The FRONTLINE Interviews
Yamiche Alcindor
White House Correspondent, PBS NewsHour
Yamiche Alcindor is the White House correspondent for the PBS NewsHour. She is also a contributor to NBC News and previously worked as a national political reporter for The New York Times.
This is a transcript of an interview with FRONTLINE’s Gabrielle Schonder conducted on August 22, 2019. It has been edited for clarity and length.
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Contrasting Obama and Trump
… The Obama inauguration and the Trump inauguration: We’re going to weave that together, the two conflicting messages.Can you kind of just take me there?
Obama’s inauguration was this incredible celebration where people felt like hope and change were going to come into their personal lives.I remember being in D.C. at the time, and there were so many people, African American people in particular, who were dressed up, who were just excited about what he was talking about.And Obama led with that message of we are now going to come together; we’re going to unify this country.Even if you didn’t back me, I’m now going to usher in this better part of your life.
You juxtapose that with President Trump, which was really a smaller inauguration, though the president doesn’t like to acknowledge that.But it was also this message of “American carnage,” this message of factories being tombstones and this kind of dark idea of what America is.And he was positing himself as “I’m the person who can fix this.”So he was really, I think, playing on Americans’ fears, where Obama was really playing on Americans’ hopes.
Sarah Palin and the “Forgotten”
… Let’s jump back to the ’08 campaign for a moment and some of the themes that you just talked about that President Obama, or candidate Obama, is running on.And Sarah Palin emerges.What are some of the messages of that campaign and certainly the base that she’s beginning to identify?
Sarah Palin emerges, and there’s a gasp in Washington, D.C. There’s this idea that there’s an unqualified woman sitting next to John McCain trying to get the female vote, trying to appeal to women.But most women that I talked to were offended by the fact that she was the person who the Republicans were putting up and saying, “Women, this is what we can do for you.”
… Sarah Palin was someone who was folksy, who people felt like maybe they could relate to, but who was someone who was pretty obviously unqualified for the job of vice president.It wasn’t a partisan decision in terms of whether or not she could do the job. She just was—had these disastrous interviews where people were gasping when she was talking about being able to see Russia from Alaska and making these kind of weird references that people were not used to in the political landscape.
But what she does is start to hone this idea that politics is about personality, and it’s not about who’s qualified for the job. It’s about who you might actually like, who might feel like a regular, everyday American.And you fast-forward to President Trump.He’s not running on the idea that he is the best politician or that he has the best policies.He’s running on the idea that he’s a businessman who you like and who you should support because he can kind of really bring people together just by his personality and his machismo, but not really on his policy ideas.
Palin’s attraction to a certain base, this base that maybe we haven’t seen before.We’ll later call them the “forgotten,” but at that sort of period of time, who are they?What do they look like?
It’s interesting who Sarah Palin is appealing to.I can’t say if she’s appealing to all white Americans or kind of a large swath of white Americans, but maybe who she’s appealing to are people who are tired of politicians, people who are tired of eloquently spoken people who are making statements in a way that sounds like they know more than them.She’s talking to a part of America that wants to be out hunting, who wants people running the country who feel like them, who aren’t interested in politicians who maybe have gone to Ivy League schools.
I’ve talked to some voters who saw Obama as condescending, who thought he was too smooth.… So Sarah Palin really goes after the people who are most interested in—just people who feel regular and aren’t interested in politicians who might feel too put together or who have too much experience.And as a result, she has this base that’s really about not being highly educated.I don’t mean that in a condescending way, but it’s that people aren’t valuing your Ivy League education or your law degrees or being a Rhodes Scholar.Instead, what they’re valuing is the fact that you have a family that looks like theirs, that your understanding of world politics is something that’s simple and can be put together in a sound bite.
Trump and the Birther Movement
I’m going to jump ahead a little bit to Trump’s use of the birther movement as a political tool.Can you help us understand what he’s doing early on?
President Trump’s entire political career can really be traced back to his birtherism support and the idea that President Obama was not born in the United States.It’s a racist, completely unnecessary, completely baseless claim.But it’s a claim that unites a lot of Americans who are frustrated that they see a black man in the Oval Office.
So what President Trump does at the time, then a private citizen, is that he captures this idea that Obama is somehow not worthy of the presidency.He captures this idea that people are angry at the fact that Obama was able to ascend to the presidency.And it, in some ways, goes back to that idea that at his core, President Trump has at least used racist ideas to get ahead in life.You think about before that, there was a Central Park Five ad where he was calling for the death penalty of these five young boys of color.So he really uses birtherism to launch his own political career.
And it goes back to also his idea that he’s frustrated with Obama.Obama made fun of him.He doesn’t personally like Obama, finds him condescending.But he’s also maybe a little jealous of Obama, so he uses birtherism to attack the president.
And at a certain point, Obama responds.He ultimately releases the birth certificate.
President Obama, this qualified, African American man who completely deserves to be president based off of winning the presidency but also working at it as a freshman senator, he has to release his birth certificate.And I think it’s one of the saddest moments in American history, that as African Americans celebrate the idea that a black man can be in the Oval Office with his black family, he has to try to prove to Americans that he belongs there, that he was born in this country.
It was sad.It was sad, and it was heartbreaking.And it also, in some ways, speaks to the idea that African Americans are constantly trying to prove themselves in this country, constantly trying to say we’re not just African Americans in the hyphenated way, but we are in fact Americans.
… And the power that Trump has at this point and to force the issue, to force Obama to respond, what does it tell us about the movement that’s behind him?
I’m not sure if President Trump particularly had the power to force President Obama to release his birth certificate, but I think what it is is a movement that President Trump is the face of at the moment, as a private citizen at the time, to gin up enough cultural anger that people feel as though they deserve to see President Obama’s birth certificate.It’s a dangerous precedent to set, that the president of the United States has to respond to racist ideas, has to respond to racist tropes.
But it’s what President Obama does because he’s trying to unify the country, and he presents his birth certificate as a sort of olive branch to this growing movement of people who are not going to be satisfied by his birth certificate, and aren’t satisfied by his birth certificate.
The Trayvon Martin Killing
Staying a little bit in this area, but moving towards the Trayvon [Martin] killing.… Help me understand the backlash when he weighs into the controversy.
President Obama, as the first African American president, had been very careful not to talk too much about race.It was frustrating some African Americans, but it put a lot of other Americans at ease.They felt as though even though he was the first African American president, he was leading as though and making a point that he was the leader of all people.
