The FRONTLINE Interviews
Peter Baker
Chief White House Correspondent, The New York Times
Peter Baker is chief White House correspondent for The New York Times. He has covered four administrations, beginning with Bill Clinton’s second term.
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.
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Contrasting Obama and Trump
The two men in their first moments as president of the United States, give me a sense of who they were, … who they were and what their aspirations or efforts were in the direction of either healing or causing division.
Well, I mean, Barack Obama emerges on the national stage by talking about division, by talking about overcoming division.His first speech to a televised audience that anybody outside of Illinois ever saw was at the 2004 convention, and he talks about how “We’re not a red America; we’re not a blue America.We’re the United States of America.”
And it’s this propulsive idea that launches him to the White House arguably, that he is going to be a healer, somebody who’s going to help patch up these divisions that have been tearing us apart.He’s going to bring us together.And his inaugural address in 2009 is replete with this idea of a new beginning of unity, the themes you want or expect a president, at the beginning of his administration anyway, to sound: that this is a new start, and we’re going to put the election behind us; we’re going to put the competition behind us; we’re going to put the anger behind us and move forward as a country under new leadership.It doesn’t last very long after any inauguration, but that’s the theme he tried to strike on the day he was sworn in.
Flash-forward eight years to Donald Trump’s inauguration, and he’s come at this from a different place.His whole political campaign to get to the White House was about sowing division, about talking about division and about even exacerbating division by talking about us and them, by framing his appeal to America as “They have been profiting off of the system forever; I’m the one who’s going to come to Washington and break it up.I’m going to drain the swamp.I’m going to destroy the elites who have put us all down.”And his inaugural address reflects that anger, reflects that resentment that he had come to channel as a political figure.He talks about “American carnage,” about a country that is laid to waste by decades of poor leadership, of rotting cities and emptying factories, and a very dystopian view of America.
And you couldn’t have a bigger contrast between these two messages, eight years apart, between the idea of at least aspiring to hope and change and playing off division and saying, “They have taken advantage of us for too long, and now it’s time for us to rise up and stop it.”
And Trump’s inaugural address was marked by this attack on the system as the system literally stood and sat behind him on stage.The very people he is attacking, in effect, in this inaugural address are the Republicans and Democrats who have been part of the system for years, and were at that very moment, you know, listening to him just feet away on this dais on the steps of the United States Capitol.It is a real remarkable start to his presidency.
The Promise of Obama
… Let’s talk a little bit about Obama’s mindset at the beginning and as he was running.This idea that he is his biography, and he’s selling his biography to America as proof of purchase; that if I can make it, we can all make it.
Each channel Sinatra in their own way.Obama was kind of a cipher on the national stage.Nobody had known him for very long, and a lot of Americans saw in him what they wanted to see, right?So for many Americans, liberal Americans, they saw him as the champion of a new progressive era who would bring a more left-leaning, activist government approach to the office.To a lot of people in the middle, including some Republicans, he represented something different.He represented somebody who talked about bridging the divide, about reaching across the aisle, about being a post-partisan figure.And he became kind of a Rorschach test.In fact, that was the phrase that Obama himself uses: “I’m like a Rorschach test.”People saw what they wanted to see.
And that served him well in the election.That’s a way of getting votes, by convincing people you are what they want you to be.The trick was, of course, once you’re in office, you actually have to govern, and these two identities that he had sort of come to represent were fundamentally clashing ones.You couldn’t both be a bipartisan, post-partisan bridge builder, consensus builder, and be the full-throated champion of a new liberal movement and have those things work at the same time.
So for him, that was the fundamental conflict of his presidency, reconciling these different ideas that people had of him.But he—he did aspire to at least give voice to the idea that, you know, we had to overcome these divisions.He was the third president in a row actually, in fact, to make that explicit promise of his campaign.Bill Clinton said he was going to heal “the breach”; that was a phrase from Isaiah.He used it in his second inaugural address.He was going to be “the healer of the breach” that afflicted America.George W. Bush said he was going to be “a uniter, not a divider.”And Barack Obama says, you know, he was going to put an end to this idea of separate Americas.
None of them achieved what they set out to achieve.None of them accomplished that lofty goal.And in some ways each of them practiced division himself.Politics is about division.Politics is about different ideas clashing in the marketplace of politics, and some side winning and some side losing.So division, to some extent, is baked into our system.From the very start, the Framers created a system that was intended to play to our divisions, and in fact take advantage of our divisions to prevent an access of power in any single person or party.
What happens by the time Obama comes into office is that the normal divisions, the things that had been playing out over decades and generations have now exacerbated to a—to a whole new level, brought to the fore by the advent of social media, like cable television magnified to a degree that we have not seen in many years.And as much as Obama wanted to see himself as a uniter, he ultimately was a polarizing figure, maybe not because of things he did, maybe because of things he did, maybe a combination.But either way, you know, polls would tell you today that we were as divided and polarized under President Obama as we’ve ever been by any modern president.
Sarah Palin and the “Forgotten”
At the time that he is being applauded and Americans are applauding themselves for being open to the idea of an African American president, there is on the other side this woman named Sarah Palin, who comes and identifies another strand.It’s a strand that’s been there, but it activates in some what feels like a new and unique way.It will eventually be called the “forgotten” by Donald Trump, or the evolution of the Tea Party.But take me to just briefly in this case what Sarah Palin identifies, represents, come to be the symbol in that election with John McCain versus Obama.
I know it’s true.Sarah Palin, who’s the vice presidential candidate in 2008, …Sarah Palin ends up giving voice to a part of America that had been overlooked in some ways by the people in power and Washington, by both parties, the sense of populist frustration on the right, the idea that the country had gotten out of control; that it was serving elites over the ordinary Americans; that the power centers of the country, whether it be Hollywood, whether it be Washington, whether it be New York, were imposing a radical, more liberal agenda on a country that didn’t want it.And she became, in effect, the champion of this strain of American life that otherwise didn’t have somebody of prominence speaking to their values, grievance and resentment.
… You probably asked the former president this question.Did he, by your lights, know about fear and the forgotten, or whatever you want to call them, [add those] to his equation as he’s thinking about becoming the bipartisan champion of American politics?Did he know what was happening with Sarah Palin out there in America?
That’s a great question.I think he didn’t have much respect for Sarah Palin.He was evaluating her on her own merits rather than what she represented in a larger sense of things.And what he saw was—was a candidate who didn’t seem to be prepared for national office, who seemed, in his view anyway, to be superficial, demagogic, not a serious figure, unlike John McCain, who had been a part of the national conversation for so many years.
So I don’t know how much Obama was focused on what Palin represented at that time.Perhaps he should have seen the Tea Party coming.But I think he genuinely believed he was going to be the one who could bring people together.And it speaks to his lack of experience at the national level as well.He had a fundamental confidence in his own sense of a reasonableness—he had what I always call sort of a reasonable-man theory of governing, which is that if I simply get people to sit down at a table with me, even if we disagree, we’re so reasonable that we can come up with some sort of idea that makes everybody happy.
