The FRONTLINE Interviews
David Remnick
Editor, The New Yorker
David Remnick is a journalist and writer. He has served as the editor of The New Yorker since 1998.
Following is the transcript of an interview with FRONTLINE’s Jim Gilmore conducted on August 9, 2019. It has been edited for clarity and length.
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The Promise of Obama
Let’s talk a little bit about the promise of Obama.When he comes to town, his inauguration, during the election, he’s the man who can bridge the divide, both racially and politically.What was so attractive to people about Obama when he came on the scene?
Well, there’s a difference between what’s attractive about Obama to his supporters and how people who didn’t vote for him looked, and his detractors.So he gave a very famous speech at the Democratic convention at which [Sen.] John Kerry was nominated.You remember this, the “There’s [no] red America; there’s no blue America; there’s just the United States of America,” etc.That was a deeply misunderstood speech.It was well understood as the making of a star, a political star.Who’s this guy, Barack Obama?I’ve never heard of him.Now he’s a star.But the idea that somehow that speech believed itself is wrong.That—it was an aspirational speech.It was a rhetorical aspiration to sometime in the future, when we get there, when the arc of justice bends toward its ultimate point, there will be only the United States of America.
But Barack Obama is no fool.He knew how divided the country was.He has a good sense of history.He knows that slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow is all, in relative terms, last week, so there was no illusion about a post-racial America, either in 2004 or 2008.
I think what people saw in him was that, first of all, that he embodied some sense of hope coming out of the Bush administration, that he embodied some sense of historical possibility.You could see it, you know.It was there in palpable terms.He’s an African American man who spoke a language of unity and possibility and hope.And even if you saw some hokum in it, even if you had great doubts about it, even if you knew that this was purely aspirational, people were willing to attach themselves to that, as opposed to a politics of division, or, as we would see eight years later, the rhetoric of “American carnage” and invasion and aliens and Mexican rapists.
The Promise of Trump
Since we’re there, why don’t we continue with that?What did Trump represent?What attracted the people that voted for him?
I think on one hand we think of Donald Trump as somebody that just blurts things out.I think that’s a very unwise way and unlettered way to think of Donald Trump.Donald Trump has been trafficking in racist division to his political advantage, to the advantage of his celebrity, for decades.That’s who he is!It’s who he’s been.He’s his father’s son, as a real estate man, as a celebrity and all the rest.
So, like many people, Donald Trump knew very well that while there was a wave of hope and support for Barack Obama on the one hand, beginning in 2007-2008, there was also a reactive politics.On the day of Barack Obama’s inauguration, around that time, Glenn Beck, of sainted memory, was talking about how Barack Obama was a racist, that he hated white people.This was a voice that embodied the anxieties and emotions of a lot of people, like it or not.
And Donald Trump attached himself to that sense of reaction, that sense of anxiety, and brought it to his advantage.And when he finally decided to become a politician, what was his cause?What was his initial rhetoric?It was the rhetoric of birtherism.He was of racist conspiracy theory.It had nothing to do with tax policy or anything of the like.It wasn’t about policy; it was about attaching yourself to a reactionary and reactive, racial emotion, a deep sense of anxiety.
Sarah Palin and the “Forgotten”
… When Obama was running that first time, another star is born.Sarah Palin comes on the scene.Talk a little bit about Sarah Palin.Sarah Palin tied into a different America, a group that will eventually become the “forgotten,” basically.Talk about the importance of that moment, what she was tying into and what the results were.
It’s extremely foolish to think that Donald Trump came out of nowhere, that there was never before any nativism in American politics or racism in American politics or celebrity in American politics or media manipulation in American politics.There are loads of predecessors for Donald Trump, whether it’s the Know Nothing Party in the sense of politics, or, in terms of celebrity, Sarah Palin.Remember, why did John McCain go for Sarah Palin?Why did he make that desperate choice?Because he saw in her somebody that connected not only with a certain politics to the right of himself, but connected with the television camera.I mean, she comes from Wasilla, [Alaska].She was a relative nobody in the party.But he could see, and he leapt on this notion that he [sic] would connect with people in an emotional way that he couldn’t.
And what was her rhetoric?Her rhetoric was of the “lamestream media.”There was all sorts of precursors to the rhetoric that we now think of as Trumpism.And when Sarah Palin was selected by John McCain—something I think he came to regret, and certainly his circle came to regret, Steve Schmidt and Nicolle Wallace and all the rest—they reaped the whirlwind, and not just for the Republican Party but for the country, for the essential decency of the country.The erosion—well, nothing starts with any one person, but you really have to look at that event as a precursor to Donald Trump.
The Financial Crisis and Rise of the Tea Party
… So Obama comes to town, and it’s in the midst of the financial crisis, and he’s involved, of course, with the stimulus and bailing out the banks and bailing out the auto industry.And it sort of feeds into an anger out there from the Palin people who it will connect up with and create the Tea Party, or has already created the beginnings of the Tea Party.
Yeah, but here’s the thing.I don’t think you can say the resentment of Wall Street was either left or right.And this is what really, really hurt Hillary Clinton in her campaign against Donald Trump.Those—the long history of a cozy relationship with Wall Street that was embodied by her high-ticket speeches to Goldman Sachs and the like, that somehow in the match-up between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, she managed—she managed, despite all his business shenanigans and dishonesty and the long record of his inherited wealth, somehow she managed to be the object of populist resentment, not only on the right but on the left as well.Remember, we’re—the Bernie Sanders campaign tells us a lot about the national mood coming out of the economic crisis and right through to the 2016 election.
What’s it tell us?… He ties into the same tribal polarization that’s out there.
For good reason.Nobody went to jail.Nobody on Wall Street seemed to suffer.A lot of the exertions or most of the exertions by the federal government, by a Democratic administration, did not seem to spend any time punishing people who in large measure initiated this utterly manmade crisis.It wasn’t a weather front.… There were a lot of factors that caused the economic crisis of—that Obama had to deal with.But the arrogance of Wall Street, the really horrendous cooperation between government and Wall Street to strip away regulation and leave so many people and so many institutions vulnerable was a large part of it.So many people lost their businesses and their homes and their—their being in the world, their bearings in the world.And everybody saw that nobody got punished for it, nobody.
And so the resentment was generalized, whether—you saw it distinctly on the right.You saw it also on the left embodied by Occupy, embodied by the Bernie Sanders campaign.So politics changed.And there you had Barack Obama, a liberal, but his entire economic circle was coming out of what you would call establishment circles, banking circles, and people took this to be both a symbol in reality of a failure, a failure to recognize cause and effect.
