The FRONTLINE Interviews
Matt Bai
Journalist and Author
Matt Bai served as national political columnist for Yahoo News from 2014 to 2019. He previously served as a political correspondent for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of The Argument: Inside the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics.
Following is the transcript of an interview conducted by FRONTLINE’s Michael Kirk on July 11, 2019. It has been edited for clarity and length.
This interview appears in:
TOP
Matt Bai
Chapters
Text Interview:
Highlight text to share it
Contrasting Obama and Trump
What’s Obama promising an already divided country when he gets elected and has his inauguration?
President Obama brought a promise of unity and change, obviously, when he was elected in 2008.And it was unusual because it wasn’t only an explicit promise, right?He had sort of made his career on the purple states versus the red states and the blue states and about this idea that consensus could be forged in the country, and had tried very hard to get there.
But he embodied that hopefulness in a way that somebody else just couldn’t and that he couldn’t have contrived.Just by being the first African American president, just by being younger, just by being cooler, just by attracting younger voters the way he did.There was a sense that he could almost will a change in the society, a new direction, by virtue of who he was and what he represented.
What he represented was, in a sense, more important than what he believed, which I think became a problem as the administration wore on, because what you believe is kind of important.And while he did believe things, he was kind of working them out on the fly; he had not done a lot of preparation for governing based on a belief system.It’s what he represented that was more important, and that only gets you so far in the governing realm.
I wonder how history will look at this.I mean, my sense in thinking about the Trump inauguration, which was very strange, was that we didn’t quite know what he would represent.There were theories of a Trump presidency, and it was by no means a foregone conclusion that it was going to be reactionary or reckless or divisive.I think there was certainly this question in mind of, did Trump have another speed?Did Trump have a pivot in him?I don’t think he expected to become president; I think it was clear that that surprised him.He did not have a long history with advisers.He did not have a philosophical basis that had been demonstrated in public life.
I at least came to it, and I think—I think you come to every new presidency in a sense wondering, what are we really going to see versus the rhetoric or all that?And I think his inaugural address was just right away out of the box a very clear flag in the ground to say, no, there’s no—there is no other speed there; there’s no pivot.It was a—to my mind, it was a graceless address.It was a dark address.It was extraordinarily pessimistic about the state of the country.It was bleak.And it was followed almost immediately—and I think this was very resonant—by an argument about the size of the crowd in which the new president and the new president’s spokesperson made very clear that truth was nowhere near the top of their list of concerns, in which they just outright lied and refused to back down and made a fight of it.
And that address and that week I think made pretty clear where we were headed.And I don’t think it ever changed particularly.
The Promise of Obama
Let’s now go through Obama.He says that his biography is who he is and what his résumé is everything you need to know about me.I am the savior; I can do it.Just look at me; I’m standing here right now.Everything I am represents who I will be and what America could be.
I mean, the genius of President Obama in a sense—and it wasn’t genius by skill; it was sort of the genius of the moment—was that he could be kind of whatever you wanted him to be.There was a real ability to project onto Obama what you wanted to see, and he encouraged that.I mean, hope and change is not an agenda; hope and change doesn’t mean anything.Hope and change basically says to the public, whatever, however you think, whatever you think hope and change look like, that’s what I can be.
And there’s both a benefit and a cost to that.The benefit is obviously you can attract an awful lot of people and raise an awful lot of hope in the country, which is not a small thing.And he did.I thought that election, to me, remains in my mind very inspiring because of all the people who did vote for him from different walks of life, because of the people who waited around the block.He did well with Independents.He did extraordinarily well with young people.Brought more African Americans to the polls.There’s a genuine hope expressed in that election.
The problem with being anything people want to project on you is that you then have to make choices, and you’re going to disappoint them.And it helps to know exactly what you think change and hope ought to look like.And I think it took President Obama a long time to try to figure that out in office.And I think that’s perfectly reasonable because he had not governed at anything like that level before.And, you know, governing is like anything else you do in life.You learn from doing it, and it’s not intuitive.
Sarah Palin and the “Forgotten”
… Sarah Palin sort of meets some of that description—hadn’t had a lot of experience, but she also lit up a group of Americans.
She did.
A different group of Americans than were lit up by Barack Obama, people that would eventually I guess be the “forgotten” that Donald Trump will talk about and the Tea Party that will beset [Speaker of the House] John Boehner and others, and Barack Obama.… I’d like to get a sense from you about what Palin attracted, what she did, how she lit it up.
When the histories of this period are written, and obviously Donald Trump will be a huge force in that history, I wonder whether we’ll understand or future historians will understand what an important point on that continuum Sarah Palin actually was.We have had—and I’ve talked about this endlessly—a gradual commingling, intertwining of politics and entertainment in this country.I believe it started in the 1980s.I think it’s been a long process, and the Internet obviously expedited and changed that.Social media created a different kind of celebrity.
Sarah Palin was not a politician, is not a politician.I say “was” because, you know, she went on to do the thing she really wanted to do, which was to be TV star.Sarah Palin was not a traditional politician.She was not prepared for the office of vice president.She was certainly not prepared for the office of president.She seemed to know very little about history, geography, governing, philosophy, anything.She was a character.She was an entertainer.She arrived on the scene as almost like a reality show contestant who had entered a show to be the running mate and outlast the tarantulas and the lightning storms and had come through and been crowned.
And much, you know, much to John McCain’s shame, I think it was the most shameful thing he did in public life, was to enable that process.
I wouldn’t say without Sarah Palin there isn’t a Donald Trump.Without Sarah Palin, there would have been somebody else on the road to Donald Trump.Our politics became a form of reality television, and Sarah Palin was, for a good, long moment in American politics, was the absolute apotheosis of that.
Is it your calculation that Obama knew about that group of people that were taken with her, that she appealed to?Is that a forgotten America to him?Does he know they’re out there?Does he just ignore them?Does he care about them?
Yeah, it’s interesting.I mean, I talked to him at some length about this prior to his becoming president, and I think President Obama, not unusually, not by any means alone, I think he had such confidence in his ability to inspire and charm and persuade that I think he legitimately felt for a long time before becoming president and for a good period after that, that he could unify, that there were a group of people who had hated the Clintons, who were fearful of the liberal elite, who had been talked into kind of bunker mentality in the country, who felt under siege and at a disadvantage, that he could speak to those people.He did not feel race was a barrier.And I don’t necessarily know that race was a barrier either.He did not feel ideology was a barrier.I think he felt that if he could just speak to people, you know, president or presidential candidate to public, that he could build consensus.
I don’t know if he misunderstood or couldn’t have known—I mean, I think the confluence of technology in politics in that moment, the sudden explosion of social media, the ability to speak to niche audiences and to consume whatever information made you feel good versus some objective form of truth, I think that really undermined him.You know, he may not have been completely wrong about his own ability; it may just have been completely mismatched for the moment.So there was—
The moment is what?The moment is Fox?The moment is all of that?
Yeah, it’s Fox, but then it’s also—
[Rush] Limbaugh.
It’s the online; it’s the viral videos; it’s Facebook.It’s all of the forces that are coming to the surface at that period, you know, in the 2008 period, that are just beginning to reshape the way people get information and the way they talk to each other and who they talk to and who they meet and what community means in America, because for a very, very long time in America, community were the people on your street and in your Lions Club or in your school.And then all of a sudden, you can forge communities based on common beliefs or conspiracies or paranoia or anger.And it doesn’t matter where people live; you can be anywhere.Suddenly, you know, we all did it.I play Scrabble with people half a world away; I’ve been playing with them for years.I don’t know who they are, but I know them; they’re part of a community for me.
And the whole idea of community in America is being ripped up and rewritten as Obama becomes president.And so I don’t know.I really don’t know if his theory of consensus was naive or if it made perfect sense 10 years earlier, but the moment changed.I will say that I think he and his team were slow to understand how transformative that was and spent a lot more time complaining about it than they did figuring out ways to work through it.
