The FRONTLINE Interviews
Charlie Sykes
Political Commentator
Charlie Sykes is a contributor to NBC and MSNBC and is the founder and editor-at-large of The Bulwark. He is also the author of several books, most recently How the Right Lost Its Mind.
Following is the transcript of an interview with FRONTLINE’s Jim Gilmore conducted on July 23, 2019. It has been edited for clarity and length.
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Contrasting Obama and Trump
So to begin with, we’re probably going to start looking at the two inaugural speeches by the two presidents, Trump and Obama.Give me a thought of who these two guys are, what they sold to get to office, what they represent.Certainly unity, division seems to be part of it, unifier and divider.What do you see as you look back at these two presidents and what they represented?
You know, what I remember watching Barack Obama was how aspirational he was.And even among Republicans who were critical of his policies, there was a sense that, OK, this is a turning of the page.There is something to this hope-and-change agenda.And I remember sitting with a Republican officeholder during the Obama inauguration, and he said, “You know what?We’re not going to be in power for another generation.Republicans are not going to be elected to the presidency for another generation,” because it seemed so optimistic and so hopeful.
And then you fast-forward to Donald Trump and that inaugural speech, which was “American carnage,” where, in fact, he painted this dark picture of Americans and really consciously set out to divide Americans on the basis of race, on the basis of class, on the basis of ideology.So it really was very striking that in eight years, in just eight short years, you’d gone from this sort of sunny, optimistic vision of Barack Obama, where he said, “We’re not red states, and we’re not blue states,” to a president who seemed to thrive on the tribalization of American politics.
And your overview of how we got there after this decade?
I’m still stunned by it.I mean, I’m still trying to get my head around what happened to the Republican Party, how something like this happened.And I think historians are going to grapple with this for a very, very long time.How do you go from a Barack Obama to a Donald Trump?I mean, I think part of it is the trauma of the financial collapse.There was a delayed reaction, a sense on the part of many Americans that they had been left behind, that they were being ignored, that they were treated with disdain.
And when Donald Trump stepped forward and said, “I’m going to be the voice of the forgotten man,” that actually resonated with a lot of people for a variety of reasons.
What did he mean by “forgotten”?
Well, I think he meant—I always struggle to get inside Donald Trump’s mind, so I’m always hesitant to do that, but I think he was talking about the parts of America that had been hollowed out.Republicans had talked a good game about free trade, but they really didn’t have an answer for all of the industries and the factories that had shut down throughout the industrial Midwest.
And the Democrats were perceived to be a largely urban party and an elitist party.And even though blue-collar workers had been voting Democratic since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, I think that they’d gotten lost; they’d fallen between the cracks.So neither political party was talking about the kinds of voters in Pennsylvania and Ohio and Michigan and Wisconsin who were feeling left out and left behind.
The Promise of Obama
… Obama represented—basically everybody said he sold his biography, that he was a guy that was able to bridge the divide, that he was going to be able to be a unifier.Why was that so tantalizing to the voters?
Well, Barack Obama was such a charismatic figure, and the prospect of electing the first African American president in this country was really attractive.And even if you disagreed with his politics, there was something about the historic nature of what he represented.He represented youth; he represented energy; he represented a certain kind of decency.And he represented a turning of the page in a country that has wrestled with the race issues for so many years.And I think there were a lot of Americans—and I think I was probably one of them—that thought this was a decisive turning point for America and race.And it, of course, turned out not to be.
Sarah Palin and the “Forgotten”
Out there at the same time, of course, was Sarah Palin, who represented something very different and who tied into a very different American public, a public that basically will become the forgotten, I suppose.What was going on there?What was the reality of what Sarah Palin had tied into, and did the GOP understand the power behind that?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and whether or not if you have to trace back how you got to Donald Trump that you have to go back to Sarah Palin; that Sarah Palin was the proto-Trump; that Sarah Palin represented some of the trends in the Republican Party that were going to culminate in Donald Trump.But I’m not sure the Republican Party understood this.I don’t think they had any idea.
John McCain, who I think came to understand exactly what Trumpism represented, did not know that he was setting this little prairie fire by picking Sarah Palin.But it was this populist strain, the willingness to dumb down the discourse, the sense of us versus them, the definition of the real America which excluded much of the actual American experience, that’s all Sarah Palin.
And an understanding of the anger that was out there?
In the beginning, I don’t even think she understood the anger out there.There’s a certain quality among Republicans of chasing after their own base rather than leading their own base, a sort of recognizing that they could tap into certain emotions.But as those emotions became darker and I think more divided, I think they adjusted themselves, and so you had that sense of “Those are my people; I need to catch up with them because I am their leader.”And I think that that’s part of this story.Sarah Palin, I don’t think, began as a leader of a populist revolt, but I think she tapped into it.
Everybody talks about the fact that eventually [Hillary] Clinton, when running against Trump, doesn’t get the forgotten, doesn’t understand that group.Did Obama understand the anger out there?Did he understand this population that would become the forgotten?
I don’t think fully he did, and I think that his party forgot as well.I do remember that moment when he was caught on tape talking about people who cling to their guns and their Bibles.And that disdain, I think, reflected some of the elite Democratic disdain for that population.Whether they took them for granted or simply were writing them off wasn’t clear.
So the way that that population would have heard that statement by Obama was how?How did they hear that?
I think they saw that as an expression of contempt, as an expression that “We’re not listening to you; we’re not paying attention to you; we are better than you.”
Obama and the Financial Crisis
The financial crisis and how it was handled by Obama, did they understand fully the stakes that were at hand?… Statements such as Obama telling the bankers when the bankers were brought into the White House that “I’m the only one between you and the pitchforks,” when the thought was that he was going to lower the boom on them, did they understand the stakes of the decisions that they were making, the power of the anger out there due to this recession?How do you view it?
Well, I think both Republicans and Democrats thought they could control all of that.They felt that, look, we are preventing the Great Depression.But the way it looked from ground level was that the big banks, the people who had created the financial crisis, were being bailed out when the little guy was being screwed, and I think that really fed into the narrative that somehow the federal government and the political class was not working for people like you and I; that they were content to take care of Goldman Sachs, they were content to take care of [AIG].But when it came to the factory in Flint, Michigan, when it came to a factory in Ohio, they just really didn’t give a damn.
And the long-term effects of that were what?
Well, I think disillusionment and I think alienation, and I think laid the groundwork for Donald Trump, who came in and said: “We need to blow the whole thing up.Neither political party is working for you.We need to, again, put people like you first.”And of course there’s a racial overlay of that as well.I’m getting ahead of you, I know, but I was thinking that as this anger was building, as people saw their communities hollowed out, as they saw their family members, their loved ones, losing jobs, they get a sense that the culture was not just ignoring them but was despising them.
And I think that during the last several years, especially, when there was all of this talk about white privilege and much of the debate became racialized, it played very differently, say, in rural Michigan than it might have played, say, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to be talking about white privilege at a time when a lot of white working-class individuals were looking around saying: “I’m not privileged.I’ve just lost my job. I worked for 30 years at this factory, and it is now gone.I’m looking at my community, and it’s ravaged by opioids.Why do you keep talking about privilege?Why are you talking past me?”And I think there was that sense, and that became—it was reinforced over and over again.
And did Trump just get that at a basic level?
I think Trump at a gut level gets this.I don’t attribute great strategic thinking to Donald Trump.I think I’ve described him as having reptilian cunning.But I think he had a gut sense of that kind of alienation, and some of the people around him or that he brought around him certainly did.People like Steve Bannon, I think, were ready to overtly exploit those racial resentments and animosity.They understood them; they understand which buttons to push, which code words to use, and it proved to be extremely potent.And it still is extremely potent.
The Affordable Care Act
Right.Back with the Obama years, the decision to push hard on the ACA [Affordable Care Act], on what became known as Obamacare, did they understand what was at stake?… Did they understand what pushing forward such a large, mammoth program without bipartisan action might do to them eventually?
No.Neither political party—here’s part of the disease that we have in American politics, is that both political parties, when they’re in control, feels that they must push to the absolute maximum.They say to themselves, “If not now, when?,” which is very, very seductive.And so the impulse is to push the agenda as hard and far as you possibly can, forgetting for the moment several things: number one, that every extreme action creates an extreme reaction, and a lot of our politics is about reaction and the reactionary nature of our politics.And that’s descriptive.I’m not trying to—it is just the pushback.
And also, there is nothing more fraught than health care, because it is so personal and it is so intimate.And every political party that decides to take on health care in some massive, poorly understood way reaps both a backlash and political retaliation.So if the Democrats and Barack Obama had focused on reviving the economy, if they had focused on that instead of health care, things might not have turned out differently, but they might have.The blowback might not have been so extreme, and people would have focused more on the economic recovery than on the divisive issue of health care.
And when they realize at the sort of ninth [sic] hour that they were not going to get any Republican vote, what would have happened if they had pulled back at that point, pulled back on what they were expecting to do?How dangerous a territory were they going to get to?Of course, they don’t know that there’s going to be dozens of repeal attempts and that Obamacare would become the focus in election after election to come.Why did they make this move, and what were the results of it all?
Well, I think that at a certain point, there should have been calmer heads in the room, and this would apply to decisions the Republicans made, to say there is no major domestic policy change in this country that has not been bipartisan.You go back to the 1960s.We think of it as a very divisive time.Most of the major programs of the Great Society were passed with Republican and Democratic votes.Go back to the New Deal.Most of the major pieces of legislation were passed on a bipartisan nature.
To ram something like this through with—on a strictly partisan vote is fraught with danger.Now, the temptation is overwhelming.The temptation is overwhelming, especially in an era where “compromise” and “bipartisanship” become dirty words.And I think that that’s what has been happening, where that is no longer seen necessarily as a virtue.It’s like, get it across the line, and I think the thinking was that this would be like Social Security or Medicare.Once it’s in place, people will love it.It will become part of the fabric, and it will be untouchable.And, of course, that’s what [Speaker of the House] Nancy Pelosi meant was we have to pass the bill in order to find out what’s in it.I think she got kind of a bum rap on what she was saying there.
But I think that was the thinking.You push this thing through; then you own it for a generation, and it will be popular.And it was, I think, a miscalculation.
I mean, even to the point of not understanding that if you push it through, and this is as antagonistic an audience as possible, that you’re not even going to be able to fix the problems.You’re not going to be able to make it work the way you expect to make it work because nothing’s perfect when it comes right out.
Well, and that was obvious, though, at the time, because of the way they passed the bill, without getting too much into the weeds, with the reconciliation, that they wouldn’t be able to go back with the legislative fixes that you would normally figure.But this is part of the problem of our politics: You get the momentum; then nobody wants to say stop.
Obama says at this point, or at some point he comes to the conclusion that this is a GOP that can’t say yes to anything.But the question on this one is, how much of it is his fault as well?
Well, I know it’s unpopular to say that both sides contributed to all of this, and there’s no question about it: The Republican Party became extremely oppositional.And especially now, it seems very ironic when we were talking about deficit reduction.But also, there was that moment where early in Obama’s presidency where it looked like he was open to working across party lines to get some of his legislation through, and there were a lot of Republicans who thought, well, wow, he might actually govern the way he campaigned, and if he does, we’re in a world of political hurt, because if he has this bipartisan image, it’s going to be very, very difficult to be critical of him.
And then there was the meeting where he sits back and basically says, “I don’t have to take your input because I won.”And many of the people, the Republicans, when they came back and they told members of their caucus about that, that was a moment where people said: “OK, we’re not going to be having this ‘Kumbaya’ moment.We’re not going to be able to work together.We need to basically go back into our bunkers and be as oppositional as possible.”
The Rise of Conservative Media
The success of the conservative media at this point of jumping on board, and the attacks on Obama, and joining in with the Tea Party momentum that was growing, and the GOP attitude, how important was the press when it came—especially the conservative press—when it came to this point?And were they just finding a new way to operate?
It’s impossible to overstate the impact of the rise of the conservative media and the way it’s changed our political environment.To a certain extent, what happened was the political parties were replaced by conservative media; that Fox News became more important than the Republican leadership in Congress.And at the same time, you had outside organizations that also decided this was a great opportunity to build their mailing lists, raise money, get more clicks.And so you had this vast outrage machine that arose on the right.
And this outrage machine—you’re talking about not just the Tea Party, but the Heritage Foundation, talk radio, Fox News—really changed the nature of our politics in ways that I think we’re living with today.And you talk to people like former Speaker John Boehner, and he’ll describe the complete transformation of the way that the legislation was done, that the public suddenly now had vastly more information—not all of it accurate, but vastly more information—that members of his caucus would say, “Well, if you don’t do what I want, I’m going to go to Fox News, or I’ll go to Breitbart, or I’ll go to Rush Limbaugh, and they will beat you up.”
And as that outrage machine gathers momentum, it becomes harder and harder to negotiate and make bipartisan deals, and the Obama administration was right in the middle of that.
…The Tea Party Congress is eventually elected.Why are they elected, and does the GOP understand—of course, with the GOP’s help—do they understand exactly what the deal is?They know that these guys are electable.They know they’re popular, the media will be behind them; the conservative media will be behind them.So they make a deal with the devil, some people sort of say.Just take us to that moment and what took place.
Yeah, I mean 2010 was an extraordinary moment because you had all of this Tea Party energy, and the Republican Party surges back into the majority.They’re very, very heady days.But I don’t think they knew exactly what they were getting.This goes back to the analogy of growing the baby alligator in the bathtub, and then suddenly you have a grown alligator wandering around the neighborhood, or you start a small fire, and suddenly you have a forest fire.
So the Republicans were more than happy to take the votes of the Tea Party members and the Tea Party freshman class, but it changed the nature of the caucus in fundamental ways.And I think this started to show up when you started having votes on the debt ceiling, when you started to have votes on the budget deals and the rise of the Freedom Caucus, where you realize you now had a hard group of congressmen and women who were really not interested in governing.They were more interested in taking a stand and frustrated one legislative procedure after another.
So it wasn’t just the Republicans were unable to negotiate with Barack Obama; they were unable to negotiate with one another.And you saw that in what happened with Speaker Boehner.
Obama and the Republican Party
With the economic plan that was brewing.Explain how, in fact, it blew up in Boehner’s and Obama’s face.
… The grand bargain.Well, the grand bargain blew up because neither party was able to bring its own members around to the idea of compromise.Democrats wanted more revenue than the Republicans were willing to accept.And Republicans were never that interested in going along with John Boehner’s compromise with Barack Obama.
So Boehner misjudges his own party, basically?
Well, yes, and that’s part of the story of this era, is the Republicans did not know what they were becoming.They didn’t know what had happened to them fully, and they didn’t understand the trajectory of their own party.And I’ll be honest with you: A lot of us did not understand how radically the party was changing from 2008 to 2016.I mean, you saw it in the government shutdowns and the rise of people like [Sen.] Ted Cruz and what the Freedom Caucus did and the increasing power of the conservative media to bully members of Congress away from compromising.
But again, the Republican Party became caught in a sort of loop of constantly overpromising its base and not being able to deliver, or promising their base things that could never happen.They were completely unrealistic.And then when they didn’t deliver, then there was this explosion of outrage, this sense that they had been betrayed.And all of the outrage machines, you know, fed on all of that.
And so when Donald Trump came along and said, “You have been betrayed; these people have made promises they can’t keep,” this resonated with Republicans who’d been fed this line by the outrage industry on the right for several years.
The 2012 election and when Obama wins, he feels that at this point, the fever is broken, but that does not turn out to be the case.What did they misjudge?What does it say?Even Newtown that happens at that point, they think, all right, we’ll get a bipartisan deal on this; everybody’s got to agree that there’s a problem when young children are being slaughtered.But even that won’t go through.So take us to that moment, the optimism that Obama had and the realities that soon sunk in.
Well, first of all, most Republicans thought they were going to win in 2012, and so the loss was a surprise and a really deep disappointment.It also didn’t change any of the underlying reality of where the party was going and its need to serve a certain constituency.And I remember Newtown was kind of a turning point for me as well.It was so horrible.I was on the radio then, and I remember saying: “I do not want to have the same conversations anymore.I am sick and tired of hearing the same loop that we’re hearing on gun control.”And I think there was a real disgust on the part of a lot of folks.
But the reality hadn’t changed, which was that the Republican Party was never going to break with the NRA.The NRA chose that it was going to take the most absolute line because that’s what it had been doing.And once it chose that it was going to take the absolute line, the Republican Party was held hostage.
And that’s kind of the pattern of the politics, where no one wanted anyone to get to the right of them and nobody wanted to be perceived as being squishy or compromising.And I think Newtown really captured the implications of that for our politics.Here was a moment where 80%, 90% of Americans, I think, would have supported some sort of a reasonable compromise about it, and yet nothing happened.So this is where you have the Republican Party held hostage by its base, and American politics held hostage by that Republican Party.
The Republican “Autopsy”
Another big issue in 2013 and 2014 was the loss of, in 2012, the “autopsy” is done by the Republican Party, and there was a feeling that, OK, we’ve got to make the tent bigger again, and reform of some sort with immigration has to happen.And the Senate passes it, and then lo and behold, it blows up in the House.Why?Why the backlash in the GOP base?What was misunderstood by the leadership and the effects, the long-term results of this?
Well, I will admit that I miscalculated that as well.And some of that came as a surprise.So let’s go back to the autopsy.This was Reince Priebus, who I’ve known very, very well, was presiding over that at the RNC [Republican National Committee], and I think that was the consensus position of thoughtful Republicans and conservatives; that this is a party that needed to broaden its appeal, that it had taken a wrong turn, and it faced demographic annihilation if they did not appeal to women, young people and minorities.
And even people like Sean Hannity went on the air and said: “We need to rethink our position on immigration.I was wrong to take such a hard line on immigration.”And of course then you had the Gang of Eight coming up with the immigration plan, which again, all compromises are not perfect, but you had some of the brightest lights in the Republican Party that were willing to sign onto it.[Sen.] Marco Rubio staked his political career on it.
And then it gets to the House of Representatives, and the House is very different than the Senate, because the House is much more sensitive to the pressure from the conservative media and the base.And up until then, I don’t think that there had been a full recognition in the Republican leadership of how immigration was playing in the base.I’m from Wisconsin; it was not one of the top 10 issues.It was not a concern; it was not an obsession.
And so there were always these voices out there, but they were never dominant.And I think that what you saw with the blow up in the House was the pressure, again, these loud voices.There were people like Michelle Malkin, who may not have a huge constituency, but were able to focus on the vulnerable members; you know, the Laura Ingrahams of the world.
… So the defeat of [House Majority Leader] Eric Cantor really sent shockwaves through, and I think that was really one of the turning points, to suddenly realize that this was really potent for most Republicans in the House.Most Republicans in the House are not afraid of Democrats in a general election.They’re afraid of being primaried.And the defeat of Eric Cantor was really a shocking moment, and nobody saw it coming.He was the speaker to come, and so when he went down, I think that was an underlining of the potency of the immigration issue.
Longer term, I do think there was also a backlash when President Obama began issuing executive orders on DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals] and others.There was a sense that we can’t make a compromise with you because we don’t know what you will enforce, because there’s always been this fear that we will give you some sort of relief, a path to citizenship or legality in return for border security, but then we never get the border security.
And when it became clear that the Obama administration would engage unilaterally, that I think created a lot of backlash among Republicans figuring, “Well, we could pass this, but then we don’t know what you’re going to do, what executive action you’re going to do that might undermine this.”And this was taking place the same time there was controversy about Obamacare, so the system was overloaded.
Obama’s Executive Orders
So when Obama goes to executive orders for DACA and such, what’s the blowback from the base?What’s the blowback from the Freedom Caucus and all?
Well, I think the concern was that we can’t come up with a compromise with the Obama administration because we don’t know what they might selectively enforce or not enforce.So I think it deeply eroded any sense that there could be a deal or a grand bargain.
… Obama’s view—why does Obama end up using executive orders at this point?How frustrated is he with the inability to accomplish anything?
Well, I think at this point in his presidency, he’d grown very, very skeptical of Republicans’ willingness to compromise about anything whatsoever, and especially with Republicans in control, to be able to govern with his phone and his pen was really, I think, he saw it as his only option.Of course it created precedents that were to come back later.
With what results?
Well, the precedents to come back later is watching what Donald Trump is now doing with his opinion, his phone, which is, of course, ironic watching Republicans go along with that.
So the Tea Party people, have they been the ones that have morphed, basically, into the anti-immigration people?Is that what has taken place?
I think that’s what did take place.But one of the great mysteries is exactly what happened to the Tea Party.It’s not clear to me.I watched it very closely, and it looked like it was a spontaneous, grassroots movement, but then people decided that there were ways to monetize it, there were ways to weaponize it, and the Tea Party morphed into a lot of different things.And it happened over a very, very quick period of time where it went from a really grassroots organization to something that was organized on a much bigger basis, and then was taken over by a lot of, shall we say, entrepreneurial grafters.
So within a relatively short period of time—and I watched this very closely—I was looking around asking people, “Exactly who are the Tea Partyers or the people who claim to represent the Tea Party?,” because immigration was really not part of the original Tea Party.But in a relatively short period of time, you started hearing that this is what they were concerned about.So was this the original Tea Party?Were these people who were opportunistic and came in decided they were going to push their agenda under the banner of the Tea Party?That was never clear to me.
Obama and Immigration
So Donald Trump is one of the people that sees this issue as very important, very politically powerful.So he comes down that escalator in 2015, and he provides the message that he does, a very divisive message using fear to some extent.What is taking place there, and why is it happening, and what will the consequences, the results be?
Well, Donald Trump comes down that golden escalator, and he says something that is ugly and appalling, and much of the political world reacts against it.But then it turns out that it politically works for him, that it appeals to the Republican base.And I remember listening to it at the time, and one of my first reactions was when he said, “They’re sending over the rapists; they’re not sending over their best people,” I was thinking, that’s from Ann Coulter’s book.He basically has taken lines from Ann Coulter’s book, which was, I would say, extreme, painted with a really broad brush.Ann is, shall we say, not a voice of moderation who has played the race card for many, many years.And then you have a presidential candidate was channeling Ann Coulter’s racism, and it was appealing to Republicans.It did not disqualify him.
And there were time and time again that Donald Trump would say things that you figure, “That’s the end of the campaign; there’s no way it goes on,” and yet the Republican base embraced it.And I think in part was because he defined himself, he branded himself as the hardest of the hard-liners.And when Ted Cruz tried to say, “Well, I’m pretty hard-line, too,” that brand had already been taken for him.And so I think a lot of people interpreted this, “Well, the Mexicans are sending rapists; we need to build a wall and have Mexicans pay for it; we need to ban Muslims,” those were all just sort of symbolic statements that I am taking the hardest possible line, and people bought it.
And people bought it why again?
… Well, because there’s different ways of looking at this.Donald Trump didn’t invent these darker impulses.They were preexisting conditions, but he found a way to tap into them and bring them out.And so there was a lot that was latent there.There was a lot of things that I think had been growing for some time that the Republican Party leadership had ignored or had dismissed but that he decided he was going to stoke those fires, and the success was pretty obvious.
By the way, part of it also was that he managed to take all of those anxieties of all those forgotten Americans and very quickly said: “It’s not your fault.It’s these people’s fault.It’s the immigrants’ fault.”He managed to make them the target and the theme, and so all of that resentment is channeled through Donald Trump at immigrants, at foreign countries.It’s the Mexicans; it’s the Chinese.And people said: “Yeah, it’s nothing I’ve done.I’m not responsible for this.My country has betrayed me because it’s allowed these people to do this to me.”
And so the playing of the victim card but also identifying the villains was very effective.And this is something Donald Trump does.He picks his enemies, he picks the target, he frames the villain, and then he pounds away at it and pounds away at it.And for a lot of Americans, that explains their problem, explains where we need to go.
The Muslim ban is the first thing the first week of his presidency.What’s the message that it’s sending?I think you’ve written about it in that it’s one of the things that is dividing us.Describe what you thought about the travel ban that at first they referred to as the Muslim ban.
Well, let’s go back to the Muslim ban where he stands up and he says, “I, Donald J. Trump, am calling for a ban on all Muslims coming into the country.”It was so shocking.You remember at the time how other Republicans reacted to that.Mike Pence said that was a horrible idea.[Speaker of the House] Paul Ryan said, “This is not who we are as Republicans; this is not who we are as Americans.”It was one of the most extreme statements that any presidential candidate had ever made, to basically say that you are going to exclude an entire religion from your country.And everybody sat back and said: “OK, well, this is too far.This is the end of his campaign again.”And it wasn’t.Republican voters bought that.
So people shouldn’t have been surprised when he followed this up with the Muslim ban where, again, he draws this line that is very much designed to say: “This is the other.These are the enemies.These are the people you need to be afraid of.”And the flip side of that, of course, “I’m going to keep you safe from these people by doing this sort of thing.”And even after four years, I think you still have to go back and go how stunning that was.
One of the things that was the most powerful in getting evangelicals to support Donald Trump was his emphasis on religious freedom.But religious freedom for Donald Trump meant protecting Christians against legislation or against administrative action.And his emphasis on religious freedom was really something that galvanized support of the evangelical Christian movement behind him despite all of his personal problems.
But then what does Donald Trump do?He singles out an entire religion for banning.And what was extraordinary to watch was how many of his supporters didn’t see the contradiction.You can’t say you’re for religious freedom and how important religious freedom is and then call for the ban on all Muslims.But again, I think that’s part of the success that he’s had of dividing people by race, by ethnicity, by religion.
Of course, what his people tell us and tell everyone is that it wasn’t a Muslim ban; it was a travel ban.I mean, we’re allowing Muslims in from Indonesia, from India.What’s your response to that?
Well, this is the problem with Donald Trump, because he had let us know who he was and what he intended to do before he issued the ban.And I think everybody understood what the travel ban was designed, in fact, to do.And his supporters, his base, I think interpreted the travel ban as a Muslim ban.And so yes, technically it is not, but it was the symbolism.This is why Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller pushed it, because they understood the symbolism; they understood the message that it sent to his base.And what they were saying was promise made, promise kept.He said he was going to ban Muslims; look what he’s doing.
So you’ve got the Muslim ban; you’ve got the fear of the caravans and the midterm elections; you’ve got the meeting about the possible immigration deal that turns into a comment about “shithole countries.”How do you see that as part of the things that are dividing us?
Well, it was interesting.Coming up to the midterms, the president emphasizing the caravans, and it did occur to me that Donald Trump sees everything as a television show.And if he was the executive producer of the midterm elections, this is something that he would have made central to the show, which is, “Look, here are the teeming hordes of aliens who are coming to steal your job and take your women from you.”This is exactly the imagery that he wants to impress upon Americans, that there is this alien horde coming, and only he can protect you from the alien horde.
The Muslim ban is the same thing.“Here are the enemies coming to kill you and do things, destroy your communities.Only I can block them from doing all of this,” which is why, ultimately, he was never going to make a compromise on immigration, because he doesn’t want to solve the problem.He wants to use it as an issue.
Increased Division Under Obama
The Obama legacy is not what he expected.In fact, what happened during the Obama years is Americans became more divided, not more unified.But how in the world do we get from an Obama to a Trump, even though the division happens, the division continues to grow through Trump?But how do we get from A to B?
…Well, I think part of it is maybe to take the focus off of Obama and Trump themselves.Maybe it didn’t come from the top.Maybe it reflects what’s been happening in the country, that we were never as unified as we thought we were; that the problems we thought we had gotten past, we had not gotten past.And then, of course, this vast new communications industry that is really built on fomenting those divisions, those fears, make us fear one another.I think that’s part of it.
And then, of course, that’s all overlaid on the part of this vast economic dislocation that made people wonder what their place was.I mean, you had a lot of people who really looked around and said: “Is this the America that I thought it was?Do I really have a place in this?Am I going to be replaced?Are there people who, in fact, look down on me who are going to ruin my way of life?”And so once those fears are in place, then they’re easily exploitable.So did Barack Obama cause this?Did Donald Trump cause this?They contributed to it, but they didn’t cause it.
And your overview of how Trump’s America is different than Obama’s America?
See, this is what I worry about.I worry that Donald Trump reflects a changed America, but that he’s also changing it; that he’s changing the character of the country; he’s changing the culture of the country.Again, not because he creates racism or xenophobia, but because he feeds on it.It’s like just because an ember is burning doesn’t mean that it’s going to grow into a massive conflagration, but here comes Donald Trump, and he pours gasoline on it, and he encourages these dark impulses.
I think it was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who said that evil doesn’t run between classes or nations; it runs down the middle of every human heart, so that Americans can go either way.Abraham Lincoln appealed to the “better angels of our nature”; Donald Trump appeals to the darker impulses of our nature.And so which direction are we going as a country?Are we more willing to indulge our prejudices?Are we more willing to stand with fellow Americans and chant, “Send her back, send her back,” or “Lock her up”?Is this who we are, or could we have been something different?
I know some of these people, and these are people who lead good, wholesome, responsible lives.They belong to their churches; they’re good citizens.And yet somehow in this age, they get drawn into this kind of a movement.I mean, we Americans are not necessarily unique in that respect.So we’re a country that now is willing to accept serial lying; that’s willing to accept overt racism; that’s willing to accept a president of the United States who behaves in a way that we would not find acceptable from any corporate executive, any other community leader.So what does that say about us?
The Legacy of Division
And the long-term effect of it is what?
I don’t know.Again, that’s really what I worry about, because we’re not just going to go back to normal when Donald Trump leaves.The day that Donald Trump leaves the presidency, America is not healed.The damage of this is going to be long term, and I think it’s going to be very, very deep.And that’s what I worry about, taking the focus off him and turning it back onto us and what have we been willing to accept that we weren’t willing to accept before?How do we think about each other?How do we think about being an American?How do we treat one another?What are our standards?And I think the damage is potentially going to be very deep.
We’ve talked about on the Republican side.Let’s talk about the Democratic side for a second.[Sen.] Bernie Sanders is a result of some of the same tribal polarization from the liberal side.What’s going on with Bernie Sanders?What does it say about when he was running against Hillary, and now that he’s running again, what does it say about the Democratic Party and the divide that’s there and this polarization and this fear that exists on the Democratic side?
Well, I think that’s one of the most interesting developments, that to a large extent, Bernie Sanders was tapping into the same anxieties that Donald Trump was tapping into.In fact, you listen to Bernie Sanders supporters, and they often sounded very much like Donald Trump supporters, and Donald Trump supporters sounded like Bernie Sanders supporters.So this is an indication that there is something deeply dislocated.
And also, the way in which our politics are no longer along the same liberal-conservative continuum.Right and left are not quite so distinct.It’s why everything is a little bit jumbled.There’s the sense that the system is rigged, that the sense that we need to have some sort of massive change.And you see that on both ends of the political spectrum.
But again, I’m not sure that at this particular moment the Democrats have come up with an answer for Donald Trump, because I think a lot of Americans, they want to be safe, they want things to be prosperous, and they want things to be normal again.And if they perceive the Democrats to not be committed to their safety, a danger to the economy and their prosperity, and promising revolutionary upheaval rather than normalcy, they may turn back and go, “You know, I’m going to hold our nose and vote for Donald Trump again.”
Trump and the Republican Party
One of the first legislative avenues that they took, of course, was the repealing of Obamacare and the attempt to repeal and replace Obamacare.It didn’t go so well.It fell apart because they had no plan.And the results of it were, to some extent, that Trump was able to bring more power to himself because he said: “Well, the Congress ain’t going to do anything.They can’t do anything, so I’m going to have to move forward, and I’ll fix it.As I said during the campaigns, is only I can fix it.”Was that a turning point in some ways in what it said about a GOP which soon afterwards would start pledging their allegiance to Donald Trump more than they had before?
Well, first of all, I think it was a miscalculation for them to go into the repeal of Obamacare before they took on something like, for example, infrastructure.You think of the alternative history.What if Donald Trump sat down with the Democrats and said, “Let’s find some common ground and let’s push a trillion-dollar, $2 trillion infrastructure plan”?Think how our politics would be different.
But I think what the health care issue showed was that the Republicans were not really prepared to be a governing party, at least at the congressional level; that for all of these years and for all of these repeal attempts, they didn’t have an idea of what to do.They were the dog that catches the car and doesn’t know what to do with it.
But I also think that you’re seeing now the Republican Party make its peace with presidential rule by fiat.This is something they hated when Barack Obama did it.They hated it when Barack Obama governed with a phone and a pen, but they’re completely OK with it now that it’s Donald Trump using that executive authority, acting unilaterally.And this, again, is part of the change in our political culture.Rather than having long-term, bipartisan solutions to problems, we have unilateral executive action which then can be reversed and undone by the next president.
So we’re going to have this switching back and forth and back and forth and neither political party standing on any sort of principle when it comes to excessive use of executive power.As long as it’s our guy, we’re OK with it.
Trump and the Media
The media attacks on Trump from early on; the comedians that were on every night ridiculing him; the coverage that he kept on saying was unfair, that it was all fake news.And that’s what he does, is he decides at some point that he is his best representative.He is going to be the one that hits back at the media who is undercutting him, he feels.And it’s a constant refrain of “Fake news,” and soon after, it’s picked up by conservative media, which is backing the president up on this.What’s the effect of all this?This is really as early as February; this is really happening full bore.What’s your take on what was going on?
Well, this is something that I noticed happening during the campaign; that really, we were creating alternative realities in the media, that—the conservatives have complained about media bias for many, many, many years.But at a certain point, we had become so successful in questioning the media that we had destroyed the—we had completely destroyed the credibility of the media.We had delegitimized fact-based media, and as a result undermined the immune system of a lot of voters to false information.
And it was really extraordinary watching Donald Trump pivot and take fake news, the term “fake news,” and adopt it as his own critique of the media, because there was such a thing as fake news during 2016.There is still such a thing as fake news, and we will see it again in [2020]: absolutely false propaganda.And this is part of the problem of our age, is how do people know what’s true anymore?
So one of the accomplishments, I would say the dark accomplishments of Donald Trump, has been to delegitimize many of the independent sources of criticism of his own administration.So he has created this alternative reality that allows him to dismiss or discredit anything that is negative while pushing his own narrative.So the fact is that we can have some of the best investigative reporting of our lifetime, which I think we’re seeing, and 40% of the nation will either not hear it, will never know about it, or will reject it because of the source.And Donald Trump has ridden this.
So what does it mean in the long run?Gary Kasparov makes the point—the former chess champion makes the point that the point of constant lying and propaganda is not to convince you to support or oppose a specific program; it’s to undermine your entire critical sensibility.It is the annihilation of truth.And that’s the world that we live in, that Donald Trump is flourishing in, where he knows that whatever he says is going to be repeated within the right-wing echo chamber and that when he’s challenged on it, it will be dismissed by much of his base.
And that’s part of the transformation, and it’s going to be very, very hard to turn back on even after he’s gone.It’s a tremendous challenge.
Russia and the 2016 Election
… The Russians were very savvy at this.In fact, during the election of 2016, they found the divides within the United States.Talk a little bit about the fact that it was not just lies that were out there; they were manipulating the divisions in America that were already there.Explain.
Right.The Russians did not invent their own propaganda.They found the divisions in our country; they found those hotspots, and they exploited them.And all you needed to do, really, was to look at some of the click-bait conservative media to see what was getting the traffic, what was getting the reaction.Read the Drudge Report, read Breitbart, watch Fox News, recognize which of these narratives, which of these stories had the most emotional impact and then replicate all of that.
I’ll tell you what my experience was in 2016, that the flood of these misleading or outright false stories was increasing.In the past, I’d always been able to push back on my audience and say: “OK, you understand this is not true.This is not the case.There are not bodies stacked up in the Clinton library, and here’s the source of all that.”By late 2016, though, I was no longer able to do that.People were not willing to accept the corrections.
And that’s when I realized, uh-oh, things have gone too far; that we created this hermetically sealed bubble that if I could show you that a story was not true because it was in The New York Times or The Washington Post or NBC or PBS, people would say, “Ah, those are liberal outlets; I don’t care.”And that was—there was a tipping point that took place.And I think the Russians didn’t create that tipping point, but they exploited it.They saw the fissures of division.They saw these pivot points, and they went right for them.
The Mueller Report
And how was it used by Trump and his people, and by the media that supported him, like Fox?When he brought up—when the Mueller investigation, he would talk about the “witch hunt,” …What was going on?