And his presidency was spent refuting that assumption again and again and again, whether it be with Republicans in Washington, whether it be with foreign adversaries who didn’t want to listen to him, the Russians, the Iranians, the North Koreans, whoever.Time and time again, I think, Obama found himself frustrated that his view of how politics were supposed to work didn’t match the reality.
The Affordable Care Act and the Rise of the Tea Party
One of the great examples, of course, that presents itself absolutely to this discussion is Obamacare, or what becomes known as Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act; his aspiration to, in a bipartisan way, bring the country together for another Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid moment.Talk a little bit about that, how Obamacare fits into what you were talking about.
President Obama thought that he could come up with a bipartisan health care bill by adopting ideas that had, in the past anyway, been advanced by Republicans.So rather than a single-payer system in which the government basically takes over health care, he proposed drafting a new system on top of the existing private insurance marketplace.He would create market incentives to achieve his goals.We wouldn’t take over health care; we would simply try to create competition in these markets where people could get policies that otherwise they might not be able to get.And that was fundamentally a Republican idea that had been advanced in the ’90s when Republicans were looking for an alternative to what President Clinton was proposing.
And President Obama’s mistake was assuming that Republicans would therefore like what he was proposing.“I’m using your idea, so you should therefore support me and support my plan.”And I think that that—again, it comes to his view of how governing works.He would often tell Republicans what they should want, and they would resent the fact that he was telling them that.And even if he was philosophically right, that he would take Republican ideas and try to incorporate them into his plans, the other party doesn’t want to be just simply lectured to or told what they should want.
I had an interview with him once about this.We were actually talking about the stimulus package.The stimulus package got not a single Republican vote.He was stunned that the Republican Party would oppose him in this moment of crisis.He considered it to be an act of partisan politics and disreputable in his view.But by the end of 2010, I think he’d come to understand, a little bit anyway, how that had happened, which is that he presented to the Republicans his stimulus package that incorporated what he thought they should want.
So it’s got a third of public-works spending the Democrats like.It’s got a third of money for states that were, you know, whose budgets were crashing.And it had a third—there would be tax cuts.And his view was: “I’m giving you tax cuts.You should like this package.You’re Republicans.You like tax cuts; therefore, you should like this plan.”
And Republicans didn’t want the president to simply say: “Take my plan.In theory, I’ve done what you want.”They wanted to be able to tell him what they wanted.Maybe they wanted tax cuts, but maybe they wanted them in a different ways.Or maybe they just wanted to be able to get the credit for pushing him into doing the tax cuts.And in this interview I did with him in 2010, in September of 2010, he acknowledged that he had come to believe that one of the mistakes he made was not letting Republicans negotiate tax cuts into the plan.Rather than presenting it as a fait accompli to them, he should have sat down with them with a plan that didn’t include tax cuts and allowed them to like push him into doing something he would have been willing to do anyway.And that way it would feel more of a compromise, and they would feel more ownership of it.And it might have actually gotten more bipartisan support.
Now, a lot of people would say it was fated not to get bipartisan support no matter what, that the Republicans were always going to be obstructionists.But there was no question there are certain points in his early days where things might have taken a different path and would have shaped the rest of his presidency in a different way.
It’s also part of his calculation that didn’t seem to take into account, for example, what would eventually become the Tea Party.And he would be surprised by the Tea Party summer that August, wherein those town hall meetings and everything is erupting.This group that comes from Palin and others, … did he understand there was a forgotten out there?It was almost like he didn’t understand it until that all erupted in August.
He didn’t have a feel for those people, I think, in that sense.And he had betrayed that during the election during one of these closed-door sessions that later became public where he talked about voters in Pennsylvania who didn’t like him because they were “clinging to their guns and Bibles.”And it was said in a way that it was perceived as being dismissive.Whether he meant it that way or not, you know, it came across that way.And that sort of sent a signal to a lot of Americans that he didn’t think much of us, and he wasn’t our president; he wasn’t representing our interest.And I think he never overcame that perception that he was himself removed from at least the experience of a lot of Americans.
Now, some of that might be race; some of that might be class; it might be education.Some of that might be, you know, from being from Hawaii, which is not part of the continental United States, but, you know, he never had that sort of tactile understanding of that part of America.
So by the time health care is coming up in Congress, he’s already passed an $800 billion stimulus.He is continuing the bailout that George W. Bush began.He has begun talking about regulations of the environment and Wall Street, and it just feels to a lot of people like whoa, this is a government that suddenly is spending a lot, large deficits, and is now beginning to come into my home and tell me what I wanted—what kind of doctor I can have, what kind of health care I could have.
This was exacerbated by misinformation put out by his opponent, something deliberately about things like death panels that didn’t exist.But it played into this insecurity.It played into this sense of, you know, the American ethos that we don’t want government telling us what to do and having too big a hand in our daily lives.While many Americans were grateful and happy to have a new health care system, a lot of them resisted; a lot of them resented the idea.
That really hard vote—you must have heard stories of people warning him, “Don’t go without some Republican votes on the health care.”Why does he go forward, Peter?
Well, in fairness to him, he tries for quite a while to get Republican votes.And he thinks he’s going to get some—[Sens.] Olympia Snowe, Chuck Grassley, a number of these Republicans he’s working with early on, has some hopes to get their support.And then the summer of 2009 happens, and somebody like a Chuck Grassley, who is genuinely, you know, probably instinctively a bipartisan dealmaker, goes home to Iowa and finds himself pelted by complaints at these town hall meetings, you know, angry people: “Why are you messing with our health care?Why are you doing it?”
And the Republicans come back to Washington more resolved than they had been to stand up against Obama at this point.And a lot of Democrats fault Obama for trying too long to be bipartisan.He never should have bothered to work with these people.They were never on the level anyway.But by ultimately passing a health care program that didn’t have any significant Republican support, he doomed it to be seen as a partisan program.… Medicare, Social Security, a lot of big programs that had been enacted in the past had bipartisan support.They had Republicans and Democrats alike supporting them, maybe not in equal numbers, but it was not seen as just a Democratic thing, even if they were Democratic presidents.
By passing a health care program essentially on the strength of one party, it was fated, destined to become a continuing partisan divide, part of the issues that would come up in election after election from then on.
And all the way into the Trump administration.
All the way into the Trump administration, even to this day.Now, you know, Obama’s calculation was, well, these other programs started off not so popular and ultimately became ingrained in our system to the point where everybody supports.Even Republicans who didn’t like them originally consider Social Security and Medicare to be sacrosanct today.
That’s actually a misreading of history.I went back and looked at this.If you go back and look at the polls, Medicare, Social Security, they had strong support in the public from the beginning, and got stronger.But there were like two-thirds supporting the enactment of these programs from the start.That was never the case with Obamacare.He never had that kind of support from the beginning.Therefore, didn’t have the legitimacy that it needed to kind of become part of the bedrock of our social fabric.
