♪♪ >> Hello and welcome to "GZERO World."

I'm Ian Bremmer and today I brought a few friends along with me, our first ever live studio audience.

[ Cheers and applause ] We've got a great show for you, certainly a show for you, a conversation with two of the most distinguished journalists in America.

I promise you that is not an oxymoron.

D.C. power couple Susan Glasser and Peter Baker.

She's a Washington columnist for The New Yorker.

He's chief White House correspondent for The New York Times.

And together, they're topping best-seller lists, came out at number two with a bullet, a new book called "The Divider."

It's an incredibly detailed, at times jaw-dropping look at the Trump presidency.

We'll talk about that.

We'll talk about the upcoming U.S. midterms and the state of American democracy in 2022.

How much longer do we all have?

Don't worry.

I've also got your "Puppet Regime."

>> What's going on here?

>> This is an intervention.

>> Ha.

>> But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

>> Major corporate funding provided by founding sponsor First Republic.

At First Republic, our clients come first.

Taking the time to listen helps us provide customized banking and wealth-management solutions.

More on our clients at firstrepublic.com.

Additional funding provided by... ...and by... >> Who are the 2022 midterm elections about?

I have options for you and the audience.

We're going to start with option A.

The midterms are about Joe Biden, but... [ Audience cheers, boos ] Yeah, maybe.

Maybe.

Traditionally, they have been a referendum on the incumbent, that's true.

The incumbent president and his party.

It's always been a "him."

That may change over time.

And if Republican House leader Kevin McCarthy has his way, the next month will be all about blaming an "aging and out of touch president, occasionally falls off his bicycle, for the highest levels of inflation in 40 years and hordes of illegal immigrants swarming the southern border, and even occasionally Martha's Vineyard."

>> Joe Biden has launched an assault on the soul of America.

On its people, on its laws, on its most sacred values.

>> Unfortunately for McCarthy, the President is still riding high off what the Gen Z-ers would call his hot girl summer.

[ Laughter ] He has, with the passage of multiple pieces of landmark legislation over the past months, a popular executive order on student loan forgiveness, though it does have some detractors.

Not to mention falling gas prices, until at least the Saudis had something to say about it.

And a booming job market.

And judging by his September 1st speech outside Philadelphia's Independence Hall, you remember?

It's the one that kind of made him look really evil and malevolent.

Biden is intent on making the midterms all about 45 and his most hard-line supporters.

Here he is.

>> But there's no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven, and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans.

And that is a threat to this country.

>> I promised you more than one option.

Let's try a second option.

Kick the tires on option B.

The midterms are actually about Donald Trump.

[ Audience boos ] Oh, Manhattan audience.

Look at this, Chelsea on a Friday night.

It's true, it's true that the former president who is facing multiple criminal and civil investigations, some of which are even new, continue to promote lies about the 2020 election and defend those who violently assaulted the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Also true, however, that not all Republicans and not even all Trump supporters see it that way.

Biden himself has acknowledged that.

And surely, tarring one-third of the U.S. population, none of whom happen to be in this audience, apparently, as being beyond redemption, does little to bridge our country's political divide.

But hey, it is a strategy.

Getting back to my original question though, maybe "who" is the wrong word.

Maybe we should be asking what the midterm elections are about.

Option C. The midterms are about the culture wars.

>> Yeah!

>> Yeah?

Maybe?

Maybe.

Everyone's saying, "Nah, it's Joe Biden.

It's really Joe Biden."

Well, the culture wars does include Roe vs. Wade, right?

Yes.

Yes, it does.

Start with a series of horrific shootings this spring and summer, put gun control front and center.

That is until the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade and with it, nearly five decades of abortion law.

That is a lot to digest.

And don't forget a generational divide on gender rights.

And of course MMA-style PTA meetings that's like cage fighting over critical race theory, whatever that is.

Will that be enough to get voters out to the polls?

Regardless of who or what the midterms are about this year, one thing is clear: The global stakes are plenty high.

We wake up every morning to news of democracy under attack, whether it's Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine or China's tightening grip on Taiwan.

And you better believe that as American voters are heading to the polls on November 8th, our allies and our adversaries alike will be watching closely to see how healthy our own democracy is.

To talk about all of that and more, I'm joined today by The New York Times' Peter Baker and The New Yorker's Susan Glasser.

They both live in Washington D.C. How does that work?