Well, this has all been accelerating, that you create—again, you create your own narrative, and in the modern conservative movement and Republican Party, there’s been a willingness to go along with this.That the tone is set from the top and that—people’s willingness to accept this I find to be absolutely extraordinary.So that when you talk about something like the Mueller report, you really have two completely different worlds, two Americas.The narratives that you will see on Fox News will have different themes, will have different characters, will have different issues than that which you’ll see anywhere else in the country.
And Donald Trump is counting on this.And this does fundamentally change our politics.You see sometimes Republican politicians acting in a certain way, and you’re thinking, why would they think that they can get away with that?And the answer is because they can get away with it, because they know that they’re not trying to appeal to a general-election audience.They’re trying to appeal to the folks that are going to get them on Fox News or get them on The Rush Limbaugh Show.They’re appealing to their base, and they will be applauded for the most extreme behavior.
The Party of Trump
So Trump really takes over the GOP.… This is the Trump party.You write about this.Talk a little bit about what’s at stake, what’s at stake for the GOP?And you talk about the fact that for survival, they’re going to have to reject some of the things that Trump is selling.
This was a fight for the soul of the Republican Party, and Trump won.There’s no question about it.And it’s not so much that Trump took over the Republican Party; it’s that the Republican Party completely capitulated to him.You wonder whether or not if some people would have pushed back, if [Speaker of the House] Paul Ryan, rather than becoming an enabler, had become an articulate critic of some of this, would it have made a difference?It probably would have cost him his speakership, but maybe there would have been an alternative voice in the party.
So you have a party right now that is divided between people who are just simply afraid of him, people who are strictly transactional, who just figure, “I’m going to go along; I will praise him because I want something from him,” and then a relatively smaller group of people who I think are just pure Trumpkins.They are the true believers.
But I think what they’re all united in believing is that in order to survive politically, not lose in a primary, that they have to stick as close to him as possible, even when he puts out racist tweets.You cannot criticize him in public.Even when he engages in the most reckless behavior, you cannot break with him in public.So there is that short-term survival instinct.
But here’s what Republicans have to grapple with.Longer term, what does Trumpism mean for you?What happens to a Republican Party that alienates young people, women, minorities; that has turned itself into a cult of personality that clearly no longer believes in things like fiscal conservatism or national leadership or the importance of personal character?What happens to that political party?So to a certain extent, in this Faustian bargain, they are trading short-term political safety for long-term political disaster.
The other thing that you write about is conservatives in general, this willingness to turn a blind eye to the president’s lies, constant lies; that fringes like the “alt-right” fully support and what this is, I think you defined, as a moral failure.Explain.
Well, I mean, there’s two separate moral failures there.Number one is becoming numb to the fact that the president is a chronic liar.And I think the calculation has become pretty clear; that in order to have any influence in Washington, D.C., you have to keep your mouth shut and lavish the president with praise.That’s also the route to safety, because if you criticize the president or correct the president, he will tweet at you.Now we have elected members of the United States Senate and Congress who are afraid of the president’s tweets.
I think it’s a more fundamental problem that the president has brought in elements of the “alt-right” into the mainstream of American politics.And this is a fundamental moral failure.The “alt-right” is a euphemism for white nationalism and white supremacy, and whether you’re talking about what happened after Charlottesville or whether you’re talking about him saying that minority members of Congress should go back to where they come from, this should be a bright line.And at one time, it was.But I guess silence becomes a habit at a certain point.You become inured to it.If you sold 50% of your soul, is it that much more to sell another 10%?
But this is going to haunt the Republican Party for a long time, because they’re going to want to say, of course, “This was not us; we’re not the party of exclusion or white nationalism.”And yet you have been white nationalist-adjacent now for four or eight years, and that’s going to be very, very hard to deny.
Trump and the Culture Wars
Specifically you mentioned the statements about the four Democratic congresswomen [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib].Where did that come from, and why—is this a political strategy?What’s happening here, and specific to that, why is it such a danger?
This, of course, is the mystery of Donald Trump.How much of it is strategy, and how much of it is impulse?I don’t attribute great strategic genius to the president or think that he’s playing four-dimensional chess.But there is a certain reptilian cunning in Donald Trump, in his willingness and his ability to pick out who he wants to be his enemy.He wants those four Democratic freshmen to be the face of the Democratic Party.He wants to run against a socialist radical Democratic Party, and if that is a socialist radical brown female Democratic Party, that’s all the better for him, which is why he relishes this fight so much; that he thinks, in fact, he has hit on a way of freezing the Democratic Party.Notice who he picks fight with, how often he picks fights with black women or with black athletes or with people that he thinks will repel his base.And his goal here is not to expand his base; it is to harden it.It is to polarize the electorate.So he picks the most polarizing figures on the left, and he says: “This is what I’m up against.They’re not just people who disagree with me.These are people who hate America.They hate you.They want to destroy everything you believe.”This is not a choice between Democrats and Republicans.He wants to frame this campaign as a clash of civilizations.
So at some instinctive level, picking a minority woman who wears a head scarf and making her the symbol of what he’s against, he thinks that that works with his base.He thinks that will turn out the hard-core votes he need to win the Electoral College.
And previous to that, there was, of course, the NFL demonstrations.
Right, same thing.
That moment, what was that?
Well, that was, again, that was pure Trumpism.You basically make it about patriotism.You make it about you either love the country or you hate the country.And Colin Kaepernick was a perfect foil for Donald Trump.The NFL players were a foil for Donald Trump.He wants to own patriotism.He wants to make this, again, a choice between I, Donald Trump, love America.The Democrats, the people I’m against, hate America.And look who’s on the other side.It’s Colin Kaepernick; it’s Ilhan Omar; it’s AOC.It’s folks like this.
So I don’t know that this was hashed out in a war room of great political strategy, but it clearly goes to the essence of Trump’s strategy.
And the Roy Moore episode of supporting Roy Moore in Alabama.What was at stake there and what it says about the GOP?
Well, to a certain extent, it also showed the limits of this binary politics.The argument, of course, with Trump among Republicans is it’s a binary choice.No matter how awful Donald Trump is, the other side is so much worse.It’s the Flight 93 election.We’re all going to die anyway; we might as well at least try to save America with Donald Trump.They tried to apply that to Roy Moore as well, which is a binary choice.This America hating Democrats who want that Senate seat.