Well, in fact, if you’re [Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell or you’re the Republican Party, he just handed you an issue.And you’ve got no Republican votes on it.And you’ve got this growing fire out there that’s soon to become the Tea Party.You talk about an issue that they’ll vote 22 times on, repeal and replace forever and ever.
They could never vote enough times to repeal Obamacare.Now, they never had a replacement, right, that was satisfying to even their own party, much less the other party.But voting against Obamacare became just sort of like one of the neon lights of the Republican Party.It was going to be as popular as can be at least within their own base.
He looks back on it.Do you think he regrets the way it was played?
Obama’s not a big regrets guy.You know, the time I did interview him in September 2010 I asked him about regrets, and he had a few, but they were really tactical and small-bore.And most of his regrets are about communication, not policy.“We just didn’t communicate all the great things we’re doing as well as we should have, because if we did, the American public, of course, would have supported us,” rather than thinking, well, maybe actually there was a flaw in what we’re proposing.
Obama and the Rise of Partisanship
Well, you’re right about this, because one of the things that you notice if you go back, as we’ve done, and look at all these moments, and this guy comes in with this bipartisan impulse, and no matter how knocked around he gets by it, whether it’s stimulus, whether it’s Obamacare, Affordable Care, and the one we’re about to talk about, he just keeps coming back no matter what happens.And this one is the grand bargain, is the idea of working with Boehner and even the new Tea Party.Take me to the beginning of that.What sets that up?What’s the aspiration?What is he hoping to do? ...
Obama thinks that he can cut a deal with [Speaker of the House] John Boehner.John Boehner is a reasonable guy, as far as Obama is concerned.They actually kind of forge kind of an unlikely friendship.They have a few shared passions, like smoking secretly.And even though you have this sort of son of a bartender from middle Ohio and this, you know, Hawaii-born person who lived in Indonesia growing up, they actually kind of find an interesting and unlikely bond.
Because of that, Obama thinks, well, we can cut a deal.We can finally make progress on these big fiscal issues that are holding us back.He’s got to figure out the Bush tax cuts.We’ve got to get these deficits down.We’ve got to put more of the onus on the wealthy.That’s how Obama sees it.And in Boehner he sees a dealmaker.In a different era, it might have worked, because in different eras, people who had different philosophies still managed to come together and cut deals on big topics like that.
When you think of Reagan and [Speaker of the House] Tip O’Neill on Social Security in 1983, neither one of them got everything they wanted.Both had to swallow something they didn’t like, but they recognized that the final product was worth having.But the incentive structure has changed in Washington.There used to be a political benefit, or at least perceived political benefit, to finding a sponsor on a bill from the other party and holding a press conference and standing there with your hands together saying, “We together, these Democrats and Republicans, both agree we need to do X.”And even if your bill never passed, you would get credit from your constituents.
Today, the incentive structure has changed to be the exact opposite.If you were perceived as working with somebody from the other party, even on a goal that your constituents share, you are punished, or at least that’s the perception that elected lawmakers have; that the worry they have is of being primaried, as they put it, from the right if you’re a Republican or the left if you’re a Democrat, not that you have to go reach out to the middle and find the swing voters by talking about bipartisanship.So “compromising” has become a compromised word in Washington.It’s a dirty word.Use the “C” word, you know, there’s a price to pay.And that’s the opposite of the way it used to be.
And maybe no moment fits that bill better than when you’ve got a Republican who’s willing to play, and you’ve got a Democratic president who’s willing to play.They’re both powerful men who, as you say, once upon a time this would have been a done deal.And in fact, it doesn’t happen.
It doesn’t happen.Obama’s getting punished by the left; Boehner’s getting punished by the right.But Obama has more control over his party, and Boehner, it turns out, doesn’t.He’s got the Freedom Caucus.These are the Tea Party Republicans who come in who are banging on him not to cut a deal with Obama.It doesn’t even matter what the deal is; it’s just the idea of the deal is wrong.This idea of “go along to get along” is tarnished in the Republican eye.
And so Boehner wants to cut a deal.He has these secret talks with Obama.They actually pretty much come up with a deal that includes more taxes and spending cuts, and it’s one of these classic split-the-difference kind of Washington compromises.So then, when the details started to get out, Boehner comes under fire from his own caucus.He suddenly discovers that he cannot carry his own Republicans.And the idea of passing a bill like this with Democratic votes and not a unanimous or at least a mostly unanimous Republican Caucus is anathema to him.He sees it as throwing his speakership away.
And Obama makes things worse by suddenly changing his view of how much more taxes we can have.He says in one of their conversations, “I want to think about more taxes than we had previously agreed on because I think we can get it within this Gang of Six that have come up with their own plan.”Details are, you know—
But basically Boehner felt like Obama had changed the terms of the debate.Whether he had or not, that became his excuse anyway to get out.And he says, “No deal.”
… We’re coming up to the 2012 election now, and it’s a different Barack Obama who decides to run for reelection.It’s not every other word is “bipartisan.”It’s not healing the breach.It’s not whatever.It’s full on now.
Yeah, it’s a different Obama running for reelection.He’s a more, you know, scarred president who has become himself frustrated by the way Washington works.No longer quite so believing in the idea that bipartisanship is possible.His speech on the campaign trail is much more about stopping Mitt Romney and the forces of wealth.He becomes much more engaged in kind of a class-warfare argument to the country; that the inequality is such that we need to stand up against the 1%, and that’s—it’s a different message than it was in 2008.It was not a coming-together message.It was not a hope-and-change message.It was a stop-the-other-guys message, and continue what we were already building.
For all of that, even at that moment during the campaign he would tell people that he thought that once they got through the election, then there would be a chance for bipartisanship.He said, “The fever will break.”That’s the phrase he used, “The fever will break,” meaning once his second term, if he got one, was no longer at stake, that once there was no longer an election at issue, of course the Republicans will want to sit down with me and cut some deals.There wouldn’t be any reason not to at that point because they don’t need to defeat me.That was the way he saw it.
And even some of his own advisers thought that was still naïve on his part, or still overly optimistic on his part.And it turned out not to be.
Exactly.And if there was ever an issue that—we feel like it’s sort of crass to say it about something so emotional, but a slam dunk for a newly reelected president of the United States, it’s what happens in Newtown.And there he is, emotional in the press room.He says to Biden: “All right, if I can’t, you can.Get me a deal, Joe.”Set that up for me.At that moment, what does Obama believe he can do, his presidency can do?
The shootings at Newtown, Connecticut, really transform how Obama is going to start his second term.You know, the entire plan they had for his fifth year in office, his new chance to start again with a second inauguration was thrown out, and gun control becomes suddenly the paramount priority.It hadn’t been on the list, hadn’t been debated really in the election, hadn’t been something that Obama thought was even possible.But he was so moved by what happened in Newtown, and he thought the country was as well, that this would be a chance to do something the Democrats would have loved to have done before but never thought was possible.
He assigns Joe Biden to come up with a plan.“Let’s come up with a plan for gun control.”And they take this to Congress, and they discover that even for all of the grief over the children who had been shot, even for all the outrage, even for all the support shown in the polls for gun control, that he cannot overcome the entrenched opposition to it in the Congress, mostly from Republicans, although even some rural Democrats.And it’s a damaging moment for him.
