The FRONTLINE Interviews
Dan Balz
Journalist, The Washington Post
Dan Balz is chief correspondent covering national politics for The Washington Post and is the author of several books, including Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America.
The following interview was conducted by the Kirk Documentary Group’s Mike Wiser for FRONTLINE on April 27, 2022. It has been edited for clarity and length.
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Trump’s Initial Claims of Fraud and the Republican Response
Right after the 2020 election, President Trump comes out that evening and says, "Frankly, I did win the election."And there's a period in there of a day or two where it's primarily Don Jr. and Eric and Steve Bannon and Alex Jones who are pushing the conspiracy theory.And it's not till the end of the week that you start to see Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham and others come in.I was wondering if you could help us on understanding the stakes of that moment, what decision those players, key players inside the Republican establishment faced when Donald Trump came out and said, "Frankly, we did win this election."
Yup.You know, I would back up slightly before that night, because through the latter part of the election, Trump had made it very clear that, as he said explicitly, "If I don't win, it will be because this election was stolen or rigged."So he had put down the predicate in the weeks before the election that he was not prepared to accept anything other than a victory.But nonetheless, when he came out at whatever it was, 2:30 in the morning on the night of the election and said what he said, which is that "This election is being stolen; I won, and it's being stolen," it was a shocking moment.
I remember we were working remotely, obviously, that night, but I think all of us had this kind of collective sense that we had gone over an edge that we did not necessarily think we would go over and that Trump was doing something that was so inimical to everything we know about the way elections are run in this country and the degree to which people accept the outcome and that he was not having any of that.And I remember sitting and watching that and being shocked at the degree to which he was literally trampling on all the democratic norms that we had gotten used to.
And in fact, at that hour, by 3:30 or 4:00 a.m., I had written a second piece of an overnight piece talking about the threat that this posed.But at that moment, to some extent, Trump does seem to be on his own that he's making this claim, and that the Giulianis of the world and the Don Juniors of the world are obviously bought in.But I think that, like so many people, the Republican establishment was certainly taken aback by that as well; as much as people should have learned to take some of what Trump said seriously, that they weren't prepared for this.And given the stakes that were involved at that point, and the dangers that this posed to an orderly transfer of power, I think everybody kind of—they had to take a collective—take a deep breath and think about what this meant.But because Trump had such power within the Republican Party, it was inevitable that in one way or another, much of the party would either verbally fall in line or quietly fall in line.And there's obviously a difference in that, but the practical effect is the same: that Trump is able to continue to spread this lie about the election with very little pushback from members of his own party.
… I just want to ask you about when Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz, who are two of the first to come out at the end of that week and they go on Fox News and further the conspiracy theories about the election, how important was it to everything that would happen that they went out, that the Republican Party went out?As inevitable or not as it was, how important was it to what the president, to what Trump was trying to do that he was getting voices outside the family to join what he's saying?
I would say it was helpful to very helpful.Now, the fact that they were doing this on Fox News was—they were, in essence, using the party apparatus to spread the word to the party faithful, but that's an important element in terms of how these things get communicated to the base of the Republican Party and to some extent, not to the extreme extremes, but to kind of the more rank-and-file Republican loyalists who are loyal Fox watchers.So to have that vehicle, that communication platform, and to have people of the stature, frankly, of a Ted Cruz or a Lindsey Graham ratifying in some way what Donald Trump was saying—whether they believed it or not—was valuable to Trump because it helped to kind of spread the net more widely that what he was saying was not completely made up, that these, quote/unquote, "responsible senators" could also see irregularities of a scale that would change the election.
… Ted Cruz—I'd like your help in understanding who he is because there's allegations that he's rigged the election in the Iowa caucuses that are coming from Donald Trump.So can you help me set up who Ted Cruz is in Iowa in 2016 and his relationship with Trump?
Well, in the days and weeks ahead of the Iowa caucuses, Ted Cruz looked like he was in a position to become the front-runner for the Republican nomination.Cruz is a very shrewd politician and a very smart politician, and he had put together an organization in Iowa which was poised to win the caucuses and therefore kind of create a springboard, which the Iowa caucuses often have done, to put him in the top rank of the race.There's no question that ahead of that, Trump was the one who was drawing the big crowds, that Trump was the person, the candidate who was the one who had the most energy behind him.
But in the narrower game of how you win a caucus or a primary, Ted Cruz looked as though he had found the keys to the kingdom.And so the late polling indicated that he was ahead.And I think that if you were taking bets among people who were watching closely, most of them would have bet that Ted Cruz was going to win the Iowa caucuses.But Trump had this energy, and he was kind of on a roll toward the end.And toward the end, it looked as though Trump might in fact be the candidate to do it.So you had a situation in which you had Ted Cruz with a ground operation that was poised to win the caucuses, and Donald Trump who seemed to have the raw energy to do it.And toward the end, there was an email that went out from the Cruz campaign that indicated that Dr. Ben Carson, who was another candidate at the time and had a clear following among the conservative right, was dropping out of the race.
And this would obviously be helpful to Cruz because Cruz could try to take some of his support.And lo and behold, on the night of the primary, or the caucus, Cruz ended up as the winner, and Trump immediately claimed that it was a rigged and stolen election.I mean, this was the first time that he had weighed in in that way.He had not said that in advance in the way that he did in 2020, but he made clear that he thought that Cruz had stolen the election by doing something illegal, by doing something fraudulent.And Trump never got over coming in second in Iowa.
I remember doing an interview with Trump in probably June of 2016 along with my colleague Jenna Johnson, who was the Trump reporter at the time, one of the Trump reporters, and we were walking him through how he had won the nomination, how he had effectively won the nomination, and he kept coming back to Iowa."I didn't get enough credit for how I did in Iowa."And he said that repeatedly.You could see that what had happened in Iowa had stuck in his craw in a way that he couldn't get rid of it.And his anger at Cruz, which came out in those days after Iowa, was at the heart of that.So that was a moment in which a) you saw Donald Trump being not prepared to lose an election that he thinks he should win and being prepared to bend the truth to make it look as though he's in the right and somebody else is in the wrong.
And my next question is, was it a warning sign of what would come now that we know what happened with Jan. 6?And just as importantly, was it understood as a warning sign at that time by the Republican Party, by Ted Cruz, by others?
Well, I don't think it was taken as a warning sign in part because there were still—I would say still most of the Republican Party did not think Donald Trump would end up as the nominee of the party.I think in that period, in that January/February/even early March period, there was a belief that in the end someone would topple Donald Trump, even though he was the leader in the national polls, and following Iowa, had a big victory in New Hampshire.But it was always the sense of, whether it was Ted Cruz or anybody else, that once the others in the field had to drop out because they were losing and you got a one-on-one race between Trump and whoever was the other person, that the party would coalesce around the non-Trump candidate.
And so in the sense of projecting forward as to who Donald Trump really was or what he might do if he were the winner, I don't think people were taking him seriously in that regard.I think they took him seriously as a contender for the nomination, but I think they thought that he could be defeated.And that was certainly the view of Ted Cruz and the people around Ted Cruz.They absolutely believed that if they could isolate the Republican nomination battle to Cruz versus Trump that they could prevail.So it was that that they were focused on much more than this larger kind of existential threat to democracy.
… Lindsey Graham is remembered now in that period of 2015-2016 as being one of the most outspoken critics of Donald Trump, and he's also a critic of Ted Cruz in that period, and of both of them.And he sort of embodies maybe the establishment sphere of what's happening inside of the party.Who is Lindsey Graham in 2015-2016?How does he view especially Donald Trump, but the election that's taking place?
Well, Lindsey Graham at that point is still an acolyte of John McCain.And Lindsey Graham is a formidable figure within the Republican Party—well thought of, smart, talkative, available to reporters.And I'm not sure that people thought that he was a likely winner of the Republican nomination, but he was certainly somebody who was talked about as a viable and legitimate candidate.
