The FRONTLINE Interviews
Peter Baker
White House Correspondent, The New York Times
Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times. He previously spent 20 years reporting for The Washington Post. He is the co-author, with Susan Glasser, of the forthcoming book The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017–2021.
The following interview was conducted by the Kirk Documentary Group’s Mike Wiser for FRONTLINE on April 26, 2022. It has been edited for clarity and length.
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Trump’s Early Presidency
When Trump arrives in Washington and he has his first joint address to Congress—and this is the one where people say, "Is he acting presidential?"What I'm interested in is, who is he in that moment, and who is he especially in relation to the Republican Party, to the people who are in that room, and what their expectations are of him?
Donald Trump executed what Jared Kushner once told me was a hostile takeover of the Republican Party.He was not really a Republican; he was not really a Democrat.He was somebody who has flipped back and forth between parties opportunistically over the years.I think he literally changed parties five times, six times.And for him the Republican Party was a vehicle to something he had long wanted to do, which is to achieve power in the White House.And it happened to be that running as an independent, like a Ross Perot-type situation, was untenable, so Donald Trump made the logical decision to highjack one of the existing parties and use that as his vehicle to power.
So by the time he shows up for that joint address, he is this outsider coming in, promising to break up Washington in all sorts of ways.The "American carnage" speech that he'd given at his inauguration was a clear sign to Washington that he did not come in with plans to be their friend.He didn't come in planning to be one of them.
And the joint session speech is important because there is this question of whether he can be a president or not.He's a such a showman; he's such a carnival barker; he's such a pugilist in all forms.He likes to stir things up.Can he be presidential?
And so he stands up there in front of these people that he had disparaged so viciously now for months and years, and he is in the position of trying to basically assert leadership over them, to say, "I'm here now.I'm in charge.We're going to do things my way."
And he managed to do it in a way for about an hour where he keeps control of himself and doesn't go off script for once and doesn't sit there and throw bombs at them and doesn't insult them directly to their face.And people kind of go a little nuts about it and say, "Wow, maybe he really can change.Maybe he can evolve.Our whole fear during the election that he was this wild, erratic, volatile figure, maybe in fact the office will change him.He will grow into the office because the enormous burdens and responsibilities of that position are such that they will mature him in a way that we hadn't seen."
And of course that was everybody's wishful thinking.It was fooling themselves.Donald Trump was not going to change.He was certainly not going to change for Washington.He was not going to bend to Washington's idea of what a president should be.And yes, for an hour he can read from a script and not go off once a year, but that's about it.He wasn't going to do anything else that was going to defer to the ways and the customs and the norms and the traditions of Washington, much less to the ideals of a democratic system that he didn't really buy into.
… There was talk of, can he be a rubber stamp?Is he somebody who's going to do—all of these things that we've built up over eight years that we want to do, this is the guy who wants to be in pictures, but we're going to be able to do what we want to do.Was that part of the calculation?
Yeah, yeah, no question.For Republicans like Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, and for other Republicans in Congress there was this hope that he was enough of an empty vessel that they could be the substance, right?He would be the showman, he would be the figurehead.He would come out and play to the cameras, because that's what he did best, but in fact he didn't really have a philosophical core.He didn't come into office with some great ideology.Again, he switched parties repeatedly.And so therefore, they could fill the empty vessel.
There were only a few things that Donald Trump clearly cared about, right?He did have a strong core belief in this idea that America had been shafted by its allies and by its adversaries, whether it be on trade or security or immigration or any of these things.But beyond that, he was pretty flexible.He had at one point supported gun control, before he didn't.He supported abortion rights, before he didn't.He supported gay rights, before he didn't.He supported Hillary Clinton, before he didn't.He was a guy out there who was kind of a political chameleon.So Paul Ryan and these guys who did have some real commitments on policy ideas figured, OK, we can work with this.We can make it happen.He's enough of a flexible figure that we can be the policy while he does the showmanship.
And sitting behind him, besides Paul Ryan, is the vice president, Mike Pence.What's his calculation in sitting there, and who is he in that moment early in the Trump presidency?
… Mike Pence is such a fascinating figure in this moment, standing behind Donald Trump.What is he thinking?We never know.Mike Pence is the ultimate stoic figure.He never hints even a tiny bit what he's really thinking, what's going on behind that mask of his.He is as controlled and shielded as any figure I've ever seen in Washington.
But what we know of Mike Pence at that moment is he's a committed conservative.He in fact says that he is a conservative first, in effect."I'm an American, I'm a Christian, I'm a conservative, and I'm a Republican in that order."And he has made some sort of bargain to take this position, to be number two to this man.He is a committed Christian conservative who believes in the evangelical agenda—anti-abortion, for religious freedom over gay rights, all of these things—working for a man who is to a real evangelical a pretty vulgarian figure: thrice married; extramarital—cheater on his wife; accused of all kinds of sexual misconduct; foul-mouthed; clearly not religious; doesn't even know anything from the Bible.And yet he has tethered himself to this figure.Mike Pence has tethered himself to the least religious, the least committed Christian conservative figure that the party could possibly imagine.
And I think part of the calculation is, "I can make this work; I can get something done"; that yes, there's going to be controversy, and, yes, there's going to be scandal, and yes, there are going to be moments that are deeply uncomfortable, but in that process I can advance policies that will matter"—on abortion, on gay rights, on religion, on all of these things that matter to Mike Pence.
And so he's standing behind him in this moment thinking, OK, here we go; let's see if we can make this work.
Pence, McConnell, Cruz and Graham
The other person who's there, who's a powerful figure inside that chamber is Mitch McConnell, somebody who we know also has his skepticism about Donald Trump, but who cares especially about judges but lots of other causes.What is Mitch McConnell's calculation when he's in that chamber and he's looking at Donald Trump, who is now the president of the United States?
Yeah, Mitch McConnell is one of the clearest-eyed figures in Washington, some would say incredibly cynical.But he's not looking at Donald Trump with any great hope or any expectation that something is going to be different than he imagined.He understands Trump from the beginning, but he makes his own calculation: "OK, I can be fighting this guy for four years, or I can figure out some accommodation, some way to make this work."And he, of course, is the ultimate pragmatist and tries to figure out how to make it work.
He never sucks up to Trump.He doesn't—he's not one of the Republicans who tries to pretend that Trump is the greatest guy in the world, and "Yes, I really do like him even though I said bad things about him."He just isn't going to be a guy who is going to stand up to him in public, either.He's going to maneuver as only McConnell can.
And for him, the tradeoff is mostly judges.What can I get done with this guy?He has no policy convictions whatsoever other than probably immigration and this idea that America has been shafted over the years in trade.So where can we meet and get something done?And it is judges.
And there is a meeting in the fall of 2017 where they had been fighting now for weeks publicly.McConnell's not trying to fight, but Trump likes to mix it up, and he takes some comments that McConnell makes as offensive and starts banging away at McConnell the way he does at anybody.
And McConnell comes in, sits down in the Oval Office, and essentially they come to a truce.Essentially they come to an understanding: Let's not fight, because there's no point in that.Let's figure out what we can get done together where we actually agree, and the judges is the area where we can.He says, "Mr. President," in effect he says, "you can really transform the federal judiciary in this four years you have, and I will be your partner on that," something Mitch McConnell's wanted to do for years, something he's always cared about because he understands that the judiciary is a long game.Remember, his memoir's called <i>The Long Game</i>, and the reason is that judges will be there long after senators and presidents are gone.
So they effectively come to a truce in that moment, understanding where basically instead of fighting each other, they will collaborate on the judges, and they obviously will include the Supreme Court.They'd already gotten Neil Gorsuch confirmed at that point.There's going to be at least one, they thought, and obviously there ended up being two more seats available on the Supreme Court, but also dozens and dozens of appeals court and trial court positions that they could fill over the course of the next four years, literally hundreds of positions.
And McConnell as the master of the Senate procedure can ram them through, one after the other, while other issues and other legislation gets put on the sidetrack in order to facilitate his priority.And that's a key moment in the Trump presidency.
… Ted Cruz, for example, who Trump accuses of rigging an election, who he makes comments about his wife, who spreads conspiracy theories about his father—Cruz who goes to the convention and refuses to endorse him.… By spring of 2017—I'll ask you about Cruz first, is now on board with the Trump presidency, or seeming, in a way that even McConnell was not.What's the calculation that he's making and that Republicans are making that early on?
This is one of the most remarkable phenomena of the Trump era, is all of these people who got up and opposed him in 2016, not just saying, "I think I would be a better president or somebody else would be a president," but really said, "This guy is unfit to be president."He is a kook.He is dangerous.He is psychopathic.He is a narcissist.He is a liar.
These are all things that his fellow Republicans said about him, things that you would presume to be disqualifying—not simply "We disagree about tax policy," or, "I have a better health care plan than he does."These are fundamental criticisms."This guy is a kook.This guy is unacceptable.This guy is dangerous to the republic." …
But guys like Ted Cruz made a calculation somewhere along the way that it was OK that Trump had slandered his father and attacked his wife and that he was all of these things that Ted Cruz said he was—a liar and a narcissist and all of that—and put that aside and says, "Now I'm going to be basically his best friend."
And why do they do this?Why did they do this?They do this because they see that within their party, Donald Trump, the outsider, is more popular than they are, and has control, in effect, over the base, and that standing up to him only gets you booted out, in effect, from the Republican Party.Look what happened to Jeff Flake.Look what happened to Bob Corker.Look what happened to Mark Sanford.These Republicans, who in the first year of Trump's presidency, say the emperor has no clothes; this guy is all the things that we said he was a year ago, that he hasn't changed; he hasn't suddenly become different than what we said on the primary campaign trail when we opposed him, and in fact we need to speak truth to power.Those guys are all got pushed out, in effect.They got punished.They lost their seats.They were exiled, in effect, from the modern Republican Party as it's constituted under Donald Trump.
So Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham and Rand Paul and a handful of others who said these things about him that were so disqualifying in 2016 suddenly come out and say not only is he acceptable, but he's the guy, and I'm going to be his guy.They're now competing for the mantle of the most Trumpy figure in Congress, to be—who's going to be his most important ally in Congress.