They're out with a new book on former president Trump called "The Divider."

And it's topping all the best-seller lists.

Let's get right to it.

♪♪ Friends, Romans, divided countrymen, please help me in welcoming Susan Glasser and Peter Baker.

[ Cheers and applause ] So you wrote a book about Trump.

>> Yeah.

>> It's doing incredibly well.

The audience doesn't want to hear more about Trump.

I keep hearing people saying they don't want to hear more about Trump.

You're giving us more about Trump.

Do people not know what they want?

>> Yeah.

>> Have you ever been on a highway when the car crashes?

People say they don't want the traffic jam.

Why do they stop the car and look at the accident?

This is like, I'm sorry, but you need to read about it.

You need to understand what happened.

Right?

>> When you started this book, and you said this in the acknowledgements.

I thought that was very interesting.

You were planning on actually leaving the United States to become foreign correspondents.

And you chose not to when Trump was elected.

Is that because the U.S. felt like more of a foreign country to you at that point anyway?

>> Well, Peter had been a White House correspondent going all the way back to Bill Clinton.

And I think the concept was that if somebody's going to be blowing up the White House, you probably want to have, if you're The New York Times, the person there who understands what's like normal-crazy and what's crazy-crazy in the White House.

So yeah, we moved back to Washington a few months after Peter and our son moved away from Washington.

We had to get a whole new house.

And so we got to be foreign correspondents in our hometown.

>> And if you're being foreign correspondents, how are you -- Are you explaining the United States and the Trump White House to a whole bunch of readers that don't understand him?

No, it's not just they don't like him or they don't relate to him.

They literally think he's from another planet.

Is that what you're basically saying?

>> Well, he is from another planet, in terms of Washington.

Right?

He was like no other president we've ever had.

And so that was the job.

The job was to try to understand how different this White House was, as Susan says.

Not just the normal, okay, Republican-Democrat, but normal president versus not normal president.

He fits in the not normal president category.

And so it was important to find out what is going on there as best we can.

>> Now, you say it's like a car crash.

But to be fair, if you told me the car crash that I'm about to see is literally the same as the car crash I just saw a mile ago, I might speed up a little bit.

[ Laughter ] This is a different book.

What is it that is particularly unusual, new, novel in not 20 minutes, that you're saying, "No, here's something, here's why our take together really matters on this really over-covered guy"?

>> Right.

Except that it's not.

The truth is that there actually hasn't been an actual history of the four years of the Trump administration.

And there's been a lot of great journalism all along the way.

These are important moments.

But if your kid or your grandkid 10 years from now is like, "What the heck?

Donald Trump was a president?"

We really wanted to write a book that would put together and show that January 6th and the catastrophic ending of the Trump presidency in 2020, it was not some crazy outlier that you can just sort of look at what happened at the end.

But that really, you have to go back and look at all the four years to really understand.

And then you see very clearly, by the way, that this was not some extreme, bizarre event at the end, but a four-year war on American institutions.

Every presidency, you're going to have a book like this that comes out that's a full history.

That's going to happen with any White House.

The difference with Donald Trump is that this is, as we put it in the introduction, an active crime scene, right?

It's not just history.

This is the present day of American politics and maybe even its future.

So there's an urgency to it.

And what we found is that actually in many examples like this, it's not just the clown show or the tweets.

That can often be the public theater of the presidency that we saw so much.

But when you go back and you look into it, many of the things that we didn't take seriously enough were real attacks.

For example, pulling out of NATO.

We were told by multiple officials, Trump was much more serious about this than I think the reporting on it contemporaneously had us to understand.

>> He said it was obsolete.

He said, "These people aren't paying.

Why do we bother?

Why is it worthwhile?"

But then of course, I thought one of the interesting things about NATO, was that it was the one time I remember Trump saying publicly that he was wrong about something.

He initially uttered that it was obsolete.

Then he said, "Well, yeah, but I didn't -- I was a real-estate guy.

I talked to my generals.

The generals know more about this stuff.

And they said it's not.

And now I believe my generals."

What was behind that?

I remember when he said that.

>> Yeah.

Well, because they were waging this war to basically keep him from blowing up the alliance.

And I don't think he ever actually really changed his mind.

>> Yeah, he didn't change his mind.

>> I think he still -- >> He did say that.

>> He did say it.