Lindsey Graham has always been a fairly outspoken person.He's not afraid to say whatever's on his mind.He can blow with the wind as we've learned in the years since then, but he seemed to have a take on Donald Trump that a lot of other people agreed with: that Trump was a blowhard and that Trump would say all kinds of outrageous things and that Trump wasn't a serious candidate, and that in many ways, Trump was a threat to the Republican Party, in part because Donald Trump's convictions were not those of a true conservative.And Lindsey Graham is a genuine conservative and has those genuine conservative principles.And I think he saw in Donald Trump that Trump was, in some ways or another, a fraudulent candidate and not to be treated as a serious candidate, but to be treated with disdain and to try to push him out of the mainstream of the Republican Party.And so that was the role that he was playing.
His relationship with Cruz—honestly, Mike, I'm not as clear on what that relationship really was, but we know that Cruz in many ways was an outlier in the kind of the club of the Senate, that Cruz was prepared to do things for his own advancement as opposed to what may or may not have been good for the party as a whole, and that he was seen as somebody with raw ambition, and I think that Lindsey Graham obviously saw him as a threat to his own ambitions within the Republican Party and within the nomination battle.
There's a while in that primary where Cruz doesn't really directly go after Trump, but as it heats up and it becomes the two of them, it gets to be quite personal, especially coming from Trump towards Cruz.He's talking about Cruz's wife.He has conspiracy theories about Cruz's father.He has "Lyin' Ted."He has a nickname for him.Can you help us understand?Especially looking back now at some of the things that … we would come to identify with Trump as far as conspiracy theories, as far as allegations he was making, what was Trump's approach to Cruz in that spring?And what do you make of it now?
Well, Trump, I would say, systematically destroyed his opposition in the 2016 nomination battle.And it started out with Jeb Bush, who was if not the strong front-runner, clearly seen as the front-runner for the nomination just because of his pedigree.And there's a kind of an interesting bookend or pair of events.Jeb Bush announces on June 15, 2015, for president, and the next day, Donald Trump announces.And it's almost as though you had the pre-Trump and the post-Trump period in that nomination battle.And so Trump first goes after Jeb Bush, and Jeb Bush never gets traction in the race.
Fast-forward a bit.Ted Cruz becomes the real opponent to Donald Trump.There are others still left in the race, but Trump sees Cruz, as a result of Cruz winning Iowa and Cruz having seemingly a pretty good operation, as a threat to him.And so in the way he went after others, he went after Ted Cruz in an effort to knock him down and to knock him back and to hopefully, in Trump's mind, knock him out of the race.
Now, we know from Trump's past history that he's given to conspiracy theories.You go back to the birther controversy back in 2013 and thereabouts with President Obama, and then he continued to kind of hang on that well into 2015 and 2016.So the idea that Donald Trump would latch onto a conspiracy theory about Ted Cruz's father being with Lee Harvey Oswald is not outlandish in the context of Donald Trump.
It's outlandish in the context of the truth, but it's not outlandish in the context of the kinds of things that Donald Trump will do and say about an opponent.Donald Trump has always been the kind of the person who throws a lot of chaff up in the air to distract people and to put his opponents off balance, and that's what he was doing with Ted Cruz.And he tweeted out that photo of Heidi Cruz and Melania Trump and drawing attention to the looks of the two of them.On that one, Ted Cruz took him on.There was a debate in which Ted Cruz, I think, said, "Leave Heidi the hell out of this."And, you know, it was a moment in which Cruz genuinely went back at Trump, and they were in a clear battle.And Cruz saw Trump as somebody that he had to fight back against, that he couldn't simply roll over in moments like that.
So that was that supercharged period in the Republican nomination fight, where Cruz still believed that there was an opportunity to deny Trump the nomination when I think most other people believed that Trump had enough of a hold on it that it was going to be very, very difficult to deny him that.
… It felt like Trump was playing from a different playbook during that election.There was violence at the rallies.There was things he was willing to do that even Ted Cruz wasn't.Was that part of—again, looking back at warning signs, was what Trump was willing to do—was he operating from a different playbook than even somebody like Ted Cruz?
He was totally operating from a different playbook, and I think that that's what threw off everybody in the Republican Party.Before Trump got in the race, the Republican nomination contest in 2016 was setting up as a battle between kind of the Ted Cruz view of what the Republicans needed to be and the Marco Rubio view of what the Republicans needed to be.Rubio's view was that the Republicans had to figure out a way to expand their coalition and obviously to do much better in the minority communities, particularly the Hispanic community, and that they needed to be a bigger tent and a more open party.Cruz's view was that in nominating Mitt Romney in 2012 and John McCain in 2008 that the party had never actually nominated a true conservative in a period in which the Republican Party had and was moving farther and farther to the right, and so that was the test that was coming.
That was sort of the choice that was looming until Donald Trump got into the race, and it was like Trump broke all the crockery because he didn't play by any of the traditional rules.He had views that were not traditionally conservative.He was prepared to say all kinds of outrageous things.And because he was a reality-TV star, he understood, in ways that none of the other candidates did, the power of social media, the power of being outrageous, and the ability to command a following by doing and saying things that were outside of the norm.And so that's the kind of campaign he was running.
I've often likened him to the first independent candidate to actually win the nomination and win the presidency.And by that, what I mean is he had all of the elements of somebody who could run as an independent, though we know that independents can't actually become president just because of the structure of the way we have things.
But he had celebrity; he had money; he had a kind of cross-cutting ideology that would appeal to a broader base than just the Republican Party.But he went in and hijacked the Republican Party because he knew that the only possible path to winning the president was to be the nominee of one of the two major parties.… All of the things that we saw in that campaign were things that foreshadowed the kind of president he would be and that foreshadowed, if you will, his lack of respect for the traditional pillars of democracy and the accepted norms of what a president or a presidential candidate ought to do.
What Trump Offered Voters
… He gives this speech at the convention where he says, "Only I can solve this."There's this violence; there's talk of the groups he's appealing to.Is what he is offering to the party—is it being a strongman?Now we say authoritarian.Is that what—is that part of what he was offering in that election?
Yes, he was offering himself as the strongman.He was offering himself as a leader who would do things that no other leader would do to bring order to the country.That convention speech that he gave in 2016 in Cleveland was a very, very dark speech.Probably the only darker speech he gave was the one he gave on the day of his inauguration when he talked about "this American carnage stops right now and right here."But that speech—it was a law-and-order speech.It was a speech indicating that he was prepared to do whatever it took, and that line about "Only I can fix it" or "I alone can fix it" was indicative of how he saw himself as a singular force and a very strong force, and somebody who was prepared to use that force in terms of governing.
Now, frankly, it didn't extend necessarily to the use of the military in foreign adventurism.But in terms of dealing with domestic issues, that was a signal of the kind of thing he was prepared to do, and we had seen through the course of the campaign that he was willing to tolerate violence and even encourage violence by his supporters against people who were opposed to him.
And did they take him seriously when they saw that, when they saw him come out and say that at the convention?Did the party leaders see it as that?
I don't think they took it seriously enough.I think that they believed at that point that if he were to win the presidency—and I think that many of them did not even at that point believe he could win the presidency, that Hillary Clinton had the advantage and that she would probably prevail—but I think that their view was if he were to win the presidency, in one way or another, the presidency would change him; that it would force him to kind of pull in and be a more responsible leader; that the trappings of the office and the responsibilities of the office would be grave enough that he would see that he could not do the kinds of things that he was signaling that he was prepared to do when he spoke at the convention and the things he said during the campaign.
So I think that, again, no, they did not take seriously what he became once he became president because a) they didn't think he could win, and b) they thought if he did win, he'd be housetrained in some way or another that he would not be that kind of a threat.
I mean, ironically, one of the people, if anyone, does seem to take him seriously, it might be Ted Cruz.There's a report in Tim Alberta's book that he has a meeting with his advisers about what he's going to do at the convention where he's been asked to speak, and he says, "History has not been kind to the person who holds Mussolini's jacket," and he decides not to explicitly endorse Trump in that convention.Can you describe Cruz in that moment, the decision that he's making and the results of what happens?
