And I wonder, first of all, just how you're watching all of this play out, but also what you're hearing from your fellow members and the former members of the organization.

One to your first, your second question is that I'm hearing a lot of confusion.

Right.

And people trying to figure out how this impacts the entire press corps, because every time something like this happens, everyone knows that it's not just about the organization or the organizations that are being impacted.

Right.

When I was president of the association and the AP wasn't allowed into the Oval Office, as they had done for decades because they called something the thing that they wanted to call it, that they decided they call it made an editorial decision.

It wasn't about the AP either.

Eugene, just to reiterate, this is from a reporter who works for Fox

Mm.

Donald Trump and the administration always want to try and find ways to make other people scared.

So this isn't about MS now, this is not about CNN, it's not about political.

It is about the President of the United States telling everybody, and telling the American people, all of you at home, that you're not allowed to know what's happening here.

You're not allowed to know the truth.

And so when you have, uh, other organizations watching how the treatment happens, how do they behave? Do they stand up? Do, is there gonna be a boycott? Are there gonna be letters sent? What does it look like in response?

Sure

... on your own, right? And so it's like what do they wanna do? And so the first time that CNN pops up as the folks that are supposed to be the pool camera, right, the camera that is showing what the president's doing at that time, and the President of the United States or his team says, "No," that is the test, right? That is the test whether or not the five bureau chiefs have made a decision.

Your sense in a state like Iowa, to say nothing of Ohio, Texas, Nebraska, Georgia, what is the pitch J.D. Vance is going to be making about who or what this administration is defending that future from?

It is some of the same cultural fights and cultural wars that we have seen from him, right? This is a vice president who, since he became a senator and turned into more of a Trumpy type person, has spoken about immigrants, has spoken about how black and brown people are going to come and take jobs, has talked about how the culture that is a part of this country, the people that built this country, and he's not talking about about the slaves that actually built this country, right? He is saying that is gonna be stolen from you.

And so that's the future that he often talks about.

He is someone who is, as you look at him, he is someone who has been always kind of the cleaner upper of the ways that Donald Trump says things, but they seem to believe or at least spout the same things.

when he goes out and talks about this, and frankly, he's a much better messenger than Donald Trump in this moment for Republicans for the midterms, because he's going out there and he's saying like, baby, give me one more chance.

He's saying, we're going to try, we're going to do better.

Like all of those things, his voters do want to hear that.

Understanding that a one size fits all approach is not going to work this time.

That's a lot to stretch for $5,000.

I don't think that's going to work.

But I think the thing that's really interesting—so, Vaughn talked to some folks.

I talked to some folks that were on the ground, like, in the arena.

And we were bouncing around, talking to younger people, older people, people from around the country.

And every single one of them told me that they didn't think that it was actually going to happen.

Every single one of them told me that they saw it for what kind of everyone else sees it for, is a way to juice turnout for Republicans in the midterms.

point, because if your local community then is aware that dollars to fix your roads are dependent on you actually pushing these people out, that changes how people relate to each other and treat their neighbors, right?

it feels like people look around and go, I just don't think that he's really about it anymore.

One of the ways I've described it, guys, is, you know, when you're a kid and your mom makes you go to your uncle's house and it's his birthday party and no one wants to go, but you have to respect your uncle.

You have to, like, smile and wear the shirt.

And when he wants to give you a hug, you give him a hug.

Like, that's what it feels like, a little bit forced festive in a lot of the places and the folks I was talking to.

Like, there obviously is a lot of enthusiasm.

Don't get me wrong, right? These are like as MAGA as you get, right? Because you have to spend money or spend time on a weekday to go out and sit in the heat.

And it's clearly not true because President Obama is using his time and his energy out there to raise precious funds that, frankly, House Democrats are going to need if they're going to be competitive.

And I wonder, as you've been talking to voters on the ground, how they are supposed to square the reality that Trump is trying to present with the reality that is actually reality.

The people here aren't really living in the actual reality that all of us and the voters that are probably right outside of this little bubble are living in.

When you talk to folks here, whether they are people that work in the Republican political apparatus or they're people who just wanted to come and see their favorite president, they seem to be living in the reality that Donald Trump has created.

And Donald Trump has always been very good at creating a reality for other people to live in, full of all the kinds of things that he wants to be true, even if they aren't true.

And that's been on full display.

I wrote something for our newsletter today about the cognitive dissonance that is happening here and on absolutely full display.

And it's not just Donald Trump and his very long speech last night, where if you were a person who woke up From a coma, you would think that Donald Trump was running again and wasn't the person in charge of the country at this point.

I mean, how did that land?