I think he still believes it was obsolete because he kept saying again and again to his staff, "Maybe we just get out, let's just get out."

And they kept saying, "No, sir, let's not do that because it would just destroy our relationships with Europe.

And that's actually kind of important to the United States."

Imagine, of course, if we had Putin invading Ukraine without the United States being part of NATO.

What a difference that would make.

>> So this brings me to two different sorts of points.

The first is, Biden becomes president.

NATO today is considerably stronger than it was, not only under Trump, but before Trump.

>> Yeah.

>> So does that mean to you that actually those four years of Trump presidency don't actually have the same impact that you might have thought they would have at the time that you were in the middle?

>> Yeah, but now you need an invasion to make it go away?

That's not exactly the right -- >> Well, but even the perspective on the United States once Biden came in.

suddenly you saw those numbers in the Pew surveys from all the European populations that had sunk to these incredible post-war lows, and they just bounced right back up.

Just felt like people were just ready to turn the page and move on.

Do you feel that way?

>> Look, Ian, you work internationally with a lot of world leaders.

What do they think about the word of the United States right now?

They don't think it's very good, do they?

United States as a leader in the world.

Would you make a deal with the United States that was controversial and think that it was going to stick forever or maybe just for the next two years?

I think that the damage done to American credibility when it comes to making deals is very, very serious.

>> If he comes back or just generally?

>> Just generally because the prospect that Republicans could take over Congress, and even if it's not Trump, the party has been remade in his image in a way that I think would lend anyone to question, if you had another international climate accord, how much stock would you put in the United States' long-term willingness to commit to a course of action right now?

As long as the U.S. remains this polarized and this divided, the greatest geopolitical crisis in the world is right in Washington.

It's right in our midterm election.

And I think that's going to be the case for the foreseeable future.

The foreign policy crisis is not about NATO per se.

It's about the United States and whether this superpower can get its act together.

And there's no sign of that happening.

>> You brought up midterms.

I want to talk more about foreign policy, but I'll ask about midterms directly because we've just seen, in The Washington Post, that a significant majority of Republicans that are actually running for office in the House are actually election deniers, or at least have said that publicly.

What does that mean to you in how the Republican Party is potentially turning and what we're setting ourselves up for 2024?

Given, again, everything that you are spending your lives on right now.

Peter, I'll go to you.

>> Well, it's all about Trump, right?

It's about his dominance of the party.

It's about currying favor with the king.

They know that they can't say anything other than that because then they pay the price.

And they know it because they've seen it happen.

What happened to the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach him over January 6th?

Gone.

Lost their primaries, were forced out, decided to leave out of frustration, what have you.

And the rest of them saw what happened.

So they all say they agree with former president Trump about the election, whether they do or not because that's the price of admission.

You don't get into the party unless you say that.

>> So let me move on to where we think Russia is going.

And I say that because you wrote a book on Putin.

>> We write all the fun characters.

>> You do.

[ Laughter ] And I wonder at the time that you were writing that, because clearly, your view of Trump has been fairly consistent over the course of the last four years.

I'm wondering if your view of Putin has been very different over the course of the past, say, 15?

>> I think it's been very consistent.

If you go back, we were there for Putin's first term.

>> I remember.

>> First four years in office.

And I think if you look back, you see the through lines from when he was starting to today.

Now, I don't think we would've necessarily said then he would invade other countries per se.

But we knew that he was not some modernizer, not some Westernizer the way a lot of people in Washington thought or hoped he was.

That he was in fact a KGB guy who wanted to restore central power at the very least, if not the old borders of the Soviet Union.

I think what you see today is very much the logical outcome of what we saw in those four years.

>> Yeah, that's right.

I think with both Putin and Trump, they're very different characters, but a similar rule applies, which is when somebody tells you who they are, you should listen.

And when we were in Russia preparing to come back to the United States -- and this was early in Putin's tenure -- what did he say?

He said the breakup of the Soviet Union is the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.

A century filled with more than its share of catastrophes.

And this was an incredibly revealing moment.

It suggested that he was unsatisfied with the post-Cold War peace, that he would do whatever he could, given his capacities at the time, to revise what he saw as defeat for Russia and the Soviet Union.

And basically that's what he's done.

>> Now, right now we are in an environment where people are getting increasingly concerned about where this is all heading.

People ask me, "What's the off-ramp?"

Can you even talk about an off-ramp until you can talk about trying to stabilize the situation?

