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Jelani Cobb

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Jelani Cobb

Staff Writer, The New Yorker

Jelani Cobb writes about race, politics and history for The New Yorker. He is also the dean of Columbia Journalism School and the author of The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress.

The following interview was conducted by the Kirk Documentary Group’s Mike Wiser for FRONTLINE on July 5, 2022. It has been edited for clarity and length.

This interview appears in:

Lies, Politics and Democracy

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Early Claims of Election Fraud and the Republican Response

Donald Trump comes out after the election, and he says, "Frankly, I did win this election," and there's this period of time where it's not clear which way the Republican Party is going to go.And eventually, some of the senior senators and others in the party start to come out and amplify questions about the election.What were the stakes at that moment for American democracy, for the country, at that time, and how important was the decision that Republican leaders were making at that time?

So in that moment where Donald Trump comes out on election night and almost like seemingly on the fly, begins saying, "We're on the verge of winning this election," and then he says, "Frankly, we did win this election," that was an impossibly dangerous moment for anyone that really understands democratic societies or authoritarian ones, for that matter, the reason being … the old cliché about democracies holds true, that in a democracy, the first election is not the most important; the second one is, you know, the one in which people have to actually make a transition to peacefully give up power to their opponent, if their opponent has won.

And there was never really any question about Donald Trump's willingness to wreck the institutions of American democracy if it served his own personal and political aims.And so that's not the type of language that you hear, like elections being rigged or that the election has been stolen, precisely because that is how bloodshed begins.That is how societies slip into violent conflicts and, at the extreme end of it, civil wars.

And so I don't think, in terms of the potential implications, I don't think there was anything more dangerous—I don't think there was any moment more dangerous than the one that we saw that night.

And how important was it when the Republican Party comes out, and they start to amplify that?How important was the decision that they were making?

There had been a question all along, you know, from the initial moments when Donald Trump declared his candidacy in 2015, there had always been this question about how the GOP would react to him, and how they would respond to him.And over time … I think, to the horror of many, some of whom were Republicans themselves, the party became increasingly compliant with Donald Trump's demands.And so there was always a question about whether or not there was a line that people would just say, "This far and no further," as it related to Trump.And almost—you know, we saw this with the questions around Russia and meddling, and we saw this with the questions around strong-arming Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Ukraine, the impeachment that that generated, and there always was the question of, where is the line in the sand?

And I think that moment at which Donald Trump was taking a wrench to the machinery of democracy, and pushing the society into what I think reasonable observers saw was a highly volatile and potentially violent moment, that was the final capitulation for the Republican Party, as you saw senator after senator and Republican after Republican falling in line with statements that were not only exceedingly dangerous but fundamentally untrue.

Trump and the 2016 Election

So let's go back and talk about that history.And as we go back, one of the first early signs of this that we look at in the film is this moment in Iowa with Ted Cruz, and Donald Trump isn't willing to accept that he lost it.And there's multiple examples going back through his life of saying things are rigged, everything from the Emmys to Mitt Romney losing to Obama.How important is it to democracy for a loser to accept?And in this case, what was the warning that you see from Donald Trump in that moment, in him not being willing to accept defeat in Iowa?

If you go back and read the Federalist Papers, the founders, particularly Hamilton, fixated on the potential of people to subvert democracy, whether through their own greed or their own—the quirks of their own character.But they understood that democracy, at its best, was a still fairly fragile set of agreements and that people had to remain onboard.People had to be in adherence to these agreements in order for the system to remain viable.

And so when you look at all of the precursors to the 2020 election, and the extent to which there was this kind of self-centered belief that it was impossible for Donald Trump to ever fail, never was there anything that he ever failed at that he didn't think was indicative of the other person's problem, not his own.And there was no reason to believe that that kind of character was compatible with the presidency or compatible with a peaceful transfer of power at the end of a presidency, and so—especially if the end of that presidency was as the result of losing an election. …

I mean, what are the implications for democracy, if you have somebody like you've just described Donald Trump in the system, and, you know, to what extent was that a warning?

So if you go back, even to the earliest days of the republic, George Washington was the first and only nonpartisan president of the United States.And so he's succeeded by John Adams, and when John Adams loses the election of 1800, there's a big question of whether he will willingly give up power to Thomas Jefferson, who has defeated him.And Madison [sic] does so and sets this precedent that has been adhered to continually since then.… Which is not to say that we have not had political violence in this country.We have had a great deal of political violence throughout the history of this country.But in terms of simply the transition from one administration to another, that has been conducted peacefully for the duration of American democracy, for the history of it.

