President Trump this week took a wrecking ball to the east wing of the White House and in so doing obliterated the line between metaphor and literal reality.

This was a week in which Trump, defying all norms of presidential behavior, posted an AI generated video of himself wearing a king's crown, dropping a planeload of excrement on protesters.

He also pardoned a convicted crypto kingpin who has worked to enrich the Trump's family's own crypto business, and he asked the Justice Department to pay him $230 million as reimbursement for legal costs he allegedly incurred when the government he now controls investigated him.

Also, he seems to be going to war with Venezuela.

All this and more next.

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Thank you Once again from the David M. Rubenstein studio at WETA in Washington, editor in chief of The Atlantic and Moderator, Jeffrey Goldberg.

Good evening and welcome to Washington Week.

I want to start with an apology.

We pride ourselves here in our accuracy, but we realized very late in the day that our backdrop is no longer correct because it still features the east wing of the White House.

Let me show you where it used to be.

So this right here, that was the that was the east wing.

Now it's a hole.

That's just a hole next to the White House.

Over here, that's the West Wing that's still standing as far as as far as we know, although I'm not there right now to prove it.

in the back here, you got the, uh, that's the Empire State Building, and uh over there that's LAX, um, and also we have, uh, we got a cold front moving in from Ohio, so uh break out your sweaters.

Um, anyway, we'll fix the picture to reflect the new reality once Congress restores our funding.

The list I read at the top of the show, that's not even all of the norm busting news from this week.

Tonight our overall subject is impunity.

How does a president get to knock down the East Wing?

Is that even legal?

By what authority does he do the things he does?

Here to provide us with some insights are our guests, Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times.

Susan Glasser is a staff writer at The New Yorker.

David Ignatius is a foreign affairs columnist at The Washington Post, and Tolu Oloornipa is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Um, thank you for participating in my fantasy camp.

I've always wanted to do the weather.

I've always want, and I have a laser pointer.

I'm going to call on you with a laser pointer from now on.

Um, you know, watching the Week.

you know, you gotta love it.

Yeah, you know, like, you know, challenging times call for a different approach.

Um, uh, Peter, let me, let me start with, with you.

Uh, I, I want you to listen to, uh, something that President Trump said, a few years ago.

Why don't you just listen to this?

If the radical Democrats take power, they will take a wrecking ball to our economy and to the future of our country.

Now we know where the wrecking ball was headed.

So the White House is called the people's house, uh, we, we, we send somebody there for 4 years.

to live in it rent-free, uh, and then pass it on to the next person who we choose to send there.

So I just don't, frankly understand how a temporary occupant who pays no rent can just knock down a part of it without congressional approval without anyone's approval.

Yeah, yeah, Washington, Washington's a historic city, and if you try to change your door or your front yard in a lot of different parts of the city, you would have to go through a whole big bureaucratic process that would take months and months and months.

Not if you're President of the United States, it turns out you just call demolition company from Maryland.

You get them down there and whack away without telling anybody or asking me.

It wasn't a government agency that took down, no, no, of course we're in a shutdown anyway.

That's right, exactly.

And he says he's he said he's paying for this with private funds.

Now look, there's the argument that he's making is that there needs to be a ballroom sufficient to presidential, you know, needs, and it's true the state dining room only seats about 140 people.

and presences in the last few years have been using the South Lawn, putting a big cathedral tent there because it isn't big enough.

Fair enough, and there are a number of people who think that that's not a bad idea necessarily, but the way he went about this, the sort of unilateral way that sort of the I'm doing it by fiat way, the people's house is now suddenly my house and I get to decide that we're getting rid of this structure that part of the structure has been there since Theodore Roosevelt put it up in 1902.

That really struck a lot of people, Republicans and Democrats this week, and I think it really lent to the metaphor that you've played with here, which is a guy who's taking a wrecking ball to Washington writ large, right?

To, you were a former White House bureau chief.

It's no you, you know the, the building and the people who run the building.