Foreign terrorist organization-

Yeah, I think the thing that's so interesting is every single year, the party that's in power and the president sitting behind the, the, the Resolute Desk wants to make it a choice election in the midterms.

And the other party wants to do the opposite.

And Donald Trump is, uh, according to Democrats, playing into their hands, because what they've always wanted is to run against Donald Trump, to run against the Trump administration, to force their opponents on the ground in all of these different states, especially in purple districts, purple states, and making sure that those folks, um, hold Donald Trump as close as possible, right? You have this kind of cognitive dissonance that's happening in this room, I think.

Jim, you asked what is the thing that folks are, should think about.

You have Ana Paulina Luna talking about, um, the fact that people shouldn't, in public office should not make money, and Donald Trump has made $2.2 billion over the first year in office that we know of.

You have Scott Baessin, um, in here talking about things that he knows is, is, aren't true.

Yeah.

breath because they do.

They get real excited and hyper.

But there are, you know, talking to Tallarico, you start to understand why he is making sense for some voters in Texas, why Democrats in Texas feel like this is probably their best chance.

I know you guys probably talked to Kendall, the head of the Democratic Party here in Texas.

It's clear why Kendall and folks are.

are see this guy as kind of their best hope that they maybe ever had beto for people in dc felt like the person who was going to get it done but when you actually look at the polling you talk to voters on the ground the numbers were never as good for beto and you know polling is a snapshot in time and you shouldn't stake everything on it but democrats can do better the environment is better for them nationally which means you're looking at voters who maybe voted for trump in 2024 So many of them saying they wouldn't do so again, many of them being hurt because of the economy.

Looking at Tallarico and just looking at anti-incumbency, right, the folks who are actually in charge in Washington, D.C. And Ken Paxton has a host of different things and controversies that folks have looked past before.

What do you make of all of that?

What the hell is Trump doing starting a trade war with Canada?

He will start a trade war with anyone, it appears, [laughs] whether they be enemy or ally.

I think what's so important for folks to remember or understand for the first time is that tariffs are something Donald Trump has actually...

It, it's been a part of who he is and how he thinks of the world for a very long time.

So unlike almost all of the other policies that are operating with- out of the Trump White House, this is one that he truly believes, and so that's why they're never going anywhere.

He feels like folks have been ripping off the United States for a long time.

He feels like you should just be able to raise them, and then for whatever reason, he thinks these benevolent businesses that operate within our capitalistic society w- would take on all of those prices when we know that that trickles down to actual folks.

[laughs]

Hmm

...

this is not normal, and, and I... you know this better than anyone.

This is not a world in which we can pretend, like, the president going after especially the women reporters the way that he does is normal, and then his team tweeting out, um, attacks about her children.

And to watch people, the Republicans, go after Jon Ossoff and say, "Oh, no, how dare he talk about Natalie?" when the president every single day is attacking women in sexist and misogynistic ways.

And as a reporter, what I do know is there is no surefire way More than to say the way that they've reacted, there's, that is the one way to make sure that reporters continue on this line of questioning about what this relationship is and, you know, how close they are.

And, and, and m- I trust what Maggie said and what they reported in their book, but there's also, she's, she's always around and she's always printing off things.

Mm.

Um, we don't know how this is gonna end up tonight, but talk to me about it.

I think part of the thing that's really interesting, and when you talk to pollsters and folks who have been trying to figure polls out for a long time in the, in the era of Trump and cell phones and, and people not having landlines, et cetera, is that sometimes when they're, they're kind of creating the folks that they're polling for some of these polls, they're trying to capture the excitement.

They're trying to capture, most importantly, what is the electorate going to look like on that Tuesday.

And nowadays, the electorate in the excitement phase of the election before that Tuesday looks a little differently than it does on actual Tuesday.

So you go to Michigan, for example, we also saw this, I think it was, like, 15 points before we went into, um, the Tuesday where Abdul El-Sayed ended up eking it out over Haley Stevens, the sitting congresswoman for the Senate seat there, is that they tr- they kept going and, okay, well, the younger people are gonna come out, more people that are on the left, and that ended up not actually being true.

And so that is something that all of us who either folks that work in politics [laughs] like Basil, or people that cover, like the other three of us, who have to figure out how to deal with that.

Two, I think something that's really interesting is you are...

Wisconsin is not New York City.

And I don't think you're wrong about – Right.

Right.

I think part of it is it's a both and, right? I think, you know, there are folks within the Republican Party who, just like us, for many years saw Donald Trump as an entertainer.

Not that he was entertaining.

I didn't watch The Little Apprentice Show.