Obama’s Executive Orders
A president who has just been reelected has a short window when the mandate of that vote gives you power, to say to Congress, “You need to do what I tell you to do because I have the people behind me.”And when his first thing out of the box in his second term turns out to be a failure, turns out to be a crushing defeat, it undermines his political stature, undermines his credibility, undermines his capacity for imposing his will on the political order in Washington.
And by 2014, running up the white flag in some ways, …Obama walks out and basically punches Congress in the nose and says: “All right, you want to fight?Here we come.”
By the time he gets to 2014, he’s given up.He’s decided that the fever has not broken; Republicans are not going to work with him.The phrase he uses all the time is, “They’re not on the level,” meaning that their opposition is not actually based out of principle but out of partisanship.And so he announces at his State of the Union, basically, “I’m through with you people.”He says, “I’m going to use my own power to advance my priorities where I can, and if you want to work with me, great, but if not, I’m not waiting for you any longer.”
And it’s a several-point plan.He’s going to use his phone and his pen, as he puts it.The phone is the convening power of the presidency.You can bring anybody you want to the White House when you’re president—captains of industry, governors from around the country, whoever, and you can use that sort of bully pulpit in a way to effect change.And then you can use your executive power to do what you can do, even without legislation.
A good example of that is, for instance, the minimum wage.He wanted to raise the minimum wage.Congress didn’t want to do it.So he uses his executive power to force federal contractors, anybody who works for the federal government, to raise their wage floor.That has a ripple effect in the economy more generally.And then he used his power of communication that a president has to set the stage so that city councils and state legislatures around the country, a lot of them went ahead and raised the minimum wage.A lot of companies thought, as a beneficial thing to do, companies like Walmart and other big employers voluntarily on their own initiative raised the minimum wage.So a president has the capacity, even without Congress, to set the tone for the country and perhaps lead by example.But it also was basically a declaration of war, a declaration of war against Congress, against lawmakers and against Republicans who by this point had taken over the House in one midterm election and was heading toward taking over the Senate in another.
Another good example of something that ripples all the way out to now is his decision on DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals], using immigration as something he can get in the middle of and enact something that becomes an arguing point even to this day.
Yeah, I know.He finally recognizes that he has failed to achieve any immigration reform of consequence through Congress, and he’s not likely to in the immediate future, so he turns to his executive power to at least do what we can.And his—the executive action he takes to spare younger immigrants who were brought to this country illegally by their parents, through no fault of their own, becomes a signature element of his approach at this point.“You’re not going to do it?I’m going to use my executive power.”
Now, he had already said he didn’t have the power to do that, and he changed his mind with a new legal interpretation and pushes the boundaries of what we think a president can do unilaterally.And this excites, obviously, his supporters who are—have been banging on him for a long time to take more aggressive action on immigration.He was taking a lot of heat from the left because he was the “deporter in chief,” as one of his critics put it.In fact, he did actually deport a lot of people.… And so this use of executive power is meant to sort of reassert himself in that debate.
The consequence of that, though, the downside of that, the trade-off is, you don’t have support for something that will outlast your presidency.If you can sign a piece of paper as a president and make something happen just like that, the next one can come along and sign a piece of paper and undo it just like that.
And what Obama I think understood intellectually but certainly learned viscerally through this process was that there is something really important about getting legislation through.If it’s put on the books as the law of the land, it’s much harder to undo.And so while it was invigorating, I think, for him and his supporters to start using his pen and signing all these executive orders, it would have a consequence of not being sustainable and pushing the boundaries of where the Constitution said the president can act.
Obama and the Trump Campaign
There is around this time someone who picks up the immigration cudgel.… Obama must be watching by ’15 certainly as he comes down the escalator and talks about Mexican immigrants.From what you can tell, what does Obama see when he’s—and what are the implications of what he sees as he watches the rise of Donald Trump?
Obama doesn’t take Trump seriously.He sees him as a carnival barker; he sees him as a showman, as a demagogue, but not as a serious figure.He’s a joke, as far as Obama is concerned.He’s the guy who promoted the birther controversy, as somebody who got under Obama’s skin and in a big way.And Obama then gave it back to him at this famous dinner in 2011 when he mocked Trump with Trump there in the audience in front of thousands of people, which really left Trump seething.
Even as late as 2015, Obama didn’t see Trump as a serious threat.He just couldn’t believe that the Republican Party would nominate Trump.And once the Republican Party did nominate Trump, he just couldn’t believe that the American electorate would pick him as president.The idea that the American public would elect twice Barack Obama—you know, first African American president in history, champion of liberal values—and then turn around and pick Donald Trump, who played the racial resentments and anxiety, who promoted conspiracy theories and seemed so anti-immigrant, it just didn’t compute for President Obama.It just didn’t make any sense to him.He couldn’t imagine it.It’s a failure of imagination.
At one point on the campaign trail, he said to people, “Look, this would be like a personal insult if you were to elect this man.”And so it took a long time for him to see that coming.
It goes back to that question I asked you about the Sarah Palin touch.Did he know there was another America, the forgotten America, Donald Trump’s America, the America that Donald Trump will someday be president of?
He understood intellectually, of course, that there was another America, as you will, but I don’t know he ever felt it in a visceral way.He didn’t see that as being successful in the long term.How could it be?He had won these two elections; how could America then turn back, in his view, to a very different way of thinking?
So he didn’t know how divided America was?
He came to learn how divided America was.He did say, for a president who never, or very rarely, expressed regrets, he did say in the last State of the Union address, the one thing he feels like he had really failed on was this idea of bipartisanship, of bridging the divide, and he’d come to realize the divide was much larger than he had ever imagined it would be, much more stubborn, much harder to cope with.So it was a hard lesson for him over eight years.It was something that—something he didn’t imagine, something he didn’t see coming.
Division in the Democratic Party
… Help me understand the other division inside the Democratic Party and the rise of Bernie Sanders.
People forget now, but Obama spent a lot of his presidency fending off criticism from the left.He wasn’t liberal enough, as far as they were concerned.He kept compromising with the Republicans.Why was he doing that?Why didn’t he have a public option with his Obamacare program?He had told us he was going to have one.A public option was a government-run alternative to private insurance.… Why did he agree to the compromise with Republicans on the Bush tax cuts?Why did he not do more on climate change in passing legislation?Why did he not pass immigration legislation?Why did he deport so many people?
There was a fundamental disenchantment by a lot of people on the left with Barack Obama for much of his presidency.And he—I think this manifests itself in Bernie Sanders, this sort of pent-up resentment on the left, you know, the same beliefs that Donald Trump is running against on the right, the idea that Washington needs to stop telling us what to do, and we need to take back our country, our party.And Bernie Sanders, as unlikely a figure as he is—you know, septuagenarian, socialist from Vermont with wild hair and a kind of Larry David persona—somehow captures that sense of resentment, grievance and disenchantment.
