The FRONTLINE Interviews

Darlene Superville

White House Correspondent, The Associated Press

Darlene Superville is a White House correspondent for The Associated Press. She has covered politics for the AP for more than a decade.

The following interview was conducted by FRONTLINE's Jim Gilmore on January 13, 2021. It has been edited for clarity and length.

This interview appears in:

Lies, Politics and Democracy

Trump’s American Carnage

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Darlene Superville

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The 2016 Trump Campaign

If we can start out with Trump the candidate being not what is normally thought of as a Republican candidate back in 2015-2016—and he’s calling for a hostile takeover, and he’s battling with every other candidate, and the other candidates have a lot of horrible things to say about him because of his lies and these conspiracy theories that he falls into—should the GOP have been on notice?Did they understand, once he was going to win, [what] kind of president he might be? What would have been their calculation about Donald Trump?

I think the calculation about Donald Trump was power, right?At the time that Donald Trump was running for president, a Democrat was in the White House.Republicans had lost the White House to Barack Obama, and they desperately wanted to get that back.And so Donald Trump was the vehicle by which they would once again be able to control two of the three branches of government in the United States—the White House and Congress.Republicans had controlled both the House and the Senate, and they wanted to win back the White House to advance their agenda.The Supreme Court was part of the calculation, as well as there were some members of Congress that wanted tax cuts, and that was one of the first things that Donald Trump did after he became president at the end of his first year.He signed a really big tax cut package.

So he was the vehicle for a lot of their hopes and dreams, and that’s one of the reasons that many people think that a lot of Republicans turned a blind eye, if you will, toward the falsehoods that he spoke, the behavior that we saw during the campaign, and even the behavior in his past life as a private businessman in New York City.

The Selection of Mike Pence as Vice President

Let’s talk about Vice President Pence, or to-be Vice President Pence.

… What was the thinking about Pence?They’re 180-degree different kind of individuals in every possible way.Why were they stuck together?I know the GOP was certainly pushing it.Trump people were pushing against it for a while, but in the end it becomes a marriage of convenience.Talk a little bit about why that relationship was one that came about.

I think one of the things about that relationship was that Mike Pence balanced Donald Trump out in—during presidential campaigns, when you get up to the point where you’re trying to pick a running mate, there’s always talk about balance, whether it’s geographic or political.And there’s other kinds of considerations that come into play.And Mike Pence balanced out Donald Trump in many different ways.Whereas, for example, Trump had been married three times, the vice president had been married for a long time to one woman, had children with one woman, not three women the way Donald Trump did.Mike Pence also brought along for Donald Trump the evangelical, conservative Christian vote, which is something that Donald Trump needed and wanted given his past, his personal past.

So those are two key reasons why many people think that Mike Pence was added to the ticket, to provide some balance and to also in some ways give Donald Trump a measure of legitimacy, I think, in the Republican Party.You know, if somebody like Mike Pence would agree to join the ticket and be the running mate for somebody like Donald Trump, then maybe he wasn’t that bad, maybe we should vote for him, that kind of thing.

… You would see them together quite a bit while you were at the White House.How did they operate together? …

Mike Pence turned out to be a very loyal number two to President Trump.There were many times when the president would be holding an event and the vice president had the job of introducing him.We in the press corps all got a little bit tired of hearing the vice president say it was the honor of his lifetime to serve this president, or he had the honor of introducing Donald Trump to whatever audience they were going to be in front of.

There’s not much evidence that their relationship, their president-vice president relationship, worked the same way, for example, that the Obama-Biden president-and-vice president relationship worked.You remember President Obama gave Vice President Biden a lot of portfolios to work on immediately, gave him the economic recovery portfolio when they came into office.Afghanistan was his portfolio as well.For a while, Joe Biden had a Middle Class Task Force that he led to try to come up with solutions to help people rise up into the middle class.We never really got a sense from Donald Trump that he was specifically handing Vice President Mike Pence specific portfolios until of course the coronavirus burst onto the scene and the White House needed to address that in some way, and the task force was created, and President Trump said to Mike Pence, “Why don’t you handle this?”

