The FRONTLINE Interviews
Evan Osnos
Journalist, The New Yorker
Evan Osnos is a journalist covering politics and foreign affairs for The New Yorker.
The following interview was conducted by FRONTLINE's Jim Gilmore on Jan. 13, 2021. It has been edited for clarity and length.
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The 2020 Election
If we start at the election, talk a little bit about before the November election. Trump was talking about fraud; that if he doesn’t win, it will be stolen from him.There’s all the COVID things going on and the “Free Michigan” movement and the debates.Trump is saying “Proud Boys, stand [back and] stand by.”Talk a little bit about what he’s doing, how he was running that election, how odd it was and significant it was.
In every way, this was an election unlike anything we’d seen before.People were obviously under the incredible strain of the virus, and at the same time, Donald Trump’s candidacy is beginning to fail.The numbers are clear.He’s losing the race.And the more it becomes clear he’s losing the race, the more exotic, the more dramatic his claims become.
… What began in the beginning as him saying, “We shouldn’t trust the process of mail-in voting,” escalated over time until it was a full-scale challenge to the legitimacy of the election, full stop.There was nothing that could happen, in effect, that would satisfy him other than winning.And he said it explicitly.
And within the ranks of the Republican leadership, there was this growing sense of a divide between the people right around Trump, who were to some degree actually convinced that they might win.They really did think that the polls might be wrong in 2020 in the same way that they were wrong in 2016, and their whole self-narrative, their whole identity was based on the idea of them pulling a rabbit out of a hat.
And then there was this other view, which dominated the ranks of congressional Republican leadership, Mitch McConnell and others who really had a grip on the national picture, who said, “No, no.The numbers are clear.He is losing this race.”And there was also a real concern that Donald Trump was perhaps shooting the party in the foot, because by going out and telling Republicans that the process wasn’t to be trusted, it was illegitimate, it wasn’t worth your time, in effect he was telling people to stay home, and that was going to matter enormously in states where the results were going to be very close.
Trump Alleges Election Fraud
So on election night, he immediately disputes the results.He won’t concede.And the fake claims and the claims of fraud begin that will elevate and continue on until this day.Talk a little bit about that reality and what it was setting in motion.
… In a sense, Donald Trump and Joe Biden agreed on one thing, which is that the first side to come out and make a statement was going to seize the initiative, seize the momentum, and Biden’s side got a jump on it.They came out, and what they said was, “It appears that we are winning, but it’s not clear yet.The results aren’t in.”And that put Trump on the defensive, and it’s not a position that he expected to be in.
For Trump, when Fox News called the race in Arizona for Joe Biden, that was a shock wave that went through the Trump team, because they had been counting on the idea that they would be able to create enough of a suggestion of plausibility — they just might be able to win, quote/unquote — that that would sustain them, and that that would become the energy behind their challenge to the legitimacy of the result.
Once it was clear that, in fact, they had lost Arizona, and that Fox News was the one saying it, they were in a deep, deep problem, because that at that point meant that they had to begin a rearguard action.1They had to push back.And that was the beginning.The moment when Fox News called Arizona for Joe Biden, that really set in motion a chain of events that would unfold over the weeks to come in ways that I think none of us really could have predicted.
So what’s Trump’s strategy?
His strategy at that point is to say, “Everything I have been telling you has turned out to be true.This is a theft.This result is being stolen from me.Don’t trust the numbers that come out of television.Don’t trust the numbers to come.”You know, he was relying on a fiction, the idea that, because he was ahead in the count in some states early in the night, that that was the, in a sense, the true result, and that anything that followed from that was untrue.
Anybody who actually understood what was going on in the states knew that cities count slower than rural areas, and eventually, it was inevitable that cities, which tend to be Democratic, were going to be able to generate more votes in the end than rural areas.Donald Trump was counting on the idea that people would be seduced into the fiction that because he was ahead early in the night, that was the real result, and anything that came later was an example of fraud.
And I have to tell you, you know, Jim, for—here we are now, weeks later, and I am amazed at how much that idea really did percolate into the mental groundwater.And people did come away with this idea that the quote/unquote votes changed over the course of the night.And that’s amazing, because that really was, you know, him essentially creating an idea and propagating it.
