The FRONTLINE Interviews
Molly Ball
National Political Correspondent, Time Magazine
Molly Ball is the national political correspondent for Time magazine and a political analyst for CNN. She has previously reported for The Atlantic and Politico.
This is a transcript of an interview with FRONTLINE’s Michael Kirk conducted on July 9, 2019. It has been edited for clarity and length.
This interview appears in:
TOP
Molly Ball
Chapters
Text Interview:
Highlight text to share it
Contrasting Obama and Trump
OK… Take yourself back to maybe the hinge between Obama and Trump, the candidate rising up; Obama, by our lights, I guess, the unifier, at least who said, “My personal biography is unification,” and Trump somewhat the opposite.Can you talk for just a little bit about the difference between the two as presidents, what their view of the politics of the country are, the people in the nation are?And then we’ll fly down to 15,000 feet.
Sure.I mean, there’s a school of thought that says that every president is a reaction to the last one, and you couldn’t get a more opposite president of Barack Obama than Donald Trump.I suppose you could compare the two and say they were both outsiders when they came on the scene, they both ran against the political establishment of their own parties, but the similarity certainly ends there.
Obama famously staked his brand on the idea of bringing together those red states and blue states and finding the things that as Americans that we share in common, lifting them up, repairing the country’s racial wounds, repairing the divides between different ideologies.Much of his original 2008 campaign message was about the bipartisanship that he had achieved, both as a state senator in Illinois and in the United States Senate working with Republicans on issues like arms control and ethics reform.
And so this was very much a presidential persona about positivity and unity.And coming at the end of the Bush presidency with the economy in free fall and the country entangled in these unpopular wars that seemed to be going so badly, this idea of hope and change was very powerful.And I think, although many came to view Obama as a divisive president, particularly on the right, I think he was permanently stamped with this brand of trying to bring the country together.
Trump had been making noises about running for president for decades, but in this era he really created his political brand on questioning Barack Obama’s citizenship, teaming up with fringe conspiracy theorists like Joe Arpaio in Arizona to hunt for the birth certificate, long after the idea that Obama might not have been actually born in Hawaii had been resoundingly debunked continuing to beat this drum of, you know, what Obama and others saw as really just a racist attempt to convince people that Obama was The Other, that he wasn’t one of us, that he was a secret Muslim and couldn’t possibly be American.
And so that was what sort of launched him in contemporary politics.It got him on the radar of some of the more fringe right-wing media and got the attention of a lot of the sort of Tea Party activists who were concerned with these—this kind of American identity issue.And he continued to beat that drum, and he came on the scene, and his first appearance as a candidate, famously coming down that escalator in Trump Tower, was to talk about the ways that non-Americans were hurting our country, right, by Mexico not sending their best and among the people coming into the country there being rapists and murderers.
And so you could say that Trump was just as stamped from the beginning with this identity as someone—how do I put this?—with this identity as someone who wanted to advance the interests of certain Americans and not others, and this idea that, you know, there are winners and losers; it’s a dog-eat-dog world.You want to be with the winners, and that means you’ve got to put down the losers.And I think that that was a powerful driver of his campaign, and that has continued through his presidency in ways that we’ve really never seen before with an American president.
I was there on election night at the Midtown Hilton in New York when, you know, Trump shocked the world by winning the election and at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning finally took the stage and gave a very conciliatory speech.And there was an idea, for a brief moment, that he was about to pivot, that he was about to be, quote/unquote, “presidential,” which he’d always claimed he was capable of doing; he just didn’t feel like it.
And that would have made sense, right?I mean, becoming president of the United States, you would expect that to change a person.You would expect a person to be sort of cowed by the gravitas of that incredible responsibility.And so there was hope that Trump would have a sort of honeymoon period.He would show us all that he was capable of uniting America and speaking to everybody at once.
And I think those hopes were very quickly dashed, because he reverted pretty much immediately to the sort of divisiveness that had powered his campaign and has continued as president to be focused almost entirely on the preferences and moods of his core supporters rather than the rest of the country.
Trump, Palin, and the “Forgotten”
That base, that core of support, who are they?Who were they?