He may never have been a particularly viable candidate in the sense that it’s still hard to see him as a president.But he represents a way of sending a message, a message to the party, a message to Obama, a message to the establishment that they need to pay more attention to us.And so in some ways, there’s a parallel to Trump.
Russia and the 2016 Election
During the 2016 election campaign, now we know the Russians were all over it, exploiting the divisions, racial divisions in this society, class divisions in this society.It’s almost like they had a playbook and they knew exactly where the tender spots were, and they exacerbated all those problems through Facebook and other things.
Help us understand what we learned about our own democracy from what the Russians did in the summer of 2016.
The Russians are like that bully on the playground who knows that you sprained your ankle and then kicks it repeatedly.He knows where your vulnerability is.They knew where our vulnerability is.Our vulnerability at the moment is our division.And they played to it masterfully.They posted social media memes that played up racial divides; that played up class divides; that played up insider/outsider divides.I think they started their operation to intervene in the election with the idea of simply sowing discord and weakening the United States as a country by doing so.It only later became a mission to actually specifically elect Donald Trump.But the original goal was play to the American divisions, exacerbate them where they could, and therefore weaken the United States on the international stage.
And Obama’s lack of aggressive response, informing people—a man who doesn’t regret much may look back on that and say, “Is there something else I could have done?”
Certainly a lot of people around Obama look back on that with regret and say: “We choked.We should have done more.How come we didn’t do more?”Even at the time, there were people inside his circle who were arguing for a more aggressive response, and he kept pushing them off.Obama, by the end of his presidency, had come around to the idea that action sometimes was worse than inaction; that the consequences of doing things that might seem like a good idea could be—make things worse than they were to begin with.
And in his case he believed that if they went too far in publicizing the Russian threat, it would play into Trump’s hands in discrediting democracy.Trump was already saying that the election could be rigged and he might not accept it if he didn’t win, and Obama worried that it would look like a Democratic president trying to elect Hillary Clinton rather than warning about an external threat from a foreign adversary.
He also made the same calculation a lot of people did, which was that Hillary Clinton looked like she was going to win and that therefore, he didn’t necessarily need to do anything to prevent the election from being tilted by the Russians.He did have a private conversation with Vladimir Putin and said: “You need to knock it off.We know what you’re doing.”He did eventually allow his intelligence chiefs to put out a statement saying, “We think Russia is intervening in the election.”But even there they didn’t go so far as to say everything that they knew or say that the election—that Russia was specifically trying to help President Trump.And it was a more passive approach than even some of his advisers wanted him to take.
And as if we need further evidence of the divisions that are the political divisions in our society, [CIA Director John] Brennan goes up, sits with McConnell, says, “This is happening,” and McConnell says, “No.”
Yeah.Well, in the—in the heat of the campaign, at the most partisan moment of our four-year cycle, the president’s people go to the Hill to see Mitch McConnell and [Speaker of the House] Paul Ryan and say, “Let’s have a joint statement, a Democrat and Republican, a joint statement saying, this is outrageous what Russia is doing, and we are warning the public against it.”And Mitch McConnell wouldn’t go along.He saw it as a partisan effort by Obama, and the Obama people saw his refusal to go along as a partisan effort by the Senate majority leader.
And so you had this disconnect.And because McConnell wouldn’t go along, Obama basically said, “Well, then we shouldn’t.”And a lot of his people said: “Well, wait a second.Why do we have to let the Senate tell us what to do?If he doesn’t want to do it, fine, but we should be taking action ourselves,” because then Obama worried that it would be discredited by being seen as partisan.
Obama and the Trump Victory
And there’s the moment near the very end of his presidency where Obama is sitting, talking to Ben Rhodes and others and sort of offloading lessons, I guess, across the eight years.Tell me a little bit about his perspective at that moment.
Yeah.So after Trump wins and Obama is trying to process it, like a lot of people, in his White House, aides are in tears.They’re distraught.He tries, as the president, to bring them together and tell them it will be OK.But in his own mind, he’s not really sure, you know.He’s kind of going through the various stages of—of grief and denial and disbelief and—and hadn’t yet gotten to acceptance.And he’s in a motorcade at one point, I think overseas, during a trip after the election but before the inauguration, and he’s talking with Ben Rhodes, his deputy national security adviser, and he’s sort of reflecting on this.He says, “You know, maybe we—maybe I came along 20 years too early, you know.Maybe I pushed too hard.”
It’s a rare moment of introspection on his part.He’s not really given to entertaining doubts, at least out loud.But he’s trying to make sense of this.How did this happen?What does this say about us?He meets with Trump three days after the election in the Oval Office.It’s the first time they’ve ever actually talked, ironically.As central as the two had been in this sort of long-distance argument they had been having for years, the two had never actually been face-to-face.
And Obama comes out of that meeting scratching his head and talks to his—he couldn’t read the guy.He says: “Who is this guy?I’m trying to place him in American history.When have we had somebody like this guy?”And Ben Rhodes says to him: “Well, we’ve seen this before.It’s like Huckleberry Finn.It’s this sort of, you know, this—this character in Americana who is this huckster, and a—and a liar.”
But Obama, he can’t quite make sense of it.I think it’s just—it’s just—it boggles the mind, from his point of view, that this, in his view, somebody he sees as a charlatan would be taking over the office that he had held for eight years.
I read somewhere that Obama takes the opportunity there to plead on behalf of the DACA kids, the Dreamers.
He does, yeah.
To Trump.
Yeah.In this meeting that President Obama has with President-elect Trump, one of the few things he asks of him basically is to take care of these kids, these younger immigrants, who had been spared from deportation by his DACA order, and Trump had made signs that that’s something he was sympathetic to.You know, Obama had some hope that Trump might actually turn out to be a little bit more of a middle-of-the-road figure than his campaigning had indicated.In fact, Obama thinks for the first few weeks or months that he might actually be able to guide President Trump a little bit, that once he was off the campaign trail, that he understood what he didn’t know and might look to Obama for a little guidance.That doesn’t last very long, obviously.
The Trump Inauguration and Transition
… It’s post-inauguration.It’s that weekend.It’s the crowd-size argument.It’s “[Sean] Spicer, get out there and lie if you have to.” …What’s going on there?What do we see?And what’s the kind of meaning of it?
Yeah.I mean, the meaning of it, Trump is fundamentally insecure about his election.He didn’t win the popular vote.There’s just rumors out there about Russia, and he thinks that people are questioning his very legitimacy.So the idea of how many people come to see his inauguration becomes—you know, it takes on outsize meaning for him.And he’s a very competitive guy.Crowds matter to him.And he has to basically be, in his mind, the first, the most, the biggest on everything.