Then Trayvon Martin is killed in Florida, and the country gasps.The country is really on edge, and African American people want to know what the first black president has to say about this teenager being killed while walking home with some candy, being racially profiled by the neighborhood watch leader.
And the president says something that is pretty measured, which is: “If I had a son, he might look like Trayvon.I could have been Trayvon Martin.”And that angers a subset of the American population who feel as though President Obama is weighing in unnecessarily into a private matter.And it lasts.That anger lasts, and it in some ways fuels President Trump years later and his candidacy, because at rallies people told me: “Well, the president should have never talked about Trayvon Martin.He should have never weighed into that.”And that starts to really build on people’s anger when it comes to President Obama.
… And at the same time on the left, there’s a feeling that he waited to weigh in, that he’s not doing enough on race.Can you help me understand frustrations about his response to Democrats?
President Obama was very cautious on race.Some Democrats and some African Americans who had turned out in record numbers for him who, in some ways, Obama owed his presidency to felt as though he wasn’t saying enough about race.They wanted him to be talking about the inequalities that African Americans face all across the country.They wanted him to say plainly that mass incarceration was a racist part of America.But he never really got that far.Instead, he weighed pretty measuredly on the idea that Trayvon Martin could have been his son, could have been him.And Democrats want him to use the force of the Department of Justice to come down on George Zimmerman.They want to see the Department of Justice usher in some sort of justice, which is not historically what the Department of Justice has done.It’s very, very rare for the Department of Justice to bring a hate crime charge or to charge officers after fatal encounters.
And people are frustrated by that, and people are frustrated by the fact that the Department of Justice doesn’t really change that much under President Obama.The faces change, the ideals change, the top changes, but the actual statistics of the DOJ don’t change very much.
Obama After Newtown
Let’s talk about Newtown for a moment.This is really one of Obama’s darkest moments of the presidency.It’s also a test for himself to work with Republicans on gun reform.Can you help us understand the challenges facing him to deliver something after that attack?
Dozens of young children killed in Newtown, Connecticut.As a reporter, I was in Connecticut, and everyone felt like the world was going to change.Everyone felt like this is going to be the mass shooting that makes America really look at its gun laws and change something.And President Obama is under enormous pressure to deliver something.But Republicans and the NRA [National Rifle Association] are also under pressure to make sure that they hold the line and don’t allow Democrats or even some Republicans who might want to do something to change the gun laws.
So President Obama tries to enact some gun laws, but the NRA proves to be an opponent that he just can’t get over.
Obama and Race
… The time that Michael Brown is killed and the video is beginning to go viral, how little has changed with Obama and race at that moment?And then take us into the protests that erupt in Ferguson, if you can.
Michael Brown is killed in Ferguson, Missouri.A video of his body laying on the ground for four hours circulates on social media.A lot of young African Americans who voted for Obama, sometimes for their first time ever voting for a president, expect the White House to do something, and President Obama is limited in what he can do, both in the fact that the president isn’t the person who can actually prosecute police officers, but also he’s limited because he’s still cautious about how he weighs in on issues of race.
So as we see, we see protests erupt.We see people saying, “Black Lives Matter”; “We want to see change.”And President Obama starts to bring in the protesters into the White House.There are these highly politicized meetings where you see protesters sitting alongside President Obama.He’s having a private meeting with protesters to try to figure out what can be done.He starts task forces to handle the idea of police-involved shootings and policing in America.There are consent decrees in place in a number of different police departments.
But ultimately there’s a subset of protesters who are just disappointed because President Obama isn’t able to say: “You know what?Black people in America, you’re no longer going to be shot by the police.You’re no longer going to be stopped at disproportionate numbers.” … Five years after Ferguson, what we see in Missouri is that black people are still disproportionately stopped by the police, and those numbers have gone up, not down.And that’s after President Obama, and that’s under President Trump.
So black people just still feel as though they’re not safe in America, and they realize that even though an African American man is in the Oval Office, their children, their daughters and sons, are not any more safe.And that, I think for a lot of people, is terrifying.
And how difficult was it for Obama at the time, the position he’s in?
President Obama’s in a tough, tough place.He understands the weight of what people are feeling, what African Americans are feeling.He’s an African American man with two daughters.He sees himself in Trayvon Martin, possibly in Michael Brown.But he also sees the institutions of the United States and realizes that the Department of Justice still has to slowly and methodically figure out what happened in Ferguson and that this one case might not usher in change.So as a result, I think he’s trying to thread this needle, and it feels as though both sides end up being disappointed by what he does.
The Black Lives Matter movement develops really under his administration.What is the discussion that we’re having as a country at the time?What’s the reckoning that Obama’s having?There’s also a countermovement that develops; we can talk about that.But help us understand sort of Black Lives Matter, the impetus for action.
Black Lives Matter is born out of a very simple idea, which is that African Americans deserve to be treated as equally and equally to white people.But the slogan “Black Lives Matter” offends at least a large portion of the population because people start saying “All Lives Matter,” when in reality, Black Lives Matter activists are saying: “Well, you don’t show up to heart patients and say: ‘You know what?Your liver is really what’s important here.We don’t want to talk about heart cancer or heart problems.We should really be talking about breast cancer.”
So what people are feeling is that the Black Lives Matter movement is too specific; that African Americans don’t deserve to have a movement that calls for equality for them.… President Obama’s in a tough place because Black Lives Matter is so specific to black people’s needs.They’re not saying, you know, “We all want equality.”What they’re saying underneath the slogan, but the slogan itself, “Black Lives Matter,” becomes this thing that President Obama either has to embrace or has to let go.And in most cases he embraced it.He brings the leaders into the White House.
But ultimately, I think Black Lives Matter leaders and Black Lives Matter organizers understand that one African American president isn’t going to change hundreds of years of enslavement, hundreds of years of discrimination.And that is, I think, what people run up against and the conversation we continue to have under President Trump.
The optimism, though, that Obama felt at the time, do you think he knew that?Do you think he knew that he couldn’t fix it?
President Obama, at least outwardly, is this person who’s all about hope and change.He’s someone who talks about bringing people together.He’s someone who tries to, I think, make the case that racism is something that once people understand it will want to change it, where Black Lives Matter activists and a lot of the people I’ve talked to, they say actually racism is the consequence and the purpose; that it’s not something that’s just happening to African Americans; that there is a whole system and people in place that are happy that racism is happening.