It wasn't my thing at all.

But people saw him and saw him as an entertainer.

And I said, what are you waiting

So even if he gave kind of a nice speech tonight or even if he said what he's supposed to say It really, it's unrelated to his actions, which is the most important thing, I think.

It, it doesn't matter, right? Like, I, I think the point of, of all of this, right, the question of whether or not these dinners, you know, people should go to them and all of that, right? That is a debate for everyone to have.

I was president of the association.

We put on a dinner.

Donald Trump did not come to the dinner.

Um, but the focus of the dinner is supposed to be on the journalist and the First Amendment, right? And so when you're looking at the folks getting those awards, Tyler Pager, Jo- Josh Dawsey, who have a lot of access, journalism, as people like to say, they have continued to cover this president as doggedly as anyone, despite being in that room, right? And so just being in the room with him does not mean all of a sudden as a journalist you are no longer going to cover him hard.

That is not how it works.

Mm-hmm.

Eugene, jump in.

Thank you.

Everybody's making really good points.

And I think something that is really important when we're talking about this, especially when we're listening to the interior secretary, the representative of the administration, the representative of the president's movement, is obviously the question is not about free speech.

The question is whether or not the free speech they were exhibiting on Saturday and that they exhibit all the time works.

Is that appropriate? And is that welcome in the movement of this president? Is that welcome in the administration of this president? And why do these folks feel like they can come out of the woodwork, albeit wearing masks? Right.

So that shows that there's a little bit of shame in the work that they're doing.

Eugene, last word.

... given Trump is so visual and he's clear why he wants people in these jobs.

It feels like part of how Donald Trump learns and likes to be talked to.

It's like he likes a big photo, he likes something that's very clear.

He doesn't, as we all know, he doesn't, despite what he told Usah Vance, he doesn't read a lot [laughs] according to everyone who we've ever talked to.

And I think that's what's so interesting about this, is it feels like...

I was talking to someone yesterday who's kind of an expert in Democratic backsliding, and they were, like, talking about Pulte before your great reporting came out, but this concern that we're gonna backslide into m- democracy as a country led by some of, in his words, "The dumbest people," right? And that seems to be how it's operating, right? You have Bill Pulte, 38 years old, no experience.

He, the only experience he has is in the housing agency going after people like Adam Schiff, the Senator of California, going after Lisa Cook, going after Letitia James.

Mm-hmm.

Um, g- that whole DCCC endorsement in some districts is, is feeling like a bit of an albatross.

Yeah.

I mean, 'cause it's like the smell of DC, right? That i- that is part of what Amanda is hearing from both the, the voters and more importantly the folks that are starting to run, is that you, you don't want to be of DC.

You don't wanna have the smell of DC in some of these areas, right? There's some of these areas where you have incumbents doing great, right? Including in New York, [laughs] where you have Hakeem Jeffries won his primary handily.

You have AOC win her primary handily.

And so it isn't across the board in any of these, but what is across the board-

Democrats are out, uh, performing Republicans in Republican states.

There's a world in which the Democratic Party says to voters, "Anyone who is going to be with us the majority amount of times when they come to DC and vote, we are happy to have them as Democrats." There's a part of this where they say, "We hear how upset so many of you are out there, so many of you voters are.

That is the entrance that I would drive into, and to just see the octagon lit up is like, this is the White House, and the party tacked onto it, um, I guess we could thank Citizens United for all of this.

Look, uh, and part, [laughs] yes, and also part of this is when people hear a million dollars per person, per plate, however you wanna put it, while they are struggling to put gas in their car, while they are struggling to put food on the table, the questions that they have is, "Is anyone focused on me?" And I think that's something that this entire midterm that I've been hearing from Democrats, Republicans, and Independents.

"Is Donald Trump focused on me as a voter?" And for Republicans, "Is he focused o- on us as people who wanna keep the House and the Senate?" And the answer continues to seem like it's no.

Mm.

But then it seems like he's made it worse, and I think one of the first rules of politics is, you know, do no harm.

And what we've seen over and over again, the choices that he made, this tax law where a lot of wealthier people are gonna benefit m- more than people who have less money, right, who, people that are less well off, that's an issue.

Um, and the fact that Donald Trump and Steven Miller, Deputy White House Chief of Staff, who deals with immigration, and Kristi Noem, and now Mark Winmaland, the Secretary of DHS, have been so focused on mass deportation, they're not thinking about the fact that immigrants are also the lifeblood of the economy in many ways.

And he doesn't drink coffee, really.

I don't know what to say.

We're going to skip that.