Looking at who Donald Trump was, and looking at his reaction to losing in Iowa to Ted Cruz, there was never any question that this was going to pose problems.And notably, in 2016, he said that the only—he said this outright—the only way he could lose to Hillary Clinton would be if the election was rigged.Now notably, he didn't make any complaints about actually winning that election.You know, he made complaints about saying that the popular vote was rigged, but he didn't say that in an election that was tainted by people cheating that the results would be invalid, because those results would seem to favor him in that instance.

So from the outset, there were observers in 2016, myself being one of them, who said this person will never give up power in a peaceful fashion, just thinking it would be inconsistent with everything that we know about this person.And if this person won a second term, they would not be compatible with the idea that they couldn't run for a third.And that was at least my estimation of him from the beginning.

So that was obvious to you even then.

Yeah, I think it was very obvious when you look at the pieces of Trump's character and how they conformed to what we've seen with authoritarians in other places—you know, the complete self-centeredness; the subjugation of the society to the whims of his individual psychology; the casting doubt on the political processes; the reorienting of the public's trust away from institutions to him as an individual, most notably when we saw the speech at the convention, where he said, "I am the only person who can fix it."

In democracy, at least in American democracy, in theory, the individual is supposed to be smaller than the institution of the presidency.And here we had an individual who was blatantly casting himself as bigger than any institution in the United States, and nothing in that reflected the kind of personal or democratic humility that would be required of that office.

The Rise of Political Violence

… So in that campaign, one of the things that we see, that maybe we've seen in American history but maybe not in recent presidential history, is the president and the crowd—and is the mob—and is saying, "Bring him out of here on a stretcher. Back in the old days"—sort of encouraging violence.What is the signal?What does that say, when you see moments like that?

I think that the moments in the campaign, from the outset really, where Trump made the statement about Mexicans being rapists and the other bigoted, you know, bile he served up in that initial announcement of who he was and why he was running, the point of that was not simply to cater to people's worst instincts, although it did do that, but to point out that he would not be constrained by any of the rules or guidelines that had heretofore kept people's behavior in check.And—in a political context, always the question is, when does this dovetail into violence?

And so the overt egging on of his followers and his adherents to commit acts of violence against people who they saw as outside their fold—now, that could have been protesters; that could have been Democrats.In many instances, he directed his anger at the press, and people began booing and harassing reporters who were there, you know.I was on the receiving end of some of that during one of his campaign rallies.

And so what this really reflected implicitly was a statement that he was beyond the boundaries; that the old system and the old dispensation that had, to his mind and to the minds of his followers, had not worked well for them, was being swept away and that they were going to do things differently.The people who you were supposed to remain civil to, well, you can punch those people in the face.You can take these people out of here on a stretcher.

And metaphorically, it lent itself to this idea that there were two different versions of America, irreconcilable and hostile, and that they were going to take the belligerent approach to people whom they never really viewed as equally American in the first place.

I mean, we are a country that has a lot of violence, that has had political violence in the past.But when you look at that, I mean, how unusual is it?What do you make of him introducing that into American politics, or not introducing to it, but playing on it?What do you make of that?

So I think that, you know, the logic of political parties has always been that they work as a kind of elaborate set of filters.You know, you can translate popular will into public policy, but in theory, you filter out the worst behaviors.You have increasingly rational and responsible figures at each tier of the party, and the most volatile elements are going to be, at least in theory, constrained.

What was alarming about Donald Trump was, here was a person who was steamrolling his way toward the nomination who didn't reflect any of that.It was governance by id, the worst impulses, you know, the violent streaks of the desire to—you know, the time for arguing is done; the time for reasonable discourse is done; now is the time to punch people in the mouth.And if you have no check on that, it is—people refer to that as populism.It really wasn't.You know, it was more of a kind of street-corner bravado that was passing itself off as a political movement.

And so the further he went with this, the less capable that filtering system was, and you began to see more and more of something that had always existed in American politics, and had existed in Republican politics for a really long time, which was a will toward the violent subjugation of people whose citizenship you hold in question in the first place or whose patriotism you hold in question in the first place.

… When you see the rallies, and you see racist groups, nationalist groups attaching themselves to Donald Trump, obviously there's this explicit racial rhetoric that he has, but is there something about also his—the authoritarian side of who Donald Trump is that is attracting these groups?Why are they attaching—you know, as Roger Stone says, why are they attaching themselves to Donald Trump in that moment in 2016?