And I think what President Trump’s presidency shows is that there are people who are happy with the way that racism has played out; that the privilege that white people, that they enjoy in this country, that they understand fundamentally that it comes at the detriment of African Americans, where President Obama makes the case that once white people understand that their privilege is because black people are held down, that they’ll not want to keep that privilege, where Black Lives Matter activists say that’s naïve.
… And the conservative media’s response to Black Lives Matter?
Conservative media and Fox News used the Black Lives Matter movement to demonize African Americans, frankly.They take the protesters and make them into caricatures.They say that these are the young African Americans that want to take over the country, and they make the case that President Obama is going to align with these people and destroy your way of life.And they’re largely talking to white Americans.
The conservative media is excited by the Black Lives Matter movement because they can now put a face to what they think of as this grand conspiracy by African Americans to want to take over the country, which is baseless and not true.Instead, African Americans just want to be treated equally, which is what the Black Lives Matter movement is all about.
Candidate Trump
Let’s go to the campaign now.So candidate Trump is emerging in a deeply divided Republican field, and he’s speaking to that base we discussed earlier that Sarah Palin had identified.In contrast to the great unifier that we’ve been talking about, Obama, this appears to be a candidate who’s really playing on the divisions in this country.Do you start covering him early in the campaign?Can you give us a sense of what you begin to see about the folks he’s directly speaking to?
I was covering Bernie Sanders for a large part of the 2016 campaign, and what I found was a group of people who felt like the system was rigged.And they were blaming billionaires; they were blaming wealthy people for their problems.When I get to start covering the Trump campaign, I find the same sort of frustrations, but instead of blaming wealthy people, this group of Trump supporters are blaming immigrants and people of color.They’re pointing at those people and saying: “These are the reasons why we don’t have good jobs.These are the reasons why our factories have closed.It’s because these immigrants have come and taken our way of life.”
Before the 2016 election, I got pulled into several meetings by Republican leaders, leaders of the RNC [Republican National Committee], who were making the case that Republicans were going to be focused on diversifying their electoral base; that they were going to be making the case to African Americans and to Hispanics that the Republican Party had room for them and had their best interests at heart.
But then you see President Trump, and he does the exact opposite of what Republicans were planning to do for the 2016 election.He puts immigration at the center of his campaign.He puts racism and racially charged ideas at the center of his campaign, and he makes the case that immigrants and Mexicans, that they’re animals, that they are troublesome, that they’re rapists, that they’re criminals.And that’s not what the Republican Party is prepared to do.But it proves to be a winning message.He beats 16 other Republicans who are talking about unifying the party and having a broad umbrella.
And it teaches the Republican Party a lesson about its own party, which is that people respond to culturally insensitive rhetoric and that President Trump understands that at least for some people, there is a racist vein going through their towns and that they’re inherently angry at the fact that President Obama and his black family were in the Oval Office.
There’s a complete rejection of the “autopsy” of 2012 and clearly a division within the Republican Party at that moment, that he develops an insurgency within.
You have Republican leaders who are frustrated at President Trump, who think he’s making the party look crazy.But there are also people who write him off, who say, “Well, obviously he’s not going to be president, because he’s going against the complete idea of our 2012 autopsy.”But what they’ve learned is that President Trump does have this instinctual political gut that leads him to make the case that he is going to be the best person for the job because he understands the cultural divisions that are at play in America, especially after President Obama.
Obama After Charleston
So back to Obama for a moment.We spoke a little bit about Charleston, but let’s go there.Again, speaking about the deep racial divisions and Trayvon and Michael Brown, we’re now in Charleston, which is a different sort of level of experience for Obama as he’s traveling down there; that this is a kind of reckoning that so little has changed, and in fact, he may be the source of so much of the anger and so much of the resentment.
… Who would have thought in 2015 that a young white man would gun down nine African American people in a predominantly African American church?The idea to Americans that racism would happen that viscerally, I think, was not thought of, frankly.I remember being a reporter down in South Carolina, and people were just beside themselves that this could have happened.People thought, obviously, that racism was still existing in America, but this was a lynching in America.This was a lynching in 2015.
By the time President Obama comes down to South Carolina, people are in need of a healing.People are in need of hearing from the Oval Office and are watching from Washington, D.C., to say: “What are we going to do next?How are we going to ever get past this?”
And what President Obama does is something that he does very well, which is he comes down and he is the “consoler in chief.”He sings “Amazing Grace.”He has this moment in the church, Mother Emanuel, where people feel as though the president understands how to move forward; that the president will not just come down and feel you and understand and empathize with you, but he will also have a plan for how to move forward.
And his plan, as Obama has always been, has been to not make this young white man the center of how you see white people, [but] that we as Americans all reject what happened in this city.And it’s a message of unity, and it’s a message that makes African Americans and white Americans look at themselves and say, “We are all Americans, and we can move past this,” which is what the country needed at the time.
Is there also a bit of pain and hopelessness in Obama that this is a period that—at a moment that shows how deeply divided the country is?
By the time the murders in South Carolina happen, President Obama has already dealt with birtherism and has understood how just by being a black man, he can divide a whole country.Then he has to deal with the pain and anguish of these murders.I think President Obama is personally pained by what happens in South Carolina, and I think he’s coming to the realization that racism is not just going to be something that is at the ballot box or is a softly held belief where people maybe experience microaggressions, but it’s going to be a violent strain in America.It’s going to lead to people massacring nine people in a church.
So I think when President Obama is giving his eulogy at the church, he himself is pained, and it comes through as authentic.It comes through as him feeling—as not just the consoler in chief, but also as an American who’s hurt for his country, and that really gets at the core of his presidency and gets at the idea that he is someone who can unify the country because he can feel what Americans are feeling.
And the response to him in the church that day?
People in the church that day were expecting Obama to come and give a speech and be eloquent and be somber.They didn’t expect President Obama to sing “Amazing Grace” and change the entire feeling of that church to really encapsulate what that moment meant for so many people.So people in the church react to him as though he’s the father of the country.He’s not just the president in that moment; he’s someone who’s putting his hands on the nation and saying, “We’re going to have to get through this, but I understand your pain.”It was remarkable.
Bernie Sanders and the Democratic Party
Let me ask you about Bernie, who you raised earlier.So the ’16 campaign is in full swing around this time.There are progressives that are disappointed by Obama, and they are throwing their weight behind Bernie.There’s the early win in New Hampshire.Help me understand Bernie’s rise.
