The FRONTLINE Interviews
Bill Kristol
Founder, The Weekly Standard
Bill Kristol founded The Weekly Standard. He is currently an editor-at-large for The Bulwark and a co-director of Defending Democracy Together.
The following interview was conducted by the Kirk Documentary Group’s Mike Wiser for FRONTLINE on May 3, 2022. It has been edited for clarity and length.
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Trump’s Claims Following the 2020 Election
So I want to take you back to 2016, but before we get there, I just want to spend a brief moment where we might start the film, which is right after the 2020 election, when Donald Trump comes out and he says, “Frankly, I did win this election.”My question is, when you’re watching that, how important a moment was that, and were you surprised that he did that?
It was a very important moment.Has it happened before in American history that a sitting president, who clearly had lost an election or who was en route to losing it and there were outstanding votes—no one was saying he had to concede that night, right?There were enough votes out that it was fair to say, as the network said, “Let’s wait two or three days.”But to simply claim that there’s been fraud and that he won the election, I think that’s pretty unprecedented in American history.I saw it, and I thought, Oh, my God.All the things he was hinting at and his allies were hinting at for the preceding weeks and a couple of months, really, we’re now about to go through some version of this.It would obviously depend on how close it ended up being, really, how much support he got from other Republicans, but I thought we were entering a very dangerous period.
And did it surprise you, based on everything you knew about it?
It didn’t surprise me much.He’d been telling us.He told us in 2016 that the election was rigged.He told us in 2020—even though he was the incumbent president of the United States, in control of the Justice Department and the Defense Department and had a bunch of Republican governors in some of these states—he was telling us in 2020 that the election was rigged.So I wasn’t surprised that after the election or late on election night or early the next morning, he told us the election was rigged.… The question for me was never would Trump claim the election was rigged; it was how much would other Republican elected officials, conservative elites, allies elsewhere go along with that?
Republican Response to Claims of Election Fraud
I mean, and there’s that period there—a day, two days—where it’s Trump, it’s his kids, it’s Alex Jones pushing questions about the election, and I think Don Jr. at one point saying, “Where are the 2024 contenders?”And by the end of the week, Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz are out there amplifying some of these claims.How important—was that a moment of decision for them and for the party?
You know, there are lots of mini-moments of decision, I’d say, between Nov. 3 and I guess all the way to Jan. 6.There was that initial sort of going along with his claims.But that was still a little bit of “Let him go to court.”That was Mitch McConnell’s line, right?"It’s perfectly legitimate to ask the courts to take a look at this, and that’s all we’re doing here."And then as it escalated through November, and state legislators start getting pressured by Trump, and he’s saying incredible things on Twitter and in press conferences, and his allies are inventing schemes of fanciful accounts of fraud and so forth, and we’re hearing about new legal theories that would allow state legislators to overturn the election, it’s hard to know when it got out of control, honestly.It got out of control way before Jan. 6.I think that’s the most important point I would want to make.
There’s been an understandable focus on Jan. 6.It was a horrible day for America.It was—the video is still amazing, the pictures still amazing to look at.But Jan. 6 was the process of two months, and in some ways much more than two months.It wasn’t an out-of-the-blue thing that, oh, my God, what happened, how could this have happened?It was a one-off.Not at all.It was the culmination of a couple of months of election denial and of a real attempt, a real plot, a real plan to subvert the election results.
Do you think that it would’ve happened that we would’ve ended up where we were if it had been just Trump, if the members of the party hadn’t come out and amplified that?
No.I’ve always thought that the key to Trump’s power wasn’t Trump himself—he’s a good demagogue, and he’s the president of the United States, so he has a lot of people doing what he wants—but that it was the willingness of the Republican establishment and of conservative elites, at first grudgingly and then less grudgingly and then some of them enthusiastically, to go along with him.Otherwise, you have—think of it—do the thought experiment.
Even as late as Nov. 3/4/5, Trump sits in the White House.He’s a sullen and unhappy loser.He’s claiming fraud.What if the entire Republican establishment, what if Fox News all say: “Look, the president’s understandably disappointed.It’s unfortunate that it turned out this way, but obviously there’s nothing much to that”? Or: “We’ll take a quick look at it.The courts should take a quick look.But obviously, we’re going to go ahead with the legal transfer of power, and it’s totally inappropriate to start riling people up and pressuring state legislatures, state election officials and inventing conspiracy theories and so forth”?I think that’s a very different scenario.That’s a sort of unfortunate couple of months—maybe a little bit of violence, honestly, because Trump would’ve had ability to reach crowds.Maybe a few people go along with him and echo it.But that’s very different from having large parts of the party and Fox News and others in the media and generally in the conservative establishment either echoing it or at least not putting a firm stop to it.
The 2016 Election
So let’s go back and see how we got here.And one of the moments we’re thinking of starting with is the Iowa caucuses back in 2016, when Ted Cruz wins, and one of the first things that Donald Trump does is say that the election was rigged and that Ted Cruz had somehow cheated.Can you go back to how somebody like Ted Cruz would’ve seen Donald Trump at that point, how you saw a moment like that when it was happening?
Well, I guess in a way I’d go back even before Iowa in this sense.… What he had said before then, incidentally—about President Obama being born in Kenya and all—it was all so full of conspiracy theories and crossed so many lines in terms of intemperate rhetoric, inappropriate rhetoric, the Mexican judge, you know, the kinds of stereotyping and nativism and attacks on individuals that, you know, by the time he denied that Ted Cruz had won Iowa, it was like, oh, my God, here’s Trump again, right?So there is a way in which it is a little bit the frog in the boiling water.You kind of get a little bit used to it.And at each stage—again, I come back to the Republican elites and the conservative elites.At each stage, there was an awful lot of: “Oh, that’s Trump being Trump.The tweets are inappropriate.But come on.At the end of the day, he’s a major figure in American life, and he’s surrounded by people who we know because they’re Republican political consultants we’ve worked with, and he’s got some senators even who are supporting him.So don’t get too alarmed.”So I’m not sure how big a dent—for me, at least—how big a dent the Iowa moment made on me.There had already been so much that had been rationalized, really.
I mean, did Ted Cruz or did the Republican establishment at that point—whenever the Republicans decide to meet.And maybe Ted Cruz is probably not part of that establishment.But did they recognize—was there recognition in that point in 2016 of a threat, of an existential threat to the party at that point?
Yes.I mean, the Republican establishment was against Trump and didn’t think he would win—and nor did I, for that matter, think he would win the nomination.Thought he was another one of these outsiders—businessmen, like Steve Forbes or Herman Cain or a rabble-rouser like Pat Buchanan.And those people get some traction, and they may win a primary or two, get some delegates, but they don’t win the nomination.I think that was kind of the conventional view, which wasn’t foolish, given past history.It just turned out to underestimate Trump in a way and underestimate the moment and an awful lot of things coming together to make Trump’s victory possible.So I think there’s a lot of underestimation of the possibility of this.
Then Trump wins, basically, fair and square, more or less, the nomination.Doesn’t win with a majority of the vote exactly.There’s a splintered field.He’s fortunate in certain ways, some of who his opponents are, but whatever.He stacks up delegates, and he wins.Then the whole Republican establishment basically privately decides he’s going to lose the general election.And of course it did look like he was going to lose the general election, and the polls showed him losing pretty comfortably and that he didn’t do very well in the debates.
And he could’ve lost, and if you reran that election five times, he probably would lose it four times.But he drew the inside straight.Comey comes out 10 days before.Hillary Clinton makes some mistakes.He gets lucky in a few states, and he wins the election.And then there’s the moment of truth, I think, which was how much are people going to continue to try to check Trump and how much are they going to decide to just go along with him?And there’s a bit of a mix there for the first year or two.I’m now kind of collapsing the whole Trump presidency quickly, telescoping it.But there’s a bit of a mix for a year or two, I would say, of checking and enabling, you know, acquiescing and then also a little bit of private pushback at least.And then after, by about 2019, the checking and the pushback is fading away, and the acquiescing and enabling are dominant.
So we’ll break some of that apart.But just to go back to that primary period, I mean, were you alarmed?Were you sounding an alarm inside the Republican Party, inside people you were talking to?And what was the response in that primary period?
I mean, I was publicly saying that Trump was unacceptable; people shouldn’t support him; they should make clear they couldn’t support him in the general election even; they should band together against him.The response was, you know: “Yeah, he’s not great, and I’m sure not for him, but, you know, look, we’ll survive this.We’ve survived other things.And if he gets the nomination, the establishment will kind of run the campaign around him.He’ll probably lose anyway.” …So I’d say yes, people thought I was being alarmist when I was alarmed.
And did you have allies?I mean, one of the people we are interested in is Lindsey Graham, who had made some quite strong statements in that period.And can you tell us about what his role was and how you saw him making very strong statements in 2015 about Donald Trump?
I mean, Lindsey Graham was running himself, so there’s a bit of a—he was making strong statements partly, as he saw it, in his own interest.But lots of people were.Mike Lee, even as late as the convention in 2016, was denouncing Trump.And of course many others were, in conservative establishment, in the donor world, were saying, “I’m not going to give a cent to him, and I may not even be able to vote for him.”A lot of that faded away in the general election.There was an awful lot of hostility to Hillary Clinton and a lot of issues.People talked themselves into believing they could live with Trump.They could manage Trump.It was worth—the deal with the devil was worth it because we’d get the tax cuts, or we’d get the Supreme Court nominations or we’d get certain other policies that people liked, or their friends would get good jobs in the administration or whatever, or just that kind of party loyalty and tribalism kicked in.
So I’d say by October of 2016, it certainly felt very different from the spring and even the early summer of 2016.I mean, it was interesting how much things changed.It’s hard afterwards—five years later, six years later, it’s hard to almost look back.… It was a kind of a gradual or maybe episodic process in which people—different people rationalized different things at different times.The upshot of it all was a massive amount of rationalization by, certainly, 2019 or 2020.
I mean, was it frustrating for you when you would have those conversations with people and they would push it off or they would not see it as a real threat?
Yeah.I mean, sometimes you just sort of think, am I going a little crazy?Maybe I just don’t like the guy; I’m overdoing it.Fine, you don’t have to like the guy, but maybe he’s OK; they’ll keep him under control.And I’ve got to say, I don’t really hold it that much against people that during the campaign, they talked themselves into thinking that he wouldn’t be much of a threat.A, people thought he was going to lose, and B, you sort of did think back then that if someone became president of the United States, he or she would be more responsible than that person had perhaps acted in the campaign.We were used to people being somewhat demagogic—not like Trump—but slightly demagogic in campaigns after all, right, exaggerating things, exaggerating how bad the other party is, turning a blind eye to some of their own followers.And then they become president and they tend to become mostly responsible.
But it wasn’t crazy.It didn’t seem crazy to hope that that would be the case with Trump.And some very respectable people went into the administration early on—not-so-respectable people, too, but there were some—and you thought, OK, they’re going to keep it on an even keel.And again, I don’t think that was a ridiculous scenario.We’ve seen this in other countries and at the state level in America.Obviously at all kinds of businesses and stuff, some wacky person by sort of accident becomes head of the whole thing, but, you know, there’s a big infrastructure underneath that person, and they let the wacky guy kind of, you know, do his thing and pop off and spin around a little bit and enjoy the perks of the office, and meanwhile, the system chugs along.
And of course that happened a little bit, incidentally.We do, thank God, in America have a giant, very well-established infrastructure of civil servants and the military and others who weren’t just willing to go along with whatever Trump’s latest fanciful idea was.But I think people …overestimated how much Trump would agree to be constrained, how much he wanted to be president.You’ve got to sort of give him credit in that way.He didn’t just want to—I mean, he loved the perks, and he loved having football teams at the White House and billing the Secret Service for all the rooms at Mar-a-Lago, and he took advantage of all that side of it.But it turned out he actually wanted to kind of be, in his own way I guess you’d say, a kind of a consequential and important president.And he wasn’t willing to simply let staff run circles around him or trot him out and, you know, kind of keep him under control.He was more, at first, when he didn’t know Washington very well, and I think was maybe even a tiny bit intimidated by what he had gotten into.But certainly within a year or two, he was running the show.
I have a very low view of Trump in terms of his qualities and so forth, but they thought he would be easy to manipulate, and it turned out he was the one doing the manipulating.For me, that’s really so much the bottom line of the Trump presidency and the Trump episode in terms of the Republican Party and conservative elites.They all thought they were going to manage him, to manipulate him, and he ended up being the one doing the manipulating.
What Trump Offered Voters
… If you look back at the speech where he says, “I alone can fix this,” people often say Donald Trump doesn’t have an ideology; he’s not a conservative.Now that we look back at it, was he offering something that we may not have understood at the time, when he gives that speech at the convention?
Oh, yeah.I mean, look, he had a real feel for people’s anxieties and unhappiness about various things.He was willing to stoke those anxieties and hatreds in some cases, resentments in ways that other politicians weren’t willing to.I remember in 2015, ‘16, people would say, “If only Jeb Bush had understood that immigration was such a volatile issue.”Jeb Bush understood immigration was a volatile issue.Jeb Bush thought it was irresponsible to take a volatile issue and make it more volatile and be a demagogue about it.So it wasn’t like it never occurred to Jeb Bush that he could get more votes if he attacked Mexicans as rapists or said we should have a ban on Muslims.Jeb Bush thought you can’t do that as a serious person running for president of the United States, and he thought—and I guess a lot of us thought this, too—that ultimately, the voters don’t want that kind of person as president.
And I think in the past, the voters have usually rejected that kind of person as president.Maybe a senator, Joe McCarthy, a governor—we have plenty of demagogues in American history—talk radio hosts, whatever, but not as president.So I do think, in that respect, it’s hard to blame people for just assuming that it wouldn’t work out and that he would pay a price for these things.But he telegraphed what he was about.And as I say, it was exploiting anxieties.It was making himself the solution, nothing about the system or policies or institutions that were going to be strengthened.It was all—what was it he said?“I am the solution,” or “I am the one.”
Yeah, “I alone can fix this.”Is this something we’ve seen in America before?Is it a strongman?Is that what he’s offering?
Yeah, yeah, it is a version of a strongman.And look, every president, successful presidents have a little bit of that.Let’s not kid ourselves, you know.People looked up to FDR or Kennedy or Reagan.And there was a little—often went a little overboard in the adulation probably, and they probably went overboard themselves in their own view of themselves, you know?It’s not like they don’t have egos.But yes, “I alone can fix it” is a pretty striking, classic strongman statement.But I remember at the time—I never thought Trump would get the nomination.I thought it really would be like that Buchanan or Herman Cain or these business types and demagogues who don’t really make it to the nomination.
Once he won the nomination, I was very worried that he would win the presidency.I thought Hillary Clinton would probably win.That’s what the polls suggested.But I remember being on TV and arguing—didn’t argue really, but discussing the race, especially with some of Hillary Clinton’s strategists and Democratic Party types, and they would say, “Oh, Trump never could win.”I’d say: “I don’t know, you know?People want change.They’re sick of the status quo.With all due respect to Secretary Clinton, it is, you know, like, she’s been in government a long time and she was in the White House herself, and she was President Obama’s secretary of state.”One reason Trump did so well, obviously, is that he had Bush as his main opponent, first opponent really in the primaries and then Clinton in the general election, you know?
There’s a mood for change, and the establishments of each party say: “Do you want change?Do we have a deal for you.We’ve got a son and brother of the most recent Republican presidents, Jeb Bush, and we’ve got the wife of the second most recent Democratic president, who also was secretary of state for President Obama.”It’s like the opposite of “Let’s have some fresh faces and new voices.”I say this as someone who respects both Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton.They were perfect foils for Trump.
And people had all these—some of them understandable, some of them simply bigotries, frankly—but these unhappinesses about the way America was going.And again, most responsible candidates have taken advantage of some of them, but they’ve also understood that there had to be limits and you had to damp it down.And McCain says to the woman in the audience, “No, Barack Obama’s a decent man, and you shouldn’t attack him for allegedly lying about his religion,” or whatever the issue was in the famous exchange in the town hall in 2008.And other candidates have tried to keep some limits on sort of what would be done.Trump was having none of that, of course.
But he wasn’t a stupid candidate.For me, the moment I thought he could win was sitting watching his acceptance speech at the convention—let me see if I can get this right—his acceptance speech at the convention, and Hillary Clinton’s slogan, or one of her slogans, had been, “I’m with her,” right?That was what people were supposed to think about: I’m standing with her.And Trump said, “She says, ‘I’m with her,’ but I’m telling you, I’m with you.”So it’s the opposite, right?I’m with you, the regular people out there.She just is a big shot who wants everyone to be with her, you know?It was a very clever way of framing it, and he was good at that kind of populist, demagogic rhetoric, and again, partly because he was so shameless.Again, it’s unfair, I think, to these other politicians to say, ”Well, they just weren’t good at it.”They just thought it was wrong to say some of the things that he was willing to say.
He attacked—I remember during the convention, he attacked the father of the Gold Star parents of the soldier who had died in Iraq and who was Muslim.And, you know, I just remember watching that and thinking, This is really horrible.This is just terrible.No one else would’ve done this, whether you were a dove or a hawk or Democrat or Republican.I remember also thinking, I’m not sure this isn’t going to work though, you know?I’m not sure a lot of people won’t discount this gentleman who spoke at the Democratic convention because Trump will make it seem as if he’s just litigating a kind of—I don’t know what, a kind of grudge against America or something, even though his son fought for America.
You were sounding an alarm, and at the same time, Hillary Clinton does decide she’s going to do something about this.She gives a speech.There’s a famous line about “deplorables.”Was the Democratic response—was Hillary Clinton’s response to what they were seeing, to what you were seeing—was it effective?Was it a mistake?How do you evaluate their response to him?
I mean, it’s hard to know.I don’t think it was a mistake.I just think the messenger—if you’re running against someone, first of all, there’s a big discount factor when A is running against B, and B attacks A. Well, that’s just politics, right?It would’ve been better to have more neutral observers saying this is unacceptable.It would’ve been much better to have more Republicans saying it.There’s a reason why in 2020, to jump ahead, why our little Republican Voters Against Trump effort, I think, did make a difference, because people thought, Oh, even Republicans are against him being reelected, not just the normal—of course every Democrat’s for the Democratic nominee.Every Democrat’s always for the Democratic nominee.I think there was a little bit of a—more than a little.There was a considerable discount when the Democratic nominee attacked the Republican nominee.That wasn’t really news.So again, I hold it against the Republicans.Even some of the ones who didn’t go far out in supporting Trump, who grumbled, who were very cautious in their support, who either didn’t appear with him in some places—very few of them, how many of them said: “This man should not be president of the United States?I’m a Republican, but I’m just telling you, we cannot risk this man being president for four years.”Very few Republican elected officials said that.
Trump’s Early Presidency
So he is elected, and he becomes president.He comes to Washington, and some people who were quite outspoken against him—for example, Lindsey Graham in that first year says, “I’m all in.”When you’re watching that, I don’t know if you’re talking to Sen.Graham or not, what do you make of that conversion?
You know, the first year was a little complicated, I would say.That is, some good people—and I talked to some of them before they were going in and deciding whether to go in—went into the administration and even to the White House and thought, you know, I think I can prevent some of the bad things from happening.And there were some policies people agreed with, and they wanted to help implement, and some of them, they did, incidentally, in a fairly uncontroversial way in some agencies and departments.Others did prevent some bad things from happening.So I think it’s more understandable that people, you know, went in with him or supported him in the first year or two or sort of supported him in the hope that it could be made to work out OK.
I personally think that was always wishful and that Trump gave plenty of signals that he wasn’t interested in being managed in that way.Think of the reaction to the inauguration and the crowds.Remember that?I mean, it was so stupid and silly and idiotic.He had a bigger crowd than anyone else.He didn’t have a bigger crowd than anyone else.Make Sean Spicer show a photo, you know, a fake photo of the crowd.1Everyone ridiculed it, correctly, and thought, this is just so childish.But they didn’t quite understand, I think, what it showed about Trump, that he wasn’t playing by the usual rules of the game; that he was willing to say anything; he was willing to have other people say anything for him.And a fair amount of those people, it turned out, were willing to say those things for him.And—and this will be my final point on this—a lot of my liberal friends would say: “God, don’t they realize they’re ruining their future?What are they joining?They’re joining this administration.It’s going to be a total embarrassment.It’s such a disgrace.It’s a black mark on—they had a promising career ahead.”
And I remember saying at the time, I hope that, frankly, that’s kind of the case, that this is a black mark.I’m not so sure that’s right, you know?He’s president of the United States.He’s going to be president for four years.The party’s moving in his direction.Maybe they’re right to—from their own self-interested point of view, maybe they’ll do better as a result of joining the administration.Maybe it’s those of us on the outside who are going to be kind of cast into the wilderness.And that turned out to be correct.I mean, people who supported Trump, people who worked in the Trump White House, the Trump administration, so far it’s like a lot of them are doing very well.Some of them have just gone back to the private sector, but I don’t think they’ve been discriminated against exactly.Journalists who jumped on the bandwagon are doing extremely well.
A lot of people we all thought were kind of second and third tier, you know, they saw this as their chance, and they soared into the first tier.It’s not a first tier I would want to be in, on Fox News or OANN or whatever, but from their point of view, they’re doing better than they were doing when they were sort of not well-known reporters at second-class, very conservative magazines or something, websites.So I think we all underestimated the degree to which once Trump got going, once he was president and … once he got the party on board and the establishment onboard, it became a bit of a snowball almost, you know?Once some people are on board, then more people got on board.
Then the donors looked at it and thought, jeez, I don’t know.We’ve got to get along with these guys.This is kind of the party that represents our interests, and they hold the presidency and the House and the Senate.I’m not picking a fight with all these people, you know?I have a lot of business interests, and it’s irresponsible for me to just—so I’ll just go along.I won’t be a cheerleader, but I’ll go along.
Then three months later, the invitation to a private fundraiser, $100,000 a person at Mar-a-Lago, comes along.And it’s gee, I’m just kind of going along.I don’t want to be a cheerleader, but if I don’t go and this other person goes, I’m kind of looking like I’m scorning, spurning the president of the United States.So yeah, maybe I’ll go; I’ll just go this once.I’ll just go.I won’t say much, and I’ll kind of just duck in and out and I’ll go to Mar-a-Lago.Then two months later, it’s, you know, will you support every Republican running for the Senate who sounds like Trump?Well, yeah, I guess I’d better.You know, it’s a kind of incremental thing.People did talk themselves into rationalized increasing degrees of loyalty and subservience, honestly, to Trump.
I mean, were you talking to Republicans at this time who got elected to Congress in that first year?What were they saying to you about what they were doing?
So I still was on decent terms with a fair number of Republicans, I’d say, in 2017 and ’18.After that, it kind of all fell—I sort of had no—not much more interest in dealing with them, and I’m sure the feeling was very mutual.But no, I’d say Elise Stefanik, who became very well known for supplanting Liz Cheney in the House—and the reason she was able to do that is she was unembarrassed in spouting the election lies, the big lie about the election, having first defended him in the first impeachment by not telling the truth about what he was doing there. When I saw her in 2018, I think it was, on the Hill, she was like: “Look, I’m an elected official.I’m not in your position, Bill.He’s terrible, but I think if we can just kind of hold it together for the next couple of years, we can get beyond this.”And it wasn’t crazy, honestly.Elected officials are in a different position than someone like me.And personally, not that anyone cared much, but I personally felt like you could be a decent person and still make that honest calculation: “I can do some good for the country here.No point just blowing myself up politically for no purpose at all.”For me there, the 2019, what he did with Ukraine was sort of an incredible tipoff of how far he was willing to go.And then the Republicans all rallied to him, every single one but Romney, right, in the House and the Senate.
But I was still on good enough terms that I must’ve spoken to maybe a dozen House Republicans in the fall of 2019, urging them to step up and to vote for impeachment and really make clear how dangerous what Trump was doing was.And I had a lot of nice conversations.Two or three of them were like, ”Oh, I’m actually retiring, Bill, so I think I’m going to just stay out of this.”And then others were the opposite:“I’m running for reelection, so I can’t afford to do this,” you know?… But no, it’s amazing that, except for Romney, no one stood up then.
And then for me, the moment, I guess, is the reelection of 2020, because if you think about it for a minute, I mean, it’s one thing to say we can tolerate it and control it and limit the damage for four years.Fine.But then what you should be willing to do is make sure it’s only four years.So I spent all of 2019 going around, trying to find people to run against Trump in the Republican primary.They probably would’ve lost.Trump had support from most of the party.But a strong showing by a serious senator or governor type, you know, would’ve gotten 25%, 30% of the vote maybe, would’ve been a signal that I think a lot of those voters could then have moved over to vote for the Democrat in 2020.And I think it might’ve laid the groundwork for more of a defeat of Trump than ended up happening.And of course we weren’t able to get any senior people to run.
And then they all fell in line.And by the summer of 2020, they were, not all enthusiastically, but they were all supporting Trump, right, with very few exceptions, a couple of people who said, “I can’t vote for him.”Even those people, mind you, were sort of: “I can’t vote for him, so I’m writing in Ronald Reagan.”Is that a serious response to the moment?So I think the reelection is when one really saw the captivity to Trump.
I mean, when you were talking to people—just to go back to what you said about impeachment—and you’re talking to them, and they’re talking about the election or “I’m not going to be running again,” were they agreeing with you on the merits of it?Or was the discussion—is that not part of the discussion?
No, it’s different people, obviously, different discussions.But no, it was often part of the discussion.There was a certain amount of: “Look, it’s not quite as bad you say, Bill.Every president has a little bit—wants a little political help from foreign leaders.And ultimately Ukraine got what it needed, so Trump didn’t really insist on it, and people were able to talk him out of it.”So there was a lot of wishful thinking, I guess I would say, and rationalization.And ironically … the fact that the system did have guardrails, did have bulwarks, it’s against too much abuse of presidential power.Not all of them stood up, but some of them did.All those people we saw testified in November/December of 2019 were able to say, “No, Mr. President, we can’t do that,” right?Some of them got fired, but I mean, there was a big system in place, a foreign service and so forth, and ambassadors and the military.
… So the fact that the system did have guardrails, ironically, made it easier for people to tell themselves: “See?He’s not doing that much damage.And the system is still working.”And I would say: ”Well, that’s OK, maybe—God knows, I hope it works for the 2020.I think it probably will.”But you can’t have another four years, especially then with the turnover in 2020 and the kind of people who were coming in.And for me, that’s the one part that just is very hard to forgive.I mean, the idea that you could try to maneuver for four years to make it less bad than it might otherwise be is understandable.The idea that you wouldn’t speak out and say, “We cannot afford to have four more years of him,” that I find really hard to excuse.
And I will say, John Bolton, for example, who’s very conservative and maneuvered pretty hard, frankly, to become Trump’s national security adviser and thought he could work with Trump because they had certain common views on some issues and stuff—what he found out, what Trump was real—I don’t know why he didn’t know this ahead of time.But what he found out or chose to find out or found out that he couldn’t really work with Trump in any responsible way and quit or got fired.I give him credit, because he said the guy should not have a second term.And John said it shouldn’t be Biden either.… I’m going to write someone in.But still, he went a lot further than a lot of other people who were keeping awfully quiet or saying, you know, “He’s bad, but oh, my God, the Democrats, how can you even think of them?,” you know?
Trump and Charlottesville
I want to go back to one thing that seems important now, especially in the wake of Jan. 6, which is Charlottesville and Trump’s reaction to that.And was that another moment of choice?Was something made apparent in that, and was that a choice for Congress and the party?
Charlottesville was a very big deal at the time.And in a funny way, looking back at it three, four years later, it’s like, really?Trump said an awful lot of horrible things.Why was that one so bad?But of course, I mean, it was terrible and Nazis, and a woman was killed and so forth.So Trump, totally irresponsible, doesn’t really apologize for what he said.And there was a pretty big backlash.People resigned from advisory boards.Businesses: “We can’t have this.My CEO is not going to do that.Can’t go to the White House anymore.”But for me, the ultimate effect of that was the opposite.Because guess what?Three months later, they weren’t turning down their invitations to the White House.They weren’t cutting off Republican candidates who refused to denounce what happened in Charlottesville.
I mean, they weren’t supporting it, obviously, but there was an awful lot of sort of “forget and forgive” attitude pretty quickly, as we saw after Jan. 6, which was, you know, no businesses:”We’re not supporting any of the 140 House Republicans, whatever it was, who voted to overturn the results.”A few months later: “Well, some of them are kind of better than that, really, and you know, we have a lot of interest before their committees, and they could win the majority in 2022.So we can’t just cut ourselves off from one of the two major parties.”And again, when you hear that, it’s not a crazy position, and maybe it’s even a responsible position in some ways.You have to watch out for your shareholders and stuff.
But each one of these individually can seem plausible or reasonable almost, but you add up years of this, and it’s sort of like any one excuse, “I’m sorry, I don’t have my paper done on time because of this,” that could be true, but when there’s the 37th excuse, maybe the teacher realizes this person is not being honest, either with me or with himself.And these people, these Republicans really weren’t being honest with the public, but I think in a way not with themselves.The degree to which they wished for a certain outcome and kept pretending they weren’t seeing what they were seeing, or they were only seeing a bit of what they feared to be seeing, and then they would dismiss, you know, the real alarmed people as alarmists or Democrats or whatever.
I mean, it’s an interesting case study of a kind of, I don’t know, rationalization that—by a lot of people who at first kind of saw the situation, I would say.They didn’t fall for Trump.They weren’t in love with Trump.They didn’t think, oh, my God, he’s the best ever.It was, “Oh, my God, we have to deal with this guy.”But I would say a lot of those people I knew—and I knew a lot of them pretty well who were in the: “Oh, my God, I guess we have to deal with this guy for a year or two or three, and then we get beyond it.”By year three, it was sort of: “You know what?He’s not so bad.He’s not quite my style, but he’s winning, or he could be winning.And he’s a puncher.Maybe we need a little more of that.And furthermore, we’re getting this and that.And furthermore, the left.Can you believe how crazy they are?”And people really talked themselves into it over time.
Trump and the Conservative Media
… During the presidency, one of the things that’s changing is Fox News, which had a lot of critical voices about Trump during the primary.And you used to work there and appear on there.What were you seeing at Fox, and was it an important part of the story?
So I left Fox after 2012, so I’m a little—don’t honestly know much more than anyone else about what was happening internally.But no, no, I think the radicalization of Fox—which I would date to about 2013, to President Obama’s reelection, actually, and the reaction to that—was moving pretty fast between 2013 and 2015, ‘16.And I think that was a very important part of the story.I mean, I was on Fox in 2012 and election coverage on Chris Wallace’s show almost every Sunday, on Bret Baier a fair amount.We weren’t friendly to Trump.
Trump emerged in 2011, 2012, remember, with the birther stuff.I recall—I haven’t looked this up.I think this is correct—I think I recall being on Fox, and we all just made fun of it.This is just idiotic.In fact, I remember being critical of Romney for accepting Trump’s endorsement in 2012.Do you remember?They had some press conference together for like 10 minutes.Romney was embarrassed to be there with him, but he sort of felt—they told him, you sort of got to kind of accept his endorsement, so they did it quickly at 11:00 some morning in a hotel.And I remember thinking, you know, you shouldn’t have even given Trump that degree of legitimacy.But someone else said: “Oh, come on, Bill.This is politics, you know?”And OK, fine, Trump’s not going to play a role.He didn’t speak at the convention in 2012.He was a marginal figure.And Fox was not sitting there, cheering on: “We’ve got to get Trump more in the middle of everything.”By 2015 and ‘16, of course, they’re all for him.
And how important was it?What were you seeing when you’re watching it during the Trump presidency, and what’s the effect on those people we’ve been talking about, the leaders of the party?
So I don’t watch it and didn’t watch it much, so I’m probably not the best person to answer this.But I would say two things about Fox.I think Fox is very important.People can say social media, other modes of communication—there’s a lot more than Fox, and that’s all disinformation, algorithms.I think that’s all true, really.And then individuals became very prominent supporters of Trump.But I think without Fox, it doesn’t quite come together the way it did.Having a major cable network sort of each day pushing the narrative and demonizing the opponents and excusing or covering over what Trump has done, I think that gives it a kind of centrality.
Otherwise it would’ve been a lot of different voices sort of excusing Trump.It wouldn’t have been everyone. You know, you can all watch Fox at 8 p.m. and get the same kind of message that people can go out, the back-bench members of Congress and the state legislators and the local talk radio guys, go out the next day and push the message.I would say, though, that having said that, I think you can think of a country in which you’ve got Trump and then Fox and social media and all this disinformation and all kinds of problems.There would be a lot of problems with a demagogue and a populace that’s open to demagoguery, and a lot of people in between getting rich off the demagogues and getting rich off the populace and fostering it even more, right?That’s not a very healthy situation.
But I think without the conservative elites, it doesn’t become the danger it became.I think it becomes kind of an unfortunate kind of kookiness in the body politic.We’ve had it before, and it kind of probably expends itself over time, and it never becomes a kind of threat to our actual democracy.It becomes a threat to civility; it becomes unpleasant; it can distort our politics some.But I think it was the conservative elites and the Republican elected officials who took a difficult and unpleasant situation to a genuinely dangerous one.I think they don’t get enough of the criticism, in a funny way.
One way to put it, if you want to say it, is the problem wasn’t just Fox. It was <i>The Wall Street Journal</i> editorial page, which the entire business class obviously reads, and conservative intellectual class.They weren’t pro-Trump, but they were certainly anti-anti-Trump, and they certainly rationalized and excused things, and they certainly explained how the Democrats were even worse.And that’s where a ton of the elites were.They weren’t going to go for the most insane kind of rabble-rousing stuff, but they managed to get themselves into a position—and here, the <i>Journal</i> was very important, and other conservative elites, and Republican elected officials, where a lot of people out there thought upper-middle-class business people and so forth, you know, thought: OK, well, look.Trump is not my first choice, but better than the alternative, better than the alternative.Some of those attacks on him were unfair, you know, and whatever they learned from the <i>Journal</i> op-ed page and so forth.So I think that’s an underrated part of why we have the threat we have.
Or another way of putting it is, do this thought experiment: Trump’s president and he’s swirling around, but there’s not a united political party behind him and at his disposal.There are Republicans checking him; there are Republicans challenging him; there are Republicans advancing other things.We had that a little bit in 2017, ‘18, but that collapses.And what’s dangerous is a demagogic president with one of our two major political parties behind him, and increasingly behind him and not reacting against the demagoguery, but embracing it and almost—now almost competing to be who can most—who can say it the most baldly or in the most extreme way.So that’s, I think, what has made the Trump phenomenon so dangerous.
Trump’s Relationship with Authoritarian Leaders
… One of the other things that happened that I want to ask you about is Trump and authoritarians and people who—many inside the Republican Party had seen as America’s enemies before, from Kim to Putin to Xi to a number of authoritarian leaders.When you were watching that, was there alarm about it?Should there have been alarm that this is more than sort of a humorous aside to Trump?
I mean, there was some alarm.And I think, on that stuff, you might say the Republican establishment stood up a little more, didn’t simply go along with Trump.It was so kind of crazy and so contrary to Republican self-image.There was a little more resistance on that.I know the polls show that the Republican electorate sort of became more pro-Putin over the Trump years, but out of Republican members of Congress, maybe not so much.And now with Ukraine, I think back to a more normal, so to speak, attitude towards dictators.So that, I think, people didn’t see the indirect damage that was done, in my view, in terms of foreign policy and America’s standing in the world.
But on that, I think the Republicans were a little more willing to quietly say, “Well, I don’t quite agree with him on that.” …
The 2020 Election
I mean, that brings us to the election of 2020, and there’s a lot of talk there about the radical left, about antifa, about—even with COVID, there’s a control; they’re trying to control citizens.Is that part of what you’re talking about?The rhetoric that’s ramping up in 2020—is that what you’re referring to?
Yeah, 2020 is the culmination, I think, both in terms of the public health—the way in which the pandemic is handled by Trump, and then the way in which Trump’s handling is excused, as well as the election stuff, obviously.But if you think of the one-two punch there—the big lie and the attempt to make the public health establishment of America, which didn’t handle it perfectly, obviously, somehow responsible for the pandemic and for all the—everything that went with it.There’s something so crazy about that.Once the vaccine comes out, it’s really crazy, right?People are dying because they’re refusing to get vaccinated.And no one’s holding anyone on the right accountable, and it’s all being covered over, basically, or explained away.
If you had told me beforehand that we’d have large chunks of the Republican Party refusing to be vaccinated and also attacking the people who said, “Maybe you should get vaccinated,” on the one hand, and then defending a big lie about the election for which there was zero evidence, that’s pretty astounding, right?If you think about it, that’s kind of a big political party, the Republican Party, and there are a lot of intelligent people in it, and they’re embracing not one but two big lies simultaneously in 2021, incidentally, not in 2020 so much, though some in 2020.In 2020, at least they had the excuse that Trump was president, so it’s kind of hard to—you know, you have a certain deference to the president, right?2021, President Trump has lost, and they’re crazier than 2020.
I think that’s really a big point one has to make—that, I mean—it wouldn’t have been crazy after Jan. 6 to think maybe this broke the fever; maybe this was the wake-up call.And of course, many people thought it was, and many people like Kevin McCarthy behaved as if it might be for about 48 hours, and then they all gave up quickly.And it’s not just that they gave up, and people kind of grudgingly accepted it.Within six months, it was not just, “It wasn’t as bad as the liberal media says.”It was: “They were patriots, and it’s terrible that they’re being held in the D.C. jail in bad conditions.And furthermore, I want to repeat that the election was stolen, and we need to do all these things to the local level, not just to make sure the next election isn’t stolen, but to lay the groundwork for us to overturn the election.” …
The degree of accelerated radicalism and extremism in 2021, 2022 is really striking and startling, I would say.
To go back to 2020 for a second, when you see those images—this is in the wake of the Black Lives Matter, George Floyd moment—you see the president walk across Lafayette Square, and there’s the helicopter over the protesters, and there’s the troops lined up in front of the Lincoln monument, what are you making of it?Is that a warning sign along the way, or is that a normal response to what was going on in the streets?
I mean, it was so crazy between the pandemic and then, unfortunately, to George Floyd and all that, you can see that people might’ve thought, well, it was just such a weird moment, we needed to have a kind of law and order—plenty of military out there to make sure there was peace.But especially if you’ve worked in the White House, seeing that image of him walking across Lafayette Square waving the Bible around at St. John’s Church is really unbelievable, and it feels like you’re not in America at that point.And if you saw a clip of this on television from some other country and they were speaking not English, but maybe some language that sounds East European or Spanish or something like that, you’d think: Oh, that’s one of those unstable democracies; I hope they get through this, but they don’t have many years of having been a democracy, so maybe this will kind of all collapse.
And I think actually that reaction is as true a reaction or as useful a reaction as the: Oh, this is America.Nothing bad can happen here, you know?That, for me—the institutions here are strong, and the culture’s pretty strong, and the norms and all the habits, I mean, we have—it’s not Hungary, right?You can’t elect one guy; he decides to become an authoritarian; and within about eight years, he controls two-thirds of the media and three-quarters of the universities; and every business is dependent on his favor.We’re not there, you know?But we were a lot closer to that, or at least Trump wanted to bring us a lot closer to that, and a lot of people were willing to go a lot closer to that than one would’ve thought.
… One more question on 2020, which is a lot of Republicans have been saying that they win the deal.They were getting judges; they were getting regulations; they were getting tax cuts and things.By 2020, there isn’t a Republican platform.Had the party changed by that point, from where we were when we started in 2016, by the time we get to 2020?
Yeah, it was Trump’s party at that point.There were individuals who weren’t crazy about Trump.But yeah, the failure to have a platform is, in a way, very indicative, right?I mean, party platform has never meant that much, but it was sort of a matter of pride.If you were a certain kind of party regular, this is our platform, and it’s different from their platform, and that’s why I like this party, you know?That pretense was all gone by 2020, you know?
I mean, what does the party stand for at that point?
Trump.And it stands against the left and against the Democrats who were assumed to be far left.
So going to the period after the election, we talked about some of the calculations that people were making about amplifying it.When you were watching Mitch McConnell as he’s remaining silent for those six weeks that he is, were you growing concerned?Were you surprised by that point?
I don’t know that I was really surprised.I was a little surprised because clearly, Trump had lost, and so that should’ve been a liberating moment for all of the people who privately complained about Trump for the last four years.They were still intimidated, so they didn’t speak up.But they still told themselves—and people were quoted to this effect on background, of course, not by name in the newspapers—that you know, well, he can pop off here for a while; nothing will come of it.I was alarmed.I was alarmed partly because I’d been in government and I could see a little bit of what he was trying to do with the Department of Defense and the Department of Justice and Homeland Security.And suddenly, the defense secretary was fired.It was the Monday after the election.When has that ever happened?
And these really—people who were not up to the job, but are true Trump loyalists, and some of them kind of crazy, followers of Michael Flynn and stuff, are put into Defense Department.And then the Justice Department, Bill Barr, who I knew back in the day in the Bush administration, quits on Dec. 23, I think it was.What’s that about?You quit one month before the end of an administration?And it was clear that he—and he had been a Trump loyalist and had done things I certainly wouldn’t defend with Mueller and so forth.But even he—there was things he was clearly being asked to do or could see that he was about to be asked to do that he didn’t want to do, and so he leaves.Now, these people—he was not a profile in courage.He didn’t speak up.He gave a fulsome resignation letter to Trump and certainly didn’t criticize Trump.So I had a little visibility into what was going on.I knew some people, obviously, down the trenches of these departments and career people actually.
So I was alarmed just about—and then the state legislative stuff.This stuff was so beyond the pale.I thought people were being too quick to assume, ”Well, none of this will ever go anywhere.”And it didn’t ultimately work, obviously.… It was kind of a haphazard plot, you might say.But sometimes haphazard plots succeed, and even if they don’t succeed, they can do a huge amount of damage, and that’s what happened in this case.
When you’re talking to people in the trenches, what were they saying to you that was making you concerned?
I mean, people I knew who had served in the Defense Department till near the end of the Trump administration—and these were foreign policy experts.They weren’t that political.They just saw the kind of people who were coming in, and people coming in and sort of with some control over intelligence agencies and so forth, or at least talk about different people coming into CIA.And if you see this happening in a foreign country—a president loses an election, says he denies the legitimacy of the loss; fires the defense secretary, who was a Trump person but was a decent, traditional defense secretary; puts in an acting secretary with a bunch of staffers who were really kooky; then the attorney general of that administration leaves; and meanwhile, you’re hearing about state legislators being pressured and so forth, and there’s a huge PR campaign going on—you’d look at that country and you’d think: Oh, man, I wonder if those election returns are going to stand.Now, because it’s the U.S., you kind of assume, of course they’re going to stand.This isn’t going to work.And it didn’t work.But I think it was a little closer run than people realize.And again, just to even go through this and not repudiate it firmly, laid the groundwork for Trump to go on promoting the big lie and other people to go on saying it.And so now we’re here in 2022, and God knows what percentage of the Republican Party believes the 2020 election was stolen, and God knows what percentage of Republican elected officials in ‘23 and ‘24 are going to be willing to do things that they once never would’ve considered doing, in terms of being open to—if the election is a doubt, the state legislature may just have to step in and appoint electors in this state, and that kind of thing.
So you know about the role of the vice president, and you seem to have seen that firsthand.And Pence is in a key position here, and apparently talks to [Dan] Quayle at a key moment.Can you help us understand what the pressure was that Pence was under, somebody who had been loyal to Trump for so long?
Yeah, I mean, Pence had just a clear conflict between what Trump wanted him to do and what the Constitution and the rule of law required him to do.I think he managed to navigate those conflicts in various ways over four years, not always, in my view, in the right way, but he had turned a blind eye to an awful lot of things and been involved in various things that were not wonderful.But this was such a blatant transgression … that he did the right thing.And I think one has to give him credit.One shouldn’t get begrudging about this.If Pence goes the other way, we have a much more serious constitutional crisis and political crisis, and probably more violence and so forth at the state level.So it’s good that Pence did what he did.
The fact that Pence had to call my former boss, Dan Quayle, to be kind of reassured and, in a way, build up his strength, in the sense that there would be people out there who would back him up—he called former federal Judge Mike Luttig, very respected conservative jurist—that’s itself astonishing.I think Quayle’s reaction to—and I haven’t talked to Quayle about this in any detail—but Quayle’s reaction to the call shows this, right?He’s like: “What are you even calling me for?This is not a close call.” …So the fact that Pence felt under the pressure he did, and the fact that after four years of being Trump’s vice president, it wasn’t totally obvious what he should do is itself very worrisome, of course.Was very worrisome.
Jan. 6 and the Aftermath
… So we go to Jan. 6.Is this a moment—can you pull together what you’ve been talking about, and especially in terms of the Republican Party?Is this a moment when the consequences are coming together, when you’re watching it?What are you thinking?
Yeah, I mean, I was astonished by Jan. 6, as I think everyone was, just that they got into the Capitol and so forth.But I thought, sure, it was the consequence of what we’ve been seeing for two months, but really, for four years or five years almost.There were the intimations of violence way back in 2015 and 2016, certainly, and the rabble-rousing.For me, one part of Jan. 6 that’s underappreciated, when you think about it, is there’s the terrible riot, everything that happens.They flee; they finally clear out the Capitol; they return, which was good, to have the vote; and then 140 House Republicans vote to overturn the results in Pennsylvania, not to accept the Pennsylvania electors.There’s no question about who won Pennsylvania!
There’s not a single serious person who thinks it was even that close, honestly, by the end.… But that’s, for me, even if you did think there were problems, after what had happened on Jan. 6, you had a political responsibility, really a moral responsibility, to sort of end it.There should’ve been 435 votes to certify every elector, and that’s it.And at least that would’ve sent a little bit of a signal.So I, again, very much hold the Republican elites responsible for just being unwilling to do the most elementary thing that you should do, if you’re a responsible political actor.
It’s over anyway.You’re not really going to turn the election over.So let’s just make sure we send a good signal here for people to stop indulging in this.And that’s one reason we have the big lie today, obviously.It was not—the stake was not driven through its heart late at night on Jan. 6, the morning of Jan. 7.And then, of course, everyone decided it turned out you could do very well promoting the big lie after Trump started to do it.So yeah, that’s very bad.It’s very bad that Jan. 6 ended with 140 Republicans voting to overturn the Pennsylvania electors or not to recognize the Pennsylvania electors.2
Yeah.I mean, at the same time in the Senate, you have the Lindsey Graham speech; you have McConnell coming out.There’s reports and newspapers—is he going to support impeachment?McCarthy doesn’t support impeachment but gives a speech sort of blaming Trump, and funders seem to be leaving.Did it seem like a moment, like the moment it finally comes?