But I think the thing that's really important is this is one of those things that this White House could sell, right? They could say, you know, sometimes the president falls asleep at things, but that's because he's calling reporters at night.

That's because he's on the phone all the time.

But instead, what they want to sell, they could say that.

They're not saying anything now.

Given how highly choreographed this has been, given that they have told service members they're allowed to come, but only if they pay their own way, meet a certain way, and because clearly the president wants a very specific aesthetic at this event, why then wouldn't you want a fair and free press there to cover its splendor?

But what about this situation about the taxes? What about that?

There's no settlement.

I don't know what Todd Blanch is talking about.

There's no legal person who doesn't work for the Trump administration that I've talked to, that our colleagues have talked to, that will say that there has been a settlement.

And therefore, anything that you do around it, calling it a settlement, is not legally binding, according to legal experts.

It has nothing to do with me.

I'm not a lawyer.

Your sense when you talk to folks inside the White House, do they feel they have made a mistake here? They do not

At some point, Republicans are going to have to throw him overboard to save themselves.

And well, yeah, we'll just it's also connected to like this legacy making that we're seeing.

So when people are looking at and Donald Trump has said himself, he's been on on Air Force One and, you know, been like, I don't know if I'm going to heaven.

And then there was this time period where folks in the White House were talking about the president bringing this up in meetings, like thinking about death.

As you get older, you start to think about what is my legacy.

And then we start to see, OK, now he wants a ballroom.

Now he wants this arch.

That

[laughs]

... and pull out things, would he believe it? It's hard to know.

But the way that he operates is as if the confidence of that you project is the most important thing.

And so does he wanna go on this trip? I don't know that he wants the flight, but I do think that Donald Trump in the second term has been so focused, when you talk to people around him, and they will say this, he is so focused on the legacy aspect of this, and he knows that the presidents who have, like, long-lasting legacies, for the most part there was some kind of international component to it, right? The, it's, it's rare that a president gets to be, you know, a legacy if he doesn't have some kind of international peace deal or doesn't stop a, doesn't win a war, right? That doesn't happen as much, and that's how he views the presidency and hi- this current presidency.

And when you talk to folks who are around Donald Trump, Steve Bannon has said this publicly, is that they want him to be focused more, uh, on domestic issues, but his eyes are set on, you know, getting the, you know, the Nobel Peace Prize and [laughs] all of, and being seen as someone who has stature because at the end of the day that is so important to him.

So he wants to go on this trip because of that, but he also sees himself as the leader of the strongest country in the world.

I probably also imagine that he doesn't see China really on the same level.

But it hasn't finished.

they pivoted to talking about the ballroom?

We were all still kind of trying to get home after the event.

We were in the car watching President Trump in his press conference.

And the speed at which it happened, we were kind of confused.

We thought we misheard him because of how much it went from everything that we all went through, his team and the security failures that we all saw, to this ballroom.

And thanks to you guys for making clear to people this has absolutely nothing to do with the WHCA.

Cannot be clearer.

Exactly.

But I wanted to ask, like, what were you doing when it became clear that there had been a breach in security, there were gunshots? What, what were you doing?

Yeah.

We had, we had kinda just started, right? Like, and the whole table was just talking.

We were having fun.

We were talking about, um, what we were expecting that day.

We were talking about, you know, what would the coverage look like of, of Donald Trump and his speech, and, um, but the party, the MS Now party that we were having that night that was celebrating the First Amendment and all the folks that are in that room, what that was gonna look like.

And we were- I was far back enough close to the door that it was very clear very quickly to, to me and some folks around me that it was, like, gunshots.

Yeah.

Pins.

Um, I'm not sure.

I think the letter wasn't specific.

I think, like, it, it wasn't really specific.

It was, like, very long, and they...

But I think what they're hoping for, and I think this will happen, is at least an implicit defense, an explicit defense of the First Amendment, a defense of the WHCA, the Correspondents' Dinner there, and some implicit, uh, digs maybe at people who do not support those things.

[laughs]

...

And even with that, he's got 20,000 plus votes in Texas.

Yeah, I mean, isn't that like the political thing to do when you're running? You say, what they're doing is political.

Okay, but is it true? Did the thing happen? And I think he has not answered to that.

You know who hasn't? Also, Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, right? I think what's really important to remember, it's not just these— folks are not happening in a vacuum, right? Like, Tony Gonzalez is not in a vacuum by himself.

Donald Trump, Mike Johnson, they have helped create the environment in which he doesn't feel the need to leave.

He doesn't feel the need to resign.

He doesn't feel the need to drop out of the race.

What does it say about them? What does it say about the folks who gave, you know, looking to give PACs to the nomination? What does it