And so when he sees this tweet that shows pictures of his inauguration versus Obama’s inauguration, and which is very clear, from the pictures, that there aren’t as many people showing up for him, it drives him crazy.Drives him absolutely livid, and he starts insisting that’s not true.“We have the biggest crowd ever.”He tells Sean Spicer, his press secretary, “You go out there and tell them that.”Sean Spicer, his very first appearance for the White House Press Corps ends up getting this badgering, belligerent performance about crowd size, while people are kind of scratching their heads.And it sets the tone.It sets the tone from the beginning, you know.This is not about healing; this is not about bringing people together.It’s about, you know, who’s up and who’s down, winners and losers.
And Donald Trump is fundamentally a winner.That’s how he sees himself, and that’s how he wants everybody else to see him.So whether it be crowd size or whether it be the shape of the economy, whether it be any kind of metric, in his mind, he has to be the biggest, the most, the first or what have you.
… This idea of fake news.You have Kellyanne [Conway] coming out and saying, you know, facts—
“Alternative facts.”
Alternative facts.It feels like that’s what’s afoot, especially after that very first press conference, where that we are the “enemy of the people,” or whatever.
There had been this idea that, once the election was over, you’d see this New York businessman again, this guy—you know, somebody who’d worked in a Democratic city and was pragmatic and would find ways of governing that sounded different than the more demagogic kind of campaign-trail rhetoric.And in fact, that was a fundamental misunderstanding of who Trump really was.
The person he showed himself [to be] on the campaign trail is the person he was going to be as president.He was not one of these “Let’s get together and try to pretend, at least, that we’re unified” kind of president.He was a, you know, “I was all about us, and us versus them a few months ago, and I’m still about that today.”He filed for reelection the day he was inaugurated.He never got off the campaign trail.It was always going to be about that.
And throughout his presidency, he has catered to his base.He has tended to them religiously, meticulously, and he has never made an effort to reach beyond them.He has not—even the kind of false efforts that some presidents make to at least look like you’re a unifier, he’s never bothered to try that.It’s not been part of his calculus.His calculus is not “Let’s win over people.”It’s “Let’s make sure our people are excited and enthusiastic and come out.”
Even if the result of that is … deepening the division in the society.
He is about division.His presidency is predicated on that.He wants division.He craves it.He enjoys finding seams and driving right into them.Whether it be the NFL or various basketball players or Hollywood actors or politicians, even of his own party, there’s no fight he doesn’t want to be part of.And there are plenty of fights he’d like to start.It’s just the way he operates.
And from his point of view, it generates excitement among the people who support him.It shows that he’s a fighter.In some ways, it doesn’t matter whether he fulfills his campaign promises, as long as the people who support him see that he’s fighting for them.And in some ways, it’s what his political identity was in the first place.“I’m the one who’s going to go to Washington and drain the swamp and break the system.I’m the one who’s going to fight for you.”And if he went to Washington and then was seen as accommodating the other side, working with Democrats, for heaven’s sakes, that would cut against the very persona he has spent so much time shaping.
The goal is the fight.The fight is the goal.It’s—there’s no reward, from his point of view, in unity.There’s a reward in fighting.
Trump and the Media
When [Special Counsel Robert] Mueller is appointed, it initiates a new dimension of the strategy in lots of ways, an undermining of institutions.It’s almost like a rationale to be able to do it, to say, “Here I go.”
Anybody who comes up against him, anybody he sees as a threat, it’s not that he’s simply going to have a debate with them.He’s going to undermine them; he’s going to question their credibility; he’s going to question their integrity in a way that no other modern president has done, not anyway as effectively and intensely as he has.So we’ve got Mueller, and it’s angry Democrats, you know.He automatically starts discrediting them.And repetition is the power, right?Every time he talks about—he talks about the “witch hunt,” the “hoax,” “18 angry Democrats,” he sets the predicate for this investigation before it’s even started, so that whatever it comes out with will be seen, at least by some part of the American public, as discredited.
He does that with the media, the “fake news,” the enemies of the people.“Don’t believe what you’re seeing.If you see something critical of me, it must be fake news.”Every president doesn’t like his media coverage and complains about the press.It’s part of the—part of the system, and that’s fair that they want to complain about their coverage.But what he does is systematically undermine any other institution that he sees as competitive of him.
And the effect of fake news on the already divided electorate?
… It further exacerbates the partisan divide over the media.More Republicans, according to polls, tend to agree with him that the media is unfair and out to get him and can’t be trusted.More Democrats actually begin to look at the media favorably than they used to, because if Trump doesn’t like the media, it must be doing something right.So it widens that divide when it comes to the perception of the national media.
Trump and the Republican Party
… We talked a lot about Obama’s impulse towards bipartisanship in his early efforts with dealing with Congress.Trump’s early efforts dealing with Congress; the Obamacare, replace and repeal; his standing on the sidelines, kind of scratching his head about, what are these guys doing?They don’t have a plan?I thought this was going to be on my desk at the very beginning.And in an interesting way, watching him decide he has to take over the GOP, because he’s not going to be able to work with these chuckleheads in Congress in any way, is a fascinating experience across spring and summer of his first year in the presidency, leading up to the McCain—
Yeah, from the beginning, the real goal, I think, is taking over the Republican Party and forcing them into taking his leadership, right?There’s a real risk for President Trump.The Republicans in Congress are not going to follow his lead.They were not enamored with him to begin with.They didn’t support him for the nomination.As late as just a few weeks before the election, many of them were telling him to drop out, that he couldn’t win, that the Access Hollywood tape had fatally compromised his candidacy.
So he comes into office looking at a Congress where he has no friends, and he has to basically take command of the Republican Party.He’s not going to work across the aisle.His goal is simply to take command of the one party and then work through that.His party controls both Houses of Congress at that point, and better to force loyalty from them and work with them on their goals as well as his than to try to like, create what he sees is kind of a false bipartisanship.
So when he watches what happens with Obama[care] repeal and replace, what does he see?
Well, he doesn’t understand why this health care thing is so complicated.He says, “Who knew health care was so complicated?”Well, he’s the first president who never had a day of experience in either the government or the military, so it’s all new to him.And the vagaries of the legislative process are lost on him.He’s a businessman.He likes to get things done.You know, in Trump Tower, you just give orders, and on The Apprentice, you just simply say, “You’re fired,” and that’s the end of it.
The idea of working with a legislature is kind of, it’s a mystery to him.And so how is it these Republicans can’t get this done?What is it you’re doing, Paul Ryan?You told me you were going to get this done.Why, Reince Priebus, my chief of staff, have you not delivered on what you told me you were going to be able to do?So it becomes frustrating to him and aggravating to him.
And then it culminates, of course, in this moment on the floor, late at night, middle of the night, where John McCain turns out to be the decisive vote on whether to move forward on the Obamacare repeal and replace.And he shows up there on the floor, and he goes like this, dramatically gives the thumbs down.Big moment for President Trump.Never going to get it.Searing.He still brings it up to this day.And it’s part of his frustration, aggravation, anger at the system as a whole.
So, while he is a Republican, he is still basically a system breaker, you know, a china breaker, and—and his experiences in Washington have fueled that rather than turned the other way around.
