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A Player To Be Named Later
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Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan were bylined, after Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt, on NYT’s account of Trump’s equivocations over whether to help Mohammed bin Salman fight back the Houthis.For two weeks, the question of whether to yield to pleas from Saudi Arabia and order the U.S. military to strike targets in Yemen controlled by the Iran-backed Houthis has bedeviled President Trump.
A decision to go forward could open another front in the war against Iran that Mr. Trump started but has been unable to end as it spreads economic shock around the globe.
The president had wavered for weeks over the Saudi appeals for help in fighting the Houthis, who took advantage of the instability in the Middle East and reignited their war with the kingdom this summer.
But things came to a head on Thursday: Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s de facto leader and a major ally in the Iran war, called the president to implore him, again, to step in to help blunt the rapidly advancing group, administration officials said.
Mr. Trump had met with advisers just the day before and told them he did not favor strikes. But after speaking with the Saudi crown prince, he reversed himself and told the Pentagon to prepare for airstrikes against the Houthis.
But by midday Sunday, the president appeared to have reversed himself again. There would be no U.S. airstrikes against the Houthis — at least not for the time being, according to administration officials. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss military planning.
The story came out Sunday, and so after Trump went to Camp David on Saturday to make this decision. And so also after something … weird happened on Saturday night: Trump returned from Camp David early.
Donald Trump flew home to D.C. late Saturday evening, cutting short his trip to Camp David as the State Department warned Americans abroad that the conflict between Saudi forces and Yemen’s Houthi rebels was rapidly escalating.
But the president was focused on other issues Sunday as he took an early morning ride to his golf club in Sterling, Virginia, after he was spotted with golfers Gary Player and Bryson DeChambeau – along with DeChambeau’s model girlfriend Mikayla Demaiter – on his helicopter ride back to the White House. Rain and clouds rolled through the D.C. area over the weekend, which typically cause changes to the president’s schedule when he’s flying back from Camp David.
The Independent reached out to the White House for a reason why Trump cut short his trip to the presidential retreat in Maryland, after White House officials declined to give an explanation to pool reporters tailing him. On Sunday morning, Trump left for his Sterling, Virginia club — a short drive from the White House — just before 9 a.m.
Meanwhile, the conflict in the Middle East appears to be deteriorating with no sign of a negotiated settlement to end hostilities on the cards for the near future. Territorial gains by Houthi militants in Yemen and further clashes with Saudi forces have caused fears to rise of even tighter restrictions or greater danger to civilian energy traffic passing through the Strait of Hormuz and the surrounding waterways.
And, per the pool report, Trump returned early on a separate helicopter from his irreplaceable aides, Natalie Harp and Walt Nauta, who returned five minutes earlier on a different helicopter. The next day, Sunday, Trump went to his Virginia golf course for seven hours, but was not seen playing golf.
Most of the press attention about this early return has focused on Bryson DeChambeau and his busty girlfriend because it gives them an excuse to show boobies. And I do find it notable that Trump walked away from a planning session on how to bail the Saudis out of the security crisis he had created by starting a stupid war with one of the LIV golfers who made a losing bet on Saudi money.
But I’m interested in Gary Player’s presence. Or perhaps I want to use Gary Player’s presence to talk about the role he plays in the epilogue of Maggie and Swan’s book. Because like Maggie and Swan, Player seems to serve a mirroring function for Trump that parrots his desire for power.
The epilogue describes how the journalists had spent two months trying to get an audience with Trump for the book, until suddenly in mid-March — as the Iran War, and with it, his presidency and the US empire, had started falling apart — he granted it, but not before claiming Maggie “insists on writing false stories about me, even though she fully knows and understands that the exact opposite of anything she says is usually the truth” in a Truth Social post.
They situated the interview as occurring on the seventeenth day of the war: “Trump had made a demand for an international coalition of warships to secure the waterway, but few nations seemed interested in helping.”
