In a wide-ranging conversation at the White House yesterday evening, Donald Trump was in the mood to talk about everything under the Sun – from the speedy success his second administration has had putting fear into the hearts of bureaucrats and Eurocrats, to why he believes there is a path to a balanced budget. He spoke to The Spectator for the first magazine interview of his second term, following a major day of international politics with his meeting with prime minister Keir Starmer.
One of his most interesting comments concerned a conversation with President Joe Biden, in the aftermath of the 2024 election, on the question of whom he blamed for being pushed out of his role. Trump told me in the interview:
‘I went to the White House a few months before this all happened. I guess I had won… [Biden] asked for a meeting, and I went and we talked for a little while… and I asked him, I said, “So who do you blame?” Because he was very angry, you know – he’s a very angry guy, actually. And he said, “I blame Barack”… And he said, “and I also blame Nancy Pelosi.” I said, “What about the vice president?” He said, “No, I don’ t blame her.” Which was interesting. Yeah. He didn’t blame her.’
Asked about the war in Ukraine, in anticipation of a meeting today with Volodymyr Zelensky to sign a much-touted rare earths mineral deal, the president had a mournful tone:
‘The hardest part for me is to think that all of these kids are dying. This week, they’ re going to lose 2,000 guys. Now, they’re Ukrainian, they’re Russian, Ukrainian, Russian. But you hate to see that, it’ s human beings, right? And it’s such, it’s such a bad war and it’s such a vicious, it’s such a vicious war. It’s really a bad one. You know, it’s a drone war. It’s a whole new form of warfare that’s taking place. It’s actually a terrible and sort of amazing. People are studying it. You know, the Koreans went in because they wanted to learn. They learned the hard way – this was not good. They have suffered tremendous casualties.’
In response to a question about the difference between his first cabinet and his second, which held its first full meeting this week, the president expressed particular pride in the younger generation of leaders he’s promoted from within his coalition. In lieu of the headlining boardroom generals in his first term, Trump has focused on naming a series of Generation X and elder millennials who fought on the battlefield instead:
‘It’s very interesting. So I was able to get people that were great, like, I’d see Pete [Hegseth, secretary of defense], I’d be interviewed by him. And what he wanted to talk about was the military. In fact, whenever he called me, it was always to get somebody that was in trouble because he was too aggressive militarily out of a jail. You know, I got numerous soldiers out of jails because they did what they were trained to do. The liberals within the military put them in jails. They teach him to be a soldier. They teach him to kill bad people, and when they kill bad people, they want to put them in jail for thirty years.
But I mean, honestly, Ben, it was just the fact that I’ve been here for four years under great pressure. But one of the big things is that if you think about it, when I was first elected, I had two jobs: to run the country and to survive. And it was vicious.’