Well, it’s interesting.You know, Trump won the Republican primary with a different type of Republican primary voter.They were more—they were older, less likely to have college degrees.They were—they really gravitated to his message of, you know—at a time when a candidate like Lindsey Graham, who briefly ran for president, was basically talking about more war and less Social Security, Trump is talking about less war and more Social Security.
And it turns out that even though those weren’t really the policies of the Republican platform, there were a lot of people in the Republican base who were attracted to that, who gravitated to that—the positions on immigration, on trade, on foreign entanglements, on entitlements in particular.The Republican Party, powered by [Speaker of the House] Paul Ryan, had been pushing entitlement reform, which is to say cuts to retirement benefits, for a long time, and Trump was really the only candidate who said: “No way.I’m going to protect Social Security.”And you’d go to these rallies, general-election rallies in Florida, that was a big part of the message that old white people were responding to.
And so, but—and so, to win the general election, Trump took this sort of new type of voter, this nontraditional Republican voter, and sort of stapled it onto the existing coalition of base Republicans and appealed very powerfully to evangelical Christians in particular.And so he was able to take that Republican base, convince them he was good enough, in part by convincing them he’d appoint the right judges to the Supreme Court, in part by convincing them Hillary Clinton was worse.
And he did not win a majority of the vote, but he did win the electoral college because he was able to stitch those two groups together.
Barack Obama, when he’s running in ’08, [Gov.] Sarah Palin is on the other side of the other ticket.She seems to have identified in her running an early harbinger of some of the Trump voters that a lot of people called—that Trump called the “forgotten.”Clearly they become the Tea Party.Clearly they become other subgroups like that.Does Obama know when she’s running they will become part of the Tea Party summer, they will become part of the anti-Affordable Care Act?Does he know, do you think, when he’s talking about unifying America, that that subgroup is out there waiting?
Let’s talk about the Tea Party for a minute, because the Tea Party’s really interesting.It ostensibly came about as a protest of the bailouts, which began under George W. Bush.So it ostensibly was this sort of libertarian, anti-tax, right?“Tea” and “Tea Party” was a reference to the Boston Tea Party, but also it stood for “Taxed Enough Already.”And the idea was that this was primarily a movement of fiscal conservatives who believed that, you know, homeowners shouldn’t be bailed out, the famous Rick Santelli rant, “I don’t want to pay somebody else’s mortgage, and the big banks shouldn’t be bailed out.”
And so I think a lot of reporters, myself included, covered this as a sort of libertarian conservative policy movement that believed that the Republican Party should be pushed to the right, particularly on fiscal issues.I think what we came to find out, what Obama came to find out, what Sarah Palin successfully recognized, was that there was a part of it that was that, but there was also a big part of it that was just resentment and reaction, right?It was reacting to cultural change and demographic change and political change and social change.
And so there was a big base for this movement that was coming from the Christian right that felt they were being dispossessed and ignored.It was coming from older white people who felt that—who were discomfited by the pace of demographic and technological change.It was coming from this group of American voters who just didn’t like what was happening.
And so one of the really interesting things about the Trump phenomenon was it sort of separated those groups within the Tea Party.I found it so interesting that when Trump was running, he got the endorsement of Sarah Palin but not Glenn Beck.Now, did you ever think at the height of the Tea Party you’d see Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck on opposite sides of something?
But what he did was he realized that there were—that there was—that the Tea Party was composed of conservative voters and resentment voters, and he tapped in to those resentment voters that Sarah Palin had sort of presciently identified.I call them sort of biker-bar conservatives.And they were tremendously enthusiastic about him at the same time as other, more policy-oriented conservatives, like a [Sen.] Ted Cruz, who was viewed as very extreme and a Tea Party figure, but whose focus primarily on conservative policy, they were repulsed by the Trump phenomenon.
Obama and Partisanship
So when Barack Obama looks out from Grant Park or wherever, looks out at America, does he believe he can unify?Does he know that that is out there, that those biker-bar Tea Party denizens are out there, and they might not like him just because of who he is?
Obama came into office with a tremendous hope that he could do what he said he was going to do, which was reconcile American politics and bring people together.And he came in in a moment of real national emergency because of the great recession, or whatever you want to call it.And there—and he came in with such a resounding victory that Republicans were really on their heels.