But Roy Moore was a bridge too far.He was a terrible candidate.He was a terrible candidate even before the allegations about young women came up.He was a man who had no respect, really, for the rule of law.He was an extremist; he was a crank.And it’s really an indication of how far out of the mainstream he was that he would lose a Senate seat in a state like Alabama.
Donald Trump trying to see how far he could push the envelope there.And had Roy Moore won, think about what that would have meant for the Republican Party.The Republican Party would have been the party of Roy Moore, the party of an accused pedophile.And I think to a certain extent they dodged a bullet.
The 2018 Midterm Elections
The midterm elections and the run-up to the midterm elections where the president started focusing on the caravans and talking about sending the military down to the borders because we are at war here.The other thing was the [Brett] Kavanaugh situation with what happened before the Senate.What was happening here before the election began, how it defines the way Trump sort of operates and certainly when it comes to elections?
Well, the caravan was the perfect issue for Donald Trump because it showed it was America under attack and that he was standing as the defender of America; that America was under attack by thousands of these dark aliens who were coming to take your jobs and your women.This was the theme that Donald Trump, I think, felt most comfortable with in this campaign.And the pictures made for perfect imagery in conservative media because it was not abstract.And so of course, the president used his considerable power of the bully pulpit to draw as much attention to it as possible to create an emergency and to create a crisis that, again, would cause people to rally around him.
But this is part of what Trump has to do.Trump has to have an enemy.Trump has to make Americans fearful.He has to convince Americans that they are under attack or they are victimized in some way and that these are the enemies, and only I can protect you.And you’re going to see that throughout 2020.
Now, the Kavanaugh thing is kind of in a different category.The Kavanaugh—you want to talk about Kavanaugh?
Sure.
Kavanaugh was in many ways a high point for Trump among Republicans, because the one thing that unites Republicans is the question of Supreme Court justices.So all along throughout the first year of his presidency, the line that you would hear from people is, “But [Neil] Gorsuch.”No matter how much other stuff was going on, “But at least you got Gorsuch.”Even anti-Trump Republicans thought, OK, conservative judge in the Supreme Court, we agree on that.There was widespread support for Kavanaugh, and there was also a sense that the Democrats and the media had behaved badly in that particular case.
And you saw a rallying around Kavanaugh and, as a result, Trump a little bit in that particular case.It, of course, continues the erosion of support among women for Donald Trump, but there was considerable backlash among Republicans.
So this was probably one of the few moments where Republicans pretty much across the board were united on that particular question, despite the fact that a lot of people thought that Dr. [Christine Blasey] Ford’s testimony was quite compelling.
… So why, one more time, why is immigration the key to Donald Trump?Even to the point of closing down the government, even trying to continue to keep the government shut down when everybody was telling him that this is only going to hurt the Republican Party.What is at the essence of this immigration issue that is so absolutely essential to him?
All roads meet at immigration.What Donald Trump has done is he’s taken the themes of crime and terrorism, linked them to jobs in the economy into race, and it’s the perfect storm for him, because immigration allows him to say terrorists are coming across the border; criminals are coming across the border; I own this issue.People are coming across this border, and they’re taking your jobs; they’re responsible for you losing your jobs and these factories shutting down.Only I can protect you from that.
And also look who they are.He’s not talking about Russians coming here; he’s not talking about Canadians coming here.He’s talking about Mexicans coming here, and that has been what has solidified much of his base.So those are the themes: Economics: I’m going to protect you from these challenges from abroad; terror and crime—I’m going to protect you from terrorists and rapists, and again, they’re not real Americans.They’re coming to take your country away; they’re coming to replace you.And that has become a very, very potent, very toxic political stew.
A Divided Nation
So a decade, a bit more than a decade now, of two change-oriented presidents.… Where are we now?Your overview of the past decade and this wild ride that we’ve been on?
Well, it’s been a wild ride.It’s a wild ride now, and it’s probably going to get wilder.I don’t know.And I think this is one of the things that’s been opened up in the era of Trump, is who are we as a country?Where are we going?What did we think we were, and what did we turn out to be?And frankly, I don’t know that we know the answers yet.
Are you surprised by the fact that a few years ago, the president of the United States was Obama and that now we have a guy who is 180 degrees from what Obama is or was perceived to be?
I’m shocked by this president every single day.I’m shocked by the fact that Donald Trump is sitting in the office once held by Abraham Lincoln.I’m surprised that Donald Trump is the successor to the two President Bushes.I’m surprised that Donald Trump is sitting in an office once held by George Washington.Everything about it is shocking, and I don’t think I’m alone in all of that, because you keep asking yourself: “How did this happen?What kind of a country would embrace Donald Trump?What kind of a country would tolerate Donald Trump?”
And I think that, to a certain extent, he likes the trolling.He likes keeping us off balance.But it does raise this fundamental question of what is America right now, and is America what we thought it was?And is America immune to history?Because I really don’t know.I think the most pressing question is not how did this happen, but what does this do to us?Where do we go?How are we changed by this experience?And I don’t think anyone has any idea.
How might it change America?
I think it might make us meaner, crueler, more divided, less willing to think of ourselves as a nation that has things in common as opposed to political tribes who need to be protected from one another.
Anything we missed on this big story about the divide in America?Any other thoughts you have that we haven’t touched on that you want to talk about?
We’ve covered a lot of ground.It’s such a big subject.I mean, I think the question you’re asking is why Americans are so disoriented?Because think about what we thought America was when Barack Obama was inaugurated in 2009, what our self-image was, where we thought the country was going, compared to America of Jan. 20, 2017, when you’re swearing in Donald Trump as the president of the United States.How does a country go from one edge to the other?And I don’t know.I mean, I watched this from within the conservative movement, and it was disorienting; it was disillusioning.There’s still a sort of head-snapping surprise that all of this could have happened.And we keep asking ourselves, what did we miss?What did we ignore?What changed so rapidly within the movement?
You know, the Republican Party of 2012 I don’t think would have nominated Donald Trump.But then again, the Republican Party of 2008 had nominated Sarah Palin as vice president.There was a time in 2012 when Newt Gingrich was leading the presidential pack.So this is the kind of thing that just going back and piecing it together is incredibly difficult.
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