A reporter for the New York Times admitted on Friday that President Donald Trump is "way more effective" in his second term in the White House.
During a conversation on "Washington Week with the Atlantic," ABC News chief Washington correspondent Jon Karl, MSNBC's Jonathan Lemire, and The New York Times White House correspondent Tyler Pager were discussing President Donald Trump's announcement that he and private donors would foot the bill for a new ballroom costing $200 million at the White House.
"I mean, he's planning to build a 90,000-square-foot ballroom," Karl said. "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."
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Karl said that Trump's first term "kind of came and went. It was rather ephemeral in its effects on the country despite what we all saw at the time."
The ABC News chief added that in Trump's second term, "he's making more radical changes to the country and to the White House that'll live well beyond his presidency."
The Times' Pager agreed, and admitted that Trump has a more loyal staff in his second administration as compared to his first.
"And I think part of it is because he now knows how government works," the reporter said. "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."
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Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, then asked Pager, who authored "2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America" with Josh Dawsey and Isaac Arnsdorf, if it is "very effective" to be president for four years, and "then be off for four years and plan the next four years."
"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," Pager said. "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."
