How the Trump Era Changed Trump

New York Times

3 hours ago

Ten years after a self-professed real estate tycoon and reality television star announced he was running for president, the country and its politics have irrevocably changed, my colleague Peter Baker wrote today.
The man himself isn't quite the same, either.
President Trump is still the attention-loving, payback-obsessed main character that he was in 2015. But he learned during his first term what glass he could break if he only had a hammer — while his four years out of office drove him to turn grievance into vengeance.
To guide us through the way the Trump era has changed Trump, I Slacked the person who has chronicled his decade in more detail than just about anybody: my colleague Maggie Haberman. Our lightly edited conversation follows.
The decade that's passed since Donald Trump came down the escalator and announced his first presidential run has changed the country enormously. You've covered every twist and turn along the way. How has this decade — with his rise, and fall and rise — changed Trump?
In all of the big ways, Trump is very much the same person he was when he first announced, and for many decades before 2015. He is deeply focused on himself, on getting 'credit' — something he brought up in a Truth Social post over the weekend about Iran and Israel — and on dominating media coverage and his perceived rivals, and commanding financial advantage. He has always been interested in payback. But the experience of the Russia investigation in his initial term first began to harden his behaviors. Then, the four years out of office, which included indictments, a criminal conviction and two assassination attempts, have had a deeper effect on him than I think is always clear.
What is that effect, and how has it shaped the first months of his second term?
A couple of points stand out. One is, armed with the backing of a Supreme Court decision last year that granted him broad immunity for official acts, he is doing some of the things he wanted to during his first term, like maximizing official power — and testing what courts will let him get away with — to dismiss inspectors general and swaths of the bureaucracy, and to use the Justice Department openly as something of a personal law firm.
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