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Tim Alberta
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The FRONTLINE Interviews
Tim Alberta
Author, American Carnage
Tim Alberta is a staff writer for The Atlantic. He formerly served as chief political correspondent for Politico and is the author of American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump.
The following interview was conducted by the Kirk Documentary Group’s Mike Wiser for FRONTLINE on May 6, 2022. It has been edited for clarity and length.
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Trump’s Initial Claims of Fraud in the 2020 Election
[Trump comes out, and he says, "Frankly, we did win this election."] There's that period of a couple days where it's Don Jr., it's Alex Jones, and there's a moment by the end of the week where you've got Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz and Kevin McCarthy coming out and amplifying some of the questions about the election.Can you describe the moment when Trump comes out and the choice that the Republican Party faced in that moment?
… The only word that comes to mind is paralysis.You have Republicans who've been listening to Trump for the past year seeding doubt in the legitimacy of the elections, sort of leading up to this moment.None of them are really sure whether or not he's going to follow through, whether he's going to actually pull the trigger and claim to win an election that perhaps he did not win.
And of course, in hindsight, it's easy to call that naive or Pollyannaish and think, well, of course he was going to do this.Why would he have spent a year laying the groundwork to try and subvert democracy only to then back away at the last minute?That's not Trump's style.
But I think this was sort of part and parcel of the entire Trump experience, dating back four or five years, where so many Republicans who had sort of come up in a traditional political ecosystem and were not prepared for him to follow through on some of these teasers, some of these threats, some of this rhetoric that they hoped was just, you know, Trump blowing off steam.And well, why should we weigh in because, you know, just humor the guy; what's the worst that could happen?
Well, we found out what's the worst that could happen.We found out that there is a downside to humoring him.But in those 48 hours following the election, and when Trump comes out in the White House and says that he did win this election, and he starts just dispensing with lie after lie and unfounded rumors and conspiracy theories, Republicans are paralyzed because they're not sure what they're supposed to do about this.
Now, I could say what I think they should have done.I think a lot of us could say what we think they should have done, but Republicans in that moment, they know that based on the numbers that are adding up in these battleground states that Trump is going to lose.And they also know that they've shared the same ballot with Trump and that many of them have won their races despite the fact that he's lost his.
And so you've got a lot of competing impulses in this moment.You've got some Republicans who are saying, “Well, wait a second.If I go along with this, if I sort of endorse this effort to delegitimize the ballot box, what about my election?Does that delegitimize my victory?What kind of can of worms are we opening here?”
But I think for many Republicans, they simply default to the same stance that they've taken for the previous four years, which was, "My base is on his side, and who am I to stand between him and my base?"
And what makes this ironic, of course, is that elections are purposely—and brilliantly, I may add—they are run locally in this country.Elections are administered at the local level.And for so many of these Republican Congress members, they know the people in their districts, the county clerks and the recorders, the people who are charged with running these elections, these are people that members of Congress have relationships with.And by the way, in safely Republican areas, those elections are being run by Republican officials. Most of them are partisan elected officials.
And so these Republican members of Congress, in the 72 hours following Election Day, when all of these wild claims of rigged election and a conspiracy to steal the ballot box are swirling, you know that all of these Republican members of Congress, the first calls they're making are back home to their elections officials, Republican elections officials, saying, “Hey, give me something to work with.There's got to be something.There's got to be some irregularity, something that's out of whack.There's got to be something that we can investigate, at least to throw this guy a bone.”And what they're being told time and time and time again is, “Not really.Sorry.We’ve got nothing for you.”
And so that’s the circumstance in that initial period right after the election where Trump is making these unprecedented claims, and Republicans across the party’s spectrum, across the party's many divides, they are sort of in stunned, paralyzed silence for a time, but they know that that silence is not sustainable and that they have to choose:Either they can choose to stand up and say what they know to be true and what they're being told by those elections officials, which is, “There's nothing to see here; this election was run as freely and as fairly as any other election”; or they can side with Trump and they can go along with him, or at least they can enable him and continue to humor him in the hopes of staying on the right side of their political base.
And obviously, the vast majority of Republicans chose the latter.
The Response from Graham and Cruz
Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham—How important was the moment when they come out and they start asking questions about the election, and how important was that—you know, why did they make the decision, and how important was that to everything that would follow?
Well, put yourself in the shoes of Ted Cruz for a minute.It's been a very interesting four years for Ted Cruz, and he has been on every conceivable side of the Trump phenomenon, and he knows what it's like to be sort of run out of the party on a rail, to be booed off stage at the convention.He knows what it's like to be in the barrel, to have all of the power and the ugliness of the Trump political apparatus come down on him.
And he also, by the way, still wants to be president, right?Ted Cruz wakes up in the morning, looks in the mirror, and sees the president of the United States.And so he knows in this moment when all of these Republicans around him are sort of paralyzed, not sure what they're supposed to do in response to the president claiming that the election was stolen from him, Cruz, who is nothing if not opportunistic, he sees this as an opening.He sees this as an opportunity.
If no Republican was willing to stand up and lead the fight on Obamacare, he was going to do it, because there was a political opportunity there.Even if it meant shutting down the government, even if it meant doing damage to the political system as we know it, he was willing to take that opening.
And this was no different.And Cruz looks around, and he sees that there are really no Republicans stepping forward to lead this fight on behalf of President Trump.And he knows that—more importantly, he knows that this isn't just about humoring Donald Trump at this point, because let's be clear: Ted Cruz has argued cases in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.Ted Cruz is an Ivy League-educated lawyer.Ted Cruz is one of the smartest men in politics as far as understanding the Constitution, understanding what it means and what it doesn't mean.
So Ted Cruz understands that Donald Trump is not going to be the president come Jan. 20 of 2021, but Ted Cruz also understands that this is no longer about Donald Trump.This is about Donald Trump's voters and what they perceive to be a Republican governing class that is still scared, that is still weak, that is still feckless.
Donald Trump rose to power in the first place because so many Republican voters viewed their elected officials, their leaders as cowardly and as spineless.And so Ted Cruz surveys the landscape in the days after the election, and he decides, you know what?This is my opportunity to go to war for these people, the same way that Donald Trump was willing to go to war for these people.
And the fact that it was a war fought on false pretenses, a fabricated and phony war that was never going to lead anywhere, that made no difference to Ted Cruz, not in that moment.He saw the opening, and he took it.
… Why is it important, because Trump was pushing it, but how important was it for a Graham or a Cruz to come out and to say this and to amplify it?
Right, right, right.So you've had four years of the Republican Party largely marching in lockstep with this president.Despite some of these sort of smaller, fleeting moments of division, the party is largely unified around him.
But here's the ultimate test, right?Here's the president of the United States, coming out, addressing the nation and telling them that we live in a banana republic, that our elections are no longer trustworthy, that this election was stolen from him, that this is a crime of unprecedented proportion.
And in that moment, Republicans have an opportunity unlike any other to finally, despite everything that's taken place, despite all their enabling of Trump, despite all of their subjugation to Trump, over all of these years, they have this opportunity now to break from him and say, “Listen, this is a bridge too far.This is un-American; this is undemocratic; this is unconstitutional what you're about to try to do, and we're going to have nothing to do with it.”