I was in Texas in 2018 during the midterm elections where Trump comes to campaign for Cruz, and watching the two of them on stage together as if they had been best friends forever after what Trump had said about Cruz's wife and his father, after what Cruz has said about Trump, it's the height of Trumpy era—I'm not sure what the right word is—cynicism or calculation or accommodation.But it's remarkable.
Now, look, in politics, people always say negative things about each other during a campaign, but if it's a primary you come together for the general.That's not unusual.But again, what's different here is what they were saying about him.What Ted Cruz and the others were saying about him was not, "I don't think he's good enough to be president," or, "I think I would be a better president."It's that he is fundamentally anathema to our system.He does not believe in democracy; he does not believe in truth; he does not believe in morality; he does not believe in anything that we should find acceptable as Republicans.That's what Ted Cruz and them said one year, and the next year they're like, "Go, Trump.We're with you all the way."
The last character I'll ask you on … is Graham and the role that he takes on in the Trump presidency and the calculation that he makes, because he is certainly, when you're looking at television clips of being outspoken, and he's outspoken all the way through the general election, but he goes—it's in that period of spring of 2017, he says he's all in on Trump.What is that calculation that he in particular is making?How is it different from others?
Lindsey Graham is one of the most interesting figures of the Trump era, no question about it, because he does go from being his most outspoken critic in 2016 to his most outspoken friend by 2017-2018.
There literally is this moment where he says on the campaign trail, "This guy is a kook."He uses that word, "kook."And then when he's in office, with President Trump is in office, Lindsey Graham at some point says, "You guys are so mean to him.I can't believe you ever called him a kook.It's outrageous for you to use that word, 'kook.'" He uses the word, the same word he had used.1
Suddenly it was no longer not appropriate, but it was outrageous for anybody to call him that.And it's not that Trump had changed at all.It wasn't like, oh, I didn't understand about Trump; he's a different person than I understood, or he's evolved.No, it was none of that.He was the exact same person.But what changed was Lindsey Graham.What changed was his calculation.
…So why does Lindsey Graham do it?What's in it for Lindsey Graham?And what's in it for Lindsey Graham is access.Suddenly Lindsey Graham, who had never been on such close terms with any president during his political career, was being invited into the inner sanctum.He's being flattered; he's being courted; he's being wooed by this figure who had made wooing a lifetime career.And suddenly he's there on the golf course, and he's there in the Oval Office, and he has his cell phone number and calling him at night.
And he says at one point, "Look, if you know anything about me it's that I want to be relevant."And suddenly Donald Trump was making him relevant.
And it's in the same period time John McCain is fading.Lindsey Graham had been John McCain's running buddy now for years.McCain was this incredible figure, important figure in Graham's life.But he was dying of brain cancer and increasingly absent from Washington and fading from the scene.And so in effect, what a lot of people are saying about Lindsey Graham is, is he transferring his loyalty, his energy to Trump with the fading of John McCain?And what a change because John McCain and Donald Trump could hardly be more different people.
And this is very irritating to John McCain in his last months in life.He and Lindsey Graham really have a break as a result of this.… John McCain is back in Arizona saying, "Why do you have to go golfing with him?I don't understand.Lindsey, this is bulls---."And Graham is saying, "Oh, you don't understand.He's a better guy than you think.He believes what we believe in.We can make this work."
It gets so bad that at one point John McCain and Lindsey Graham aren't speaking anymore.And they eventually reconcile before McCain dies, but if you remember his memorial service at Washington National Cathedral, the people who are speaking are Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Meghan McCain—not Lindsey Graham, his best friend from the Senate.Lindsey Graham is relegated to reading a couple lines of Scripture and no speech whatsoever.
And instead what he has done at that service is to invite Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner to come to the service, which Meghan doesn't even know is going to happen.And she looks out as she's giving tribute to her father in these very emotional terms, these very emotional anti-Trump terms, and there she sees, because of Lindsey Graham, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, who she loathes.And she later says, "I hope it was the most uncomfortable moment of their lives," as she, Meghan McCain, is up there giving a speech that so starkly contrasts her father with this interloper in the White House.
And there's Lindsay Graham as the person who had invited him.That's the final break, I think, for Meghan McCain anyway, with Lindsey Graham, who no longer believed that he is a member of the family the way he had seemed for so long.
And Graham is just—he's made a calculation.He gets to be part of the inner circle.And yes, he's going to criticize Trump from time to time, but he wants to be on the inside, and finally he's on the inside.
Trump and Charlottesville
… As you look back now after Jan. 6 at Charlottesville and at Trump's response and at Trump's understanding of who those people were and the violence, what do you make of Charlottesville, looking back at it now?
Well, I think, I think Charlottesville is a signal moment.It's a moment where he shows that as president, his priorities are, first of all, not to bring people together but to foment division and antipathy toward other Americans.I mean, to say that there were very fine people on both sides when one side is a group of white supremacists who are chanting, "Jews shall not replace us," and who caused the death of this young woman—to make them equivalent to the people who were protesting against racism and against antisemitism and against injustice was a telltale marker of Trump's view of America.
And part of it is that the white supremacist segment of the population is supportive of him, and for Trump, anybody who likes him is OK in his book.It doesn't matter what they believe.It doesn't matter whether what they believe is the same thing he believes.What matters is that they like him, and if they like him, he's never going to say anything bad about them.No other calculation is as important as that."They like me; therefore I will say good things about them."
… His staff is fighting with him about this.His staff is trying to get him to say the things that a president is supposed to say, which is you denounce white supremacy; you denounce Nazism; you denounce hatred.And at one point he reads the words, but you can tell from his body language he's not happy about it.And afterwards he just—he gets mad at his staff because it doesn't make the fire go away.It doesn't actually settle the controversy.And it doesn't settle the controversy because everybody knows he doesn't really believe it.Everybody knows it's not real.And he gets mad at the staff and therefore basically says, "I'm not going to do that anymore.I'm not going to read your words.I'm not going to follow your script.I'm going to say what I think."
And it's a moment of truth for a lot of people around Trump, too.That's the other thing that's important.It's a test.What are you going to do or say about this, because there are very few Republicans in high office who thought that Trump did or said anything right at that moment.Almost all of them disagreed with him and felt, in fact were disgusted by this.Some of them said something, and some of them didn't.Some of them said this is outrageous and we don't agree with this, and some of them basically kept their mouths quiet because they decided it wasn't worth fighting with him.
And then among the people who work for him it becomes a test as well.So you have Gary Cohn, his national economic adviser, Jewish, outraged by all of this terrible, hateful things that people in the streets of Charlottesville were doing and saying.
… Gary Cohn tells The Financial Times how disappointed he is in Trump for his rhetoric about Charlottesville, but he doesn't quit.And he has made a choice at this point.But it's also poisoned his relationship with Trump, because Trump saw the piece in The Financial Times, and he thinks, here's this guy who's willing to criticize me publicly while taking my money and while working for me and my staff, and therefore he doesn't trust Cohn anymore, and that's the beginning of the end for their relationship.
… Mitch McConnell issued a strong statement against it.A number of senators and other Republicans—not all of them—issued strong statements.His corporate counsel was falling apart.It felt like—was that a moment where things could have gone a different way?What was the pressure he was under?What was the Republicans' response to that?
Yeah, it's one of the times, one of the few times where Republicans did say flatly, for the most part, "We disagree with this; this is wrong; he shouldn't have said that; do better."Mitch McConnell does.Paul Ryan does.As you say, his counsel of business leaders who just agreed to advise him disband rather than have them all quit one after the other in protest.
There's a pretty universal reaction to this among Republicans that this is not acceptable.And yet, right, and yet, nothing changes ultimately.They do not, in fact, rein him in.He does not, he is not rein-in-able.He is not going to listen to them.He is not going to simply kowtow to them.And it becomes one of the last moments, actually, that Republicans ultimately voice their disapproval of him.
His flirtation with extremism is so evident, so manifest in this moment, in this Charlottesville moment.And that is an important foreshadowing of what is to come.He is willing to play with fire.He is willing to play with the segments of American public that had been relegated to the fringes for years by both parties, and now suddenly has, in effect, the imprimatur of the president of the United States.And it's not a one-off; it's not a one-time thing.It's not a mistake.It's not something he regretted.This is part and parcel of who he is.He is willing to play with these forces in society that had—that want to tear apart the consensus that both parties sort of had leading up to Trump's presidency about issues like race and discrimination.
And so, in some way, it really is a seminal moment.
And it does seem like there is a choice at that moment that can be made.And you mentioned Flake, Corker, Sanford.What was the choice that they made?What was the response?What was the lesson that was learned from their example?
So Jeff Flake and Mark Sanford and Bob Corker are three of the few Republicans who basically say, "We're not going to sit there and just take this and pretend that this is normal, pretend that this is OK."And so they do; they speak out.They speak out time and time again.
And what they discover is that in trying to lead the parade, they look behind them and there's nobody behind them.It's just them.It's just a handful of Republicans who were willing to say what they all—not all, but many of them believe, which is this is outrageous, and the conduct is unacceptable.
And of course Trump goes after them.He's pounding away on Twitter and saying things on camera and so forth.And what's amazing is how much a tweet can be intimidating to these people, that it quiets so many of them, that so many are just unwilling to say something because they're afraid of a tweet.And Jeff Flake and Bob Corker and Mark Sanford and a handful of Republicans aren't afraid of that, or at least decide to go ahead and say what they're going to say anyway.
There's this incredible speech by Jeff Flake.Jeff Flake gives one of the most extraordinary speeches of the Trump era on the floor of the Senate where he basically says, enough of this.This is an "emperor has no clothes" moment where he says, "Let's not pretend that this is normal.This is not normal.This is not acceptable.This is not who we as Americans are."
And a lot of Republicans privately said, "Way to go, Jeff; we agree with you," and then went back to their offices and said nothing publicly, said nothing on camera, didn't issue statements, didn't tell the public or their constituents that they agreed with Jeff Flake."You go, Jeff, but you're on your own."And he was.
