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How's it going? I'm Playbook editor, Mike DeBonis. Happy Monday. Just something a little different today. I'm joined by Zach Stanton, deputy editor for Playbook for today's Playbook Daily briefing. Hey, how's it going? Over the weekend, we got our first glimpse of one of the most anticipated political books of the year. Maggie Haberman's new book, Confidence Man, The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America.

It was excerpted generously in the Atlantic where Maggie drew from her several interviews with Donald Trump.

And Zach, I'm just curious, what really struck you about that piece?

It really, I will start out by seeing it really dominated

the top of Sunday's playbook for good reason because there was just so much sort of jam-packed

into it. And I just wonder what you found to be the most telling and notable tidbit.

For sure. Well, in some ways, it was kind of a throwback to the Trump era when you had a certain

unpredictability about what he was going to say and who he was going to say it about.

And these little sound bites that he would make would become news and sort of dominate Twitter

and in turn dominate news cycles. And so you had such a

weird mix of these odd little moments of him talking about different Republican leaders, whether

as Mitch McConnell or Mike Pence, one of the moments that I remember is, you know, he's recalling

talking to Pence ahead of January 6th and telling Pence that, you know, he's recalling talking to Pence ahead of January 6th

and telling Pence that, you know, you have a chance to either be Thomas Jefferson or you can

be Mike Pence, and he chose to be Mike Pence.

And, you know, he has similar choice words for people like, you know, again, Mitch McConnell,

even sort of tepidly for Jared Kushner.

But I think the things that jumped out to me the most

were actually the moments of surprising self-reflection.

There's part where he's talking basically about his whole modus operandi, where he talks about,

you know, this question that he's been asked again and again was, you know, if you had to do it again, if you had to run for president again, would you have done it,

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