McConnell’s Relationship with Trump

Do you know the relationship with Congress, with McConnell, how they viewed this president?… Some people say that McConnell and other leadership saw President Trump as a pen, basically, to sign their legislation, so they could use him to get through the things that the GOP wanted to get through.Was that pretty obvious in the beginning?What was that relationship like?

I would say that was pretty obvious in the beginning.I mean, one example was the tax cut package that I referred to a moment ago.That was something Republicans wanted, and they couldn’t have gotten that had Hillary Clinton won the election, for example.So in Donald Trump, they saw power.They saw an opportunity to regain power and an opportunity to push legislatively for those things that they wanted in Congress: tax cuts, judges.Sen. Mitch McConnell launched an effort to basically remake the federal judiciary, and Donald Trump was the vehicle to do that.So they worked together to appoint conservative judges, three justices to the Supreme Court.McConnell worked very diligently in the Senate to get all of those nominees confirmed.And there’s something like 225 or so conservative federal judges that are now out there and serving for the next 30, 40, 50 years.

The one thing they were not able to accomplish was overturning the Affordable Care Act, which was something Republicans hated from day one when—after Barack Obama signed it into law, and there were numerous attempts to try to overturn it, undo it, and—but that was one area where they failed, failed to get what they wanted through the president.

… It is interesting, though, because of the relationship between McConnell and Trump, how he sort of—again Trump threw McConnell under the bus there for a short period of time because of Obamacare.

Yeah, their relationship has kind of ebbed and flowed over the past four years.Obamacare was a low point, but the judges was something they both celebrated.The relationship seemed to get better.And then just recently, with the election, it’s now on another down slope, another breaking point in that relationship.And that’s pretty much been characteristic of the president’s relationships with a lot of Republicans in Congress.And a lot of it goes back to the president and his, just, desire for loyalty, and the minute that you don’t do what he wants you to do, whether you can do it or not, out comes the cell phone, open up the Twitter, and send off a mean tweet about somebody.So that was the way a lot of his relationships seemed to go, up and down, up and down.

The Response to Charlottesville

Charlottesville was in many ways a warning salvo that went off about this president and the way he dealt with his base and his inability to call out white supremacists in this situation.And it was also a moment when it seemed that he could get away with things, to some extent, where leadership would not come down too hard on him.What did Charlottesville say about Trump?

That’s a good description of it, I think.It was—Charlottesville was early in the presidency.It was in August of 2017, so he’d only been in office for seven or eight months or so, and it was one of the first big moments where there were a lot of calls for a lot of Republicans to come out and denounce what he had said about there being good people on both sides of the rioting down in Charlottesville.But you didn’t have that.You had the vice president who didn’t want to criticize him.Mitch McConnell, some of the other Republican leaders, they would come out or tweet or release statements that talked about how much they hated racism or they hated white supremacy or neo-Nazism, all of the elements that you found in the midst of that rally in Charlottesville.But very few and very few top Republicans would say the president was wrong to say there were good people on both sides and that kind of thing.

And so in some ways, an argument could probably be made that the president might have become a little bit emboldened after that episode, right?And he just continued to push boundaries and norms and traditions in all sorts of ways, ways that we knew—or that we know presidents carry themselves.He just pushed in a different direction.

And there are some people that are arguing that that’s what we are seeing now, because there were no brakes on him earlier, he never seemed to suffer any consequences for any of the things that he did, that we find ourselves as a nation where we are today.

… Something else happened after Charlottesville.There were some GOP critics, like Jeff Flake and Sen. [Bob] Corker and an awful lot of other voices out there all over, including the media.And yet the president did not back off.In fact, he attacked those that attacked him, and he basically brought down, for instance, some of those senators and such, another warning sign to those that were in the Senate and in the House that there were penalties to be paid if one went against this president.How did you see that?