And so was Bob Corker.And so was Mark Sanford.And they all paid a price.Flake and Corker end up not running against because they—at least in part they find that their support within the Republican Party has begun to dissipate.Mark Sanford loses a primary to a Trump-endorsed challenger.He had been governor of South Carolina—suddenly now couldn't even win a primary for the House of Representatives.
And guess what?Everybody else paid attention.They noticed what happened.They watched what happened.I don't want to be Jeff Flake; I don't want to Bob Corker. …
The Republicans’ Compromise with Trump
This is also the moment you say McConnell is making an explicit deal about judges with Trump.So he's making his own calculation of his legacy because he's always said, Civil rights is one of the things that got me into politics.And here I've got to make a choice between judges and between standing on principle, breaking with the President in a serious way.The moment ends, at least the way we've always portrayed, we don't get into the details of the tax ceremony, but the video of it, when they're celebrating at the White House, is pretty remarkable because you have Pence, you've got all of these figures really praising Trump and giving credit to Trump for this moment.What does that moment represent to you after the turmoil of Charlottesville and that first year, to see the Republican Party there on the lawn of the White House?
Well, the tax cuts are the payoff, right?The tax cuts are what you get for putting up with everything else.This is the one area where Republicans are generally unified; cutting taxes is a unifying force in the Republican Party.And this moment where they're celebrating their legislation is to say, okay, all the other stuff was worth it because here we made it—managed to do something that we care about as policy, that, you know, politics, good for our constituents and our reelections, perhaps.And that's the tradeoff.
And they are praising Trump repeatedly for this, even though he had almost nothing to do with it.If you go back and study what happened with tax reform, really tax cuts, of 2017, Trump had very little to do with it.This is a Congressional bill.He gave them, in effect, carte blanche to write the bill as they wanted to do it.He had some thoughts about, you know, the corporate tax rate or this or that, but broadly speaking this is a bill written entirely by Congress.
In fact, we interviewed for our book the chief tax policy guy under the Trump administration.He said, We had nothing to do with it.Donald Trump had nothing to do with it.He knew nothing about the details.He had no fingerprints on it.This was all Congress doing what it wanted to do.
And that was fine with Paul Ryan and the others who said, Fine, this is what we get as part of the tradeoff.We end up living with this clownish, scandalous, racist behavior in the White House, but in trade what we get is this great freedom to write the bill as we want, to cut the taxes, and to finally pass big legislation.And they do.
Trump’s Approach to Authoritarian Leaders
… Trump's relationship with autocrats, with Putin, with Orbán, Kim, with others.What was going on?What was Trump's relationship with these authoritarian leaders?What was his relationship with Democrats?What were the signals that he was sending during his presidency?
There was something very real about Trump's admiration and affection and even maybe envy for autocrats and dictators.I mean, it was not a calculation on his part.This is just really where he was at.I remember I was on Air Force One with him once, coming back from an international meeting where he had just had dinner with Xi Jinping, and he was just so envious of Xi's ability to do anything he wanted to do.He had autocrat envy; he really wanted to be able to do what a guy like a Putin or a Xi Jinping or an Erdogan could do—snap your fingers and things fell into place just as you want them.He didn't want to have to deal with a Congress or courts or independent federal agencies.The idea that he had to get somebody else's approval to do something was unthinkable for him.
Remember where he comes from.He comes from a business that had been family-owned for his entire life.No shareholders, no board.He didn't have to answer to anybody.He made up his mind; he decided to do something; it was done, period.That was it.He had to answer to lenders, but broadly speaking, as a businessman, he never had to work with any other force within his business.He could do it as he chose.And that's the way he saw the presidency; he thought the presidency should be like the Trump Organization, where he snaps his fingers and things are done.And nobody else should be allowed to question his decisions.
So he thought guys like Kim Jong-un and Erodgan in Turkey and Putin and Xi Jinping, they had it the way he wanted to have it.They didn't have to run for reelection; they just stayed in office for the rest—and he would express these things publicly as well as privately that were extraordinary.Imagine a president of the United States saying, "Yeah, I think it would be great if I could stay as an autocrat for life."He did.And it was just one more wild thing he said that caused people to talk for a few hours before the next wild thing he said.
But in fact what he was telling us, which we didn't listen to probably enough, was that he did not believe in the system that he was governing.He did not believe in the American democratic constitutional system as it was set up.He would rather have it be something closer to what they have in Russia or China or Turkey or Hungary, or one of those places.And people took it as kind of a joke, but he was telling them what he really thought.
… Especially now as you look back after Jan. 6, and especially inside the Republican Party, was this setting off alarm bells?Many of them had been hawks on Putin, on North Korea, on these very regimes that he was so adoring of.Did it set off alarm bells in the Congress, in the Republican leadership?
It set off alarm bells among some Republicans, right, real conservatives.There were people like John Bolton who went to work for Donald Trump as national security adviser in large part to try to frustrate Trump's own agenda, because he was worried that Trump would make some terrible deal, as he saw it, with Kim Jong-un and North Korea or the Iranians or with some of the other people that they considered anathema.
Putin was the biggest test for Republicans because for basically a half century, one of the few unifying forces among Republicans was this skepticism if not outright opposition to Russia.And to suddenly have a leader who was not only friendly with Putin—it's one thing to be friendly with your foes—but to express the kind of admiration and the deference that Putin that Trump showed to Putin repeatedly was definitely uncomfortable for many Republicans.
It wasn't just that he was trying to make friends with a Russian leader.George W. Bush tried to be friendly with Putin.But there was something more there, right?It seemed deeper than that; that Trump was eager for Putin's approval, not just a calculation saying, "We've got to get along because we've got to make deals that we can make"—that's one thing.He seemed to really want Putin to like him.
And you talk to aides of his.They scratch their heads; they couldn't figure it out: What did he have on him?There were people in his own administration, senior people, who genuinely wondered, did Putin have something on this guy, the guy they were working for?And they didn't know.And they thought it was possible.They thought it was possible that Russia had something on their president.
Now, the Mueller report didn't turn anything up that was criminal, but it didn't mean that the behavior wasn't an outlier in Republican history.And one of the things that's remarkable is that Putin didn't show it back.At these meetings, he acted very diffident toward Trump, which I think made Trump want his approval even more.Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un and these other guys figured out how to flatter Trump.They figured out how to work him.
Putin was different.Putin was like, Yeah, yeah, yeah.I mean, he was very disdainful.It seemed like to people who worked for Trump, of the president, which seemed to make him want his approval only more.It's a rather remarkable dynamic.
They may have been concerned about Putin, but were there concerns about democracy, about the integrity of our system, about those things that would come to the forefront?
There were some who were, some who weren't, right?Among Republicans, there were certainly some who thought that Trump's affection and admiration for autocrats was a bad signal for American democracy.But a lot of them just kind of wrote it off as kind of a quirk of Trumpism and thought, well, that's just him, and he's just that way.And they didn't see it as a warning sign about what it might mean for American democracy down the road, partly because there was this phenomenon where people were able to in the end keep guardrails, they thought, around Trump; that yeah, he would say things and express ideas, but then he could be talked out of it, or he could be forced out of it.
So he suggests, for instance, that he's going to unilaterally get rid of birthright citizenship.In other words, he was going to rewrite the interpretation of the 14th Amendment, by himself, through executive order, the kind of power grab that Republicans would have screamed about had a Democrat suggested it; that the president of the United States was taking it upon himself to rewrite, in effect, the Constitution.
And they pushed back.Paul Ryan and some of the others said, "No, there is no such power; you cannot rewrite the Constitution, in effect, this way."And they succeeded.Trump, in effect, backed off.
And I think what they took from that experience was, Trump was manageable.He's out there; he doesn't believe in the things we believe in, but we can make this work.We can make sure there's a good chief of staff around him, like a John Kelly.Congress will keep him in line.
When Trump came in, he wanted to first let up sanctions on Russia.It was Mitch McConnell and the Republicans in the Congress who said, "No, you don't do that.If you do that, we're going to pass a bill overriding your decision."And Trump backs off.
So they thought that they could in fact keep Trump from going too far on the big moments.And what they discovered was, they were wrong; that those were temporary or one-time victories, not a sign that he was going to eventually stay in the box that they wanted him to stay in.
The First Impeachment
… How do you understand that first impeachment and how it was seen by people like Liz Cheney and others inside the Republican Party?
The first impeachment looks more important with hindsight.We look back on that and put that in the context of what was going to come later, and now it makes more sense, because what the first impeachment is telling us is this is a president who doesn't believe that he has to abide by limits; that in fact his office and the government, even security aid to an ally, these are all just tools to advance his own interest.Now, every president uses the office, obviously, to advance their political career, no question about it, but they saw limits.There were places they would not go, and one of them is, you don't use security aid to leverage a foreign country to go after your domestic political opponent.
Now, for Republicans, this was a warning sign they chose not to see, in effect, not to react to.And part of that I think is because Democrats did jump on it so fast, and they did—it became quickly a partisan test, us versus them, polarization.
And anti-anti-Trumpism is as important a factor in Republican politics in this era as Trumpism.So it's not just that they like Trump; it's that they really don't like the people who don't like Trump.And so if the Democrats were up there screaming and hollering, making a big fuss out of it, then the natural reaction among a lot of Republicans is to kind of be contrarian and say, well, wait a second.And they'll look for reasons to justify their vote to save Trump in office.
And a great example of this is Adam Kinzinger.Adam Kinzinger is a Republican from Illinois, and he has been a critic, occasionally, at least, out loud, of Trump.Doesn't like Trump.And we talked to him for our book.And he ends up voting against impeachment.Why does he vote against impeachment?He says, "I was actually looking for a reason to vote against impeachment.I was looking for, how can I justify voting against this?"And in the end, he allowed himself, he said, to be turned off by the Democrats' process."Ah, they're railroading him; they're not giving him enough due process.They're—they didn't take a vote on whether impeachment should be an inquiry or not," all these things.