So the stakes then for Obama, did they recognize what they were getting into?… Because the fact is, they could have let the government go down in flames.
I think to this day, it is not widely acknowledged enough the degree to which the economy could have collapsed to a far greater degree—far greater degree.And I don’t mean just more banks collapsing; I mean many millions of people more losing their homes, many businesses in addition losing their way.And I think it’s also not acknowledged how little support the Obama administration had from Congress.They wanted the stimulus to be much larger and knew they couldn’t get anywhere.
So it is to Obama’s enormous credit, I think, that he put a stop to the collapse of the American, and by extension international, economic system.I mean, it’s an amazing achievement, and done rather quickly.But people left that experience—voters left that experience resentful of the fact that there was no punishment.And they saw that even when Obama one time rather subtly expressed disgust for Wall Street, Wall Street suddenly thought of Obama as its enemy, even though he had essentially rescued Wall Street.So the lines were cast.
Passing the Affordable Care Act
And the health care bill, what was at stake?The argument will go that when he saw that there was no possibility of bipartisan cooperation, he should have pulled back, because you can’t pass something like this, this big, without some bipartisan participation.What’s your overview of what was at stake pushing in that direction and why he did it?
My overview of this is very simple.Presidents of the United States since Harry Truman have been trying to broaden and make general health care for the United States of America.We saw it with the Clinton administration most dramatically in the ’90s, and it failed for all kinds of reasons.
There are all kinds of drawbacks to Obamacare.There are all kinds of drawbacks to the process perhaps.He succeeded.Tens of millions of Americans suddenly had health care when they did not have health care before.I—to my mind, that’s a political—an enormous political victory.And even Republicans who are hell-bent on doing anything they can possibly do in contemporary times to prevent the return of a Democrat to the White House have not been unanimous in their condemnation of the result.
You remember, very famously, John McCain’s real last act as a political player was to reject—to reject the Trump administration’s attempt to reverse Obamacare.So I think there’s a recognition, at least in some corners of the Republican Party, which has shown itself to be as an organization nothing but cynical, that there’s a recognition that the majority of American people see Obamacare, however flawed, as an enormous advance.
But in 2009, it caused—
True enough.
—amazing anger amongst the people that had been Palin people, who are looking at what they think is another sort of welfare, that they’re going to take the money from me and they’re going to give it to the undeserving; they’re going to give it to the black folks—
Black people.
—in the inner city.
Yeah.
Talk a little bit about that 2009 summer, the rage that was there, and the roots and the consequences.
I think you can’t deny the fact that there was anxiety on the part of a lot of opponents of Obamacare, that this was—this is their interpretation, not mine—a transfer of resources, wealth and attention from a white population to a black inner-city population.That is a gross caricature of what the actual reality is; it’s not an accurate portrayal of things.But this is how it was both interpreted by the Republican Party leadership and how the voice went out among Tea Party people, and it deepened the fracture in American life.And I think you see the result of it today, to this day.
The Tea Party and the Republican Party
And in 2010, by that point the Tea Party was gaining strength.The Republican leadership saw it as a vehicle to gain a majority.They basically decided to ride the tiger.And what are the consequences of that, what the lessons of that election are?
Well, remember, too, that Obamacare did not exactly roll out smoothly.It stumbled; computer problems that was therefore blown up into: “Look at this.This is a massive cock-up, you know.It’s not just socialized medicine; it’s Soviet-style disorganization.”And it added to a narrative of “The state is incapable of doing anything well.”
The fact of the matter is, Obamacare, at least that part of it, righted itself rather quickly.Where it’s been supported by the states in question, it’s been a success.The state of California is an obvious example.Where it’s gotten nothing but opposition from states in question, then it’s been more problematic.
I have to tell you, I don’t think that health care is a—or the battle over Obamacare is a singular explanation of why we have the level of division that we have now.I think it—and this is tragic to say, and it’s not a matter of partisan; it’s just a matter of sheer observation—that the level of cynicism among the Republican Party leadership exemplified by [Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell is at a historic level, beginning with the announcement that “My primary goal is to prevent the reelection of Barack Obama,” not to improve government, not to improve Americans’ lives, not to improve the overall health of the American people, not to unify the American people.“My primary goal is to prevent the reelection of Barack Obama.My primary goal is to get as many Republican-appointed judges, conservative judges, as I possibly can.”I’m now speaking in the voice of Mitch McConnell.And he succeeded.
One of the great cynical acts of American public life in my lifetime is Mitch McConnell’s prevention, a year before Obama is finished, his success in preventing even meetings with Merrick Garland as a Supreme Court nominee.He wouldn’t allow people in the Senate to meet with Merrick Garland.And it was an enormous failure of politics and political will—although I have no answer about how it could be overcome—for Obama basically to throw up his hands and lose at this.
Everything about what’s going on today is exacerbated by and deepened by the support or the silence afforded Donald Trump.Every time he does something outrageous or hateful, cruel or callous, he can count on his party’s leadership to either rush in behind him and support him or quietly recede into the background.They’re terrified of him.They’re terrified, above all, of his supporters.They’re terrified of losing their jobs in Washington; that is their greatest value.That is their greatest value—not the well-being of the American people, not the national security, not any number of goals that you’re supposed to go to Washington for—but the seats they sit on.That’s what they value most.
Which brings us back to the 2010 election.What is the irony of the fact that they make a deal with the Tea Party folks at that point, not realizing that this group of people coming in is going to basically undermine the GOP leadership that exists at that point?They eventually bring down [House Majority Leader Eric] Cantor; they bring down [Speaker of the House John] Boehner.They change the political ideology of the GOP to some extent because these people want to keep those chairs.How does it go back to that election and the power of the Tea Party, which in fact is a continuing story throughout this whole decade?
I think what you’ve been seeing now for a long time, and it comes to a different level in 2010, is that there’s the collapse of what used to be called party discipline.Whether you liked it or not, the whole idea that a whole caucus in the Senate or the House would just line up behind the House speaker or the Senate majority leader, what have you, that is something that came into deep question and [was] deeply challenged by the Tea Party.You see a little bit of it, too, in the Democratic Party in the House side, too, in the question of impeachment or the conflict between—which is I think relatively small compared to this Republican fracture—but in the conflicts between [Speaker of the House] Nancy Pelosi and some of the freshmen, so-called squad, the AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] and the others, four new members of Congress who were to the left of Nancy Pelosi and more radical on certain questions like climate change, for example.