… All presidents, all politicians are shaped by their vulnerabilities to an extent, and I think when President Obama took office and the country was in real crisis and his approval ratings were otherworldly—70, 80%—there was a fear among his advisers that he was seen too much as an orator, too much as a talker and not enough as a doer.And there was a determination, I think, to rein that in, to show him being president.There was concern, you know, was he qualified to be president?Did he really want the job, or did he just want to go around talking and inspiring people?
And so I think there was a—there was a pretty contrived idea, a pretty outright determination in that first year to have him doing the stuff and not out there talking about it, not just giving speeches.And I think that was a mistake, because I think he had a window in that first six—six or eight months of the presidency when his approval ratings were ridiculously high and the country had a tremendous amount of anxiety about what was happening, things that he could not have foreseen, where he could have probably spoken directly to the country and laid out a path forward and might have actually been very effective in building more consensus for his agenda.And that was exactly the period in which they preferred to see him in backrooms cutting deals rather than on the television, and I think he needed to be on the television.
The Financial Crisis and the Bank Bailout
… Here’s a living, breathing example of him doing something instead of talking to people on television about it, and that is the meeting with the bankers at the White House in March.
…A couple days before, the Times and Post had reported huge bonuses.He’s livid, but they’re coming in the room.They’re going to sit there.How’s he going to act?What’s he going to say?America is paying close attention.And what does he do?He lets them off the hook.He says: “I’m standing between you and the pitchforks, fellas.We’re going to spread the money out.We’re going to give you the TARP [Troubled Asset Relief Program]; we’re going to give you what is necessary to save the economy.”And in a way, if you look back, some people we’ve talked to say this is the moment that he gives the GOP an issue they need.… Let’s talk for a moment about what this does for waking up [then-Senate Minority Leader Mitch] McConnell and the other Republicans who want to stand in opposition to his bipartisan aspirations.
First of all, the bailout of the banks had begun under George W. Bush with Republican support.I don’t think Republicans saw support for the banking industry or the bailout as particularly useful issues for them until their base rose up.I mean, that came from the grassroots.I think they were as supportive as the Democrats were and had in fact begun that process.
And had President Obama come out and cut ties with the banking industry and beat them up, I think Republicans would have rushed to their defense.I don’t think Republicans were any clearer than Democrats about what was happening at the base of the Republican Party at that point.I think it took them by surprise.And that was to some extent true of health care, too.Health care bubbled up from the grassroots, too, during that summer before the midterm elections in 2010.That wasn’t—that wasn’t brought on by Republican strategy on Capitol Hill.
I think Republicans, the story of the Republican Party in a sense, from the beginning of the Obama era to now, is of having been carried along on a populist wave they neither understood nor controlled.And their primary emotion has been fear: fear of losing seats; fear of losing their jobs; fear of losing control of their party.I think it’s been an extraordinarily difficult time to be a Republican leader, even as the party has, you know, objectively speaking, seen a lot of success, because I don’t think they’ve been in control of events, and I don’t think they have felt in control of events.
One thing we know is the night he’s at the inauguration and dancing at the balls, they’re meeting at the Caucus Room having a dinner and drinks, and [Newt] Gingrich and others are saying, “Wait a minute; we’re just going to say no to this guy.” …Their strategy from the very beginning is no cooperation.What’s their thinking on that?
I think that is very simplified.And in fact, I don’t think that’s what Gingrich said.I spent a lot of time with Gingrich during that period.I just happened to be writing a cover piece about him in the very opening months of the Obama administration, and I think for Gingrich and other top Republican strategists, the calculation was a little more complicated than “We’re just going to say no.”I think that’s how it got remembered.
But, you know, talking to Gingrich and others day to day at that point in time, I think the feeling was that they had to wait and see if Obama would box them in.If he came to them with an agenda that they really could not oppose, that their base would not oppose, then they were going to sort of bide their time and be careful.They were concerned—there was some concern that just opposing whatever he did, if he came across with sort of a Clintonian, later-stage Clintonian centrist agenda, could backfire.They certainly wanted to oppose him.
And then the first thing he came with was this massive spending program, the stimulus program.I mean, the way I described it at the time is, Republicans were almost out of options.They had one bullet left in the chamber, you know.And Obama came along and kind of walked right in front of it, which was, you know, what greater vulnerability do Democrats have?What vulnerability did they have left at all other than being big tax-and-spend Democrats?That was the one argument left to the Republican Party, and he kind of walked right into it.
I think he would say he didn’t have a choice because the stimulus package was necessary, but, you know, they turned over the details to Congress.They did not manage it particularly well.There was an awful lot of money spent that was—that was easy to caricature, and it opened a window for Republicans to oppose him, and I think from that point on, they felt emboldened that they could do that.And that moment where there was some indecisiveness about it disappeared very quickly.And then ever afterward, people said, “Well, they were going to oppose him from day one; they were going to oppose him from day one,” I know that’s not true because I was right in the middle of those discussions as a magazine writer at that moment, and I know that there was considerable anxiety about whether they could oppose him or not.It just became feasible.
The Rise of Conservative Media
… If the GOP didn’t have the power, the sway, the whatever, the ideas to oppose, certainly Limbaugh, [Mark] Levin, [Ann] Coulter, [Laura] Ingraham, Fox out there as a sort of form of public—you’ve already alluded to this—opposition.Every time he moves, in some ferocious way, [Roger] Ailes and [Rupert] Murdoch and others have made a decision, and it’s a business decision I would assume.Walk us through that a little bit.
I can walk you through it.I mean, it’s a funny thing.I’ve obviously thought a lot about this, lived through this period, chronicled this period.You know, for years, I’ve heard about the power of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter and Levin and all these other people, and they speak to the Republican base; they mobilize the Republican base; they forge public opinion in the conservative community, all of which is true and formidable and part of the changing media landscape and the changing civil discourse in the country for which a lot of people bear some responsibility.
But I’ve never been able to get all that excited about the moral depravity of talk show hosts or bloggers or anyone else.My feeling is politics is about leadership; politics is about choosing.I can’t find a lot of respect for politicians who get up in the morning and ask, “Oh, my gosh, what is the—what are the talk show hosts saying, and can I afford to oppose them?,” or this or that.
I mean, what the story of this moment in American politics is and will be [is] a lack of leadership, a lack of steel.I don’t know why; I don’t know if it’s generational.Maybe the first generation to lead the country who didn’t put on the uniform and go fight is lacking some kind of perspective that previous generations had?Maybe the boomers are just— they’re just not constitutionally capable of making difficult choices in their lives or in their government?I think that’s true.Maybe it’s technology.Maybe it’s the culture from the ’60s.I don’t know what it is, but it’s been a long, fallow period for principled leadership at personal expense.
And if you don’t—if you’re not willing to stand up for some kind of belief system, even at the risk of losing your job or losing your party, then that’s on you.It’s not on the person making money.Sure, there’s a huge industry making money off political extremism on both sides, particularly on the right.But, you know, but that’s not—that’s not an excuse to abdicate leadership.We should put the onus where it belongs.We elect people to make tough choices; we don’t elect them to do what they think is politically feasible.And I think we’ve let them off too easy.
And the power of that part of the political landscape to effect the division in America itself among the voting public—your thoughts?
I mean, the danger of talking in this moment when you’re my age, it’s like you’re like the old guy on the lawn: “Get off my lawn, you kids!It was better before the internet.”You know, I don’t believe that.I’ve always thought of myself as something of a futurist, but this is just a different moment than I grew up.I grew up with three and then four networks; what, three national newspapers printed by satellite, and you had your city newspaper and your local news.And everybody consumed the same information, and by and large that information was intended to be true and intended to leave decisions up to the populace.And then people debated that information, and they had—it wasn’t always a healthy or wonderful debate, but at least they were debating the same set of facts.