He latched on to these ancillary issues as an excuse to vote against impeachment, which he would come to regret, and because it was easier to go along with your party than it was to break with it.
Now, had 10 or 20 or 30 members broken with Trump on impeachment, then maybe others would have had to the courage to do it as well, because they didn't like him or they didn't think much of him.And they would have had Mike Pence as president, by the way.This wasn't going to put a Democrat in power; this was going to put Mike Pence in power if Trump were removed.
But they didn't like the other guys even more.And that is a powerful force that works to Trump's benefit in this era.
I think that's really helpful because we've gone back and looked back at some of the—there were all those warnings at the beginning of the Trump presidency, which seemed a little overwrought about authoritarianism and how does democracy die.One of the things that they were saying was that severe polarization is an institutional threat to the functioning of democracy.
In Washington you have to pick sides.Us or them?Whose side are you on?And they may not like Trump, but they really don't like the other guys.And in the end, you have to dance with the one who brung you, right?That's the calculation a lot of them make.And it doesn't make them feel good about it—they're very uncomfortable—but they harness their antipathy for the other side rather than their support for their guy.And that becomes the driving passion.
And it culminates in another amazing television scene of the president holding up the newspaper, acquitted, singling out Mitch, name-checking people who were in the room.What is the significance of that moment?
You know, I'm going to tell you about a scene in our book.
… He's at this dinner at the White House that he's organized with evangelicals just hours after he's been acquitted, and this idea of loving your enemies comes up, and the answer is, "No, you don't have to love your enemies."And he gets up the next day at the prayer breakfast, and Arthur Brooks is there, and Arthur Brooks gives a talk before Trump does, and he talks about loving your enemies.And he says, "We need to get past this divisiveness, this polarization in our society. Forgiveness."
Trump gets up, and this is on camera, and he says, "I don't agree with that.Arthur, I'm sorry.I just don't agree with that."And he says, "I don't like the people who say that they're, you know, praying for me," by which he means Nancy Pelosi."I don't like people who cite their religion when they come after me.What they've done is wrong, and they shouldn't do it."And he holds up the paper, "Acquitted," and he's triumphal.He's not interested in loving his enemies.He's not interested in forgiveness.He's not interested in reconciliation.
And this is such a contrast, by the way.So I covered President Clinton's impeachment from start to finish.And President Clinton, who had a lot of his own issues for sure, but when he is acquitted, he gets up there by himself, and he says, "I've done wrong.I'm happy to be acquitted," in effect, he says, "But I've done wrong, and my goal now is to bring the country together, to move past this moment of division to achieve reconciliation, and I apologize for my actions."
Trump's reaction after being acquitted is, "I won.You guys lost, and now you're going to pay a price."And what happens is, from this moment forward, he gets up in the East Room, and he has this ceremony, which is basically a pep rally, a victory rally, and he name-checks, as you say, all these Republicans who stood with him.And there's the attorney general of the United States, who is supposed to be a somewhat dispassionate figure, sitting in the front row, cheering him on.
And in the days and weeks that follow, what you see is a vengeful, retaliatory president who is taking on all the people who caused him grief.He fires people who testified; under subpoena, had no choice, but he fires them anyway from the administration.He fires inspectors general.He begins purging his administration of anybody he thinks is disloyal.He puts a 29-year-old aide in charge of loyalty, who then begins going around and interviewing political appointees to make sure they're loyal enough to Trump.2
What he takes from impeachment is not humility.It's not a lesson in avoiding going too far.It's the other way around.He is emboldened; he is unleashed.What he has taken away from impeachment is, what are they going to do with me now?There's no accountability.What are they going to do?Are they going to impeach me again?
And he now feels free to do anything he wants.And it changes his presidency in a lot of ways because he beat them.He beat Mueller.He beat the Ukraine impeachment.So now he is free, in his way of thinking, to do whatever he wants.
That's really helpful.It reminds me, back at the beginning of the Trump presidency when people were talking about guardrails, and they were saying, whatever Trump does he's going to be in a system.He's in a democracy that's been going on for 200 years.There's the Constitution; there's impeachment; there's checks and balances on the system.And in this case, Trump had made a calculation after impeachment about the people who are going to enforce that and who this party is, who the Republican Party is.Do you think that that's a moment where it's a signal that we should have paid even more attention to about the ability of our institutions to check a president?
The system pulled out its biggest gun, impeachment, and it failed.It did not rein him in.Not only did it not remove him, it didn't serve as a warning to him that there were limits.It's the other way around: I survived; therefore, I can do what I want, not "Oh, my gosh, look how close I came; let me try to avoid going too far in the future."
The system did resist him on a lot of levels.There were moments when Congress and the courts and the media and the bureaucracy frustrate his designs, but this one moment where he is acquitted in this trial becomes for him this lesson that "I can beat the system," that "I can beat the system."
And by the way, he has spent a career doing this.He has spent a career pushing the envelope as far as he can, without accountability.How far can he go without being indicted, sued, all these things?And he had succeeded time and time again.And here he has once again; he's figured out in Washington, too.He can get away with it; he can do what he wants.
And so the lesson he comes out of that is, "I'm the guy.They have to bow to me."And he's looking ahead thinking, I've got reelection wrapped up; I'm going to be here for eight years.This is the moment.
Trump’s Response to COVID
And then he's confronted with COVID.
And then he's confronted with COVID.
There's lots of lessons inside COVID.… We're interested in watching what it's like for Republicans in Congress as they're watching this president go on with conspiracy theories, everything from how it started to how you can treat it to eventually it's going to be about liberating Michigan and other states.Help us understand, when you look back on it, Trump and misinformation and then how it was viewed in Washington as they were watching all of this, all of the things that were going on in that period.
I think the most important thing to understand about Trump and COVID is that finally he has met a challenge that he cannot intimidate, he cannot cow, he cannot Twitter into submission.He cannot beat it like a drum, right?This is the kind of challenge that does not respond to the tools that he has so successfully used up until this point.
His modus operandi, his normal way of handling opposition or challenges is to beat it into submission, and COVID didn't care what he tweeted about it.COVID didn't care what he said about it.And so he needed something to be an enemy, because that's how he knows how to operate.
And he shows this from the very beginning.He says COVID is just the media exaggerating.He says, their way—it's their new hoax, he says, meaning it's the same as the Russia investigation in his mind.In other words, a pandemic, a global disease that's going to ultimately kill millions of people around the globe is, to him, the equivalent of a partisan investigation.That's what he's trying to make it anyway, because that's how he knows how to respond.
And it didn't work in the sense that that doesn't stop the spread of this disease.So instead, he's constantly looking for ways to get out of the hole he finds himself in.
… So he literally comes from impeachment, where he's feeling enabled and emboldened, into COVID right away.In fact, there's a debriefing in the Senate the morning he's acquitted in the trial by the health experts of the senators of COVID.So you see in this moment of triumph for him the moment of foreboding of what's about to happen.
And while he's busy rooting out disloyal people in his administration, while he's busy retaliating against enemies, while he's busy pardoning friends who he feels were unfairly treated, COVID is making its inevitable, inexorable way into and around the country.
And so in terms of disinformation—I know your question was about that—first of all, Trump is a conspiracy theorist at heart.He both believes in them and promotes them.He believes that they are a useful tool for him.You know, he once said to a friend that if you say something often enough, it becomes truth.That's his way of thinking about things: that if he says something often enough, no matter how untrue it is, he makes it into truth.And by the way, a substantial amount of public will go along with him.
And so he's spreading disinformation and conspiracy theories about COVID, about where it got started or what it will actually add up to.He's in denial about how serious it is, at least in terms of his public pronouncements.And he's desperate for a miracle cure.He's desperate to get out of this box that he cannot figure otherwise how to get out of.
And so he's promoting things like hydroxychloroquine and other quack ideas of his that come from the far reaches of the internet rather than listening to the experts who actually work for him.He has the most informed apparatus of experts working for him in the United States government on almost any subject, and inevitably he will prefer to listen to some crackpot on the internet or some ally of his who comes up to him and says, "Hey, you know, this is really great."
So when Larry Ellison tells him that hydroxychloroquine is good and he says, "OK, that's good.Larry Ellison says it, it must be true."Larry Ellison founded Oracle, an amazing accomplishment, but he's not a doctor.He's not a medical scientist who's spent his lifetime studying infectious disease, but Trump would rather listen to that guy because that guy because that guy's telling him what he wants to hear than to listen to Tony Fauci, who's telling him what he doesn't want to hear.
Trump will always pick the guy who is telling him what he wants to hear over the person who's telling him what he doesn't want to hear.
You said that he wasn't successful, and you meant he wasn't successful in beating COVID or containing it in this way, but he was successful in another way, which was convincing a lot of his voters that it wasn't serious in the same way that these drugs were out there; that the masks were an effort to contain them.And that for us seems like another test for the Republican Party.This is literally a life-or-death test for some of them about how they respond to the things that Trump is saying.And how do they respond to those things?
Well, he makes it into a partisan issue.A disease that doesn't give a crap about whether you live in a blue state or a red state suddenly is yet one more wedge issue to use, OK?He's attacking blue-state governors.He is making a mask into an us-versus-them divide.He wants to divide because that's what he knows how to do.
And Republicans who are watching this, including some who are very cognizant and knowledgeable about health care, are very much disturbed because this disinformation can kill people.
If you tell people, no, a mask isn't necessary, and they choose not to wear it because of that, or you encourage the people who don't think vaccines are a good idea, there are consequences to that.People's lives were shattered as a result of believing things that they were told.And of course, the most memorable example of that was the bleach briefing, where the president of the United States gets up there and is told that scientific study of COVID indicates this or that about how the cells can be killed, and he extrapolates that to say, "Well, then if you ingest bleach or something like that, then maybe that could be a cure, right?Don't you think you ought to be looking at that?"He says to the scientists.And they're like all maintaining their faces, like they don't know what to say.This is so crazy, but they don't want to say it out loud.