And had the party broken from him decisively and uniformly in that moment, I think there's a very good chance that the entire narrative shifts around this idea of a stolen election.Sure, you would still have some of the president's most fervent supporters go along with it, but if you had the entire Republican elected class up and down the ballot, people who had voted with the president 99% of the time and who wore red caps to rallies in their districts, if you had those people who had credibility with their base, if they had come out in unison and said, "Listen, I love this president, I voted for this president, I'd like him to be the president for four more years as much as anybody, but what he's saying here is not true; and in fact it's dangerous and un-American," if Republicans had been willing to do that, I think we would have seen a very different outcome.
But instead, you had some of these very opportunistic Republicans seize that moment to make sure that if there was going to be a fight that they would be the ones leading it.
Cruz and the 2016 Election
… Who was the Ted Cruz running in 2016 against Donald Trump?How did he see himself?How was he offering himself in a way that might be surprising if you're coming out of the story that we just heard about what happens in those days after the election?
So the irony of Ted Cruz and his campaign for president in 2016 is that he had properly diagnosed the failures of the Republican Party in the eyes of the Republican base.Ted Cruz saw a Republican establishment that was sort of fat and complacent and lazy and that was not responsive to some of the grievances of the conservative base.And so Cruz builds his presidential campaign for 2016 around this idea of being a fighter and sort of going outside the box and defying political convention and taking the fight from the bottom up to a political class in the Republican Party that had grown sort of hopelessly disconnected from its constituents.
What Cruz, of course, never could have banked on is that somebody would out-Cruz Cruz.He never calculated, never took into his considerations, he and his team, at the outset of that campaign, never, never could have conceived of a scenario in which someone would sort of flank him from the populist right; somebody who could be louder, somebody who could be sort of more unconventional, somebody who was even less tethered to sort of the rules of the game, if you will.
So Cruz is a guy who, you know, rides this sort of Tea Party momentum into Congress in 2012, wins this Senate seat having really come out of nowhere. …
One of the things that you have to understand with Ted Cruz is this is a guy who met his wife working on the George W. Bush campaign, worked in the Bush administration, wife was a VP at Goldman Sachs.… But Cruz himself was something of a true believer.Cruz was far more comfortable in that sort of Tea Party world than he ever was perhaps in the George W. Bush world.This is a guy who, as a kid, memorized the Constitution and would go around reciting it to people in sort of performances with a traveling troupe.
I mean, this is a guy who argued cases in front of the U.S. Supreme Court as solicitor general.This is a guy who, in his blood, claims to be a hardcore constitutionalist and somebody who would always sort of adhere to the rule of law, and who would quote John Adams, saying that this is a country not of men but of laws.
So this is the Ted Cruz who comes to the U.S. Senate in 2012.And this is the Ted Cruz who, in record time, makes enemies out of just about every single Republican colleague of his on Capitol Hill.This is a guy who, not only is he uninterested in making friends as a general rule, but this is a guy who understands that making enemies in the Republican Party is politically advantageous to him, because he intuitively understands already—this is all the way back in 2012—he understands intuitively the disgust and the distrust, the grievance that so many conservative voters feel, the animus they have towards the Republican ruling class.
And so Cruz wants to capitalize on that.He doesn't just want to go to Washington and make speeches on the Senate floor and then go out to dinner with these guys and pretend to be pals.Cruz actually calculates that his path to power in the Republican Party is by actively antagonizing and alienating his Republican peers, his Republican colleagues in the U.S. Senate.
And it works.It works.It sets Cruz up to run a campaign in 2016 that is not just sort of anti-establishment in theme or in theory; it's not some abstraction.This is a guy whose colleagues have joked publicly about murdering him, and it's perhaps his greatest political asset.
So let's go to the moment after the Iowa caucuses.It takes a little while for the results to come in, but once they do—and you write about in your book Trump’s response, his call to Jeff Kaufmann.Can you describe that moment, especially now that we're looking back through the lens of 2020, and what we see him do in Iowa and whether that might have been an early warning of who Trump was?
… So knowing what we know now, I think you would go back to Feb. 1 of 2016 and you could view it as the beginning of the end.It's Feb. 1 of 2016, and Donald Trump has just experienced the thing that he cannot stand to experience; he has lost.And this is not just a matter of sort of defeat and statistics and vote share.Trump has, in running for president, built his entire image around the idea of being a winner.And the notion, not just of losing, but of losing in his very first contest—here, after months of brutal hand-to-hand political combat between all of these Republicans seeking their party's nomination for president, finally we see voters casting ballots for the first time.
… And so what we have in Iowa is really the first test case of whether this reality television star-turned-presidential candidate, who has said and done these outlandish things, who has defied political conventions at every turn, whether this is real, whether he can actually translate to the ballot box the way that many Republicans refused to believe that he could.
And in this first test case of whether Trump was real as a political candidate, he loses.He does the thing that he swears that he'll never do.He loses, and it is something he cannot tolerate. …
The final results are tallied in Iowa, and Ted Cruz is the winner.And there's a little bit of hubbub, a little bit of controversy surrounding the results because of some hard-edged tactics, let's say, used by the Cruz campaign.
And Trump is furious.Trump is humiliated.Trump cannot stomach the headlines calling him a loser.And so he rides to the Des Moines airport where his private plane is parked and he's seething on that car ride.And he gets on his airplane, and they're about to take off from the Des Moines airport, but they don't.They sit on the runway for a few minutes so that Trump can make a phone call.And he calls Jeff Kaufmann, who is the chairman of the Iowa Republican Party.And Trump says to Kaufmann, "You know, Jeff, I think you need to disavow the result of this election.I think we both knew that Cruz cheated."And Kaufmann says, "Mr. Trump, I can't do that.There's just—what do you mean, he cheated?We just had an election.The votes have been counted.Cruz won."There's a long silence, and Trump says, "I really think you need to disavow the result.Think about it, will you?"Hangs up the phone.1
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Now in the moment, Jeff Kaufmann and some people who knew about that phone call, they may have just chalked that up to passions running high, Trump being a sore loser.But in the sweep of history and everything we know now, that episode was a bright red blinking light foreshadowing everything that was to come and just what a danger to democracy that this man posed.
… What would it have told Ted Cruz about Trump when he sees Trump making public proclamations about rigged elections, that he had cheated and there was a rigged election?
It's Groundhog's [sic] Day, right, with Bill Murray.This whole thing is Groundhog's Day, because nobody took Trump seriously when he ran for president.Nobody took much of what Trump said seriously even when he became the front-runner for the Republican nomination.So around the time of the Iowa caucuses, when Trump is just throwing everything against the wall and when he makes this call to Jeff Kaufmann asking him to throw out the results of this primary, this caucus in Iowa because he lost, I think everybody just sort of shrugs.