Well, Ted Cruz was the last holdout.Ted Cruz was hoping, in one way or another, that a miracle could happen, and the miracle was not going to happen.But he was going to lay down one last marker for his own satisfaction and for his own history.And I remember being in the convention hall when he made that speech, and it landed with a thud.It was not what Ted Cruz hoped was going to happen at the convention.I think Ted Cruz thought, in one way or another, people would rally to his side and that he would be seen as a truth teller.And in fact that convention was in Donald Trump's hip pocket, and that speech went down very, very badly, and it hurt Ted Cruz at that moment.And I think he's had to—that was a moment when he kind of got religion and he figured out what he was going to have to do in the Trump era to be part of the Republican Party.
To be explicit about it, what's the decision that he faces at that moment after the speech?He'll end up endorsing him by the fall.What's that decision that Cruz faces, and why does he make it?
Well, it's realpolitik.I think that at that point, if you're a Republican officeholder, with rare exceptions, it is enormously difficult to say, "I'm not going to support the leader of my party," and particularly if you have run for the office, if you have run for the nomination.In general, if you do that, you vow to support whoever wins the contest.And that was the choice that Ted Cruz had to make at that point.
Was he going to make a bet that by walking away from Donald Trump, the Republican Party eventually would come to him, that Trump would lose the election, and that there would be then a new fight for the leadership of the party and that he would be positioned as the person who had spoken the truth about Donald Trump?But that's a very difficult position to maintain over a period of time, and we saw one after another Republican leader who certainly had doubts about Donald Trump—and some serious doubts—one after another ultimately falling in line and supporting Trump for the good of the cause, and in a sense, for the good of their own futures.And he was kind of exhibit A on that.
The other person who makes a decision that summer, and then we won't really talk about him until after the 2020 election, is Mike Pence.What is the decision that he makes, and why does he decide to sign on with Donald Trump, somebody who seems to be so very different from him in so many ways?
Well, I think that the reason that Mike Pence signed on with Donald Trump is pretty simple, and that is that he was being offered the vice presidency of the United States.And so if you're a part of the ticket and that ticket goes down, and the ticket loses, it's going to be blamed not on the vice presidential nominee; it's going to be blamed on the presidential nominee.So the calculation is if we lose in the fall, it's going to be Donald Trump who gets the blame, and I will have been the vice presidential nominee, and therefore my stature and standing has been elevated within the party, and I come out of that as somebody who can pick up the pieces and look to 2020 to be the nominee of the party.And if we win, I'm a heartbeat away from the presidency.And whatever you think about Donald Trump, you have that ability to help shape the future both in a policy sense and a political sense of the Republican Party.
And frankly, in the history of vice presidential selections, there's often ticket balancing.And Donald Trump needed somebody like Mike Pence to reach out to and to help secure the conservative wing of the party and, in many ways, the religious right within the party with whom Mike Pence had a very strong relationship.So it was helpful to Donald Trump to have Pence on the ticket, and for Pence, it was probably not a very difficult calculation to make to accept that nomination.It's very hard to turn that down.
Trump’s Early Presidency
… So Trump comes into office.And one of the moments we might use is that first joint address where people say—they're still wondering, can he be presidential?And the Republicans are wondering, who is this guy?Is he somebody who's just going to sign off on bills for us and be in photo ops?Can you take us to that moment and to this perspective, especially of Mitch McConnell, who he sees and who the Republican establishment believed they have in this reality-television president who's walking into the chamber that day?
I think that the Republican establishments still believe that the presidency would tame Donald Trump and that he would look to them for leadership on policy matters.I don't think Mitch McConnell ever had any doubt about the dark side of Donald Trump.I don't think that Mitch McConnell saw Donald Trump as a true conservative.I don't think he saw him as necessarily a responsible politician.I think he had serious doubts about a lot of what Trump was.And he was able to kind of signal that without saying it out loud.And so I think for somebody like Mitch McConnell, it's, OK, we now have a Republican president and a Republican Congress; we can now go to town on a Republican agenda, a conservative agenda.We can cut taxes, we can repeal the Affordable Care Act, and we can get a lot of judges appointed to the federal bench and perhaps to the Supreme Court.So in that sense, they see Trump as somebody who would help make it possible to achieve the ends that they wanted as opposed to somebody who they ultimately could not control and could in fact damage a lot of the Republican Party or turn the Republican Party against their own establishment views.So they were—if you look back on it, like so many people, they were naïve about Donald Trump at that point for all that he had done and said during the course of the presidential campaign and in the early days of his presidency.I still think they were not prepared to see him for what he really was.
Trump and Charlottesville
And I mean, I guess at least for us, one of the most dramatic moments where it must start to be coming true and you look back and you say, "Why wasn't it becoming clear?" was Charlottesville.What's at stake for the party when Donald Trump comes out and he says both sides were to blame in the situation?And what's at stake as they're deciding how to respond in that moment?And especially looking back after Jan. 6, what do you see in Charlottesville?
Well, Charlottesville was clearly a harbinger of the future, because it was an expression of the white supremacist part of the Republican base and of what was stirring in the country that Trump had tapped into.It's certainly not the only reason or necessarily the single reason that Donald Trump was elected president.We know that there was much more to it than that.But in one way or another, Trump made it possible for people to say out loud what people had been unwilling to say out loud prior to his presidency, that he was able to release in the country elements of racism and white supremacist anger that had been below the surface and in a sense kind of bottled up.I mean, we knew from DHS's analysis of what was stirring in the country before Trump that this was a potential problem, but Trump brought it to the surface, and Charlottesville was the moment, I think, when it just kind of exploded in plain view.
And when he did that press conference at Trump Tower a couple of days after that happened and said there were good people on both sides, frankly, he was alone in the Republican Party at that point, at least in terms of the Republican establishment.If you go back and look at what Ted Cruz said—I don't have the words in mind, but Ted Cruz was very harsh about what had happened at Charlottesville.There was no accommodation in his condemnation of what the protesters had done down there.And others were the same.I don't think there were any responsible Republicans who saw that as anything other than what it was, which was a kind of a resurgence of neo-Nazi violence and thought coming forward.So Donald Trump was alone at that point.And perhaps the Republicans should have not simply condemned what they condemned, but recognized the dangers of Donald Trump in a way that they, again, were not prepared.
But that was still early in the presidency.That was in August of 2017.They had a lot of work they still wanted to get done with Donald Trump, and so they condemned the protesters, but they didn't necessarily condemn Donald Trump for trying to accommodate to what had happened in Charlottesville, and I think that's an important difference.It had become very difficult for people in the Republican establishment to truly criticize Donald Trump, even if they could criticize things that Trump was setting off.
… And there were some people, most notably [Jeff] Flake, who do draw a line at that moment.So that's my question: Was that a moment of choice for the party, for somebody like McConnell, who does issue strong statements against what happened in Charlottesville that are contradictory to the president that make him uncomfortable?But was it a moment where they had a choice between drawing a hard line or not?
Well, there's always a choice in moments like that.And so yes, they did have a choice, but I think that the calculation that they made was that Donald Trump was not just the president of the United States and the leader of the Republican Party, but somebody who commanded the vast majority of Republican voters.And if you are an elected official like Mitch McConnell, you are generally not prepared to go against not just the president but to go against the entire base of the Republican Party.And so you might try to make it appear as though you're unhappy with some of these things, but to make an open break is to risk the position that you have, is to risk the leadership position that you have.
And I think that whether it was people who went into the White House with Donald Trump when he first became president or the McConnells of the world or the Paul Ryans of the world, I think they all felt that it was better that they be there to round off the hard edges and to soften the hard edges and to prevent the worst from happening, quote/unquote, than it would be to walk away or to make an open break because they weren't going to drive Trump out of the presidency.And I think their fear probably was, or their rationale was that if we walk away from this, if we make a clear break from Trump, our positions will be filled with people who will be even more accommodating to Donald Trump, and he'll be able to do even worse things.