This is not the world my kids live in.It’s just not, you know, that’s just technology; that’s just society.It starts with cable news.It bleeds seamlessly into the internet.And we have communities based around ideology and anxiety, and people finding connectedness through rage or fear or moral superiority, and consuming the information that conforms to their worldview.
And in some ways, maybe we’ll look back and say the challenge of leadership in this whole time was to figure out how you build any consensus or speak to any issue when nobody can agree on a set of facts.Yeah, all these folks in the media, your radio hosts and your website scoundrels and everybody else, everybody’s going to bear some responsibility for the state of the country.We all have responsibility.We as journalists hopefully know that we have that responsibility.I’ve always taken it seriously.And I think there are a lot of people out there who have not taken their responsibility seriously in these years.
But we as a society have also been slow to get smarter about what’s in our public interest and how we process information and where we get it.We’ve not taught that well.We’ve not figured that out very well.And we’re not very well informed in the sense that we value truth and objectivity over comforting worldviews, and that’s unfortunate.
Passing the Affordable Care Act
… Obama exerting a little leadership when he decides to vote, to push the ACA [Affordable Care Act] through without a single Republican vote, without the support and approval of almost anybody in the electronic media, what’s behind that?Take me to what you figure the calculation was.
I don’t have a really popular view on this.I understand the calculation.The calculation was pretty simple.… The calculation was you could not get that health care bill through any other way but in a strictly partisan manner.The negotiations had broken down.It had taken too long.Democrats had fought among themselves.Sen. [Edward] Kennedy dies; Republicans win the special election.There’s simply no way they can filibuster.There’s no way to get it done if you don’t do it in a partisan manner.
And the Democratic base was screaming.And it was the biggest single priority.Obama had invested so much of his presidency in it.And that was the way, you know, to get it done.
I remember sitting with Max Baucus at the time, who was the head of the Budget Committee in the Senate.I remember very clearly Baucus saying to me he did not think you could pass a law that big and that transformative without Republican support, and he was getting a lot of flak from the Democratic base.And I said, “Why?”And he said, “Because you can pass that law, but you cannot sustain it.”He said, “We have seen this before.”He said: “Every big piece of social legislation has to be fixed and changed, and people try to undo it, and people try to challenge it.And if you do not have investment from at least some forces on the other side, you will never be able to sustain the kind of reform that you’ve put in place.You’ll just pass it temporarily.”
And he was just 150% right.It made sense to me at the time, and it makes more sense to me now looking back.Some things you can pass that way, in a purely partisan nature.Republicans have been pretty successful at it because generally they’re trying to dismantle government programs; they’re not trying to build new ones.But that kind of social legislation of which we had not seen a real example really since the Great Society, that last piece, I think, of the sort of mosaic of New Deal and Great Society government, that could not be done the way they did it, and I think time has borne that out.
The Rise of the Tea Party
And even as they’re talking about it, out there in the summer recess of 2009, when all the Congress goes home and there’s the town meetings and there’s the first energy around the Tea Party growth, and then the class in 2010 as an unintended but virtually powerful consequence as well to that vote and even the idea of going forward with it, what do you make of the rising of that?I’m not sure Obama really understood where that energy was coming from out there.What do you think?
No, I think that’s right.I don’t know.I’ve never considered the question, was the Tea Party—if it hadn’t been health care, would it have been something else?There is among a large segment of American society a deep distrust of government.I don’t disdain that; I actually understand it and in some way share it; that for a lot of people in this country, you know, there are tremendous—there are huge successes in government: Medicare, Social Security.We could go on and on in programs that work really well.But the experience of a lot of Americans particularly in hard-hit economic communities over a decades-long period in America has been that the things government does don’t work as intended, don’t succeed or make things worse, and their interactions with government on a daily basis in those interactions, I think people often feel powerless or frustrated.
And so bringing new government to people, creating more government control over any part of American life is really difficult; it’s delicate.And it is incumbent upon you if you want to succeed not only to make it clear and understandable, but effective and competent.
And I think looking back on that period in the Obama years, probably nothing was as damaging as the botched rollout of that health care program when the website didn’t work and the exchanges didn’t work and people couldn’t get on.I think it was just crucial in that moment, in that first sort of incubating moment of a massive social program to say to people, as Bill Clinton had, “Government can work; government can be effective; we can do this well; we can do this as well as the private sector or in partnership with the private sector,” which, by the way, I think is something they could have done much more with the exchanges.I never understood why they didn’t.
And they had an unwavering faith in the federal government, and very little management of the federal government.I mean, they turned over the rollout of that health care plan website to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid [Services].When you think of the technological wave sweeping the country, that’s not where your mind goes.And they didn’t manage it carefully enough, and it was a real failure.And I think it was very hard to come back from.And—and it confirmed, I think for a lot of people, their worst fears about health care.
To me, that was—the rollout was the critical thing.Were you going to turn back the tide of fear and anxiety about that program, or were you going to—or were you going to show people that it wasn’t what they feared?And they failed.
If you look at the video of all those Tea Party rallies, the pictures of Obama’s face on a gorilla, the Zulu warrior Obama, the health care, it’s almost the first manifestation of what can only be described as racism.And we’ve talked to people who were inside his administration who say it was really the first time it dawned on him, in front of them anyway, that “This is about me, too, isn’t it?”And they said it was just devastating to him, this idea that a lot of that noise out there was about him and his skin color.
Well, there was always an element of racism to resistance against Obama, because racism exists in the country; because he’s the first black president; because people have stereotypes.I think it was, it’s—I choose to look at it as a kind of progress that we had reached a point in his presidency when being African American as a president was the drawback that Catholicism had once been, or that Judaism still is in American politics, or ethnicity was—any ethnicity was at one time.… Politics is always wrapped up in identity, and all great politicians, or most, at least in modern times, have some part of their identity that causes suspicion or outright rejection.It’s more pronounced on race because we’re a country that’s so racially divided.But I think, you know, I’m sure President Obama always understood there was some element of that.And I think, you know, and ugly as it is, I don’t think it ever represented the majority of resistance to his administration among the people who opposed him.
I mean, it’s important to remember, Barack Obama is the second Democrat in a century to twice win more than 51%, more than 50% of the vote, any majority of the vote.He was only the fourth Democrat in history to win more than 50.1% of the vote, period.He won Independents in both of this elections.So the country acquitted itself pretty well on the issue of race.I don’t think that was the principal driver of the division that was sown during the Obama years.But it always—there was always an echo of it.It was always lingering.It was always there because of who he is and because of where we are in the life of the country.
Donald Trump and Birtherism
And into our story enters Donald Trump and birtherism.
Yeah, well, that was the racist manifestation of resistance to the president.Not all resistance to the president, to President Obama, or even most resistance was racially motivated, but the birtherism certainly was, and Donald Trump was at the forefront of it.And I think that’s why President Obama called him out at that White House Correspondents’ Dinner one year, which became sort of a thing of legend because it apparently fueled Trump’s resolve.
But … I think it rankled President Obama, because the birther stuff was just a pure racism/xenophobia, and it was based in nothing.
… Why is Trump involved in that?This man who becomes our president, what does it tell you, that he is involved in that?
I’ve never understood the birther thing.I mean, I don’t know.I don’t know why he got involved in the birther thing.I mean, I know he always wants to have attention, and I’m sure some attention came to that.… I don’t know that Trump’s thing is racism so much as just sheer xenophobia.He really has this fear and disdain for outsiders, for others.
… There’s only one consistent strain to his philosophy politically or personally that runs through all the years when I first met him, when I spent a little time with him in the late ’90s, all the way up to his presidency, and that is an extreme distaste for outsiders, foreigners, a real fear of people who were not sort of American-born and American-identified, or English speakers, or whatever form that takes.And I don’t know where that comes from.I’m not sure we’ll ever know.
Obama and the Rise of Partisanship
Obama, from the beginning of his administration, bipartisanship is the goal.… And the amazing thing about the guy is, even though it’s repudiated, even it doesn’t work, even though the Republicans aren’t going to play, even though it’s getting pilloried by the technology out there on the radio and on the web, he keeps plugging away, right, thinking, “If I can just get them in a room and sit with them, whoever they are, we’ll get reasonable with each other.”And that brings us to the grand bargain, perhaps the moment where he finally gives up.