He decides to do what he does: aggressively assault members of his own party; primary them.Thirty-one retire or get out of town as fast as possible.[Sen. Jeff] Flake is gone, anybody who has the temerity to step up against him.So that by fall, by late fall/early winter, by December, the tax bill happens.They all walk out in front of the microphones, and they bow down in homage to Trump.
Yeah, I know.He is enforcing loyalty in the party.He does not brook dissent within the Republicans.If some Republican says something about him or votes against him, he will push back with more force, a sledgehammer.Other presidents might try to win over dissenters in their party.Other presidents might try to ignore and marginalize dissenters in their party.Trump takes them on head-on, and in effect, he forces the party to decide, are you with him or not?
And by the time the tax bill comes up at the end of the first year, they decide they’re with him.This is a central priority for Republicans that they actually all share.It’s one thing where Trump and Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell have a philosophical agreement.They have a political agreement.And it’s the one unifying moment, actually, within his own party, is this tax bill, because otherwise they don’t necessarily share the same goals.He’s protectionist where they’re free trade.He’s anti-immigration where they’re trying to solve the issue because they see it as a threat to the party.He’s trashing NATO and the allies, where Republicans have spent decades building up these alliances.There’s a lot of friction points with his own party.The tax bill is the one time where he brings them together.
The demonstration project of his willingness to step into state politics is Roy Moore, I suppose, where he goes down, spends some capital, gives a speech, talks about the NFL, and dives into the cultural world as much as the political world.And I guess that’s what he’s doing.He’s also—McConnell doesn’t like Moore, doesn’t want to give any RNC [Republican National Committee] money to him.That’s what Roy Moore is all about?
… Roy Moore becomes part of Trump’s war against the chattering class in Washington, right?The chattering class in Washington, Republicans and Democrats, think of Roy Moore as this hick, Deep South, Ten Commandments-waving politician who doesn’t fit in the modern Republican Party, much less with the Democrats.
And these allegations of sexual misconduct only fuel that determination by the establishment to keep him away.Trump basically says, “Forget that.”You know, he sees Moore under attack, and he identifies with it.He identifies with any figure who comes under fire, and he decides to throw in with Moore.It’s a gamble, and it’s one he loses.But it goes at the heart of how he practices politics.
Other presidents would have looked at that and said, “That’s a loser; I’m not going to go anywhere near that one,” or, “I may even come out directly against him, because that’s going to make me look better with suburban moderates and women I’m trying to appeal to in the next election.”Not Trump.He doubles down.And in the act of doubling down, it is—that’s who he is.That’s what his appeal is to his supporters.It’s the fighter in him.
…And they may not agree with him about Roy Moore, but they like the fighter.They like the guy who’s willing to get in there and mix it up.
The 2018 Midterm Elections
Yeah.By that fall, and now we’re in ’18, …Mueller gets announced.You have [Brett] Kavanaugh happening.You’ve got the midterms coming.… He’s in full-blown campaign strategy, if he ever got out of it.But he is absolutely in full-blown campaign mode.
You know, by the fall of 2018, he’s using every tool at his disposal, right?He’s—he’s out there using these rallies to gin up the base.He’s using the Brett Kavanaugh hearings to motivate conservatives, not to try to reach out to people who might have been offended, but to say, “Hey, look what they tried to do; they tried to go after your justice, you know?”And he turned it into a political selling point rather than, you know, something to be shunned.
He uses the military to go to the border.He’s talking about these caravans, a threat to America.“They’re coming for you.They’re coming to our border now.We have to stop them.”And he sends the military, which really discomforts a lot of people in the armed forces who don’t want to see themselves politicized.And he’s pulling out all stops.He knows what’s at stake, and what’s at stake in these elections is his future ability to govern, because if the—if either house were to flip, suddenly then his opponents have subpoena power, and it will be a very different day.They may not be able to pass legislation, but they can start doing investigations that they couldn’t do or wouldn’t do when it was just Republicans in charge.
And such a thing actually happens.
And that’s exactly what happens.And he—he convinces himself, or at least he tells everybody, that, you know, it’s a great victory because he won a couple seats in the Senate.Well, losing the House was the big game, because suddenly now, it transforms his presidency.It means that his second two years in office are all going to be combat.It’s all going to be conflict.It’s all going to be, you know, fighting over—over the Mueller probe and the emoluments clause and various Cabinet scandals and, you know, census fight.All these things, now that he could have just sort of pushed through, or at least dismissed in some way or another, Democrats have a tool now to come after him.
But many presidents love having the other party having some control over one—especially the House, because you’ve got an enemy now.And if anybody needs an enemy, it’s Donald Trump.
Trump loves an enemy.So the advantage of the House flipping, it’s now he has one.He has somebody to blame other than Republicans if things don’t get done.Wall not being built—that’s because of the Democrats.Immigrants coming over the border—that’s because of the Democrats.Deficits going up—that’s because of the Democrats.And so yeah, he’s now got this foil that he likes to use in public.He doesn’t have to always go back to Hillary Clinton from 2016.
Division is his friend.
Division is his friend.Division is the central animating force of his politics.
The 2020 Election
Since we’re right here, what is the strategy going to be, as the film will be in January of the election year.And where is Trump heading into that election?
Yeah.I think Trump heads into this election year trying to replicate the lightning in a bottle he had in 2016, which is to say, he doesn’t have to win the popular vote; he just has to win the Electoral College vote.And the way you do that is by winning specific states with enough votes to push you over the top.That’s animating your supporters more than winning over converts.He’s not reaching out to the middle.There are no swing voters in the Trump calculus.It’s all about making sure the people who got you there stick with you.And if you can get a few more votes, fine.But you want the people who brought you there to stay dancing with you.
And as far as this theme of division and his election?
Yeah, division is central to his reelection strategy.You know, he has to show the public, particularly his public, why the other guys are dangerous to the country and they’re going to turn things back.He’s going to be on the attack from the start and it will be the sole message you will hear until November.
So going back to 2014 and Obama, you said that Obama would say that things were “not on the level,” and you said in the beginning about his belief that if we all get together, people are rational.… By 2014, when he’s saying they’re not on the level, how has he changed his understanding of the role of rationality and who people are?
… I think by 2014, this idea he had when he came into office, that if he simply sat down with people, everybody could of course come up to agreement is pretty much gone away.The last six years have shown that really not true in Washington today.For whatever reason, maybe he’s at fault; maybe it’s the system; maybe it’s Republicans.But for whatever reason, the system is not working in that way at this point, and in fact, it’s more about applying pressure and power to get what you want.And so he decides to use his own power to work independently of other people.Rather than working across the aisle, that part’s gone.It’s all about getting things done on his own.
Trump Relationship with the Press
Were you at the first Trump press conference, in the White House, and he comes out, and is combative?
… No, I covered it from watching it on television.I wasn’t in the room.