And so the idea was that Republicans were going to have to work with him because he was so popular.He was quite popular when he was elected, and his people believed, perhaps naively in retrospect, that that meant Republicans would have to come to the table if they wanted to succeed as a party.I mean, there were people at the time talking about there’s not even going to be a Republican Party anymore, right?I mean, if Barack Obama can win the state of Indiana, there’s basically no—the Republican Party’s just dying out; it’s inevitable.Look at what’s happening with public opinion and where young people are going and where the demographics are going.That’s it, you know.Put a fork in it.
And so—and so the administration believed that, and Barack Obama believed that there really would be this moment of national unity, that they would come together to do the stimulus because they could all agree that they needed to give the American economy a boost.And then he thought he would get Republican votes for health care.There actually were Republican votes for cap and trade.His vision was that he would take conservative approaches to liberal problems, basically, and therefore conservatives would support them.It turns out the math is not quite that easy in American politics, but you know, as most people remember, he took a health care proposal that had been supported by Republican governor of Massachusetts Mitt Romney and the right-wing Heritage Foundation, he adopted that as his approach to universal health care, and then I think was surprised when Republicans were no longer interested once that policy was coming from a Democrat.
What did he not know or understand?
There were some things that he couldn’t anticipate.I think it depends who you ask.I think—I wonder what Obama himself would say to this question.Or maybe he has said.I think he did say in later years that he underestimated the Republican resistance and particularly Mitch McConnell in the Senate who famously said that his number one priority was to make Obama a one-term president.Now, I think McConnell’s gotten a bit of a bad rap for that quote.He said it was his number one political objective; he didn’t say it was his, you know, meaning of life in the Senate, and people have made too much of that.I mean, I’m sure there are plenty of Democrats who have said it’s their political objective to defeat Donald Trump.That’s a little aside there.
But you did have, you know, Mitch McConnell in the Senate working very hard to deny Obama any Republican buy-in for his policies.McConnell I think correctly perceived—and McConnell, if nothing else, is a very good tactician—perceived that if there was Republican support for Obama’s proposals, they would be popular because they would be viewed as bipartisan.They would be viewed as something Republicans and Democrats could, had done together.It would be hard for Republicans to campaign against something that they had been complicit in.
And so by denying any kind of bipartisanship to any of the Obama administration’s initiatives, they could portray the president as a partisan who was trying to force his liberal vision on the American people.And in an economy that was still floundering, although it was beginning to recover in fits and starts, they could pin the blame for everything from what sucked about the health care system to the high unemployment rate, that could all be pinned squarely on the Democrats who controlled the White House and both houses of Congress.
The Affordable Care Act
So if you’re Barack Obama, and you assume or you’ve been told “You’re not going to get a Republican vote on the Affordable Care Act; it’s not going to happen,” and experienced people say to you, wise hands in Washington say to you, “You might not want to get such a hugely important piece of legislation passed without any support from the other side, even one or two votes,” yet he goes forward.What were the risks to him to push that through without any Republican support?
Well, I mean, the Affordable Care Act is a long and complicated saga.But let’s not forget that for a very long time, the administration and the Democrats in the Senate held out hope that they would find Republican support.Max Baucus on the Senate Finance Committee spent months and months trying to convince some of his Republican colleagues—and he was a relatively conservative Democrat who had very good relationships with the other side.So did the late Sen. Ted Kennedy just by being an impassioned liberal.He had a very good working relationships with Republicans.So it really wasn’t until maybe late 2009/early 2010 that Democrats in the Senate and the administration realized they weren’t going to get—you know, Republicans didn’t come out and hold a press conference and say, “That’s it; we’re never going to give you support.”They sort of strung along some of the Democrats in the Senate until the very last minute.
So by the time the administration realized there wasn’t going to be Republican support, the Affordable Care Act had already passed the House.It had been in the Senate for months and months.This wasn’t something they could back down from because they owned it anyway.
There was a movement inside the administration, particularly from then-White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, to back off and say, “OK”—you know, particularly after Scott Brown’s election to the late Sen. Kennedy’s seat in Massachusetts—to say: “All right.This is too much of a third rail, too much of a hot potato.Let’s drop it.Let’s do something more limited.Let’s do a sort of smaller package that just helps kids or something like that.”
And it was really then, then and now, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi who urged the administration to stick with this fight.Now, the president was always in that place.He had advisers who were urging him to back off.But I think he was always in the position of agreeing with Speaker Pelosi that they’d come this far.This was something Democratic presidents had been trying to achieve for almost a century.If we have a chance to push it over the line, let’s push it over the line.
