resonated with his base.

And remember during his first term, we saw things like Black Lives Matter and protests around issues and he made it very clear that he was against it and thought it was an issue that was against the values that he held.

And so I think for his base, it is something - - it is that he has been speaking to and that they've been urging him to go after because some see it as some of the overpractices that were happening as they see it under the Biden administration and before it.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: One more question because you're in the Pentagon all the time.

There are many senior officers, flag officers, I've spoken to over the last several years, who did feel like the emphasis was too much on, let's say, a Democratic Party agenda related to race and gender and so on.

There are a lot of people who are for that, obviously, in the Pentagon.

What's the mood right now inside in terms of implementation of these programs?

Is there relief among senior officers about where this is going because they don't want to talk about these issues at all?

Is there a lot of anxiety in the part of senior officers of color, women?

Give us -- go a little bit deeper on what you're feeling apart from the defensiveness that you outlined.

NANCY YOUSSEF: So, in the NDAA of 2023, it actually required the military to get rid of DEI offices.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: That's a national -- explain what that is.

NANCY YOUSSEF: I'm sorry, the National Defense Authorization Act.

And in that -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes, that pays the bills.

NANCY YOUSSEF: That's right.

And in that they had to get rid of it.

So, a lot of this had already started before the Trump administration came in and one of a lot of them offices that they just changed the name in some instances.

And so this has been an issue that they've been tackling a year before the administration came in.

Where I see troops talking about in particular leaders is the potential to affect readiness.

Once we start thinking about as a unit, as anything less than a unit, that can affect military readiness.

And I think when you're hearing troops start asking themselves, is my race, is my gender going to be used against me, that's when you start to feel it.

The military needs unit cohesion, and that begins by looking at everyone there as merit-based in there because of their contributions to the unit.

That's where you start to hear the worry.

And you start to hear minority service members and female service members start to express their concern.

We just had a memo come out in the last hour saying we're not going to celebrate things like Black History Month and others in the same way.

It undercuts the military culture which demands that everybody look as a fellow soldier.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: It's very interesting and worth more conversation.

I want to pivot now to a new Jeopardy category, Fights with Friends, because that's another area of the Trump administration that we haven't really talked about yet, and we'll get to the tariff aspect of this, which is looming.

But first, Greenland.

Mark?

MARK LEIBOVICH: You look at me.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes, I look at you because you're the only person I know who's ever been to Greenland.

And you're just back from Greenland and from the capital of Nuuk.

And I just -- if you can give us your sense of how seriously in Greenland are they taking Trump's desire to absorb Greenland into the United States.

This isn't that category, also not just fights with friends, but in the category of completely extracurricular activities on the part of the Trump administration that nevertheless create unneeded anxiety when there's so much other going on.

But talk about your experience there.

MARK LEIBOVICH: Yes.

first of all, my boss sent me to Greenland for -- in January.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Your boss must really not like you.

MARK LEIBOVICH: You know, he must.

I've done something wrong at some point.

But, you know, but I figured I'd work in The Atlantic's Nuuk bureau for a few days.

That's no doubt.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: It is, by the way, in the Atlantic.

MARK LEIBOVICH: It is.

Like, yes, we're not called The Pacific, right?

Anyway, I went to Nuuk, this is obviously kind of a goofy little story because it involves a place that most people have never been to, present company excluded, and, you know, it's kind of field peripheral at this moment.

But, look, if you live there, it's the only issue in town.

If you live in Denmark, it is like the number one geopolitical issue in that country, in many NATO countries.

I mean, the fact is Donald Trump had this conversation, he wants to buy -- okay, to give a little background, he wants to buy Greenland from Denmark.

Had a conversation, apparently, about a week and a half ago, with the prime minister of Denmark, did not go well at all.

He has not ruled out military intervention, some kind of economic intervention, I mean, it's kind of -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: And noting, by the way, that Denmark is a member of NATO.

MARK LEIBOVICH: Correct.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: So, Denmark, if the -- God forbid that it ever came into some kind of -- PETER BAKER: We have to come to Denmark -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Come to Denmark's aid in the way that Denmark came to our aid after 9/11.