GOP Leadership After the Election
So take us into the heads of GOP leadership, [Sen. Mitch] McConnell and [Vice President Mike] Pence or more generic, any way you want to play it.What were they thinking?I mean, they are realists.They understand politics.They know the truth, and they know that this is very dangerous territory, and yet they’re pretty much silent or very supportive.Like [Sen. Lindsey] Graham, you know, soon after going on television, sort of saying, “Yeah, there’s fraud here.”What’s going on within the leadership, the GOP leadership?And [explain] why it matters.
Well, you had a few different views.There were some people among Donald Trump’s closest allies, among the GOP leadership, who leapt to his defense, people like Lindsey Graham, who became one of his proxies, going on television and talking about the idea that this thing was stolen from Donald Trump.And then there were others, like Mitch McConnell, who was waiting it out.He was biding his time.
His view was, the numbers are clear, Donald Trump has lost this race, but I don’t need to do anything that is going to expose me to the vengeance of this president or to the retaliation from his loyal voters. Because one of the things that became so clear, even on election night, was tens of millions of Americans had cast ballots for Donald Trump, and he had this army of loyal followers out there who were prepared, in some ways, to throw their support against whoever he said they should.
And I think there were a lot of Republican leaders who were waiting.They were waiting for the math to do the work that they didn’t want to do, which was coming out and saying, “It’s clear what’s happened.Donald Trump has lost.”You know, they were afraid that if they came out and said what we all knew the numbers were telling us, that ultimately they would be the ones who would find themselves in the crosshairs, not only of Donald Trump, but long after Trump is out of politics, they would find themselves enemy number one for his followers.
The Georgia Runoffs
So then Georgia.The runoffs are pending, and Trump goes to war against the Republican leaders in Georgia in charge of the election.His phone call with Raffensperger…
What’s going on here?
It’s really in Georgia that the fissures become clear, because Donald Trump, in effect, goes to war against fellow Republicans.He starts calling the senior election officials in the state of Georgia — Brad Raffensperger, secretary of state — and he’s telling them, explicitly, “It’s up to you.You have to,” as he put it, “find the votes, ultimately, that will put me over the top.”And it was really, you know, in a sense, what you had was a moment that was really like nothing we’ve ever seen, where the whole sanctity of the election rested on the shoulders of a few individuals who were being asked, in effect, to stand by what the results told them, which was that their own party had lost.
But there was tremendous pressure on them to bend to his will, to do what he asked, or, you know, something even less—maybe to just stall, maybe to say that the results were unclear, anything that would have satisfied the mythology of a dispute where one really didn’t exist.
So McConnell’s quandary?I mean, he’s worried about the Georgia races.It’s the control of the Senate that’s at stake.But he basically can’t go against the president.What’s going through McConnell’s brain at this point?What’s at stake?Trump will not stay on message, no matter what they try to do.What’s that situation, and how significant?
The relationship between Trump and McConnell is collapsing.… They talked for the last time Dec. 15.This was really only a few weeks after the election result.It was still before Georgia’s Senate race, and they had gotten to such an impasse, really a cold war within the senior ranks of the GOP, that they were no longer speaking.Mitch McConnell, in the end, has always had a fairly transactional relationship with Donald Trump.And at that point, the transaction had gone bad.In a sense, neither one trusted that the other believed that it was in his interest to stay in partnership.
Mitch McConnell, curiously enough, had done pretty well on Election Day: that the Senate was hanging in the balance; he had the possibility of returning as Senate majority leader.He had a very different set of interests in play than what Donald Trump was caring about.All Donald Trump cared about, in the end, was Trump’s own candidacy.And McConnell didn’t want to do anything or endorse anything that might undermine Republican votes in Georgia and jeopardize the possibility of people being enthusiastic and voting for their own Republican candidates.
But what are the warning signs?What does this represent?I mean, you’ve got [Georgia's voting system implementation manager Gabriel] Sterling coming out and saying, “Wait a minute, folks.People will die.This is very, very dangerous.The belief in these conspiracies is causing a decay in the democratic institutions.This is very, very serious.” …2
You had the people on the ground, the Republicans who were closest to the action in Georgia, were beginning to see signs that this had passed the point of political discussion and debate, had entered into a kind of almost physical level of violence.It was becoming clear that there were people on the ground who were actually listening to what Donald Trump was saying and believing him, that this thing was being stolen from them and that it was up to them to be able to fight back.