They did not anticipate it would be as unpopular or as polarizing as it was.There was a feeling that because it would benefit so many people, people would see that and be happy about it.But a number of things happened.I mean, in part, none of it took effect for several years, so whatever still sucked about the health care system could then be pinned on the Democrats who tried to do something about it.And of course, the debacle later on of trying to do the exchanges and all of the problems that they ran into, the implementation of it.
So depending on who you talk to, I think they would say that there were failures in implementation and failures in messaging to sell the Affordable Care Act to the American people.But it is—but just as a fact, a policy that affects tens or hundreds of millions of people, that is disruptive to a major sector of the American economy, that’s going to disturb people.Any kind of disruption in the fabric of people’s lives creates a reaction.
And so—and this was essentially a redistributive policy.This was a policy that raised taxes on people with money to give benefits to people who didn’t have health care.And so, to that extent, you know, the Republicans’ message about Obamacare was essentially correct: They’re taking stuff from you to give to others.
Obama and Race
Now let’s talk about Trayvon Martin.Let’s really talk about, from up high, about race, another thing he thought, he hoped, he prayed he didn’t have to deal with it, just by being elected, just by being who he was; things were going to get better in that department.We know from looking at everything, from the “beer summit” to Trayvon Martin to Ferguson to Charleston, that there is this burden that he didn’t want to have to face, that he periodically has to face.… Give me a sense of Obama the black president, the Trayvon Martin story.Step up out of it a little bit, if you can, and say what were the implications, what was the importance, what did we see and what was his role in it.
Well, so much of Obama’s appeal, particularly to white people, was as a figure of racial healing, as someone who could bring the races together, as a black man who didn’t make white people feel bad, essentially; a black man who wasn’t angry and who wanted to create unity.
A lot of rank-and-file voters that you talked to, white voters, would say that the moment that changed their opinion of Obama actually was that moment that precipitated the beer summit, the arrest of Henry Louis Gates and Obama just sort of off the cuff saying he thought the police acted stupidly.And that really set people off, because it made a certain amount of white people feel like he was taking sides and like he was speaking for his group and putting it ahead of their group.
And so whatever ambitions he had of trying to speak for everyone and bring everyone together for some people really fell apart in that moment.That was the moment they started to see him as someone who was trying to get something for his people at the expense of their people.
And this is at a moment when you do have a rising tide of, quote/unquote, “identity politics” in America, right?You have an emboldened feminist movement with feminist blogs and voices coming up to be more aggressive about demanding equality for women.You have the Black Lives Matter movement and other advocates really pushing for an increased and more aggressive voice for people of color, immigrant movements demanding to be heard, and so on.
And so, to the extent that the demographics of the country are changing and a lot of white people are already feeling maybe even just at a gut level like their position in society is being eroded or the social order, the social hierarchy is starting to fall apart in ways that they don’t understand, those seemingly tiny and even improvised moments that Obama did weigh in on racial issues, starting with the beer summit and then continuing with his comments on Trayvon Martin, segments of the right latched on to these and created a narrative of race war.If you listen to right-wing radio or read some of the right-wing blogs, there was really this narrative of racial warfare and the idea that, you know, the establishment and the media are covering this up, but actually white America is under attack.And any tiny bit of ammunition from Obama fueled that narrative.
And Obama’s instinct always was to try to reconcile people, to try to bring people together, but it was also to do that by not seeming too much of a racial advocate, right?And my former colleague Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic has written about this I think very insightfully, that—and I don’t want to speak for him, but his thesis was basically, it was sort of the tragedy of Barack Obama that he was a little bit blind to the irreconcilability of black and white people.But that came—that’s where he came from.He came from a blended family.He came from a family where white people loved their black son or grandson.And Ta-Nehisi’s conclusion is, the only type of black man who could get elected president in America is one who saw the races as fundamentally reconcilable, even if, at the end, in some view, that wasn’t true.
Trump and Race
…I seem to remember that you wrote from out there in America about some of these things.Did you?Do you remember that?