We're not even at that point yet.

>> Honestly, I find this "off-ramp" phrasing to be completely triggering of me.

>> I didn't mean to... >> No, no, no.

But it's not you.

It's not you.

>> But I did, apparently.

>> Ian, how many times have you had U.S. government officials in the last 15 years talk to you with very great seriousness about the various off-ramp proposals that they were going to offer to Vladimir Putin to get him to stop invading Georgia?

To get him to stop annexing Crimea?

To get him to stop intervening in Syria?

Have you ever known Vladimir Putin to be a big fan of American-created off-ramps?

>> No, not particularly.

[ Laughter ] >> No.

And a lot of people were focused on when Joe Biden said "Armageddon."

The thing that really worried me about Joe Biden's comments were that he used this phrase "off-ramp" because that suggests to me that he's thinking about proposing something to Vladimir Putin, that it's hard to imagine Vladimir Putin accepting.

>> Biden saying that this is the most dangerous time, this is the closest we are to nuclear war.

Nuclear war.

Something that really scared us when we were young.

And we all remember "The Day After," right?

I had nightmares for months after that.

Since 1962.

I don't think most Americans -- I think one of the reasons that "Armageddon" is a big deal is because most Americans were not ready to be propelled back into that reality.

Do you think that's where we are right now?

>> Well, I think you have to take it seriously, right?

In other words, there's a lot of reason to believe that Putin is just blustering.

He tends to talk about nuclear weapons at times when he is weak, when he has had a setback of some sort.

So it's his way of re-establishing dominance in a sort of Trumpian way, in the international stage.

"Pay attention to me.

I'm strong.

Don't think I'm weak."

Doesn't mean he is necessarily preparing to do it.

Intelligence people would tell you they haven't seen any signs of moving of assets or resources that would indicate that.

But having said that, you can't assume that.

What if you're wrong?

What if that assumption is wrong?

When somebody tells you, as Susan says, that they're thinking about using nuclear weapons, you ought to take that seriously.

So that's when you hear a president say, "Armageddon," yeah, it's alarmist language, but if you're not taking it seriously, then we're not doing it right.

>> So if I want to take the two halves of this conversation and put them together, you were just talking about how former president Trump wanted to leave NATO.

And he probably won't have the same guardrails on him in terms of the kind of cabinet if he wins a second time around.

If you are right and Trump is going to run and gets the nomination and is back on Twitter and back on Facebook, and that is the policy that he is driving, what happens?

>> Well, I think you're right to suggest that the fraying of this very bipartisan consensus in Washington around support for Ukraine is likely to occur.

Donald Trump has been pretty vocal -- considering actually how disastrous it's been for Russia, Donald Trump has been a pretty vocal pro-Putin, pro-Russia voice throughout the conflict.

He has opposed the major aid packages.

>> Briefly, not from the beginning.

Not at the beginning.

He said, "I don't know who this guy is."

>> Yeah, but then he said he was a strategic genius.

It's very hard to walk back "strategic genius" on the eve of Putin invading Ukraine.

Not a move of strategic genius.

So it's pretty hard to walk that back.

He's also been publicly on the record as opposing the major aid packages that Congress has passed for Ukraine.

And in fact, he and Tucker Carlson are leading something really without much precedent in American politics, which is a pro-Putin wing of the Republican Party.

Remember when the Republican Party was tough on Russia?

It's a pretty big transformation.

It's a minority, but I think you're right that Trump back as the nominee of the Republican Party, back in the middle of our daily discussion, I have to say, the idea that we're going to be back to writing stories about, "In a series of early morning tweets, Donald Trump said, blah, blah, blah."

I'm not personally looking forward to that, I must say.

>> Okay, so before we close, Peter, single thing that Trump accomplished over the course of his four years that most impressed you.

>> Um... [ Laughter ] I will say this for him.

He is the most transparent president we've had in modern times, which is to say that when he has motivations to do things that other presidents would never admit, he tends to admit it out loud.

When he says he doesn't want a cruise boat with COVID patients to come to our shores because he doesn't want his numbers to go up, he is telling us what his real motivation is.

When he tells us that he wants the Justice Department to prosecute his opponents and spare his friends, he's not pretending it's for any altruistic reason other than he just wants his friends to be spared and his opponents to be prosecuted.