You have to understand that at this stage, nobody thinks Trump is going to be in it for the long haul, much less thinks he's going to win.I think there's a select group of Republicans who are increasingly concerned by the time the Iowa caucuses roll around that this guy has real momentum, that he has a base that is loud and growing louder by the day.But there are very few people in the party who are seriously entertaining the idea that Donald Trump will last the duration of the primary season, much less that he'll be the party's nominee. …
That spring, as it heats up between Trump and Cruz, there’s a lot that's been made about the attacks, and obviously, he criticizes the looks of Cruz's wife, but looking back over some of the other incidents that are mentioned in the book—the accusation he wasn't legitimately able to be president, like a birther-type accusation against Cruz; the accusations of extramarital affairs; that his dad was involved somehow in the JFK assassination—there seems to be this strong undercurrent, too, of misinformation, of lies coming from Trump.Can you describe the nature of the attacks, how they worked on—that were coming from Trump onto Cruz during that spring of 2016?
Yeah.So as the primary field winnows, and it becomes evident that Ted Cruz is really the only Republican standing between Donald Trump and the Republican nomination, we enter a stage of sort of zero-sum combat between the two candidates and the two campaigns, the likes of which we’d never, frankly, seen in modern American politics.
And what differentiated the two of them was very simply the fact that Ted Cruz, despite all of his anti-establishment rhetoric, despite his reputation for being kind of a knife fighter and coloring a little bit outside the lines, Ted Cruz was still a United States senator who had a rich political pedigree and sort of understood that there was only so far outside the lines he could color.
Donald Trump had no lines.There were no boundaries.If Ted Cruz brought a knife to the fight, Donald Trump brought a nuclear-tipped bazooka.There was just—there was no comparison as far as what they were willing to do, how far they were willing to go in their escalating sort of attacks on one another. …
So what you see in the spring of 2016, as the field winnows and you really have a mano-a-mano, Cruz-versus-Trump contest, you see Donald Trump go scorched earth in ways that we'd never seen before.And it's not just that he's questioning whether Cruz is eligible to be president because, “Oh, well, he was born in Canada,” kind of a birther 2.0 routine.It's not just that he is insinuating that Cruz's wife is ugly.It's not just that he's floating theories about Cruz's father having been complicit in the assassination of JFK.
Donald Trump has a sordid history with some very shady characters, one of them being Roger Stone.He's also very close with people in the tabloid world, people who professionally go digging for dirt and who professionally spread disinformation.And Donald Trump does not hesitate to deploy those people on his behalf to try to not only end Ted Cruz's campaign for president, but to try and ruin Ted Cruz's life. …
… He’s going to follow and amplify Trump’s lies about the election, but at that moment, the most famous piece of footage of Cruz talking about Trump is saying he's a “pathological liar”; “practically every word that comes out of his mouth” is a lie.Can you describe what Ted Cruz diagnosed in Trump, what that attack was that he identified and articulated so early on?
So Cruz knows that the end is near.His campaign is running out of steam quickly.Trump has all the momentum.Cruz had tried to stage kind of a last stand in Indiana and really rolled out the red carpet for the governor of Indiana, Mike Pence; got his endorsement; traveled around the state; spent all the money and resources and time that they possibly could to try to steal another victory in Indiana to sustain their campaign.But it was evident within about 48 hours of that Indiana primary, it was evident that Trump was going to win, and he was probably going to win big and that Cruz's campaign was effectively finished.
At that point, Trump didn't need to resort to dirty tricks.Trump was winning; it was over.But he couldn't help himself.And so Trump goes on Fox News and starts speculating about Ted Cruz's father being complicit in the assassination of JFK.And Cruz had already begun preparing mentally for the end of his campaign that night in Indiana, but when he saw what Trump said on Fox News, something snapped inside of Cruz.I mean, that's the only way to think about it.He had been pushed too far finally.
Cruz is smart enough to recognize that oftentimes in Republican politics, the runner-up for president in one race is then the nominee four years later.And Cruz is a very young man; he has a big future ahead of him.He knows that the smarter move here is to sort of, as graciously as possible, bow out of the race, throw his support behind the nominee, play nice, and if Trump loses in the fall the way that most Republicans expected that he would, Cruz is set up perfectly; he's in the catbird seat to be the nominee four years later.
So he knows—his brain is telling him, don't take the bait; just let this thing fizzle out.But his gut is saying, I can't take it anymore, I cannot exit this race without telling the world what I really think about this guy.And so he does.
Cruz calls a bunch of reporters together, tells them to get their cameras on, and then he unleashes.He unleashes six months of pent-up rage, six months of pent-up animus and really six months of pent-up disorientation.Cruz cannot for the life of him understand how this man, who has spent his entire life as a Democrat, who has, you know, championed Planned Parenthood, who has advocated for a single-payer, government-run health care system, how is this man outflanking me as a conservative champion for the people?He can't understand it.
And it's not as though Cruz's mystification over Trump's appeal is what drives this.Cruz had watched as this man humiliated him, humiliated his wife, humiliated his father, attacked his family in the most brazen and despicable way.And he felt at that moment that if he was going to lose, he needed to get a few things off of his chest.And he did.
Cruz at the convention.Can you bring us inside there, and first, that discussion that he has with his advisers where he talked about why he's not going to endorse Trump.
Fast-forward into the summer of 2016, and, you know, Trump is the nominee-in-waiting, and the entirety of the Republican ruling class is trying to come to terms with Donald Trump.People who had held out, like Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, so many Republican elected officials who had been cool or lukewarm towards Trump, they're trying to get to a place by the time of the Republican nominating convention where they can be comfortable publicly wrapping their arms around this guy and endorsing him and projecting unity to the masses.
And one by one, over a period of months, people are falling into line.There's just one holdout, and it's Ted Cruz.You see, time did not heal all wounds.… I talked to people close to Ted Cruz in the days after he left the presidential race, and they were concerned for him; they were concerned for his health and for his mental state.This was not just any political loss.This was something that wounded him and haunted him deeply.
And so here is Ted Cruz being invited to speak at the coronation of the man who had devastated him and humiliated his family and put them through hell.And once again for Cruz, it's sort of a battle between the head and the heart.The head is saying, just go through the motions; do what you need to do; pledge your support to this man; be a team player, and in four years, you will be on deck to be the Republican nominee because that's the way this works.And his heart is saying, can't do it.I cannot subjugate myself to this man.I cannot in good conscience pledge my support and bend the knee on national television in front of the world to this man who attacked my wife and attacked my father.I can't do it.
And so Cruz begins to write his speech for the Republican convention.And outside of Trump's acceptance speech, Cruz knows that his address to the Republican convention is going to be the single most watched, the single most important, the single most suspenseful movement in Cleveland at this convention.
And as Cruz is writing the speech, he suddenly finds himself in the middle of a fierce disagreement among his inner circle of advisers.He's got three or four people over here who are telling him, “Ted, you have no choice; you have to endorse Donald Trump.You cannot go to Donald Trump's convention and give a prime-time keynote address and not endorse the man for president.Your future in the party will be finished.”
And then he's got these other voices over here, and they're saying, “Ted, not only did this man humiliate you and your family, but this man is undemocratic.This man is anti-constitutional.This man is downright un-American, the way that he talks about things.And you want to be on the right side of history here.This isn't just about 2016 or 2020.In the long run, you will be proven right by standing firm in your convictions and your fidelity to the Constitution and to the principles that you believe in.You should not be willing to compromise those things in the interest of immediate political gratification.”
