By Marc A. Thiessen
One is struck, upon arriving at Donald Trump’s personal office on the second floor of his Mar-a-Lago Club, by how modest it is.
Walking past a photo of Trump with Ronald Reagan by the doorway, I stepped into a small, sunlit room decorated with gifts from supporters, a shelf filled with the books he has published and “jumbos” — large, framed photos from his presidency that once lined the walls of the West Wing (and might one day again).
Trump greeted me before taking a seat behind a small oak desk, far less ornate than the Resolute Desk he once used in the Oval Office. Behind him was a painting of nine Republican presidents in a bar, modeled on “Dogs Playing Poker.” To his right, blocking the window, is a large, recently installed panel of bulletproof glass — a reminder of the two assassination attempts he faced in nine weeks.
While his office is modest, the man who occupies it has outsize ambitions to do something no former president has done since Grover Cleveland: take back the White House after losing it four years earlier.
I had come to see Trump for an interview, which happened to have been scheduled for the day after a gunman was discovered lying in wait in the bushes of his West Palm Beach golf course. But Trump didn’t bring up this new attempt on his life. (Here’s my column about what he said when I asked him about it.) Rather, what he wanted to talk about first (well, after the latest polls) was the Heritage Foundation’s much-pored-over Project 2025, a far-right wish list that Democrats have been working furiously to tie to Trump.
“The head guy called me up. I said, ‘You have no right to write a thing like that. You’re not speaking for me,’” Trump told me, referring to the organization’s president, Kevin Roberts. “I said, ‘You really — what you did is terrible.’”
“Not only that,” he added. “They were interviewing people for jobs, which isn’t so good.”
Project 2025 has unquestionably been a gift to the Harris campaign. A September New York Times-Siena College survey found that a near-majority of likely voters say Trump is “not too far” to the left or right on the issues, while a 47 percent plurality find Harris “too liberal or progressive,” and 52 percent say she is a “risky” choice. So Harris is using Project 2025 to paint Trump as the risky extremist in the race. “They know it’s been disavowed, but they take ads and then they [use] … the worst five sentences.”
Trump noted that Harris has backed off much of her 2019 agenda. “She changed everything,” he said. “We were going to send her a MAGA hat.” But she has not laid out a coherent platform to replace her old one, and as a result has been unable to answer such basic questions as what she would do on Day 1. So, I asked Trump: What would you do on Day 1?
“Not one thing, many things,” he said. “First thing: Close the border. People are going to come into the country, but they’re going to come in legally.” And he said he would unleash domestic energy production — promising to prod gains at multiple times the levels achieved during Biden’s term — which he argued would be a powerful antidote to the high inflation of the Biden-Harris years. “Energy is going to bring prices way down,” he said. “That’s going to bring interest rates way down.”
But energy is central to his thinking for another reason: his desire to restore deterrence, and thus peace, in the world. He argued that Biden’s approach to energy early in his term helped spark Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “It drove [the price of oil] up to a hundred dollars a barrel. And Putin said, ‘Man, at a hundred dollars a barrel, I’m going to be the only one to make money on the war.’”
There is an increasingly vocal isolationist faction in the Republican Party that believes Trump is their ally. And Trump fed that perception by choosing one of that faction’s most vocal champions, Sen. JD Vance (Ohio), as his running mate.
But as I have pointed out, any fair examination of Trump’s first-term record shows that he is no isolationist. This is a president who destroyed the Islamic State’s caliphate, bombed Syria (twice) for using chemical weapons on its own people, killed Iranian terrorist mastermind Qasem Soleimani, launched a cyberattack on Russia, approved an attack that killed hundreds of Russian Wagner Group mercenaries, armed Ukraine with Javelin missiles, and warned he would unleash “fire and fury like the world has never seen” if North Korea continued to threaten the United States.
I wanted to learn more about his strategy for maintaining peace in a second term. I pointed out he has said he believes that if he were in office, Russia would never have invaded Ukraine and Iran would never have attacked Israel. “Correct,” he said. So, I asked: Will China attack Taiwan while you’re president?
“Nope, not while I’m president,” Trump said. “But eventually they will.”
“Taiwan’s a tough situation,” Trump continued. “Don’t forget, it’s 9,000 miles away” from the United States, while Taiwan is just 100 miles from China. He wants Taiwan’s leaders to use the next four years to dramatically increase their defense investments. I pointed out that Taiwan is now spending 2.6 percent of its GDP on defense, which is more than all but a handful of NATO allies. “They should spend 10,” Trump said.
I also noted that during their debate, Harris said that if Trump were still president, Vladimir Putin would be in Kyiv. “No, he would’ve never [invaded],” Trump replied. “Putin would’ve never [have] gone into Ukraine. We would talk about it, and it was the apple of his eye, but he would never have gone in with me [in charge].”
Trump is the only president in the 21st century on whose watch Putin did not invade his neighbors. He marched on Georgia under George W. Bush, seized Crimea and started a guerrilla war in Donbas under Barack Obama (fighting continued there while Trump was in office), and launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Biden’s watch. But, Trump pointed out, Putin “didn’t take anything” during his presidency.
“You have to look at history,” he said. “For four years, he wasn’t lined up at the border. He only started really thinking about it, to be honest with you, after Afghanistan” — referencing Biden’s disastrous handling of the U.S. withdrawal in 2021.
“The problem is, now it’s a much different situation because [Putin has] lost a lot of men, but he’s made a lot of progress. You know, he has taken over large portions of that country,” Trump said. “And one of the biggest problems I have is that Europe — as they did with NATO before I came along — Europe skates. Europe should be putting the same money as us. Europe is a similar size. The economy, if you add them all up, it’s a similar size.”
What about NATO allies, such as Poland and Lithuania, that have given more aid to Ukraine than the United States as a percentage of GDP? “Well, the ones that are close,” Trump said, “they’re in trouble if something happens. Poland’s in a different circumstance than some of the others. Some of the others are … much further away. … They should pay equal to us.”
Many on the anti-Ukraine right believe Trump shares their hostility toward Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. But Trump told me he likes Zelensky. “I had a good relationship with Zelensky,” Trump said. “I like him. Because during the impeachment hoax … he could have said he didn’t know the [conversation] was taped. … But instead of grandstanding and saying, ‘Yes, I felt threatened,’ he said, ‘He did absolutely nothing wrong.’”
Just over a week ago, Zelensky sparked controversy when he visited a factory in the battleground state of Pennsylvania that manufactures ammunition for Ukraine with Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) and Sen. Bob Casey (D) present but no Republicans. This prompted Trump to take a shot at Zelensky during a campaign event. But the two leaders patched things up at Trump Tower on Friday. At a news conference before they sat down, Trump heaped praise on Zelensky, calling him “a piece of steel” during his impeachment and declaring that, thanks to him, “the impeachment hoax died right there.” After their meeting, Trump said “I learned a lot” and “we both want to see this [war] end, and we both want to see a fair deal made, and it’s going to be fair.” He even accepted Zelensky’s invitation to visit Ukraine, saying: “I will. It’s a beautiful country, beautiful weather, beautiful, beautiful, everything. But we have to get this over with.”
How will he do that? I asked Trump about an interview with Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo in July of last year in which he said that, if Putin does not agree to a peace deal, he’ll give Ukraine more aid than they’ve ever gotten before. Did he stand by that? “I did say that, so I can say it to you. But I did say that and nobody picked it up. They don’t because it makes so much sense.”
Listening to Trump discuss how he deterred America’s adversaries, a theme emerges: Biden emboldens our enemies by signaling that he fears escalation; Trump makes our enemies fear escalation, which causes them to back down.