Yeah, that has been or was a hallmark throughout all four years of Donald Trump’s presidency.He came in, remade the Republican Party pretty much in his image.He had a huge following of supporters.He had the ability to pretty much make or break candidates and officeholders who would seek reelection.If they crossed him, you know, they had the fear that Donald Trump would send a tweet out against them and/or he would encourage somebody to run against them during a GOP primary and they would lose; they’d be primaried.

So he wielded enormous power over Republicans, and a lot of that power instilled in them a certain level of fear, which then led them, many of them to refrain from calling out the president when he did something that they disagreed with or that they thought was outrageous.So the power of Twitter, the power of his base, his power to make or break candidates, to encourage people to run against Republican candidates that he thought were disloyal or didn’t support him sufficiently, all of those bundled together were very strong motivations for lots of Republicans to not stand up to him in the way that many people would have liked.

Trump’s Allegations of Election Fraud

… Before the election, Trump was all about talking about the fact that he couldn’t lose the election.If he ever lost the election, it would only be due to fraud and having the election stolen.… He seemed to be revving up his base.He seemed to be willing to support people who believe that violence is a way to get their way.What was going on during that period of time, and what was the danger in some ways, because in some ways it sort of helps define what’s to come?

… Before the election, and as COVID was introduced into the country, we had many states that were changing their election laws to make it easier for people to vote by mail because they were afraid to be out and about during the pandemic.And at some point the president just started—you could almost argue that he started laying the groundwork back in the spring for what we’re seeing today.He challenged a lot of the states’ decisions to change their voting processes to make it easier for people to vote.He started challenging mail-in votes, saying that the whole system is open to fraud, ripe for fraud, that kind of thing.And it just went on and on and on up until the election.

And there were a number of interviews that he had given where he was asked point blank if he would accept the election results if he lost, and he would not commit to doing that.He would say something like, “Well, I have to see; we have to see,” which I think was unprecedented.I don’t remember any other president kind of refusing to say they would accept the outcome of an American election.

And some of his reluctance to criticize his supporters for anything they did that was wrong, we first saw that in Charlottesville.There were people that supported him, not necessarily very good people, but he didn’t want to criticize them because he wanted their support.It was the same situation that you saw in the debate where he told the Proud Boys group to “stand back” and to “stand by.”

During the pandemic, after states had begun shutting down and he started to get a little agitated at all the restrictions, he went on Twitter and tweeted “Liberate Michigan,” “Liberate Virginia.”And in Michigan specifically, which had some of the strongest limitations on restaurants and bars and that kind of thing, the people there were starting to get restless.And once the president tweeted “Liberate Michigan,” you saw a lot of them stream to the state Capitol with weapons and roam the halls of the state Capitol there.And then we learned about the plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.There was a rally that he did in Michigan at one point during the campaign where the “Liberate Michigan” came up during the rally, and there were chants of “Lock them up, lock them up, lock them up.”And these were the people of Michigan talking about their leaders that had imposed all these restrictions on them.And the president didn’t say to the crowd, “Well, no, we don’t want to lock anybody up.”He kind of joined in with them.

So it’s been a running theme throughout his presidency as well that he’s just been reluctant to point out where his supporters have gone wrong, people who support him have done wrong.And we saw that just this past week with the riot at the Capitol.It took several hours for him to go on Twitter and attempt to say to those folks, “Don’t do this, it’s wrong,” or, “Go home.”So that is one thing—another thing that he’ll be remembered for.

… On election night, he immediately refuses to concede.… Talk about election night and what you saw and how it set things in motion towards where we are today.

On election night, the results were coming in.I think it was around 3:00 on the morning of Nov. 4 where he finally came down to the White House.There was a party there.A lot of his supporters were there, administration aides, White House aides that worked for him.He came down with the first lady, the vice president, the vice president’s wife, and he spoke.I think most people were expecting some sort of a concession speech because that’s kind of what happens in the wee hours of the morning after an election.But that’s not the kind of speech that we got from Donald Trump.Instead, we got a speech where he said that he wanted the vote-counting to be stopped.He didn’t want any more votes to be counted.He may have been ahead in a few places and seemed to think that was enough and called for the vote-counting to stop, and he pledged to go to the Supreme Court to get it stopped.

