Good evening and welcome to this episode of the Mary Trump show. I am so excited to have with me as my guest today Tim O'Brien, journalist, author of the revelatory Trump nation, the art of being the Donald and executive editor and columnist at Bloomberg opinion Tim.

Hi, it's so good to have you. Hey Mary, it's great to be live with you instead of digital. Right. And as we were saying for the break, it's weird because I feel like I've known you for a really long time because of your work obviously and just you know you have a perspective on one of the things we're going to talk about that very, very, very few people have and that's strangely unusual.

Because I think you and I would would both have thought that Donald's a pretty transparent person is exactly what he appears to be. And yet here we are.

Here we are because people just routinely discount how damaging and destructive he can be. And he, you know, and he creates his own narrative.

And he, well, he creates his own narrative. But I think a lot of times other people created for him and he just kind of jumps in as it as it serves his purposes.

But one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you because listen, I think we, we know how dangerous it would be to pretend that Donald's not a problem anymore.

That if we just ignore him, he'll go away. I think that's a terrible mistake. But I'm really sick of talking about him.

Although again, it's necessary. But we must.

But I think what's becoming even more important, especially as we see these hearings unfold is to talk about his enablers and the people who use him for their own ends and the people he uses.

Because I have to be honest with you.

One of the things that most shocked me was the extent to which Donald, and just want to back up for a second, you actually have a much better sense of this than I do because I didn't really start paying attention to Donald in the way what needed to until 2016.

Before that, he was just sort of my estranged uncle. You know, so you're saying, you're trying to rip off your inheritance.

Yeah, well, there's that. I found that out eventually. But seriously, you know, he was he was he was Donald. And I didn't really want to pay attention to anything else until it became an utterly necessary.

But you've had your fingers on the pulse of this much longer than I have the real concern is the people he finds shockingly who are even weaker than he is. How do we make sense of that?

Well, because I think he has this, you know, he is not a sophisticated man. He is an ignorant man. But he has this reptilian sensibility about other people's vulnerabilities and the kind of people that come into his orbit.

And I think either identify through him because they have a weak sense of themselves, they overestimate who he is, and they feel like they're in the sort of, you know, buzzy orbit of the sun God. And then there's another group of people who see them, I think, see him as as their useful idiot, someone who they think they can manipulate or use to further their financial or political or social and.

And as you know, he grew up watching his father do this. And I first got exposed to to Donald in the early 90s. I was a research assistant on the first kind of definitive investigative biography of Trump, well, by Wayne Barrett, the great village voice investigative reporter.

I grew up in the Midwest didn't really know. I was aware of Donald Trump in the headlines, but it never looked at him closely as a business man. And then I went on this deep dive as Wayne's research assistant in the early 90s. I did a book about gambling in the mid 2000s. I interviewed him for that.

And then I was at the New York Times in the early 2000s and covered him for the paper wrote Trump Nation. He sued me for that book, getting lost.

And of course, I would say, you know, and then many runs for president in 2015, I'd begin covering him again. So he's like the ghosts of Christmas past, you know, I like to, I can hear the chains up in the attic. And what did you do to be like this?

I just, I think I don't know. It's something happened in the must be karma, but the constant over all those years, say from the early 90s to 2022 is that he has always been surrounded by these two populations of people you just spoke about.

And I think you learned it as father's needs that that you could get lawyers and fixtures and other political operatives who could teach you how to weaponize legal system and weaponize politics in your own financial favor.

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