In the broad lens of history, it does appear that the president, President Obama kept trying and trying to go across the aisle at pivotal points in his administration.I think closer in at the moment what was clear is that those were very sporadic efforts, and the reason in part they didn’t work is because nothing was being done in the interim.He kept reaching out and then withdrawing, and reaching out and then withdrawing.
I remember early in the administration, when he was so burned by the stimulus and felt so embarrassed by Republicans who had opposed him when he tried to reach out, and all the aides who had come over from Congress were saying, you know, “Told you you can’t work with these people; you can’t work with them,” and they sort of disengaged, and I remember Mark Warner, now senator, former governor of Virginia who’d had so much success with the Republican Legislature in Virginia, Warner said to me, he said, “I went through this.”He said, “In Virginia, you go, and they embarrass you, and you feel like a fool,” he said, “and, you know, you’re double-crossed.”And he said, “And then I went back, and I went back, and I went back, and I had them over, and I talked to them.”And he said—and he said: “It doesn’t happen the first time.You have to—you have to show your persistence and show your stalwart commitment to this.”
And I think that was lacking actually in Obama’s approach.He would withdraw for periods of time.Yes, I mean, halfway into his administration or into the second term, he’s trying to get Boehner to sit down and do this grand bargain, which would have restructured the entire federal budget, but they barely knew each other at that point.They’d barely spent any time together.It happened, you know, they started talking on a golf course. ….
You know, you get pilloried for this.People say, “You’re naïve”; “Oh, they should have had a few beers, and then everything would have been great.”No, that’s not what I’m saying.But there is a—there is a benefit to sustained engagement in anything in life, and politics is no exception.And there was a real stop-and-start inconsistency to the way the Obama administration approached—approached partisanship and bipartisanship.And look, the healthcare thing is a pretty good example of it.I mean, once they went ahead and slammed health care through the Congress without a single Republican vote, it was going to be pretty hard to build any relationships going forward from there.
What happened with the grand bargain?
Well, what happened with the grand bargain is two things.I mean, I wouldn’t—President Obama changed the terms pretty late in that negotiation.He was hemmed in by members of his own party who were forging a side deal of their own, and that deal was considerably more generous in terms of the amount of revenue it would raise, the taxes.And he realized that he was going to have to change his terms, and so that very much upset the Republicans.
But then, having said that, the Republican leadership was willing to make a deal, and John Boehner was willing to make a deal.And the president was able to get Democratic leaders in Congress to sign off on that deal.And it was a revolt from [House Majority Leader] Eric Cantor and junior members of the Republican leadership that stopped it.It was absolutely scuttled by Boehner’s own people.I mean, he would complain ever after that Obama had left him in an untenable situation by changing the terms, and that was true.
But the fact was, he couldn’t get it done.He didn’t have the strength or the conviction to have a fight about it in his own party, and it fell apart.
Because something fundamental had changed, too, from the days of Tip O’Neill and Ronald Reagan or whatever you want to go back to, and that was the Tea Party Congress comes in; the Freedom Caucus exists.There’s a whole new point of view inside of his own caucus.The speaker of the House cannot control the members of his caucus.
… I mean, look, …President Obama … was absolutely willing to sign off on cuts in the growth of Medicare, … and they were absolutely willing to make some very unpopular choices in their party, and he had gotten signoff for it, which was impressive.And Republicans couldn’t do it.
But look, the—you know, in some ways, the story of our time is the dissolution of strong political parties: losing people, losing control, losing credibility.And it’s been just much more pronounced on the Republican side.And as I said, they’ve—it’s the last 10 years has been a period of time where Republican “leaders,” quote/unquote, have basically been carried along by a populist tide in their own party that they don’t really understand and don’t really control; that they created, I think, through a lot of rhetoric and divisiveness over a 30-, 40-year period, probably going back to Reagan and Nixon.They created the monster, and they’ve been unable to get it under lock and key, and unwilling to risk losing their own jobs or their own standing in order to take a stand on principle.
And so they’ve been pretty powerless.I mean, in a sense, you know, you could look at Mitch McConnell and say, wow, he’s held power for a long time.But the power he’s held isn’t worth all that much because he’s really at the mercy of that base, and so is every other Republican leader of this era.They have allowed the car to drive them instead of driving the car.And maybe, you know, to be fair, maybe that’s just the nature of a society where institutions are weaker and social media is stronger, and it may not be possible to captain a political party in the sense that you can corral public opinion inside your own ranks.
One of the things we’ve driven by in our conversation is that Obama at some moment heading into the 2012 election obviously has decided bipartisanship and just be a good guy and get people at the table, he’s going to come out swinging a little harder in the 2012 election.
… I never had the sense that President Obama particularly enjoyed that reelection campaign.I certainly didn’t.I don’t think anybody who covered it really enjoyed it.It was kind of a lousy campaign.It was kind of about nothing, and it was, you know, it was not terribly substantive.But he certainly—he tacked left for that campaign, for sure, a little more populist, and ran a much more partisan, unyielding campaign than he had four years earlier.But that’s the nature of reelection campaigns; it’s the nature of being under attack.… Presidents always are better off running against congresses of the other party, which he was able to do, right?I do think that’s probably the nature of reelection campaigns.
And I think that second victory really was a, you know, a really validating moment for him and his administration; that for all the divisiveness, the country was still with him.He won it by a decent margin, you know.As I said, he’s only the second Democrat in 100 years of Franklin Roosevelt to win—twice win the popular vote.I mean, he, I think—I think it showed that—I think that election showed more than anything, that for all the frustration and all the partisanship, he still inspired a lot of people, and people still basically believed he was trying to do the right thing.I don’t think they ever lost that belief.
Obama’s Executive Orders
By the time he’s rolling out the EOs, especially something like immigration and the DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals] thing, he’s certainly deciding to go forward; here I go.
Yeah, I never liked the executive order approach.I understand the rationale.You know, if Congress won’t do anything, government’s got to get done, and if government’s got to get done by executive order, fine.George W. Bush took that approach.Barack Obama then took that approach.… And we’ve seen it in the Trump era, too.
I’ve always thought that’s a capitulation and a pretty poor substitute for real governance.It’s unsustainable.It’s not in the spirit of representative government.It gets reversed the minute another president comes in.It’s always reversible.It creates this incredibly whipsaw-like government, where you please your base by doing the thing by executive order that you couldn’t get done in Congress.Somebody comes in, changes policy; it makes it very hard for businesses to plan, for people to plan, for the country to be on any kind of steady course.I just don’t think generally we should be governing by executive order.I think it’s a symptom of a real sickness in the functionality of Washington and sort of a misuse of the executive branch.
And in some ways, certainly the immigration EO, the backlash that resulted from it was formidable.
Yes.Anytime you do something by executive action, and of course particularly if it has the cultural resonance that an immigration order does, or abortion, which we’ve done a million executive orders back and forth, anytime you do that, it has the sense for a large number of people that there’s been a fiat; that you are—that you are seizing power, in a sense, rather than governing.And look, you can understand the frustration of President Obama.We’ve had—we’ve been close to comprehensive immigration reform multiple times.The agreement is there; it’s sitting on a shelf.We just can’t pass it.And he was determined to do something.
I think, you know, particularly in his second term, where he wasn’t going to face reelection again, I think he was determined to do a bunch of things that he thought were necessary and compassionate, and that was one of them.But—and that policy, I think, because of the—that executive order, right, because of the impact it had in protecting a lot of—you know, a lot of people who had deep anxiety about their status in the country and who were—who probably needed protecting, I think was more defensible than others.