… Where is the party by the end of the year, by the time that you reach that tax ceremony?And is the party a check on Trump at that point?How does he understand his own power, his own ability to push limits at that point?
Well, I think the party is totally in the grip of Donald Trump by the end of that first year.I mean, they could see what he had done to somebody like Jeff Flake.Jeff Flake stood up and very strongly criticized Donald Trump, and criticized him at the heart of the problems of what Donald Trump represented.It wasn't that he had a policy difference with Donald Trump.He had a fundamental criticism of Donald Trump as an authoritarian leader who was prepared to trample on the constitutional norms and the pillars of democracy, and he was prepared to stand up and say that not just once, but repeatedly.And he did a book about it.And Donald Trump went after him, and it became clear very quickly that Jeff Flake had no future in the Republican Party at that point.
And Bob Corker ran into the same problem in his criticism of Trump.And so other politicians—politicians are risk-averse.They run for election, and they want to run for reelection and win reelection.And they want the applause of the crowd, and they want the support of the base.And they could see that Donald Trump operated in a way that was different than most presidents, that Donald Trump was prepared to go after people in his own party who disagreed with him.Most presidents are a little bit more—significantly more hands-off about those things, and Donald Trump was not.
Donald Trump was prepared to pick fights with people who disagreed with him, even in small ways.And that was a different kind of opposition that they were dealing with.And so they took the lesson of what happened to somebody like Jeff Flake or somebody like Bob Corker, and they learned from it.And they learned that there were limits to how far they were prepared to go to criticize Donald Trump.
In those first two years, where is the Democratic Party during—as they are watching all of this, as they—in the run-up, of course, to the midterms and the dramatic confrontation over Kavanaugh?What is their approach to the warnings that they first said that they first saw in 2016?What are they doing in those first two years?
Well, in the first two years—
And is it effective?
Well, in the first two years, the response of the Democratic Party was resistance to Donald Trump, and strong resistance.And I think that that started the day after the inauguration with the enormous women's march in Washington and in places all around the country.And I think that the number of women who came out onto the streets the day after the inauguration set a tone for the Democratic Party that carried through the 2018 midterms.
That was a resistance that was a grassroots resistance.This was not a top-down.I mean, there were elements of top-down related to it, but there was something stirring within the Democratic base and particularly among women, suburban women in particular, that they were repulsed by Donald Trump.It had very little to do with his policy positions on taxes or approach to China or trade or anything like that.It had everything to do with the degree to which they saw him as a misogynist, as a bully, as somebody who was anathema to the values that they held; that there was a stylistic aspect to the way Donald Trump carried himself and carried out his presidency that they were going to fight against.
I remember talking to many women in the aftermath of that and asking them about, what was it like on election night when you realized that Donald Trump was going to be the winner of the election, or what happened the day or two after?And the sense of despair was just palpable even months and months after of the kind of depression that people went through when they saw that.And that's what the Democratic Party became.They did not have the numbers to really oppose the policy agenda of Donald Trump, but they had the power of the grassroots to take back the Congress, and certainly to take back the House in 2018.And I think that's what they were driving at for the entire time.And Nancy Pelosi clearly understood that.She understood how they were going to try to harness that.And that was what they were pointing to all through 2017 and 2018, which was we have to try to take back the House in 2018 to set up a roadblock to Donald Trump.
The First Impeachment
… I want to talk to you about the first impeachment, which we're struggling to understand.But if you believe the other side is the enemy, right, that you can't trust them, then how can an institution that's made up of Democrats and Republicans speak with one voice or act as a check?And that seems like a big part of the story.
Yeah, you know, I mean, you made a reference to the kinds of writings that were coming out in that period of—Death of Democracy and How Democracies Die and all of that.There was a lot of scholarship that was at work in those periods drawing from examples of history, whether it was the Nazis, obviously, in pre-World War II, but to also some of the things that we could see happening in Europe at the same time, and the question of, you know, could this happen in America?
And I think we've always thought that we were more or less immune to those things because we're a functioning and strong democracy, and we've gone through some very, very difficult periods, and we've come out the other side, seemingly in pretty good shape.But one of the points Tim Snyder from Yale, the Yale historian, made in a conversation I had sometime last year, which was that democracy's not easy, and democracy's not necessarily a natural form of government.Democracy takes work, and I think that prior to Donald Trump's election, I think we all took democracy for granted, that this is the nature of things; it's the natural order for things.And as we watched the Trump presidency unfold, we began to have second thoughts about that and recognized that if you attack the institutions of democracy, they can crumble, or they can begin to erode.It's not as though there's a snap of the fingers and the temple comes falling down.It's that smaller things begin to happen, and people kind of accept them and don't pay attention to it.And I think that that was part of what was going on in the period of the Trump presidency, is that people were watching this and seeing what he was prepared to do and say about the judicial system and the press, obviously, in trying to denigrate fact-based journalism.All of those kinds of things that you could see that the net effect of that could be enormously damaging to democracy, and that you could end up with a president who, in a sense, felt he had free will to attack those willy-nilly.And that was kind of the battle that was beginning to be formed.
… There are people who, after Jan. 6—Liz Cheney, Kinzinger, others—who are very critical of Trump and how he handles the post-election period and how he handles Jan. 6.But when that first impeachment happens, everybody but Mitt Romney on the Republican side is not going to be participating on it.… Can you help us understand what happened and understand the context of the first impeachment and why it ended up the way that it did?And where would Liz Cheney be in that?
Well, it's a good question, and I'll try to be as helpful as I can on it.I think you have to put that first impeachment in the context of the Russia investigation that ultimately did not deliver what a lot of Democrats hoped it would deliver.I think that people believed that Robert Mueller was going to deliver the goods that would lead directly to an impeachment of Donald Trump with evidence enough to persuade people to impeach him.
But I think that frankly, I think that Democrats were deluding themselves to some extent, because while there was a lot of evidence of contact between the Trump campaign and people who were loyal to Trump and Russians, drawing that up in a way that it made it, in a sense, a criminal enterprise was always more difficult to show.And I think that the hope was that Mueller would find smoking guns that would make it indisputably clear that that was the case.
The Mueller report was much stronger on obstruction by Donald Trump than it was on what had happened in terms of the Russia piece of it.And I think that that had an effect on Republicans in particular, that this was in some ways simply a political attack against Donald Trump, but not something that rose to the level of impeachment.And obviously, the Democrats came to the same conclusion, that they could not move forward on impeachment.And Nancy Pelosi had always been clear that if we're going to move on impeachment, it needs to be a bipartisan effort; that you can't have a successful impeachment if it's strictly partisan.And I think she concluded that if they moved ahead on the Russia piece of it, that it would be strictly partisan.So that gets put to the side.
And then the Ukraine thing comes to the fore, a total surprise to everybody.Nobody knew this was out there.It appeared to be so egregious an abuse of power that I think that Pelosi at that point felt that she and the Democrats had no choice but to go forward with impeachment, even if it were going to be another partisan event.It's a question of how do you hold somebody accountable for something like this?
And I think that she and the other Democrats felt that they had to do this.It was always going to be problematic, but it was—and I think in her view, it was kind of a constitutional duty to go forward with that impeachment.And we saw, as a result of that, we saw tremendously damning testimony, including from some very courageous civil servants and Foreign Service officers who showed exactly what was going on, which was, in essence, this kind of extortion attempt by Donald Trump to President Zelenskyy.And I think they saw that as a clear-cut case of an abuse of power.But the Republicans were not prepared to buy that.Only Mitt Romney was willing to walk off the cliff and vote to convict.
But the rest of the party, I think, saw it in the context of what they believed was a years long effort to try to take down Donald Trump through some kind of constitutional or legal means as opposed to taking him down politically at the ballot box.So I think for most Republicans—as we saw, for all Republicans except Romney—if not an easy vote, it was not a difficult vote to vote to acquit because I think they saw it as a way for them to say to the Democrats, "You are abusing your powers in an attempt to go at what you think is Donald Trump's abuse of power."