This has to be one of the most shocking things to happen to the physical structure.

Well, certainly that you can remember, for sure.

I spent a lot of time in the east wing.

There are a lot of memories that people have there from Republicans and Democrats who've worked at the White House who have spent time in that building and seeing it.

defaced and deconstructed in a matter of 3 days was really shocking to the conscience of a lot of people, especially people who have worked there, but it's also for people who admire Washington, who admire the presidency, who admire the White House.

It's a sign that this president is not doing things the way previous presidents did.

He's doing it his own way and he's doing it in a way that really thumbs his nose at the idea that, you know, checks and balances actually work, that I have to consult Congress or history or historians to do anything that I want to do, and he is acting with a lot of impunity.

This is something that s tru ck a nerve in ways that other things that he's done from the tariffs to other policy things that maybe people couldn't really understand, but seeing the White House being torn down in a way that was never expected in the way that he promised that he wouldn't do.

I think that was a big shock to a lot of people.

Susan, stay on this theme of impunity.

He just, he didn't go to Congress.

He didn't say, you know, I have this idea.

He didn't send it through a historical preservation commission.

He didn't do any of that.

What does he know about checks and balances right now that we don't.

Well, I think Donald Trump heard the message loud and clear from the United States Supreme Court, even before he returned to office in the summer of 2024 when the Supreme Court ruled essentially that the president has immunity for almost any act that could occur in the course of his presidency since Congress controlled by Republicans in both the House and the Senate has proven to be essentially supine when it comes to any of the kind of sweeping acts of executive, you know, overreach that we've seen so far.

It's it's not, it's not really a reach for Donald Trump to conclude that he had the unilateral power to do whatever he wanted.

He's at this point he's the man saying, you know, come and get me if you dare.

And it strikes me that, you know, when you give already the most powerful office in the world, you know, the sense that there's literally no one who's going to say no to this person who is raged his entire life at the idea that there are rules and constraints, and you know people trying to stop him from doing what he wants right now, he's on a tear in part because there's nobody who's going to stop him.

He's constructed an administration with people around him who are there explicitly because they are yes men, and in some cases, yes, women, and just to this point about he still feels the need to mislead, right?

He did say when he rolled this out originally this summer, oh no, there's not going to be damage to the existing structure, and then boom, he creates a new set of facts overnight on the ground.

I would also point out that the new ballroom that's envisioned while there could be a strong argument to say this, you know, should be done.

Not only is there no process, but the design that Donald Trump has personally green lit is for something like 90,000 square feet.

It is going to overwhelm the White House, the main, the main building of the White House is 55,000 square.

Correct.

So it's going to overwhelm the White House itself again approved by no entity aside from Donald Trump himself.

David, you've covered Washington for a little while.

You ever see anything like this?

So this does feel different, and I've been trying to think, why does it, it feels so different?

Peggy Noonan, who's a, you know, fairly conservative columnist, wrote on the Wall Street Journal this morning, a very angry, um, you know, emotional piece, uh, headline was a republic, but can we keep it ruminating on this.

I think part of it is just this feeling that this is the people's house, and he's treating it like his own personal property.

He's treating every part of the government like his own personal property.

It's almost a compulsive desire to blow through limits, uh, you know, in every direction involving the military, the CIA, Justice, uh, you know, the campaign of retribution against his enemies, and I think it's begun to worry more and more people.

This is such a symbolic moment with with a steam shovel, uh, you know, if, that photograph on the Washington Post, my, my beloved newspaper hadn't appeared.

We might not have known about this for a day or two.

I mean, they were doing this stealthily, which is shocking, right?

They didn't announce it.

They tried to hide it.

They, they knew there'd be a reaction.

I don't think they knew quite the reaction that there would be.

But what's really remarkable too is how anathema it is to the original design of the White House.

The original idea of the White House was to produce a relatively modest home for a present compared to the to the palaces of Europe.

They didn't want a Versailles, George Washington and the group that brought us the White House wanted something that was the people's house.