I covered the Trump campaign, and I know the piece you’re talking about.It was at a moment when Trump had refused to disavow the endorsement of David Duke and the Klan, and that created an uproar.And he was in—actually, he was in Alabama giving a big rally and accepting the endorsement of his very first U.S. senator, which was Jeff Sessions.And I spoke to lots and lots of Trump supporters who—and you’d ask these people, what do you think of Trump not disavowing the Ku Klux Klan?Is that problematic at all?And what they’d say is, “Well, I hate the Klan, but I don’t think it’s any different than—you know, if he has to disavow the Klan, why doesn’t Obama have to disavow Black Lives Matter?”In a lot of Trump supporters’ minds, these were equivalent sort of racial advocacy movements, and Trump couldn’t help who was backing him, but if he—but they saw Black Lives Matter as just as racist a movement.
And I think this is also when the sort of us-versus-them nature of the Trump campaign and what would become the Trump presidency really became clear, right, this idea that he’s for us, and to lift us up, he’s going to put them down.
Talk to me a little bit about Charlottesville and the memo that you released and that was printed.Fascinating, completely fascinating.Tell me the story around all of that.
Where to start with that?Well, I think you have to put this in the context of it still being pretty early in the Trump presidency, right?He’s been president for less than a year.Republicans in Congress have been sort of buffeted by his propensity for, shall we say, surprise.He’s always doing things that they don’t like, they find unsavory, they find offensive, and they’re having to find ways to sort of talk around it, whether by sort of ducking into their offices and not talking to reporters or making excuses or whatever.
I think nowadays you see a Republican Party that’s much more full-throated in its support for Trump, defense of everything that he does, but this was at a time when Republicans in Congress were still kind of feeling thrown around by Trump’s constant offenses.
And so when Charlottesville happened, it shocked a lot of people.It shocked members of his own administration.It shocked people in the Cabinet and his advisers and so on.And so my Republican sources in Congress, many of them were horrified, and the idea was that they—nobody wanted to defend what Trump had said.And so they were sort of gobsmacked when—there’s regular talking points that come out from the White House communications operation and are sent to Capitol Hill so that the party can all be on the same page and everyone can make the same arguments in support of the policies they’ve all agreed to get behind.
But this was sort of different.This was at a time when there was almost universal condemnation of Trump’s rhetoric.The White House was trying to tell its allies on Capitol Hill the president is exactly correct, and here is how you defend what he has just said.And in retrospect, it is a sort of marker, a signpost of the kind of loyalty that Trump would demand from Capitol Hill and the sort of place he would force them into on these divisive issues, that even a lot of Republicans who might have carved out reputations as moderates or as, you know, immigration reformers or what have you, they were going to have to accept the president’s rhetoric, if not in this particular case, then just overall.
So when you look back at it, here we are again years later.The importance of what happened there and the importance of sending that out, what meaning do you extract from the Charlottesville national experience and certainly his as a president?
I think you can draw a little bit of a parallel, not to say that they’re equivalent statements, but a little bit of a parallel between the reaction to Obama’s comments that precipitated the beer summit, because, for a lot of American voters, Democrats or Independents who had been giving Trump a chance, Charlottesville sort of sealed the deal, right?One of his advisory councils from the business world had to be disbanded because these big corporations decided they could no longer be associated with the administration.
And you started to see the Democratic activism building that would power the midterm elections, the first harbinger in Virginia in November 2017.This is a previously purple state that went resoundingly for the Democrats, and continuing into the midterms.And I think you saw this when Joe Biden announced his presidential candidacy.He focused on Charlottesville.He focused on this idea of Trump as a racially divisive president, a president who plays to our worst impulses, our worst fears, who demagogued some of the most sensitive issues.That was a turning point for a lot of people.And I think that if you look back on the opinions of Trump that have sort of calcified, I think that had a lot to do with it.
One year before, Obama’s sang “Amazing Grace” in Charleston.The difference between those two moments?
Yeah, it kind of tells you everything, doesn’t it?I don’t think we’ve ever seen Trump sing a hymn with tears in his eyes.
What does it tell us about the difference between Trump and Obama, at least on that spectrum?
Well, Obama’s response to a racially inflected tragedy was to go there and show as much support as he could for the victims and to try to create a moment of healing, and then also to push for a policy that he believed could have helped, right?And his critics would say that he politicized tragedies like that by using them to push for things like gun control.