And once again, he has cowed people into silence because they're afraid of crossing him.And there is a consequence; there literally, around the country, suddenly public health agencies are putting out warnings: "Don't take bleach.Don't try and ingest bleach to get rid of COVID here.This is dangerous to you.You could die from this."
And it's a moment that reveals just how irresponsible the rhetoric can be and how people are willing and eager to listen to him on something that he clearly doesn't know anything about and believe him over the people who, the pointy-headed, white-coat-wearing experts who are just part of the elite out to put us down.
… Liz Cheney is during that period watching, and it's sort of the beginning of her break.Her dad has that transplant, and she's seeing it in a very different way. …
Liz Cheney is a very principled conservative.She believes in what she believes in.And she doesn't agree with Democrats.She's not one of these Republicans who suddenly become a Democrat because she doesn't like Trump.She looked at Trump and said, "This guy doesn't believe anything I believe in."And she from time to time pushes back on him in those first three years.
But you're right.COVID is the beginning of the turn for her where she moves from just being an occasional critic to an out-and-out opponent.And it's because of her father.Her father, who had heart issues his entire life, five heart attacks, I believe, had a heart transplant, would be one of those people who is most vulnerable, in theory, to COVID.
And so she's looking at the president of the United States saying, "Don't wear masks," and saying, "What are you talking about?"This could save your life.Why would you tell people not to wear something that could save their life?
And it really gnaws at her.It does, obviously, because of her father's experience, gnaw at her.And she helps put out this image of her father in a mask: "Real men wear masks."It was to counter the president's undermining of this public health recommendation.And she's beginning to say even more clearly how irresponsible some of this rhetoric really is.
And that evolves over the rest of 2020.She still endorses Trump.She still votes for him.… So she doesn't break with him entirely, but she increasingly is showing her disdain for his behavior and the way he conducts himself.
Another example, by the way, in there is he suggests in spring that maybe they should just go ahead and postpone the election because of COVID.In other words, because it might be unsafe to go to the polling booths, let's just delay the election.Now, we had never delayed an election in American history, a presidential election, even during war.Even during the Civil War, we still had a presidential election on time.And the idea of delaying it was just, whoa.It was a bombshell.
And so Liz Cheney speaks out very bluntly, very forcefully, saying, "No, that is not something we are doing; we are absolutely not doing that."She has drawn a line at that part.That's part of Liz Cheney's evolution over time where she decided there's only so far she's willing to swallow.Only so far she's willing to go.
Trump and Black Lives Matter
… When you look just as a television producer, you look back at those images of Trump during that year, of course Lafayette Square, law enforcement operations in Portland and other places and the rhetoric that Trump has, what is Trump's approach to that moment, to the Black Lives Matter, to the use of government forces to things that had seemed like they would be off the table in other presidencies, in a democracy?
Well, Trump—long before George Floyd came along, Trump had a long history as a racial provocateur rather than a racial healing force.He's not a healer.He believes in throwing kindling on the fire, going back to the Central Park Five, going back to all sorts of New York racial events.He has—all the way to his presidential campaign, which is founded on this birther conspiracy aimed at creating this racial, racist presumption that the first Black president isn't legitimate.
So he has a long history on race.And so when George Floyd happens, his instinct is to fuel the controversy rather than to calm it.Most presidents, even those who had—who were not great racial reconciliators, believe that their responsibility in a moment of crisis like that is to try to calm things, to bring the country together and say, "Hey, let's sit down and talk about it," rather than to use violence.
That's not Trump's instinct.Trump's instinct is to fuel the fire, not to put it out.And he reacts to this, to the protests in the streets and eventually obviously the violence that follows on the part of some of them, as a challenge to him, and he wants to use force.Not just police.He wants—not just the National Guard.He wants to bring in the active-duty military.He wants to declare, in effect, an insurrection through the Insurrection Act and send in the troops.
He says things like, "When the looting begins, the shooting begins."He's not calming things down.He's amping it up.He is threatening violence to meet violence rather than trying to get everything to settle down.
And for him, it's a way of galvanizing the base, which resents a lot of the things that the people in the streets stood for.It's a way of creating energy in his campaign, which to that point had been lackluster because of COVID.Law and order: They're the bad guys, not us.Black Lives Matter is racist, not us.And it begins to provide a sort of jolt of energy to him and his sort of flagging presidential reelection campaign at that point.
… In terms of American democracy, in terms of a president saying, "I want to use the Insurrection Act; I want to send the military in; … these internal enemies are a real threat to our democracy," because as I said, we're going towards Jan. 6.And obviously, he is doing all the things you say.But when you look back on the history in the context of America, how unusual are those types of actions that he's taking, or trying to take?
There are plenty of presidents who were racist before Donald Trump and plenty of presidents who responded vigorously or forcefully to internal challenges.There have been presidential-violated democratic norms.All the way back to George Washington; he used troops to put down the Whiskey Rebellion and so forth.So it's not like we hadn't seen some version of this before.
But what's different about it is that Trump's language, Trump's approach is more like the people who never got to the Oval Office than the ones who did.It's more George Wallace than it is even Richard Nixon.It's more Father Coughlin and these other populists over time who were rabble-rousers rather than people who, as president, saw their responsibility to bring people together and be president for all the people.
Other presidents had to use force to put down unrest or civil disturbances, but their instinct was to try to find a way to bring people together because they saw that as their duty as president.George H. W. Bush, when they were confronting the riots after the Rodney King verdict, didn't relish the idea of bashing heads; he did what he felt he had to do in order to calm things down and restore order.But he also wanted to reach out and bring people together.That was his instinct.
So much presidents—not all—but most presidents saw their responsibility as bringing the country together, even in moments of division like this, whereas President Trump saw his mission as to fuel the fire rather than put it out.
And the symbolism, too, of the images that you remember from that time—of the Lincoln Memorial and armored personnel who were there; the image of the helicopter over the protesters; certainly the president walking with his military, the top general, across Lafayette Park.They looked like something out of another country—
It does.
—the type of thing you're used to seeing in a country that's not as committed to democracy.What were you seeing in that?
Yeah, no, I think that's right.My wife and I were foreign correspondents.It had a look of other countries, not America.
…To see a president emerge from the White House just minutes after police use force—rubber bullets and chemical irritants and so forth—to forcefully clear out Lafayette Square, and then to see him march across there with the phalanx of people behind him, including a top general in camouflage uniform, in order to hold up a Bible that's not even his own Bible at St. John's Church, it was just this extraordinary moment that felt very different from a lot of presidents that we've seen, you know.
For him, the imperative then was to show strength, to not look weak.
…He felt humiliated and angered that the newspapers had reported that he had been brought to the bunker underneath the White House at a moment when the protesters seemed to get too close to the building.He felt that that made him weak.He felt that made him look ineffective and emasculated.
And so this march across Lafayette Square, which they love the image of, is the result of that.He had to show that he was strong.He had to show that he was in charge.They loved it so much that within an hour, I believe, they had an image of that up on his campaign social media, showing him marching across there, as if he was personally beating back protesters and restoring order to the country.And that was the image he wanted; that's the image he wanted.
… In that period there's a lot of these images.There's violence around COVID, around political violence is going on.What is the response on the Republican Party, on the leadership as they're confronted with this in an election year, where their own seats are up and control of Congress and the president?What calculation are they making when they're seeing these things?
Well, some Republicans are bothered and worried about this.They don't want the country to tear apart on racial grounds or other grounds.But a lot of Republicans rally to the president's side in this.This becomes a galvanizing issue for them.Law and order: It's a traditional Republican value, something that they can talk about together.
And again, he is making his opposition a way of supporting him; in other words, that he is saying, "Are you with the looters and the rioters, or are you with me?"And a lot of Republicans don't like rioting and looting—a lot of Democrats don't like that either—but they make it into an us-versus-them situation where in that calculation they're going to pick Trump because the other side is so anathema.
And he loves having a foil.He wants to have a foil at any given time, whether it be Democrats or the media or now Black Lives Matter.And so Black Lives Matter becomes the enemy he can focus on and to focus others on, because it's me versus them, and whose side are you going to be on?
The 2020 Election
I'm bringing it now to the turning point in it all, which is the night of the election, when Trump comes out and says, "Frankly, we did win this election."First, describe that moment and how unprecedented it was and how important it was and what would follow.
President Trump comes out into the briefing room around 2:30 in the morning and claims victory in an election he's just lost.Now, all the states haven't been called, and it was still, in theory, up for grabs.We didn't know how all the absentee ballots would come in, but it wasn't looking good for him, and he had been told it wasn't looking good for him, and he decides he's going to claim victory anyway.He's going to start claiming that there was fraud and the election was stolen without a hint of evidence.He wasn't waiting to find out whether something had happened that should disturb us.He was claiming on the front end that this election was stolen without any bit of evidence.
In fact, he'd been telling us this for months.This is a pattern for Trump.Trump is a winner; Trump is not a loser; therefore, Trump cannot lose.That's the calculation.And he has done this every step of the way through his career, long before politics.When The Apprentice lost an Emmy to The Amazing Race, he claimed that the Emmy contest was rigged; it was a con game."We have been cheated," he said, as he stood up and marched out of the auditorium that night.
He claimed that the election was rigged in 2012 when Mitt Romney, whom he had endorsed, lost to Barack Obama.He claimed that the Iowa caucus was rigged when Ted Cruz beat him in it.He claimed that the 2016 general election was rigged before he had actually won it.And then when he won it, suddenly it was not rigged, except for the popular vote, which he lost to Hillary Clinton, so that must have been rigged; that was also rigged.Every step along the way, anything he has ever lost is because somebody else has cheated and stolen it from him.He has never admitted defeat at any point.
So he was not going to admit defeat in 2020.And he told us this; he told us this for months.He said, "This election is going to be rigged.If I don't win, it means it was rigged."There was no scenario in which he was going to graciously accept defeat.
The contest was either two things: Either I win, or the other guy cheated.And that, of course, is not what a democracy is about.Democracy is not about "I win; otherwise it's illegitimate."But that's what he was saying: if I don't win, it's illegitimate.And he was tearing at, from the very start, the foundations of credibility of a democratic system.