I think that Donald Trump liberated a certain portion of America.And those elements—you know, the hyper-nationalist, reactionary, semi-military elements that were kind of floating around in the American ethers—the Republicans had known about these people for a really long time, and for the purposes of retaining legitimacy, those people had to be sidelined, you know?In the 1980s and 1990s, they began to take refuge in talk radio, and so that was an outlet where you would hear those kind of opinions expressed.

But by and large, the establishment Republicans needed to keep distance between those people and themselves, you know, kind of plausible deniability.What Trump did was he went beyond the wink-and-nod version of this to an explicit endorsement, using the language that was common in these arenas.And people recognized that he was one of them or as close to one of them as they'd ever seen in their lifetimes.And so at the outset, the fact that he referred to Mexicans as rapists, even if someone believed that, even if a Republican candidate believed that, or any major American political figure believed that, they would never say it in public, and here you had Donald Trump. That was the first thing he said in public as a political candidate.

And so there was never really any question about why those people were drawn to Trump.You know, they saw him as the best hope of translating their paranoia, their contempt, their anxiety, their anger, into a political platform and into public policy.

Trump, Cruz and the Republican Party

In that primary, there is this brutal combat between Ted Cruz and Donald Trump, and it becomes very personal.There are conspiracy theories; there are lies.It's a very ugly election.And to a large extent, Republican leaders are just watching, you know.They're not getting involved in it.What does that tell you, as they're watching it, as they're standing by the sidelines, that interaction with Ted Cruz?

… I think Ted Cruz was an object lesson in what the Trump movement could do even to a fairly reputable, rock-ribbed conservative like Ted Cruz.Prior to Donald Trump's emergence, there was really no question about Ted Cruz's conservative bona fides.But in the midst of that combat in the Republican primary, you saw Trump sweep Cruz onto the sidelines.And really, that was a lesson for the entire party.You know, if that could happen to Ted Cruz, that could happen to anyone.

… You saw person after person recognize that.You know, Marco Rubio, who criticized Trump during the primaries and even ridiculed Trump during the primaries, and then has to immediately reconcile himself to him.Nikki Haley, who criticized Trump and endorsed Rubio, saying that she thought that Donald Trump was dragging the country in the wrong direction ... and then accepted a post in Trump's Cabinet, when he got elected.

And so what you saw in kind of instance after instance was people recognizing that the stakes had changed, that Trump was now calling the tunes, that his followers would rigorously and zealously enforce his will, and that the Trump movement posed a threat to all of their political survival.

And I think that the moment that you see this most strikingly is when Cruz has to make nice with Donald Trump.And the reason for this is that this was not only a political conflict, but Trump had insulted his father and ridiculously accused his father of being involved in the death of John F. Kennedy.Trump had insulted his wife's looks, which is far beyond the pale in American politics.And he'd done all these things, and the public gave no leeway to Cruz for that, at least not the Republican public.They felt like, you know, these things happen, but this is our person, and you really need to be on the same side as he is.

Do you think Republican leaders made a decision about Donald Trump?I mean, why are they silent over that period as they're watching what was happening? …

I think there were two things.One is that Republicans were no different from Democrats when it came to underestimating Donald Trump.And at first he was a curiosity, and he was this figure, a habitué of late-night television and reality TV and social media, none of which were weighty forums for public policy debate or the thoughtful exchange of ideas.And so here was this quirky figure who would show up, probably get obliterated in the early primaries, embarrass himself, and people would move on from it.And that doesn't happen.

The opposite happens.He picks up momentum.He gains power within the party.And then it switched to, well, if Trump is able to win the nomination, there is this machinery in place in the Republican Party, and more broadly in government, that will effectively rein him in; that we will turn him into a reputable candidate.And, you know, many people believed that on the right.Even some people in the Democratic Party believed that the responsibilities of the office would cause him to mature and become more sober-minded.

And then the final part of it is that there is a long tradition of people saying things in political campaigns that they don't entirely mean or playing to people's worst instincts, trying to gin up a crowd to give you the kind of applause that you want, but that doesn't really reflect how you actually see the world.And there was this question, you know, as we wound our way toward the 2016 election, about whether or not Donald Trump actually did believe, whether he was a skilled puppet master who had this intuitive genius for … figuring out what people in his crowds wanted to hear and saying it to them.

And then there was this slow, dawning recognition, when it was too late, that he meant everything that he said and that he was a personality that was not going to be reined in; that he was never a person who was humbled in the face of great power or great responsibility; and that he would continue with this same sort of blithe, un-self-aware rule by instinct that had led him through his entire life.