It was of a certain degree of, of, of, of modesty and certainly not a palatial ostentatious kind of thing.

And what's remarkable about this is that, you know, you saw all the gold that he's added to the Oval Office and of course he's paved over the rose garden and things like that.

He's done other things.

Those are things that could be reversed, right?

The next president could come along, take that gold out of the Oval Office and restore it to a more of a simple, simple grace that it's meant to be.

They could, they could replant the rose garden.

They're not going to be able to do this.

This is a decision for the agents.

It's so large as to be irreversible.

So, let me ask you a question, David.

David, hinted at something.

There's a lot of it is, it is an unusual thing in Washington.

It almost feels tribal, like, wait, you're not allowed to just do that to our most famous buildings, but it's not as if Congress is up in arms right now about this.

How do you explain that?

Yes, well, when you think about the White House, we think about the founders, we think about the 250 years of this country's history going back to the Declaration of Independence.

One of the reasons that the founders, as we wrote about in the Atlantic and the most recent issue, one of the reasons they didn't put all of these things in writing.

because there were checks and balances.

They thought that they would have a co-equal branch of government with Congress, speaking up against these things.

Now Democrats have been able to speak up, but you know they have limited power.

They're out of power, but Republicans who in the design of this this country and the design of our government, Republicans are supposed to be able to speak up against president of their own power just as Democrats are supposed to be able to do the same thing.

President Trump has broken that system.

He said that if you're a Republican, you speak out against me.

I'm going to get you out of the party, out of Congress, and that has been a shot across the bow for a number of Republicans who are not speaking out even when they know that what he's doing.

In many cases is a shock to their own.

So what you're suggesting is that the Bill of Rights should have had an amendment that stated future presidents may not turn the White House into Mar a Lago, right, because, because, because no one would have done this until, and by the way, the Mar a Lago thing is very, I mean, when I, the last time I was in the Oval Office, I mean, he actually has filled the Oval Office with leftovers, as as I understood it from him, leftovers from Mar a Lago, gold fixtures and the like.

Um so it does seem almost psychologically, even if they put it in the law, Jeff, I'm sure he would find somebody to argue that, you know, that strict definition of Mar a Lago is a geographic entity, so therefore it's actually fine to do this, and you know, just to the point about the the wrecking ball, right?

It's that it's metaphor made real and that the Republicans, of course, in this term versus the first term, are remarkably quiescent and quiet in, in actually they're scared or because they agree with him, you know, it was actually the first person who ever told me they thought Donald Trump was a human wrecking ball, was actually Bob Corker at the time he was the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and this was in early 2017.

I found it to be a remarkable statement at the time.

It presaged, of course, the falling out that Corker and Trump had and what's the result?

He's no longer in the Senate and I think that for me is a difference between 1.0 and 2.0 is that Donald Trump feels that he can be an actual wrecking ball, as well as, you know, sort of wrecking ball of institutions, and there's no Republicans to speak up.

Uh, you know, Corker is one of the many people who got out of Dodge, essentially.

We don't really have the corkers and the Romneys and and and and flakes, uh, at McCain certainly to say like this is what you're not in the category of things that presidents don't do, this video, which I'm not going to show, uh, because it's gross.

Um, and this is PBS.

Uh, uh, I what does this, this is, this is almost a history question.

What does that sort of thing do to the presidency itself.

Go ahead, go ahead, demeans it it it it takes it to a level of vulgarity and and crassness.

Um, you know, it, it demeans our country in the eyes of the world.

I find more and more of my uh friends uh from other countries, uh, look at this behavior with a kind of a revulsion.

It just, it's, it's not the America that they understand, but it's just not it's not appropriate behavior, right?

And I, you know, I, I, I, I keep in a sense this is a character test for our country.

What kind of people are we?

as we watch this, if people, you know, applaud it, laugh at it, think it's funny that uh dump the excrement on, on, on protesters wearing a crown.