And the facts didn't matter; evidence didn't matter; truth didn't matter.He was going to go ahead and tell people this election was rigged in order to—not to salve his ego, but to set himself up to be a continuing power in this country.Most presidents who lose reelection—Herbert Hoover, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush—they don't have power after leaving office; that's the end for them.They may try to come back, but that's it.He was not going to let that be his fate.He was going to continue to be a power in this country, and the way he would do it was by convincing at least half the country, or most of the people who were on his half of the country that something bad had happened.
And people misjudged what he was up to.There were a lot of people, including people close to him, people around him who thought, well, it's just him salving his wounded ego.He doesn't want to admit he lost; he's going to say this for a while, and then reality will, of course, overtake it.So just humor him for a little while.Let him puff—you know, let him bang his chest and say what he's going to say, but it won't add up to anything.
That's not, in fact, what happened.What we've now learned since he left office is that they were thinking, even from the beginning, as early as the day after the election, about how to manipulate the system for him to stay in power, even though that's not what voters had just decided.They were focused on myriad different ways to overturn this election from the beginning.It was not just an ego-salving exercise on his part.And people around him and people in Congress, people like Mitch McConnell, even people like Jared Kushner didn't see that.
His deputy chief of staff, a guy named Chris Liddell, who was in charge of the transition, laid out a whole bunch of scenarios before the election of how he thought it could be.It could be a decisive victory; it could be a decisive defeat.It could be a close victory; it could be a close defeat that is fought out for a few weeks.It could be a close defeat that's fought out for a little longer.No scenario did he have going past Dec. 14 when the Electoral College was going to vote.No scenario did he envision in which they were still going to be fighting and trying to change the election after it was officially ratified by the Electoral College.
And yet President Trump, from the beginning, had no plans whatsoever to ever accept defeat.
It's an amazing moment, and it's a moment that's going to force decisions for a lot of people along the way about how they're going to respond.That day, that night, in the morning, the person who comes up to the microphone after him is Mike Pence.Who is he at that moment?Who has he been?Who is he as he comes up after Trump?
So Mike Pence comes up after Trump as the guy who has almost as much as Trump a stake in this.He's the only other person on the ballot.He's just lost, too.But he has spent three years and 10 months basically being as loyal as anybody could possibly be to Trump in public while trying to avoid getting caught up in all the mishigas, all of the crazy statements and crazy actions, without ever endorsing some of the most outrageous things, yet avoiding any perception of a break with Trump.He may be the only person in Washington who hadn't been tweeted against in three years and 10 months at that point, he had been so loyal.
So here he comes up to the podium now, and the president of the United States just said that the election is a crock, is corrupt and is stolen or is being stolen, and Pence has a choice to make.What is he going to do?What is he going to say?And he finesses it the way Pence has all of these three years and 10 months by basically saying, "Well, we want to believe every vote needs to be—legal vote needs to be counted, and illegal vote"—he says words that seem to back up Trump, as in, "Let's keep fighting to see if we can"—without going as far as Trump.He doesn't make any allegation that the election has been stolen or that somebody has done something nefarious and there's this great, giant conspiracy out there that involved Venezuela and Italy and Dominion Voting Systems and everybody else.He avoids saying the more extreme things that Trump does, while saying just enough to keep on Trump's good side.
And it's a tight wire that he's been walking now for so long, and he's done it pretty successfully from his point of view, but he's about to find out how hard it really is.
There's a period of 48 hours here after Trump comes out where most of the people who are pushing the election fraud are members of the Trump family, are Alex Jones, are Steven Bannon, sort of the people on the outside.It's going to be Friday, I think, before Cruz and Graham come on and start pushing this, too.Is that a moment of decision for the Republican Party, for those people, about how they're going to handle this?
Yeah, it's actually a moment of decision for the Republican Party, and many Republicans are kind of relieved that Trump has lost, or it looks like he's going to lose at that point, and looking forward to being able to move past him.And very few at first are jumping on this stolen-election bandwagon; they're just keeping quiet or they're whatever.
And Trump and his loyalists begin to bang on them, to say, "Wait a second; hey, you've got to get behind him."Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. are tweeting out, "Where are the Republicans?Why aren't they rallying to Dad's side here?," and intimidating Republicans by name for not standing with him.
In fact, Donald Trump Jr. name-checks Lindsey Graham—"Where are you?You're supposed to be our Dad's friend"; in effect, why aren't you supporting him?And by Thursday night, Lindsey Graham goes on Hannity and says, "Yeah, well, the elections in Philadelphia are as crooked as a snake."He begins to adopt the Trumpian language.
So this 48-hour period where Republicans are saying, OK, maybe we're done with him, and now they have been forced back into his corner by the Trump loyalty test.Now, many of them keep quiet and say nothing, but very few of them, only a handful of them, basically come out and say, "This is a crock, you need to stop this; this is not true."They think they can simply wait it out, most of them.
And then the ones who speak out for him are trying to stay on the good side of the base, show that their loyalty to him so that, yeah, he'll leave, of course he lost, but it will show that we were fighting for him all the way to the end so that when we want to run in the future, we will be able to show that support and win their approval.
Republican Response to Allegations of Election Fraud
We're especially interested in Cruz and Graham, who had been outspoken critics, Cruz had had these accusations made against him.Do you know if they believed the allegations of fraud when they're going out and saying these things on Fox News and when they're becoming a surrogate for it?
It's a good question.If you put them under truth serum, my guess is they don't believe, certainly don't believe a lot of the most outlandish claims that were made by Trump and his team, and almost certainly don't believe that the election was stolen.Now, they might say and they might believe that there were some irregularities, that there were some policies made that were unfair to Trump in terms of mail-in voting and signature verification or whatever.In other words, they could point to various things and say, "Well, that wasn't really right."
But do they actually believe that votes were stolen in the amount that would be necessary to overturn the election in multiple states?It's hard to believe that they think that.
The other person who's really interesting throughout this whole period is Mitch McConnell, who's not saying anything for an entire month.What is his calculation?What is he doing during that period after Trump has announced he's going to be pushing this fraud claim?
Yeah.Well, so Mitch McConnell had been reassured by Jared Kushner, through an intermediary, that this'll be OK, that Trump is going to get out there and bang the drums for a while, but that it'll eventually be OK and he'll accept reality and everything will be fine.Don't push him.Don't make a thing out of it, in other words.
And so McConnell's calculation is, let him play it out.Let Trump puff and huff, and let Trump scream and yell.But in the end, it won't matter, because the votes are the votes.And for McConnell, there's another priority here, and that priority is the state of Georgia, because there are two runoff elections to be had, and those two runoff elections in Georgia will decide control of the Senate; they will decide whether Mitch McConnell continues to be majority leader or now suddenly the minority leader.
And he cares more about those elections than he does about Donald Trump's wounded ego.And he believes that if he is outspoken in standing up to Trump during this period, all he will do is tank the candidates, the two senators he has in Georgia that he desperately needs to win.
So he's playing a game where he's trying to have it both ways, in effect, not get on Trump's bad side by directly speaking at him because he doesn't want to rile him up, but to find a way to win these two elections.
He doesn't endorse any of the fraud stuff.What he says is, the president has a right to avail himself of every legal avenue out there.Meaning, OK, he wants to ask for recounts or file some lawsuits, fine, let him do it.There's nothing wrong with that, per se.But his priority is the Senate.His priority are these two Georgia races.
The problem for McConnell is that ultimately Trump's campaign to overturn the election, his campaign to discredit the democratic system works against the Republican senators in that Georgia election.Ultimately, what Trump is doing is telling his own voters is, "You can't trust the system."So if they can't trust the system, then why would they turn out on Jan. 5 to vote for these two Republican senators?Because it's all crooked.
And so Trump's rhetoric ultimately is directly opposite of McConnell's chief priority here.And so McConnell didn't know what to do about it.So what he decides to do is, he needs somebody to speak out.He doesn't think it should be him, so he calls Bill Barr.Bill Barr is the attorney general of the United States, had been basically a pretty important figure for Trump in many of these past scrapes in terms of framing the Mueller report, in terms of going after the investigators who had come after Trump, in terms of letting up on Roger Stone and Mike Flynn.
But Bill Barr had enough.Bill Barr thought this was nonsense.He actually used more earthy tones; he said it was bulls---.There was no fraud out there that was sufficient to overturn the election.And he wasn't going to be part of it.He had—this was too far for him; he'd finally reached his breaking point.
So Mitch McConnell calls Bill Barr, says, "Look, somebody needs to speak out here, and I don't think it can be me.I think it should be you."And Bill Barr says, "Yeah, actually I've been thinking the same thing.I think you're right."
And so a few days later, after Trump publicly trashes Barr for not aggressively investigating this supposed fraud, Barr decides to take it into his own hands.He calls a reporter from The Associated Press, invites him to lunch, and over lunch tells him there is no evidence of widespread fraud sufficient to overturn the election.He knows exactly what he's doing.He is saying that the chief law enforcement officer of the United States does not believe in the crap that the president of the United States is saying.
And the story goes out on the wire, and it has exactly the effect he knows it will have.He happens to have a meeting at the White House later that day.Sure enough, the president learns he is in the building, summons him to the Oval Office.He's in the private dining room in the back.Barr goes in; he knows what he's in for here.And on the screen is OAN Network showing one of these faux hearings, looking at election fraud, and Trump was sitting in his chair.
And Barr comes up.He doesn't sit down.He puts his hands on the back of one of the tall chairs.Trump pulls out a piece of paper, says, "Did you say this?"And Barr knows exactly what he's talking about, he says, "Yeah, I did."He says, "Why did you say it?""Because it's true."He says, "You didn't have to say it; you didn't have to comment at all."He says, "Well, Mr. President, I've been looking into this.All these claims you're making, they're all bulls---."He uses the word "bulls---" with the president of the United States.
And they have it out.And there's this incredible breaking point finally, after months and years of Trump and Barr working mostly hand in hand.And finally Barr says to him, "Sir, I know you've been unhappy with me for this and other reasons, and if you want my resignation"—and bam!, Trump slams his hand down on the table, says, "Accepted!"Doesn't let him finish the sentence."Accepted," he says.