And so Cruz finds himself at the eye of this storm.Everyone around him, the people who have guided his political career to date, they view this as an inflection point, as a watershed in his young political career.Remember, this man had only been in the U.S. Senate for four years, and here he was, the runner-up to the nomination for the presidency.The future was unlimited for Ted Cruz unless he screwed this up.And everybody around him had a different idea of how he could screw it up and what he needed to do.
So ultimately, the day before the convention, Cruz has finished his speech, and he's talking with his advisers, and he tells them his decision, that he's not going to endorse Donald Trump in his speech.And they ask him why. …
And Cruz just looks at them and shrugs and says, "History isn't kind to the man who holds Mussolini's jacket."And that's that; his decision's made.
How is that speech and the reaction the day after—how is that a turning point for Cruz?
When Cruz makes the determination not to endorse Trump, he has severely underestimated the blowback.He understands that there will be some people who aren't happy with him, and he knows that he might catch some grief for it.… But he believes that he's taking a principled stand.He believes that the people who have supported him to date have supported him because he isn't just another go-along-to-get-along politician.And so Cruz walks onto that stage in Cleveland with real confidence that even though he is defying the party's new standard-bearer, that he will still have the support of lots of folks in the party who appreciate the ways in which he has campaigned and he has conducted himself in office, and he doesn't think that this is going to hurt his career in any real way.
… Cruz underestimated two things.He underestimated the ferocity of the backlash from sort of the party's grassroots.He also underestimated the extent to which Trump still viewed himself as in competition with Cruz.In other words, Cruz thought that their rivalry was over—I lost; you won; to the victor go the spoils; now leave me alone.
When Trump and his team learned in advance that Cruz would not be endorsing him at the convention, they decided to turn the convention into a WWE wrestling spectacle.Trump's team got down to the convention floor.They began spreading the word to delegates ahead of Cruz's speech that Cruz is betraying the nominee.He will not support Trump; therefore, we should not support him.
And by the time Cruz gets to the stage to give his speech, the ground has been seeded.And when Cruz gets to the pivotal moment at the end of his speech where he talks about this November and the stakes and what you need to do as Republican voters, he says, "Vote your conscience up and down the ballot."
And I can tell you, I had moved from the convention floor with my press credentials up to the first level, and then up to the second level.And by the time Cruz was finishing his speech, I snaked my way all the way up to the third level in the Quicken Loans Arena so I could have a bird's-eye view of what was happening below me.And the boos that started at the ground level, on the convention floor, they cascaded and cascaded and cascaded.And I have been at some of the loudest sporting events in the craziest venues in the United States of America; I have never heard boos as thunderous as the ones raining down on Ted Cruz on that stage.
And in that moment, Cruz came to realize something that would guide the rest of his political career: When in doubt, side with Donald Trump.
And from that moment, the calculation that he would make to endorse him, to who he would become, is it a result of what happened there?
Look, I don't think it's any exaggeration to say that the trajectory of Ted Cruz's career was changed, permanently changed, by being booed off of that stage in prime time delivering that keynote speech to his party's convention.
That night, immediately following the speech, Ted Cruz went into a bunker with his team, his closest advisers.And I can tell you from talking to two of the people who were in the room with him in those moments that there was a real belief that his political career might be finished. …
Pence Joins the Ticket
… Mike Pence: Why does he agree to be the vice president?And what is the nature of that deal, and what is he offering to Trump, politically, and what does he get in return?
… You know, it's really important to understand that at the beginning of 2016, Mike Pence, the governor of Indiana, is in deep trouble politically.He has made a couple of major missteps in Indiana.His party has turned on him in some significant sense.The business community is furious with him.His own closest advisers and confidantes are deeply concerned about his ability to win reelection that fall.And the polling bears it out.Pence is in real trouble; it's not clear that he'll be able to win a second term as governor.
And against that backdrop of his own political misfortune, Pence is feeling torn over whether to endorse somebody in a presidential contest that's coming to his own backyard.Remember, the Trump-versus-Cruz blood fest is really climaxing in Indiana.And Pence, who thinks of himself as a constitutional conservative, is very much aligned ideologically and otherwise with Ted Cruz.But Pence, who's a very savvy political player, who has his ear to the ground, he can see the appeal that Donald Trump has to voters in Indiana and elsewhere.
And so Pence is very careful in ultimately choosing to endorse Ted Cruz, but do it in the least objectionable way in the eyes of Donald Trump.He goes out of his way—while endorsing Ted Cruz, he actually says nicer things about Donald Trump.It almost comes off as an endorsement of Donald Trump.
And so by the time Trump is convinced to entertain the idea of adding Mike Pence to the ticket, Donald Trump's first reaction when Pence's name is floated to him is, Trump says, "He says nice things about me, right?," which is so unusual for Trump.Normally if somebody at that point had endorsed one of Trump's rivals, one of his opponents, the first thing Trump would say is, “Oh, he's, you know—oh, no, he's a traitor; he's a backstabber; he's an SOB.He didn't endorse me; why would I want to have anything to do with him?”
But with Pence, at first mention, Trump says, "He says nice things about me," which is a testament to Pence and his political savvy and understanding that even though he could not stomach at that time sort of betraying his own principles and endorsing a man for office who he thought was fundamentally unfit for office, which Pence said to his friends and his allies at the time, that he worried about Trump.2But he also was not willing, given his own political circumstances, he was not willing to poke the bear.He wasn't willing to antagonize Trump and invite attacks on himself when he knew that this own position was so fragile. …
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What is he offering to Trump?
… This is a master class in political transactionalism.Donald Trump sees that Mike Pence needs him.Donald Trump sees that Mike Pence is in trouble in Indiana and that he can throw Pence the ultimate lifeline, pull him out of this terrible political circumstance that he's in in Indiana, put him on the national ticket, and put him on the fast track to becoming president of the United States—which, you know, Mike Pence is a guy who, for decades, viewed himself as a future president of the United States.He had never, never been coy about it.
And so here is Donald Trump with the ability to offer Mike Pence a lifeline unlike any other.And that's what he can offer Pence.
Well, what can Pence offer Trump?The single biggest block of resistance to Trump and to his candidacy comes from evangelical Christians and from social conservatives who view Trump as a wolf in sheep's clothing, who view him as a charlatan, who view him as a con artist.They're worried that there's going to be a bait-and-switch; that this guy, who spent his entire life advocating policies and political positions that run directly counter to the conservative movement and to the church, the evangelical church in America, that this guy is going to take their votes and then get into office and betray them.
So what could Donald Trump possibly do to signal to them that he won't betray them and that he means what he says?… There were two things that shored up Donald Trump's standing in the conservative movement and allowed him to become president of the United States.One was releasing a list of Supreme Court nominees and promising that he would choose one of these conservatives for the high court, and the other was adding Mike Pence to the ticket.Those two things, done in unison in the late spring/early summer of 2016, gave Donald Trump a fighting chance to become the president. …
… Let's skip ahead to Trump coming into office. …
Trump’s Early Presidency and the Republican Response
He comes to that joint address, and everybody says, "Is he going to be presidential?"… But it would be useful just to know, when you were talking to Republicans, Republican members of Congress, who do they see in that president?Did they see this guy as a threat to us?This guy, he's coming to Washington; he's going to take everything over?Do they see somebody they can work with?At that point, who do they see?Who do they think that Donald Trump is?