If if that becomes the acceptable norm, um, you just worry that we really are becoming a sort of vulgar nation of this public circus, that's, that's the presidency under Trump, and that, you know, it's, it's just a very dangerous direction.

Let's talk about another subject related to impunity.

and let's start by listening to the president talk about some of these activities in the Caribbean and on the Pacific side as well.

If you are declaring war against these cartels and congress is likely to approve of that process?

Why not just ask for a declaration of war?

Well, I don't think we're going to necessarily ask for a declaration of war.

I think we're just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country, OK, we're going to kill them, you know, they're going to be like dead, OK.

David, you, you wrote in, uh in uh your column this week on the subject of Venezuela.

Um why America slept?

That might be the title of a future book examining the Trump administration's shift of national security focus away from a mounting Russian threat against Europe and toward a noxious but relatively impotent network of drug gangs in Venezuela.

Go into this a little bit.

So to me, the mismatch of of our national security priorities has been stunning.

Uh, the Venezuela regime of uh Nicolas Maduro is noxious as, as I said in the column, it, you know, it, it's um uh uh despotic regime, but it's, it's, it's not a global threat to the United States.

Meanwhile, Russia is increasingly waging an open uh, covert action against Europe and NATO.

It's sending drones, it's sending saboteurs, it's threatening assassination.

In Europeans feel they are on the edge of a war with Putin who will, they will change the map for a generation.

And this mismatch, uh, I think is, is, is stunning.

And, and uh what is Trump trying to do in in in the idea of sailing sailing, largest aircraft carrier in the world toward the coast of Venezuela to, to what end?

I mean, if you're going after drug traffickers, I don't think you need the USS Ford, right, Susan, why Venezuela?

Why now?

You know, I think David is making an extremely important point because I, I think it's sure, part of the performative uh optics of the Trump presidency, right?

He's renamed not in a legal sense, but in his own sense renam ed the Defense Department, the Department of War.

Well, once you create a Department of War, then you need a war to go along with it.

Now he's in a little bit of a conundrum since he's spent years telling his followers that he's the president of peace, and that he's not going to go to war, so it strikes me that he's operating in that sort of Trump bully mode which some previous presidents of both parties have done in our own hemisphere and fortunately it seems to me that he's essentially punching down, looking to create a kind of a short victorious optics drive n conflict with shadowy amorphous, bad guys never getting Congress involved in it.

At the same time, I think that not only is Trump ignoring the bigger national security threats, but it seems to be part of a conscious shift in the administration's view of what is national security.

Donald Trump made a very important comment right before the 2024 election.

He was asked about national security threats, and he said, Well, you know, you have Russia, you have China, and then you have the enemy within, and of those, the enemy within is the greater threat, and I think what you're seeing is the pivoting of the role of the US military deploying troops in the streets of American cities where Donald Trump doesn't like the Democratic leadership pivoting to a focus on the western hemisphere, which is what he's done with a lot of the resources at the Pentagon.

I think this is a very significant shift that we're seeing right now, Jeff, right?

Peter Will he actually go to war?

Well, I mean, the way he is, right?

I mean, the way he is, you know, he's using military force against against non-military targets that are not an imminent threat in the conventional sense of what the truth is we don't know who were on those boats.

They have not told us who are on those boats.

No due process, and the two guys that they did rescue from one of those things, they then sent back.

They didn't have enough to prosecute him, even though they would have had enough to have killed them in a bombing, and so it's it's a remarkable thing.

Now we've been heading down slippery slope in this way for a while, right?

Remember under Obama, he used military force to kill American citizens who were designated to be terrorists, and people thought that's a really extraordinary expansion of executive power.

That person's never been convicted of anything.

Well, now Trump is taking it the next step by leaps and bounds and going after these boats that that may or may not have the people he says on them and may or may not be doing the things he's saying that they're doing.

And in any case are not an imminent threat to any Americans.