Well, there are progressives who are angry at Obama and remain frustrated at Obama for a number of issues, including his handling of policing and the DOJ not doing enough, or not doing enough in their eyes when it comes to police-involved shootings.They’re also angry because President Obama deports thousands of people, and there are immigration activists who see him as the “deporter in chief” and give him that nickname.So by the time Bernie Sanders gets on the scene in 2016 and 2015, people are longing in some parts of America for a more progressive candidate, for a more progressive face of the Democratic Party.
So Bernie Sanders gets on the scene, and he coalesces his message around the fact that the system is rigged and that people who are rich and are making a lot of money; they’re the source of the problems in America.And he makes this idea that middle-class Americans are not being served by their government, a central theme of his candidacy.And it works.
It’s populism on the left?
It’s populism on the left.And there are people, including a lot of millennials, who feel left out of the Democratic Party.They feel as though the Democratic Party sees millennials as the Facebook generation.They’re the generation who doesn’t really understand how much baby boomers and others had to struggle to make it, when in reality, millennials are the generation that saw Lehman Brothers collapse.Millennials are the generation who are saddled with student loan debt.Millennials are the generation who understand that racism may not be in “Colored only” signs but who have still seen their friends and their family members shot down by police officers.
So there’s this idea that millennials want to be treated as people who are Americans, who have dealt with hardships, and Bernie Sanders has a message for them in particular.
And Hillary did not?Hillary didn’t speak to them in the same way.It was an establishment voice?
Hillary Clinton was an establishment voice to some people.Hillary Clinton was also being targeted by the Russians.… There were millennials who were focused on the Clintons using the term “superpredators” and were focused on the 1994 crime bill, even though some of them hadn’t even been born when that happened, or were very young when that happened.But they were still dealing with the remnants of mass incarceration.
But there is at least some evidence that… Russia was having this campaign that was centered on making sure that African Americans were focused on the term “superpredator.”So I think there was one, real outrage by the way that the Clintons had ushered in mass incarceration through the 1994 crime bill, but there was also a social media campaign by a foreign government pushing millennials away from the Clintons.
The Access Hollywood Tape
Let me ask you about that Access Hollywood tape.… So you’re seeing this video that goes out, and the Republican establishment is seeing this video, and Republican leadership is seeing this video, and they are starting to break with the campaign.There’s a Trump response to the video, which is not the apology but the decision by Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner to bring about the Clinton-era accusers.Help us understand what they’re doing and how they pull off this success.
The Access Hollywood tape and the aftermath crystallize the presidency of President Trump, which is that he will never apologize.He will never back down.He will always try to go lower than his opponents.So in this case, you have the president on camera talking about sexually harassing and sexually assaulting women—not just joking, but actually talking about that.And you have the Trump campaign saying: “We know how to fix this.We’re going to bring the women who say they were sexually assaulted by the Clintons to the debates.We’re going to make Bill Clinton’s issues and his challenges center stage for Hillary Clinton’s presidency.”
And it works in many ways.Republicans are jumping ship after the Access Hollywood tape.They’re talking about their daughters and their sisters, and you see so many Republicans denouncing the president, even though he is the Republican nominee and there’s not going to be someone else to emerge.The Republicans are basically saying: “Whatever.Give it to the Democrats.”But President Trump doubles down, and he does something that no Republican strategist would have told him to do, which is that he goes even lower and makes Bill Clinton’s challenges the center of Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
It’s a counterpunch, and it really turns up the heat on the entire moment.
Yeah.The Access Hollywood debacle and the response by President Trump illustrates the way that he plays politics.He punches, and then he punches harder, and then he doubles down, and he refigures, and then he punches again.He is never someone that's going to say, “I made a mistake,” or, “I apologize.”That’s not part of his character, it’s not part of his presidency, it’s not part of his campaign.It’s also not part of who he is as a person.
And his base responds how?
I talked to so many Republican women after the Access Hollywood tape who told me: “This is what my husband is like.This is what my uncle is like.”I think lost in the Access Hollywood debate is how women are treated in this country.There were so many women who are dealing with being victims of sexual assault and sexual violence that can look at the Access Hollywood tape and say, “Well, if my life has been hard, I’ve had to bear the challenges and the consequences of my family member sexually assaulting me, how can I hold the president to a higher standard that I have people who are close to me who have violated me?”
And I think that’s the saddest part of the Access Hollywood tape.It’s not the politics of it; it’s the fact that women have been made to bear unbearable sexual assault experiences, and they threw up their hands at the Access Hollywood tape and say, “He’s not any worse than anyone else.”
The Trump Victory
… Let’s go to the election.The forgotten that we talked about earlier speak, and in many ways, it’s a rebuke of Obama.Do you think he understood that this group was out there as he’s watching the election?
It’s hard to say whether or not President Trump is a political genius who knew that there was this group of people, this fragile coalition of a couple of states that he could somehow channel to win the presidency.What we do know is the president is going with his gut, and he’s going with his political instincts and saying, “If I feel this way, there’s probably a group of people out there who agree with me.”And he’s capitalizing on his fame and the success of The Apprentice.So many people, the first time they hear the name “Donald Trump,” it’s in recognition of his wealth and his power, and the people who end up making up his support and his base are people who are taken by the idea that when they land in a city, they can see the name “Trump” on a building.
And Obama watching the election that night, the rebuke of his presidency, the feeling that there’s this group that has come out for President-elect Trump, do you think he understood that?
No one expected President Trump to win, including President Trump and President Obama.They were both equally surprised.For President Obama, it must have been heartbreaking to know that the person who was succeeding you is someone who built his career on a racist idea that you weren’t born in this country and that you somehow maybe through your own governing and your own policies somehow opened up a lane for this base of Trump supporters to usher in someone who you’re completely the opposite of into the White House.
It’s hard to say whether or not President Obama feels regret about that, because I think there’s also, based on my conversation with people close to President Obama and Democrats, there’s this feeling that President Obama just by being African American ushered in the Trump base; that him being the first black president made people so angry that they threw aside political experience, threw aside people who were not condescending, people who were instead embracing diversity, threw aside all of that to say, “We want President Trump.”
… The inauguration.So we talked about the speech.This is more about the response after.This is the debate about the crowd size.“Alternative facts” comes a little bit later, but it’s in this time period.The Women’s March, the press is also coming down very hard on Trump.It’s a bit of the preview of what’s to come.But you’re there; you’re in the thick of it.What’s it like?
