Diary

Alexandria, Virginia I entered summer with the following list of tasks: convert the shed into an office; discard several tons of debris from the storage room; assemble that Amish treehouse that’s been sitting in the yard; chop down the ash tree. A gust of wind took down the crabapple tree right before the Memorial Day barbecue. On the guest list: my younger brother, who moonlights as an unlicensed contractor; my wife’s cousin who built his own home; and Terry Schilling, who constructed a luxury treehouse. A normal man would have leaned on such a guest list to get the work done for him. A writer self-conscious about his manliness would make a show of chopping the tree up with the dull blade of a cheap chainsaw.

Apparently an acquaintance has dubbed me the “Kremlinologist of the right.” Redolent as it is of the Cold War-era drama surrounding the Kremlin, when the West was desperately trying to suss out what Winston Churchill called a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, I could hardly object to this quip upon learning of it. Indeed, I recently traveled to two hot spots of the Cold War, Vienna and Budapest. I went full immersion in Vienna, where I attended a screening of Orson Welles’s The Third Man, a humdinger of a movie if there ever was one. Graham Greene set it in postwar Vienna, which was divided between the four occupying powers, France, Great Britain, America and the Soviet Union.

We held the party for my new book, Traffic, at Umberto’s Clam House, by the office of our new news organization, Semafor. Umberto’s is best known as the site of a notorious 1972 mob hit — “they blew him down in a clam bar in New York,” Bob Dylan sang of Joey Gallo. I’d worried the space was too small, but it was perfectly packed and noisy, with blue oil paintings of crabs on the walls. I broke off a conversation with CNN president Chris Licht to take a call from a recently fired anchor from another network. When I came back our executive editor Gina Chua began the short program by spilling who I’d been talking to.

A little over a year ago, I was gravely injured in a missile blast while covering the Ukraine-Russia war for Fox News. The severity of my injuries has made recovery a very long and arduous process. Every day I have a number of things I have to do. So in the morning, I’ve got about an hour and a half or so of facing all the problems that have popped up overnight. I do a lot of exercises, a lot of stretches. I do a lot of balance work. Everything from using rubber bands to try and get my thumb to move a little bit more to taking care of my burns because if I don’t, they break open and bleed a lot. I do that every single day. The list is honestly endless, and the beginning of every day is tough. I tell myself that the worst part of the day is finished in the morning, which is great.

My favorite campaign moment since I announced I was running for president was at the Machine Shed, a restaurant in Urbandale, Iowa. Of course, we all love a packed house and an energetic crowd, but I thought the questions asked were really authentic and suggested to me that there was a level of trust that I have started to build in the community. One person said they liked what I was saying, but wanted to know how I could represent Americans as a Hindu when we’re founded on Judeo-Christian principles. I love that. To be in a full room with a couple hundred people and someone stands up and looks me in the face and asks me that? That’s pretty inspiring. I told them that our basic values are the same, including the emphasis on family.