To lu all this is happening during a government shutdown and even covering the shutdown quite extensively, you wrote this week, the president has taken extraordinary steps over the past 3 weeks to weaponize the closure of the government, steering federal funds to shield his chosen beneficiaries from the shutdown's harms, even as the opportunistically damages the interests of his opponents.

What are those steps that he's taking that are that you describe as frankly partisan.

Well, they've stripped more than $35 billion away from quote unquote blue states because of and they've articulated that way.

Yes, they've specifically listed the states in some cases they've talked, they've targeted states led by minority leader Chuck Schumer in the Senate and other top Democrats saying that because you are in favor of this shutdown, we are going to take money away from your constituents, but a lot of those constituents, first of all, they are Americans, so they're constituents of the president and Congress, but they are also in some cases Republican districts within these blue states that are being hurt by this.

Now the president has said that he's going to take money away from certain parts of the government and steer them towards people that he likes, like the military and other programs that he thinks should be funded.

He's even said, you know, we're giving money to the people, we want to give money to, and the Democrats are being killed by this shutdown, and he's not really taking a role of trying to solve this problem.

He's trying to weaponize it and get partisan gains from the situation of being in a shutdown for 4 weeks, and we're very close to a situation where a lot of people are going to be hurt by Snap money are running out and other programs that people rely on in addition to government paychecks not being there for anybody anymore.

Right, this is sort of a quick round robin of all the things that's called the show all the things that happened this week.

One of the things that happened this week is that the president has asked the Justice Department to reimburse him for $230 million in legal fees that he says he incurred while defending himself from the justice department, Peter, he controls the Justice Department.

It seems somewhat likely that he's going to get paid.

Well, even he said it was awfully strange that it would be up to him to decide whether to pay him using money.

By the way, when we say Justice Department, we should use the word taxpayers because that's what we're talking about.

These are the taxpayers who will be paying the president of the United States to earn $30 million.

Now I don't see him volunteering to give money to Hillary Clinton, or for that matter, Peter Struck or Lisa Page or any of the other people who've been investigated over the years who didn't get charged and didn't get convicted, but he himself, of course, is only concerned with his own grievance, his own sense of resentment for the government.

Persecution complex, and so the idea that the government is going to pay $230 million to the President of the United States.

It's just unheard of.

We're beyond unprecedented now.

We should just retire that word because it doesn't even come close, right, David, last word to you, uh, this week just seems to, it's been a pile up of things that we've never seen before.

Is this now the crisis?

So, you know, we, we've seen a a week where the president asserts um essentially unlimited power, and it's the the combination feels like the combination of a process been been going on gathering strength for 9 months now.

I think we're all waiting for the Supreme Court to say no, there are, there are limits to your power, and I think the greatest fear, uh, a lot of us have is that when this finally gets to the court, the court will assent, accede to to this level of, of unitary, unlimited power, and then we're in a really different place, right?

Right.

Well, I mean, this is our continuing subject, uh, on this show, um, and, uh, we'll come back to it, but now we have to go to sports traffic and weather on the AIDS.

David Ignatius will be doing the traffic report from now on at Washington Week as we expand our footprint across Washington.

Anyway, we do have to leave it there for now.

These issues will be revisiting next week.

I want to thank our guests for, for joining me and I want to thank all of you at home for watching us.

For more on how the government shutdown is affecting the president's own base.

Please read Tolu's article at theatlantic.com.

I'm Jeffrey Goldberg.

Good night from Washington.

Corporate funding for Washington Week with the Atlantic is provided by Consumer Cellular Certified Financial Planner professionals are proud to support Washington Week with The Atlantic.

CFP professionals are committed to acting in their client's best interest.

More information at let's make a plan.org.

Additional funding is provided by Ku and Patricia Ewens for the Ewan Foundation, committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities.

Sandra and Karl Delay Magnusson.

Rose Herschel and Andy Shreeves, Robert and Susan Rosenbaum.

Charles Hammoway through the Charles Hammoee Fund.

Steve and Marilyn Kerman.

and my contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

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