… The speaker of the House, the Senate majority leader can no longer count on a kind of automatic obedience.And you see that the Tea Party helped blow that up.
Conservative and Social Media
Let’s talk a little bit about media, because at this point—the media’s been changing dramatically since this point.The Tea Party was helped tremendously by social media, by Breitbart and other conservative voices, talk radio.How did that in some ways, starting at this point, change the dynamics of America in a lot of ways, lead to a lot of what we’ve seen since, and the importance of it?
Vis-à-vis Trump, for example?
… We can talk about that later, if we can keep it to the time.
Well, I just can say, I think Donald Trump again is not to be underestimated as a media analyst.He’s recognized a few things all at once: the power, now longstanding, of what used to be called the counterestablishment.In this country, we had all kinds of establishment institutions that were thought of, certainly by conservatives, as liberal: CBS, NBC, ABC News, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, the Brookings Institution.And there came a day in, certainly in the ’70s, into the ’80s, when you had the rise of what Sidney Blumenthal, then a journalist, called the rise of the counterestablishment, whether it was in academia, whether it was in the news media.The apotheosis of this is Roger Ailes and Fox News.
And he was, for whatever else you think of him, a genius at the art that I knew only too well, living in the Soviet Union, of propaganda.He was not interested in having—the way I would see the way The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times coexist.One is certainly, if you read it with a certain kind of eye, one is left of center in its bearing, somewhat; the other is certainly right of center in its bearing, partly because of its interest in Wall Street and its audience.But they’re not propaganda sheets in the sense that I’m used to thinking of them.
… Roger Ailes made no secret of what he wanted Fox News to be.In fact, I think it far exceeded the expectations of even the Murdoch family.And its influence has been enormous.And they saw—Fox News saw Donald Trump as this fantastic opportunity, not only ideologically but commercially, as both an ideological standard-bearer but as an entertainer as well.He was like the perfect storm, the perfect thing for Fox.Even though they disagreed and they had friction, the Trump–Roger Ailes marriage was made, depending on what your ideology is, in heaven or hell.
Obama and the Republican Party
The election of 2012,… Obama is elected again.He feels that he is going to be able to break the fever, this inability to work with Congress, with the Republicans.
Yeah, he was dissuaded of that.
How?
He didn’t have the votes.
Right.
He didn’t have the votes.This is just math.You don’t have the votes, you don’t win.And there’s not a lot of compromise going on.Look, on the Democratic side, you heard a lot of voices; I would hear it all the time: If Obama would only play golf more with [Sen.] Lindsey Graham or Mitch McConnell or So-and-So.If it were only like Washington and we could all gather around the dinner-party tables of Katharine Graham or Perle Mesta or other such places of yesteryear, Washington would work better.It’s just nonsense. It’s nonsense.
And occasionally you’d see Obama’s frustration about this.You remember very famously Obama at some speech said, “You go have a drink with Mitch McConnell.”I mean, those relationships were miles apart.There were no relationships.And compromise happened, oh, so rarely.And they were also incredibly far apart ideologically.
But then you have—
And I don’t think—and I think it’s very hard.It’s very hard for me, as hard as I try and travel and talk with everybody, for me quite to understand fully why, at this late date, the Republican Party as a whole is so enthralled to, say, the NRA; why it is so set upon unfettered—seeing unfettered protection of guns as a tenet of American life; that the notion that somehow possession of AR-15s and the lack of background checks, even what I would think of as the most rudimentary measures for public safety, is so alien to the Republican Party.
So there is—there’s such a gap in understanding where each other is on issues like this that it’s—there’s a sense of violence in the rhetoric of division.It’s very, very hard for someone to—look, I think you can debate all day long about the details of, say, immigration policy.There’s much to talk about and debate and that—what used to be called sensible people disagreeing.But there’s no sense, for the most part, in our daily lives that the conversation is sensible in any way.And this is—the gasoline on that fire comes from the White House.
Barack Obama, for whatever faults you want to ascribe to him, whatever disagreements you had to put on his lap, there was a bearing, a character, and a sensibility of reasonableness, of decency.That is not what obtains now.You have a guy who even conservatives know—they know it in their hearts—that I’m voting for him despite his horrendous character; I’m voting for him even though what he says on Twitter is not only wrong, it’s disgusting.So people—opponents see their people, their ideological opponents not as reasonable people disagreeing, but as someone I can’t understand because they’re making what we see as a deal with the devil.
Which brings us back to 2012, the breaking of the fever.So what does the administration do first?… Newtown happens, and Obama decides on that very emotional day, we have to deal with this; this is something that all sides can agree on.
So Newtown happens.Children—kindergarteners, first grade, second grade—are slaughtered, slaughtered, at a school.And Obama appears on television, emotional.Thinks he’s appealing to our—not only our better angels, but just our sheer sense of what is decent and right, and it’s rejected out of hand.It’s rejected out of hand.And it happens—I swear to God, as somebody who follows the news for a living, and this is, you know, it never stops; it happens every day.Maybe not with the same sense of enormity as Newtown, but we’ve had now mass—but we’ve now had mass shootings far larger than Newtown in Las Vegas.We’ve had mass slaughter that is distinctly based on hatred of ethnic groups, slaughter in a synagogue in Pittsburgh; a mosque burned to the ground; Christian worshipers in South Carolina; people who write out their tenets of faith, and they tell us exactly—why did those people get killed in Charleston, in Mother Emanuel Church?Because Dylann Roof felt that white women were being taken away by black men.It’s the same rhetoric as, you know, 19th century.“Jews will not replace us,” the rhetoric of what informed the mass killing in Pittsburgh.
Who’s pouring gasoline on the fire of that kind of rhetoric?… The president of the United States.The gap between Barack Obama appearing on television after either police shootings of young black men or mass killings and the way that Donald Trump reacts to it speaks to such a profound division of not just politics but of character and sensibility that it becomes impossible for one side to understand the other.Impossible.And it inflames our public life; it depresses our public bearing and our personal sense of the day today to such a terrible degree that probably hasn’t been seen since the Vietnam War era.