President Trump’s inauguration was interesting because he felt like someone who was angry still, even though he had won what he had sought.And the idea that the first controversy of the Trump presidency is him claiming that his inauguration crowd size was larger than Obama’s underscores what will be the theme of his presidency for the years that he’s in office, which is that he feels aggrieved by the media, by the American public, and he’s, I think, a little jealous of President Obama because he sees him as this beloved figure that had record crowd sizes at his inauguration.
So we see in President Trump him making this claim that is baseless, that his inauguration size is bigger than President Obama’s.What we also see is President Trump forcing people in the White House to defend his lies.Sean Spicer has that press conference where he’s angry and throwing up his arms and saying, “Of course his inauguration size was bigger than Obama’s.”And it’s the first taste of what we’re going to see, which is President Trump lying, and then White House aides defending that lie, even though it’s demonstrably false.
Trump and the Media
… Early on, why don’t we just talk about this kind of developing “enemy of the [people]” idea?… What are you seeing at the time?How do you understand it at that moment, what he’s doing?
After President Trump wins the election, he needs another foil, and he decides that the media and reporters are going to be his opponent.And as a result, we see him start to really use the term “fake news” in a new way.It’s in a way to really cast aside any sort of reporting that illuminates the flaws of his presidency, and it’s successful in a lot of ways because everyone starts using the term “fake news.”It’s also dangerous in a lot of ways because international leaders start jailing journalists and using the term “fake news.”
But the president is looking for someone to fight with, and the media and reporters are people who punch back, so he’s essentially getting the fight that he wants.
Later you guys have these little moments.What do you make of it at the time?What is he doing?
President Trump, I think, really just likes to argue and wants people to be pulled into a confrontation with him.I’m not the kind of reporter who is confrontational by nature.I’m the kind of reporter who presses for answers, so in my interactions with the president, I’ve always kind of really pushed back with questions.
So after the midterms, and he’s obviously lost, and his party’s lost a number of seats, he’s angry about that.He also used ads that were deemed too racist to appear on Fox News.So my question, which might be the question of the presidency in a couple of years, is, are you emboldening white nationalists?Are you doing this on purpose?And the president gets angry and calls my question racist.But I pushed him on that because the president would rather argue with someone than actually be pushed on questions.
And that, I think, has been my experience with the president.After the testimony of Robert Mueller, I put the question to him about what Robert Mueller said about his campaign aides lying.Robert Mueller said that aides to the White House in the Trump campaign were lying to his investigators and his team, and when I put that question to the president, said, “Well, what do you make of that?,” he was angry about that question.But instead of me saying, “Why are you yelling at me?,” I just kept on asking him the question.And eventually he answered it.
I think that’s how you handle President Trump.It’s by pushing the question, not making it about yourself, not making it about the media, but about pushing for answers.And the president doesn’t like that.But it’s how I think you best do your job in these times.
Trump and Charlottesville
Let me ask you about Charlottesville. …
… President Trump’s comments on Charlottesville leave me personally aghast.I’m a reporter who has reported on race for a long time, and I never would have imagined the person in the office of the president calling people who go to a Nazi rally “very fine people.”And the president takes a moment where he could be talking about unity or hope and change, and instead gives weight to the idea that it’s OK to go to a Nazi rally.
And a young woman died in Charlottesville.So the president isn’t just OK’ing people who went to a rally.He’s also nodding to someone who used his vehicle to kill someone in the name of white supremacy.That’s terrifying to a lot of people in this country who are expecting the federal government to protect them from the wills and violent nature of white supremacy.Charlottesville is probably the ugliest and the saddest moment of President Trump’s time in office, because people at that moment expect more from him.People at that moment say: “OK, maybe he was not qualified to be president.Maybe he has sexually assaulted women, frankly, but he’ll have the decency to call out white supremacy and Nazis very clearly.”And the president doesn’t do that.And that leaves a large part of the country feeling dangerously unsafe.
This is a sharp contrast from President Obama in South Carolina and in Charleston.
Yeah.In Charlottesville, President Trump calls Nazis very fine people and decides he doesn’t want to be interested in unifying the country, where in South Carolina, President Obama, he comes to the church in South Carolina with empathy and tries to unify the country and doesn’t vilify white Americans, even though the face of that particular tragedy was a white man.Instead, he says we’re all going to get through this.President Trump doesn’t do that. …
There’s the expectation, in some ways, that this is a moment for the president to heal all wounds, and in fact, that’s quite the opposite again.He doubles down.
Yeah, Charlottesville is probably the first time where the country realizes, “This is going to get bad.”And by the president not acknowledging that the murder of an American citizen by a supporter of white supremacy is totally unacceptable, by him not doing that, he gives weight to the ideas of racists, and fast-forward, you see an increasing number of hate crimes.You see people telling their neighbors to go back to their countries.You see the president later ratcheting up his rhetoric.And it is the beginning of a time in America where people realize that America is not just a place where racist ideals can exist, but it’s a place where racist ideals can be fueled by the White House.
The Dreamers and DACA
… DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals], doing something about DACA, is a big priority for Jeff Sessions, Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller pretty early into this administration.There’s talk there’s going to be an EO [executive order] to reverse or to rescind DACA, and that doesn’t happen for a few reasons.But ultimately, there’s lots of discussion about what to do about the program, and then ultimately Jeff Sessions makes an announcement.Are you around during this time period.Do you remember the—
I was covering Congress.
OK.Do you remember the Jeff Sessions speech that the deadline is going to be instituted for Dreamers?
… So President Trump comes into office, and there’s a little bit of hope that maybe he will do something for “Dreamers.”And then Jeff Sessions makes this speech that makes it pretty clear that the Trump administration is going to set a deadline for people to become Dreamers, to take advantage of DACA, and that they will, in fact, be moving to possibly deport thousands of people who were brought to this country as young children and who know no other home but America.
Let me ask you about a White House meeting that happens Jan. 9 of 2018.This is the meeting where the president brings in a bipartisan group from the Hill, mostly Democrats.[Sen.] Dianne Feinstein is there, and it’s a conversation about the DREAM [Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors] Act, and he’s saying, “Send me what you’ve got; I’ll take the heat.”And it goes live on CNN.Are you there for that?
I’m there.I’m watching it.I wasn’t in the room.
That’s OK.