MARK LEIBOVICH: I mean, to give you a little window into this, though, I watched President Trump's inaugural address with a group of parliament members and politico types in the capital of Nuuk.

And they were all kind of ours.

Did he mention us?

We're going to get a line.

We're going to get two lines or something like that.

And then when it was clear where the speech was going and how aggressive it was and how, you know, one woman I was sitting with said, that's very menacing.

I don't want him to mention us now.

They, sort of at the end, like, one of them said, well, can you feel like we've, you know, a sigh of relief in here?

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Because he mentioned Panama.

MARK LEIBOVICH: He mentioned Panama.

Everyone thought, okay, we're next.

You know, Gulf of America, we're next.

And usually that segues to Canada.

Often it goes to Nuuk, to Greenland, never got that far.

Look, I mean, it's a -- again, on one hand it's a goofy story, on the other hand it's deathly serious with a very far reaching direction.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Based on your reporting, do you think the Trump administration is serious about trying to find a way to own Greenland?

MARK LEIBOVICH: I think -- look, right now, I mean, traditionally, it belongs to Denmark.

If they want to negotiate some kind of sale or some kind of trade or something, I mean, that's been done in history before.

That could happen.

But as far as any kind of force, again, using military, using economic strength, that hasn't happened.

But, you know, again, no one really knows what they're dealing with here.

PETER BAKER: This is classic Trump, by the way.

So, this is -- everybody took it as a joke, right?

When this first came up in, I think, your paper first reported back in 2019.

And we went back and looked at it for our books, Susan Glasser, my wife, and I, we discovered it wasn't a joke.

It's actually something he had been bringing up for more than 18 months before it became public because his friend, Ron Lauder, put it in his head that this would be a great idea.

And he would bring it up at cabinet meeting after cabinet meeting.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Ron Lauder, the -- PETER BAKER: The billionaire, exactly, yes, the billionaire pal of his, just is randomly a thought that Lauder had.

Now Lauder is no longer on the inside, it's stuck with Trump.

We asked Trump during an interview we did for the book, why Greenland, and he said, I looked at the map, it looked like a great thing.

I mean, he has his real estate view of it.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: It looks like a great thing.

MARK LEIBOVICH: Well, not only that, I mean, there is actually a geopolitical argument for wanting Greenland.

I mean, like, the climate change, I mean, the trade paths that, you know, the melting ice is creating, there's all kinds of really valuable minerals, possible (INAUDIBLE) deposits.

I mean, there is -- PETER BAKER: Another president wouldn't negotiate maybe more military presence there or, you know, leasing more territory for a base or what have you.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I mean, the United States military can get what it wants out of Greenland without Greenland.

Is that fair?

NANCY YOUSSEF: I don't know.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Basing?

NANCY YOUSSEF: They could get basing, absolutely.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I mean, basing issues and other issues, overflight.

NANCY YOUSSEF: Absolutely.

There's no need to invade.

There are all sorts of options.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: It's amazing that we're spending this much time.

I bet Greenland has not been discussed this much on -- MARK LEIBOVICH: I could talk about it forever.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Apparently, yes.

But this goes to your theory, by the way, that this is a flood the zone issue.

It's like, well, they're not talking about anything that I'm doing for the last two hours, so I'm going to raise the question of Greenland again, and then everybody jumps because he is the president.

So, what the president says is axiomatically important and it and it matters.

ALI VITALI: But it's also a reminder, right, of the way that policy and ideas get made in Trump world whoever talked to him last, proximity is power, and then you start looking at who's around him, Elon Musk.

Okay, now you're offering potential government buyouts for federal employees.

Where did we see that?

Oh, yes at X, when Elon Musk had last taken over.

There's lots of parallels.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: stay on this dealing with friends question, tariffs.

Why now?

What's going to happen?

ALI VITALI: In theory, they could be coming as soon as this weekend, or even as soon as Saturday.

And the plan at this point is to leverage a 10 percent tariff against China, citing fentanyl flow and trafficking into the U.S. And then the other idea is to put a 25 percent tariff on imports from Canada and Mexico.