And it’s ridiculously sad.Let’s talk about race—
Look, you know, I’m a journalist, and it’s an enterprise and activity that I deeply believe in and love, however flawed and fallen on a daily basis it may be.We also live in an era where the Enlightenment, the sense of true and false, the sense of science versus charlatanism, is not just in question; it’s in question by the president of the United States.It becomes impossible to have a conversation, a debate of any sense whatsoever.The phrase by the president of the United States: “Well, some say”; “people are saying.”Would it surprise you one bit if Donald Trump went out in front of the microphones and said, “Well, there are people who say that we didn’t land on the moon.”That wouldn’t surprise you a bit!Tuesday would just be in keeping with Monday and Sunday and the days before.
And that’s the equivalent of having a president of the United States who says, “Well, climate change is a Chinese hoax.”Everything is cast into doubt.These are not matters of debate; these are matters of fact/non-fact, science/non-science, and the person doing it is not some nutcase in his basement; it’s the president of the United States.It’s the president of the United States who goes on Alex Jones, a lunatic conspiracy theorist, and talks about how people so admire Alex Jones.
So you have to forgive millions of Americans if they think there are days where they’re living in Bizarro World.
Obama and Race
Let’s talk about the racial divide in America.You talked a little bit about Obama, going back to 2004.… But it’s a situation where you’ve got a black population who’s kind of saying, well, he’s not standing up the way we want him to stand up; we have to stand up for ourselves here.And it changes the direction.But talk about what was going on with Ferguson and the bind he was in.
… Ferguson is one symptom of the whole thing.So Ferguson’s a complicated thing.
I was once interviewing Obama in the White House, and I asked him a question about race, and his answer was unusually guarded, inconsequential and, for journalistic purposes, almost useless.Then we went on to another subject, and he was direct, and another subject, he was direct.End of interview, the usual 45 minutes, an hour, whatever it was.He leaves the Oval Office.I get my things together.I’m about to leave.I see him.He’s walking down the hall, and he’s about 50 yards away.He turns on his heel, comes all the way back and says to me: “You’ve got to remember”—and I’m paraphrasing here, but—“I am the president of the United States.I’m not the president of black America.Everybody knows who I am because they look, they can see me; I’m black.But anything I say on race, anything I say on race, if it’s torqued one bit to the right or torqued one bit to the left, it’s a little bit [like] about what I’ll say about currency.It can move markets dangerously, and I have to be extremely careful and calibrated in what I say.”
What he didn’t say was the most important thing that happened with Barack Obama in racial terms was on the first day.It was on Election Day.He was elected.He was the first African American president.Everything else was secondary and tertiary to that.And he was very careful.But there were times where his emotions and his really deep thinking over time would come out.
For example, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard professor, comes home from a trip to China, and on his porch he is arrested and handcuffed by a policeman in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who thinks he’s breaking into his house.And to call it a misunderstanding would be a radical understatement.And words are exchanged, and it’s very unpleasant.And Skip Gates clearly believed, and with good reason, that he was the subject of prejudice on the part of the police, to say the least, and the cop felt he was being unduly accused.
And Obama had the, you know, at a press conference got up and said, you know, “That could have been me; that could have been me,” which is just axiomatic.I’m sure it was him at certain points.There’s no way that Obama has got through life without being the subject of prejudicial incidents.No black person gets from the beginning of their life to the end, no matter how coddled a life they may be lucky enough to live.
And the next thing you know he’s having a “beer summit.”He calls the cop and Henry Louis Gates to the White House and then has Joe Biden sit with them so that—so it doesn’t feel like anybody’s ganging up on—it was—it was incredibly complicated and contrived.It was Obama trying to juggle one thing or the other, because he saw also in the polls people were speaking much more for the police than for Henry Louis Gates.
And that happened all the time.So, you know, we good liberals watching public television or working at The New Yorker think of the Obama election as a great historical advance, and I believe that to this day, in the world of two steps forward and one step back at best.But there are a lot of people who thought this was a calamity and a threat to them.And a threat to them.And they see the numbers of people of color growing in this country, and there’s enormous anxiety about it.That’s what’s responsible in large measure for the political career of Donald Trump.
The lessons that Obama learned from the beer summit and going through that?
Well, the lessons that Obama learned, he’d have to learn it from the beer summit or from any one incident, was that his job was different from the job of Cornel West or Bryan Stevenson or any other civil rights leader or intellectual.His job was a political job and had far different complexities.This was—look at the mid-60s.Martin Luther King, Jr., had a certain job; Malcolm X had a certain job; and Lyndon Johnson had a certain job. Thankfully—we could argue this for days and days and days—but at least in one instance in the mid-60s, they—the interests coincided, and the result was the Voting Rights Act and a Civil Rights Act.And history took one of its steps forward.
Once Barack Obama became president of the United States, he’s not a civil rights leader.He can be a president with civil rights interests, he can fight for enlightened interests, but he has to bring the country along with him, and that doesn’t just include his constituencies, black or white; it includes other people as well.
Obama After Charleston
… Charleston.… The speech, singing “Amazing Grace,” an amazing moment.… Some people look at that and say this is when Obama finally was able to be the real Obama and not worry about the consequences, be his black self as well as the president.… What was your overview of that speech, of that eulogy?
I think Barack Obama felt a profound sense of failure in the sense that he had eight years in the White House, countless examples of killings and mass killings and all the rest, and did not, with all his powers of persuasion, with all his eloquence, with all his intelligence, was unable to sway the popularly represented officials of Congress to do anything about it, to do anything about it.And I think that was a source not only of frustration but of deep anger that he’s loath to show on the public stage.
Now, I may be intuiting that to some degree, but I think I do know something about him, and he keeps a lot well hid.That’s part of his talent.It is not by coincidence that our first black president was probably the least able to and the least willing to show anger because of the myth of the angry black man.
But there were moments—Charleston, killings by police officers of young black men—where the tears from Obama did flow.The emotion from Obama was not held back.And that was a moment—these were moments of catharsis, however rare.
… I mean, yeah, Barack Obama grew up in Hawaii, which is different from growing up in Watts [Los Angeles] or the South Side of Chicago or South Bronx.But he knew acutely, as any person of color does in this country, what can happen, what does happen routinely.And when Trayvon Martin was killed, his emotions were on the skin.They were available to us.And I think a lot of white people who are not always in spaces where they see the emotional reaction of people of color to tragedies like this saw it in him that one—those rare times.And—but he didn’t let it happen very often.He felt he couldn’t.
And when he did, he was attacked by the right[-wing] media.