… There were all kinds of very specific warnings.People were being followed.Election officials were being accosted near their homes.It was—this was becoming something that was about much more than just politics or elections.It was beginning to take on the aroma of a physical conflict.And so you had the people closest to it on the ground who started to talk about it in those terms.And they publicly pleaded with the president, saying, “This cannot go on.We have to put an end to this.”
But Mitch McConnell and others in Washington stayed silent.They didn’t want to—they didn’t want to jump in.You know, in a sense, McConnell’s whole strategy of politics has always been that you reserve your power.You keep your powder dry until the moment when you are absolutely required to use it, and then you only use it in a way where you can be reasonably sure what the result is.
And in this case, there was so much in doubt in terms of how it was actually going to play out, Mitch McConnell wasn’t willing, in a sense, to risk any of his own capital in order to try to shape the result, even when he knew what the result should be.
So we’ll go out of chronology a little bit here.But the loss of Georgia, the message for the GOP and McConnell’s view, and does he blame Trump?
Absolutely blames Trump.I mean, to bring us up to date, by early January there was a feeling that, in fact, Georgia might be a loss for Republicans.This was almost unheard of.But the numbers were becoming clear that there was a level of chaos on the Republican side and that Donald Trump’s attacks on the legitimacy of the system had discouraged people to such a degree that it was—it wasn’t likely that Republicans were going to turn out in the same numbers that they might have in another state.
This is a—at that point, alarm bells begin to go off among Republican leaders in Washington, people like Mitch McConnell, who begin to realize their hold on the Senate is in doubt, something that they never imagined was in play.And at that point, they begin to try to marshal the troops, but it really was too late.
…Biden’s people were telling me, really not long after Biden won, the Democrats began to shift their resources down to Georgia.They were sending money and people down to that race, down to those races, because they recognized that they actually—they had a chance there.As much as that sounded implausible, they might be able to do something.And meanwhile in Washington, of course, something very different was happening.Donald Trump was systematically undermining Republican enthusiasm about even taking part in the Georgia race.So these two things were going in completely opposite directions.
The Mob at the Capitol
So let’s talk about Jan. 6.Pence, the quandary that Pence is in, that Trump is asking him to reject the certification of the electoral votes, that he has decided that he’s been told by his close advisers at that point that Pence can do it and it’s his last chance.Talk about the position this puts Pence in, the position it puts him in with his relationship with Trump, with his relationship with the Trump base, the movement that Trump has created.Describe the situation for Pence.
I mean, here is a guy who hitched his wagon to Donald Trump in every conceivable way, morally, personally, aesthetically.For three years and 11 months, he had played the role of the loyal servant to Donald Trump.No matter what Donald Trump said, Pence would find a way of translating it into some language that he thought might be more palatable to the Republican establishment, more palatable to evangelical Christians, the communities that he was a part of.
And everything, everything along the way, he had been willing to take flak on behalf of the administration …After all, he was in charge of the COVID response, which will go down in history as such a failure for the administration.And yet at the end of this process, all of that loyalty, all of that subservience was worth nothing.
And he finds himself in the position where Donald Trump summons him and says, “It’s up to you.You are the one who can—who can reverse this result.”And you know, Pence—Pence, interestingly, amazingly, Jan. 6 was exactly 20 years to the day after Mike Pence entered Congress as a member of the House of Representatives and sat and watched Al Gore, the outgoing vice president of the United States, certify his own loss in the election.And at the time, Pence actually turned to the person next to him, who went on to be Sen. Jeff Flake, and said that he admired what it was that Gore had done, what he’d done for the republic.
And so that day dawns, in effect, with Pence in the position of being asked to choose between Donald Trump and his own political future and his place in history and the future of the republic.That’s not hyperbole.That’s literally what was on the line for him.And you know, in a way, I think—Pence was, in the days leading up to that, Pence was trying everything he could think of.He was calling constitutional scholars, even conservative constitutional scholars like John Yoo, and asking them, “Is there anything I can do here?Is there any wiggle room?”And the law was absolutely clear.There was nothing he could do.
