In ordinary times, a reminder to America's men and women in uniform that it is their responsibility to disobey illegal orders would pass without much comment from anyone.

Indeed, in our armed forces, the armed forces of a democracy, it is common to be reminded of this basic, obvious, and until recently non-controversial demand because it's so utterly foundational.

But when six Democratic lawmakers, all veterans of the military and intelligence agencies, issued this general reminder the other day, Trump accused them of sedition and suggested that they be executed.

Now, maybe if he had been having a better week, he wouldn't have acted this way.

Or maybe not.

I'll talk about the president's behavior tonight with my panel.

Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at the New York Times.

Leanne Caldwell is the chief Washington correspondent for Puck News.

Jonathan Carl is the chief Washington correspondent for ABC News and the author of Retribution: Donald Trump and the campaign that changed America.

And Toluanipa is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Thank you all for joining me.

I appreciate it.

U John, you've been the target of Trump's anger before.

Couple times.

So have I. Uh it's a pretty big club actually.

It's not really uh it's not really exclusive.

Uh but this week felt a little bit different somehow.

The more intense, the anger was more sustained.

Yeah.

I mean, he's been doing this for a long time.

Obviously, he called the press the enemy of the people, but it did feel more intense.

Uh the way he went after Katherine Lucy of Bloomberg on Air Force One, calling her piggy.

Uh and then the display with my colleague Mary Bruce in the Oval Office was over the top.

Both great reporters, by the way.

Both excellent reporters.

Our official position at Washington Week is both great reporters.

No, I mean I mean I mean they truly are both great reporters and and they both uh didn't take the bait.

I mean they didn't like engage with him on this and they were incredibly professional.

They were they were very professional and respectful in their questions and also ignoring the personal taunts which are it's not easy.

you're in the Oval Office and the president is calling you a terrible person and you you know that everybody's seeing this also and it's all playing out and and he's sitting next to a guy that allegedly, you know, um executed a or ordered the execution possibly bone saw.

I mean, this is this is but but Barry was completely steady and then came back with a question later on about the Epstein files that really needed to be asked.

These were all like the questions you knew needed to be asked and Trump went off.

What I took from it is my sense is that he's rattled.

Uh I I I think he was rattled by something we haven't seen this term and we really didn't see to this degree in in his first term, the defeat he faced at the hands of Republicans in Congress, Republicans who have been entirely uh supplicant to him suddenly standing up and going in a different direction on the release of the Epstein files.

And I I think he I think he was frankly rattled and that was part of what was going on.

Right.

Tulu, the the backdrop here is is very important.

There's been a bunch of stuff that hasn't gone his way about the the Virginia New Jersey elections for starters.

Give us a sense of of where he is in popularity and and it just seems like the wind is not at his back.

Yeah, November is a really tough month for Trump.

We're think we're thinking about a year ago.

He was at the peak of his political power, returning to office, winning this landslide election in his mind in terms of having the biggest comeback in political history and all the great things that people were talking about when he beat Kla Harris to re uh turn to the White House.

And his first 10 months in office were pretty much signs that there was very little that can be done to stop him.

He was steamrolling through his opponents.

He was pushing forward executive orders.

But then we had the elections in the first part of this month and he was defeated very soundly in New Jersey, in Virginia and across the political map.

Republicans lost significantly because of what Trump is doing.

It was pretty clear that the country sent a message to him and he also lost in the Supreme Court in terms of how his tariff policy is being viewed.

We haven't seen the final, you know, ruling on that, but it was pretty clear that the Supreme Court justices were not in favor of uh what he's doing on tariffs.

And he had to move away from his tariff policy by removing some tariffs because people are worried about affordability in the economy.

And he's not winning on that issue as he has in the past.

And so, he's really focused on all of the areas where he's starting to lose ground.

And most importantly, he's realizing that he is going to be a lame duck very soon.

And people within his own party are starting to look past him.

That's his biggest reason why he's concerned.

And Peter Epstein, there's Go.

Epste.

Yeah.

Go.

Go.

Yeah.

The thing he can't shake.

Thing he can't shake.

The House of Representatives literally went out of session.

Leos and I did for probably a record amount of time certainly in modern times, six, eight weeks because they didn't want to have to deal with this question and he got his hat handed to him.

So much so he had to get in front of the train and give permission to all the Republicans to vote for it so they wouldn't be crosswised with the MAGA base.

