I want to switch to tariffs.

Tyler, could you explain tariffs to us?

That's your homework assignment.

Could you explain specifically is there a governing theory to the way Trump is carrying out his tariff policy?

TYLER PAGER: I mean, I think it's important to sort of reiterate that this has been an interest of Trump's dating back to before his political life and something he wanted to do in the first term and was not necessarily surrounded by the people that largely would just go along with what he said or agreed with his worldview.

So, I think what he sees in tariffs is an economic weapon.

He sees leverage, and Trump is someone that wants to make deals, cut deals, and in order to make a deal, he thinks he needs to have leverage over them.

And so he's trying to reset the global economy with this sort of cudgel.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: But I guess my question is also, is this just going to go on forever?

Like it's Tuesday, so he's slapping punitive tariffs on X country.

Next week, he pulls them off and hits another country.

JONATHAN LEMIRE: It's tariffs, something he's believed in, but it's also something he believes he can execute unilaterally.

It is a personal power here, which is deeply attractive to him, that he can settle scores, that he can go after whatever country's up or down, you know?

And we've seen even this week, you know, depending on, you know, his feelings towards that country's leader at the moment, he'll increase or lower the tariff.

JONATHAN KARL: And, by the way, it's not his power.

JONATHAN LEMIRE: No, it's not his.

JONATHAN KARL: I mean, there is a very serious legal case underway now.

I think there is a very good chance that his so-called reciprocal tariffs will get declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, including the appointees that the justices that he put on the court.

I don't know how it's going to, but that is a very real possibility, not just the tariffs but the trade deals that he's negotiated.

I mean, the U.S.-Mexico agreement was ratified by Congress.

NAFTA was ratified by Congress.

Trade deals need to be ratified by Congress.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.

VIVIAN SALAMA: I mean, Trump's preference for tariffs is also very indicative of how he does -- how he operates, because he's doing this in a punitive way to punish states for typically what presidents would use sanctions for.

But sanctions are very tedious.

They take a lot of legal work to actually roll out.

Tariffs are a lot easier, at least under the Trump administration don't if about that.

So, he can put them on and then next week just completely pull them back if he wants to.

And that's how he's doing business with a lot of these countries where he is holding their feet to the fire and saying tariffs this week, but next week we can roll them back.

And that's - - it's roiling markets as a result of it.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.

My personal opinion is that the media should control international tariffs, but that's just me.

JONATHAN KARL: Specifically the host of this.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Just specifically Washington Week.

The -- I want to I want to switch to the Justice Department issues for a moment.

We see that there -- now the Trump administration is going to investigate the New York State attorney general.

We see that the FBI is firing more of its officials who were involved in authorized investigations of Donald Trump or Donald Trump-related activities.

Jon, you've been following this for a long time.

This is fairly naked now.

JONATHAN KARL: It's retribution.

I mean, this is actually what Trump campaigned on, maybe even more than tariffs, definitely more than tariffs, retribution.

He complained about -- I mean, this is the Justice Department that tried to put him in prison.

And he is out to take revenge against anybody involved in any of those.

And he's got people in power to do it.

And what was interesting this week is you had the firing of Brian Driscoll, who, for a hot second, was the acting FBI director, but, you know, a career FBI agent, storied career with the agency gone.

And also the head of the Washington Field Office, who, you know, had been involved in supervising some of the January 6th investigation in the Mar-a-Lago, the investigation and the documents in Mar-a-Lago.

What's interesting about that is the head of the Washington Field Office was put in that position by Kash Patel.

And Kash Patel went on television and said that he had made the decision because he was an upstanding guy who had tried to fight back against the weaponization, but he had to follow orders because he was in the chain of command.

And now Kash Patel has been undermined, which I think is a -- I don't know what that means.

This is the guy, this was the president's, you know, appointee to clean out the FBI.

And even somebody that he stood up for is gone.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Tyler, in your book that just came out, you talk a lot about -- obviously it's about the Biden campaign and the Trump campaign.

Is any of this -- this level of retribution, is it surprising to you based on what you and your co-authors saw develop over the last year-and-a-half?

TYLER PAGER: No.

And I think it comes back to Trump's decision to run.

His decision was crystallized in large part because of the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago.

And he saw he was not just running for his freedom, but he wanted to come back to Washington and lead a retribution campaign against all of those people that he felt persecuted him.