Yeah.So– Trump really represents a lump of clay to many Republicans early in his presidency that can be formed and shaped by them.There's some uncertainty over where his real ideological convictions lie or whether even he has ideological convictions.But I think, you know, much of the rationale that Republicans used in late 2016 for rallying around Donald Trump was this idea that he was going to be an executive in the business sense, that he was not going to meddle in the details, that he didn't have a terribly specific agenda, that he was going to contract out much of the policymaking to them.
And so even for some of the Republicans who had been very, very reluctant to support Trump or who had even been outspoken in objecting to Trump during his campaign, they were excited, many of them, at the opportunity now, with not only a Republican president but with Republican majorities in the House and Senate, to shape a policy agenda with unchecked majorities in Washington for the first time in a very long time.
And so … it certainly seemed as though that despite Trump being this sort of cartoonish, volatile, unpresidential character throughout the campaign and on Inauguration Day and stepping into the House chamber for the first time to give this joint address to Congress, despite all of these reservations about Trump the man, there was this sort of quiet, somewhat unexplainable excitement about Trump the president.
And I think the only real explanation for it is the idea among many Republicans that they could control him. …
And so even despite their reservations about him, they didn't disappear overnight; many of them still viewed him as sort of a clown, as a buffoon, as somebody who was not to be taken terribly seriously.But if they viewed him as an idiot, they viewed him as a useful idiot at that point.
… Mark Sanford: Who is he, and does he represent the approach of the majority of Republicans in the caucus in those early months?
… One of the truly fascinating characters who emerges in the early stages of the Trump presidency is Mark Sanford.Now Mark Sanford at this point is a congressman from South Carolina.Mark Sanford previously had been the governor of South Carolina, and at one time in his political career had been the odds-on favorite to be the Republican nominee for president.In fact, early in the 2012 presidential cycle, Mark Sanford was riding high.He had the highest favorability ratings of any governor in the party.He had the money flowing in.The world was at his feet, and everybody believed that Mark Sanford was going to be the guy to challenge Barack Obama in 2012.
And then his political career self-destructed.He was caught having an affair with a woman in Argentina while infamously claiming to be hiking the Appalachian Trail.And Mark Sanford later told me that perhaps subconsciously, he'd gotten caught on purpose having that affair because he didn't want to be president.He was looking for a way to blow up his career so that he wouldn't have to try to live up to these expectations of everyone else.
And so his career implodes.He leaves the governor's office in shame and under a cloud of scandal.And then, somewhat miraculously, a few years later he resurrects himself politically, and he runs for Congress, and he wins.
And Sanford in some way is the unlikeliest character to be calling out Trump for his falsehoods, for his deceptions, for his lies, because he was defined in his political career by this humiliation stemming from the extramarital affair and his lies to cover it up.
And yet, somewhat ironically, Sanford, he uses that, that history, as sort of a superpower to insulate himself, to say, “Listen, I know lies when I see them.I know deception when I see them.Take it from a guy who practiced it, right?And I've done everything I can to repent, and if I've taken a pledge now moving forward, it's that I'm never going to stand for anything like this again.I'm going to hold myself accountable, and I'm going to hold everybody else accountable.And this guy is a liar.”
It was only a few weeks into Trump's presidency when Sanford invited me into his office, and we sat down to talk about Donald Trump.3And up until that point, there had really not been a single Republican who was willing to sound off on Trump and say publicly what they had all been saying privately.
3
Politico: ‘I’m a Dead Man Walking’
And Sanford just decided to let it rip.He sort of lit Washington on fire, telling me how this man was just a serial liar and how he was manifestly unfit for this office and how he was defying the very things, like reason and sort of compromise and nuance, the very things that make a constitutional republic work.And Sanford said to me, at the end of that interview, I said, "You realize how this is going to come off.You realize what this is going to do to you."And Sanford just kind of smiled, and he said, "Yeah, I'm a dead man walking."
Turns out he was right; that term in Congress was his last.And Donald Trump made a special project out of making sure that Mark Sanford paid a price for his disloyalty.And that was the last of Mark Sanford.
Trump and Charlottesville
By the end of that year—I want to ask you about where the Republican Party is, and we have used that tax ceremony where everybody praises him.Earlier in that year … they've issued statements about Charlottesville, and a lot of them have moved on, except for some people like Flake.And by the time you get to that moment in December, I think Dec. 20, when they're praising him, where is the Republican Party—but also, are they enabling Trump, especially in the wake of Charlottesville, with that praise?What is inside that moment?What does it reveal?
… It's becoming clear, as the first year of Trump's presidency is winding down, just how transactional many of the other Republicans are.In other words, it's not just him.You have a lot of Republican leaders, a lot of rank-and-file Republicans in Congress, who view Trump's missteps as an opportunity.
And you look at Charlottesville, for example, and the outrage and the indignation that so many Republicans felt, but some of them were willing to use that as sort of a bargaining chip.Tim Scott, the only Black Republican in the U.S. Senate, he marched into the Oval Office and gave Trump a sort of blistering lecture on race relations in America and the horrible history that had led to the events in Charlottesville.And Donald Trump said to him, "What can I do to make it better?"And Tim Scott, without hesitation, said, "You can support my provisions in this tax reform bill."4
And that episode was, I think, sort of broadly representative of how many Republicans approached their relationship with Trump.They understood how important loyalty was to him and how he would reward loyalty.So rather than going to the mattresses with him, rather than calling him out at every opportunity, rather than highlighting his offenses or his inconsistencies, they would use them as bargaining chips, and oftentimes they could cash in those bargaining chips for everything from a ride on Air Force One to a policy being passed that they could go home and tout to their constituents.
And so Trump in many ways, when he was dispensing with his daily hyperbole and his bad behavior and his lies and his outlandish rhetoric, he was almost like a central bank of political leverage, handing out favors that could be later cashed in on the condition of unflinching, unconditional loyalty from the Republicans around him.And that really, I think, came to define the party's relationship to Trump.The graver the misstep, the uglier the circumstance, the more leverage they then had to take to him and get what they wanted from him.
The First Impeachment
… One area we've been trying to understand is the first impeachment, because—not the details of the phone call or any of that, but the fact that there are people like Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, basically everybody in the Republican Caucus except for Mitt Romney in the Senate who opposes it.And the question is, why?And is it a result of polarization?Is it a result of the Democrats talking about impeachment and “Russiagate” and the dossier for two years?What's the political moment that would lead even a Liz Cheney, who's going to be critical, going to break with the president, to not defend him, go on the attack against the Democrats for launching the impeachment?
You're going to get tired of hearing me use the word “binary,” but the first impeachment of Donald Trump is an exercise in binary politics.You have plenty of Republicans who understand full well that what the president had done was deeply irresponsible, hugely problematic, and if it were committed by a president with a D next to his name, absolutely impeachable.
