Full Episode: Washington Week with The Atlantic full episode, 10/24/25

Jeffrey Goldberg: President Trump this week took a wrecking ball to the East Wing of the White House, and in so doing, obliterated the line between metaphor and literal reality. This was a week in which Trump defying all norms of presidential behavior, posted an A.I.-generated video of himself wearing a king's crown, dropping a plane-load of excrement on protesters. He also pardoned a convicted crypto kingpin who has worked to enrich the Trump's family's own crypto business, and he asked the Justice Department to pay him $230 million as reimbursement for legal costs he allegedly incurred when the government he now controls investigated him. Also, he seems to be going to war with Venezuela, all this and more next.

Good evening and welcome to Washington Week.

I want to start with an apology. We pride ourselves here in our accuracy, but we realized very late in the day that our backdrop is no longer correct because it still features the East Wing of the White House. Let me show you where it used to be. So, this right here, that was the that was the East Wing. Now it's a hole. That's just a hole next to the White House over here. That's the West Wing that's still standing, as far as we know, although I'm not there right now to prove it. In the back here, you got the -- that's the Empire State Building. And over there that's LAX. And also we have we got a cold front moving in from Ohio. So, break out your sweaters. Anyway, we'll fix the picture to reflect the new reality once Congress restores our funding.

The list I read at the top of the show, that's not even all of the norm-busting news from this week. Tonight, our overall subject is impunity. How does a president get to knock down the East Wing? Is that even legal? By what authority does he do the things he does?

Here to provide us with some insights are our guests, Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times, Susan Glasser is a staff writer at The New Yorker, David Ignatius is a foreign affairs columnist at The Washington Post, and Toluse Olorunnipa is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Thank you for participating in my fantasy camp. I've always wanted to do the weather. I've always wanted -- and I have a laser pointer. I'm going to call on you with a laser pointer from now on.

You know, Washington week, you know --

David Ignatius, Columnist, The Washington Post: You got to love it.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Yes. You know, like, you know, challenging times call for a different approach.

Peter, let me start with you. I want you to listen to something that President Trump said a few years ago. I want you to listen to this?

Donald Trump, U.S. president: If the radical Democrats take power, they will take a wrecking ball to our economy and to the future of our country.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Now we know where the wrecking ball was headed.

So, the White House is called the people's house. We send somebody there for four years to live in it, rent free, and then pass it on to the next person who we choose to send there. So, I just don't frankly understand how a temporary occupant who pays no rent could just knock down a part of it without Congressional approval, without anyone's approval. How does that happen?

Peter Baker, Chief White House Correspondent, The New York Times: Washington's a historic city. And if you try to change your door or your front yard in a lot of different parts of the city, you would have to go through a whole, big, bureaucratic process that would take months and months and months. Not if you're president of the United States, it turns out. You just call a demolition company from Maryland, you get them down there and whack away without tell anybody or asking.

Jeffrey Goldberg: It wasn't a government agency that took down the --

Peter Baker: No.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Well, of course we're in a shutdown anyway.

Peter Baker: That's right, exactly. And he said he is paying for this with private funds.

Now, look, there's an, the argument that he's making is that there needs to be a ballroom sufficient to presidential, you know, needs, and it's true, the state dining room only seats about 140 people, and presidents in the last few years have been using the south lawn, putting a big cathedral tent there because it isn't big enough, fair enough. And there are a number of people who think that's not a bad idea necessarily. But the way he went about this, the sort of unilateral way, the sort of, I'm doing it by fiat way, the people's house is now suddenly my house and I get to decide that we're getting rid of this structure.

Part of the structure that's been there since Theodore Roosevelt put it up in 1902, that really struck a lot of people, Republicans and Democrats, this week. And I think it really lent to the metaphor that you've played with here, which is a guy who's taking a wrecking ball to Washington writ large.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. Toluse, you are a former White House bureau chief. It's no -- you know the building and the people who run the building. This has to be one of the most shocking things to happen to the physical structure certainly that you can remember.

Toluse Olorunnipa, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: For sure. I spent a lot of time in the East Wing. There are a lot of memories that people have there, from Republicans and Democrats who've worked at the White House, who have spent time in that building. And seeing it defaced and deconstructed in a matter of three days was really shocking to the conscience of a lot of people, especially people who have worked there.

But it's also for people who admire Washington, who admire the presidency, who admire the White House. It's a sign that this president is not doing things the way previous presidents did. He's doing it his own way, and he's doing it in a way that really thumbs his nose at the idea that, you know, checks and balances actually work, that I have to consult Congress or history or historians to do anything that I want to do. And he is acting with a lot of impunity.