And is this an example of the hyper-partisanship in Washington now really showing fundamental weaknesses in the institutions that we believed were the type of things that would hold a president in check, either the threat of them or the actual use of them?
I think our system is so polarized that impeachment is no longer the kind of vehicle that the Founding Fathers believed that it could be or should be; that instead of Congress holding the leader of a separate branch of government accountable, it's become one more example of partisan exercise and that the two parties play to their particular bases and are loyal to themselves as opposed to stepping back and saying, "What's our constitutional duty?"I think that at this point, impeachment is not a viable vehicle to try to adjudicate these kinds of potential abuses, and I think that both the first and the second impeachment of Donald Trump bear that out.
I mean, you could see it in the reporting of how Trump interpreted it, and there's the moment where he walks out with the Republicans who had supported him after he's acquitted, and he holds up the newspaper.And a lot of the reporting is that he felt unleashed after that point, that the constraints were off because of that acquittal.Could you describe that moment and how you see Trump's understanding of whether those institutions were constraining him anymore?
I think Trump came out of that first impeachment feeling quite emboldened.He had survived the Mueller report.He had, in some ways, turned Mueller against the Democrats and the critics of his presidency.He survived the impeachment vote, and I think he thought he was in the clear.And at that point, the pandemic had not taken hold fully.The economy was in very good shape.And I think he looked forward to November and thought, you know, if not a clear path, he's got a very good path to winning a second term.And a second term of a Donald Trump in Donald Trump's mind would mean he could do some of the things he wasn't able to do in his first term.
So Donald Trump never has a small opinion of himself, but I would guess at that moment—and he kind of expressed it in that triumphal way that he did after the impeachment—that I'm back in charge; I'm back in control; I'm riding high, and I'm going to let it rip.And I think that there were fears, perhaps even within the Republican Party, that an unleashed Donald Trump could be very, very dangerous.
And in that period, too, he seems to be much more willing to fire people, people even who testified in the impeachment trial.He has a different chief of staff.Some of those constraints, informal constraints that had been around seem like they're starting to fall away.Did it feel like Trump, that those constraints on him, that he was acting on that?
It did very much feel that way, and this was not something in which there was a bright line pre-impeachment and post-impeachment.I mean, he had been losing people who were kind of seen as the responsible adults in the room over a period of time.But Donald Trump's willingness to continue to take retribution against people who he believed were against him and who were fighting against him or who were doing things that were hostile to him continued apace.
So I think that the fear would always be that a second term of Donald Trump would mean he'd be surrounded by people who were even more accommodating than the people who had originally been around him, some of whom did try to constrain him, and that he would only have people who would facilitate whatever he wanted to do as opposed to offering constructive criticism and some suggestion that no, no, you don't want to go that far.I think that was always the fear.And in the way he carried himself, that was clearly going to be the situation.
Trump’s Response to COVID
And of course, then there's COVID.And on the road to Jan. 6, we're still trying to figure out where that fits into it.I mean, one of the obvious things is that there's conspiracy theories, there's misinformation, there's "Liberate Michigan," and there's also Liz Cheney who, it's reported, is watching this—her father who has had a transplant is concerned by what she's seeing from the president and that kind of misinformation, and a rupture starts to happen.How do you understand the COVID period in this story, on this road to what would happen on Jan. 6?
That is a really hard question in my mind as to how they intersect, because I think all kinds of people, whether they were Democrats, Republicans, independents, liberals, conservatives, scientists, non-scientists, ordinary citizens, whatever, in those early months of the pandemic, people were just genuinely frightened.This was something that none of us had ever experienced, and we were all afraid, in part because of the way we saw it hit in New York City in such a terrible way.And it was this idea that, could that happen in my neighborhood?Could that happen in my city?And Trump seemed impervious to any of those concerns.Trump seemed only to be worried about anything that might reflect on him in a bad way, so with this notion of "Well, if we do a lot of tests, then we're going to have more cases, so that's only going to make me look bad, so let's not do that," and in all kinds of ways, he was unwilling in a public setting to take it seriously.It was always, "We're going to be fine; it's going to go away."
In some ways, that reflects the character of Donald Trump.He's a salesman, and he's a real estate developer, and so he has to paint a picture of the future that's always bright and wonderful and everything's going to be fine.And I think that he brought that sensibility to this.And the other thing we know about Donald Trump as president is that he was not somebody who was prepared to do real homework.He was not somebody who was prepared to really dig in and understand the complexities of some problems, and so he wouldn't necessarily believe the scientific evidence that was being presented to him.He just wanted to get this put behind him.But because of that, I think Donald Trump helped to politicize the pandemic in ways that have been harmful to the country.
And we can see that if you kind of fast-forward to the vaccination period.There are just a lot of people who have not gotten vaccinations who didn't start out as being anti-vaxxers, but because Trump was hostile to a lot of the science during COVID, they've kind of bought into that even though he helped hasten the arrival of the vaccines.It's an anomalous notion.
So how this leads to Jan. 6, I'm not sure other than that it seems to me that it deepens the political divisions in the country and reminds us that there is nothing that now is kind of a common experience in the country; that everything that we go through becomes refracted through these political prisms, and that Trump has one view of the world and that people who are loyal to Donald Trump take that view of the world, and other people have a different view of the world.
I mean, I hadn't thought about this before you mentioned it, but in the post-election period, he's going to be selling a lie about what happened on Election Day.And here it's almost like a test run.He's actually selling alternate science, from hydrochloroquine to conspiracy theories about it.I mean, there's something about being able to convince his—the people who support him that what the scientists say, what the newspapers say isn't true.I mean, is it the most clear example of that in the Trump presidency, of his ability to shape reality?
Let me think.It may be as clear an example.It's the clearest big example.I guess I would say that.I'm trying to think of other examples.But it's certainly the clearest big example of his ability to paint an alternative universe to people and to get people to buy into that.And because this was such an enormous moment in the history of the country, and one that has gone on and on and on, it has shaped several years of people's lives and perceptions that people have of what's the right thing or what's the wrong thing or what's the good thing or what's the bad thing.
And Trump spoke with the loudest voice on that of an alternative view of what this threat really was and never wanted to say in a dire way what this threat was.He always wanted to minimize it and make it look as though normal life could go on and that you didn't have to worry about it.And so yes, in that sense, it's the biggest example of painting an alternative picture of reality.
George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter Movement
In that same spring, some of those warnings we talked about, those books that had been written early in the Trump—in 2016 that people had said, you know, maybe it's not so serious; he's not competent to be an authoritarian leader.You start to see these images in response to Black Lives Matter and to George Floyd.I'll start just with Lafayette Square, with the president walking with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs behind him.What do you see in a moment about that?What does it reveal about Trump, about who he is, about what his appeal is, about how he's approaching the presidency that's different from other presidents?
What you saw in that walk across Lafayette Park was, in a sense, kind of the embodiment of Trump's view of the strongman as president: courageous to walk through an area that had been filled with protesters and demonstrators; courageous in threatening to bring out the military to suppress the demonstrations and protests that were going on in cities around the country, and then standing in front of the church on the north side of Lafayette Park and holding up the Bible, and holding it up and not saying anything, just simply a photo op.It's Trump as reality-TV star put together with Trump as strongman to send a signal of what he had said in that 2016 convention speech that "I alone can fix it," and that it was a reminder of how Trump saw himself in the context of the history of the country; that the country was at a fragile moment and that it needed somebody like him to restore order to a country that, in his estimation, was threatening to run off track.And a lot of people believing in his world of support believing the same thing.
And what is the response by this point in the Trump presidency from the Republican establishment, from somebody like Mitch McConnell, to images like that?There's lots of examples, not just that.There's the helicopter over protesters; there's police who were not marked who were operating in Portland and other places.What is the image of the troops in front of the Lincoln monument?What is the response from, by this point in our story, from the Republican establishment, from Mitch McConnell, when they see images like this that look so much like they're from another country?