I mean, as they're looking at him, too, you had said that Donald Trump was saying things explicitly that maybe there had been a wink or a nod to in the past.A lot of people use the phrase "saying the quiet part out loud."As they're watching Donald Trump, do they—what is the party that he is taking over, and to what extent had the groundwork been laid by decisions that those leaders had made before?

… So when Donald Trump emerged, you know, people who observed politics or people who had a sense of history, you know, thought that he reminded them of Joseph McCarthy in a few ways, particularly in the trafficking of conspiracy theories; the easy way in which he found himself at odds with the truth, you know, lying fluently.

And the thing about McCarthy is, you know, we have this thing we call McCarthyism, which really did not begin with Joe McCarthy.You know, McCarthy was simply the most visible and most shameless proponent of a set of political practices that existed before he came on the scene.The same could be said for Donald Trump, that the elements of Trumpism, or the things that came to be called Trumpism, were present long before Donald Trump took the ride down that gilded escalator in Trump Tower and gave the announcement speech in June of 2015 that he was running for the presidency.

What he did was assemble those disparate elements and market them in a way, shamelessly, boldly, overtly, that people hadn't seen, at least not on that stage of American politics before.And so the GOP had, in the years prior to Trump, seen figures like Pat Buchanan in 1996, who ran the nativist "America First" political campaign for president.They had seen the increasing reliance upon the politics of racial anxiety and racial resentment.And that goes back even further to figures like Strom Thurmond, the senator from South Carolina, and Jesse Helms, the senator from North Carolina.

… They'd seen the none-too-subtle race-baiting of the 1988 presidential campaign, where the George Bush the elder campaign produced the ads about Willie Horton, a Black man who had been convicted of sexual assault, as the means of saying that Michael Dukakis, the Democratic nominee, was soft on crime.And so all of those things were present in the party.I mean, you go a generation before that, to the 1964 presidential election, with Barry Goldwater being the nominee and his opposition to the Civil Rights Act of that year.These things were not new.

What happened is that Donald Trump had a particular talent for marketing them and recognized what their political potential could be, and that he arrived in a moment where those anxieties were uniquely resonant in American society.And the combination of those two things was immensely combustible.

… But when you look at those, you know, in general terms, can you describe what it was that the Republican Party was tapping into, that then Donald Trump, you know—sort of a list of what you were talking about, just in more general terms?

… So the elements of Trumpism were not unique to Donald Trump, and they had been present before Donald Trump.I think the talent that he had was in assembling those anxieties and marketing them.He did so at a moment that was particularly volatile.… He tapped into the fear that many white people possessed, that this was not going to be a majority white society anymore, anxiety around demographic change.There was a particular kind of anxiety that was associated with the fact that there had been a Black president.There was a Black man in the White House for the preceding eight years.… And for people, many of whom wound up supporting Donald Trump later, it felt as if the world was upside down, you know, seeing an African American in the presidency.He was running against Hillary Clinton in a moment at which a country with a long history of sexism was countenancing the idea of there being a female head of state.

And between the ideas of immigration, the ideas of race, the ideas of gender, an always-resonant idea that America had lost its place in the world and was being taken advantage of, that the nation had been suckered and led astray in some kind of way—and he bound all of those things up into a a neat bundle of anxiety and marketed himself as the antidote for them.

Pence’s Calculation

… So the question of legitimizing Donald Trump—the clearest example in the film is Mike Pence, who makes the decision, you know, he appeals to evangelicals and to this sort of establishment of the party.How important is that decision that a Pence makes, to legitimize a candidate like Donald Trump?

One of the more notable elements of 2016 was the migration of evangelical voters into the Donald Trump camp.There were a number of reasons why this was surprising.One, he was a New Yorker, not a Southerner.Two, he was divorced—twice.Three, he had been a figure of tabloid news reportage for the outrageousness of his personal life.There was nothing that suggested piety, you know, was a virtue he pursued in his personal life.

And so what was the appeal?Well, the appeal lay in the fact that people thought that he was the best vector to achieve, you know, particular goals that evangelicals had sought for half a century, most notably the reversal of <i>Roe v. Wade</i>.But for people who were holdouts, people for whom Trump's personal behavior and his personal lack of Christian conviction—I mean, certainly not in his rhetoric or his public speeches does he make great reference to his own religious sentiments.