And yet, coming off of several years of sort of relentless Democratic attacks on Trump and this sort of much ballyhooed investigation into collusion, alleged collusion between the president and Russia during the 2016 campaign, there was a sense among many Republicans that even though they did view Trump's actions and his conversations, his phone call with the Ukrainian president as completely inappropriate and an abuse of power and very arguably as impeachable, that if they were to take this vote now for impeachment, after everything that the Democrats had done and everything they had put Trump through during the first couple years of his presidency, that they would themselves be seen as effectively no better than the Democrats, that there could be no greater betrayal than for Republicans to have defended Donald Trump against these allegations of having colluded with the Russians in 2016, only to then turn around after that investigation and impeach him for something that was, in their view, probably more egregious, but far less publicized. …
And do the Democrats bear responsibility for—the Republicans say it's Trump derangement syndrome.Is there something on the left that's real that they're reacting to?
Oh, yeah.I mean, listen—the former speaker of the House, John Boehner, he had this expression, that in politics when somebody is committing suicide, don't shoot them.And Donald Trump throughout the first several years of his presidency was politically making what seemed like daily attempts at suicide, and Democrats could not stop shooting him in the process.
And oftentimes, the only thing that sort of saved Trump and restored Republican Party unity was Democrats overplaying their hand and stretching too far in their attempts to convince the American public of what the American public in many cases already knew, which is that this man is dishonest; that this man is abusing his power.
But it got to a place where many voters who had been reluctant to support Trump in 2016, because of this sort of relentless, day in and day out onslaught against Trump, many voters sort of got to a place, strangely enough, where they came to view an attack on Trump as an attack on them.
And it's very unique in our politics; it's not something that we have a lot of precedent for, and it's sort of a psychological dynamic that I'm probably not equipped to properly diagnose.But there's certainly something to say for the fact that when you would talk to Republicans, moderate Republicans, Trump-wary Republicans during that first impeachment proceeding, there were people who would tell you candidly that what he'd done was absolutely an abuse of power and that they were probably inclined to impeach.But there was almost no way for a moderate Republican to break ranks at that point without sort of being viewed as a Trojan horse, that they'd been manipulated by the Democratic Party and that they had effectively switched sides.In other words, there was no—there was no objective analysis of that first impeachment vote, given the context of the times.
The amount of polarization on Capitol Hill and in Washington, and frankly across the country stemming from the Mueller investigation and from this two-year-long dispute over allegations about colluding with the Russians, that for Republicans to then turn at the end of that and suddenly impeach the president for something completely separate, it would have smelled like the deep state to any Republican voter out there.And the last thing any of these Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill were willing to do was to feed into this sense, feed into this narrative of a sort of well-coordinated, very shadowy attempt to undermine Trump from within.And I think that, more than anything, shaped the approach that most of those Republicans took to ultimately exonerating the president.
He is acquitted.And from the people we've spoken to so far, they say the president feels emboldened after that, and one of the things, as he's heading into 2020 with problems from COVID and Black Lives Matter, and he's ramping up talk about antifa, about the radical left, about an existential us-versus-them sort of conflict.Can you describe what you're seeing and what you’re hearing as you're talking to voters in that run-up to the 2020 election?How were they taking that talk, and was it changing things on the ground?
Yeah, so I mean, two separate things.First, you know, you have to get inside Donald Trump's head for a minute here and think about how, for the previous four years, he had time and time and time again crossed lines that people told him he couldn't cross.He had systematically destroyed all of the conventions, all of the rules, all of the boundaries that govern our politics and our government.Trump viewed them as expendable.And there was no price to be paid.In other words, every time Trump would cross a line, the line would move and then he would cross it again.
And so by the time he is claiming to be exonerated by the Mueller report, and then he is acquitted in his impeachment trial, and he has gotten away with basically doing and saying whatever he wants for the first three years of his presidency, he views himself as invincible, and understandably so.This is a president whose own party refuses to hold him accountable.And frankly, this is a president who has politically benefited from many of the attacks launched on him by the opposition party for one reason or another.And it creates this environment in which not only does Trump feel invincible, but from the ground up, any of the potency that may traditionally be attached to some of the political attacks coming his way, just isn't there anymore. …
… As he's ramping up apocalyptic rhetoric and talking about antifa, what are you seeing as far as talk of civil war and guns and a belief about whether the other side is a cabal of pedophiles or not?Especially when you look back from Jan. 6 and the people who were going to show up there, were you seeing hints of that on the campaign, as you're talking to voters?
… Look, as a personal note, I moved out of D.C. during Trump's presidency, moved home to Michigan, and really decided that I wanted to cover the 2020 campaign in a different way than I'd covered previous campaigns.I wanted to spend a lot less time with the candidates and with their staffs and a lot more time with voters.And so that's what I did in 2020.I traveled the country, much of it driving—small towns, big cities; super-conservative white voters in rural areas, super-progressive Black voters in urban areas, and everything in between.
And suffice it to say that by the time we got to Election Day, I was scared about where all of this was headed.I don't pretend that every other reporter or political observer or politician shared my same set of experiences, but I would say that anybody who was surprised by Jan. 6, anybody who didn't see Jan. 6 coming, they didn't want to see it coming.They chose not to see it coming, because there were only so many times when I could be in mid-conversation with voters somewhere in this country when, unsolicited, they would start talking about secession or talk about arming up or talking about civil war.You could only hear that so many times before you started to take it seriously.
And long before Donald Trump claimed that the election had been stolen from him, and long before he and other Republicans urged people to sort of take their country back and not let this stand, that tinder was already being sparked.And the fact that we made it all the way until Jan. 6 without serious civic unrest and without lethal violence is, in and of itself, sort of a minor miracle, from my perspective.
But certainly, by the time we get to Jan. 6, you have the ideal conditions in place for violence at a scale that most folks weren't prepared to witness.
Republican Leadership in the Wake of the 2020 Election
Because that's where I want to go, is that period after the election.Because we started talking about it at the beginning.And the first question I want to ask you is, because you write about it in your piece, the people we're interested in—Graham, McCarthy, Cruz—and we don't have to do them all separately, but my question is, they're going out, and they’re—at the very least they're casting doubt on the election.They may be even stronger.They may be feeding a belief that the election was rigged.Do any of them believe what they're saying?
No.
Do the Republicans believe it?
Do Republicans believe—
I'm talking about leadership.I’m talking about Graham, McCarthy, Cruz, those—the leaders of the party who are going out and amplifying this or adding questions.Do they believe what they're saying?
No.
You might be sitting at home during this period watching cable news, and you might see one of these prominent Republicans come on the air and deliver a fire-and-brimstone speech about how America's self-government is under attack and how this is an existential crisis, and that if we don't do something to stop this that our sovereignty as a nation is in jeopardy.And you might ask yourself, wow, do they really believe this?
And the answer in almost every single case is no.They don't believe it.So why are they willing to say it?Why are they willing to rip away at the fabric of American democracy if they don't believe in what they're saying?
Power? Influence? More power?It might sound reductive if you've never been involved with politics or if you've never had the sort of proximity to power that these people have.But it is addictive, it is consuming, and it is corrupting.
And what we saw in the aftermath of this election, and the decisions made by these Republicans, was no different in kind than what they'd been doing for the previous four years.It was different in degree, but it was fundamentally the same calculation: Either you're with him or you're with them, and if you hope to have a career in the Republican Party, you’d better be with him.It's that simple.