The Constitution required of him to certify the result.And he knew that that relationship with Donald Trump was about to explode.And I think the thing was, you know, there’s so many elements that are just, I mean, beyond sort of the bounds of fiction, if you really think about it.Pence goes into the Capitol having told Donald Trump and told the public that he’s going to certify the result that the electors have ordained.And at that moment, as he goes into the Capitol, Donald Trump begins to say in his speech that it’s Mike Pence who is listening to the wrong people and that it all rests on his shoulders.And he’s rallying this crowd, whipping them up into a frenzy about the idea that Mike Pence is to blame.And while Mike Pence is in the well of the Senate presiding over this process, there are protesters moving towards the Capitol, entering the Capitol, saying, “Hang Mike Pence.”
And if anybody wondered if this was just a rhetorical flourish, they had erected a gallows, an honest-to-goodness wooden gallows, outside the Capitol.And here is Mike Pence, after nearly four years of doing anything Donald Trump asked of him, and his now life is literally being endangered.And in the end, he broke with Trump, and he went into hiding inside the Capitol that day.
You know, when Pence came to the Capitol that morning, he was accompanied by his wife and his children.They were there to see history happen.And as the Capitol was engulfed by rioters, he was hustled out of the Senate into hiding, and his Secret Service detail said, “We want you out of here.We want to get you out of the Capitol.It’s not safe.”And he refused to go.And I think what’s interesting is, you know, one of the things that really—you know, if there was ever any real hope of repairing the relationship between Donald Trump and Mike Pence, it collapsed in those hours, when Donald Trump was in the West Wing, watching on television as rioters rampaged through the Capitol, and Mike Pence was there in hiding with his family, and Trump never called.Nobody among Trump’s advisers even asked about how Mike Pence was doing.
Finally, one of Pence’s advisers called the West Wing and said, “Just so you know, the vice president is safe and sound.” …
Trump goes so far as he’s not only [not] asking about his safety, but he’s tweeting at the same point that Pence is hiding in a secret place, saying that he’s a coward and again, lashing out at Pence.I mean, what must be going through Pence’s brain?
Pence was apoplectic.I mean, the thing that’s interesting is, you know, Mike Pence is a—is a very restrained person.Everybody who works closely with him describes him in the same terms.He’s unflappable.He’s all very self-contained.And in that moment, when he was in hiding inside the Capitol, he was angrier than the people around him have really ever seen.And in a way, it was the unraveling not only of his loyalty to Donald Trump; it was also the unraveling of his political future.
He had made a bet that by shuffling along behind Donald Trump for nearly four years that he might ultimately bear the mantle of the future of Trumpism.Maybe he could inherit that role, go on to become president of the United States himself.And instead, not only was he not going to be president, but he was under physical threat from the very voters who he had stood for.
Earlier on, and we’ll talk about outside and your story as well in a little bit, but first, McConnell’s speech, where he breaks from Trump finally, and he says the Senate has the “higher calling than an endless spiral of partisan vengeance,” why now?Why does McConnell finally make the break? …
You know, I think over the course of those years, there was always a disconnect between what the most dire prognoses were, that this was leading the country down a very, very dark path, and the kind of practical, day-to-day political calculation that goes on in the mind of Mitch McConnell.He’s not a person with a catastrophic imagination.He sees the world in very limited terms: “What can I get done today?What can I get done tomorrow for me and my party?”It’s about the win.
You know, Mitch McConnell was once asked early in his career why he changed fundamentally on some of the biggest issues in politics, like abortion, like the environment, and he said, “Because I wanted to win.”And for as long as Donald Trump allowed him to win, Donald Trump was important to Mitch McConnell.And at the point when Donald Trump, in fact, became a loser—to use the word that Donald Trump would use—then he became not only immaterial to Mitch McConnell, but he became an obstacle to the future of the Republican Party.
And what I think is amazing is, you know, even at the moment that the rioters were entering the Capitol, beginning to sweep across this institution that Mitch McConnell holds so dear—he is a person who will constantly talk about the traditions and the rhythms of the Senate and how much that matters to him—and even up until that moment, he had tried to have it both ways.He tried to satisfy this delusion of the public that, in fact, the election had been stolen from Donald Trump, and at the same time, he was trying to protect his own place in the Senate and protect his own place in history.