Trump’s response to a tragedy generally is to take it personally and to think about people blaming him, to think about—to get defensive on behalf of the people he sees as his supporters.And that pretty much epitomizes, I think, the difference between those two brands of politics; that when Trump was asked, rather than give the sort of very formulaic, any junior communications staffer could have written in their sleep, a talking point about how, you know, we deplore racism and we mourn the victims—and he did give that kind of statement at first, but his instincts took over, and his instincts always were to get offended on behalf of people he felt were being maligned, even if those people, in this case, turned out to be white supremacists.
Bernie Sanders and the Democratic Party
In the 2016 election, on the left with Bernie Sanders and his sort of surprising support and win in New Hampshire at the end of the Obama presidency, what does he say about where the Democratic Party is at that point?
Yeah, just as much as it was surprising to see Donald Trump rise in the Republican primary, I think a lot of people were really surprised to see Bernie Sanders get as much traction as he did.And you would, if you were out in Iowa, see some similar people at the Trump rallies and the Sanders rallies.They’re both drawing these huge crowds of impassioned supporters.They’re taking up a lot of the same issues, particularly free trade and particularly foreign wars.
Trump hasn’t necessarily governed this way, but a big part of his pitch that distinguished him from other Republicans was that he was against foreign entanglements.He accused George W. Bush of lying to get America into Iraq, which wasn’t something you thought a Republican nominee for president would ever say.And I did meet people who said they were choosing between Trump and Bernie Sanders.
What I think the people like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, the Democratic establishment didn’t get, and what powered Bernie Sanders, was that there was an appetite for radicalism on the left.There was an appetite for—there was an idea on the left and the right that the country is in crisis and that extreme times call for extreme remedies.
Now, I think it’s important to remember that Bernie Sanders lost the Democratic primary.The establishment prevailed.And that is a significant difference between the Republican and Democratic parties, that in one party those people were enough of a plurality to win, and in the other they were not.
But it certainly was more than, you know, Hillary Clinton and her team or anybody else expected, this surge of—this surging appetite for something more extreme, for actual socialism, for someone who’s proposing not to methodically and incrementally ameliorate our problems, but really to upend the entire system.
We’re watching the Democrats form a kind of new, maybe, a new party, a new ideology, new silos, new whatever you want to call them.It may be in response to Trump, but also in some ways in response to Obama and Hillary.As you watch the Democrats now form up whoever the Democrats are going to be, what are you watching for?
Well, there’s this continuing tension within the Democratic Party between the establishment, incrementalist wing and the more extreme or radical, less compromising wing.In many ways it parallels the split in the Republican Party going into 2016, and it’s funny that I think so many people believed that these divisions would hurt the Republican Party and make it impossible for them to regain the presidency, and that turned out not to be the case.
… But one of the sort of larger macro trends in American society in the last several decades, we talk about increasing partisanship, increasing polarization, but actually people are leaving the major parties at a historic rate, and the parties themselves are not popular with pretty much anyone.What we see really increasing is negative partisanship.People are more and more sure who their enemies are.
And so, you know, Trump was really able to unify the Republican Party against Obama and against Hillary Clinton.They might have disagreed on everything else, they might have been divided between the establishment and the Tea Party and the conservatives and the moderates and so on, but everyone could agree on who their enemies were.And I think that’s what’s going to unify the Democrats now, is they may disagree on whether to, you know, go for Medicare For All or just tweaking the Affordable Care Act.That’s not really an ideological difference so much as a difference of degree.But they can—but they all agree that they want to get rid of Trump.
And when you talk to Democratic primary voters, most of the ones I talk to are less concerned with any kind of ideological litmus test than they are with who can beat Trump.And if that’s a moderate, I think a lot of even liberals will support a moderate candidate.
That does still leave the identity of the party a bit unresolved.And whoever the nominee ends up being, whether or not that person becomes president, is going to have a lot to say about what the party stands for, because it’s in a moment of transition; it’s in a moment of flux.It’s really in a moment of crisis given what happened in 2016 and how unexpected Hillary Clinton’s loss was.
Latest Interviews
Latest Interviews
Explore
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, with major support from Ford Foundation. Additional funding is provided the Abrams Foundation, Park Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Heising-Simons Foundation, and the FRONTLINE Trust, 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.