That Jan. 9 meeting was interesting because President Trump was positioning himself as this person who’s going to broker a deal between Republicans and Democrats.There’s hope that he might usher in comprehensive immigration changes, which is something that President Obama could never accomplish.And there’s a feeling that because President Trump wants to outdo President Obama so much that he might actually be the person who can get this done.So he is talking about the Dreamers as this class of people that he wants to protect.You see Democrats and Republicans openly discussing things that are usually talked about in closed-door meetings.So it’s also a window into what will be the Trump presidency, which is a lot of freewheeling meetings happening on live television, a sort of The Apprentice for the White House.But there is real hope in Congress that there might be a change in immigration.
In fact, [Rep.] Kevin McCarthy in that meeting says, “Wait a second; you may not want to—” and sort of pulls the president back.Do you remember that?
Well, I remember Republicans being very, very scared hearing the president talk about ushering in immigration changes.President Trump even floated the idea of a pathway to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants across the country.… But because President Trump was this person who ran on a sort of populist agenda, Republicans don’t know what to expect when it comes to his stances on immigration.So it makes Republicans nervous, but of course ultimately the president makes it very clear that he is not going to be ushering in immigration changes and that Democrats are not going to get what they want out of this president.
Two days later, he calls [Sen.] Lindsey Graham and [Sen.] Dick Durbin and says: “Come up here.I’m ready to sign and talk to you about the DREAM Act.”And they’re on their way up in a car, and there’s another group from the Hill that beats them up there.These are hard-liners.This is [Sen.] Tom Cotton; this is Rep.[Robert] Goodlatte.And they’ve been called by Stephen Miller and by [then-White House Chief of Staff] John Kelly.And this is the meeting in which the president has some pretty intense words for certain immigrants, a certain group of immigrants.Can you take me to that meeting?
… The president lays out pretty plainly in this meeting the kinds of immigrants that matter to him.He doesn’t want people from Haiti or from Africa, countries that he refers to as “shithole countries.”He says he wants people from Norway.And it’s impossible to ignore that the people he’s talking about as undesirable are people of color and black people, and the people he wants to build the American dream with are white immigrants.
And it is a defining moment in his presidency, because people realize that the president will speak very bluntly on issues of race and that he will not try to sugarcoat what he wants the country to look like.
I remember being a reporter, and I was on break.I was on vacation, and I got called by my aunt, who immigrated to this country from Haiti in the 1970s, and she was crying, because she said: “Well, why would he call Haiti a ‘shithole’ country?Why would he say that I’m not someone who he wants to come to America?I have a good job. I have a degree.I pay my taxes.”And it was a window into just how deeply felt those comments.It wasn’t just that the president was saying he didn’t like the makeup of Haiti or the economics of Haiti and African countries.It’s that he was saying the people who came from those countries were not the kind of people who deserved to be Americans.And that was so offensive and so hurtful, and it spurred me to call the Haitian government, who later told me that they were going to be asking for a formal explanation from the American government as to what the president meant by “shithole countries.”
It’s an incredible message to send out.
It’s an incredible message, and President Trump saying that about African countries and Haiti, it goes to the heart of what people had been facing for decades.People had been told that Haitians brought AIDS to this country, even though that’s not true.People had had to march and protest to be seen as rightful Americans in this country.And people thought they were past that period.Haitians thought that now they had proven that they were Ph.D.-carrying, that they were owning taxi companies, that they were thriving in America, that they were being welcomed into America, and what they learn is that the president is going to rely on the old stereotypes that hurt them in the past to build the future of America.
Zero Tolerance and Family Separation
Let me ask you about “zero tolerance.”The program is announced by Jeff Sessions, and the wall memo’s been signed by [Department of Homeland Security Secretary] Kirstjen Nielsen.There’s sharp response from the public to this.Can you take me to the announcement?And then there’s this really monumental shift in immigration policy and enforcement strategy.
Jeff Sessions announces this zero tolerance policy on immigration, and it becomes crystal clear to advocates that their worst fears will be realized.The Trump administration uses the language of the president of immigrants invading this country, of immigrants being an undesirable part of this country.To then put into policy some of the things that President Trump had been talking about, people thought at first maybe when he called Mexicans rapists and criminals that that was going to be a campaign slogan issue, but that he was going to, when he became president, change his tone.
What Jeff Sessions makes very clear is he’s going to use the laws of America to really put into place what he thinks about immigrants.And it ultimately is used to separate thousands of immigrant families.Young children are pulled from the arms of their mothers.Infants are being told that they can no longer see their parents.It ushers in a part of America and a history of America that people are going to look at for years to come as the defining moments of the Trump presidency.
So zero tolerance turns into family separation, which turns into traumatic impacts on immigrant families and children.And the consequences of those actions, the consequence of the zero tolerance policy have not, I think, even begun to be seen, because we’re going to have generations of immigrants who are going to be able to tell the story of America ripping them from the arms of their parents.
… Let me ask you [about] another moment, though, in that room, when Kirstjen Nielsen comes in to defend the program and talks about family separations and really is combative.Do you remember that?
Secretary Nielsen defends the president’s policy of separating immigrant families, and she becomes the face, in some ways, of his immigration policies.And what Secretary Nielsen is dealing with is defending something that is, in most cases, indefensible.There’s audio of children crying for their parents.There’s a public outcry from evangelicals, white evangelicals who have supported the president who say even this is a step too far.But Secretary Nielsen and the president double down. …
And this idea of deterrence, that this is a policy that’s thought of to deter immigrants from coming?
The Trump administration makes the argument that child separation has to happen, family separation has to happen because immigrants need to know before they come to America that this is going to happen to them and they want it to be a sort of deterrent.The problem is that immigrants coming from Central America have no idea that they’re going to be separated from their children.Mothers come to America and don’t know that the moment they step foot on American soil, their infant children and their toddlers and their family members are going to be put in separate holding cells from them.
So it’s a complete farce by the Trump administration to say that child separation was a deterrent.And it ultimately proves to be indefensible.The president, a couple of weeks into this very public outcry, has to take back family separation.And he then starts saying that President Obama had family separation, which is, of course, not true.But what we see is the president backed into a corner, and even he understands that he’s gone too far.
And he acts.He ends things.
President Trump ends family separation, at least on paper, even though advocates and the ACLU say family separation continues for weeks and maybe even currently.What we see is the president at least publicly trying to save face and say, “This wasn’t actually what I wanted to do; this was me just continuing what President Obama was doing,” which is a complete lie.The president wanted to separate families.… The president wanted to punish immigrant families coming to the United States, and he decided taking away immigrant children from their parents was going to be the way that he could send the message to each immigrant that was coming to America that America didn’t want them here.