Well, I think that the response is sort of quiet resignation; that the George Floyd killing, I think, alarmed everybody.Almost no matter what side of the political spectrum you were on, to see that video, that horrific video I think had an effect on everyone, and the protests that followed that, I think had significant support on the part of a broader public, and similarly with some political leaders.Mitt Romney came and marched in Washington with Black Lives Matter demonstrators in the wake of that killing.And I think that people recognized that the racial divisions in the country and the police violence in Black communities was a threat to our democracy, if you will.
But at the same time, in watching Donald Trump, I think they saw a president who they were worried might carry things too far, but a few months ahead of an election, they were not going to do an open break with him.And so I think, as I say, I think it was quiet resignation that this was another example of the kind of dangers that Donald Trump posed, but they're making a kind of a Faustian bargain that they have to win the election to continue to be able to do the things in their conservative agenda that they want to continue to do.
… But it also seems like you see in this period voices inside maybe not the establishment, but inside the Republican Party that are not just being quiet about Donald Trump, but they are actively supporting his view when he says, "When the looting starts, the shooting starts."Sen. Tom Cotton writes a "Send in the Troops" editorial.Is there a new part of the Republican Party by this point in the story, and what do you see in something like that editorial that Sen.Cotton writes?1
1
New York Times: Tom Cotton: Send In the Troops
I think partly you have to look at it in the context of what was going on in some cities.Beyond the enormous peaceful protests … there was a lot of violence in some places, Portland, Oregon, being kind of the most visible place.But some other cities had similar—not on the scale that Portland had had.And I think that for some people on the right, that violence was something that they were not prepared to condone even in the context of the outpouring over George Floyd.And I think that their view was we have to have order in the country, and the Cotton op-ed piece in The New York Times was kind of symbolic of that view of the world, that you can have two views at the same time.
One is that you can view with horror what happened to George Floyd and believe that something needed to be done to respond to that to deal with the long history of race and racism and racial injustice, but at the same time, that can't be used to condone outright rioting and violence of people who may be just trying to take advantage of that.So I think that that's part of what was going on.Whether it reflected support for a kind of a Donald Trump strongman approach is a different question.And I think all of that gets wrapped up in that moment, and sometimes it's hard to pull those threads apart to think about, all right, what's really going on here?We know that Donald Trump had support around the country for almost whatever he would do and say and that the hard right, the violent right, the white supremacist part of the Trump loyalists were willing to go to battle on behalf of Donald Trump and behalf of what they saw was restoring order.
And so I think that that moment probably helped to supercharge everything around what Donald Trump was saying, and maybe helped to set the environment for what ultimately happened on Jan. 6.
I mean, he's also saying it's not just that we need to send in the troops and that there's violence, but that the enemy, right, that the radical left is taking over cities; that they are an existential threat; that the threat is not overseas by this point in the Trump presidency.He seems very focused on a domestic threat.And is he selling that?Is the party buying it at that point?And what's the effect of that type of rhetoric about the enemy being the other side?
I don't think he's selling it to the Republican Party in the sense that we often talk about the Republican Party.I think he's selling it to the people around the country that he wants on his side for the battles at the moment and to come.And the Republican Party—and again, we're talking kind of about the establishment Republican Party to the extent there's an establishment—but the establishment Republican Party is in many ways powerless to offer a real counter to that, in part because a lot of establishment Republicans believe in law and order as well.
But Trump is speaking to a different audience.And Trump has always spoken to a different audience.Trump is not trying to convince establishment Republicans to believe everything he believes.Trump is trying to convince a broader public, and therefore that that broader public will help to silence people within the Republican establishment who might otherwise speak out more forcefully against Donald Trump.So I think that's the dynamic that was working throughout the Trump presidency, and certainly in that moment.And Trump tried to exaggerate those threats to make them seem as though those were the real existential threats to the country and democracy, when in fact they were not.And that was the priority of Donald Trump, or that was the mission of Donald Trump: to create a sense of fear about some of these isolated episodes of violence to suggest that this was the entirety of what's going on in the country, and to seize on any rise in crime in cities—and there have been increases in crime in cities over these periods—but to make that the focal point as opposed to some of the other issues that were impeding his progress toward reelection.
And I suppose if you said it in those existential terms, then something like Joe Biden winning the presidency or Joe Biden becoming the president itself for some of his supporters might be an existential threat that requires dramatic action.
Oh, there's no question about that.I think that there's no question that people in the conservative movement saw in Biden a threat to their own futures, and a threat not just to their futures, but a real threat to the country; that Biden would be hostage to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, the extreme left of the Democratic Party, and that he would become kind of a tool of that part of the party to impose much more government control over people's lives.So again, it's kind of an apocalyptic moment on the part of a lot of people of the stakes of every election now.It's not just that another party might come to power.It's that everything that one side believes in could be destroyed if the other side wins, and certainly that was the view on the left and in the Democratic Party of a second term of Donald Trump.And I think that was a view held by people overseas as they were kind of watching America go through this very traumatic period, and a period in which, as somebody overseas said to me that, "It's like you all are fighting your own demons and have lost the capacity to be the leaders of the world."I think that that was the fear on one side.And the fear on the other was that if the left takes over the country, they're going to destroy America.So the stakes become enormous.
I mean, that's amazing thinking about that going into what we're going to talk about, which is after the election.And if you go into every election, then every election for both sides is an existential threat.Both sides believe the other side will do whatever is necessary to win the election.That seems like that does go right to the heart of how we function as a democracy.
… I think that's absolutely right.I think the difference is what we learned from election night forward was that Donald Trump was prepared to act on that in a way that nobody thought any president would ever do and that he carried it to an extreme that went way beyond what any normal person would have expected or believed possible.
The Lead Up to Jan. 6
So let's catch up with some of our characters now in that period after the election.The first person is Mitch McConnell.And what is the calculation he makes in waiting a month before he congratulates Joe Biden?What was at stake for him, and what were the consequences of the decision?Why did he make the decision that he made to remain silent on it for a month?
I don't have any inside reporting on this, but my sense of McConnell is that McConnell is kind of emblematic of the Republican establishment.I don't think he believed for a moment that Joe Biden had not won the election.I don't think he believed that the election was fraudulent in any significant way.Yes, there may have been some irregularities here and there, but not on a scale that would change the election.But at that moment, there are all kinds of lawsuits being filed, and I think that if you're in Mitch McConnell's shoes, you're saying to yourself, I'm going to let this run for a little bit; I'm going to let this begin to play out; I'm not going to step in front of this kind of legal train that's moving, because let's see what happens.Let's see what evidence is put forth, if there is any real evidence that's put forth.Let's see what judges in all kinds of different jurisdictions think of this.
And so, rather than saying definitively Joe Biden won and this is all nonsense, he stands back, as do most people in the Republican leadership and in the Republican establishment, if you will.Most elected Republican officials kind of just stand back.They don't believe Donald Trump, but they think, OK, there's a process that gets played out, and there's constitutional steps that are yet to happen that the Electoral College has not met.There's no reason to, in a sense, short-circuit that.Let's let it play out and in due time, it will become clear that Joe Biden won fair and square, and at that point, we can speak out and do it.
What were the consequences of that?Now we know Jan. 6 is going to occur.What are the consequences of a month of silence? …
The consequences of that are that it allows Trump to plant a seed that begins to grow and grow and grow and take root in a way that you would never think that it would have.You would have thought that at some point, even Donald Trump would say, OK, the game's over, and Joe Biden won, and we'll have a transfer of power.
He was never willing to say that, and as long as he was prepared to make that argument, there were more and more people who were not just prepared to believe it, but prepared to try to do something about it.And I think that that was, again, a threat that was underestimated quite widely, frankly.As with so much, it's this notion of, well, it will never come to that.It will never come to what it came to.But we see the power of a lie to create an atmosphere and to create a passion inside of ordinary people to go to the barricades on behalf of Donald Trump because they think something illegal is happening, and they want to do something about it.