But there’s a cost.There’s a cost to governing by executive action, even when you’re doing the right thing.You deepen people’s cynicism.You deepen their opposition.It sows—it sows a sort of suspicion that what you’re doing is something you couldn’t do by regular means.And it creates policies that then become footballs, that then can just be done and undone, and done and undone.And meanwhile you have people like the “Dreamers”; you have people like these immigrants who want to stay in this country and be productive, and they don’t even know when the order might be reversed.Are they protected?Are they not protected?They don’t know.
I mean, that’s—it creates tremendous—it does exactly the opposite of what government is supposed to do in that it creates uncertainty and tumult where there ought to be stability and consensus.
The Trump Candidacy
And into this world, into that time, into the aftermath of that decision, a little-known candidate, Donald Trump, decides immigration is an issue that he can ride, with the help of [Steve] Bannon and [Stephen] Miller and [Jeff] Sessions and others.We get an impulse that turns into an actual campaign.And there you have it.
Yes.Candidates who don’t, as a general rule, and Trump doesn’t lend himself to a lot of general rules, candidates who don’t know what they believe but can sort of fire up crowds are kind of the most dangerous to me, because they follow the applause, and whatever is most visceral turns out to be the thing that animates them.And I think Trump is the best example of that in some ways.
He didn’t—wasn’t serious about becoming president, I don’t think.Didn’t think he’d become president.I think everything, virtually everything he has ever done in the public sphere is a marketing exercise, is a brand-building exercise, and I don’t think this was any different.I’m certain it wasn’t.And so I don’t think he gave like 10 minutes’ thought to what a campaign would be about, much less a government.
But all the fire among the people surrounding him, like the Stephen Millers of the world, and Bannon, and all the fire he was getting from the crowds was about immigration.It’s a very visceral issue, and it’s tied up in xenophobia and racism, and certainly Trump had, as I say, a real xenophobic streak going way back.And he attached himself to it.He loves applause.He loves to arouse passion and emotions.It’s the thing he’s best at; it’s the thing he cares most about, is sort of provoking emotion.He doesn’t care if it’s positive or negative.Just like he never cared if the [New York Post’s] “Page 6” press was positive or negative; it doesn’t matter.If you’re talking about him, if you’re responding to him, he’s happy.And immigration was an issue that got people to respond.
So I don’t think Trump set out to be the president who would cause a once-in-a-century fight over immigration.I just think he set out to provoke people and capture their emotions and get attention.And I think the immigration issue very quickly became the way you do that.
And that fits the birther arc as well.It’s the same—it’s two ends of the same pole, or whatever it is, right?
Yeah.I mean, there’s a couple of ways to excite the base of either party, right?And if you’re trying to excite the conservative base, I guess you could be—it could be on issues of religious conservatism and morality, but he was never going to have that going for him.That’s not his thing.But you can—there is definitely a segment there to be excited by this notion of sort of closing the borders and isolating the country and withdrawing from the war.The war in Iraq had led to more of this isolationist idea, too, this nationalist impulse, which was really sort of a kooky margin of the Republican Party for a long time.I remember Pat Buchanan going and whipping people up over this when I was with him in, you know, whenever that was, 2000.And it was just tiny rooms of people screaming and yelling who didn’t really matter in the Republican Party.But they—you know, Trump turned it into something else, in part because he had a field of 17 candidates and social media and this fractured market that enabled him to consolidate a base of support.
In a sense, the biggest misperception—and it’s a damaging misperception—in American politics is that Trump somehow stormed the Republican Party or that his ideology or his pitch represented where the Republican Party as a whole was at, and that he has somehow dominated his moment.It’s just never been true.He was at 25, 30% of the party for most of the primaries.You know, at best you could say—because a lot of that was celebrity, just sheer celebrity.So at best you could probably say a fifth of the primary electorate was deeply animated by this sort of xenophobic nationalist impulse.He never got to 50% until he was basically the fait accompli as the nominee.He won one national election in which the real margin of victory for him came from people, Independents and conservatives, who didn’t really like him but just could not stand to vote for Hillary Clinton.And he was fortunate in that way.
And he just squeaked by.Did not win the popular vote.There’s been one national election since in which he and his party were just outright and starkly repudiated in historic terms by the electorate.
So I see no evidence for the idea that Trump’s nationalist view of the world, his views on immigration, his views on foreign policy somehow represent the great new wave of American politics.It’s a niche market, and he’s been extremely able and fortunate in being able to exploit that niche market.
But I don’t think it’s nearly as dominant in American life as people think it is.I mean, look, …the white nationalist movement in America had a national call to arms to stand up for the last—the last stand of the movement in support of Donald Trump, and they barely filled a park in Charlottesville.This is not a—this is not a growing national cause.This is a loud, dying ideology that he represents.
When Obama is—you know him well enough; you’ve watched him a long time.When he’s watching the rise of Trump, and it’s the dying days of the Obama administration, what’s he thinking, do you figure?What’s that say to him about his potential successor that it’s Donald John Trump?
Look, I can’t say what President Obama was thinking.I certainly have spoken to him over the years, as have others.I think he was mystified and surprised by Hillary Clinton’s inability to sort of close the deal with the American electorate, and frustrated by the campaign.And I think he was sort of stunned to be succeeded by Donald Trump, and I think it probably felt very surreal for him to be sitting there.
But I also think, you know, if you know President Obama, he has kind of a fatalistic streak about him, almost a philosophical streak.I think Obama generally believes that the currents of history are deep and long, and we’re just a bunch of twigs.At some point, I think this worked against him as a president.I think it’s hard to be a successful president believing that you can only do so much to stop the tides of history, I think.I think you’re benefited by a sense of grandeur in that office.
I think when people say Obama’s professorial, I think if they know him, this is what they mean, which is that there is a philosophical bent to him that says: “I can only do so much.America’s going to be what America’s going to be.We all just get a few minutes here to try and change it.”So I think that’s probably how he viewed the rise of Trump and the sea change in the country, as sort of, you know, “I came, and I did my time on the stage, and I did what I could to shape the currents of history.”But I don’t think he—I don’t think he ever felt that it was a reflection of him.I doubt very much that he stays up at night or ever did thinking, I brought this on somehow where I should have stopped this.I think he basically thinks you can do what you can, and history has its way.
He wouldn’t accept responsibility that it was more divided at the end of his presidency, we were more divided as a nation at the end of his presidency, and that gave in some way energy to a different kind of change candidate.
Well, I’m certain he thinks we were more divided by the end of his presidency than before.If he didn’t think that, he wouldn’t be as smart as he is.But I don’t think he accepts or necessarily should accept responsibility for that.I think he sees that as the confluence of a lot of social and technological forces that he only had so much ability to shape.And I think he’s right about that.I mean, there are moments in American history, in any history, where leaders make colossal blunders or brilliant decisions that change the course of the country, you know.You think of Franklin Roosevelt, you think of Richard Nixon, two poles of that, I think.I give Ronald Reagan credit, I think, for shaping his moment.
And there are many other moments where you are managing forces, trying to shape forces that are greater than the individuals who lead.And I think it is fair to suggest that Obama inherited one of those moments.I mean, I think we are still trying to get our heads around the vastness of the technological and economic and social transformation that we have seen in this country in the last 20 years.I don’t know that there have been any periods or many periods in American life where so much of our daily lives and our work and our plans have been transformed sort of overnight by digital technology that some people have and some people don’t; by globalism that has left some people out and made some people rich, right?It’s been an extraordinarily tumultuous time.And to be president in that time, I think, is to have to accept some limitations.
So I think there’s more President Obama could have done.I think there’s things he could have done differently.But at the end of the day, if he feels—and I think he does—like the direction of the country was only partly and the divisions of the country were only partly within his control, I would say that’s probably true.
Trump and Social Media
So is it possible that Trump is the beneficiary of the change, of the technological change, this man who has been using Twitter since the birther moment?
Oh, yeah.Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely.I will say, this is almost in a sense where Trump gets a bad rap.He did not create this moment.He did not create the ugliness.He did not create the Twitter/social media universe.He did not create the xenophobia, the nationalism, the backlash against globalism and global crusades.He did not create entertainment politics, politics as a form of reality show television.He created none of this.