… You're talking to people during this period that are saying, “Well, you're hysterical about your concerns.”When you’re talking to people, what are they saying to you privately about this, about what they believe, about why they're doing it?
… Here's the thing.The beauty of American elections is that they are run locally.Any Republican member of Congress who you saw on Fox News railing against the legitimacy of our elections, calling them crooked, I can guarantee you that that Republican member of Congress, he or she knows back home in their district or in their state the people responsible for administering the elections.They know the township clerks or the county recorders, the people who are in the position locally to run the elections and count the votes and report the results.And guess what?In most of these Republican jurisdictions, the people in charge with counting the votes are Republicans.
The reason that we know that they were lying to us about the election being stolen is that we know that they are in contact with those Republican elections officials in their own backyards as of Nov. 4, and they're telling them, “Please, you’ve got to tell me that something's wrong; you’ve got to tell me that there's some irregularity; you’ve got to tell me that you caught somebody doing something.You’ve got to throw me a bone so that I can throw him a bone.”
There was nothing.Nothing.
Mitch McConnell’s silent till six weeks after the election, where a lot of people are saying, “Indulge him; he's going to get over it.”What was a consequence of the silence?What was actually happening during those weeks between the election and between Dec. 15 for McConnell, but going all the way up to Jan. 6?Was the county changing?What moments were happening in that vacuum?
Yeah.So put yourself in Mitch McConnell's shoes for a minute.You've spent the last four years issuing no comments on a president who is driving you crazy, who is hurting your party's reputation, who is oftentimes undermining your legislative efforts, who is unwittingly sabotaging much of your agenda in Congress and across the country with his behavior and with his rhetoric.
And you're sort of to the point where you just wish he'd go away, even if that means that you have to deal with a Democratic president for the next four years.Well, you just got done dealing with one for eight years, so that's not the end of the world.If you're Mitch McConnell, and you've been around the block a few times, you've seen what the numbers look like and what they portend; you're Mitch McConnell in the days after this election, and you're looking at the numbers, and you're talking with your advisers, who are some of the smartest political minds in the country, and you can see that Trump lost and that he's not coming back from this, you don't really want to go spit on his grave, do you?He's buried.And the last thing you want to do is be seen as dancing on his grave at this point, so you're telling yourself, why should I go out of my way to antagonize him or, even more so, to antagonize his voters when a couple of months from now I'll be free of this guy?I won't have to worry about him anymore, or at least I won't have to work with him anymore.
So for McConnell and for a lot of Republicans during this period, there's just this sense of, let him vent; let him say what he wants to say; let him get it off his chest.It's not going to change anything, so why bother?Why bother correcting him?Why bother confronting the lies?Ultimately he's not going to be president come Jan. 20, so what harm does it do just to humor him a little bit?Turns out there's a lot of harm in humoring him. …
… Let me just ask you one question about the House, where Kevin McCarthy and Liz Cheney are.We're now on Jan. 1.We’re in the run-up to Jan. 6, so a lot of the things you're talking about have happened now.And there's sort of a clash between the two of them.And McCarthy and the majority of the House Republicans are going to vote to not certify at least some of the states.How important a moment is that?How important a choice is it that they're facing?
So put yourself in the shoes of a Republican member of Congress.For the previous four or five years, you have come to these forks in the road time and time again where you have a decision to make.Whether it's on the weekend of Access Hollywood, you're going to stand with Trump or you're going to break away.Whether it is after Charlottesville, whether it's after Helsinki, whether it's the impeachment vote, you have had to make a decision whether you are with this guy or whether you're not.
And time and time again, the people who have decided that they're not with him have paid a consequence for it, in some cases with their careers.Now, fast-forward to the aftermath of the 2020 election, and bear in mind the fact that almost all of these Republican officeholders understood that no, the election had not been stolen; no, Donald Trump had not been cheated out of a second term; and that no, Donald Trump was not going to be president come Jan. 20.
With all of that in mind, if you're one of these Republican officeholders, there's a little voice in your head that's saying, you know, this is the last fork in the road.This is the last time that you'll ever have to worry about making one of these decisions that could potentially end your career.Yes, you know that the election wasn't stolen, and yes, you know that it is a rotten and corrupted and blatantly anti-democratic thing that you're about to do, to take this vote to decertify the election results.But once you take it, you're in the clear.It's like being in the mob—that one last favor, and then you'll be released from this life.And that's how many of them interpreted it.
There was a freshman member of Congress, brand new, third day on the job when the Capitol was invaded, as they were beginning the arguments over whether or not to certify the election results.And this freshman member of Congress, Peter Meijer, from Michigan, he told me on the record that a senior member of the Republican House delegation came to him and said, "Listen, I don't believe the election was stolen.I don't believe any of this, but I'm going to vote to decertify."And Meijer asked him, "Why?Why would you vote that way?"And this member of Congress said to him, "It's the last thing Donald Trump will ever ask you to do."5
5
The Atlantic: What the GOP does to its own dissenters
Jan. 6 and the Aftermath
… So let's go to Jan. 6.And there's something you write about—that you've written about, which is those people who were there.You described them as having been conned into coming there, and not just by Trump.What's the responsibility, what were the choices that were made that led to this attack on the Capitol and an attack on the peaceful transfer of power?And what's the responsibility for the choices that individual politicians, congressmen, senators had made that led to that?
The tragedy of it is that so many of these people have just been lied to nonstop.They've been lied to by their elected officials.They've been lied to by their favorite media personalities.They have been lied to and manipulated.And some of them were willing to die for those lies.
And this was not a foregone conclusion.It didn't have to be this way.Time and time and time again, elected officials in the Republican Party who knew that Trump was lying to them, who knew that Fox News was lying to them, they chose to go along with those lies, either to parrot them or to enable them, to stand by and say nothing at all, because they knew that objecting, that crying foul, that stepping out of line and telling their constituents, “No, this isn't true; no, you're being lied to; don't believe it,” that would be the end of their careers.
And, you know, you're supposed to be detached and objective as a journalist covering all of this, right?But it pisses me off.I've watched it happen to friends.I've watched it happen to family.I've watched it happen to my community.I've seen how this has changed the fabric of American life, perhaps for good.And it was avoidable.
It was avoidable.It's not a partisan thing.It's not an ideological thing.People who voted with Trump nine times out of 10 and who have conservative values and conservative ideas, they still could have done the right thing by their constituents.They could have told them—when the moment in history called, they could have stood up and said, “Listen, I'm for the guy; I voted for him; I supported his agenda, but I am not for this.I will not abide what he is doing right now, because it's dangerous.It's undemocratic, it's un-American.”
Every one of them had that opportunity, and almost none of them took it.They took the cowardly way out.
And then, when the people came for the People's House, and when the shots fired and the attackers scaled the walls, and the mob started beating the policemen, what did all these people do inside of Congress?All these people who had fomented this, all these people who had enabled the lies, all these people who had invited this violence, what did they do?They ran.They went looking for cover.They weren't celebrating.They weren't joining the mob.They ran from the mob, and they cowered.That's all you need to know about them.
