Thus we’ll probably know only in retrospect when Donald Trump has finally gone too far. But we can note in real time when he goes further than he has before—and he did that again yesterday.

* * *

The vehicle was Trump’s astonishing on-the-record interview with Peter Baker, Michael Schmidt, and Maggie Haberman of The New York Times. The 7,500-word transcript is here. The Times says these passages are mere “excerpts,” but they are plenty, and are completely worth reading end-to-end.

First, an obvious point that is newly relevant after this interview: For all of Trump’s denunciation of the “failing” and “fake news” mainstream press, he clearly craves attention and approval from the most mainstream-y of the established media. Barack Obama seemed to do interviews with major newspapers and networks because he had to—and then sessions on Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars and Zack Galifinakis’s Between Two Ferns and Marc Maron’s WTF because he liked to.

By contrast Trump, for all his anti-press tweeting and rally-ranting, seems to lap up attention from what he thinks of as the big media powers of his rising years in New York, starting with Time magazine and the Times. Think of how he displayed a fake Time cover in his golf-course club houses and has inflated the total of his actual cover appearances, a Time cover being the mark of having made it for someone who grew up when he did. Two months ago, Trump called Time’s editor, Nancy Gibbs, and two colleagues in for a rambling tour of the private quarters of the White House—and you get the feeling from their account that Trump would have been happy to sit and talk all night. (“Mr. President, we don’t want to hold you,” you can almost hear them saying.)

In the case of the new NYT interview, Trump comes across as enjoying the chatting and camaraderie of the reporters. For instance, on the difficulty of rolling back health benefits once they’ve been extended:

Trump: Nothing changes. Nothing changes. Once you get something for pre-existing conditions, etc., etc. Once you get something, it’s awfully tough to take it away. Haberman: That’s been the thing for four years. When you win an entitlement, you can’t take it back. Trump: But what it does, Maggie, it means it gets tougher and tougher. As they get something, it gets tougher.

Through the course of the transcript, you can sense Trump shifting from an opening tone that is not very wary at all—“Hi fellas, how you doing!” are his first words—to a comfortable intimate-schmoozing performance before what he assumes will be a sympathetic audience. All credit to the Times reporters for drawing him out this way. It’s the journalistic counterpart of the strategy leaders from Xi Jinping to Emmanuel Macron have figured out: You get more from Trump with honey than with vinegar.

And what makes this exposure to Trump’s mind and mood different from what we’ve seen over his past two years in political life and his previous decades in the public eye? For me it’s the accumulation of these elements: