The FRONTLINE Interviews

Robert Draper

Author, Weapons of Mass Delusion

Robert Draper is a contributor to The New York Times and is the author of the forthcoming book Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind.

The following interview was conducted by the Kirk Documentary Group’s Mike Wiser for FRONTLINE on April 29, 2022. It has been edited for clarity and length.

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Lies, Politics and Democracy

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Robert Draper

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Trump, Cruz, and the 2016 Election

So let's start back in 2016, which is a place we're interested in because we've been going back and looking.And in Iowa, it's Cruz versus Donald Trump, and the establishment is watching.And that's a moment where Donald Trump actually accuses Ted Cruz of rigging the election.Can you help me understand who Ted Cruz is at that moment when Trump is accusing him of having rigged the election and where the state of the Republican Party is at that moment?

In 2016, Ted Cruz had by that point already emerged, even in his freshman term as a U.S. senator, as a key figure in the conservative movement, very close to the right-wing think tanks.Had ridden sort of the last vestiges of the Tea Party wave to victory, a surprise victory in 2012 in Texas, and wasted no time making his impact felt in Washington, helping to orchestrate a government shutdown and immediately becoming a thorn in the side to Republican leadership, making lots of enemies along the way, including enemies in his own party.But he was nonetheless a darling in the conservative movement and an early favorite, at least in those quarters, for the GOP nomination for president in 2016.Cruz hired some first-rate talent.He courted, in particular, evangelical leaders, believing that the early primaries and caucuses were very heavily weighted with evangelical voters.

And in particular that was the case with the Iowa caucus, which would be the first contest.So Cruz racked up as many endorsements and followers in the evangelical movement that he could and therefore was primed to be a favorite, if not the favorite, of the caucus.But along came Donald Trump.And Trump, at the time he announced his candidacy in June of 2015, was sort of laughed at by members of the political establishment, certainly including those in his own party.Had great difficulty getting anyone's attention, couldn’t get any donations, couldn’t get any top-tier campaign aides, but was from the jump enormously popular among the conservative base of the Republican Party, so much so that other candidates, such as Ted Cruz, but also Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Scott Walker and a few of the others who were considered favorites, did all they could to placate and flatter Trump, figuring that he would implode at a certain point, but that the base that was at that point embracing Trump would remember the fond words expressed by these other guys and therefore move towards them.… That was the stage leading up to the Iowa caucus, where it was clear by January 2016 that the three big guns would be Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump.And what happened was that Cruz managed to eke out a victory.

Trump—and this is obviously a foreshadowing of what we would see years later—immediately said that it was rigged, that Cruz had stolen it from him.It's actually not the first response that Trump had.His first response was to blame his staff and to threaten to fire all of them, but his first public utterance relating to the caucus was that Cruz had won it unfairly and that this portended a rigged contest where all of the party elites were doing whatever they could to rob Trump of victory.

… One of the things that comes through in your description of Cruz in the article is a level of calculation about evangelicals, about how he is going to be presenting himself.And as that clash between the two men develops and it becomes very personal, especially on Trump's part, where he's attacking—has conspiracy theories about Cruz's father; he's attacking Cruz's wife; he's calling him a liar, brands him as a liar—and when you watch that, it almost feels like Cruz is operating from a different kind of playbook than Donald Trump was.Is that what was going on in that spring?Were they playing the same game?

Well, for starters, the pursuit of the evangelical voter, which was really a critical subplot to the 2016 nomination, was played out in very different ways by Trump and by Cruz.Cruz, in a lot of ways, did it the old-fashioned way, which was to court evangelical leaders and to pretend like he was one of them.I emphasize the word "pretend," because it really was a remarkable thing to see on the campaign trail how Cruz, who never quoted Scripture before, never prayed publicly before, would lead all of the rally-goers in Iowa with prayer, would litter every speech with references to Jesus Christ and to Scripture.Trump made no such pretenses.Trump didn't have a favorite Bible verse to spout out, and Trump would be crass and profane and brag about his affairs.

And yet evangelical leaders saw in Trump the kind of strength and willingness to sort of bulldoze his way into the arena as exactly the kind of person that they wanted on their side.I've always said that the supposed author of The Art of the Deal was in fact never much of a dealmaker at all except in one case: The deal that he cut with the evangelicals was a marvel to behold.Essentially he said to them, "Look, I don't really care who my judges are.You seem to care.So give me the list, and I'll make them judges.In return, I want your vote."And that deal stayed in cement for the entirety of his presidency.

… So as to the game that these two guys were playing, I mean, Cruz was assiduously courting Trump's conservative voting base.So he was playing the game of not wanting to offend them while at the same time after a while having no choice but to punch back at Trump when Trump really started dealing low blows, tweeting out an unflattering photo of Heidi Cruz, and then when his good buddy the editor-in-chief of the National Enquirer published a story alleging that Cruz had had all sorts of sexual affairs with women who included staffers of his—Cruz's—at a certain point, Cruz could no longer turn the other cheek.But it still was clear that this was proof of the old adage "Don't get down in the mud with a pig."This was exactly where Trump excelled.And whether it was Cruz or Marco Rubio or anyone else, getting down to Trump's level when it came to unleashing insults was a surefire way to guarantee Trump's victory.

Was there something else that was even bigger going on?Because Cruz, as you've described it, is running as an ideological candidate, as appealing to evangelicals.He's taken the idea of the ideology of the Republican Party.And Donald Trump seems to be offering up something different.I think of that speech at the convention where he says, "I alone can fix this."There's starting to be, especially looking back with the hindsight of Jan. 6, you see violence at the rallies; you see a rhetoric about who the enemy is.What was Trump offering that was different to the Republican Party, to the Republican base, than what Ted Cruz was offering?

Trump was really a throwback to yesteryear's populists—you know, Huey Long and George Wallace.He was trying to rile up the voting base, playing to their grievances, playing to their fears, to their anger.So he certainly was not an ideologue, but he did have an idea.And the idea, as opposed to the ideology, was that America's best days were now behind it; that it had lost a sense of itself; that it had sold itself out to China, to political correctness.And he was essentially playing to the nostalgia and sense of loss that was felt by the white working class that constituted his base.

This wasn't a novel concept.The Republican Party had been doing this kind of thing for years, but usually cloaked in niceties.Trump never bothered with that.Trump was very frank in saying, "We don't win anymore, and the world is laughing at us.China is taking advantage of us.We don't have time for political correctness."Trump never apologized for anything that he said, including really, really rancid stuff that he would say about Megyn Kelly, the then-Fox News host, and his opponents.Trump therefore got the reputation of being a guy who told it like it was, and it was a real remarkable thing to see.

… That moment when Ted Cruz walks out at the convention and doesn't endorse Donald Trump and is booed, what is that moment?What does it represent, and is it a turning point for him?

There was still a belief at the time of the Republican convention that Trump did not yet have a stranglehold over the Republican base, that he was still something of a novelty, but also ideologically speaking, a poser, bent, it seemed, on self-immolation.And so Ted Cruz made the calculation during the Republican convention that he wasn't going to endorse Trump.Instead, at his speech at the convention, he basically said that people should vote their conscience.And the next morning, Cruz defended his decision in a group full of Texas Republicans, and they really just ate him for lunch.They tore him up and down, and a lot of people said at that point that Cruz was finished in the party.

He waited another month or two, Cruz did, before he did finally throw his support behind Trump.But even all the way until a couple of weeks before the election, when the Access Hollywood tape came out in which Trump bragged about groping women and things like that, there was disbelief that Trump has momentarily cast a spell over the Republican Party and its constituents, but it's going to pass, and when it does, we're going to be here to pick up the pieces.Even Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, was essentially telling people that no one thought that Trump was going to win on Election Day.

Trump arguably didn't think so himself.At least the reports are that he was shell-shocked when he learned that he did win.So the question then became for Cruz, for Reince Priebus, for so many others after all this is over, what do we do, and who will claim the mantle that has fallen from Donald Trump's head?

I mean, how hard must it have been for Ted Cruz to make this decision, right?He's been accused of rigging elections; [Trump]'s attacked his wife; [Trump]'s accused his father of being involved in the Kennedy assassination.He has seen all the other things that aren’t directly related to Cruz, and he's been humiliated.And how hard must it have been?And what do you know about Ted Cruz that tells you how he made that decision that he made to endorse Donald Trump in the end?

Well, you have to remember about Cruz that he wasn't operating in a bubble, in a vacuum.He was receiving lots of advice, imploring advice from members of the conservative media, from other leading Republicans, saying to him in effect, "Ted, this is bad for the party.It's bad for Trump.It's also really bad for you and for your future if you don't get onboard the Trump train."And the most animating feature of Ted Cruz, more so than ideology, is ambition.This is a guy who has long wanted to hold high elective office, was bragging back in the year 2000 when he was in the Bush campaign, telling people that he was going to be the first Latino governor of Texas.And so he had his eyes on one prize or another, the governorship or the presidency, for some time, and if it meant eating a little crow and having to apologize to his wife but allowing him to live to fight another day, then he would do so.

Pence’s Calculation

One other character that we're interested in in this period—maybe you can help us a little bit with it—is Mike Pence and why he decides to become the vice president.

… [Bob] Corker basically turned down that, which is interesting to us, because we're at this point asking, were people making choices?Because a lot of things get explained by political necessity, but there does seem to be some people who are making choices.Can you help us understand that vice presidential selection and Pence and maybe a little bit of Corker, and whether Pence made a choice there and knew what he was getting into?

Of all the choices faced by vice presidential hopefuls in the 2016 cycle, I think Mike Pence's was probably the easiest.You have to recall that he was, at that juncture, a pretty unpopular Indiana governor who was unlikely to get reelected.Pence himself was a very ambitious man who had his eye on the presidency, but there was no path for him.There was no stepping stone until Trump offered him one.Trump saw in Pence a guy who really wanted the job, a guy who would do what he could to earn the job, a guy who knew his place, and a guy who spoke the evangelical language.

So Trump saw him as a good package, though at the same time, it wasn't a gimme.There were something like 16 names that were drawn up as potential running mates for Trump.A number of them were women, including a few surprise names like Condoleezza Rice.These, by the way, were names of people who had not asked to be put on this list, and in several cases, such as Condoleezza Rice's, basically said, "You can go ahead and take me right off that list."But Pence was not an obvious choice, and he also was not an obvious sidekick to Donald Trump for all the glaringly obvious reasons, just extremely different men.But he presented—he wanted the job, whereas others, like Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, did not particularly want it.He was more interested in being secretary of state or something like that.

And there were others who, Trump feared, would come into the job immediately looking for the Oval Office.And Gov. Kasich of Ohio fit that description.Marco Rubio, the same thing.So he saw in Pence a willing partner who also knew his place.

Liz Cheney and the Republican Party

That's interesting.And it would work out for almost the entirety of those four years until the very end.One other person who's running in that cycle, interestingly, is Liz Cheney.Can you help us understand who she is and where she comes from and how she sees herself in the Republican Party?

Liz Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, was someone well known in Washington long before she ran for Wyoming's at-large congressional seat in 2016.She had worked in the State Department under Colin Powell; was a foreign policy hawk like her father; helped him write his books and was very, very savvy when it came to messaging; was extremely capable on the Sunday news shows and was a figure who traveled in those circles well before she decided to run, all of which is to say that when she did run, fatefully, as it would turn out, the same electoral cycle that Trump did in 2016, she arrived in Washington with a portfolio that was outsized for a freshman.

She was able to pick up the phone and call foreign leaders in the Middle East.She had connections with the conservative think tanks, knew everybody in the mainstream media and had lots of relationships on the Hill.So it's an interesting setup to consider Trump, who comes into Washington a stranger at the same time that Liz Cheney arrives as someone who really knows the ropes.These two weren’t natural allies because Cheney was an actual conservative ideologue who certainly didn't view Trump as her favorite choice, but she believed that they would be able to find common cause, and for a time, they did on a variety of issues relating to the military, relating to the budget.And so for several years, those two were pretty much in lockstep.

And in fact, when Trump was impeached the first time in late 2019, at that point, Cheney was the conference chairwoman of the Republican House and essentially led the charge in defending Trump while excoriating Nancy Pelosi and her Democrats for what she believed was an unjust process and essentially a witch hunt against the president.It's interesting because when you look back on what Cheney was saying then, it was clear that she was appalled by Trump's conduct in the Ukraine scandal, but not enough to vote to impeach him.And so the argument that she made against the Democrats was a process argument: that they weren’t taking enough time to subpoena witnesses, to go through all the courts necessary to fulfill those subpoenas and were instead conducting kind of a rushed impeachment process that she found lacking in form, though the merits of the impeachment itself she never really quite addressed.

I mean, but this goes to who Liz Cheney is, right?Because later, she's going to be accused of being a RINO, of not being a real Republican.But when she comes in, she has this pedigree.And how much in her veins is the Republican Party, is her identity?Is that part of her identity?

Cheney was born into the Republican Party.Her father was a powerful Republican well before he became vice president.He had been secretary of defense in the first George Bush administration.Previous to that, he had been the House minority whip for the Republican Party.And so the name Cheney was a brand that was inextricably linked to the GOP.And so the notion that a day would come when Liz Cheney would be labeled a RINO, Republican in Name Only, just beggared imagination.

I mean, it seems like a parallel universe in which she could be labeled anything other than the staunch conservative she always was.And indeed, by the time that Trump and others began to label Liz Cheney a RINO, she had in fact not changed her position on any issue of the day.All she had done was cast a vote of conscience to impeach the president and then refuse to back down from it, and indeed continue to say that Trump was unfit to serve office and that the Republican Party needed to move on from Trump.These were the unforgivable sins that of course had absolutely nothing to do with policy preferences, but instead had to do with her belief that Trump and the Constitution were competing principles.

… Let me ask you just briefly before we get to the impeachment moment, what was her approach to the Trump presidency?

In general, Congresswoman Cheney followed the view regarding Trump that he's the president we've got; I will find ways to be of service to him, to assist policies of his that I happen to prefer.When there are things that Trump does that I disagree with, I will say so, but not in a nasty way, but only in the furtherance of what I believe are the proper policies to pursue.These would typically have to do with, say, Trump's distaste for NATO troops being in certain places like Germany, Trump wanting to withdraw troops from Afghanistan.Cheney, the hawk that she is, did not hold the same views and was not shy about saying so, but also, again, was not looking to pick fights with Trump.And Trump, in the meantime, also had, I think, a healthy regard for Liz Cheney, though he often expressed distaste for the Iraq War and would talk about how stupid Bush was and what a warmonger Dick Cheney was.He nonetheless recognized political royalty when he saw it and saw that in Liz Cheney.

And so his words were often very respectable towards her, and he expressed appreciation as well when she was among the chief messengers opposing his impeachment in 2019.And so all the way up until the coronavirus, they were allied more often than not.The coronavirus did change things.That's where a fracture began to occur between those two.And it was because, just to put it bluntly, Trump was anti-science in Cheney's view.She had an immunocompromised father, Dick Cheney, who had a number of heart attacks and thus was highly susceptible to COVID, and she thought it dangerous for Trump to be saying things like that COVID would go away "like a miracle" and to constantly contradict his own scientific experts, such as Tony Fauci.

So Cheney began to post on Twitter and speak publicly supportive sentiments about Fauci while at the same time chiding Trump for not doing everything that was necessary to stem the spread of the coronavirus.So that was really when we first began to see a divergence that was unlikely to be altered.

… You've talked about COVID and how that was a changing point for Liz Cheney.How did that start to exacerbate tensions for her inside the Republican Party?

It's always important to remember that Trump was immensely popular—still is, but in 2020 was especially immensely popular within the Republican Party, by which I'm referring to the Republican voter.His approval rating was something like 93.And so when Liz Cheney began to question Trump's behavior vis-à-vis the coronavirus, she was, in the view of other Republican leaders, playing into the hands of Biden and the Democrats by mounting criticisms of someone who the Republican base loved.And so, even when other Republicans were unsettled by Trump's careless talk regarding the coronavirus, they sure didn't like hearing a Republican leader like Liz Cheney criticizing him, on top of which, it's worth remembering as well that in the spring, summer and fall of 2020, a lot of Republicans, including elected officials, were of the mind that, OK, the coronavirus is a terrible thing, but so is shutting down our economy, and we've got to be able to get back to work; we've got to be able to let our children live their lives and go back to school and not have to wear masks.

And so much of what we saw in the way of the spread of conspiracy theories like QAnon and the basic rage that would metastasize the Capitol on Jan. 6 really springs from that period of time when Americans felt like they were losing their freedoms to this virus that perhaps originated in a Chinese lab, and that the Democrats seemed perfectly willing to let the economy crater just for the sake of trying to contain this virus.And it sort of played into an enduring conservative sensibility that, let's let the individual make their own choices about whether or not they want to wear a mask, whether or not they want to go to work and not have the government enforce it.

So of course the Democratic response to that would be it's a pandemic, and if you're trying to control the spread of a truly deadly virus, you can't do it by having these controls be optional.And so a lot of enforced sequestration, mask wearing, etc., really was viewed as necessary by the scientific community, as well as Democrats.But this was really antithetical to conservative ideology, and Trump played that for all it's worth.If anything, it's Liz Cheney who became sort of a peculiar figure amongst Republicans by saying "Trust the science" and "I believe Fauci."Notably, she had one ally in the Republican Party on this, and that was Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

McConnell had suffered polio as a child and had seen how long it took to have polio vaccines develop.So it just was staggering to McConnell that here we'd have these vaccines, now talking about, say, 2021, and so many people would refuse to take them.So McConnell also in 2020 was joining Liz Cheney in saying, you know, "Wear your mask; control the spread; trust the science; trust Dr. Fauci."But they were really kind of lonely figures in the Republican Party as regards that message.

… Thinking about Liz Cheney, a conflict between—here's her father, who's given her her identity as a Republican, has put her and her understanding of herself, but who's also a transplant recipient and who's weakened.I mean, is this a clash between her political ambition and her family?Is that what's starting this wedge?

If there was any sort of clash within Liz Cheney, she never showed it.It has always instead seemed to be the case that Cheney was really following her principles.And in conversations that I had with Congresswoman Cheney, she was just very matter-of-fact about the notion that when a virus is killing thousands upon thousands of Americans and shows no sign of abating, then until we're able to develop the vaccines that will help create that abatement, we just have to be smart; we have to follow the science.And perhaps that's because it was the house that she called home, as it were, because her father was immunocompromised.But she seemed guided much more by that than by any kind of question as to what the political ramifications would be for her to do this.

And I think we would see this as well when she announced that she would be voting to impeach President Trump.It may well be that Liz Cheney did not foresee the kind of blowback that would ensue politically, but it also really does seem to be the case that at the time, that was just simply not a consideration of hers.It was an open-and-shut case in her view that the president was a danger, was a threat to America and unfit to hold office.

… One last question about this period in 2020, which is that in the story that we've been telling, at least in our film, a lot of the characters are Republican politicians.The dynamic is Republican politicians … that some of them are becoming more sympathetic of some of these sort of authoritarian things that Trump is doing or misinformation?Is the party changing—leadership changing, members of Congress changing at a fundamental level at this point?

I think one telling change in the Republican Party that took place during Trump's presidency was the rebranding of the group known as the House Freedom Caucus.These guys were these far-right ideologues within the House Republican Party who were essentially a thorn in the side to Republican leadership, always wanted to shut the government down, always wanted to drive to cut into deficits and to cut spending.That's what they were.Then along comes Trump.Trump doesn't believe any of that stuff.In fact, the deficit exploded during his presidency.But he was immensely popular, as I've mentioned.And so the Freedom Caucus realized they were going to have to refashion themselves; otherwise they would have no future.And they did so.

They became essentially Trump mini-mes.They became the sort of populist grievance group that was much more about social wedge issues than about cutting taxes and cutting spending.And so that change was a subtle thing I think not remarked on very much in the media, that nonetheless would foreshadow the emergence of figures such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, who was a wealthy business owner in the Atlanta suburbs who decided to run for Congress in 2019.Greene possessed some pretty wacky beliefs, including being an adherent to the QAnon and other conspiracy theories, and so was viewed at the time that she sort of came out of nowhere and managed to get in a runoff in the 14th District of northwestern Georgia—she was viewed with some alarm, but also basically, Republican leadership thought, there's not a whole lot we can do about her.But she'll come to Washington and either she'll change or she'll be marginalized.And instead, Greene was really a kind of avatar, someone who would essentially help transform the party into a party much more like her and the MAGA— "Make America Great Again"—forces and Donald Trump than anything the Republican establishment ever imagined for itself.So Greene herself, who of course then would become a member of the House Freedom Caucus, arrived in Washington.And the very fact of her arrival was at the time viewed as a sort of curiosity and maybe an unfortunate sign about what the Republican Party was allowing, but no one was thinking this person is going to become a leader of the Republican Party which, by the way, now as a freshman, she is.

Trump’s 2020 Election Fraud Claims and the Republican Response

… So let's go to after the election, and there's a moment Trump comes out and he says, "Frankly, I did win the election."And what does Kevin McCarthy do in a moment like that, and how does he make a calculation about—what is his choice, and what is the calculation that he makes?

Well, whenever you're talking about Kevin McCarthy, you have to bear in mind that what he cares about far more than anything else is to be speaker of the House.It is his utmost consideration.And so when—McCarthy never believed that the election was stolen.He said to people that he knew that Trump had lost fair and square.He also said to people that he knew that there would be stages of grief, as it were, regarding Trump, and denial being the first part of the first stage, but that eventually Trump would come to recognize that he had lost and would stand down.McCarthy was mistaken in that regard.But he still believed, McCarthy did, that he could use his own relationship with Trump to manage the situation.Those two had gotten along well.They're kind of an unlikely fit because McCarthy is a politics nerd and Trump has a native disdain of politicians, but he respects—has always respected McCarthy's political judgment and his understanding of political minutiae.So there had been a good relationship there.But McCarthy was of the view that he could coax Trump ultimately into doing the right thing, to writing a congratulatory note to leave on the Resolute Desk of the Oval Office for the new president, Joe Biden.

And all of these turned out to be misjudgments on McCarthy's part.And it is not like McCarthy to speak firmly or harshly to anybody.He also was of the view, McCarthy was, that the Republican Party had wedded itself to Trumpism and couldn’t be unwed from that; that the party needed those voters, and McCarthy himself in turn needed those voters to help regain the House majority and thus put him in position to be speaker of the House.So he was always very careful when it came to Trump not to push him too hard, not to defy him, but to placate him as much as he did.And that was the kind of balancing act that McCarthy was undergoing in the days after the election leading up to Jan.6.

Let me ask you about something that you've probably done some reporting on for your book, which is a remarkable moment, which is during when all of this is happening in December, and the president calls in a number of his closest allies from Congress.And one of them is Marjorie Taylor Greene, who records a video afterwards.How serious was—this is something we're trying understand, is how serious was the plot to overturn the election, and how serious were the people who were in the room with the president that day?

Well, the plot to overturn the election was a serious and a sophisticated one, and it had multiple steps, multiple prongs, multiple actors.And now in mid-December when Marjorie Greene, Lauren Boebert and a number of other congressmen and incoming congressmen came to meet with President Trump, that was less about finding a way to overturn the election results and more about the attempts to find fraud and to assist in the Senate runoffs in Georgia.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, for better or for worse, was sincerely of the belief, and is to this day, that the election was stolen.There—this is what happens when you live your life in a media bubble, as Greene has—and I say this just factually, not without judgment—but she's—in her world, news organizations like CNN and The New York Times had discredited themselves by the so-called Russia collusion hoax, as Greene would say.And so she instead lived on a steady diet of conservative media, and that conservative media served as an echo chamber and as a cheerleading corps for President Trump.

That on top of her own experiences as someone who went to a lot of these Trump rallies told her that there was no way Trump could lose; there was no way.And I was watching the other day a video of her in September of 2020, just after she had clinched her victory because the Democratic opponent had dropped out.She was at a boat rally in Georgia, and she was saying, "Look at all these boats.President Trump's going to win in a landslide."

And again, the unit of measurement was, you know, Biden's not having huge rallies; Trump is having huge rallies.I, Marjorie Taylor Greene, don't know anybody who's voting for Joe Biden.Everybody I talk to is voting for Donald Trump.

And so when instead the very state that you live in, Georgia, swings the other way, this is a moment of incredulity for someone like Marjorie Greene.And the only thing that could explain it is that the Democrats stole it, and that is a rational proposition if you're Marjorie Greene because all you've heard are demonic things about Democrats, that they're liars and they're cheaters.

And so exactly how they would pull off a conspiracy of this type is another issue.But so that meeting and others like it in December of 2020 were a meeting of people who really were all of the same view, that there was simply no way the president could have lost this unless the election was not fair and square.

… We've talked a little bit about the decision that Kevin McCarthy made, but leading into that Jan. 1 conference call where they're discussing what to do, why does Liz Cheney make the choice that she makes that would change her political career forever?

Well, for Liz Cheney, the choice was not a choice at all.She was simply dealing with the facts that were splayed out in front of her.The first fact was that there did not appear to be any legitimacy to the claim that the election was stolen.The second fact was that it was not a legal proposition to overturn the election.And she produced herself a brief, she and her husband, that she passed around to her Republican colleagues to that make that very argument.

So those were just what the facts were.And unlike some of her colleagues, Liz Cheney operated purely on the facts and did not look at the facts and say, "Yes, but they amount to a political inconvenience, and therefore I'm going to dwell in a factually parallel universe."No, she stuck with the reality-based proposition, politically costly though it might be. …

… She pulls together the defense secretary.It's almost like she's operating from a different era.What does it say that Liz Cheney can write a 20-plus-page memo with details from Republican judges on all of these things and that a majority of the Republican Caucus is not convinced by it?What does it say about our politics and the party?

Well, what all of this may say about Liz Cheney is that she failed to recognize where so many of her colleagues were.In a sense, she was behaving as if from a bygone era where you did what you could to win an election.You throw the book at your opponent, but if they prevail anyway, that, you know, you nod your head to the Constitution and you walk gracefully out the door.

And in producing this "Dear Colleague" brief that basically made the case for why they had to certify the election results and not vote to decertify them, she was operating under the assumption that other Republicans like her would pay no attention to the MAGA base, pay no attention to their party leader's factually challenged insistence that the election was stolen and be the voices of reason, be the adults in the room.Well, that scenario had left the room a long time ago.

And so you can certainly argue that Cheney did the right thing.In fact, I believe she did the right thing, not only to vote as she did, but to try to convince her Republican colleagues to do the same.But she also seemed at that juncture to believe that she could sway her colleagues.It was produced not just to show the rightfulness of Liz Cheney, but to actually change votes.And there is very little evidence that she accomplished that task.

She doesn't even get Kevin McCarthy to weigh in and to say which way he wants people to vote.How does she view Kevin McCarthy at that moment, leading up to Jan. 6?

Well, she knew a number of things well before Jan. 6 about Kevin McCarthy: one, that he was extremely ambitious; another that he didn't like to drop the hammer on people.He was nobody's idea of an arm-twister.And that he would often instead say to people what they wanted to hear when it wasn't necessarily true.

And along with all of those, she could see that in the furtherance of his own ambitions, he was going to placate the Trumpy elements of his Republican Conference.He was not going to defy them.So in the days leading up to Jan. 6, McCarthy's message to his Republican colleagues was not, like Liz Cheney's, "We've got to certify this election."He instead basically said, "Look, you know, there are millions and millions of voters who have real concerns about the legitimacy of this election, and they feel like they're not being heard.You can be the voice for those voters.We should have that argument."That side of the argument should be presented.McCarthy, without being explicitly in saying, "Yes, vote to decertify," did explicitly say, "Make the argument.Go ahead.I won't stop you.In fact, I think it's a pretty good idea."

Liz Cheney was very ambitious.She was on a path, she believed, to potentially be speaker.Had she given up her ambitions by that point?

No, Cheney in the days leading up to Jan. 6 by no means had given up her political ambitions.She may well have lost sight of how feasible her ambitions were because it's—because at this point, the Republican Party had already really become the party of Donald Trump.She simply believed that was not the case.

But beyond whatever she believed or did not, she also was of the view that she, Liz Cheney, being a Cheney, was a lifelong Republican, was a steward of this party and was not going to let it move in this other, crazier direction without a fight.She wasn't simply going to become part of the surrender caucus.

It's interesting because Romney, too, these people who have this generational attachment to the party.Can you take me to Cheney on Jan. 6 and Trump's speech and what that means for her?

Cheney was preparing a speech that she intended to give on the House floor about certifying the election on Jan. 6 when she received a call from her father, who had been watching Trump's rally on the news.And he was quite alarmed and told his daughter that Trump had called her out by name, saying, "The Liz Cheneys of the world, we've got to get rid of them."And so he was concerned right then and there for the safety of his daughter.

And so at that moment, Liz Cheney had at least some sense that there were ominous goings-on.She did not, however, suspect that that was going to lead to a mob breaking into the Capitol.Her father did tell her that people were marching from the rally to the Capitol.But it was not clear that they would overwhelm law enforcement that happened to be in the vicinity.

Jan. 6 and the Aftermath

And as she watches what happens that day and as she watches what happens after, when they reconvene, what is she seeing, and how is she interpreting those moments of that day?

You know, it was in the 2:00 hour, between 2:15 and 2:45, that the House was evacuated and Cheney and others were led into a holding room in the Longworth Building.And it did not take long at all in that period of time for Liz Cheney to recognize that Trump bore responsibility for the crazed behavior of those who had stormed the Capitol.

But something set in in the ensuing hours to harden her views regarding Trump, and that was that while this crazed mob was raging through the Capitol building, Trump wasn't doing anything to stop it.And so the commander in chief was essentially sitting on his hands while these rioters were chanting, "Hang Mike Pence," and saying they wanted to kill AOC and Nancy Pelosi.This struck her as a dereliction of duty that proved once and for all that the president himself was a threat to the country.

And so it was at that time, while she was in sequestration with other House members, that she began to say that, to Democrats, that they needed to draw up articles of impeachment.

Amazing, especially for somebody who had been defending Trump in the first impeachment that there's this clear turning point, especially when a majority of the Republican Caucus goes on that same day to vote to not certify.

Well, I think that surprised her, and that surprised Democrats, too.I mean, I interviewed a number of Democrats in addition to Republicans for the book that I'm doing about the Republican Party, and their view was that, yes, there had been this kind of nutty talk about decertifying the election results, but when they saw the fruits of that nutty talk, they—the Republican members—that surely they would change their mind.It was an astonishing thing for Democrats then to reconvene that evening and see that the Republicans hadn't said, "OK, OK, we realize we've gone a little bit too far this time; let's go ahead and vote to certify and end this once and for all."

They were deeply surprised and certainly chagrined to see that the Republicans, particularly those in the House Freedom Caucus, but extending well beyond that, too, since it was, after all, a majority of Republicans who voted to decertify, still were of that frame of mind.

And yet there is this period where you have Lindsey Graham, who gives this speech that night; you've got Mitch McConnell sending out signals about impeachment.There's reporting now about what McCarthy was saying behind closed doors in those first few days.And there was a feeling in Washington, rightfully or not, like maybe this is the moment.… What happens to that energy, that moment that seems like this is the moment things are going to change?

Well, it is true that there was this period in the immediate wake of Jan. 6 in which it felt like the Republican Party had come to its senses.But that moment lapsed, and it lapsed for a very simple reason, and that's that the Trump conservative base still was of the view that the election was stolen, still was of the view that Trump was the rightful president and that his victory had been stolen from him.When Republican members went back home and heard from their constituents, they could see that the frenzy that they had been whipped up into over the 2020 election results was still an animating feature of their lives.

And so it's—of course, many of these Republican members had participated in the whipping up into a frenzy of this by their own overheated talk of a stolen election.Many of them never believed that, but believed it was politically profitable for them to say so.They had, in essence, helped create this monster now that they couldn't push back into the cage.

And so the moment where it seemed like Trump might be renounced—something that had a kind of political logic to it since, after all, thanks to Trump, from 2018 to 2020, the party had lost first the House and then the White House and the Senate, that seemed to have a logic to it.But the reality is, that's not where the Republican base was.

And so once it became clear that Trump and Trumpism weren't going to go away, then the sentiments, the notion that reason would return to the Republican Party ceased to exist.And by the way, probably the earliest sign of this was at the very end of January when Kevin McCarthy himself, the House minority leader, took a trip to Mar-a-Lago.He happened to be in Florida anyway doing a fundraising thing and went to visit Trump, was photographed wearing a big grin next to Trump.It was the first sign any of us had actually seen of Trump since Jan. 20, when he left Washington.And so there's McCarthy saying in the way that a picture can tell a thousand words that Trump is still the leader of our party, and we can't succeed without him, regardless of what had happened in the 2018 and 2020 election cycles.Going forward, we still need him.

And you think that was the turning point, that photograph was the turning point.

That photograph represented a missed opportunity in the view of Liz Cheney.She believed that had McCarthy never done that, and had Republican leadership just stopped talking about Donald Trump, and certainly not extended any olive branches to him, then there would be an impeachment trial.Trump would either get out of that fine or he wouldn't, but that would be its own process, and then the party could move forward.But instead, by traveling to Palm Beach, Cheney's view was that Kevin McCarthy dragged the party right back into the mire, right back into Trumpism.

You describe a tense meeting in February, a caucus meeting that Cheney's at and where people speak against her.One of the things that's striking about it, as you describe it, is what she's saying, where she's saying we cannot become the part of QAnon and Holocaust denial and white supremacy.Because we're looking for moments of choice, what is going on in that meeting, and what is Liz Cheney saying to her caucus members is the choice that they face?

On Feb. 3, the House Republicans held a special conference to discuss whether or not Liz Cheney should be removed in her role as chair of the Republican House Conference.There was active consideration to that because Cheney had not simply voted to impeach Trump—that was bad enough—but continued to denounce Trump and Trumpism and to say that the party must move on from Trump.And that was really egg on the collective face of the Republican Party in the view of many of her House Republican colleagues.

So this turned out what is ordinarily like an hour-long conference became four hours instead.Cheney began by giving a speech that was not what you would call apologetic because she believed she had nothing to apologize for.She did acknowledge this had created some heartburn for her fellow Republicans back home, and she said that that was not her intention, but she also didn't back down from it.

She said that history is watching.History will judge this moment in time, and that the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln, could never become a party obsessed with conspiracy theories like QAnon, could never be a party of white nationalism, could never be a party that resorted to violence when elections didn't go their way.

Well, her fellow Republicans didn't take kindly to that, and so she stood there the entire four hours while one person after another came to the microphone and denounced her.A few people came to her defense as well, but they kind of aired it out, and at the end, Kevin McCarthy gave his own speech basically trying to move the party back to being anti-Democratic Party rather than a party that was riven with all this discord.

The reality is, at that moment in time, a significant majority of the House Republicans were annoyed by Liz Cheney but didn't think it served the party's interests to depose her.And so she won quite handily, and probably McCarthy's speech wasn't even necessary.Mainly, people just needed to get their invective out of their system.She had enemies before Jan. 6, had earned—those animosities had hardened as a result of her impeachment vote and some of her verbiage since then.But for that moment in time, it still seemed that she and McCarthy could be on the same page, and she could still be a leader to the party.

That began to change after McCarthy went to Mar-a-Lago.She deeply disapproved of that.And then a couple weeks after he went to Mar-a-Lago, the two were part of a brief press conference in which they were both asked if Trump still should be considered a part of the Republican Party, a leader, and McCarthy's answer was yes.Cheney's answer, in so many words, was no.And she actually herself hadn't been directly asked that, could have ducked it, but basically moved towards the microphone.

It seems like Kevin McCarthy early in February might have thought it could be a big party, and we can have Liz Cheney and Marjorie Taylor Greene.But it becomes clear that Liz Cheney may have been right, that they had to make a choice between the two.Is that what happened over those months leading up to—

Yeah, Liz Cheney had a different theory of the case about the fortunes of the Republican Party than Kevin McCarthy did.McCarthy's view was that the Republicans, no matter what you thought about Trump, they couldn't win without him.They—that without paying obeisance to the MAGA base, all of those Trump supporters, that they would just stay home, and they wouldn't vote in the 2022 midterm election; the Republicans would not return to power; Kevin McCarthy wouldn't get to be speaker of the house.That was his theory of the case.