Oh, yeah.Look, I think one of the things that we will never know, and I wonder if he’ll make it available to us in his memoirs, is the emotional life of Barack Obama as a president insofar as how much he had to mash down, emotionally.Emotionally.I mean, look, he’s known for his coolness.He’s self-admiring about his own coolness.That he let fly.The kind of cool-guy thing, he loved displaying that.He was very self-aware of it.I think it was more through Michelle Obama herself—and you can read it; you can see it in her book, but also encounters I’ve had, others have had, you could hear that to be Barack Obama as president was a uniquely complicated emotional performance and life.And I wonder if we’ll ever get that, short of a novelist coming along and imagining it for us.
… What [Obama] did then was he, quote/unquote, said "the rancor and suspicion between parties is worse now than it was." He was admitting the divide has become worse. So the question I guess is, he admits it; what was his overview of the consequences of it going forward, and how in the hell it leads to a Donald Trump becoming President?
… Here’s the thing.We live in a country of 300-odd million people.How many people vote in a presidential election, a fourth of them?And then it’s divided right down the middle, and 11 people choose the difference.And if you win by five percentage points, it’s a gigantic landslide.So the division is already baked in, right?Most people think of themselves as one side or the other and they can’t imagine doing otherwise.And there’s this narrow band in the middle.We know the names of the counties in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, wherever it might be.
So the division—when were we ever enormously unified?That’s the rarity.But the division now is inflamed.And Obama has said to me and others that there are days when he wonders whether he came along 20 years too soon; that demographically speaking, it might have been more natural to have a president named Gonzalez before Obama.And it certainly would have been demographically more logical to have a woman first before an African American because half the nation and more is female.
So he comes along, and for, again, millions of people this is a great historical advance, a source of enormous inspiration and possibility, hope.But what was concealed by that confetti were the faces of the people who thought just the opposite, that this was a moment of threat, and the demographic change that was happening slowly but surely had now been accelerated by the election of a black man in a house built by slaves.
And, you know, I think Obama is a guy who has a historical sense that Jim Crow was yesterday.You know, in historical terms, Jim Crow was yesterday, and the reaction to Reconstruction is not so long ago.So the notion that there would be a reaction to his election and then demagogues and politicians who were perfectly capable of inflaming it, throwing gasoline on it, lighting a match on it—you know, again, publicly he always had to enact hope.I never saw it more vividly than when I interviewed Obama several days—no more—after the election.The election was on a Tuesday, obviously, and I’m down there toward the end of the week, and the White House was like a morgue; it was like a morgue.Funeral home.
And Obama had talked to countless people on staff: You know, this is the United States; we’re—we’ve written our chapter.Now, the next chapter, we have to hope that, you know, even though we don’t like his ideology, he’ll be his best self, and blah, blah, blah.
And then he met—and he had a meeting with—he had a meeting with Trump.And then I had an interview with Obama the next day, two days later, and it was very clear that Trump’s performance was alarming right off the bat.He was reasonably polite, unlike now.But his ignorance of anything approaching policy or how the world works or the state of the world was to everybody who was in the circle that knew about these meetings appalling.Appalling.
The only thing that gave Obama any sense of good cheer in with the bad was that at least there was a sense of modesty when it came to hearing about how bad the situation was with North Korea, for example.But for the most part in those meetings, his attention was like a bad schoolchild.He was constantly wandering away from the subject at hand.All he wanted to do was talk about how famous he was, how big his rallies were, how big his margins were in this state or that state.This was amazing to Obama and his people.And they kept quite quiet about it.
But from day one, it was very obvious that Donald Trump is who he appears to be.There’s no secrets with Trump.There’s no Other Trump, as you sometimes see with historical figures; there’s the public one and the private one.No, this is—you know exactly what you’ve got, and that’s what you’re going to have till the end.
The Trump Transition
And Obama’s view of this man that he’s meeting at this point who is the guy who basically led the birthers and the relevance of that?
Imagine the amount of emotional discipline it takes to be cordial to a guy who you know is going to be a president, a disastrous president, that the disaster is baked into his character and his sense of rhetoric, his sense of who he is, not just ideological, and whose entire political career was generated by a racist conspiracy theory aimed at you and your place of birth, and you greet him in your home.“Please, sit in this nice chair in the Oval Office, and we, as statesmen, will exchange information for the greater good of the United States of America.”Please imagine the emotional discipline necessary to carry that off.
And it’s been now, you know, we’re approaching three years, and Obama still remains rather subtle in his criticism of Trump, considering what the offenses are.…
You know, and still, Obama gives a public statement that goes out on social media that never mentions Trump’s name, but is very firm about what kind of rhetoric is destructive, what kind of racism has no place in public life.And that’s about the boldest statement he’s given so far.So he has played by the rules of successor-predecessor relations.He lives in one universe, while the president of the United States, Trump, lives in another universe where he accuses Obama not only of being born in Kenya, but of, you know, tapping his room, of all kinds of criminal offenses, which returns us to that familiar place, Bizarro World.
Trump the Candidate
So when he first came down that golden escalator, and his rhetoric, his divisive message about immigration, immigrants, and it resonates with this group of people he defines as the “forgotten,” the establishment doesn’t understand it.They think he’s done.The media basically thinks he’s done after that point, after that speech.What’s going on in America that the media missed, that the establishment missed, that he got?Who are these forgotten?Where do they come from?And how important is it to understand that and how it leads to the division or is part of this division that we’re talking about?
… I don’t think there’s one Trump voter, just as I don’t think there’s one supporter of Barack Obama or whoever it may be.
And I think it’s axiomatic that while one Trump voter might be just a blatant racist that another person might be somebody who’s lost his or her job through deindustrialization, for reasons of globalization or reasons that they can’t understand or see or sense, but they sense something changing that makes them deeply anxious, and they feel left out.On the other hand, that latter person, by definition, is buying into a whole complex of ugly things, knowingly or unknowingly.That’s deeply troubling.
So again, we’re talking about tens of millions of people who voted for Donald Trump.I don’t think tens of millions of people are ready to march with tiki torches in Charlottesville, but those same people have to ask themselves at some point if they’re exposed to Donald Trump in even the most casual way, what am I buying into here?Not just did a tax cut help me, or did it only help the rich?What am I buying into here?What America am I buying into here?What ethos am I buying into?