Trump talked about maple trees. Steven Cheung talked about TikTok engagement arising from the war. Trump showed off his ballroom plans.
The journalists interjected, making an extradiegetic comment, describing a focus group, starting that same day, that would show voters hated the war. But Trump didn’t care about polls, the journalists continued their interjection, because he was operating on gut instinct. They closed that interjection with this astonishing paragraph:
It would take a combination of mind reader and psychologist to explain fully why Trump was willing to gamble so much more recklessly now. There were the obvious theories: He was term-limited and no longer had to worry about reelection; he had immunity confirmed by the Supreme Court and no longer had to worry about prosecutions; he was more confident in his instincts; he had already served a presidential term and had felt vindicated so often; and there was the fact that he was a walking moral hazard, rarely saddled for long with the costs or consequences of his risk-taking and rule-breaking. Now was his moment to try things, like military adventures and overthrowing the global trade system.
The don’t consider what the rest of us would (indeed, Maggie has specifically disavowed the possibility in interviews) — that the man is nuts, in a dangerous combination of Narcissistic spiral and senility, which makes him very easy to manipulate by a shrinking number of handlers both within and outside the White House. Nor do they consider that possibility in the next paragraph, where they describe how “digressive” the actual interview was. McDonald’s stunt, Walter Reed, Netanyahu “is not afraid of war,” Miss Universe and Venezuela, Pam Bondi’s slowness “with respect to things,” his enthusiasm for but ignorance of his own tariffs.
Then the journalists invite Trump to reflect on how powerful he (believes he) is. That’s where Gary Player came in.
Instead of answering directly, he embarked on a strange story.
“There’s a great golfer named Gary Player,” he said. “Did you ever hear of him?” Player, Trump explained, was a friend and one of the greatest golfers of all time. He had recently turned ninety and Trump had played with him to mark his birthday. “And he shot a seventy-one, which is pretty tough.”
But the point of the story was not about golf. It was about a friend of Player’s, a man Trump described as “a historian.” They had attended an event honoring Player, Trump said, and the historian—whose name Trump could not immediately recall, dispatching Harp to find it—had gotten up to speak. “And he said, ‘I’d like to say something about the President.’ ”
Trump gestured for Harp to bring us copies of the two-page document. He began reading from it, reciting the names of some of history’s most powerful figures, explaining how each fell short of his own power as U.S. President. Alexander the Great, the Caesars, William the Conqueror—“They didn’t have airplanes, right? You couldn’t travel around.” Genghis Khan. Attila the Hun. Tamerlane. “Napoleon,” he said with relish. “Hitler. Mao. Stalin.”
These leaders “maintained power through fear,” he said. “Who would ever do a thing like that? Right?”
Trump lingered on the document’s central argument: that each leader, however fearsome in his day, had no global reach. Their power was local. But his was not.
“I never thought of it in terms of that,” Trump said. “It’s very interesting, the power.” Then he added: “But when I read it, I said, ‘He’s right.’ ”
[snip]
“If President Trump is the American Eagle, then William the Conqueror was merely a sparrow.”
“You can’t talk about your power,” Trump told us. “Oh, I’m so powerful. You can’t do that. Doesn’t come off well.” He was content to let someone else make the case on his behalf, and he wanted to make sure we left with a copy.
The idea was, Trump’s lifetime biographer insinuated, that Trump was letting Gary Player’s “historian” tell of his unsurpassed power, rather than speaking of it himself. He was using a storyteller to make himself the most powerful man in history.
The journalists interject again to reveal that the author of this sycophantic assessment was not a professional historian, but rather a hobbyist; he was actually Player’s caddy. (But then, Trump’s caddy, Dan Scavino, is one of the few who remains in his proximity.)
Nevertheless the caddy story is the foil for Trump to tell Maggie and Swan exactly what they were spinning away through their whole book: he really is that powerful. And they agree with him.