So it was a very defiant speech, pretty much continuing in the same vein that we’d heard from him throughout the final weeks of the election where he was very much riled up and spreading this message that the election was going to be fraudulent and it was going to be stolen from him, even though there was no evidence that any of that was going on.

And as the weeks go by and his lawyers continue to lose their cases brought in some of these states, he continues to grow the conspiracy theories, … and never presenting any real proof, certainly to the courts, who keep knocking them down.And meanwhile, leadership, the vice president is very supportive of him.McConnell is either silent or sort of throws it off and says, “We’ll get there, and it’s important for elections to be fair and all the votes to be counted.” …Can you talk about that a little bit and how, as it got more serious, as his base becomes more angry because they believe in what he’s saying, that the leadership does not take a stand?How should we view that?How will history view that?

I think history will view that as a moment when some of those leaders should have stood up and should have spoken out and made it clear earlier that Joe Biden was the president-elect and that he would be the next president of the United States.I think—we had the election.There were a number of states that were still too close to call, even when the president spoke at 3:00 a.m., the morning after the election.So you could understand that a couple of days would still need to go by before all that would be settled and we’d have a declared winner.

And that happened on the weekend.That happened on Saturday, I believe it was Nov. 7.And that’s the point when folks like Sen. McConnell, perhaps Ronna McDaniel at the RNC and some of the other top Republican officials could have come out and said—congratulated Joe Biden, said he was going to be the president-elect, and try to help the folks that supported Donald Trump, the 70 million or so people that voted for him, accept the fact that he had lost and that the next president would be Joe Biden.

But instead, they didn’t do that.Some of them felt the need to give the president space to come to terms with the fact that he had lost.Remember, Donald Trump is the kind of person, and he’s long been this way, one of the worst labels that you could slap on him is the label that says “loser.”And he just couldn’t come to grips with that, and still to this day apparently still cannot come to grips with the fact that he lost the election.

So there was this period of time where they felt they would give him space and give him time to come around and accept it.But instead, what happened during that period of time was the president and a lot of his allies and supporters—Rudy Giuliani and others—used that period of time to continue to push the false notion that the election was fraudulent and that it was stolen.And Donald Trump also said many years ago, “If you say something again and again, if you say it enough times, people will start to believe it.”And so they were saying over and over and over that there was fraud, there was ballot stuffing, the election was stolen, and the people that support Donald Trump ended up believing that that was what happened.And there are those who think that if folks had come out sooner and embraced Joe Biden that maybe we wouldn’t be where we are right now with the president of the United States facing the prospect of—or facing pretty much the certainty at this point of becoming the only president in history to be impeached twice.

… And then there was Georgia, where the president goes after Republican officials who state that after three recounts and legal suits, stated very clearly that Georgia went for Biden and there was no fraud, and yet he goes after them.… What was going on there, and how blatant was it, and how will history view that?

Well, it was very blatant.All you have to do is listen to the recordings of the phone call that are out there.The conversation was more than an hour long with the president of the United States continually pressing these officials to find votes, to find enough votes to be able to declare him the winner of a state that he clearly lost.… During the call, they talked about vote counts and different numbers and things, and the president would come back with his own numbers, and some of the people on the call, too.There was one point in the call where the issue of votes for dead people came up, and the president rattled off some astounding number of dead people that he thought voted, and I think it was [Georgia Secretary of State Brad] Raffensperger who then came back and said, “No, there were only two.”And then I think Mark Meadows jumped in to say, “Well, there were more; you just don’t know about it.But I can assure you, there were more.”