Can you help us understand what goes on between our other characters, which are Liz Cheney and Kevin McCarthy?Apparently, according to reporting, there's a caucus meeting, and Liz Cheney is very aggressive on saying, "We can't vote to not certify these states," and Kevin McCarthy sort of saying, "I'm going to let everybody in the caucus decide what they want to do."What are the calculations that they're making, and what are the stakes and consequences of that debate between these two leaders of the Republicans in the House?
I think that the differences of opinion between Liz Cheney and Kevin McCarthy are symbolic of their sense of where America is at that moment.And for Liz Cheney, there's a kind of a constitutional responsibility to do everything possible to prevent this lie from continuing to metastasize, and for Kevin McCarthy, it's a calculation of, well, a lot of our people believe it, so we'll just let them do what they think they want to do and empower them to do that, whatever the consequences may be, because to go against it risks bringing down the wrath of Donald Trump and Donald Trump's loyalists on his head.So you have Liz Cheney basically putting country before party and Kevin McCarthy putting party and his own political ambitions ahead of country, and I think that division symbolized what was happening in that moment and what we've seen subsequent to the events that happened.
… One of the things that's so interesting about this period is Mike Pence, somebody who's really at the crux of whether the whole system is going to be thrown into utter chaos or not, and somebody who's been a loyalist to the president from that moment that he signs onto the ticket.Can you help us understand Mike Pence in this moment and why he makes the choice that he does and how important that was or what the consequences of that were?
Well, the decision that Mike Pence makes is enormously important and historically important.I mean, if Mike Pence had gone the other way and in one way or another delayed the ratification of the Electoral College count on Jan. 6 or in the morning after the riots at the Capitol, that would have set the country on a path that I'm not sure any of us want to contemplate.But Mike Pence comes from a different place in the Republican Party than Donald Trump.Donald Trump is not moored and anchored to any specific convictions having to do with the constitution, whereas Mike Pence is a constitutional conservative, and in that sense, a responsible constitutional conservative.And yes, he helped to empower Donald Trump and was a loyal, often slavishly loyal vice president.But he comes to the moment of truth, and with the help of his advisers, looks at every angle of what the role of the vice president is in that period and comes to the conclusion that he has no power to do anything other than simply preside over that event and simply say, "Here's what the count is in Arizona" or Georgia or Pennsylvania, but not to in any way inject himself or to suggest that he has an independent judgment about it.And he comes under enormous pressure from Donald Trump from all the reporting that has been done by lots of people, from my colleagues at the Post to others who have written books to what the Jan. 6 Committee in the House has done.
He comes under enormous pressure from Donald Trump and some of the people around Trump to do something that he ultimately wasn't prepared to do.And I think that history will record that he stood up at a moment when it was important to stand up and was unwilling to bow to Donald Trump.And as a result, he made it possible for that process to go forward to its logical conclusion, which was to ratify that Joe Biden had the electoral votes to win the presidency.But had he gone the other direction, I don't know where we would be today.
Jan. 6 and the Aftermath
… And now the other person who has to make a choice at that moment is Donald Trump.… What is Trump doing in that moment when he's speaking about fighting to that crowd on Jan.
6?
At that moment, he is trying to do whatever he can to disrupt the process that's beginning to take place on Capitol Hill, and I will leave it to the legal experts to decide whether what he did was inciting an insurrection.But he was at a point where he was still not willing to yield and let the process play out naturally.He wanted, in whatever way he could, to empower people to disrupt that process, and if that resulted in violence, he obviously was prepared to let that happen.He can cherry-pick his speech and say, "Well, I said go protest, but be peaceful," but the entire event was designed to intimidate Congress from doing its constitutional responsibility and intimidate Mike Pence from doing his responsibility as vice president.That event was set for the day that this was going to happen.It wasn't set for the day before or three days before or the weekend before.It was set for the day and almost the hour that Congress was going to do it.
So Liz Cheney and Mitch McConnell both basically pointed to him and said he was the responsible actor in what played out when people broke into the Capitol and tried to stop this process.She said he lit the fuse, and McConnell said—and you'll have the video of it—McConnell said something to the extent that he was wholly responsible for what happened on Jan. 6.So Trump can cherry-pick his speech in any way he wants.But two responsible people in the Republican Party, along with many, many others, called him out for his role in leading to the events that unfolded as he was in following when he spoke.
So many people have said when you watch the events of Jan. 6 that it looks like something that would happen in another country, that it doesn't look like something you would expect from an established democracy.What does it say to you about American democracy when you watch those images of the Capitol under assault?
I think my reaction was the reaction of most people, which was shock and disbelief that this actually could be happening.To watch that in real time on television was a moment I'll never forget, and it was a moment in which you begin to question so much of what you think you know about American democracy; that OK, American democracy is not as strong as we thought it was; that there is a part of the country that is prepared to lead an assault on the citadel of democracy, the Congress of the United States, the Capitol building of the United States.And I think it just threw into question so much of what we all thought we took for granted about the nature of American democracy and that this was not an end point; that this signaled a continuing battle over the future of democracy in this country that could last days, months, years perhaps as this fight continued to unfold.Even if Donald Trump lost this round on Jan. 6 and would therefore have to relinquish the presidency on Jan. 20, 2021, it didn't mean that it was going to be over.And as we've seen, it is not over.
… Lindsey Graham goes out and gives that dramatic speech.Mitch McConnell.Eventually Kevin McCarthy will.But there's also a vote on the House that they continue with objecting to the states.What do you make of what happens right in those immediate hours after Jan.6,inside the Republican Party that we've been watching?
You know, I have two thoughts about what happened in those immediate hours.On the one hand, it is American democracy prevailed and triumphed in this moment.The fact that the Capitol was invaded by a mob of protesters who were trying to stop the orderly process of democracy, and that they ultimately failed, and that Congress came back into session in the middle of the night and completed its work, and that says something very good about the nature of our system.The other side is, what in the world have we just gone through, and how is it that people who have been hiding out in the Capitol, scared for their lives in many cases, can come back and, in a sense, reward the people who put their lives at risk by voting to say something's wrong with the vote in Arizona or in Pennsylvania?How can so many Republicans kind of turn their back on this horror that had just unfolded and pick right up again as if that had not happened?You know, it's those two things juxtaposed against one another that make you wonder about what the future is actually going to hold.
We've talked about these moments of choice.Especially when you watch somebody like Lindsey Graham, you watch the speeches that McConnell makes, is this another moment of choice for them and for the party about how they're going to understand that day?
You know, I look at the speeches that were given in the immediate hours and days after Jan.6 as genuine expressions of horror and outrage on the part of people.But as with so many things, time has an effect on people, and the farther away you get from that, the more people kind of revert to the political calculations that they had made prior to that event.And so we see Lindsey Graham basically saying, "I've had enough with this guy," and not long after that, he's trying to get back in Trump's good graces.
And I think that that's symbolic of what's happened to the Republican Party writ large, that the Republican Party continues to be a party that's a Trump subsidiary, with a few exceptions to that and that the elected leadership mostly falls in line with that, even if they know and believe privately that Trump's in the wrong, that Trump's telling a lie, and that in one way or another, they want that to go away and they want Trump to go away.The feelings that come out right after Jan. 6, I think, are genuine, but they don't last that long because other events become more powerful in the thinking of what their own futures are going to be like.