If you just help us as to what happens in that sort of first press conference.I guess after he’s frustrated with—
Yeah.The first press conference, it was just wild.I mean, we’ve never seen a performance like that in the White House in our lifetime, I don’t think.He just lashes out at everybody and anybody for all sorts of reasons.He was angry and vituperative.Where most presidents try to smooth over differences, he’s exacerbating them, and—and, you know, he’s finger-waving, you know, angry eyes.It was just remarkable.And it was a sign of what was to come, right?This was not going to be your father’s presidency.This is going to be a very different animal, one that doesn’t shy away from controversy, doesn’t shy away from conflict, in fact embraces and encourages conflict.And on all fronts, with all kinds of players and institutions, whether they be Democrats or even Republicans, the press, the courts, the allies, cultural figures, the sports world, he’s ready to fight with everybody.
Do you think that that’s emotional, or is that a strategy?
I think it’s a mix.You know, we always ask that.You know, how much of this is just, you know, is crafty strategy that we don’t see, and how much is just sort of natural instinct?I think it’s a mix.I think he is who he is, and he decided a long time ago that he should follow his instincts, because they’ve gotten him where he is, right?When everybody says to him, “Well, wait a second, sir; maybe you could be more presidential, and you could do this or that,” he says: “That’s not how I got here, you know.I got here by being this way, and you want me to be something different.I’m not going to do that.This worked.Don’t screw with success.”
And it’s also just his natural instinct.He has a pugilistic instinct.That is his—his resting state is to be fighting, right?And he enjoys it.It’s not something he finds distasteful.He enjoys it—at a distance.He doesn’t actually like it in person, by the way.You get in a room with him, he has a real hard time doing confrontation up close.He can, but it’s remarkable how many times he’ll have reporters in, for instance, and try very hard to be solicitous of them while at a podium someplace, where on Twitter, he’s busy using phrases like “enemies of the people.”
Same with members of Congress.You know, when he does have Democrats in, the few times he does, he tries, anyway, to be kind of solicitous rather than directly confronting them.But give him a microphone, put him on television, and he’s—or give him a Twitter feed, he’s ready to go to town.
And to the extent that that is his strategy, what is that strategy, specifically with the media?
Well, I mean, to the sense of strategy, it’s—it’s showing that he is one of the forgotten fighting against the system, right?He’s one of the “deplorables.”“I’m one of you.And look what I’ve got to put up with.I’ve got to put up with these fake-news—these outrageous Democrats, even these, you know, RINO [Republican in name only] Republicans.”He’s presenting himself as the one honest figure in American life, even though, of course, you know, fact-checkers have found literally thousands and thousands of things he said that aren’t true.
It’s a larger truth that his supporters see, and the strategy is to—to continue being an outsider.Lots of other presidents come to town as outsiders, right?Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton—they’re going to come to Washington and clean it up.And then ultimately they become part of Washington, because that’s how the system works.Donald Trump is not going to become part of Washington.He’s trying very hard to make that clear to his constituents.He will continue to be the china breaker, right up to the last day of his office.
… Right after Obamacare, the repeal and replace fails.Do you think that there’s a change in Trump?This is the moment of the “fire and fury” in Bedminster [Trump National Golf Club, New Jersey].He’s attacking McConnell.Priebus is about to be pushed out.Is there a change in Trump and his strategy in his presidency at that moment?
I’m always reluctant to look for thought-through strategies.I think President Trump lives in 10-minute increments, you know.How do I get through the next 10 minutes?And I’m always reluctant to ascribe longer plots and plans.I think he reacts to the moment.After Obamacare, he was very mad at Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan for failing to get this through, and he goes after McConnell in public in a pretty tough way.Is that strategy, or is that, you know, impulse?Maybe both.But, I mean, I think in his—I think his impulses are his strategy.
… During the Kavanaugh confirmation, he gets sort of frustrated with Kavanaugh and how he’s defending himself on Fox News.And he has a different strategy for what he wants, how he wants Kavanaugh to be.So what is Trump’s strategy at that moment, and what does he want from Kavanaugh?And is he bothered by the way that it all becomes sort of political?
Yeah.So Trump watches Kavanaugh on Fox News, and this is not what he wants.You know, he doesn’t want a nominee who’s out there trying to smooth things over, trying to reach out to wavering senators.He wants a fighter.He wants somebody who’s going to push back, who’s going to argue and defend himself and attack his attackers.And that’s what he gets a couple of days later, when Kavanaugh comes to the Senate Judiciary Committee.Kavanaugh has every reason to be this way on his own, but by showing the outrage and grievance he feels over these accusations, he’s appealing not just to the Republicans on the committee but to the president who nominated him in the first place.
And Trump, who is often pointing out who appointed judges and who’s watching him, does he mind the idea that the court is being politicized?
No, Trump sees courts as just another political body.You know, … he refers to an “Obama judge” or a “Bush judge” or a “Trump judge.”You know, you might as well put a D or an R after their names.He doesn’t see judges as being independent figures.He sees them as just an extension of the political battles.
Obama, Trump, and Race
When Trump wins, how does Obama see it as a racial backlash?Is it his view—I think you talk about—is his existence in itself energizing his opponents?
Yeah.I mean, to Obama, there’s no question that there’s a racial element to Trump’s election.You know, he always tried not to talk about that in public.He didn’t want to be seen as—as playing to racial grievance, but he absolutely saw some of the opposition to him—not all—some of the opposition to him as being motivated by that.… At one point, Obama is even asked by his aides, “Why do you think you failed to bring people together?,” and he said, “Because I think my election appears to have literally driven some white people insane.”
The Legacy of Division
… And the last thing is, this populist surge that we’ve seen on both sides, the Republicans and Democrats, how do you view it?Has it run its course, or is this going to continue?How does this affect America in general over the long run?
Well, that’s going to be one of the tests of this year.One of the tests of this election year is going to be whether the populism that fueled Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders has run its course or not, and my suspicion is it hasn’t; that whether Trump wins or not, Trumpism is still here.And whoever is president, whether it’s him or somebody else, is going to have to figure out what to do about that.What does that mean for the country?You know, whether and how to bring people together, if that’s—if that’s the goal of the next president.
… We talk about division a lot in America, and we talk about it as if it was the politicians.But we often miss is it’s actually ourselves as much as anybody else, right?We expect our politicians to be fighting against the other side.We now physically segregate ourselves from people who disagree with us.There’s actually a number.I think it’s 800.And that number is the number of people per square mile.If you live in a place with more than that, you’re twice as likely to be a Democrat.If you live in a place with fewer than that people, you’re twice as likely to be a Republican.
Back in the ’60s, they did polls asking, “Would it bother you if your son or daughter married somebody from the other political party?,” and the number was around 5% were bothered by that.Today it’s getting closer to 50%.You know, “I don’t want no Republican at my Thanksgiving table.”“I don’t want no Democrat at my Christmas.”We don’t want to be or talk with people who disagree with us.If we’re liberal, we watch MSNBC; if we’re conservative, we watch Fox.We get our news from the, you know, from websites that agree with us.
So we can say that our politicians are dividing us as a country, but in some ways, it’s also just reflecting us as a country.And that’s who we are today.
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Jon and Jo Ann Hagler on behalf of the Jon L. Hagler Foundation
Koo and Patricia Yuen
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