The FRONTLINE Interviews
Eugene Robinson
The Washington Post
Eugene Robinson is a columnist for The Washington Post, where he writes on politics and culture. He also serves as an MSNBC analyst.
The following interview was conducted by the Kirk Documentary Group’s Mike Wiser for FRONTLINE on March 14, 2024, prior to Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race. It has been edited for clarity and length.
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Donald Trump Was Shaped by Queens
Donald Trump doesn't talk a lot about growing up in Queens.
Oh, no.No.
And wanting to break into Manhattan.But do you think it matters?Do you think he's shaped by the times and the place that he grew up?
Oh, yeah, sure.I think there always has been, and always will be, a bit of the kid from Queens who wanted to break into Manhattan, who wanted to break into the big time.And that sense of climbing, and striving to be at the top, I think that's somewhere deep inside Donald Trump.
So is that still manifest?I think now it's more a sense of sort of grievance that when he finally did get to the top, he's had all these problems.And he has all these critics.And some people may have made fun of him.And now he's facing all these charges.And so I think there's an anger of self-vindication that may be more of a motivating factor than sort of, you know, grasping kid from Queens, at this point.
Fred Trump Sued for Racial Discrimination
It's also interesting, because the racial politics at that time, and his dad has the housing units, where there's questions about excluding minorities, and—
There weren't questions, there was a lawsuit.He got sued by the Justice Department in 1972.1And then agreed to a consent decree.And that was after Trump had joined the firm.They agreed to a consent decree without admitting guilt, but promising not to discriminate against African American tenants, which they had been doing.
I mean, I guess my question is, do you think that you see parts of that in his politics today, that part of Queens, and his dad, and the lawsuit?
No, I think you do.And you hear these reports of these sort of unguarded remarks from Donald Trump that sound very 1950s, about sort of stereotypes about African Americans, and stereotypes about Jews, and stereotypes about these kind of people are this way.And the Jews are the ones you want counting your money.That sort of thing, that just sounds hopelessly retro, and not in a good way.But yeah, I think that's the way he sees the world still, in a lot of ways, from what I hear.
And the other thing that we know now, that maybe we did know before but maybe didn't pay attention to, is the Trump Organization has been found liable for fraud in the civil lawsuit in New York.And I guess the ruling that came back on that, the question is like, how early does this begin, with his dad, obviously Roy Cohn.He learns.
Right.When you're learning from Roy Cohn, you are already on precarious moral ground, I think.You're not exactly following, the Buddha; you're following Roy Cohn, a guy who was known for being mean and nasty and effective, but doing anything he possibly could do to win.
And now as we're looking back at his presidency, at the way that the Trump Organization was being run, what is it about Trump that causes all of the indictments, the impeachments, the civil lawsuit?Is there something about who Trump is coming out of all that?
I think one consistent theme is that he does whatever he can get away with.And I think that the world in which he lives, or he thinks he lives, is one in which everybody is always playing every angle.Everybody is trying to screw everybody else for advantage.And so if he doesn't do it, then he's a sucker.He's a just a simp.He's being foolish not to try to take advantage and cut every corner and do whatever he can.
And so in his imagination—and he has argued this much in court.He argued, for example, in the fraud case in New York that, “Well, you know, everybody overvalues their properties when they're applying for loans at banks and then undervalues them when they report them for taxes.Why are you blaming me for doing that?Everybody does it.Law-schmaw.Everybody does it.” And it's not true that everybody does it the way he did it.And it's not true that everybody overdoes it insanely the way he does.
And if you ever talk to people who have dealt with him in the New York real estate industry, I've run into more than one person who's had that experience, and at the end of it, whether a deal was finally consummated or not, at the end of it, said, “I'm never dealing with that guy again.I just don't want to deal with him.”
Trump’s Early Interest in Politics
The other thing that's interesting about him is he's drawn to politics.We think about him running and suddenly coming out of the blue, nowhere, in 2016, but you go back, and he was visiting New Hampshire with Roger Stone in 1987, and he's connected to Roger Stone from the beginning.What do you make of that history?