Yes, I may be pro-life.Yes, I may be someone who wants judges who look at that singular issue and a deeply important issue to me; I want that.But what other moral system, what other rhetoric am I buying into?And that’s a deep quandary for those of us who are trying to make sense of our own country: how you can say that you live by the word of Jesus or God, or whatever your religion is, and overlook so much that’s deeply, blatantly immoral?They know it.I don’t—I don’t understand it.And I think I’m not alone in this just because, you know, I’m an Eastern journalist, you know, whatever the label that you want to put on my forehead is.That’s something that’s very difficult to understand.
They say that it’s because he provides—he lives up to what he says he’s going to do, and he provides answers or works towards the things they care about: immigration, the fact of—
I understand that.
—bashing the media, the fact of bashing the elite.
I understand that.I’m not a fool.But they also understand what they’re accepting as the price of the ticket for a tax cut or a judge or—and by the way, the whole description of the immigration complex of problems or situation, three-quarters of it is complete nonsense confabulated by Donald Trump to create a picture of invading hordes.Some of it’s exacerbated by policy of the Trump administration in the most senseless way.Let’s strip away aid to Central America, and then let’s be incredibly shocked that these now more impoverished people are going to find—try to find some other place to live; namely, somewhere north.
That’s not part of the complex of the—that’s not part of the narrative that’s presented either by Donald Trump or Fox News or those who are presenting that story.
Social Media and the Rising Divide
Let’s talk one more time about the media and the use of Twitter by Trump, the power of what social media has become and conservative voices.How has that changed things for the worse?How has it added to the divide?
All presidents dream of, sometimes in their worst moments, of speaking around and past the filter of the media, right?So if you were John F. Kennedy, you had to speak to ABC, NBC, CBS and The Washington Post and The New York Times.That was the way it was; that’s the way you got your message out, and local papers and all the rest.
The media is radically changed now.Bill Clinton used to think: OK, now there’s this thing called cable television, and I will speak direct to the American people through puffball interviews with Larry King so I don’t have to deal with the editorial board of The New York Times or some wiseass from The New Yorker or whatever.I’m going to get easy questions from Larry King, it will look like an interview, and I’ll get my message out.
Now it’s way easier.You don’t need any of that stuff.And Donald Trump has called himself—I’ve heard him say it—“I am the William Shakespeare of Twitter.”And for his purposes, he’s not wrong in terms of his capacity to speak directly.He mastered Twitter right away.I mean, you can laugh at it; you can point to his misspellings and “covfefe” or whatever the hell that word was, all that stuff.But he is able to speak immediately, and then the rest of the media in thrall to it—“Did you see the…?”Literally, if you watch Morning Joe or CNN or all the morning shows, what are they covering half the time?In real time, they are telling you what the president is tweeting, and then they discuss the tweet, yea or nay.That’s a brave new world.
So the—it’s not just the conversation has changed.The nature of the conversation, the directness has changed, and Trump is really good at it.
And how does it add to the divide?
Well, have you been on Twitter lately?Have you looked at it?I mean, Twitter, social media in general, is in many ways empowering.It lessens—and it certainly lessens the power of a media that’s already struggling commercially.That’s another thing that Trump is extremely aware of, is the economic instability of the media writ large in whole.He knows damn well that everybody is trying to find their way and having a hard time of it because of the advertising market and the nature of what’s going on.
And at the same time, he’s speaking to and through a medium that has an entirely different way of communicating.He can speak to his people—[claps]—in an instant, in an instant.He can deflect, insult, nullify, de-platform, whack in the head, lie, lie, lie, direct to his people in an instant.And that’s what he does.And almost every other politician sounds—that great sin, the greatest sin of all—boring by comparison.
I mean, it’s—in some ways, everybody had to run, sprint after him to try to figure out the new game, and failed.You saw that in the Republican primaries in 2016.The game—he completely changed the game on the run.And [Gov. Jeb] Bush and [Sen. Marco] Rubio and [Gov. John] Kasich, all the rest of them, they just, they had no idea what new game they were in.They thought it was a joke and that he would—he would go away.And most of the media did, too.
You know, I was wrong and I was right about Trump.I knew how awful he was.I live in New York, right, so he’s been in the joke-sphere of New York for a long time, in tabloid life.I knew how rotten his businesses were, a lot of his history, although more of it’s come out.But the degree to which he would connect, and connect with so many people politically, I didn’t see that immediately.And very few did.And those who did see it were blind to how bad he was, too.It kind of worked both ways.
State of the Nation in 2020
You’ve got two different presidents, 180 degrees from each other in every single possible way.
I think that’s fair.
Both are presidents that were voted for because they were avenues of change.So where are we now?
… Donald Trump is an emergency.I thought of him as a tragedy from the day he was elected, and wrote and said so.He represents an emergency in American life in terms of the erosion of democratic values, in terms of our alliances and position in the world, in terms of national security, in terms of our values, in terms of the difference between right and wrong and truth and false.He represents an emergency.
And for him to get a second term would—the vastly greater damage that could be done is hard to fathom.We live in a world in which glaciers are melting; the environment is rapidly going to hell in a handbasket.A lot of the damage has already been done, is irretrievable.But that is an epochal issue; it’s not tax policy.And the president of the United States believes it’s a Chinese hoax and wants to do nothing about it, except coal, more coal.And you can extend that to other issues as well, but I take the environment as just one example.
And so eight years of Trump as opposed to one term is probably geometrically different, not just arithmetically different. …
Divide in the Democratic Party
The divide in the Democratic Party?We’ve talked about and it’s obvious this divide that has happened in the GOP over the past few years—
… Look, I have a lot of admiration for and respect for somebody like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.She is—she’s not only young and a person of color, but she’s forcing the action on a lot of issues that have been talked about but not pushed nearly hard enough.The environment is just one example.But I think it would be a mistake to say, just in arithmetic terms, that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez represents the great majority of Democrats in the House of Representatives.I don’t think even she would say that.
So there’s got to be some sense of cooperation and recognition of that, that there are people that represent the Bronx or the more liberal parts of Massachusetts or Minnesota, and it’s a much bigger country than that.Again, my politics and my feelings about those individual issues aside, that’s not what we’re talking about here.
And so, to lose to a president who represents an emergency, who is demonstrably a bigot, who demonstrably does not care about the fate of the earth, who demonstrably carries out foreign policy with all the discipline of a kindergartener, the stakes are unbelievably high.
Talk about the division in America today.We’ve had conservative people sitting in that seat who sort of say the complete opposite and will say what you’re saying is not allowing this president, who was duly elected, to accomplish the things that the people of the United States want to accomplish.But it’s so stark these days.It’s people sitting in different opinions are just so much more stark than in the past.What does it mean?