Huge setback in the sense of momentum, in the sense of uh changing the the conversation.

Uh he does not want to be talking about this.

We don't know what's in these files obviously and we'll see whether they actually get released.

They did include a clause in the bill which we should remember saying they'll be released unless they get in the way of an ongoing investigation.

Well, there wasn't an ongoing investigation until Oh, wait a second.

A few days ago when the president ordered Pam Bondi to make a new investigation into Democrats, and so we'll see whether they actually follow through on releasing everything or try to redact some things.

And we don't know what's in them.

But if it if there was a prosecutable crime in there against Donald Trump, it seems likely to think that the Merrick Garland Justice Department would have already pursued that.

So, what we're talking about is probably something embarrassing.

It wasn't the most aggressive Justice Department in the history of this.

They did indict him a couple times and that, you know, which hadn't happened before with any other president.

So, I mean, yeah, I understand what you're saying, but if there's something in there, I don't think Pam Bondi is going to be prosecuting him, right, Leanne?

Uh, the the files, everybody's talking about the files.

No one knows what's in the files.

Do you think we're ever going to have a complete understanding or something close to a complete understanding of the depth of Epstein's connections to Trump?

Um, we'll see.

I don't know.

I mean, Peter laid out a way that Donald Trump can prevent the release of Does that sound realistic to you?

Like, that's a move that they would make.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, there's something Donald Trump does not want these files out.

Um, wait, can I just ask, do we think that Donald Trump even knows what's in the files at all, or is it just he can't remember what he might have done or not done?

No, I'm serious.

I like like what does he know?

It feels like he's protecting someone or something.

Not that there's necessarily a maybe he's protecting himself.

I don't know if there's a crime.

It doesn't like you said, it doesn't seem like there is, but there's someone that or something that he seems to be protecting that he doesn't want out there.

But I think that with the files, um, Donald Trump has lost a tremendous amount of trust on this issue.

Regardless of if these files are released, the way that this has been progressing, people think that it has been covered up over and over and over again and Donald Trump is now complicit in the cover up.

And so even if all these files are released, it's going to be very hard for some people to believe that that is all that there is.

John, you Well, and look, first of all, DOJ is going to control this process.

Department of Justice, Department of Justice will control the release of the files.

So keep that in mind.

This is the Department of Justice that has basically been functioning as Trump's law firm.

I mean, this is this is a it has no independence anymore in the way that we think of the Justice Department, but I don't know if Trump knows what's in the files, and I've heard no indication that there's something in there that's going to incriminate him more than what's already come out.

I mean, we know that he had a longtime friendship with with Ebstein.

We know that they had a falling out.

We've seen all the video of them together.

I mean, who knows what more could be there, but I I have no indication there's any blockbuster there.

But we do know this.

When Pam Bondi promised that she was going to release everything and she brought in, you remember she said, "I'm bringing in 1,000 FBI agents to review everything and to get everything ready for release."

We know that when she briefed Trump about what they had that that they told him, uh, that his name comes up repeatedly in the files.

Uh, I mean, Elon Musk, I guess, told us that a while ago.

It's not a surprise.

We know that he's been on the plane.

The flight logs have been out there before Epstein's plane.

We know that he was in Epstein's address book that had already been out there.

So, I don't know that there was anything new, but he was told uh by DOJ, by the Justice Department, that his name was going to appear in these files.

And that's when he pulled the plug and said, "No, we're not going to release him."

Right.

Um Leanne, let's go to this issue of the relationship between Trump and the press.

Uh it's not u hard to notice that while he can express contempt and anger toward male reporters, he seems to be bothered especially by female reporters here.

Watch watch just a couple of uh moments of this with with me I think you are a terrible reporter.

Uh it's the way you ask these questions.

You start off with a man who's highly respected asking him a horrible uh insubordinate and and just a terrible question.

You're a terrible person and a terrible reporter.

What what what is going on here do you think with with him?

Is is it is it just pure misogyny where he has a double standard that he believes that um that reporters should not behave in a subordinate way?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, the word insubordinate just speaks so broadly about how he thinks.

So, well, go go go into that a little bit.

What do you mean?

Well, Donald Trump wants reporters in the press to to praise him and to give him good coverage and do what he wants.