So they were just not willing to believe.And it was interesting.They were just not willing to believe people in their own party who had followed the state law to certify the election numbers.The numbers had been counted and counted and counted again, and I still in many ways don’t understand why the focus on Georgia.I think in some ways it was—it goes back to the president’s ego.Georgia had been a Republican state for so many years, and he just apparently could not believe that he would lose that state to Joe Biden.That’s the only rationale that I can think of.

And yet McConnell and other leadership and Pence stay silent, even in this situation.

For the most part.Pence had made a couple of trips to Georgia before the runoffs, and he would talk about, “We need to make sure that every legal vote is counted and every illegal vote is not counted.”He would talk in those terms.He didn’t seem to go as far as the president would go in his rhetoric about the amounts of fraud and abuse and that sort of thing.But he was still clearly on the president’s side and doing what he had been doing for all four years that he was vice president, which was basically trying to find the sweet spot between the—some of the things the president would say that were not true and trying to temper that with a little bit of reality.Mike Pence has been in between the proverbial rock and a hard place his entire time as vice president.

The Mob at the Capitol

… So let’s talk about Jan. 6.… Talk a little bit about the situation that Pence finds himself in, the position it puts him in with his relationship with the president, and the position it puts him in relationship to the base, the Trump movement.How does that happen, and what’s his decision on how to move forward?

Well, the last opportunity that the president saw to be able to get his way and overturn the election, overturn the will of the people, was the vote in Congress on Jan. 6, where the House and the Senate were coming together to do their constitutional duty and certify the vote of the Electoral College, which had already in December affirmed that Biden was the winner of the election and was president-elect.So that was sort of the last stand.

On that day, the vice president in his role as president of the Senate oversees this whole process, the counting of electoral votes from the states, one state at a time.There were some people who apparently were telling the president that Mike Pence could just object to electors, that he could declare Trump the winner of the election, and all would be good.And Mike Pence, the role that he plays on that day, he does not have the power to do anything but count the votes.And—but the president didn’t want to hear that.And so he continually turned the screws on Mike Pence, turned up the heat on Mike Pence, publicly many times called on Mike Pence to do the right thing, to have courage, and if Mike Pence does this, all will be well.That’s pretty much the message that he delivered to the rally on the Ellipse of the White House on Jan. 6, as Congress was getting ready to carry out this work.And he had also tweeted about Mike Pence, and, you know, Mike Pence needs to have courage and do the right thing.

Mike Pence did his due diligence and talked to constitutional scholars, some of them conservative constitutional scholars, who told him he didn’t have the authority to do what the president was asking.And so this was a moment for Mike Pence to either stand up or buckle under the pressure, and he decided to stand up and tell the president that he was not going to do it, that he couldn’t do it.

It’s always interesting.You have the Republican Party.Many Republicans always talk about the law and the rule of law and obeying the law, except when they want you to disobey the law.And this was one of those instances where the rhetoric of the Republican Party just did not match what the president was asking the vice president to do.He was asking the vice president to basically disregard the oath that he took to uphold the Constitution of the United States.And Mike Pence, having served in Congress for many terms, served as governor of Indiana, he took his oath very seriously.And so that’s why you saw him issue a letter explaining why he believed he didn’t have the power to do what the president wanted.

And so that then subjected Mike Pence to just enormous fury from the president’s supporters, As they marched up to the Capitol, we heard on video many of them shouting, “Hang Mike Pence, hang Mike Pence.”Whenever in the history or in the recent history of this country have we ever heard regular people calling for the vice president of the United States to be hanged for doing his job?It was unreal.

… But that rally, what responsibility does the president have to own over how revved up that audience became and the mob partially made up of the people that were in the mob that went and attacked the Capitol? …

Well, in his mind, he bears absolutely no responsibility for anything that happened that day.He came out about a week after the rally and spoke and said that a lot of high-level Republicans had looked at his remarks and that his remarks were “totally appropriate.”He’s a president who has not taken responsibility for a lot of things that have happened on his watch, and for anyone, I think, at this moment in time to expect him to take responsibility for this, they’re mistaken.He just refuses to take responsibility for anything and doesn’t think he did anything wrong in this instance, even though he was at the rally and told those folks to “fight like hell,” to go up to the Capitol.He told them he would be with them as they marched up to the Capitol, which was a bit of false advertising because the United States Secret Service would never have allowed a president to march to the Capitol with a group like that.