When Barack Obama ran against Mitt Romney, I pulled the lever for Barack Obama.Surprise, surprise.I would not have welcomed nor been thrilled about Mitt Romney as president, but I don’t think that Mitt Romney would have gone out of his way to be a bigot, to undermine American alliances, to insult and worse the leaders of France, Germany, Britain, and show great mushy, moist affection for the leaders of North Korea or a Russia that did its best to put its cyberthumb on an American election.In other words, I think that Mitt Romney would have been—again, it would not have been my—a fan, but he would have been more or less a normal American president.Again, I would object to all kinds of policies, just as I would with any number of George Herbert Walker Bush.
This is different.This is not that!This is not that.And it is very hard for me to understand why a member of Congress who doesn’t—who has not only his or her seat to value but the judgment of history to value, would want to lay their claim with somebody who they find disgusting.And I know from interviews, discussions—and all journalists do—that the House of Representatives and the Senate is filled with people who find Donald Trump repulsive, but they don’t have the guts to say so publicly unless they’re on the brink of retirement.
Now, again, I know and respect, as much as, you know, I debate it and all the rest, that there are people who feel very differently than I do on any number of issues.We’re not talking about that.We’re not talking about that.We’re talking about an emergency, and we have from the very start.
The Mueller Report
… The Mueller report comes out.It’s clear, it’s ink on paper, but there are two points of view about what it says.And if the White House says one thing, there’s a group of people that will say it means this.And on the other side—
Well, in the case—in the case of the Mueller report, there was—this was not—the interpretative aspects of this was not helped by the fact that the main purveyor of one side lives in one universe of information—Donald Trump—and Robert Mueller lives in a way of speaking and a way of self-presentation and a way of being that is unhearble by tens of millions of Americans.Most people listen to him speak, or even his style of writing, his way of writing a letter with these kind of convoluted double negatives, and they don’t understand it, they don’t know what to make of it, and it lacks a sense of urgency or finger pointing or—or ferocity that they figure, “Well, he’s not that urgent about it, so how big a deal could it be?” whereas the other guy is, you know, jumping up and down, and he’s extraordinarily clear.
Donald Trump is certainly clear in his communications.“Fool,” “idiot,” you know, “conspiracy theory”—he speaks in English, very, very plain English.It’s never a big mystery about what he means or what he intends to mean.Robert Mueller, for a lot of people, it’s very hard to discern what the hell he’s talking about.That’s a problem.
And are the media at fault in some way?
But the media—look, I’m not—I’m not deluded.I know that I can write some fierce anti-Trump comment, opinion piece.Jelani Cobb can write the same, or any number of people, and most of our readers will nod knowingly: “Thank you.You are writing what I feel.”And there’s some good in that, and then some people, maybe they disagree, and they’re swayed three degrees to the left on—as a result.But most of us are in our own corners, in our own information silos created by ourselves as opposed to exterior forces.It used to be an exterior—set of exterior forces that created your media consumption and therefore your knowledge.You lived in a world in which we had three networks, a couple of newspapers and then the local press, and that’s what you consumed; that’s what was available to you.
Now there’s this panoply of stuff, and you choose what you want to hear.And it’s the rare person who selects for himself or herself a menu, a syllabus that argues within itself, that is—and when it’s arguing, it’s on a common set of facts as opposed to fantasy, nonsense, bullshit, conspiracy theory, Alex Jones over here and then this other stuff over here.
The 2018 Midterm Elections
… Let’s talk about the 2018 midterms a little bit.So Trump uses the [Brett] Kavanaugh issue, he uses immigration to excite his voters.What’s your take over how that election went down, how again it was an election of division to some extent?Didn’t work out exactly the way Trump expected when it came to the House.
Well, remember one thing: that presidential elections are radically different from congressional off-year elections; almost invariably, in midterm elections, off-year elections, that the opposition makes some gains.It’s the exception when it’s not the case.The Democrats certainly made some gains.
What was more dramatic, and it will be interesting to see how Trump exploits or how it plays in the presidential election, is that a lot of gains on the Democratic side were women and people of color, in historic numbers.Now, Trump had a choice how to react to that, and what he’s done is he’s—he’s basically saying: “Look!Look!Socialists!Socialist alert!People of color alert!”He is, without shame, without hesitation and without pause, playing the race card.He’s not the first.We just buried George Herbert Walker Bush, who is thought of as the good Bush, the patrician Bush.Please remember that his—one of his presidential campaigns was energized by, fueled by Lee Atwater, whose background in race baiting is well known, and by the use of the Willie Horton ploy [against Democratic candidate Gov. Michael Dukakis].Racist to its bone.
Please remember that Ronald Reagan, about whom even Democrats now seem to think that they must speak of in the most glowing terms, spoke, in announcing his presidential race, spoke of states’ rights in Mississippi and who was just found having spoken to Richard Nixon on the telephone referring to Africans as monkeys.
So racism is not unique at the presidential election.We live in a country in which Woodrow Wilson screened The Birth of a Nation at the White House.Thomas Jefferson thought the odor of black men and women was extremely disagreeable, even while he was having an affair with a slave woman who gave birth to his child.
Donald Trump is not unique.What’s unique is that in modern times—in modern times, in the 21st century—the president of the United States is the one overtly throwing gasoline on the flames of division and bigotry.He’s not sneaking in the word “invasion” once or twice about Mexican and Central American immigration.… He’s using the word “invasion” as the key word in his Facebook ads.It’s a very conscious use of this kind of bigotry.So when people who are in the media game, political media game, who are doing ads and buys and strategy think about how the verdict in history is going to go down for them, think about what they’re doing with Facebook and with their ads.Think about what they’re saying or not saying about Russia’s involvement online, pro or—Russia’s involvement in the campaign.
And what’s at stake, for instance, as you started to talk about, with the attacks on “the squad” and AOC?
They’re just—I think Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a convenient—a convenient target for Trump, just a convenient target.He sees a young, first-term member of the House of Representatives who has support from the DSA, Democratic Socialists of America, who has opinions that are on the left, but above all, who’s female, who is a person of Puerto Rican descent, and he uses it; he exploits it.He twists into 16 pretzel shapes what her views may or may not be.He makes a cartoon of her and points and says, “That’s what you’re going to get if you don’t elect me.”