This is something that struck a nerve in way ways that other things that he's done, from the tariffs to other policy, things that maybe people couldn't really understand, but seeing the White House being torn down in a way that was never expected in the way that he promised that he wouldn't do. I think that was a big shock to a lot of people.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Susan, stay on this theme of impunity. He just -- he didn't go to Congress. He didn't say, you know, I have this idea. He didn't send it through a historical preservation commission. He didn't do any of that. What does he know about checks and balances right now that we don't?

Susan Glasser, Staff Writer, The New Yorker: Well, I think Donald Trump heard the message loud and clear from the United States Supreme Court even before he returned to office in the summer of 2024 when the Supreme Court ruled essentially that the president has immunity for almost any act that could occur in the course of his presidency. Since Congress controlled by Republicans in both the House and the Senate has proven to be essentially supine when it comes to any of the kind of sweeping acts of executive, you know, overreach that we've seen so far. It's not really a reach for Donald Trump to conclude that he had the unilateral power to do whatever he wanted.

He's -- at this point, he's the man saying, you know, come and get me if you dare. And it strikes me that, you know, when you give already the most powerful office in the world, you know, the sense that there's literally no one who's going to say no to this person who has raged his entire life at the idea that there are rules and constraints and, you know, people trying to stop him from doing what he wants. Right now, he's on a tear in part because there's nobody who's going to stop him. He's constructed an administration with people around him who are there explicitly because they are yes men, and in some cases, yes women.

And just to this point about, he still feels the need to mislead, right? He did say when he rolled this out originally this summer, oh, no, there's not going to be damage to the existing structure, and then boom, he creates a new set of facts overnight on the ground.

I would also point out that the new ballroom that's envisioned, while there could be a strong argument to say this, you know, should be done, not only is there no process, but the design that Donald Trump has personally green lit is for something like 90,000 square feet. It is going to overwhelm the White House itself.

Jeffrey Goldberg: The White House, the main building of the White House is 55,000 square feet.

Susan Glasser: Correct. So, it's going to overwhelm the White House itself, again, approved by no entity aside from Donald Trump himself.

Jeffrey Goldberg: David, you've covered Washington for a little while. Have you ever seen anything like this?

David Ignatius: So, this does feel different and I've been trying to think why does it, it feel so different? Peggy Noonan, who's a, you know, fairly conservative columnist, wrote on The Wall Street Journal this morning a very angry, you know, emotional piece. The headline was a republic, but can we keep it ruminating on this?

I think part of it is just this feeling that this is the people's house and he's treating it like his own personal property. He's treating every part of the government like his own personal property. It's almost a compulsive desire to blow through limits, you know, in every direction, involving the military, the CIA, Justice, you know, campaign of retribution against his enemies.

And I think it's begun to worry more and more people. This is such a symbolic moment with a steam shovel, you know? If that photograph on the Washington Post, my beloved newspaper hadn't, appeared, we might not have known about this for a day or two. I mean, they were doing this stealthily.

Peter Baker: Which is shocking, right? They didn't announce it. They tried to hide it. They knew. They knew there'd be a reaction. I don't think they knew quite the reaction that they would be.

But what's really remarkable too is how anathema it is to the original design of the White House. The original idea of the White House was to produce a relatively modest home for a president compared to the palaces of Europe. They didn't want a Versailles. George Washington and the group that brought us the White House wanted something that was the people's house. It was of a certain degree of modesty and certainly not a palatial, ostentatious kind of thing.

And what's remarkable about this is that, you know, you saw all the gold that he's added in the Oval Office, and, of course, he's paved over the Rose Garden and things like that. He's done other things. Those are things that could be reversed, right? The next president could come along, take that gold out of the oval office and restore it to a more of a simple grace that it's meant to be. They could replant the Rose Garden. They're not going to be able to do this. This is a decision of the ages.

Jeffrey Goldberg: It's so large as to be irreversible.

Toluse, let me ask you a question, David hinted at something there. There's a lot of -- it is an unusual thing in Washington. It almost feels tribal. Like, wait, you're not allowed to just do that to our most famous buildings, but it's not as if Congress is up in arms right now about this. How do you explain that?

Toluse Olorunnipa: Yes. Well, when we think about the White House, we think about the founders, we think about the 250 years of this country's history going back to the Declaration of Independence, one of the reasons that the founders, as we wrote about in The Atlantic, and the most recent issue, one of the reasons they didn't put all of these things in writing that was because there were checks and balances. They thought that there would have a co-equal branch of government with Congress speaking up against these things.