And I mean, there is no way to explain the events of that day without looking back on the career of Mitch McConnell as Senate majority leader and saying that he laid a path to the destruction of the very thing which he said he held dear.The sanctity of the Senate, control of the Republican Party at the top of American politics—he lost them both by making a deal with Donald Trump.
… And the amazing visual is that … they were basically fleeing from those that had empowered the party.
… Eventually McConnell’s security tells him, “You have to go.You’re getting off the floor.”McConnell is a survivor of polio as a child.He still is a fragile physical presence, and they are literally carrying him off to get him out of there.
And the imagery of them running just a few seconds ahead of this tide of rioters who are coming into the Congress, shouting for blood, I mean, it was, you know, this was exactly what they had—I mean, you just—you fall back on cliché: the reaping and the sowing.But it’s impossible [to know] how else to describe it.You know, for weeks Mitch McConnell had stoked the fire of skepticism and rage among the public by lending the credibility of his name and stature to the idea that there was actually a potential theft at work.And now, all of a sudden, the power of that had turned just a few degrees, and he found himself right at the center of that attack.
Talk to me about the assault, the mob, the crowd, the march that ends up on the Capitol.You’re in the midst of it all.What is it like?What are you seeing?What are you thinking?
It was—the moment I arrived, I could tell it was electric with rage.The air just carried a kind of unquiet.There was a very strange element to it.You know, I have to say, I have covered riots in a lot of countries over the years, and I’d never felt it here in the United States, here in Washington.And I was walking around, and I was talking to people.And you sensed that particularly the young men who you encountered were agitated.They were kind of hopped up.
And you never quite knew.I was making kind of choices about who I would approach and who I wouldn’t based on how I thought they might respond to me identifying myself as a reporter.And, you know, I didn’t get it right every time.And there were moments when people were—it became quite clear that there was a tremendous amount of anger directed at the press, the “enemy of the people,” as somebody shouted at me when I introduced myself.
And I was also struck by the range in age.It wasn’t just young men; it was also older people; it was men and women.Some of them had brought their kids.And they were just a few feet away, I mean, literally, maybe a few—a few dozen feet away from a place where the police were having a violent clash with rioters.
You know, at one point I’m standing just at the foot of the Capitol, and there is tear gas coming out of the north side of the building, and I’m talking to a grandmother who’s there with her daughters, and she’s looking on approvingly, and I said, “What do you think of what it is that we’re seeing today?”And she said, “Well, this is what happens when the public decides to send a message to people who won’t listen.”
There was a spirit of violence in the air that I had not anticipated, even when I was walking up to the scene.You know, later we would discover some of the details of what was happening in the clutch between … the rioters and the police, and a couple of the details that stayed with me are relevant, because there was a level of physical menace that I think was hard for people even to see on television.
In one case, there was a police officer who was hit with a stun gun so many times that he had a heart attack.The kind of rage that goes into the decision to attack somebody that way is an indication of the atmosphere in the crowd.And it was—it was unnerving, I have to say.
… You’re watching this crowd.You’re watching them climbing the walls, looking at them, getting into the doors.I don’t know how much you could see.I mean, when did you know that all bets were off and that this was an exceptional moment in the history of the United States?What did it look like?
The moment when it became clear to me that we were dealing with something unprecedented was when I first came around the corner and laid eyes on the west side of the Capitol.This is the door from which the new president will come on Inauguration Day, and it was teeming with human beings.People were all over that platform, all over the stairs, all over the stage.This is an area that has always been off-limits.
… The inauguration stage on the west side of the Capitol is like holy territory in the pantheon of American politics.This is a place that nobody goes until that moment on noon, Jan. 20, when the president walks out and is greeted by his nation, and instead it was covered in people, in rioters, people climbing up the scaffolding, holding on, waving Trump flags, waving Confederate flags, holding signs for QAnon, holding all kinds of esoteric right-wing memes, things that didn’t mean much to the public but were a kind of communication system for the people who were in the grip of this ideology, this delusion.
And I was walking around, … I saw a young man with blood coming down his face.He was holding his hand to his eye, and there were a couple of guys next to him, and they were kind of hustling him along.And what struck me was they weren’t going towards an ambulance.They weren’t going—they weren’t asking for police help.In fact, they seemed to be running away.And that was a sign of how much this system was breaking down.Something was deeply wrong.