He is its pure manifestation.He is the absolute logical end point of a bunch of trends in American life, some of which were not within our control and some of which we did a horrible job both as a political class and as a media of dealing with.You know, I’ve written a lot about this confluence of entertainment and politics.I think it was inevitable that you would—if you treat your politicians like they’re entertainers and you treat your campaigns like it is a form of television drama, you will inevitably get entertainers as politicians.That is a direct line.
And when you combine in that the explosion of a sort of divisive, confusing digital culture and then add in the catastrophic policy failures that have left people feeling let down and suspicious of global intervention and suspicious of economic powers inside the country, I mean, all of that creates just this—this set of conditions for a demagogue, frankly, and for someone who can marshal all of that anxiety and all of that fervor for entertainment and all of that social media into something resembling a movement.
And as I said, the thing I will say for President Trump is I don’t think he is the mastermind of that moment.I think he is its beneficiary, 100%.
The Access Hollywood Tape
How does that help him survive the Access Hollywood moment?What happens there?What does he marshal?What do he and Bannon do that plays into that world you’ve just created for us?
You know, politicians are scandalized when we learn something about them that we did not know or that they would have purported to be untrue.So shame only sticks to politicians who have pretended to be something they’re not.You know, the tapes undo Richard Nixon’s presidency because he has claimed to be one thing, but on the tapes he is something else.He’s small, and he’s anti-Semitic, and he’s pathetic and thuggish, and that’s not who Richard Nixon had purported to be or who people thought he was.
The thing about the Access Hollywood tape is, it’s, you know, it’s a horrid sort of example of human behavior, but it did not undermine many people’s ideals of Donald Trump.It did not stun anyone that Donald Trump objectified women or talked crassly.I guess I would have thought it would have more of an impact just because of the language he used, but we didn’t learn anything new about Donald Trump at that moment.It only asked people to do a gut check on whether they could live with that, really, and I think they’d already—some segment of them had already decided.
There was, you know, I’d call 10% to 15% of the electorate probably Independents, moderate Republicans who had to choose between taking a flyer on a guy they found absolutely disdainful and kind of gross and unqualified, or voting for someone who they believed was deceptive and dishonest and entitled and would—and would be imperious toward them, fairly or not.And they chose the former, you know, in a large number.And it created a very surprising victory.But that’s what happened.
And Bannon and Trump’s decision to surround him at the debate, before the debate with Paula Jones and Juanita Broaddrick, et al., feeds the division?What exactly does it do?How does it help?
Look, it was a show.First of all, it took some of the attention away from Trump.What he’s really good at in a fight is muddying the waters, muddying the truth, muddying the focus to the point where everybody just says, “Eh, it’s a wash.”He’s done this with the media for years.“They say this about me; I say this”—you know, “People don’t trust the media; people don’t trust Trump.”He knows that in the end they kind of throw up their hands and say, “You deserve each other.”And that’s fine with him.And I think—so there was a little of that going on with the Clinton accusers.
But also, I think the real impact of all that was to remind people of what they had chosen not to remember about the Clintons and what they went through during the Clinton years, of the sort of endless controversy and drama that surrounds the Clintons that they were then going to be in for for another four years.I mean, to me, this was also the significance of—of the James Comey, you know, information, reopening the investigation late in the campaign, reopening the investigation into Clinton’s emails.
I think for a lot of that campaign, people didn’t like either candidate, and they didn’t really like them personally.And my own sense is whoever the spotlight really fell on was probably going to lose.And for most of that campaign, Trump could not keep the spotlight off himself; he just couldn’t get out of his own way, and people kept being reminded of how distasteful he was.And then after the reopening of that investigation—I don’t think it was the emails per se that hurt Hillary Clinton; it was the spotlight.It made that campaign all about her in the last couple weeks.
And I happen to feel that whoever it was all about was probably going to lose, because to the extent that it was a referendum on anyone, the public didn’t like them.And so I think it’s almost like a game of musical chairs.The spotlight fell on her last, and it stayed there, and I think that’s probably why she lost.
Yeah, I think that’s fair enough.In a divided country where 4% can mean everything, there it is.
Yeah, well, that’s a critical slice.That’s why I keep saying to people, you know, 2020 is not a base election.You can’t treat it like a base election.That’s not how Trump won.It is not his base against your base.Your base is definitely bigger than his base.Don’t worry about it; that’s the good news.He wins because of a bunch of people who don’t like him and don’t see an alternative, and if you don’t give them an alternative, you’re going to lose again.I know those people.I’ve—I’ve gone out and given speeches.… I remember, it struck me, right after the election I went and gave a speech in Florida, and it was an audience of Republicans, and it was—I would say 80% of the people in the room had voted for Trump, and about 40% said they liked him.All right.It’s a pretty clear calculus, you know.Is there someone else to vote for, or isn’t there?And in Hillary Clinton, they simply determined there wasn’t.
The Travel Ban
… What they like to call the travel ban, what others call the Muslim ban, rolls out.What’s the meaning of this moment?What does it tell us?What happens?
You know, I’m not sure I can think of a moment I find as dispiriting in all my years of covering politics as the—what we call the Muslim ban and everything surrounding it.It just—I never thought I’d see something like that in the presidency.You know, my wife’s family spent the World War II years in internment camps.I never imagined that I would look at my kids and wonder if that could happen again, you know?And there was something about that whole debate that I found so—“dispiriting” is the only word I can use, that we were having an argument about what it meant to be American, about what the basis of that was.
I remember that day when Stephen Miller, Trump’s aide, went on television and said, “No, that thing about ‘Give me your huddled masses, your tired, your poor, your huddled masses,’ that was added later; that’s not really part of the Statue of Liberty; that’s not really what it’s about.”And I guess—I get that there are a lot of people who respond to that.I mean, look, we’ve seen Trump’s appeal to xenophobia generally and this sort of nationalist sentiment, and there’s some people who respond to that.They’re not a majority of the country; they never will be.But the inability to Republican leaders to stand up, whatever the cost, when I know everyone in Washington knows that they don’t believe that, that’s not where their hearts are, because they’re fearful of losing seats or losing districts, because they have decided that Trump’s a passing phase in their party and they’ll outlast it, that’s, to me, that’s an excuse.History will render a very harsh judgment on that abdication of leadership.
I remember President Obama saying to me once that he did not consider terrorism to be necessarily an existential threat to the country, and I sort of disagreed.To me, somebody carrying a dirty bomb is an existential threat to the country.I said to him, “When does it become for you an existential threat?”And, you know, I thought that’s what he might say, you know, when somebody blows up a train or whatever.He said, “It becomes an existential threat when we abandon our own values as a country, when we respond to it in a way that America is no longer recognizable to us.”And this was before Trump was running; this was before there was any talk of banning people by religion or banning people from certain countries.
And I thought about that often later, because I did not find that a particularly persuasive answer at the time, but I thought it was a very prescient answer later.That is the existential threat of the Trump era.It’s not external, and it’s not foreigners, outsiders, terrorists.It is the willingness of a large part of the American public and a large part of the American political system to abide a wholesale abandonment of what we were always taught were bedrock American principles.And it has also highlighted the weakness of a media establishment that people no longer trust, so that when it stands up and talks about these things, it doesn’t have the impact that it ought to have.
I think that ban, as a policy issue, I think it has probably not all that much impact.As a symbolic issue to his base and to his opponents and as a marker in American life and in the American political debate when we moved into an entirely different, dark kind of period, I think its significance is hard to overstate.
Trump’s Relationship with the Media
Let’s talk a little bit about the press, the “enemies of the people.”The arguments about some of them begin with Sean Spicer coming out, talking about crowd size.They follow with Kellyanne Conway talking about “alternative facts.”The president gives that incredible press conference where he talks about the press being the enemy of the people.The impact of that?The sense of that?The change that it augurs?