Liz Cheney's theory of the case is, it's plain as day: When we tether ourselves to Donald Trump, we lose, because that's what happened.We lost in 2018; we lost in 2020.Only when we move away from Trump will we stand a chance of regaining the House majority and the Senate majority and the White House.

She also, though, believed that it was not just a simple matter of political calculation, but also a matter of right and wrong; that this man, Donald Trump, behaved in a way that was outrageous and offensive to the Constitution.He posed a danger to society.And the party just simply could not stay in any way connected to such a person; that Trump's conduct, particularly at the very end of his presidency, was an offense to democracy.

So that was Cheney's view.And McCarthy's calculations just did not involve any sort of moral or ethnical considerations.They were entirely about "How do we win?"

A lot of it does seem to be about Trump, and Trump seems to represent how do you understand the 2020 election?What do you think about Jan. 6?What do you think about how you're going to keep power?What means are you willing to do?And when they make that choice, when they vote Liz Cheney out of the leadership, what choice is that caucus making, and which side of those issues of democracy are they taking?What is that choice?

Ultimately, Liz Cheney was removed as conference chair, and that was because she had really lost the support of members in the Republican Conference who, though they certainly liked Cheney more than they liked, say, Marjorie Taylor Greene, nonetheless thought that she was posing a distraction.Again, Cheney was pursuing a theory of the case that was at variance with their own about how the Republican Party would succeed.

Her belief was not just that the party could no longer be wedded to Trump, but that every time Trump said something nutty, you know, or continued to talk about the election being stolen, that they needed to refute him, to rebut him and to make clear that they do not agree with him.Constantly bashing Trump struck a lot of Republicans as a bad idea.Constantly talking about what happened on Jan. 6, also a bad idea, since virtually everyone that we know of who participated in the riot, with maybe one or two exceptions, was a Trump supporter.

And so it confounded logic to continually harp on that.And they believed then that Liz Cheney had become a distraction, had lost her abilities to be an effective leader, and was, in their view, conducting things out of a sense of self-righteousness rather than out of what was good for the party.

The Changing Republican Part

So where is the party now?Where are they going into the next elections, going into 2024?Especially with this idea of democracy and whether the next elections are going to work, where are they?What has happened as a result of all this?

Looking back on it, the truth is that the Republican Party became what it is now in the summer of 2020 when the Republican National Committee decided not to have a policy platform and instead just basically allowing it to be the party of whatever Donald Trump says it is on any given moment, on any given day.And it is still the party of Trump.

And it's a remarkable thing to listen to people in Washington wishfully think that Trumpism is already starting to pass, will pass any day now, and they'll point to what they believe are a dwindling size of his rallies and that he no longer has a Twitter following because he no longer has a Twitter feed and that some of his endorsements have not gone as planned.

But it remains the case that Trump is the most powerful and most popular force in the Republican Party.It remains the case that if Trump were to decide to run for president right now, it's not just that he would be the odds-on favorite to get the nomination; it's possible that no one of significance would even run against him.

So he is a dominant force within the GOP, and that is the most crucial feature of the Republican Party right now.… It's a party that now has created its own ecosystem wherein facts don't matter.Before 2016, things like One America News Network, Real America's Voice and Right Side News Broadcasting did not exist.Now if you go to a Trump rally, they're the ones there and they're treated like rock stars, the announcers, by the MAGA faithful who are there.

And when you go to these rallies and when you listen to these shows, it is just an article of faith that the 2020 election was stolen, that Biden is not a legitimate president, that Donald Trump had these incredible history-making accomplishments, all of which were undone by a “China virus” and then a vast conspiracy to steal the election.

That is the ecosystem that the Republican Party dwells in now, and it's a very dangerous one for a democracy, one that, accordingly, must have Vladimir Putin smiling, because after the disinformation campaign that the Russian intelligence services launched in 2015 and 2016, now essentially Putin can sit back and admire his own handiwork as the Americans do the dirty work for him by promoting misinformation and lies on social media and on these right-wing outlets.

It's hard to see how the Republican Party disentangles itself from this world of illogic and fact-free illusion and apocalyptic notions that every Democrat is a radical socialist bent on destroying America as we know it.

Is that a danger for the Republican Party, or is that a danger for our country?

As I write in my book, our political concept relies on the health of two political parties.We can't be a democratic society with only one healthy party.We also can't be a healthy democratic society when one of those parties is utterly tangled up in lies and promotes falsehoods.

I mean, President Trump is still using as one of the qualifiers for whom he will endorse for this or that elected office is if the Republican in question will acknowledge that the 2020 election was stolen.In and of itself, that's pretty bad.It's even worse when you consider what this portends for 2024 and should President Trump run again and should he lose again fair and square only to insist that the election was stolen.Well, now there's already been one dry run for this, and people who are sanguine about it, saying, "Well, things held up just fine, thanks to a few individuals weren't there on Jan. 6," or have forgotten what happened that day.As bad as it was, it could have been worse, and it could very well be worse.

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