And at that very moment, two of the lawyers in the room—Pat Cipollone—cry out in unison, "No!"The idea that he's going to fire or accept the resignation of the attorney general in the middle of this is a disaster.
Barr turns around and walks out.And the two lawyers chase after him.Barr's in his car on West Executive Avenue outside of the White House leaving.And the car starts to move.Bam, bam, bam!The lawyers are banging on the outside of the car to get it to stop and then jump in the back, say, "You can't do this.He doesn't want you to resign.He told us he doesn't want you to resign.Please come back in."They're begging him not to leave because it's going to be this ultimate rupture.
And Barr says, "Look, I won't resign, but I'm not coming back in there.There's no point in my coming back in there and having it out with him again."He's done with this, basically.
And this is all McConnell's doing, in effect.McConnell behind the scenes doesn't say anything publicly himself for the most part, but he sets in motion this break between the attorney general and the president of the United States, the validation of the election by the attorney general, in effect, the message that, no, this election wasn't stolen.That's all because Mitch McConnell puts it in motion.
… Two more things about McConnell, and the first is, what happens in that month?Because it starts as something that the president comes out and says and everybody is shocked.And in that month, of course, you see protesters outside of the counting centers; you see by Dec. 1 is when Gabriel Sterling [Chief Operating Officer in the Office of the Georgia Secretary of State] comes out and warns about violence the same day McConnell is asked, and he's still remaining silent.What happens in that vacuum, in that month before McConnell's going to weigh in?And what happens with the claims of election fraud?
Well, basically the Trump team is throwing spaghetti at the wall, and they're trying to see what will stick.They're trying everything they possibly can to find some traction somewhere: filing lawsuits, asking for audits, looking for testimony of people who would say that things were done wrong.… There's no limit to the different theories they're advancing, all of which are sometimes contradictory with each other.It was stolen because of Dominion voting machines.It was stolen because dead people were voting.It was stolen because of this or that.
They're trying everything, hoping desperately to find something where they can get some credibility, which they have none of.They literally file 65 lawsuits in all these different states—65 lawsuits—and essentially lose every one of them.The only one they win is a very minor thing where a judge in Pennsylvania says, "Yes, your observers can be six feet away rather than 12 feet away," or something like that.
Not one shred of evidence of wide-scale fraud anywhere to be had.And it's kind of—it's this moment where the people around Trump who don't believe in this, who think this is crazy, withdraw.They pull back.And in that void comes Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, and eventually people like Mike Flynn and even Mike Lindell, the MyPillow guy, and all these figures who are conspiracy theorists and are filling Trump's ear with the wildest, most outrageous theories, and mostly telling him, "Yeah, you really won."
And so Trump has a choice here.He has a choice between the people who are saying, "You lost, admit it," and the people who are saying, "No, you won, keep fighting."And he always is going to pick the guy who says, "No, you won; keep fighting."He will always pick the person who tells him what he wants to hear, not the person who tells him what he doesn't want to hear.
And the people who tell him what he doesn't want to hear withdraw; they pull back.The campaign staff, the advisers who think this is all nuts, the White House staff who are beginning to look for other jobs, even his own daughter and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, they know this isn't going anywhere, and they're pulling back.
And so Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell and those people have the field to themselves.And they're fighting with each other, by the way, about how crazy their theories might be.And you have these wild moments like the hair--dye press conference, where Rudy Giuliani is sitting there claiming the election's been stolen while some sort of mascara or hair dye is leaking down his face.And then there's the mix-up between Four Seasons and the Four Seasons Total Landscaping.I mean, it's like—it looks like a clown show.
And so a lot of people don't take it seriously because it looks like a clown show.They're losing in every court.The numbers are what they are.It's not going to matter.It's just performative, right?That's, I think, the feeling of a lot of people in Washington.So a lot of Republicans in Washington who know it's nonsense don't bother to speak up because they feel like it will all play out.The guardrails are there; it's not going to amount to anything.It's all clownish; they look silly.We don't need to sit there and make a big deal out of this by fighting him about it, because he's going to be gone in a few weeks anyway.
And they're fooled into remaining quiet and passive.They're taking the wrong cue from what's happening here.What they don't see is how much more serious it's going to become.
You think about the decisions that Republicans are going to have to make and that they're going to make about the election, and they're watching that press conference; they're watching these other things.But what's also happening in that period as far as the voters, as far as conservative media, even off of Fox News, as you say, One America News and these others?What's in that period, especially in that month when McConnell is silent?How is that lie about the election spreading and changing the politics?
One thing Trump has learned is that if you repeat something enough times, it becomes truth, right?He has learned that time and time again.He has buildings in New York in which he has added 10 floors to what they really are, because if he simply says it's 66 stories instead of 56 stories or whatever it is, people will eventually believe it, and that's what happens in this post-election period.
He says again and again it's been stolen; there's been fraud; it's rigged.And people begin to believe him.And it's echoed by conservative media, by Fox News, by OAN, by Newsmax to some extent, all of them to different degrees.
And it's echoed by his most passionate and fervent supporters, who are out there telling the public, yeah, something bad happened here.And guess what?… If you tell people something enough times, they begin to think it might be true, especially people who already believe in you.They believe in Trump.They don't believe in the mainstream media who are telling them the election is over.They don't believe in the elites who are trying to cheat Trump.And by the time he leaves office, he's convinced most of the Republican voters out there, according to polls, that the election was stolen.
And this is hugely important, hugely important, because even if he doesn't actually get to keep office, what he has done is discredited the democratic system.He has told Americans they cannot trust their democracy, that the whole thing is a con game, and undermined the faith in the system that is core to our constitutional society.
Democracy is founded, at least in part, on the notion that we all believe in, and that we believe it is running in a fair and honest way, at least most of the time.And what he has told them, and what a lot of people believe, is that no, it's just as corrupt as everything else and that you cannot believe in it, and you shouldn't believe in it, and you should believe in me.
And it's all about who do you believe?Do you believe them, or do you believe me?And he has made that a test of his presidency from the beginning: Do you believe them, or do you believe me?
As we get towards New Year's and we're approaching towards Jan. 6, and this is something you've mentioned before, how real is the attempt to overturn the election?… And how much does that attempt that is being talked about inside the White House depend on Republicans in Congress?What's his coordination with them in that period?
If you sit back and look at what he did, it is extraordinary.He pushed on every single door he could find, every window he could find to see if he could find one that would open for him: lawsuits, state legislatures, governors, local election boards.He was looking for any avenue that would overturn the result he didn't like, and when he didn't get success here, he just pushed someplace else.
Most famously, of course, he called the secretary of state of Georgia who runs the elections down there and said, "You just need to find me 11,000 votes," basically is what he's saying.Any avenue he's looking for.
And eventually they're all exhausted to the point where after Dec. 14, the Electoral College has cast its ballots, now it's looking like Congress is the last place for him, because on Jan. 6, by law, Congress opens up the certificates from the states and officially finalizes the results of the election.And so it's going to come to members of Congress to block that in some way so that he can still claim victory.
And he has a meeting on Dec. 21 with a whole bunch of his most fervent supporters in the White House—people like Louie Gohmert and Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who hasn't even yet taken office but has just been elected, and Paul Gosar, all these really rabid Trump-supporting congressmen—to plot out the strategy.And the strategy is to do one of two things: either to disallow electors from states that he lost, or to try to send it back to the states so that the state legislatures in some of these states, which are Republican-controlled, can offer alternative slates, and then at Congress they can say, "Well, we accept this slate, not that slate."
Now, think about what we're talking about here.I mean, it is true in the early years of the republic we didn't actually have a popular election; we had states sending their own electors to Congress to vote for the president.But basically since the mid-1800s, we've never had state legislatures pretend to decide who would be elected president; it's always been the will of the people.
What they're talking about here now is having state legislatures in states won by the other guy put aside the votes of the voters—"Sorry, voters, we don't care for your judgment; we're going to give our state's electors to the other guy, that guy who lost anyway."That's what they're talking about.
And they disguise it, they wrap it up in this sort of faux legal process constitutional argument in which they say, "Well, this is allowed by this and that and the other thing, and there's precedent for this or that or the other thing," to make it sound as if it's reasonable.But what we forget, what gets lost often in that conversation is, what you're talking about is overruling the decision of the voters.
And this, of course, will ultimately come down to the person who will preside over that counting of the votes on Jan. 6.Who is that person?That person is the president of the Senate.Who is the president of the Senate?The vice president of the United States, Mike Pence.
Ultimately, as part of their plan, because they don't control the House—Democrats control the House—they need Pence to help them disallow electors from Biden states.And then there are two ways forward here: Either it goes back to the legislature, they send another slate; or they prevent a majority of votes from being counted for Biden, in which case, under the Constitution, if there's not a majority of the Electoral College, it goes to the House; the House decides.
Well, OK, the House is still in Democratic hands, right, and Nancy Pelosi's speaker, so it'll be Biden anyway; who cares?No.Under the Constitution, it's a different system.The House in such circumstances votes by state delegation.So each state gets one vote—there are 50 votes then.Well, even though Democrats control a larger number of members of the House, Republicans at that time actually controlled 26 state delegations, exactly the number they would need.So they're trying not get it to the stage where if there's not a majority they can get it to the House and the Republican delegations will vote and make Donald Trump president, even though the voters said no, we don't want him anymore.
Jan. 6 and the Aftermath
Can you help us with that period and the pressure that's put on Pence and the interactions with Trump leading up to Jan. 6?
So this talk about Jan. 6 had begun pretty quickly after the election, but the Pence people didn't realize, I think, quite how serious it was going to be, quite how urgent it was going to be until after the Electoral College votes on Dec. 14.And then from then on, the pressure was rising almost with every single day.One of Trump's allies in Congress, Louie Gohmert, files a lawsuit trying to force Pence to agree that he has the power to disallow electors from various states, which Pence doesn't think he has.
