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.

The following interview was conducted by FRONTLINE’s Gabrielle Schonder on July 2, 2020. It has been edited for clarity and length.

This interview appears in:

Trump’s American Carnage

President Biden

The Choice 2020

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Yamiche Alcindor

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Trump and the Central Park Five

It’s 1989.Rudy Giuliani is running for mayor of New York City, and Donald Trump runs a full-page ad in several New York City newspapers about two weeks after five men are arrested for attacking a jogger in the park.Can you help us understand the Donald Trump that wades into this controversy?

The Donald Trump that weighs into the Central Park Five, now the Exonerated Five, controversy is someone who sees this case and can’t resist going through and going to the worst parts of society.He jumps to conclusions and says that these five young boys should be given the death penalty.No one’s asking Donald Trump for his opinion.He’s not someone who was involved in crime or involved in any way in this case, but he wants to have his voice be heard, and he does that by using his money and his influence to call for the death penalty.

Two years before this, Donald Trump had sort of dipped his toe in the water in New Hampshire.He had contemplated a [presidential] run in ’87.Do you think he had politics on the mind when he ran this ad?

I think it’s tough to say whether or not President Trump, then just Donald Trump, had politics on his mind and running for president when he put out that ad calling for the death penalty of these five young men.What I can say is that what you see in Donald Trump in that ad is what you see in Donald Trump when he’s president, which is someone who is dipping his toe and really wading in to all sorts of really raucous societal issues, and he can’t resist but to give people an opinion that they’re not asking for.And he does this, of course, by using his power and his influence to get on the loudest bullhorn that he can afford.In this case, it’s a full-page ad in The New York Times, but going forward it’s going to be having billboards, or it’s going to be having commercials, or it’s going to be going on tours.What we see is the Donald Trump that is someone who just wants to lean in on his own stereotypes of what the world is, what these young men are, and uses that influence to just really call for this terrible thing.

And of course, I think what’s remarkable is that President Trump has never apologized for calling for the death penalty for the Central Park Five, now the Exonerated Five.He’s never said, “I was wrong.”Instead what he’s done is double down on what was clearly a mistake on his part, and he just won’t say, “Sorry.”And that is characteristic of his entire presidency.

Trump and Racial Discord

What is it about these issues, racial strife, that he sees opportunity in?

I think there are two parts.I think President Trump sees opportunity in discord of any kind—plastic straws, race relations.Anything that he thinks that people are arguing about, he wants to wade in and use it in some sort of opportunistic way for his own benefit.

But I think the other thing that’s happening here is that long before he was running for president, he was being raised by a father who was discriminating against African Americans in the very first apartments with the Trump name and the Trump brand on it.So what you see is someone who grew up in a family that was raised by people who did not value African Americans or people of color.He was raised in a setting where the people of color and the Black people that he saw were people who were working for him.It was his father’s driver; it was a maid in his home.

So now, as he grows up, he continues to use those same stereotypes to look at African Americans as people who serve him in many ways, and I think that that is indicative of the way that he’s approached life going forward and the way that he approached when he was sued by the federal government for discriminating against African Americans in the apartments later on that him and his father were both developing together. …

We talked to a former Apprentice contestant who’s an Indian American who said that he always thought that Trump saw himself as an aggrieved party and that that’s something that kind of connects with his base.

I would agree.Having interviewed people who know Donald Trump, both his African American ex-girlfriend and African Americans who have known him for a long time, he was someone who would align himself with rich African Americans because not only did he think that African Americans who were rich were kind of an interesting thing—they were a celebrity; they were part of this persona that he wanted to carry for himself—he also saw in himself someone who could connect with people because he continues to see himself as someone who’s an outer-borough guy.He’s someone who came from Queens.He’s not from the fancy, flashy Manhattan.He had to work to get to Manhattan.

So what he’s seeing in himself is someone who’s a victim, but I think you also see that even when he’s president.He wins the presidency.He defies all odds, and it surprises everyone and gets to be president in 2016, and still, he seems like he’s an aggrieved party, that somehow Hillary Clinton was given something that he wasn’t, that somehow Barack Obama was handed something that he wasn’t.He continues to have that outlook on life, that he is an aggrieved party, that he is a victim of people who are not treating him fairly.

'The Apprentice'

Let me ask you a little bit about the power of The Apprentice.So he does the show after the failures in Atlantic City.And I wonder if you can help me understand what he’s doing.He has his eye on Hollywood; he’s rebranding the Trump name.What does that reality show, what does the boardroom experience provide for him?