Now, Democrats have been able to speak up, but, you know, they have limited power. They're out of power. But Republicans who, in the design of this country and the design of our government, Republicans are supposed to be able to speak up against a president of their own power just as Democrats are supposed to be able to do the same thing. President Trump has broken that system. He said that if you're a Republican, you speak out against me, I'm going to get you out of the party, out of Congress. And that has been shot across the bow for a number of Republicans who are not speaking out, even when they know that what he's doing in many cases is a shock to their conscience.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. So, what you're suggesting is that the Bill of Rights should have had an amendment stated future presidents may not turn the White House into Mar-a-Lago. Because no one would have done this until -- and, by the way, the Mar-a-Lago thing is very -- I mean, when the last time I was in the Oval Office, I mean, he actually has filled the Oval Office with leftovers, as I understood it from him, leftovers from Mar-a-Lago, gold fixtures and the like. So, it does seem almost psychologically --

Susan Glasser: Even if they put it in the law, Jeff, I'm sure he would find somebody to argue that, you know, that strict definition of Mar-a-Lago is a geographic entity, so therefore it's actually fine to do this. And, you know, just to the point about the wrecking ball, right, that it's metaphor made real, that the Republicans, of course, in this term versus the first term, are remarkably quiescent and quiet. And actually --

Jeffrey Goldberg: Because they're scared or because they agree with him?

Susan Glasser: You know, it was actually the first person who ever told me they thought Donald Trump was a human wrecking ball, was actually Bob Corker. At the time, he was the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. And this was in early 2017. I found it to be a remarkable statement at the time. It presaged, of course, the falling out that Corker and Trump had. And what's the result? He's no longer in the Senate. And I think that, for me, is a difference between 1.0 and 2.0 is that Donald Trump feels that he can be an actual wrecking ball as well as a, you know, sort of wrecking ball of institutions and there's no Republicans to speak up.

Jeffrey Goldberg: You know, Corker is one of the many people who got out of dodge, essentially. We don't really have the Corkers and the Romneys and Flakes and McCains certainly to say like, this is what you're not -- in the category of things that presidents don't do, this video, which I'm not going to show because it's gross and this is PBS. What does this -- this is almost a history question. What does that sort of thing do to the presidency itself? Go ahead. Go ahead, David.

David Ignatius: It demeans. It takes it to a level of vulgarity and crassness. You know, it demeans our country in the eyes of the world. I find more and more of my friends from other countries look at this behavior with a kind of revulsion. It just it's not the America that they understand, but it's just not -- it's not appropriate behavior.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

David Ignatius: And, you know, I keep -- in a sense, this is a character test for our country. What kind of people are we as we watch this, if people, you know, applaud it, laugh at it, think it's funny to dump the excrement on protesters wearing a crown. If that becomes the acceptable norm, you just worry that we really are becoming a sort vulgar nation of this public circus, that's the presidency under Trump, and that, you know, it's, it is just a very dangerous direction.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Let's talk about another subject related to impunity, and let's start by listening to the president talk about some of these activities in the Caribbean and on the Pacific side as well.

Reporter: If you are declaring war against these cartels and Congress is likely to approve of that process, why not just ask for a declaration of war?

Donald Trump: Well, I don't think we're going to necessarily ask for a declaration of war. I think we're just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country, okay? We're going to kill them, you know? They're going to be like dead, okay?

Jeffrey Goldberg: David you wrote in your column this week on the subject of Venezuela, why America slept. That might be the title of a future book, examining the Trump administration shift of national security focus away from a mounting Russian threat against Europe, and toward a noxious, but relatively impotent network of drug gangs in Venezuela. Go into this a little bit.

David Ignatius: So, to me, the mismatch of our national security priorities has been stunning. The Venezuela regime of Nicolas Maduro is noxious, as I said in the column. You know, it's a despotic regime, but it's not a global threat to the United States.

Meanwhile, Russia is increasingly waging an open covert action against Europe and NATO. It's sending drones, it's sending saboteurs, it's threatening assassination. And Europeans feel they are on the edge of a war with Putin who will -- that will change the map for a generation.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

David Ignatius: And this mismatch I think is stunning.

And what is Trump trying to do in the idea of sailing the largest aircraft carrier in the world toward the coast of Venezuela? To what end? I mean, if you're going after drug traffickers, I don't think you need the USS Ford.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. Susan, why Venezuela? Why now?

Susan Glasser: You know, I think David is making an extremely important point because I think it's, sure, part of the performative optics of the Trump presidency, right? He's renamed, not in a legal sense, but in his own sense, renamed the Defense Department the Department of War. Well, once you create a Department of War, then you need a war to go along with it.

Now, he's in a little bit of a conundrum since he's spent years telling his followers that he's the president of peace, that he's not going to go to war. So, it strikes me that he's operating in that sort of Trump bully mode which some previous presidents of both parties have done in our own hemisphere, unfortunately, seems to me that he's essentially punching down, looking to create a kind of a short, victorious, optics-driven conflict with shadowy, amorphous, bad guys, never getting Congress involved in it.

At the same time, I think that not only is Trump ignoring the bigger national security threat, but it seems to be part of a conscious shift in the administration's view of what is national security. Donald Trump made a very important comment right before the 2024 election. He was asked about national security threats and he said, well, you know, you have Russia, you have China and then you have the enemy within. And of those, the enemy within is the greater threat.