… You know, the first people who had made it up onto the balconies, up the steps, had thrown ropes over the edge, and others were climbing up the ropes, as if they were scaling the citadel, trying to get into this fortress.And there was something about it that was a strange combination of science fiction and reality.They were using some of the visual language of what looked like a movie, except of course it was unfolding right there in the Capitol.
And I have to say, it was really bizarre, you know.I mean, you know, the reason why I’m stammering a little, Jim, is like some of this stuff, in the moment, you process it one way, and you begin to process it another way afterwards.You know, I’m passing people in camouflage, wearing tactical helmets of the kind you usually see on Special Forces, soldiers that I had seen in Iraq.And instead these are civilians wearing this equipment.
And they were prepared for battle, full-scale modern battle of the kind that we’ve seen over the last 20 years since the beginning of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.And that was this—it was this final confluence.It felt like all of these elements of American life, and it was now playing out on this most sacred political venue.
Two more things and then we’ll move on to history and stuff.So once the mob is cleared out, Senate and the House comes back, the bottom line on the actual final vote, half of the Republican Caucus in the House decide to continue the direction that they had started on in the beginning of the day.How will history view that moment, and what’s the long-term effect that you see on the GOP or whatever that that indeed took place?
Well, you know, the idea that they would come back after the experience of being physically hustled out of there to save their skins and then come back and still cast a vote, I guess what it told me was they were no longer operating essentially as members of Congress in the way that we traditionally thought of it, representing the public.They were, in fact, there as agents of a very specific piece of the American public, the Trump base.That’s who they were speaking to; that’s who they’re responding to.
And sort of amazingly, they were willing to still cast votes, having known exactly what the result was.… I don’t know how you explain that.I think on some level they regarded themselves as not the target of that violence, you know.They thought of themselves as, they were bystanders.They were on the wrong side of a righteous act.
… Do you think Pence and McConnell quite understood, maybe all along, or maybe really at this point, that they had made a Faustian bargain all along, and all of a sudden, it just all blows up in their face.I mean, do you think they understood that?
No.I can tell you, … I’ve lived in Washington now for eight years and have come to this view really emphatically, which is that the Mike Pence-Mitch McConnell world is quite secluded actually from the world outside.They operate within a pretty tight world of other people like them who share their ideas.They don’t really have to go out into the world.They don’t do town halls.They don’t go out onto the street very often.
And when they do go out into the wild of the country, you know, they might run into somebody who will voice a delusional theory that the election has been stolen, but they can explain it away to themselves.What they really believed was, what’s the harm, really?What’s the harm?In their minds, the mind of Mitch McConnell or Mike Pence, what they believed they were doing was a greater good.They thought that they were defending their right to rule and that their right to rule, to install judges, to pursue their policy agenda, that that was more important than whatever, to their view, far unlikely prospect of actually physical violence erupting as a result of these delusions.
This is where I come back to this idea: It was a failure of catastrophic imagination.They don’t know what it feels like to actually see a political culture unravel because they live lives of total and complete splendor and grandeur.I mean, they are operating within this world of, these are numbers on the page.I mean, they—they were winning.Mitch McConnell cares about winning, and if it meant going along with some of Donald Trump’s fantasies, that was a Faustian bargain that he was willing to accept, because in the end, was it really going to blow up in his face?He calculated it wouldn’t.
A Split in the GOP
… So where are we now?I mean, there is this civil war in the GOP.Is there a possibility that McConnell will regain control of the party?Will Trump’s power dominate even after he’s gone?The power of this Trump base, is it going to fade away once Trump is off the television screens and off Twitter constantly?How do you view where we are now, as far as the Republican Party?
Well, Mitch McConnell eventually decided that the only way that he was going to try to seize back control of the party was by erasing Donald Trump, and the way to do that was by beginning to signal that he might actually even support a second impeachment process.And that’s not because he believes that, you know, that Donald Trump had done real—that he’d suddenly come to the view that Donald Trump had done violence to the country.It was because he decided that Donald Trump was a spent force and that the only way that Mitch McConnell had a future running this party, of being able to consolidate this party, was to begin to de-Trumpify the Republican Party.That’s what was required, and that’s the choice that he made finally.