Yeah.Sean Spicer, to me, by the way, is just a terrific example of the sort of what happens to people in this moment if they don’t have a strong sense of conviction and a strong sense of what they came here to do in terms of morality.Sean Spicer was a perfectly legitimate and credible political strategist for the Republican Party, a mainstream strategist of the Republican Party, who just went out there for months and just wholly dishonored himself because he couldn’t help but get carried along in the tide of power.Boy, there’s been a lot of that.
There’s the obvious impact of this “enemy of the people” stuff, and then to me there’s the less obvious impact, right?I mean, the obvious impact is that it’s created a tremendously dangerous, unstable force in American life where people don’t know what to believe.People have been told they’re right not to believe the things they are told by credible sources.The president of the United States has contributed mightily to an environment where people believe what they want to believe, and that is going to have long-term repercussions.And many people have talked about that.
And, you know, I think for a lot of the media, it’s actually been a galvanizing and profitable moment.So I suppose, you know, it hasn’t been all bad in that respect.
But there’s the part of it that bothers me more as a journalist, which is, it’s forced us as an industry into a sort of bunker, right?It made us—it put us into a defensive crouch where we are being attacked as an institution.And then to question yourself, to be self-critical becomes untenable, becomes an act of disloyalty, as I have found on multiple occasions.
So, you know, my thing has always been, we are obviously not the enemy of the people.The vast majority of journalists out there are trying to do a public service and doing it for all the right reasons, and doing it well.It’s not a choice between being perfect and angelic and being the enemy of the people.You actually have to be able to consider at that same moment, what did we do to create this moment for ourselves?Because Trump could not have gotten away with this kind of rhetoric if we had not squandered a lot of public trust in the 20 or 30 years before.And he could not be president if we had not created an environment where politics and entertainment seem so indistinguishable.And he could not have won the Republican primary if he did not have hours upon hours of free television time and rallies carried live because they were good for ratings.
So yes, we have to defend the essential sanctity and vitality of what we do, and the nobility of what we do.But to the extent that Trump creates an environment where we can’t reflect on how we got here and what we did to create the moment, then, you know, then we’re failing also.
Trump and the Culture Wars
There is in the actions of President Trump something that goes to his method and goes to the division.Think about the Roy Moore race.Why does he choose to involve himself in Roy Moore?Think about Charlottesville.Why does he go where he goes on Charlottesville?Think about NFL and why does he choose to do that.What is it?Is it a tuning fork he’s got?Does he just go where the action is?I can’t figure this out.What is he doing there, Matt?
Did you ever read Being There by Jerzy Kosinski?
Sure.
In Being There, you have this character, Chauncey Gardiner, who—who just has no real plan or meaning to what he does, but everybody imputes to him this great higher purpose.Trump is a large part Chauncey Gardiner.It’s like, why does he go to Twitter and do this?Why does he back white supremacists?Why does he involve himself in this race and not that race?Why does he go online at night and send six tweets about how angry he is at a television show, or how terrible Arnold Schwarzenegger does in his roles, or whatever he’s talking about?He just does what he wants to do.He’s a wealthy guy with a tiny, fractional attention span, whose main purpose in life, near as I can tell, has always been to get attention.
I mean, look, I grew up in the Northeast when Trump was, you know, king of New York, you know, outside the city.I mean, that’s always who he was.He was a guy who just found a way to get attention all the time—the tabloids, the local TV, whatever it took.Trump is disappearing when eyes are not on him.He literally feels himself fading away.I don’t know what the psychosis is there.
I mean, I was in his house once, and his living room is dominated by models of his own buildings.And the—and the window is set up so you can see his own buildings out the window.So he can see the models and his own buildings in the same view from a vantage point in the room.He’s—he’s super-needy.
And so why does he do the things he does?They carry great weight as president, or maybe they did and no longer do.But he doesn’t do them as president; he does them because that’s how he goes through life, is “Look at me, look at me,” you know, provoking emotion, provoking attention.
You know, there’s far too much attention paid to Trump as a liar.Why does he retweet—just in the last few days, why is he retweeting something that he knows isn’t true?He’s misinforming the public; he’s doing this.I don’t think truth is part of his ideology.I really don’t.… I don’t think it’s material to him whether something is true or not.It’s hard for us as journalists to get our heads around because we live so much in this world of what’s true and what isn’t.It just—it’s—and the list of reasons that he does something or in the list of attributes that he looks for in something, whether it’s true or not is just way down the list; it’s not part of his worldview.He doesn’t retweet it, a lie, because he wants to mislead people.He doesn’t retweet it because he thinks it’s true.He retweets it because it’s going to get attention and provoke emotions, and whether it’s true or not is just entirely inconsequential to him.
The effect of this on a democracy?
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the effect of this on the democracy.We’re not going to know for a long time.I mean, as I said, he didn’t create the moment.He’s reflecting something in the culture. But—
But he’s driving the moment.He’s got to be having some kind of an impact on this division that we live in and worry about.
Yeah, I mean, I would like to say that none of this outlasts him, and I think certainly there’s some segment of the Republican Party who thinks, we’ll get back to normal; we’ll keep our base; we’ll grow our party, and we’ll have a normal president after this; you wait and see.But I guess I fear that we’re—he and his supporters are creating a country where truth is just a fungible thing, where it either doesn’t matter or it’s entirely subjective, and there are no trusted arbiters of what’s true or what’s not.And you get to create your own adventure; you get to create your own reality.
And the effect of that on any country would be damaging, and we’re seeing it happen in populist revolts around the world.But the effect of that on a country that’s primary glue, that’s effectively defined by the amalgamation of worldviews and backgrounds, that—where the entire principle of the country is that we all may come from different places, speak different languages, feel different things, but there’s a common set of beliefs and a common set of facts, and we have to accept those and work within them, that impact just can’t be overstated.
I mean, in America, I guess what I would say is, we don’t have a common identity in America.We don’t have common ancestry.We don’t have common religion.We have common truths, truths we hold to be self-evident and truths you read about every day.And if there’s no common truth to discuss, to debate, then it’s—there’s no country; there’s just an amalgam of factions all shouting at once.
And the thing that’s hardest for me to understand about this president is why that doesn’t trouble him, is why he is so willfully unconcerned with the consequences of that after he’s gone.It’s almost like nothing will exist after he’s gone.I get why he does it; I get what his game is; I get the need for attention and provocation.I just don’t understand how you don’t consider the consequences of that when you’re no longer there to provoke and get attention.
… Why do people participate in it?Why do voters, Americans, workers, warriors, people who have fought all these wars and done all these things, why do they let him get away with it?
Well, you know, look, first of all, I don’t think most of them do.I think his support is vastly overstated.And he’s basically—he’s won one election, and he won it against the only opponent I think he could have beaten at that time.And he’s not won much since, and he’s not been able to really—to really govern effectively either.
So I don’t—his approval rating, you know, remains hovering around 40% in any given moment, slightly less, slightly more.I would not—I would not say that he reflects the popular sentiment in America.
Tens of millions of Americans.
Well, he represents a loud segment, for sure, and a large number of people.… But if you’ve been a reporter and you’ve been out in the country for 20-odd years, you know in a lot of this country there’s a feeling that the people with their fancy educations and the professors and the people in the cities and the people in technology, that they think they know everything, and they get away with everything, and they make the money, and they make the rules, and that—you know, while communities everywhere else die.
And the thing Trump really does masterfully, and we abet him tremendously, is he angers all those elite people.He infuriates them, and he doesn’t care.He’s of their set; he has more money; he’s from New York, right?He’s not some—he’s not a guy from the heartland coming in.He’s of the elite, and he infuriates the elite, and he’s constantly sticking his thumb in their eye.And I honestly think, you know, when Trump said, “I can shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, and people wouldn’t mind,” I think this is what he was getting at; that it doesn’t matter what he’s saying or doing, but if we’re jumping up and down and are aggrieved by it, a large portion of America feels pretty good because no one’s been able to do that to us.