He told them, “Never concede,” “You cannot concede.”And so they took what he said to heart.And they went up to the Capitol to try to “fight like hell” for him.But he doesn’t think he bears any responsibility for what happened.

The attack on the building is just about to begin, and lo and behold, McConnell gets up to give his initial speech before the House and the Senate, and he says some amazing stuff.He breaks from Trump for the first time really.Why now?

I think because democracy was at risk here, and that’s pretty much the message that McConnell got across in his speech.He had a line in there that said something about you cannot imitate what you repudiate, and if you think about it, if what was happening in the United States was happening in some other part of the world—Latin America, Africa—the United States, the State Department, the president, the vice president, we’d all be out there—they would all be out there denouncing an effort in whatever country this was happening in to ignore the will of the people.And once you do that here, once you have somebody like the vice president, a single individual, deciding to overturn an election, then that’s no longer a democratic society.

And so McConnell saw that at risk and felt a need to speak out.Now, there are those, of course, who wonder why he didn’t speak out sooner.And now you have, as the impeachment vote is drawing near, you have a lot of Republicans calling for healing: “Now is the time for healing.Now is the time to bring the country together.Now is the time to unite the country.”There are many people who argue that the time for healing, the time to unite the country would have been Nov. 7, the day that it became clear that Joe Biden won the election and was going to be the next president.That’s the moment to speak to Trump supporters.That would have been the moment for Trump and other Republicans to come out, speak to those supporters, tell them that you understand that you’re sorry and hurting over the loss, but that now is the time to come together and support Joe Biden because he’s going to be the president going forward.

But that didn’t happen, and so instead we had eight to 10 weeks of claims of fraudulent elections and a president at a rally telling his supporters to go to the Capitol and fight for him.And that’s what they did.

And what’s your takeaway from the attack on the Capitol, your overview of that? …

Unprecedented.Shocking.Something that I never thought I would see, and I’m certain lots of people never thought they would ever see anything like that happening in the United States, and happening to the United States Capitol.You know, at night the dome is lit up.It’s a glowing symbol of U.S. democracy all around the world.And just to have it desecrated in many ways like that was quite a blow to a lot of people, more so to the people who were inside the building that day, lawmakers, staff, journalists who were there trying to cover what was going on, but also people who were at home or wherever they were just watching it all unfold on television.It leaves you speechless almost.

And you’ve got this moment of McConnell and Pence being whisked away, McConnell basically being carried away by his security, being chased by the base of the Republican Party.

It’s very ironic, isn’t it?Here they are, spending the last four years trying to appease Donald Trump and to curry favor with his base, and now the base is turning against them because they won’t do what President Donald Trump wants them to do, which they can’t do because it’s illegal and unconstitutional.

And while Pence is in the secure location, Trump is tweeting another attack on Pence.How did Pence become the archenemy of the Trump movement?

… It’s because he refused to do what the president wanted him to do.And the president values loyalty to him above many other things, and he saw this as a moment of Mike Pence being rather disloyal to him.You know, you go back to the campaign when he chose Pence to be his vice president in the first place.There had been reports that the president feels as though he made Mike Pence what he is today because Mike Pence was on his way out as governor of Indiana.His immediate political future was a little bit uncertain at the time, and then he accepts an offer to join the ticket, saddles himself to Trump, becomes vice president of the United States.And so Trump felt that Mike Pence owed him in some ways.But this was not—it was not something that Mike Pence could do, and he just couldn’t deliver there.He delivered in many other ways, but this was one thing that he just couldn’t deliver.

… But the vote after the Capitol was cleared, early in the morning of the day after, where half of the Republican Caucus in the House vote in the exact same way that they had intended to vote to begin with, … that it should be sent back to the states, that there was illegal activity.What’s the consequences of that, and what’s the significance of that?