Um, and that's why you see in a lot of the scrums in the Oval Office, um, a lot more and more of the reporters are friendly reporters from conservative outlets, not rep not reporters who, um, have, you know, are not from those outlets.

But I will say on the a woman on the female thing, um, women reporters notice this.

It is a topic of conversation among me and my friends constantly about how he treats female reporters.

I will say if you speak to someone like Kellyanne Conway who says Donald Trump has is great to women um look she he she was the first female campaign manager, first female chief of staff.

Um that there's highlevel women all around him but those are women who are not challenging him.

Those are women who are there to support him and reporters are there to challenge the president and that's what he doesn't like.

It's this this insubordinate subordinate spectrum.

Tuluo, you were a former uh White House bureau chief for the Washington Post.

U be among the other chiefs.

A lot of chiefs.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's all chiefs.

It's all chiefs.

Uh the Is it that unusual for a president to get upset with insubordinate reporters?

What's unusual about this for people who don't understand the ins and outs of our profession?

Well, the president has always sort of taken these attacks against the the press as part of what he thinks is a shtick.

And and John, you wrote a book called uh the front row at the Trump show.

The Trump the president sees this in a way as a show.

He sees the reporters as his foils.

And a lot of times after he attacks reporters, he'll bring them up and, you know, act really nicely to them and sort of try to play host with them when the cameras are off because he does see this as a show.

So, some of this is a little bit of give and take.

But what is a little bit different about what we're seeing this week is the president seems to have like real animosity behind some of these attacks and he's, you know, having some of these really direct attacks that are steeped in mis misogyny and also seem really personal in part because of all of the things that he's going through and what we've experienced in terms of how tough this month has been for him, how he's up against the ropes politically and instead of it being a show and a give and take, he really seems rattled and he really seems to be lashing out.

And here's the consequence, if I can add, here's the consequence of the White House taking over control of the White House press pool, which no other president, Republican or Democrat, had ever done.

They now control who is in that room.

And what that means is that there are fewer mainstream journalism outlets or whatever phrase we want to use and a lot more of these outlets that are frankly propaganda or politically ideologically in favor.

What are the names just so people at home?

I mean, we obviously Marjorie Taylor Green's boyfriend is in there and I remember the scene the other day, the name of the network, Marjorie Taylor Green's boyfriend television.

I'll let the networks speak for themselves.

Michael Lindell's network, you know, the Michael the pillow guy has it.

So, the other day, not that long ago, the president says in his exchange with with one of them is like, well, you know, I won the election in 2020.

Yes, sir, you did.

And then he says, aha, media media.

Meaning, see the media in his presentation of this has just somehow validated him because he's blurred the line between actual reporters and people who are propagandists or supporters.

I mean, Sean Spicer was in the press pool a couple weeks ago.

Congratulations to Sean.

So, the public of course doesn't see a difference and doesn't understand.

And the fewer and fewer actual reporters in there challenging him like Mary Bruce, the more and more he gets angry about that.

By the way, the Pentagon now has completely removed uh what we would think of mainstream from Fox to ABC to everybody to Newsmax I mean to to Newsmax uh and has a I don't know what you would call them a captive uh a captive press or or some of these types of outlets.

Is the White House moving in that direction itself?

Well, the the the White House communications office actually wasn't thrilled with how the Pentagon played out.

So I I don't think I think that they couldn't have stopped Pete Heget from I mean they weren't that upset to stop Pete Heget.

Uh but they weren't thrilled with what he was doing and and I think that what you know what we said here about Trump likes to have you know the show and he needs a foil.

I I and he also loves the mainstream television coverage.

So, I don't I mean, God only knows we're only a year into this where this will go, but I he is not likely to completely throw out, you know, mainstream news organizations because he wants somebody to yell at at one point and he also wants those cameras there uh to broadcast to, you know, the television networks.

One thing I just want to get back to about his really bad month, is that before the election, so early November, end of October maybe even, um, when Trump was challenging Republicans to get rid of the filibuster to end the government shutdown and Republicans in the Senate were kind of pushing back.

A Republican source of mine said, reminded me, remember the the more Trump feels like he is losing control, the more out of control he gets.

And so that just I just keep coming back to this in this time frame right now that Trump feels like he's losing control.

Things aren't going well for him and he acts out in those moments.

prices.

I mean, things that are beyond the president's control create an instability