The Apprentice provides a runway for President Trump to take off both in politics but also in celebrity.He had been seeking this name recognition, this widespread idea of him as a successful businessman, and he was someone who got some of that in part, but that also, because he had failed and because people knew that his father had handed him a lot of the wealth that he had and had given him a leg up in a lot of projects, that he was someone who was still seeking to look like he had made it on his own, when of course that’s just not true.

But The Apprentice allows him to sell this idea of himself as the most successful businessman in America and as someone who can, with a stroke of a pen, have big impacts on people’s lives.

Do we get a preview as to how he’s going to govern by watching him on The Apprentice?

I would say if you haven’t watched The Apprentice, you literally don’t understand how President Trump became president or how he’s governing.The whole entire thing is lost if you don’t watch The Apprentice, because what you see in Donald Trump is someone who is both selling this idea of himself as the best and the brightest person in America, but he’s also someone who’s cruel to the people he thinks of as losers, who takes joy in firing people in these grand ways.And you see that as president.I keep thinking about James Comey and the fact that he fired him while he was talking to a group of FBI agents.So James Comey got the almost O.J. Simpson treatment in that he—his motorcade was followed by a helicopter on the way back to the airport because he was now a disgraced FBI director.

So it’s in these bombastic ways that the president fires people.You can—you can look at the James Comey firing, you can look at the firing of John Bolton and so many other people, and it’s a straight line back to The Apprentice.

The 'Access Hollywood' Tape

Let me ask you about Access Hollywood weekend and the Access Hollywood crisis.

… Help me understand the lessons he’s applying from reality TV, from maybe Roy Cohn to that crisis, because we’re trying to evaluate both candidates in how they handle crisis over their lives.

The way that Donald Trump handles the Hollywood Access [sic] tape crisis is straight from Roy Cohn; it’s straight from The Apprentice; it’s straight from his father.It’s this idea that you double down and go forward; that you’re never apologetic; that you are someone who, even when people think that you’re down, that you’re going to just get right back up.And it’s also this idea from Roger Stone that all press is still good press, even if it’s bad press, or what other people would think of as bad press.

So you see the Hollywood Access [sic] weekend, and Republicans are fleeing from Donald Trump.Republicans who had heard him say that Mexicans were rapists and criminals, Republicans who had seen him do all sorts of other scandalous things, the Access Hollywood tape comes out, and everyone talks about their daughter and their wife, and everyone’s fleeing from President Trump.And everyone is kind of thinking that he might be done, that this entire Republican nomination, that it might come to an end.

And Donald Trump just doubles down.He refuses to really walk away from, of course, the candidacy.He refuses to acknowledge that he might be wrong in this case.And what’s remarkable is that you see Donald Trump supporters following his lead.I was a reporter in North Carolina the weekend that that Access Hollywood tape came out, and I was asking women in North Carolina, “What do you make of this tape?”And the minute that “locker room talk” was the way that the president was going to defend himself, his supporters grabbed on to that and said: “Well, this is just locker room talk.This is just how men speak.”

What do you think he learned from that moment?

I think what Donald Trump learned from the Access Hollywood tape moment, also what he learned from his entire run for president, is that he could really only count on himself; that the Republican Party, established Republicans, they were not going to have his back the moment things got rocky, and also that their counsel to him, that it might not be the best counsel; that he needed to rely on his own political instincts to figure out how to move forward.So that’s why you see a President Trump who in some ways is not beholden to the Republican Party and who simply does not trust the Republican Party, because they didn’t have his back after the Access Hollywood tape; they didn’t have his back when he was running for office.And now as president, they really are holding on, because the voters are still holding on to President Trump.He understands as president that the moment that Republican voters seem like they’re abandoning him, that the Republican Party and Mitch McConnell will do the same.

Trump and the ‘Crisis Presidency’

… I wonder if you can help us understand how the administration has been dominated by crisis, but more importantly how he’s brought in these lessons from The Apprentice, from his early lessons from Roy Cohn and Roger Stone towards adversaries, towards close advisers.You see certainly so many of these relationships blow up: Bolton, Michael Cohen, others, folks that are really loyal.I wonder if you can help us with the mood that you cover day in and day out.

Well, President Trump is a crisis president, but he’s also a reality-TV president, and I say that because what you see is this quickly swirling, revolving door at the White House that just keeps on swinging day in, day out.Almost monthly you see somebody leaving the White House in some sort of bombastic way, or the president firing them via Twitter or via some angry soliloquy that he delivers from the Rose Garden.This is a presidency that was defined by chaos from the very, very beginning.