… It's an interesting question.I don't think I've ever really known what it was that made Donald Trump get into politics and decide that was where he wanted to take his life.Now, I do think that factors involving that were, yes, this relationship with Roger Stone, and there were probably others who were saying, “Yeah, you ought to run for this.You ought to run for that.” Didn't he run for mayor of New York at one point?He wanted to be mayor of New York, I think, at one point.
And then I think another big factor was he was on that show for so long, "The Apprentice," and he became so well known that I think he started realizing that he had like 100% name recognition; everybody knew who he was.And he had established this persona, this television persona, as being this tough-guy judge of talent and being in charge, and I think he realized he could use that.
The Central Park Five and Birtherism
… He injects himself into the Central Park Five—
Yeah.
—and things that are outside of what you would think of as mainstream politics, that are racially charged.What is it about Trump that would make him decide, “I'm a real estate developer, and I want to weigh in on this scandal”?
Well, one obvious answer would be racism, right?That could be just a part of him, the way he thinks about people and groups of people and the way he categorizes them and ranks them.That could be it.I can't tell what's in Donald Trump's heart of hearts, but he does seem to think and often act in terms of stereotypes.And I think you could just demonstrate example after example of that.
But yeah, there are some things that he does care about.I think the vast majority of issues that face the country, he wants to do what's popular and what will get him votes, and now that he's sort of established this MAGA base that has a sort of set of beliefs, he's kind of stuck there.And so even if he wanted to go someplace else—for example, right now I have a feeling he would very much like to go someplace else on abortion, for example, because he's seeing that getting rid of Roe v.Wade, something he promised to his base, not going over well with the country and threatens his reelection.And I think he would love to find some way to sort of get back on the other side of that issue, but that's going to be really hard for him.
Do you think there was something about the birther issue that even though everybody thought, he's being destroyed by Obama on this, he's making a fool out of himself, this is a conspiracy theory, that that was important for his political rise and for laying the groundwork for 2015?
Oh, sure.I think the birther issue was—most people across the country didn't know about him and the Central Park Five.They knew him as the TV guy on a reality show and as a multimillionaire, if not a billionaire.But the birther stuff, for most people, I think, was his first real foray into politics, into the political discourse of the moment.
And I think that was enormously important in raising his profile, because whether he knew it in advance or just discovered in the process, there was a constituency out there that was ready to hear that.There was a constituency out there that was ready for somebody like Donald Trump became, and I think once he saw that there was a market, he sort of developed the product to sell to that market.
… Do you think in 2016—you mentioned that you thought that, coming from Queens, he has this sort of feeling of rejection by the elites and his own sort of resentment toward it.Do you think that was what helped him appeal to voters in 2016?
Oh, absolutely, because he's a performer, and he was able to perform as someone who was being looked down on by the elites, who by looking down on me are looking down on you, the voters, and he was able to sell that.At the same time, he's selling, “And, by the way, I'm a billionaire, and I have a giant mansion in Florida and a huge apartment in New York and a golf club here and my own airplane, and I'm a really big cheese.But I'm still fighting for you, the looked-down-upon and the downtrodden.” That's quite a trick to pull off.
… The thing that stands out from his presidency, up until the last year, probably, is Charlottesville.Did that signal something of a change for you in Trump or a turning point in the administration?…
It did for Joe Biden.And I thought it was just sort of outrageous.… It was so out of the blue, Charlottesville, that any president wouldn't come out and roundly denounce the neo-Nazis, right?This is not a hard one.And so it surprised me.I guess my opinion of Donald Trump had, by then, reached the point where I don't know if I was as shocked as Joe Biden was.But I believe Biden was genuinely shocked.I believe him.I take him at his word when he says that he heard that, and he just said, “This can't go on.I have to get in.I have to get back into the ring,” basically, and he got back in the ring.
Trump’s Presidency
A lot of people have said, including Donald Trump, that he never changed, that he's the same kid that he was when he was 7, and he doesn't change.But we've also talked to people who have said that they think that he did learn over the course of his presidency about who he surrounds himself.Did you see a change in Trump over those years?
Oh, yeah, absolutely.I think he became more sort of resentful.I think he was more frustrated.We joke about the deep state, and I think that the concept is a joke.But it is true: There is a professional career federal bureaucracy that knows the issues very well and knows the history of every issue and everything, and I think tried to explain to President Trump, at various times, why “Really I understand what you want to do, Mr.President, but that can't be done.It's simply not possible.”
