Maggie Haberman & Jonathan Swan's "most astonishing" Interview With Pres. Trump | The View

I've had a few encounters with Donald Trump over the years.This was the most astonishing.We're sitting across the table from him in the Oval Office.It's the 17th day of the war with Iran.He has not a map of the Middle East, but photographs of maple trees on the table.And he says, you know, I'm buying maple trees for the White House and what have you.

As one does.As one does.And then we asked him a question.He had told Tucker Carlson We had this in our reporting earlier in 2025, that he was the most powerful American president there ever has been.We asked him about that.And he's got this young woman who works for him called Natalie Harp.

They call her the human printer, because she just prints.So he says, Natalie, Natalie, go fetch me the thing.And she runs off.And in about a minute, she's back with these printouts.And he hands them to us.And he's, like, watching us while we're reading them.

And he says, this is from a historian.And the document compares him favorably in terms of his power to Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Napoleon, Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, the Caesars.

And he thought that was a good thing among the top 10.

There was no moral dimension to it, it was just about the metric of raw power.And he was sitting there, he said, Napoleon, that's very interesting.Hitler, Mao, Stalin.And we were sort of sitting there going, okay.It turned out the historian was actually a former golf caddy for Gary Player, so not a historian.But it was illuminating in a different way, which is that Donald Trump in this term is taking these giant risks that he didn't take in term one.