And I think what you're seeing is the pivoting of the role of the U.S. military, deploying troops in the streets of American cities where Donald Trump doesn't like, the Democratic leadership pivoting to a focus on the Western Hemisphere, which is what he's done with a lot of the resources at the Pentagon. I think this is a very significant shift that we're seeing right now, Jeff.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. Peter, will he actually go to war?

Peter Baker: Well, I mean, the way he is, right? I mean, the way he is -- you know, he's using military force against non-military targets that are not an imminent threat in the conventional sense of what they --

Jeffrey Goldberg: Well, the truth is we don't know who were on those boats. They have not told us who are on those boats.

Peter Baker: No due process. And the two guys that they did rescue from one of those things, they then sent back. They didn't have enough to prosecute him, even though they would've had enough to have killed them, and a bombing. And so it's a remarkable thing.

Now, we've been heading down slippery slope in this way for a while, right? Remember, under Obama, he used military force to kill American citizens who were designated to be terrorists. And people thought that's a really extraordinary expansion of executive power. That person's never been convicted of anything. Well, now, Trump is taking it the next step by leaps and bounds and going after these boats that may or may not have the people he says on them and may or may not be doing the things he's saying that they're doing, and, in any case, are not in an imminent threat to any Americans.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Toluse, all of this is happening during a government shutdown, and you've been covering the shutdown quite extensively. You wrote this week, the president has taken extraordinary steps of the past three weeks to weaponize the closure of the government, steering federal funds to shield his chosen beneficiaries from the shutdowns harms, even as he opportunistically damages the interest of his opponent. What are those steps that he's taking that are -- that you describe as frankly partisan?

Toluse Olorunnipa: Well, they've stripped more than $35 billion away from, quote/unquote, blue states because of --

Jeffrey Goldberg: And they've articulated it that way.

Toluse Olorunnipa: Yes. They've specifically listed the states. In some cases, they've targeted states led by Minority Leader Chuck Schumer in the Senate and other top Democrats, saying that because you are in favor of the shutdown, we are going to take money away from your constituents. But a lot of those constituents, first of all, they are Americans, so they're constituents of the President and Congress, but they're also, in some cases Republican districts within these blue states that are being hurt by this.

Now, the president has said that he's going to take money away from certain parts of the government and steer them towards people that he likes, like the military and other programs that he thinks should be funded. He's even said you, we're giving money to the people we want to give money to, and the Democrats are being killed by this shutdown. And he's not really taking a role of trying to solve this problem. He's trying to weaponize it and get partisan gains from the situation of being in a shutdown for four weeks. And we're very close to a situation where a lot of people are going to be hurt by SNAP money running out, and other programs that people rely on in addition to government paychecks not being there for anybody anymore.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. This is sort of a quick round robin of all the things that's called all the things that happened this week. One of the things that happened this week is that the president has asked the Justice Department to reimburse him for $230 million in legal fees that he says he incurred while defending himself from the Justice Department.

Peter, he controls the Justice Department, seems somewhat likely that he's going to get paid.

Peter Baker: Well, even he said it was awfully strange that it would be up to him to decide whether to pay him using money. By the way, when we say Justice Department, we should use the word taxpayers, because that's what we're talking about. These are the taxpayers who would be paying the president of the United States $230 million. And I don't see him volunteering to give money to Hillary Clinton, or for that matter, Peter Strzok, or Lisa Page, or any of the other people who've been investigated over the years who didn't get charged and didn't get convicted, but he himself, of course, is only concerned with his own grievance, his own sense of resentment for the government, persecution complex.

And so the idea that the government is going to pay $230 million to the president of the United States is just unheard of. We're beyond unprecedented wow. We should just retire that word because it doesn't even come close.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. David, last word to you. This week just seems to -- it's been a pile up of things that we've never seen before. Is this now the crisis?

David Ignatius: So, you know, we've seen a week where the president asserts essentially unlimited power, and it's the culmination, feels like the culmination of a process has been going on, gathering strength for nine months now. I think we're all waiting for the Supreme Court to say, no, there are limits to your power. And I think the greatest fear a lot of us have is that when this finally gets to the court, the court will ascent, exceed to this level of unitary, unlimited power, and then we're in a really different place.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. Well, I mean, this is our continuing subject on this show. And we'll come back to it, but now we have to go to sports traffic and weather on the eighth. David Ignatius will be doing the traffic report from now on at Washington Week as we expand our footprint across Washington.

Anyway, we do have to leave it there for now. These issues we'll be revisiting next week. I want to thank our guests for joining me, and I want to thank all of you at home for watching us.

For more on how the government shutdown is affecting the president's own base, please read Toluse's article at theatlantic.com.

I'm Jeffrey Goldberg. Goodnight from Washington.