You know, I think there is a period that—you know, it’s not clear that he can recover.I mean, one of the interesting subtexts of this was, Mitch McConnell is loathed by large numbers of Republicans in the ranks—in the rank and file, and for as long as Donald Trump was in power, Mitch McConnell could hold onto Trump’s coattails.But the moment that Trump goes, McConnell has to figure out a new reason for being.You know, what is it that pulls the party together?What do they stand for?
I am utterly unsure what the future holds for the party, because I would have told you in the weeks after the election, I was—I was becoming quite convinced that when Trump loses power that he will lose it faster than he thinks, that the air leaves the balloon.You know, in a way, it’s hard for anybody in that power to understand just how fast it leaves when you—when you lose the—when you lose the stature of that office.
And I’d come to believe that Trump was going to spend the rest of his life tied up in litigation, contending with the problems that are all growing out of his time in office.And that might still be true.But what he leaves behind is actually a force that is even more powerful and destructive than Donald Trump, which is a vast portion of the American population that is living in a political rage, and that’s not going to go away overnight, and that’s not going to go away with Donald Trump in court.That’s going to linger on.
Biden Inherits a Divided Nation
And how does that affect the ability of Biden to proceed and govern in the next four years?
… It represents the risk of an ongoing, chronic, low-grade level of political and perhaps militant resistance in this country.I mean, the instincts that we saw on display on that day at the Capitol will not just go away overnight.You know, they were not the product of a single day of mob action.They had been cultivated and created and groomed over the course of years.
And they don’t go away overnight.And I think we’re going to be dealing with the possibility—I mean, if you talk to anybody who works in the national security space these days, particularly when it comes to the prospects of home-grown extremism, what they tell you is that we’re at a moment now that feels comparable to them to the moments before Tim McVeigh blew up the Oklahoma City Federal Building.It’s a very uncertain moment, because you have unleashed a political energy that doesn’t require mass action to manifest.What it requires is a few unhinged individuals willing to take action.
And how surprising is it that, after four years of conspiracy theories, for a president who foments anger and division, how surprising is it that this is where we are now?
It’s not surprising at all.It’s a bizarre combination of shock and inevitability.I think we’re shocked at looking at what it is actually that has come to pass, and it is entirely clear the path that brought us here.There is no mystery here.I mean, you know, I have to say, the very first Republican debate in 2015, the first time that Donald Trump stood on a Republican debate stage, I watched it at the home of some Trump supporters in Ohio, and one of them was drinking out of a coffee cup with a swastika on it.And at the time, I put that into The New Yorker.I wrote about it.
And it seemed so out of the mainstream that it seemed almost impossible to process that that was the beginning—beginning to become a meaningful part of our politics.And five years later, that spirit of violence has in fact swept across our politics and is now the dominant fact that we have to contend with.
So yeah, from my perspective, this feels as if, over the last five years, we’ve watched these little—these little tributaries of water in the mountains, you know, coming down and all ultimately coming together as this confluence of this raging river that is stronger than any of the people who thought they could control it were ultimately able to control.
Trump and the Republican Establishment
Let me now bring you to some of the earlier history and some of the points that we have to cover to get you up earlier in the film.When Trump runs in 2015-2016, he’s an insurgent.He’s calling for a hostile takeover.Should the GOP have understood that this was a dangerous territory, this was a dangerous candidate?Shouldn’t they have imagined that this was not the best path for the GOP?What was going on?
The GOP leadership, the establishment leadership had become completely convinced that they understood what the future looked like.The future looked more or less like Marco Rubio.It was somebody who was an establishment Republican, who was friendly with the Tea Party and the far right but basically operated within the bandwidth of normal Republican politics.And he called for things like a pathway to citizenship for immigrants in the United States.And he, after all, himself was a representative of a more encompassing, diverse America.That’s the image that they had.
And when Donald Trump came on the scene, he was so at odds with everything they thought about what they knew about politics that they dismissed him.Karl Rove, the strategist for George Bush, called him a member of the “nutty right.”He said he was an “inconsequential candidate.”I mean, you can go down the list of one of Donald Trump’s competitors after another who dismissed him, mocked him.They said he was not just wrong but offensive.