He does this with the Muslim member[s] of Congress [Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib].He does this with the African American member of Congress from Massachusetts [Ayanna Pressley].He does this—he just—he—this is old stuff.We saw this in the ’30s: big noses, rats, Der Stürmer.This is just the 21st-century American version.I’m not saying it’s Nazi, but I’m saying this is an old playbook.It’s certainly authoritarian.It’s certainly grotesque.It’s certainly racist.It’s deeply wrong.
Trump and the Consolidation of Power
And two last things.The turning point where very early on, when he depended upon the Congress to put through a new health care bill, listening to [Speaker of the House Paul] Ryan and saying, “We have to do this first,” and it fails.McCain, as you mentioned, is the one that sort of kills it in the end.But there is a point where he turns and sort of decides, Congress ain’t going to do it for me; I’ve got to do it.And he kind of becomes a very different president at that point.
I think Donald Trump is very frustrated by the American system of government.I think he’s deeply frustrated, as any authoritarian would be, by the notion of a division of powers.He’s extremely attracted to, enticed by and titillated by the authoritarian examples that he sees in Russia and Philippines and Turkey and the like.He finds that extremely attractive and doesn’t quite understand the rules of the road here.And his frustration comes out in different forms, whether it’s anger at John McCain or his notion of the deep state.What he calls the deep state, you and I would call government.
He sees the intelligence agencies, who, by the way, have a complicated history—let’s not forget that—but he doesn’t care about that.It’s not like he cares about, you know, the Contras or the overthrow of [Prime Minister Mohammad] Mossadegh in Iran.What he cares about is—the only—Donald Trump only cares about one thing: how it affects him in a given moment…
Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 said that, above all, the presidency is not an office of bureaucratic management or technical administration.Above all, the presidency of the United States is a matter of moral leadership.Donald Trump told his aides, when he began his presidency, that they should think of the presidency like a television show, and each day it was their duty to win the war against their enemies.Each day was like a segment, like an episode, right?Today we’ll kick this one’s ass, and the next day we’ll tweet and undermine and ruin the reputation of this one, etc., etc.That’s the way he saw how it was going to be; that’s the way he wanted it to be run.
And so to be blocked by institutions of government is a matter of enormous frustration.It’s a matter of frustration for any president who wants to pass this bill or is disappointed by that court decision.That’s not what we’re talking about here.This is the frustration of a would-be authoritarian, who, if he could snap his fingers and make the system otherwise, would in a second, I have no doubt.I don’t think he cares about essential, foundational American values.I just don’t.
So what’s the threat of that?
Where does the threat end?What’s the threat of that?Where does it end?Where does it end?You know, when you start seeing former heads of the CIA—[James] Clapper, [John] Brennan—feel it incumbent upon themselves to come out and act as commentators, as it were, of the resistance, everything in their training tells them never to do such a thing.It is anathema for them.Try getting a quote from John Brennan before the advent of Donald Trump.It wouldn’t happen.And again, I am not naive about the history of the CIA or the NSA [National Security Agency] or—or any government institution.We could go on talking for days about the history of sins and malfeasance and dishonesty and terrible decisions and all the rest in every establishment, every corner of American government in its history.
That’s not what we’re talking about with Donald Trump.Trump is ill at ease with the basic institutional, constitutional formations of the United States.He finds it an annoyance at best and—and an enemy at worst.He doesn’t just admire [Vladimir] Putin or [Rodrigo] Duterte or [Recep Tayyip] Erdogan; he’s envious of them.
A Divided Nation
So how do you sum up, to end here, where we are now?How do you see this America where we are in 2019?
You know, you asked me before about division, crisis, and what I will say is there is precedent for this.It’s worth remembering that in 1968, at the heart of the Vietnam War, when you would have thought that anti-war—if you have a romantic version of the ’60s versus a realistic one—that antiwar sentiment was starting to grow to such a degree that Richard Nixon would not have been the selection of the American people.What we’re forgetting is probably the person that had the best chance of beating him was assassinated, Robert Kennedy.But in 1972, when anti-war sentiment was even greater, and the rumblings of Watergate were already happening, who won the election?Richard Nixon?Yes!Because the Democratic candidate, while in many ways admirable and attractive, was also thought to be too radical.And Richard Nixon destroyed—didn’t just win—destroyed George McGovern.
Now, I’m not for a minute suggesting that no matter how bad things get that the only person that can beat Trump is a centrist like Joe Biden.In fact, I’m not; I find Joe Biden has a lot of weaknesses.But the Democratic Party and Democratic voters and Americans are going to have to find somebody that’s capable of being attractive enough to the Democratic base and at the same time is able to put together a majority and win, because if it doesn’t happen, the results are going to be grave.
But is this division in America—some people have come in and said this division that they see and the way the partisan Washington operates is worse than the Civil War.
… You know, one of my colleagues at The New Yorker is the historian Jill Lepore—teaches at Harvard and the author of These Truths, which is a magnificent history of American founding and development.It’s a—it’s both a textbook in a sense, but also a thrilling history of the United States.
And we talk about this subject of division all the time.And like a true scholar, like a true historian, she puts hysteria and emotion to one side, and that’s a very valuable act.And she’s very fast to remind me, and all of us, that there have been periods in American history of tremendous division.There was a thing called the Civil War in which just countless people were killed and the country was rendered asunder and Reconstruction was hardly a warm bath of reconciliation thereafter.There’s other periods: 1968, for example, was—around that period, was a period of terrible division.
So we haven’t been to the exact same place before, in the exact same circumstances, with the same outcomes and the same dividing lines, but it’s important to remember, and not only for our sanity, that we should not be guilty of presentism, which is to think that the present moment will persist forever; that the same country that elected—just as I said the same country that voted for Obama also voted for Trump, the reverse is true.A sense of possibility, a sense of hope cannot be lost.It can’t be—it can’t be dismissed, because even for a skeptic like me, a non-believer, despair is an unforgivable sin in politics, public life, and in personal life.Despair is unforgivable.Too much depends on us not being despairing, whether it’s the environment or countless other issues of public life, American life, international life. We can’t—
…I mean, in many ways this is a terrible moment, not in the usual sense, not in the sense of Second World War or the Civil War.It’s a terrible moment for the collective spirit.And not only that, but I, as a human being, as a journalist, as an American, I—I think it’s important to refuse despair—that’s essential—and not to give in to this notion that what is now, not only the president who is now but the sense of seeming irretrievable distances and divisions is forever.I can’t believe that’s the case.And I don’t think it is.
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