He, through four years, through Twitter and his statements and conversations with the press, was as open about his motivations that we've ever seen.

And it's remarkable because he told us all the ways he was trying to manipulate and intimidate and bend the institutions of American government to his political will, to make them his instruments of political power, whether it be the military, the Justice Department, the intelligence agencies.

So we didn't have to guess.

We didn't have to sit there and say, "Well, he says he wants to do it for this reason, but he really wants to do it for that reason" because he always said he wanted to do it for that reason.

>> So that's something that impressed him.

That wasn't something he necessarily did that was impressive.

There were certainly accomplishments over the course -- >> Yeah.

He launched an insurrection at the United States Capitol.

That was unprecedented in American history, Ian.

That was something that never happened before.

>> Not one that you thought was a good thing.

>> It was impressive.

It was impressive.

>> It made an impression upon you.

>> He showed the incredible weakness of our institutions.

He showed that people were willing to go where no one thought they would follow a leader, past the bounds of law and the Constitution.

And one of the things he showed, I think, is that, not just the foreign policy world, but the policy world writ large, we tend to overstate the role of policy debates in our politics.

We tend to overstate the role of ideology in our politics.

And the really interesting thing about a challenge coming from the President of the United States to principles of democracy is that it shows that these policy fights don't mean as much as we tend to think that they mean because we care about them.

>> Susan Glasser, Peter Baker, thank you all so much.

Thank you very much.

[ Cheers and applause ] ♪♪ And now, ladies and gentlemen, as always on this show, it's time for some light affair with our friends from -- >> Fake!

A total hoax.

You see this, Vladimir?

I can't believe this guy calls us friends, particularly after that very unfair and frankly, quite sad interview that was mostly of course about me.

>> Oh, please, have you seen what I have to deal with lately?

>> What are you t-- You're the center of attention these days.

It's a beautiful, beautiful thing.

>> No, no.

This war, it's affecting my personal life.

>> Oh, cry me a river.

>> Nyet.

Crimea is fine for now.

[ Laughter ] It's a different sort of loneliness that I face.

Roll tape!

Okay, President Xi, let's crack open that six-pack of kvass and watch this war.

Wait, what's going on here?

>> Vladimir, this is an intervention.

>> Ha.

I love interventions.

I was just thinking of intervening next in Latvia or Estonia or -- >> Vladimir, your invasions have become a problem.

>> What?

>> Look, we don't mind if you crack open a new front once in a while to blow off some steam.

>> But you've completely lost control.

And as your friends, we are drawing a line.

>> Guys, maybe I had a few too many fronts this summer, but I've got a new strategy now.

Things are going to change.

You'll see.

>> It is too late for that.

We have all written down statements about how your invasions have affected us.

>> Vladimir, when you are invading, I don't recognize the no-limits friendship we once had.

>> I miss the old Vladimir who knew how to stoke tensions from the shadows.

>> Your invasions aren't just hurting your friends.

They are harming yourself.

Harming!

>> Yeah, Jack.

>> All: Huh?

>> What the hell are you doing here?

>> All: Yeah.

>> What do you mean?

I'm an interventionist at heart, right?

[ Laughs ] Well, listen, Jack, I used to have the same problem.

Invasion after invasion.

Iraq, Afghanistan.

Hell, I even got smashed off some good Grenada in the '80s.

[ Laughs ] Let me tell you something, this malarkey always ends in tears.

>> Hmm.

Okay, you know what, guys?

Maybe you are right.

I can see that I need help.

>> Well, there you go, buddy.

Recognizing that you have a problem is the first step.

>> Yes.

Yes, indeed.

And I hereby commit to a 12-step program.

[ Cheering ] So first 11 steps will be... Crimea, Donetsk, Lugansk, Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, a little bit of Monica in my life, Erica by my side.

>> "Puppet Regime"!

[ Applause ] >> And that's our show this week.

Special thanks to our guests this evening, and of course this absolutely marvelous studio audience.

[ Cheers and applause ] Thank you all for watching.

Come back next week, and if you like what you see, or even if you don't, but you're all by yourself and you want to borrow some of our friends, we will share.

Check us out at gzeromedia.com.

[ Cheers and applause ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ >> Major corporate funding provided by founding sponsor First Republic.

At First Republic, our clients come first.

Taking the time to listen helps us provide customized banking and wealth management solutions.

More on our clients at firstrepublic.com.

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