The consequences, I think, will remain to be seen.There are some lawmakers that obviously are going to face the voters in two years or four years or whenever they’re up for reelection, whenever certain senators like your Josh Hawleys and Ted Cruzes are up for reelection again.They’re going to have to answer to their constituents.There were some lawmakers that did change their minds after the riot happened and they reconvened to start the counting again, and they were that shaken by what happened that they decided they couldn’t go forward.

As for the ones that did go forward and continue to object, the only explanation I can offer for that, I think, is just, again, the power that they feel that Donald Trump has over them, or just wanting to be in his—to remain loyal to him to continue to get the support of the people that support him, because they, in two years, four years, whenever they’re up, all of those Trump supporters will remember.Mark my words, they will remember who voted with the president and who voted against the president, and so a lot of that is politically motivated and looking out for political self-interest.

A Split in the GOP

But meanwhile, the Republican Party is in the midst of a civil war.The country is in the midst of a disaster over the democracy.Where does the party move?Where does the GOP move now?Does Trump continue to have power over the party once he’s gone?Does McConnell get to remain in power to push the GOP in the direction that he feels is right?What’s your overview of where the party is going and what comes next?

Yeah, I think some of that remains to be seen.… There definitely will be a struggle in the weeks and months ahead within the party to figure out what kind of party they want to be.Do they want to continue to be the Trump version of the Republican Party, or do they want to return to some more establishment Republican Party that it was before Trump came on the scene and pretty much took over?

And you’re seeing that struggle; you’re seeing that struggle now.There’s reporting that McConnell is pleased that Democrats are trying to impeach the president again, thinking that he will be so wounded that he won’t be a factor going forward, and that will open the door for the party to kind of break with Trump and just reassert a non-Trump identity.But a lot of that, I think, just it’s too early to tell, I think.And we’ll just have to watch it play out a little bit and just see where the party, where the party ends up and which voices prove to be more influential.

And the future of democracy in America with the violence, the numbers that seem to say that 70% of Republicans don’t believe that the election was fair, that maybe all elections are tainted, that a good percentage of the Trump folks believe that violence is a way to get their way.Looking forward, what’s the state of the republic?Do we get to keep it?

There’s certainly a lot of repair work ahead in the future.Joe Biden has talked a lot about his desire to want to unite the country and bring the country together, but what we have seen since the election is going to make that job very difficult for him, because you have 70-some-odd million people who believe the president; they believe Rudy Giuliani; they believe some of the other people who are out there saying that the election was fraudulent and that it was stolen, and that Joe Biden is illegitimate.So right out of the starting gate, he’s going to have a very hard time trying to make good on his promise to unite the country.And I don’t know—I’m not smart enough to know how he—how he’s going to be able to do that.

And then there are questions that are going to linger when the 2022 midterms come around and we have the next big national election.How do you get people to believe that the elections, that U.S. elections are fair, free of fraud; that mail voting is secure and safe?There’s a lot of minds that are going to have to be changed in order to go back to the way things used to be.And I’m not sure how that happens.Will it happen in two years?Will it take four years?Will we need a decade?All those questions are just unanswerable, I think, at this point in time.

And the last question is, this administration, for four years, has been rooted in anger, in division, in conspiracy theories.Is it surprising to anyone, do you think, that it ended in this way?

It’s ending pretty much the same way it began, right, with a lot of chaos and disarray and just a lot of head shaking at events that have transpired.And you have, again, a president who is going to be impeached for the second time, only the first president.That’s not something that—you know, one impeachment is bad enough; to have two is just astounding.And there are many people who thought after the first round that the president might take stock of what had happened and maybe change the way that he did business and the way he talked to people, the way he wielded Twitter.But there is no evidence that any of that self-reflection happened by the president.He just continued business as usual, business as he knew it.And that’s where he finds himself today.

It didn’t have to end this way, but here we are.

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