In turn, that becomes something that he cannot defend, and the public outcry is so loud that he has to then sign an executive order to end a policy that he thought was going to be a hallmark event that people would rally around.
The Caravans and the 2018 Midterm Elections
The caravans ahead of the midterm.He’s talking about it; Stephen Miller is giving him daily stats on the number of folks that are coming.What is that strategy the White House is doing with the caravans?
President Trump and Republicans are faced with the midterm elections, and they have to decide on a strategy to essentially scare people into voting.The president is always thinking about turnout in his base, and he decides that he wants to start using the caravans of immigrants coming to the United States as a foil for the 2018 midterms.And what we see is the president running ads that are deemed too racist even for Fox News to air, which is saying a lot.
And the day after the midterms, he drops the talk of caravans and has yet to pick it back up because that strategy ultimately failed.
Why didn’t it work?
The president’s use of caravans didn’t work in the 2018 midterms because Democrats decided that they weren’t going to be making the case that the election was about Donald Trump.Instead, they turned to health care and said, “We can make your lives better.”They settle on a message; that message is then talked about throughout the country.And as a result, Democrats are elected in large numbers.They seat a freshman class that is more diverse than any other freshman class, and they see a strategy in which they can beat President Trump’s messaging.
And President Trump is very angry about that, and it is possibly a shadow of the 2020 election.In 2016, Democrats lost by making the argument that President Trump was unfit for the office; that he was racist; that he was a misogynist.Hillary Clinton said all of those things and still lost.So I think Democrats in 2018 decided they need to have a policy-centered campaign, and as a result, they usher in a large change and take back the House.
Leadership Changes at DHS
Let me ask you about, back to immigration, the DHS purge.We followed this ascension of Stephen Miller through a lot of crises, but then also sort of as he’s accrued more and more power and oversight.What do you make of the turnover at DHS, the frustrations the White House has about increased numbers at the border, and then also Stephen Miller’s role in all of that?
Stephen Miller is someone who is central to the president’s immigration strategy.And what the Trump administration sees, even as it ushers in hard-line immigration policies, they see the numbers of apprehensions on the border going up.They see people coming and rushing to the border to still try to get into America.They understand that even though they are trying to enact policies that are going to be deterrents, people are still motivated by violence in their home countries and by economic impoverishment to leave and take their chances on coming to America.
And as a result, the president wants to see more people in jail.The president wants to see the number of apprehensions go down, and the president wants to see more deportations.He wants to be the deporter in chief that President Obama was, frankly.And as a result, the president starts to purge people at the Department of Homeland Security.And these are people who defended his tactics.Secretary Nielsen is someone who, again and again, defended the policy of child separation even as it hurt her own reputation.
He does away with her.He does away with a number of officials and ushers in all sorts of acting people, acting titles, so that he can do away with them if he doesn’t like them.So what we now see is a cast of characters who are essentially handpicked by President Trump and Stephen Miller to pursue policies that they think will be even more of a deterrent to immigrants.
… Also, there’s a frustration that these are hard-liners that are being put in or being replaced or being fired, and they just seem to not be moving quickly enough, right?...
What President Trump and Stephen Miller really want is mass deportations, mass roundups, and they want immigrant officials to circumvent the laws.And they can’t do that.Time and time again, what we see is President Trump’s policies being held up by the courts.And in some ways, the leaders of the Department of Homeland Security, their hands are tied by actual laws, international laws and American laws, and the president is frustrated by that, and as a result, he’s firing people and trying to replace leaders in the Department of Homeland Security.But he’s not seeing the fast results that he wants to see and that Stephen Miller wants to see.
Stephen Miller’s Staying Power
What does it tell you that Steve Bannon is blown away early, Jeff Sessions leaves after the midterms, Stephen Miller remains?I mean, these are sort of the original kind of group that helped define and push the president on immigration.
Based on my reporting with White House officials in the Trump administration, the way to survive the Trump presidency is to really adjust to whatever the president wants to do, to always be ready to defend whatever the president wants to say, even if it means contradicting yourself on a daily basis.And what the president finds in Stephen Miller is someone who will go on TV when he’s summoned to defend the president’s policies, who will also really back hard-line immigration stances, at times use racist tropes to describe immigrants…
And as a result, Stephen Miller sticks around while other establishment Republicans who tried to adjust the president’s language, who tried to change his Twitter habits, all these people are done away, the people who are considered the “adults in the room.”The president doesn’t like to be seen as being handled, and as a result, all of those people are gone, and the people who remain in the background who are really seen as people who can carry out the president’s agenda, those people remain.
Trump’s Language on Race and Immigrants
“Go back to where you came from,” this line that he gives: What does he mean?What is he saying?What do people hear?And ultimately, the response?
The president tweets that four women of color who are congresswomen [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar] who are American citizens, three of whom were born in the United States, he tweets that they should go back to the countries from which they came.And what he means is exactly what he says.He wants them gone.He wants them eliminated as a political issue.He wants them to be not part of the American society that he’s building.
And it’s patently racist, and it’s a way for him to make these four women of color the new face of his opponents.First he had Hillary Clinton.Then he had the media.And now he’s really found an opponent that he really likes to beat up on, and that is “the squad,” as they’re called, in Congress.And people hear the president saying that he wants people who don’t agree with him to be gone.The president and the White House try to walk that back in conversations.White House officials have said: “Well, what he really meant was that these people, if they don’t like what’s going on in America, they should move to other countries.Maybe they should go to Canada.”
But we then see a crowd in North Carolina chant, “Send her back,” in referring to Rep. Omar.So even as the White House and President Trump try to adjust the language, voters make it very clear that they understand what he’s saying, and that is that she should go back to Africa, that she should go back to the country from which she came, and that she should take her colleagues with her.
Republicans on Capitol Hill largely seem embarrassed by the president’s language and his rhetoric, but I should tell you in conversations that I’ve had with voters in places like Dayton, Ohio, people really like that the president is saying this very plainly.I interviewed someone who said: “I’ve been telling people to go back to their country, and I’m happy to hear the president also saying that.If people have immigrated here, they shouldn’t dissent.They should leave.”