The Canadians, of course, the Mexican government, all trying to make entreaties to the administration.

Trump said something to the effect today of it's a done deal.

Nothing can be said.

But, of course, nothing can be said until something can be said.

And then we see the art of the deal once again in play.

But this could have and likely will have, if they go forward with it, true economic impacts on Americans, including people in places like Michigan, who has some of the highest percentage of imports in this country.

Many Michigan lawmakers have already been calling me and other reporters just warning about how bad this could be on the Michigan economy and then also for Americans there.

And I think that's really one of the places where you could see the rubber meet the road for Trump voters that might have voted for this theory of getting tough on the world stage and then seeing the way that it hits their pocketbooks.

Price of eggs, by the way, is still not down and this could be a moment where maybe we see a change.

But also NBC News has done interviews with Trump supporters who say, I know he's trying to bring prices down, it's hard though.

So, they're willing to let him off the hook as long as he looks like he's trying.

PETER BAKER: But if you thought 9 percent inflation was tough in one year during the Biden administration, imagine 25 percent higher cost, consumer items and so forth.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

Do we get eggs from Canada?

PETER BAKER: We're not getting eggs from anywhere right now.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: We're not getting eggs from anywhere.

In the couple minutes that we have left, I want to talk about something very serious, which is the FBI.

Nancy, we're hearing all kinds of reports over the last day that they're looking for people inside the FBI who are involved in any kind of Trump related investigation, and Kash Patel, who is the nominee to run the FBI, has clearly talked about retribution in the past.

What do you think is coming down the road here?

NANCY YOUSSEF: Well, what they're saying is anyone who is affiliated, which we're talking about hundreds of people, for things like looking at Trump or January 6th investigation, now need to be looked at about whether they have a future in the FBI.

And so we're starting this sort of culture of investigation within the organization.

And remember, these are people who didn't volunteer or ask or seek these jobs out like a military deployment.

They were assigned the jobs and they did those jobs.

And on the week that we heard from Kash Patel, in which he made it very clear despite his best efforts to calm the fears of some senators, that there will be a retribution potentially within the FBI for investigations that go against what the administration wants.

It has the chilling effect, really, when you hear about people who could be pushed out of their jobs, not for doing something political but for doing something that was supposed to be strictly not political, carrying out their jobs.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Peter, is this retribution, potentially retribution, or is this just a way of making sure that everyone gets the message, don't look into the Trump family, don't look into Trump's activities?

PETER BAKER: That certainly will not be happening in the next four years, for sure.

And, look, Kash Patel has said, and he's reflecting Trump's view, that the FBI is a corrupt, politicized swamp monster of an agency, and it deserved to be essentially broken down and rebuilt from scratch.

So, their argument will be, we're getting rid of the politicized people in order to restore its trust and integrity.

Everybody else would look at that, as we just said, Nancy has said as targeting people who just did their job.

They're not political, they were just assigned to do it.

And now the message is very clear.

You know what the consequences are if you cross Donald Trump or his people, they're not -- there is no protection there for you, at least at the moment.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Mark, last 30 seconds, what's the most surprising thing that's happened this week to you?

MARK LEIBOVICH: I would say the most surprising - - well, look, it's just -- I do think that, yes, this is sort of the random haphazard approach that we thought, but this doesn't feel random and haphazard.

This actually feels more organized.

It feels more targeted.

Yes, there is a shock and awe.

Yes, there is a, you know, one thing after another effect, as there was before.

There does feel like more of a method to the madness than there was last time.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: We'll watch next week from our bureau in Greenland, Mark.

MARK LEIBOVICH: I'll be there.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.

You should get the summer -- you try to get the summer shift.

MARK LEIBOVICH: There will be direct flights from Newark to Nuuk.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I have no doubt.

But, unfortunately, we need to leave it there for now.

I want to thank our panelists and our viewers across the globe, including in Greenland, for joining us.

For Mark's report from Nuuk, be sure to visit theatlantic.com.

It's fascinating.

I'm Jeffrey Goldberg.

Goodnight from Washington.