"And that was put into such stark relief at this really remarkable moment when Jonathan and I went to the Oval Office uh on March 16th of this year to see him.

At the end of our reporting process, we we had been asking for an interview. We we had fact-checking questions.... but we didn't want to, you know, sort of have an open mic night with him. We wanted to ask specifics about our reporting. And we did.

But at one point, we asked about power and how he was seeing himself in the context of power just based on things he had been saying to people in public and elsewhere. And it was an astonishing moment.

He had his omnipresent adviser, Natalie Harp. He said, "Go Natalie, go
get the the thing from the historian." I'm paraphrasing. She comes back with these two printouts that she says were were from a historian, words by a presidential historian.

And she hands them to us and the start of the document says essentially Donald Trump is the most powerful person who has ever walked the face of the earth.

And then he proceeds to tick off what he describes as the top 10.

Mao, Hitler, Stalin, uh, Tamarlain, Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, Napoleon, the Caesars, you know, some of the great monsters, and conquerors of history.

And he was making no moral distinction at all between, people who had had murdered and people who had conquered or people who had, you know, had built empires.

It was that they had power and they were willing to use it and that was how he was seeing himself.

The the punchline here was that it turned out that the person who wrote it was not a historian.

It was Gary Player, the golfer's former caddy and business associate... but that didn't matter a great deal.

I mean, the key thing to the people around him is is, you know, is the advice he's getting.

A a president has to have people who will tell him when he's wrong. and and if you look at his foreign policy record, it doesn't look like he's got that."

(early excerpt... there's a Transcript)