Yeah, I’d say for about 48 hours as if there might be a moment where people might finally do the right thing and also see that it was in their interest to end this, to end this, to really try to put an exclamation point after it.But they didn’t have the nerve to.There was still too much Trump sentiment out there.They were nervous about it.I mean, I think historians will look back and say: So we had all this conniving between Nov. 3 and Jan. 6 to subvert the election results within the executive branch, with state legislators, rabble-rousing with the public, the lawsuits culminating in the violence of Jan. 6.And one week after that, 10 House Republicans, 10 out of 200, I think it was, vote to impeach.It’s really astonishing.And then seven senators vote to convict, which of course is 10 short of what they needed.And so Trump’s alive politically.
Even after only 10 House Republicans had voted to impeach, if you’d had 17 senators vote to convict, I think they could’ve disqualified him from further office.3And it would’ve been a bit of a moment where people said, OK, we’re moving on.They wouldn’t have repudiated Trump, at least not like we would’ve wanted; they wouldn’t have come clean about the last four years, but it would’ve kind of ended, I think.It would’ve been a bit of a, “OK, let’s close that chapter.”They left the chapter open, and that allowed for a huge amount of demagoguery in 2021 and 2022, which continues.
And why?Because we’re interested in Liz Cheney.Why does Liz Cheney make the decision she makes, and why does the rest of the conference make the decision that they make?
Yeah, maybe we should end with this.Because that’s a good one.So Liz Cheney I knew quite well back in the day.Worked together on some things.We drifted apart in 2016, really, and then throughout the first term of Trump’s presidency, because we weren’t in the same place.She was very much in the—she was in the leadership.She got elected; then she was in the leadership.She wanted to figure out how to make it less bad than it would otherwise be and advance some policy objectives.I think she had [made] a mistake, in my view, but an honorable view of what she was trying to do.I think she was clear-eyed about it.And if you look back, she didn’t indulge in the worst kinds of demagoguery or nativism or demonization of people.But she went along with a lot of the Trump stuff, and I guess she nominally supported Trump in 2020.I guess she voted for him, or at least she didn’t say that she didn’t vote for him.But that point of that was OK, it ends on Nov. 3 and then people step up.And again, they don’t have to repudiate everything.They don’t have to sound like me or any horrible ”Never Trumper,” but they need to kind of move on pretty clearly and accept Joe Biden and move on to give a Republican agenda and blah, blah.And I think Liz Cheney really was horrified, not just by Jan. 6, but by what happened between Nov. 3 and Jan. 6.
You know, her father, Dick Cheney, who had been secretary of defense before he was vice president, signed that letter of all the living former secretaries of defense that came out on Jan. 3.That was very important for me.And I knew a little of the backstory of it, so I was sort of interested in it.But I mean, that’s so extraordinary.They were so alarmed by what was happening within the Defense Department that every living secretary of defense, including Mark Esper, Trump’s secretary of defense, signs the letter reminding the military that we cannot be involved in any of these shenanigans; we have to uphold the Constitution and the rule of law.Liz was very close to that, obviously, partly through her father and partly because she was very interested and knows a lot about those issues, and so she, I think, saw how much damage Trump tried to do after Nov. 3.And then it culminates in Jan. 6, and then she figures, OK, now we’re really going—we all need to vote to impeach, and then maybe that sort of ends it, and then we can gradually rebuild something resembling a responsible Republican Party.And then she looks around, and, you know, 95% of House Republicans are voting to acquit Trump.And she was appalled.I mean, genuinely appalled.And that’s why she’s been so strong on: “We need to have the truth about Jan. 6.We need to have the truth about what happened before Jan. 6.We can’t have Trump again.He can’t be president again.”I mean, she, in a way—she carried to the logical conclusion the judgments that she made on Nov. 3 and afterward, which was that I can put up with it this long, but only if we really closed it down now, so to speak.
And when no one else much was willing to close it down, to her credit, she went off.But she’s alone.I mean, again, the fact that she and Adam Kinzinger are the only two House Republicans who believe that we should know what happened on Jan. 6, that people should obey subpoenas from Congress, that people should provide documents when requested, that’s itself incredibly astonishing.And we’re used to it now. …
Liz Cheney and the Republican Party
So let me just skip ahead to now.And there’s this moment which is the anniversary of—there’s the anniversary of Jan. 6 and there’s Liz Cheney, and there’s Dick Cheney, and there are no other Republicans.The Republican National Party Committee is about to censure her, and they’re about to say that Jan. 6 was “legitimate political discourse.”Can you help me understand that moment, and also the risk for American democracy as you see it from where we are, from where the party is?
I mean, the risk, the threat to American democracy is that one of our two major parties is willing to excuse—not just excuse but endorse, basically, an attempt to subvert an election.Not everyone, but a very high percentage of the candidates running in 2022, a lot of the supporters of that party, a lot of the organs of that party—a front-runner for the nomination in 2024.And so, that’s pretty amazing. …But it’s one thing, again, to have gone through a very bad patch, but to have gotten through it and sort of recovered one’s bearing.But it would be as if the Republican Party in the ‘60s and ‘70s and ‘80s was still saying, “Joe McCarthy was right, and we need to have more witch hunts, make sure there are no Communists in Hollywood or on faculties.”
Not every one was responsible all the time in either party, but there was sort of a sense that that was an unfortunate period that we should just get beyond.They didn’t necessarily attack McCarthy, but they got beyond it.And the fact that people are where they are now—where the Republican Party is now—is now the threat.I mean, Trump remains a very important part of that, because he’s the demagogue who can really pull the party together, I think, behind—in support of that threat to democracy.But the party is there.And not all the party, and we’ll see what happens in a whole bunch of elections, and we’ll see what happens in the presidential race in 2023 and ‘24, but much more of the party than one could be comfortable with, in terms of basic respect for democratic rules and procedures.
My last question—and then I’ll just see if there’s any follow-ups—but based on this whole conversation is: To get to that point, was it a choice that the party leaders made to get there?
That’s a good question.I’d say party leaders made a series of choices.They didn’t want to really ever come to grips with the choice, and so they made incremental accommodations, which ended up being one giant accommodation, one big choice.So yes, I think it’s very important to say that it’s a choice, in the sense that they weren’t forced to do it and they could’ve reacted differently.And different Republicans broke off at different times.There were some who opposed Trump from the beginning.There were some who didn’t run in 2018.There were some who opposed him subsequently, obviously Liz Cheney, especially now.
But yes, it was a funny kind of choice, though, because it wasn’t—we read history books, and it’s like: This is the moment you choose this or that.But there are also ways in which you choose gradually and incrementally, and the choice is more of an accommodation and a rationalization and an enabling.It’s not a sort of, “I’m standing up here and choosing this path.”Some did that, but an awful lot went along, and they kept on going along, and then they had to rationalize why they were going along, so they became kind of enthusiastic about going along.And then they whitewashed a lot of history and decided that the people against whom they were fighting were even worse, even if there wasn’t much evidence of that.So yeah, I think rationalization is a very powerful force, it turns out, in human psychology.And you can rationalize your way into a series of choices, which becomes a very damaging and dangerous choice.
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