Embellishing this idea, Trump then surprised us by articulating one of the central arguments we had made in the introduction to our book, though from his own peculiar vantage point:
[snip]
the underlying point he made—that if he had served a consecutive second term beginning in January 2021, he would never have accumulated the power he now wielded—matched our own analysis.
The indictments, the conviction, the assassination attempts, the four years of exile that allowed him to shed the restraining forces of his first term, to assemble a team of true loyalists who had spent years studying the levers of government and plotting how to seize them—all of it had, paradoxically, made Trump stronger, more ruthless, and more commanding than he could have been otherwise: the most powerful President of our lifetimes.
Even in quoting John Judis making a different point, that Trump had destroyed a world, they still see that as Trump’s power, not his weakness.
Nobody—not the diplomats in Brussels, not the generals at NATO headquarters, not the delegates at the United Nations—believed the old order was coming back. In making this argument, the political commentator John Judis had compared Trump to one of the philosopher Hegel’s “world-historical individuals”—figures who, without fully understanding what they were doing, demolished one era and ushered in another.
This is, indeed, their thesis, as they lay out in insanely stupid partisan frame in the book’s introduction.
History is full of ironies. For Democrats, there could be no irony more painful than the realization it was their own success in removing Donald Trump from the White House in the 2020 election—and their subsequent determination to ensure he would never return—that has made him the most consequential and feared President of our lifetimes.
Maggie, who provided cover for his first criminal investigation over and over (and makes excuses for doing so in this book), and Swan, who lied about his weaponization of DOJ, treated the attempted prosecution of a coup and stolen documents as a partisan ploy, precisely what Trump claims they were. If only Joe Biden had let himself be beat in 2020, is the conceit, Trump — who was already hiring people using willingness to invoke the Insurrection Act in his lame duck — would not have embraced fascism (though the word fascism only appears in this book in a misleading description of Tyler Robinson’s bullet inscriptions). They outsource the responsibility for Trump’s fascist turn in a book that routinely ignores that the outside foreign influences described as intervening in his second term got him elected the first time (which I’ll return to).
The epilogue ends with Trump bullying Maggie again, in a bid to get her to proclaim him a winner.
Remember this,” he said. “I know your book will be critical, but remember this: People are tired of your bullshit. Always criticizing.”
He invoked his political comeback and 2024 victory. “They illegally indicted me, they impeached me, they did everything—they shot me, I guess you could say. But I won the election in a landslide. Nobody else could’ve done it,” he added. “And there’s only one thing you can say about me that anybody believes, and you know what that is.
“Essentially I won every fucking time,” he said.
Maggie told him she hoped he would read the book, that we thought it captured his presidency quite well.
Trump wasn’t finished. “And I’m tired of winning and winning and winning and just getting bad fucking press. It’s about time that you tell the truth. Okay?”
In the final scene, Trump signs Executive Orders the content of which he doesn’t understand, and a heavy gray hangs over DC.
This is, as Maggie’s stories always are, novelistic non-fiction, a narrative that always casts herself as privileged interpreter of his power and in so doing obscures the most important details, as I described when her last book came out.
Those stories, individually and as a corpus, revealed Trump to be a skilled bully. But those stories of Trump’s bullying commanded our attention, just like his reality TV show did, and reassured him that continued bullying would continue to dominate press coverage.
That press coverage, I’m convinced, not only was complicit in the bullying, but also served as a distraction from things that really mattered or levers that we might have used to neutralize the bullying.
It was power by reality TV. And Maggie Haberman was and remains a key producer of that power.
But we’re at a narrative break. We’re at a moment of Trump’s own making where both the bases of US power — its empire’s roots in the Middle East — and his own family — with Crown Prince Bonesaw’s enormous investments in Trump’s family, may collapse.
And at the moment that happened, Trump chose to travel with the guy whose caddy deemed Trump the most powerful ever over traveling with Natalie Harp.
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