And the mayor of Dayton, Ohio, has told me that there was immigrants in her city who have had to deal with people screaming, “Go back to your country,” on the streets.So the president is endorsing an idea and giving support to people who would scream “Go back to their country” to other fellow American citizens.
The El Paso Shooting
The shooting in El Paso and the shooter’s manifesto, which is specifically written about Mexican Americans and Mexicans, the elevated rhetoric, the attack, the politicization of the attack on both sides: What do you make of it?
The president uses rhetoric about immigrants and spends thousands of dollars on Facebook ads and other ads making the case that immigrants are “invading” this country.And I’ve talked to people, voters, who are worried and continue to worry that unstable people will look at the president’s words and take that to mean that they should go out and exterminate, kill, immigrants.
In El Paso, we actually see someone doing that.The president didn’t say, “Go out and kill and shoot people in Walmart,” but this shooter, who maybe was already going to be motivated to kill people based off his own personal ideals, he echoes the president’s language and targets specifically Latinos and Mexican immigrants and kills them.
And that is, I think, the beginning of a different phase in the Trump administration, which is that they are now having to reckon with people using language just like the president’s to actually go out and mass-murder people.And I think it’s still up in the air how the president’s going to deal with that.The president has not ever really taken ownership of the idea that he’s used language that was then used by a mass shooter to kill people.He avoids that topic completely.
He also avoids the fact that he was mentioned in the manifesto of the New Zealand killer who killed people in mosques and specifically targeted Muslims.He doesn’t want to deal with the consequences of at least people taking his words and using them violently.And I think it’s going to be a big issue in the 2020 election, because Democrats are going to be making the case that the president isn’t just using racist language, but that he’s actually giving weight to people to carry out violent acts against people of color.
The 2020 Election
The issue of immigration leading into 2020: It’s obviously on the top list of those parties in terms of priorities.But where do you see it, and how do you see it playing out in the election?
Immigration’s going to be a central part of the 2020 election because President Trump has made it a central part of his presidency.He didn’t just talk about it in 2016 and then drop the issue.He has gone after immigrants on all sorts of fronts.He’s gone after Dreamers.He’s separated immigrant families.He’s ended programs to help immigrants come to America.He’s helped people talk badly about immigrants by in some ways, people think, dog whistling to white supremacists.
So immigration is going to be a key issue in 2020, and the thing that I hear from people is that there are a lot of people who are going to be looking at the president’s rhetoric as motivation to vote for Democrats.Democrats are going to be making the case that they will be ushering in a new phase in America and that immigrants will be welcome here, and immigrants of all colors will be welcome here.So I think it will be interesting to see what happens.
[Talk about] how Facebook, Twitter, the growth of conservative media, how they helped Trump succeed, and even more than that, how they possibly changed America.
Conservative media has been a megaphone for President Trump.It’s been a place where people can openly talk about conspiracy theories as if they’re facts.It’s been a place where people can openly say racist things and have it be aired in millions of homes.I’m specifically talking about Fox News, but also conservative radio outlets.They’ve been the engine of the Trump administration while President Trump has been able to tap into some people’s culturally insensitive thoughts and feelings.Conservative media has been the driver of that.They’ve been the person and the entity cheering the president on.And it’s why you see so many people from conservative media working at the White House and why you also see people from the White House leaving and then going to work for conservative media.It’s a revolving door because it’s a mutually beneficial relationship.
The last State of the Union that Obama gave was pretty amazing because he talked about the “rancor and suspicion between the parties” as worse, and he admitted to the fact that—the failure, basically, of being able to accomplish some of the promises that he came to town to do.If you can talk about those failures and sort of what it means for the legacy of the Obama administration and how it leads, in some ways, to the amazing thing of the election of Donald Trump.
Chris Rock once said that African Americans should celebrate George Bush because they gave us President Obama.I think the same almost could be true, that there might not be a President Trump without a President Obama, both in the fact that he was an African American man and that angered people solely based on when they looked at him, but also in his failure to sell Americans on this idea that we are all one America.He made this famous speech that we’re not a blue America or a red America; we’re just the United States of America.
In 2019 and 2020, it’s crystal clear that we are, in fact, a very blue America and a very red America, and an America who doesn’t vote.So there are three real big categories of Americans.And the legacy of President Obama will always have the footnote of the fact that he was succeeded in office by President Trump, someone who didn’t believe that he was born in this country, someone who didn’t believe that he deserved to be president, someone who ushered in his own political career by using racism to enrage people all over this country and motivate them to vote for him.
It’s a tough thing.… In my conversations with the Obama administration, they don’t feel as though President Obama failed, because they feel as though even if he had been successful in trying to make the case to white Americans or to some white Americans—which they believe he was—that discrimination was something that Americans were living with in all sorts of ways, the very fact that an African American was in the Oval Office, the very fact that when people turned on their television they saw a black woman and two black girls living in the White House—…People seeing President Obama and a black family in the Oval Office ushered in a type of anger that President Obama, and I’d venture to say a lot of Americans, didn’t quite see coming.And that is the legacy of President Obama whether he likes it or not.But it’s also the legacy of America.It’s that we all have to deal with the fact that as we first got our first African American president,… the reaction of Americans, was not to embrace him.It wasn’t to say, “This is a new time.”It was to say, “Well, maybe he wasn’t born in this country.”
Some people say that President Obama failed to unite the country, but I think what we really all learned is that the country failed to unite around President Obama.Instead, what the country did was do what it always does, which is sit back in racism and go back to the idea that we were founded in racist ideals; that our founders were people who owned enslaved African bodies; that our founders were people who wrote that all men were created equally, but never really believed that to be true.
So America was, in fact, America.It did what America always does, which is divide amongst itself.And President Obama, some people might say, is to blame for some of that.But some of that was just the way that the country is; that if you found a country on stolen land and kidnap millions of people and bring them to the United States and create a society where color is one of the core things that divides people, that’s going to take more than one president to fix.
Obama was a magnifying glass on many of those issues.
Obama and President Trump revealed to America that racism is not only something that exists, but in many ways racism is something that powers the very institutions that we hold dear; that our Founding Fathers and our founding ideals, that embedded in them was a sense of racism and a sense that if white people were going to succeed, black people had to be the people kneeling.
Toni Morrison wrote that fear is when people have to be tall by making other people stand on their knees.And that is, in some ways, what America is.The story of America is some people feeling tall while other people were on their knees.And that, I think, has been revealed 10 times over by both the presidencies of President Obama and President Trump.
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