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Unplugged
(Editor’s note: Mike Allen publishes Axios AM daily. His colleague Marc Caputo interviewed President Trump at the White House yesterday. It provides an insight into Trump’s all-powerful “Great Man” theory.)
President Trump declared on “The Axios Show” yesterday that he’s discovered “no limits” to his power since going to war with Iran.
- A new book reveals he’s been entertaining an even grander idea: that he may be the most powerful man in history, Axios’ Zachary Basu and Marc Caputo report.
Why it matters: Trump is no longer merely testing the limits of the presidency. He’s describing power in world-historical terms — placing himself in the lineage of conquerors, dictators and strongmen who bent nations to their will.
- In a wide-ranging, 45-minute interview yesterday with Axios’ Marc Caputo, Trump repeatedly measured power by submission: G7 leaders believed him when he joked “I’m the boss,” he said, while Israel has “a lot of respect for me” and will “do as I say.”
👀 Zoom in: In “Regime Change,” the forthcoming book by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Trump proudly shows off a document arguing he’s more powerful than Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Stalin, Mao and Hitler.
Trump “began reading from it,” the authors write, “reciting the names of some of history’s most powerful figures” and explaining how each “fell short of his own power as U.S. president.”
- “They didn’t have airplanes, right? You couldn’t travel around,” Trump said of Alexander the Great, the Caesars and William the Conqueror. “Napoleon,” he added “with relish,” according to the authors.
- Haberman and Swan write that the revealing part was “the evident pleasure he took in the company of Mao, Hitler, and Stalin” — and “the untroubled ease with which he accepted a place among men who had reshaped the world through conquest and fear.”
🌐 Zoom out: Hints of that grandiose theory of power surfaced throughout Trump’s interview with Axios, hours after returning from what he called a “very dominant” G7 summit in France.
- Trump named China’s Xi Jinping and India’s Narendra Modi as the world leaders he most admires, praising Xi as “all business” and Modi as “a very tough cookie.”
- He declined to identify the leaders he considers the weakest — then pivoted to lamenting Vladimir Putin’s absence from the G7, which was the G8 prior to Russia’s expulsion after its 2014 annexation of Crimea.
- Trump lingered on French President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to honor him with a dinner at Versailles, the kind of imperial stage Trump called “my weakness.”
Between the lines: Allies, in Trump’s telling, are only relevant when they recognize who holds the real power.
- “If it weren’t for me, Israel would not exist today,” Trump told Axios, adding that his relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is “good, but we have to keep him a little bit sane.”
- Trump struck a similar tone toward Republican hawks furious over his Iran deal: “Some guys that I used to respect, I don’t respect anymore. They’re hardliners,” he said.
- Pressed on why the deal falls short of his original demands, a defiant Trump opted for his own reality — insisting the outcome does, in fact, amount to “unconditional surrender” by Iran as well as “regime change. Reality check: For all of Trump’s claims of limitless power, he acknowledged one force still constrains him — the economy.
Reality check: For all of Trump’s claims of limitless power, he acknowledged one force still constrains him — the economy.
- He argued that extending the war to satisfy hawks could have triggered a “worldwide depression.” He pointed to falling oil prices and a surging stock market as proof he made the right decision to back a deal that could end the Iran war.
- “I have one primary wish as president … I never want to be the late, great Herbert Hoover,” Trump said, referring to the 31st president, who’s forever associated with the Great Depression.
The bottom line: Trump posted the “Great Men” document on Truth Social yesterday, calling its author a “presidential historian.” Haberman and Swan report the author was actually the longtime caddy and personal confidant to golfer Gary Player.
- The document’s conclusion: Trump’s willingness to use his power on a global scale “makes him by far the most powerful person that has EVER walked this planet.”
Watch a clip from the interview.
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