And going back to that period, there's talk that Mitch McConnell might support impeachment.There's a lot of Republicans who—some who will not vote for impeachment ultimately, but who are being very critical.And … this is now the moment of the second impeachment, and the Democrats face a choice.And they face choices about how to proceed, about who are going to be the House managers, who's going to speak about it.Can you help us understand it? …
You know, the second impeachment decision was somewhat like the first impeachment decision but on steroids.The revulsion over what happened on Jan. 6 and Trump's role in that struck people as so beyond the pale that, again, something had to be done to hold him accountable and that the only thing that members of Congress could really do to hold him accountable is through the impeachment process.And I don't think there was much second thought about that.Everybody was stirred by what had happened and so alarmed by what had happened that the machinery of impeachment seemed like the simplest and the most obvious course, and one that had to be done quickly; that this was not something that was going to have to take weeks and months of hearings and testimony.As many people said, the testimonies—all the evidence is sitting right out there.You don't have to go back very far to build the case against President Trump.So I think that was what was going forward.
And I think that there were a lot of Republicans who were, you know, if not thinking hard that they might vote in favor of impeachment or conviction, were certainly more ambivalent about that than they had been during the one earlier in early 2020.I think that they, too, saw what happened in the Capitol and Trump's role in it as something that, in one way or another, needed to be checked, and so I think they were more open.And Mitch McConnell certainly gave signals that he was open to voting in favor of impeachment.I suspect he ultimately concluded that he could not get enough Republicans to go along with him to get the necessary votes to actually convict Trump in a Senate trial, and so he backed off and found a kind of a constitutional/legal exit ramp to rationalize a vote to acquit.But yeah, it was a somewhat less predictable period about how this second impeachment was going to play out until the very end, and then it kind of congealed back into its mostly partisan leanings, although there were obviously more Republicans who voted to impeach, to convict on the second trial in the Senate than the first.
And do the Democrats bear any responsibility for that, for the way Pelosi presents it, for all Democratic managers in the Senate, not relying on people like Liz Cheney?Is that part of this theme that we've been talking about?
I suppose that contributed to it, but I honestly don't know.I don't have a good answer to that.I never got a sense that the way the process was put together was that definitive in affecting how people were voting.People can find all kinds of reasons and rationales to justify a vote not to convict in the Senate or not to impeach in the House, and I think that goes back to kind of the nature of the polarized environment that we're in.There's a natural starting point for people in each party as to kind of where they are in the beginning of something like this, and it's hard to get people out of that, and very hard particularly to get Republicans to come out of that to, you know, to vote to impeach or to convict a president of their own party in a very polarized environment no matter what they might believe about some of Trump's actions. …
And what's the consequence of that?What's the consequence of that acquittal, of the difference between the vote and the speech that McConnell makes?
The difference is that it continues to empower Trump to say what he wants to say, that this is a stolen election.It empowers people who agree with that in the states to continue to carry on so-called audits of the vote or to enact new laws that, you know, in the name of election integrity, will make it harder for some people to vote, and particularly people of color and more Democrats than Republicans.It allows this whole idea of a broken electoral system to fester, and it sets up the possibility that in 2024, we go through this whole thing again, perhaps with a different outcome, perhaps with a situation in which if Trump is the nominee and he loses in another very close election, that this time, some of the things that Trump had hoped would happen in the states that didn't happen will happen; that there's competing electors or that state legislatures will not certify, or any number of things that could happen.So I think it keeps alive the risk that this is not over. …
The last characters to wrap up are Kevin McCarthy and Liz Cheney.And he, of course, very critical on the vote, Kevin McCarthy is.He goes to meet with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, and eventually there's a choice inside the caucus about Liz Cheney.Can you help us understand the choices that the two of them are making and what it says about where we are at the end of this story?
Well, Liz Cheney has decided that she's prepared to put her entire political future on the line because she believes that what Donald Trump did and what happened on Jan. 6 is such a threat to the future of the country that everything about that event needs to be brought to the surface; that we have to know everything that went on not just on Jan. 6, but in the days and weeks before that.We have to know who was responsible for what.And she's gone strongly in that direction.And Kevin McCarthy has made a different calculation, that somebody like Liz Cheney is an apostate in the Republican Party and that she is threatening the possibility that Republicans can take control of the House in 2022 because she's continuing to fight what they see as a battle they want to put behind them.
They don't want 2022 to be anything about what happened on Jan. 6 or what Donald Trump's threats to democracy might entail.They want this simply to be about Joe Biden and the Democrats.And so he was willing to speak out against Liz Cheney and to help empower the House Republican Conference to knock her out of the leadership and to, in a sense, crawl back into Trump's good graces by going to Mar-a-Lago and doing everything he could to show that he was loyal to Donald Trump.
And I think it tells us so much about where the Republican Party is today.There's no more conservative person in the Republican Party than Liz Cheney in the traditional sense of what conservatism is.But that's not what the Republican Party is today.
Yes, there's a lot of conservative conviction within the Republican Party, but the Republican Party is a Donald Trump party, and Kevin McCarthy recognizes that and believes that that's the party that he has to help empower and do whatever he can to keep going in that direction.So those are the choices the two have made.And as I say, I think it says everything about where the Republican Party is today compared to the Republican Party that we once knew.
… What are the consequences of that?What are the consequences for our democracy of one of the political parties issuing a statement censuring Cheney, saying Jan. 6 was "legitimate political discourse" of a party that has a majority of people who believe that the election was stolen, who don't have faith in the system anymore?What are the consequences for America, for our democracy?
I think we're in the middle of a continuing fight to preserve democracy as we've come to believe in it and that this fight started in earnest in the final months of the Trump presidency.It was there before that, but it intensified during the final months of the Trump presidency, and that Donald Trump being out of office has not lessened the intensity of that battle, and in some ways, I think it's become more so.I think it sets up the stakes for 2022, where you could have another change of power.It particularly sets up the 2024 election, and I think that that is going to be one of the most important elections in the history of the country.We thought that 2020 was going to be one of those moments, and in some ways, it was, but it was not definitive.I'm not saying that 2024 will be a definitive moment, but it's going to be an absolutely critical moment in the future of the country and in the state of democracy in the country and the strength of democracy in the country.
And that's the backdrop of the coming two elections.There's lots of other issues that will come into play, as they always do, and those are legitimate issues, and a lot of people will vote on those issues, but the backdrop is that we're in a continuing fight over what is the nature of our democracy and how do we best maintain the strength of that democracy, and what do people believe in, and what are people prepared to vote for and fight for in the future?And I think that's the battle royal that continues today and will shape the next several years.
[FRONTLINE's Michael Kirk] … About the time this film airs, that committee's findings are likely to emerge in late August, early September, maybe.At least some of them will emerge.How do you describe the Jan. 6 Committee?It almost looks like political theater, but is it more than that?Does it matter?Is it just the Democrats' perspective on what happened?
Well, I look at it in two ways.I look at it as a committee that is doing very methodical work to draw out everything that can be known about what happened.And we've already seen some of the fruits of what they've found in the Mark Meadows text messages and some of the other things.And we've seen the degree to which this was an active conspiracy to disrupt and overturn the election and that there were a lot of people around Trump who were part of that.So I think that this report for those reasons is going to be very, very important, and I think that this report will have implications for what the Department of Justice is doing in its own examination of these events and the degree to which they will hold people accountable, including possibly the former president.That's going to be one of the most important judgment calls that Attorney General Merrick Garland's going to have to make in his tenure.And it's not an easy call.There are a lot of people who think it should be an easy call, but it's not an easy call.But the Jan. 6 Committee could well add quite a lot of pressure on the Justice Department to take action, so I think in that sense, it has significance, great significance.
I think as a political matter, it will be seen through the same partisan lenses that so much of what we've seen over the last several years will be seen; in the way, frankly, that the Mueller report was seen.Trump was able to discredit the Mueller investigation before Mueller was able to finish it; that he made it into a partisan operation so that when it came out, people viewed it from their particular partisan or political perspectives.And I think that certainly, the House committee will be viewed—that report will be viewed in that same way, that people on one side will take it as proof and as hard evidence, and people on the other side will say it's just part of a continuing witch hunt on the part of Democrats to hurt Donald Trump and to hurt the Republican Party.So I think that the reception broadly in the country will be different than what the legal implications of it might be and what we know about ultimately what actually happened in those days.
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