And he’s also a president that has had to weather chaos; that he is someone who has, of course, has been impeached.He also had to weather the Mueller investigation.So he’s also a president who, as he was firing people, as he was doing all sorts of policy decisions that really threw the country into chaos in a lot of ways, he’s also someone who was defined by the fact that his presidency was constantly being investigated by Democrats, by independent counsel.So he was constantly feeling like he was on the defense.And that has also made him lash out at people of color, at African Americans and immigrants in a way to defend himself.

So he’s also a president, when backed up against the wall, he goes to his instincts, and his instincts are to really poke at the divisions that are America, poke at the idea of immigrants taking jobs of Americans, poke at the idea of African Americans being somewhat not worthy of some of the things that they are receiving, poking at the idea that white Americans are victims of a society that does not value them in the way that they do immigrants or African Americans.

… Can I ask you just a little bit about this theme that we’re talking about, racial strife and Central Park Five and birtherism and Charlottesville?… Help us understand that history he brings to the current movement.

From the very beginning, President Trump’s idea of race was: There are the people who are serving us, and there are the people who are being served.So he grew up with a dad who had a Black driver….And he kept that idea of what African Americans were to him for a long time.And then he moves into the Central Park Five and starts to wade into this idea of African Americans as criminals and as animals who deserve to be put to death.And then he moves into this idea that he can use the idea of race to crystallize his political ideas by calling into question the birthplace of the first African American president, President Barack Obama.

So he’s used race throughout his entire life to his own benefit by making it about his name when it comes to the Central Park Five, by making it about his political will and his political ideas when it comes to Barack Obama.And then when he becomes president, he uses race and, frankly, racist terms, like “Kung Flu” or saying that Black Lives Matter is a symbol of hate.He uses that idea of race to continue to solidify what he thinks are his political—his political wins.

I think President Trump is someone who sees racial strife as a way to get at what people are feeling in their homes and to make people feel like they are being seen.So if you’re a white person in this country who felt like the country didn’t give you all the things that you deserve to get, President Trump is here to tell you, you are right to feel resentment.You are white—you are right as a white person to feel as though this country has not taken care of you while it’s taking care of immigrants and African Americans.

The Lafayette Square Photo Op

Let me ask you about Lafayette Square.You’re at the White House.Can you walk me through that afternoon?

… So the president starts speaking in the Rose Garden.He’s surrounded by reporters.It’s kind of this valiant moment where he’s going to be talking about what’s going on in the country.He’s talking about the fact that he wants to be an ally to peaceful protesters.There’s a lot of anticipation because the president had not really weighed in a substantive way on this issue, this reckoning that we were having as a country on race.

I’m listening to the president speak on my iPhone and tweeting about it with another iPhone.And I’m sitting on the corner of Pennsylvania and 17th Street, which is really a historic corner where all the White House reporters go in to enter the White House.So to me, this is a moment of kind of solace where we’re all wondering what the president’s going to say.

And I start coughing and choking, and I start wondering what’s going on.And I look up, and it’s clouds of smoke, and it’s officers throwing tear gas or some sort of chemical gas that is making my throat and my eyes burn.And I see people running and this line of police officers coming, and they’re clearing the streets.And I’m completely confused because I’m wondering, why is the White House doing this?Why are federal officers moving people out of the way while the president is speaking in the Rose Garden?

And only hours later do I come to find out that I was physically moved out of the way, along with protesters who were being peaceful, who were not doing anything to these officers, because the president wanted to have this stroll to St. John’s Church to have this photo op where he held a Bible and wanted to be seen as leading the country through this moment.

Trump and Law and Order

He’s been obsessed with law and order since his days at the New York Military Academy in middle school/high school.What’s his view of this moment and the protesters and this show of strength that you witnessed?

The president’s view of the protesters was adversarial from the very beginning.He saw this as Americans or people who were his enemies taking to the streets, demanding something that he didn’t want to give them.And in that moment when he clears people from Lafayette Square and he—and he walks over to the church, what he’s doing is telling people: “I’m in control.I can physically move your body.And I’m the one who gets to tell you when you can stay on the street corner and when you can do the things that you want to do.”

And he holds up that Bible to say, “Yes, I’m doing this in the name of Christianity; I’m aligning myself with evangelicals,” but really also what he’s doing in this moment is saying, “This is my show of telling people that I can do whatever I want to do as president.”The president had been saying for a while that protesters were domestic terrorists, that they were antifa, that they were people who were un-American, they were anarchists, when in fact what we know for sure is that these were Americans who were everyday citizens demanding an end to racial injustice in this country.

But the president wanted every American, including the people who were in that park, but also the people who were watching those people in the park being moved, he wanted everyone to understand that it was his power, and that he was the one who could do whatever he wanted to do.

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