And I think the more he got that kind of answer, I think he got angry at it.And I think he felt that everybody was sort of conspiring to stand in his way.You saw the way he sort of went through his chiefs of staff and other officials and how, as they attempted to establish sort of guardrails, he didn't like being confined.He thought the president was the boss, and the president ought to be able to do what he wanted to do.
And this is somebody who had run not a big corporation but a family firm, where yeah, he was the boss; he could do whatever he wanted to do, basically.And now he was in a situation where you have immense, immense power as president of the United States, but you definitely cannot do whatever you want to do, whenever you want to do it.That's just not the way it works.You're at the helm of the world's biggest ocean liner; you can't turn it on a dime.And there are a million considerations for every policy decision, and you'd better think about all of them, or you're going to screw up.
One area where presidents have more discretion, really, is in foreign policy.And I think that one thing that I am just confused about, I don't know where it comes from, but Donald Trump's antipathy towards NATO and our traditional allies is—it's just something that not only surprised me but frightens me quite a bit.And I think it's real.I think it's getting deeper and deeper.One of the big questions about the potential for a new Trump administration is how different the world would look after four more years of Donald Trump and how bad that would be.
How much does his response to COVID define his presidency, define what would happen in that election?…
It's another thing that just baffles me about Donald Trump.So he faces this huge crisis of COVID.And so he does one thing that's actually smart: He does Operation Warp Speed.He pushes money toward development of these new mRNA vaccines, and that turns out to be a tremendous success.But by the time the vaccines are coming out, he's already sort of reluctant to embrace his big success, I think because it had been so bad because of the economic crash that everybody going inside because of COVID caused, because of the disruption, I think he wanted to get on some other side of that.And it actually cost lives for him to do that, because I think a lot of people would be alive today who are not if he had embraced the vaccines that he helped to create.And if he had had his vaccination publicly and had encouraged people to get vaccinated in a more sort of fulsome way, I think thousands of lives would have been saved.
Trump’s Refusal to Admit Defeat
… After the election, the run-up to Jan.6, denying that he lost, we now know charged with encouraging various conspiracies to try to overturn the election per details in the Jan.6th Committee as well, and then he's there in the White House when Jan.6 happens, not doing anything to stop it—what is all of that?Is that the most important thing about Donald Trump's presidency?How important are those moments in evaluating who he is?
Oh, I think that's, in some ways, the last month or so, or the last two months of Donald Trump's presidency and all of his post-presidency probably tell us most of what we need to know for this election coming up.I think that's the most important period in a really important way, because the idea that he actually refused to accept the results of what everyone could see was a free and fair election, and which he was told was a free and fair election time and again at the time, he didn't want to believe it, and the fact that he took it so far and continues to maintain that he actually won an election that he lost by 7 million votes and by a whole bunch of electoral votes is not just stunning, it's not just outrageous, but it is frightening, that whether he's being dishonest in making these claims or, perhaps even scarier, that he actually believes all these claims, whichever it is, it's just incredibly dangerous for the future of our democracy.
I guess since we went through it once, we can now anticipate that if he loses this election, he'll certainly say he won it, and we have maybe more of a playbook for reaction to it.But this is really playing with fire, this fundamental step in our democracy that has been followed since George Washington first surrendered his military commission and then stepped down as president all those years ago, that the peaceful transfer of power, that even this is not respected, much less sacrosanct, by Donald Trump, it's unprecedented, and it's really, really frightening.
When you look back on his life, you can say, “OK, he never admits that he loses,” but for me, it's like those moments when the violence is clear, right, it's not just something happened, he's at the White House; the violence is happening; his own aides are asking him to do something about it.His vice president is under threat, and Kevin McCarthy is calling him.How important are those minutes?
Those minutes are tremendously important, and they tell us something very scary about Donald Trump.It tells us something very scary about Donald Trump, that he was in the first place urging his vice president to deny the result of the election, and that he watches people sacking the U.S.Capitol, overrunning police, wailing on police, beating them with the American flag and with stanchions and with everything else, and to just sit there and watch it on television, and—just inexplicable.It's impossible to really comprehend in any sort of context of the way our government has always worked since its beginning.