Sorry, I shouldn't get so pissed off, but I am pissed off.
Let me ask you about the day after or the days after, because you have–Lindsey Graham makes his famous speech; McConnell is floating that he might be willing to impeach; eventually McCarthy's going to say—you know, he says certain things privately, but even publicly he says that the president was responsible for this.I mean, was it over on Jan. 6, the story that you're telling, or was there a moment of choice for the Republican Party in those days after about how they were going to understand Jan. 6 or how they were going to understand their choice?What was the—I mean, was there—was that really a moment where things could have been different, where it felt like things were going to change?
Yeah, you know, if this is the mob, then in the immediate aftermath of Jan. 6, it was the moment of just when you think you're out, they pull you back in, right?Because you thought that, well, if I cast this vote to decertify the election, then, you know, I'm done; that's my last—that's my last errand for Donald Trump; I'll never be called on again.
But then, in the aftermath of Jan. 6, there's another fork in the road.Do you condemn this sort of extremism, this sort of violence?Do you condemn the president for his role in inviting this attack, and are you willing to impeach him for it?So suddenly all these poor saps who thought to themselves that casting a vote to decertify the election would be their last act in servitude to Donald Trump and that they'd finally be free of him, and sort of released from this four-year term of constant and sort of self-perpetuating subjugation to Donald Trump, suddenly the beauty of their story is that it's not over, that it wasn't the last favor they'd ever have to do for Donald Trump.
Now there's another favor, and it's not just a matter of appeasing Trump; it's never been that.Once again, it's about appeasing his base.It's about appeasing the people who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.And more importantly, it's about appeasing the millions more who were sympathetic to it.Are you willing to come out publicly, on the record, and say that these people were violent domestic terrorists who just shamed the institution of the United States Congress?And are you willing to say that this president, this outgoing president who was legitimately defeated, that he has brought shame to his office and that he absolutely committed impeachable offenses by inciting this violence, not to mention committed impeachable offenses by calling the secretary of state of Georgia and asking him to find votes, and a dozen other things that he did in the aftermath of the election that are clearly impeachable?
Are you willing now that you've seen this violence up close and all that your behavior and your enabling hath wrought for this country, are you now willing to come out and say what needs to be said?And for most of them the answer was—shocker—no.
I know you're surprised.Spoiler alert.Even—even Jan. 6 was not sufficient to change at least publicly what these people were willing to say about Trump, about the party, about extremism, about all of it, about the election being stolen.
And in many ways, you might think that having that sort of brush with political violence would be the wake-up call some of these folks would need to say, “OK, this has gone too far.And you know what?I had a role in it, and I can't have a role in it any further.I need to say some things, and I need to repent here, and I need to try and make this right.”
But if anything, their proximity to that political violence, it cowed them even further.It made them all the less likely to step out and to condemn Trump, condemn the people involved with Jan. 6, condemn the campaign to delegitimize the election.
You know, I had a member of Congress say to me, "These people were willing to come after us inside the United States Capitol Building.What are they going do to me when I'm at home with my wife and kids?"
So if Jan. 6 was political terrorism, I think you’d have to say that it worked. …
The Republicans Exile Liz Cheney
It seems like a real turning point in the party comes with how they see Liz Cheney in this period.You know, at first in February, McCarthy seems to think he can still maintain the big tent and that Cheney can be part of it, but by the end of the spring, it seems like because of this, how you understand Jan. 6, how you understand the 2020 election—she's going to be voted out of her leadership position.The fate of Liz Cheney, what does it say about the Republican Party?
Liz Cheney committed the cardinal sin of the Trump era, which was to say publicly what she said privately.And what she said privately in the aftermath of Jan. 6 was what hundreds and hundreds of Republican lawmakers said privately at that time, which was that this can never happen again; this was an abhorrent attack on American democracy, and that the president was directly responsible; and we must … not only to purge Donald Trump from the party, purge his influence from the party, but the need to investigate and expose all of the bad actors who had been involved in the run-up to Jan. 6, and make clear to the American public that there are consequences for this sort of demagoguing, that there are deadly implications for this sort of deception and these lies and this campaign of mass disinformation that had taken hold.
And Cheney interpreted the events of Jan. 6 as a clarion call, that she now had a mandate; that she had a mission to ensure that the people involved were held accountable, number one, and that, number two, the American public could see this for what it was, to make sure that it never happened again.
And Liz Cheney could be excused for believing in the early days of those efforts that she would have a groundswell of support, that there would be a small army of Republicans who had up until that point been loyal to Trump, but who now, faced with a choice between defending Trump and defending democracy, would choose the latter.But she was mistaken.And I think to this day, she is still shocked at just how mistaken she was.
And has the Republican Party as a result of that become a party that believes the election was stolen, that believes future elections will be stolen, that believes Jan. 6 is “legitimate political discourse”?Is that what the result of that means?And if that's true, then what are the consequences of that?
Well, think, you know, think about it this way.Before the 2020 election, Gallup did a survey that showed that between 2018 and 2020, in a space of two years, there had been a 35 percentage point decline among Republicans who believed that our elections were accurate and fair, and that the ballots counted reflected the will of the voters.6Thirty-five-point decline.
So by the fall of 2020, before the election, before the Stop the Steal crusade, before Jan. 6 and the aftermath, well before all of that, you had fewer than 50% of self-identifying Republicans tell Gallup that they believed our elections were legitimate.
That trend line had been driving sharply down during the Trump presidency, before things truly went off the rails.And there was every opportunity to slow that trajectory, and even maybe bend it in the opposite direction.But time after time after time, Republican leaders, Republican officials, they went along with it.They went along with Trump.They didn't speak up.They turned a blind eye.They enabled his assault on the legitimacy of our systems.
So for all the damage that had already been done, by the time Jan. 6 comes around, and all of these people can see with their own eyes the consequences, there was still an opportunity then to really have this road to Damascus conversion moment, where you say, “OK, I see now how dangerous this is, and we've got to do something about it.We can't go along with this anymore, right?It's not a partisan thing.This is an American thing.We have to restore faith in our democracy.”
But the number of people who said that and who followed through was almost nonexistent.I mean, it's unfathomable, looking back on it, and as cynical and as jaded as we can be, having watched Republicans make these decisions time and time and time again, up until Jan. 6, even knowing all of that, it is still unfathomable that so few of them reacted to Jan. 6 publicly the way that almost all of them did privately.
And as a result, you can now see, in poll after poll, a whole body of research and evidence shows that voters' faith in our democratic system of elections is significantly diminished, diminishing further by the day practically.The erosion of confidence in our elections is an existential crisis for the United States of America.There's no other way to say it.
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Jon and Jo Ann Hagler on behalf of the Jon L. Hagler Foundation
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Funding for FRONTLINE is provided through the support of PBS viewers and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Additional funding is provided by the Abrams Foundation; Park Foundation; the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; and the FRONTLINE Trust with major support from Jon and Jo Ann Hagler on behalf of the Jon L. Hagler Foundation, and additional support from Koo and Patricia Yuen. FRONTLINE is a registered trademark of WGBH Educational Foundation. Web Site Copyright ©1995-2025 WGBH Educational Foundation. PBS is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization.