So, we are seeing him carry out much of what he promised to do on the campaign trail and what animated him personally to run for office.

JONATHAN LEMIRE: And the tone was set in the first hours, day one, the January 6th pardons.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right, right, which came and went, were not as shocking to the American people as some people thought they might be.

In other news, Trump has just removed the head of the IRS.

This is the -- he was the sixth person to run the IRS this year.

I want to -- by the way, I don't know if you guys know this, but in the Constitution, it says that if the IRS has more than seven commissioners, no one has to pay taxes today.

Yes, no, it's a very small type.

TYLER PAGER: The Treasury secretary gets another job following the long line of Senior Trump administration officials who just pick up jobs.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right, Marco Rubio being the secretary of state and the national security adviser.

What do we know about this new firing?

JONATHAN KARL: My understanding is Bessent just had -- didn't have a working relationship with him and didn't think he could do the job.

I think this was him clashing with the Treasury secretary.

And, you know, Billy Long was not exactly the most qualified IRS commissioner.

I mean, he got confirmed.

His main piece on his resume regarding the IRS is he sponsoring a bill in Congress to eliminate the IRS.

He's a career auctioneer, very likable guy, no experience related to running an organization with, at the time, had 100,000 employees.

I think about a quarter of those employees are now gone.

But, you know, he's going to be ambassador to Iceland now.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right, which is not a bad job.

It's not Greenland.

JONATHAN KARL: It's not Greenland.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

The -- I have to ask you guys, you're White House correspondents, and something very strange happened at the White House this week, we had a little bit of a president on the roof situation.

Here, you can watch this for yourselves.

DONALD TRUMP: Something beautiful.

REPORTER: What does that mean?

DONALD TRUMP: It's more ways to spend my money.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Was he -- I mean, this is criminology, I guess, or White Houseology, was he suggesting that he's building a dome over the West Wing?

JONATHAN LEMIRE: Yes.

The hand gestures disturbed me, frankly.

He's already paved over the rose garden.

He's adding a ballroom.

This seems to be -- maybe he's adding a second level, expanding extreme -- JONATHAN KARL: The amount of gold in the Oval Office is astounding.

TYLER PAGER: Each day, each time we see it, there's more and more of a -- I mean, it is clear he is making this his own.

He wants to leave a mark, but he also wants to turn the White House into a place that he enjoys spending time.

That is why he built basically a Mar-a-Lago patio over the Rose Garden.

It's why he's building a ballroom.

He's making this into his home.

And he's inspecting it like it's his personal property.

That's what we saw with him walking on the roof.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Well, seeing him -- that was his natural element.

He's looking at a building and trying to figure out what to do with it.

That's what he spent most of his life doing.

But, nevertheless, I'm going to press on it.

Is he building a dome on the West Wing, because that will look very, very strange?

I mean, he was making the international sign for, I'm building a dome.

TYLER PAGER: You don't want to over interpret what Trump's hand motions are at any point.

You just don't know.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I mean, I think it's literally my job, but, okay, I won't for purposes of the show.

JONATHAN KARL: I mean, he's planning to build in 90,000-square-foot ballroom.

That house there, that White House is 55,000 square feet.

So, I mean, he's got big plans.

And to me, it says something about the difference between the first presidency and the second Trump presidency.

The first Trump presidency kind of came and went.

It was rather ephemeral in its effects on the country despite what we all saw at the time.

This one, he's making more radical changes to the country and to the White House that'll live well beyond his presidency.

TYLER PAGER: And I think part of it is because he now knows how government works.

I think one of the things that really is the key difference between the first term and the second term is that he had a whole host of characters in the government that were trying to stymie his efforts to radically change the country.

He's now surrounded by people that are fully supportive of his agenda and helping him do it.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

I mean, one final question to you, Tyler, as the author of a book about the race.

It seems very effective thing to do, to be president and then be off of four years and plan the next four years.

It turns out in retrospect.

TYLER PAGER: Yes, he is way more effective at accomplishing his agenda with having that time out of office because those -- a lot of his aides, Russ Vought, those sorts of officials, spent their time out of government planning for this term.

And so what they've done is an onslaught of executive orders in the first six months that accomplished a lot of their goals very quickly because he knew what they wanted to do.