We held an election whose result was respected in the middle of the Civil War.We have done it in crisis after crisis.We respect the will of the voters.He doesn't.He didn't respect the will of the voters.So either he was able to delude himself that he had actually won or he simply didn't care that he had lost, that he wanted to keep power anyhow.And neither is even remotely acceptable in a president of the United States.
Trump’s Post-Presidency
You said it was that period between the election and Jan.6 that was important.You also said it was the period after that was important.
Yeah.
Why the period after? Is that important for understanding Donald Trump?
No, the period after is that you accept the result of the election on election night generally speaking, or the next day, or in the case of Bush v.Gore, when the Supreme Court rules.But when it's determined definitively that you have lost, you accept it, OK?So he didn't do that.So you get to the certification of the election on Jan.6, and the electoral votes are there for Biden.He watches this riot, and so he doesn't accept it then.
But even after the inauguration of Joe Biden, which he refuses to attend, and again, in a just completely crazy and unprecedented way even after that, he continues to insist, “I really won the election.I really won the election.” And believe me, from the emails I get and the comments I get, there are a lot of people out there who still believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump.It simply has been disproved by every court case, by every investigation, by every count of the vote, including states where the votes were counted three and four times.
It is poisonous to even have to discuss that after it's been concluded that indeed, this person won and that person lost.It's poisonous even to have to discuss it.But to keep it up for almost four years now, it damages our democracy.It's made a lot of people in his base genuinely distrustful of a voting process that, yeah, it's a little confusing, especially to foreign observers, because we don't have one voting process; we have 51, including the District of Columbia, and we have all these different systems.And maybe there's paper ballots, maybe not.Maybe there's this kind of machine; maybe there's that kind of machine.
But in every jurisdiction, there are very accomplished professionals who really put a lot of time and effort and expertise into making sure that the votes are counted right, and they are counted right, and people should understand that.And if you ever watch it, you'd see it.But a lot of people don't believe in that anymore, and that just so erodes a really fundamental underpinning of our democracy, which is that we have elections; somebody wins; somebody loses.And whoever wins goes on; whoever loses, maybe you come back and try again, but you lost.
How unprecedented is it, too—he sets up in Mar-a-Lago.He doesn't admit that he lost.He doesn't refer to himself as the former president.He exerts control over the Republican Party.He gets involved in the immigration bill.He actually is greeting world leaders at Mar-a-Lago and sort of acting as a parallel president.How unusual is that situation, and what is he doing?
Well, what he's doing down in Mar-a-Lago is sort of try to establish it as an alternative White House, with all the trappings of the presidency.Again, it's unprecedented.And yeah, he's presenting this image, especially to his base.And there are some people who are going along with it.You know, Viktor Orbán from Hungary was happy to pay him what actually looked like a state visit, which is just outrageous.That does not happen.Only the president invites foreign leaders for a state visit.But he has set this up.And so no, it's not that Emmanuel Macron or Rishi Sunak or our major allies, they obviously know who's president and who isn't.But we've never had a defeated candidate try to set himself or herself up as a rival president, and that's what we’ve got now.
He's now been impeached twice.He's been indicted 91 times.I guess some of the counts were thrown out.I don't know what the new count is, but indicted four places.And yet he's still going.When we do the biography, there's all of these things.There's the bankruptcy; there's "Access Hollywood."There's all these places where he keeps going.And you would think, twice impeached, involved with Jan.6, all of these indictments, that it would stop somebody, and it doesn't stop Donald Trump.
No, no.
What is it about Donald Trump that—
There's an energy and an indefatigability to Donald Trump that is kind of off the scale.I don't understand why he kind of keeps going.My theory is that he, at this point, is seeking vindication; that he feels that he may at some level think he was genuinely mistreated during his first term.He's embarrassed that he lost for reelection.He refers a lot to President Obama.I think he has a thing about how Obama got reelected and served two terms, and then he got bounced out after one term.He resents that.It's hard for him to accept.
Maybe somewhere in there is a very fragile ego that needs all of this bluster to protect it.I'm not qualified to psychoanalyze him.But it is, I will say, remarkable that he is so relentless in pursuing the vindication or the power or whatever it is that he's seeking.He keeps going after it.
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