And then, one by one, they made their Faustian bargains with him, every single one of them.And I think that, you know, their view was, what I heard from Republicans at the top over the years was that the American conservative movement, from its very beginnings, has always had an element of nuttiness, wackiness, the “paranoid style,” as the political scientists call it, and that they had been able to ride that tiger over the decades all the way back to Barry Goldwater in 1964; that you could keep the right wing engaged, and it would never really be able to overtake the house.You just needed them.They were the—in a sense, they were some of the foot soldiers of the movement.
And what they didn’t appreciate was that Donald Trump had picked the lock and had figured out a way to pry open the doors of the Republican house and let that public come pouring in, and they overtook the thing.
The choice of Pence as vice president, why—how odd that relationship between Trump and Pence, …and what, I guess, was Pence’s calculation of what he was doing for the Republican Party and what his job was?
For Mike Pence, this was a terrific opportunity.Here he was, being asked to become the bridge, the peacemaker between this insurgent branch of the Republican Party and the establishment.He was the one who could speak to both sides.He was politically bilingual, and he was the one who was going to allow evangelicals to make their peace with Donald Trump.He was going to allow members of the establishment to say, “Well, we know that he’ll always have his hand held by Mike Pence, and Mike Pence understands what we care about.”
So there was a theory that Mike Pence, it was kind of the perfect job, because not only was he putting himself in the position to become the heir, the natural heir to Donald Trump’s political movement, but he was doing it at the same time that he was going to be able to represent the interests of the establishment.I mean, it was—it seemed it was a perfect plan.
The Response to Charlottesville
Well, it was.Charlottesville, a warning sign, and yet Pence and the leadership back him.I mean, looking back now, how should we view Charlottesville?
You know, Charlottesville was—I think for a lot of members of the public, Charlottesville was the moment when this thing burst out into public view.Honestly, if you had been following the far right in that period, Charlottesville wasn’t much of a surprise.It was just the coalescing of a movement.I mean, the people who marched in Charlottesville had been saying for years that Donald Trump had woken them up.I mean, 12 days after Donald Trump announced his candidacy for president, the largest neo-Nazi site in America endorsed him for president.They’d never endorsed a candidate before, but that was sort of overlooked at the time.It felt somehow irrelevant.
When Charlottesville happened, the GOP leadership had to find a way to explain it to themselves, and what they said was, “OK.He’s awakened this thing, but it’s not a problem.It’s actually a vestige of an old set of ugly ideas.We’ve been contending with them for a while, but we’re rebuilding the party.We’re turning it into a direction that’s going to make it more modern.Donald Trump is a—call him a transition figure.”
That, of course, was not right.What they had done was they had ceded the reins to somebody who was pulling together this enormous movement on the far-right fringe that was swamping the party.They thought—the GOP thought they were in control, but by that point, they were already losing control.
And those that did speak out against him, I mean, Trump did not back off this or anything ever in this entire four years.But those that came after him, or sort of, you know, subtly sort of said, “Maybe this is not the direction to go,” he attacks, like Jeff Flake.What lesson did that—what did the GOP learn about Donald Trump at that moment?
You begin to see that—after Charlottesville, you begin to see some of the first defections; people began to fall away.They said, “I can’t do it anymore.I can’t participate in Donald Trump’s Republican Party,” people like Sen. Jeff Flake, who said, “I’m done.I’m out.”And what happened when they did was that Trump would turn the full force of his movement on them, and they would find themselves in the crosshairs.The lesson, I should say, the lesson for other Republicans was crystal clear, which is that if you decide to turn against Trump, even a little bit, it’s over for you.Your life in Republican politics is finished.
I remember talking to moderates, people like Congressman Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, who would try to find a way to make some distance between themselves and Trump.And pretty soon, almost to a person, they would find themselves having to announce that they weren’t running again.… What would happen, these Republicans were going home to their town halls, and they were seeing their constituents, and they would find themselves under attack, because people would say, “You’re not sufficiently supportive of the president.”
And so they were being forced to make these choices.They were getting uglier and uglier.And the few of them who said, “I can’t do it anymore,” they became, in a sense, the warning signs to the others: “This is what happens if you break with Trump.”
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