The president of the United States is bringing this up with Pence in private, saying, "You have the power to decide this election."And Pence is like, "Well, I don't think I have that power.No vice president's ever done that before.That's not possible."
And Trump was telling him, in private.And then eventually Trump begins to say it in public.And he brings in this conservative law professor in California, a guy named John Eastman, who has a memo saying here are all the different ways Vice President Pence can change the election, in effect.And he makes Pence meet with John Eastman in the Oval Office and listen to John Eastman tell him, "Yes, Mr. Vice President, you have this power."
And the vice president's done his own research.He's had his staff do his research.And he doesn't have that power.There's been no example that in history where a vice president has single-handedly, unilaterally overturned the will of the voters for who's going to be president.And he pushes back against John Eastman, says, "I don't think that's true."He says, "Do you really think I have that authority?" and he gives kind of an equivocal answer.
And at one point Pence turns to Trump and says, "Are you listening to this?Do you hear this?"What the guy actually said is, it would be foolish to do what you're proposing that I do.But Trump isn't listening to that.He just is banging away on Pence."You have to.You are the guy who is going to keep us in power."
And for Pence, this is the moment of truth.For three years and 11 months, he has done whatever he had to do to stay on Trump's good side.He's tried to avoid the crazy stuff, but he has done everything he could to avoid doing anything that would anger President Trump.And now he has reached a moment of truth.
There's no way to finagle this.There's no way to finesse this.Yes or no, white or black, pick a side: What are you going to do?And he's decided that he is going to vote to the Constitution, in effect.He's going to say, "I do not have this power to do this; it's my job to count the votes, not to change the votes."
And it's very hot in the White House in these last days leading up to Jan. 6.On Jan. 5, the two of them have a meeting, just the two of them alone, just Trump and Pence.Nobody knows what actually was said then, but Trump, of course, is pushing, pushing, pushing.
And he's pushing in public, too.Even after Pence has told him, "I'm not going to do this," Trump is telling the public, either through Twitter or in speeches or statements that, "Well, Mike Pence, he's the guy who could do this."He's publicly pushing Mike.He says, "I would like Mike Pence a lot more if he does this.If he doesn't, I'm not going to like him very much."
Leading up to Jan. 6 itself, the morning of Jan. 6, President Trump calls Pence again, 9:00 in the morning.Pence doesn't take the call.Calls him again around 11:00 in the morning.This time Pence is at the vice presidential residence.He's meeting with his staff, and they're finalizing the letter he's going to put out saying, "No, I'm not going to try to intervene in this election.A vice president doesn't have that power."He's meeting with his staff to finalize this letter when somebody walks in and says, "Mr. Vice President, the president's on the phone."
The vice president excuses himself, goes upstairs in the residence to take the call by himself.The president is in the Oval Office with people all around him, listening to his side of the conversation, and what they hear is the president pushing, pushing, pushing.He says, "You can be a patriot, or you can be a pussy."That's what he says to the vice president.And this is what Pence is being told.And Pence doesn't back down.
Finally, the choice has been made.He has no choice but to decide.He's decided he is going to stand with the Constitution, which does not allow him to do what he is being told to do.And he tells the president this.
And it's still not enough.The president is still going to pressure him.He goes out on Jan. 6 to the Ellipse, to the rally of his supporters who are about to march on the Capitol, and he tells them, "Mike Pence can save us."Basically, he says, "Let's hope Mike Pence does the right thing."He's already been told that Mike Pence isn't going to do that.He knows Mike Pence isn't going to do that.He's still putting pressure on his vice president.And he's now summoning his crowd to put pressure on Mike Pence.
There was no end of pressure on the vice president.And it's one of the most extraordinary moments, I think, in presidential history.
It really is, especially as you tell it.I mean, you talk about the fragility of democracy, and who knows what would have happened if he had acquiesced to Trump?
Well, this is the thing.My really quick point is, we often say, "Well, the guardrails worked.He didn't hold on to power."The guardrails worked because of a handful of very individual people.You know, we were one vice president or one attorney general or one governor and election board away from having this go a very different way.And there is no guarantee.What we have seen is the system is not guaranteed to work the way it's supposed to work.If there are people in the right places, it can go in an entirely different direction.
So I want to ask you all about Jan. 6.But to the extent you know, what were the communications or the attempted communications from Republicans on Capitol Hill in those days, on that day, trying to reach the White House?And how did the mood change inside the party for those people?
You mean after the riot begins, after the attack begins?
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.You saw—even in the days leading up to Jan. 6 you saw at least some of the people beginning to get off the train in some of these text messages that we've now seen in recent months.They're beginning to say, "Wait a second.This isn't going to happen; this isn't going to work.Don't try it.This is going to be a disaster." …
You see that from a few of them—Mike Lee.You see that from Chip Roy.You even see that from some of the Fox people, Sean Hannity saying, "This isn't going to work out the way he thinks it's going to work out."
So then on the day itself, the rioters are storming into the building.They're breaking windows, and they're smashing doors, and they're assaulting police officers.And you see these increasingly panicked messages coming into the White House: Do something about it.Have him say something.Get him out there.Tell them to call the mob off.
And the president is just not doing it.He's not listening to any of that.He gets out and makes a statement that is so weak that nobody even listens to him, on Twitter, saying, "Respect our police," or whatever.
People are continuing to pressure him: Speak out; do something; stop this.And he doesn't want to do it, because they're his people.Kevin McCarthy calls him and says, "You've got to speak out."He says, "Well, Kevin, I guess these people are just more concerned about the election than you are."In other words, he is siding with the mob over his own Republican ally who is in the crosshairs now of an angry, violent group of people who could do anything.
These people are, by the way, not respecting Republican versus Democrat, even.They're not just targeting Democrats.They're looking for Republicans they don't think are loyal to Trump, including, of course, Mike Pence."Hang Mike Pence," they're chanting, "Hang Mike Pence."They set up a gallows outside of the Capitol.Anything could happen.
And what Trump has shown to all these members, including his own allies, is he cares more about his election than he does about security of the Capitol.
… That moment after Jan. 6, including that night and in the days that follow, you hear very strong statements by people like Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy in particular.And in the period that's going to follow that, the mood is going to change, and they are going to change.Can you help me understand what happens, especially with Mitch McConnell and especially with Kevin McCarthy in that period from Jan. 6 to either Mar-a-Lago or deciding to delay the impeachment?What's going on?
Well, McConnell is done with Trump by this point.He's so mad that the Georgia election has gone the other direction—the Democrats win both of those elections—that he's willing to say out loud what he hasn't said up until that point.So the morning of Jan. 6, even before the violent attack, he gives a very powerful speech in which he says, "This is all nonsense.We should not be going down this road.This is crazy.The fact that you tell people the election is stolen does not mean it is stolen."And he has finally broken with Trump.Then, of course, the actual attack happens, and he becomes even more incensed, incensed by what he thinks the president has done.
So he is willing at this point to consider impeachment.McConnell believes that what has happened here is an impeachment offense, and he's not going to defend Trump the way he did the first time around.
And Kevin McCarthy is off the train—for a little while, anyway.And he says in recordings that later became public that he thinks that the president should resign.
And when the impeachment actually comes to the floor of the House, Kevin McCarthy gets up there and says, "The president bears responsibility for this."But there's already then the beginning of a change.He votes against impeachment, even as he says the president bears responsibility.
And then very shortly, Kevin McCarthy goes to Mar-a-Lago and basically kisses and makes up.Says, "Well, you know, we're putting that behind us.We're now buddies again."And it's McCarthy's visit to Mar-a-Lago that more than any other moment says the Republican Party is going to stand with Donald Trump no matter what, despite all of the things that happened.In effect, he exonerates Trump for any role in Jan. 6, and he says, "This is still our guy."
You learn in that moment that Trump is still the power, the sole, dominant power in the Republican Party, even though he was defeated, even though he was impeached not once, but twice.Even though he caused a riot to try to upend American democracy, he is still the sole, dominant force in the Republican Party.And that's either because McCarthy goes down there and validates him or McCarthy's visit is a sign of that, whichever way you want to look at it.
Now, McConnell's a little different.McConnell, he doesn't summon the Senate back to have a trial, but it's so close to the end, in the end he doesn't figure—it's not logistically really all that feasible.How can you have a fair process, or at least what looks like a fair process, in six days?So no, they're not having a trial until after he leaves office.
But he's still done with Trump, and even though he decides that he's not going to vote for conviction, he gets up and gives a speech at the end of the trial that is as harsh on Trump as any given by any of the Democratic managers who were prosecuting him.He says Trump is responsible for the mob, responsible for this event.He says that this is anathema to American democracy.He says everything except for his vote.He says that Trump deserves to be convicted.
But within weeks he sees the momentum suddenly moving back again, and the outrage that had been felt towards Trump, even in the Republican Party, begins to subside, and everyone heads back to their partisan corners; everybody heads back to their camps.Us versus them.Are you with them, or are you with us?It's that simple.
And McConnell is now put in the position where he's out with Trump publicly for the first time really in years, but doesn't want to have a fight with him because he feels it's not productive.So he's asked on Fox News, and he says, "Well, I think Trump was responsible, yeah.I'm not backing down off that.But I don't want to have a fight with him."He says, "OK, so if he wins the nomination in 2024, would you support him?""Absolutely," he says—the word "absolutely."And that's the moment you know that any Republican revolt against him is over, because McConnell's saying, "I'm still willing to accept him as the leader of my party if the voters choose him," rather than saying, "He is disqualified because of his actions."
That doesn't mean McConnell likes him any better.The two of them have been fighting ever since, but McConnell's calculation is it's not worth having a running battle with Trump when I have more important things to do.My more important things to do are in terms of legislation, in terms of winning Senate races in the next midterm election. …
A Test of Democracy
It's such a profound turning point, too, for our democracy, because that lie about the election becomes a central test inside the party.
It is the test.It is the test.You are with him or not with him based on that alone, and he will make that his mission to punish you if you don't go along with him.So he's sponsoring primary challenges to anybody who didn't go along with the lie.He is enforcing a loyalty test that is only about himself.
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