And it’s power.It’s a kind of power to make the powerful people scream in outrage and anger and fury and helplessness.That’s power.And he’s given them power in that way.And I understand it.I do understand it.… I understand why it has emotional resonance.
Trump and the Democrats
I’d love you to talk about the [Senate Minority Leader Chuck] Schumer/[Speaker of the House Nancy] Pelosi meeting with Trump, the shoutfest.
I remember that, right, yeah.
Tell us what you think happened there and what the meaning of it is.
Yeah, there’s that great moment where in front of the cameras he’s carrying on, and Pelosi keeps trying to sort of get it to stop, like, “Do we need to do this in front of the cameras?”I thought that moment demonstrated, for me, what he understood about his presidency and the modern presidency that a lot of Democrats and a lot of Republicans do not.I mean, this is where—Trump understands entertainment.He understands television.And he understands, you know, part of—he was a reality television star, and part of the appeal of reality television for people is that it at least had the appearance of breaking through the artifice of scripted television.
Everything in American life had become so scripted.TV dramas were all the same.The politics is all the same.The language is all the same.Reality television at least purports to break through that mold, but it doesn’t really, because we know it’s all kind of arranged, too.So it’s a little bit of a sleight of hand, but he gets that.
So you know, Trump, I think, the best moments for him of his presidency are when he is breaking through the artifice of Washington.People really respond to that.So for him—to Pelosi or to Schumer, yelling at each other in front of cameras, and the American public is seeing you behave like children, that’s just—it’s humiliating, and it’s beneath the dignity of the office and their offices.But to him, that’s winning, because that is showing people, “I’m not standing for this stagecraft here,” when in fact it’s a very real kind of stagecraft.Just like reality television, it is staged; it’s just not scripted.And I think that is his—that is—to the extent that he has a political skill or understanding that other people of his time do not, that’s it.
And the merits get sort of lost in all of the noise.
Nobody cares.Nobody even understands it.And you know, people don’t pay attention anymore.I mean, look, people don’t pay attention anymore to what politicians are saying, and that’s on the politicians.Just like their lack of trust in the media, we have to take some responsibility for that.We did a pretty lousy job for 30-plus years in this country of leveling with the public, of sort of we showed ourselves in the media to be very trivial and entertainment-driven and ratings-driven.When I say “we,” I’m really mostly talking about broadcast journalism, but not entirely.
Politicians did a very, you know, a very—a great job of using meaningless language and making meaningless promises that they never intended to keep, and poll-testing phrases, and saying—and sort of dumbing down the political discourse.
And the result of all that is that nobody listens to us.You can pin that on Trump and say he keeps talking about fake news, and you can pin that on, you know, on Republicans who are abiding policies that are 100% different from the policies they were proposing five or 10 years ago.But, you know, we’ve got to be grownups and take responsibility for that.We as an ecosystem in Washington, we squandered public trust, and we challenged people to tune us out, and they did.
So nobody’s listening to what’s being said in these arguments.They’re watching Trump blow it all up, and the blowing it up is really attractive to a lot of people.What he’s blowing up couldn’t matter to them at all, because it hasn’t mattered for a long time.And that’s on us.
I just have one. You’ve been talking about how social media has changed the landscape since Obama took over, and I wanted to ask you specifically about the birther moment, partly because that’s when Trump really engages on Twitter. Is that moment— would that have been possible without social media, without YouTube and Facebook? Is that an example of a place where the change is beginning?
That’s fascinating.I mean, no.The birther moment is a pretty great example of sort of the transformative power of both social media and niche media, which kind of work hand in hand, right?I mean, you couldn’t have had that when I was a kid.You couldn’t have had that 30 years ago, because the only people bringing information to the public were a couple of networks and a couple of papers, and a local paper, and vastly, by and large, they were trying to verify information.
So there was some objective truth.I mean, there were op-ed pages; there were columnists, you know.But, you know, there was a gatekeeper for information, and you couldn’t just slide around the gatekeeper.You could have gone out and given speeches or written a book and created a big sensation, but that gatekeeper still would have imposed on that theory, the birther theory, for instance, in this case, an objective truth: Here’s what we can find out; here’s what we know.
…But the people paying attention to social media, the people who latched on to Trump in that moment, the conservative media who amplified and echoed that argument, they speak to an audience that doesn’t trust the gatekeeper, and they go around it, and they create a separate truth.It may not be the majority truth, it may not be the accepted truth, but it’s truth for an awful lot of people.And it can build you a network of support.It can build you money; it builds you what I’ve called a mini movement.There are just a lot of mini movements in politics, things that sprout up and take life.They don’t sweep the country.They’re not the Progressive movement of the 1920s, right?But they are—they’re not the conservative movement of the 1970s and ’80s, but they are the—but they are small, powerful waves that change the discourse, change the nature of the politics.
Would not have been possible without cable television and social media and that combination, and we’ve not figured out how to deal with that.
The Government Shutdown Under Trump
Following up on the Pelosi-Schumer meeting, eventually he takes responsibility for closing down the government if he doesn’t get his way on the wall, and then eventually they reopen the government without accomplishing that.What does that whole episode, the closing down the government and everything else, say about his deal-making ability, the way he dealt with Pelosi and who outplayed who?
I loved that moment when Trump said, “You can blame me; if we shut down the government, I’ll take the blame,” and everybody, all the people in Washington, all the Democrats said, “Oh, my God, he took responsibility!He’s doomed!He just destroyed himself!He took responsibility!,” like anything Trump says has more than about 10 minutes of staying power.The guy literally contradicts himself every two hours.No one cares.
It just for me highlighted how in the last moment people try to apply to Trump all of these rules that just don’t apply.It’s not part of his appeal.Whether or not he tells the truth, it’s just not—if people were judging him by that, he’d have been done a long time ago.They just don’t.
Just one question about immigration in 2020. How central an issue is it for his campaign, the hot potato it is to Democrats?…
Immigration is going to be central, obviously, in 2020.Trump’s going to run on it because it’s the one issue he feels strongly about that’s resonant with his base.What he’s done pretty effectively, although you can’t do it without help, is to—he forces an extreme reaction among his opposition.He always—he takes extreme positions, and he counts on opponents to recoil from him in exactly the same proportion.So I think the danger here is really for Democrats, in my view.Trump has staked out where he is on immigration; everybody knows.It’s appalling to some people, it’s inspiring to others, and then there’s probably some middle ground that—there’s definitely a middle ground who have concerns about immigration and aren’t sure that he’s—that his way is the right way.
But what he’s sort of forced Democrats to do, predictably, is to begin having a debate that’s almost about open borders, having no rules, no laws.
… So I think the danger for any Democratic nominee is to not—to not get caught up in a sort of reactionary wave that once again I think forces American voters to choose between a president who they don’t think has the character for the office and a challenger who they just think is going to take the country in a direction that doesn’t benefit them.I think—I think if ever there was a time to show, to be cognizant of moderation and the complexity of problems and to have inclusive policy solutions that are not reactionary for Democrats, it’s now.And I’m not sure that’s going to happen.
Latest Interviews
Latest Interviews
Policies
Teacher Center
Jon and Jo Ann Hagler on behalf of the Jon L. Hagler Foundation
Koo and Patricia Yuen
FRONTLINE is a registered trademark of WGBH Educational Foundation. Web Site Copyright ©1995-2025 WGBH Educational Foundation. PBS is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization.
Funding for FRONTLINE is provided through the support of PBS viewers and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Additional funding is provided by the Abrams Foundation; Park Foundation; the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; and the FRONTLINE Journalism Fund with major support from Jon and Jo Ann Hagler on behalf of the Jon L. Hagler Foundation, and additional support from Koo and Patricia Yuen. FRONTLINE is a registered trademark of WGBH Educational Foundation. Web Site Copyright ©1995-2025 WGBH Educational Foundation. PBS is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization.