The fact that Mike Pence joined the ticket implicitly said that if I can tolerate this man, so can you.He lent his credibility in evangelical Christian circles to the cause of Donald Trump.And, you know, political tickets want to serve as much of their coalition as possible.With Donald Trump, you could say there was a particular kind of nationalist element that was attracted to him.There were isolationist elements that were attracted to him.There were protectionist elements that were attracted to him.But they really needed the energy and zeal that the evangelical base of the Republican Party would bring … and Mike Pence facilitated that.

Trump’s Early Presidency and Charlottesville

So many of the Republicans didn't expect him to win, as you said, and were skeptical about him.But he does win, and he does arrive in to Washington as the president.And they make a decision that they're going to work with him, you know, at one time estimating what they're going to get out of a deal, and at the other time, you know, further lending legitimacy to who he is as a president.What do you make of that moment, of the choice that they were facing and of what they decided on how to deal with the new president?

Well, there's a conflict implicit in this.People know that Trump is not good for democracy.It's not shocking.This is not simply a perspective that people on the left have.But he's very good for their policy and political interests.… From the outset, there was a sense that this person could make transformative changes to the composition of the Supreme Court, and that's high on the list of priorities.

And the belief is that you can just reconcile yourself to the parts that you don't like, or there's a downsizing, a minimization of the really dangerous parts of his character, and highlighting the fact that this person will allow Republicans to do things that they've wanted to do for decades.And that's the bargain, you know.It's a kind of Faustian deal.But it's also notable that early on in the Trump administration, you know, there's a kind of give-and-take, wherein he takes figures from the Republican establishment who become part of his Cabinet, who have central and pivotal roles in policy and guidance of the administration.

… One narrative of Trump's growing independence and the increasing volatility of that administration is the arc of how many of those people leave in, you know, the course of those first two years.And so on both sides, people believe that there is, you know, a bargain.Trump needs this establishment in order to gain the presidency, and the establishment thinks that they can rein him in enough to achieve their policy goals without doing irreparable damage to the system in the course of that.

… One of the biggest events of that first year is Charlottesville.When you look back at that, so many people at the time were surprised by what they saw in Charlottesville.Should they have been?What was the meaning of seeing people marching with torches, you know, chanting, "Jews will not replace us"?What was the meaning of that moment in this story about American democracy?

… I think Charlottesville really eliminated any question about who Donald Trump was or what he represented.The reason I say that is, all political candidates try to kind of maximize their surface area.They let people see them in the light that is most advantageous.If I need to be a populist, then with this crowd I'm populist.If I need to be an elitist figure of the country club circuit with this crowd, then I can be that.

And so there had been this debate about who and what Donald Trump was … and therefore what Trumpism was.But by the time you get to Charlottesville, you really couldn't deny that this was a radically nationalist, antisemitic and racist movement, because these are people who are overtly supporting Donald Trump and marching, theoretically, in a free speech rally, but really there to intimidate and frighten people who don't believe as they do.

And the demographic anxieties that had been ginned up in Donald Trump's speech at the outset, where he talked about Mexico quote/unquote "not sending their best" people here, well, that's part of this replacement theory idea, the concern that white people would become a minority in the United States, which also dates back a century.You can find that's not a new idea, but it's resurrected and given new valence, and these are people literally shouting that "Jews will not replace us."

Of all the things that you could say about the direction of American politics, or specific demands about public policy, or claims that you can make on the government to act on your behalf, you have the microphone; the world is listening; and what you announce is, "Jews will not replace us"?That's your thing?Well, yeah, that tells you, this is a movement that is not really concerned with tax rates.This is a movement that is not really concerned with the fine details of foreign policy.This is a movement that is built upon a particular kind of racial revanchism and making sure, when people would say, "Make America Great Again," the kind of derisive rejoinder was, you know, "Make America White Again."And that is literally what's being said at this point.

… There's this conversation with Paul Ryan, where [Trump] says, you know, "Those are my people."¹

The Hill: Paul Ryan researched narcissistic personality disorder after Trump win: book

He doesn't want to distance himself from it.What do we take from that conversation he has with Ryan, where he says, you know—he doesn't want to distance himself from "my people"?

I mean, Paul Ryan is a figure as close to the embodiment of the Republican establishment as you can come up with, and when Trump says that, "Those are my people," he's not inaccurate.He knows who has been coming to his rallies and who has been lending support to him.He knows who he has been in dialogue with on social media and the people amplifying his message.And really, more implicitly, he's saying that, "These are our people," as in, "This is now the core of the Republican Party," which is something that Paul Ryan seems to be loath to admit or to recognize.And it's really a kind of statement of terms, you know: "These are my people."And, you know, he's the president; he's a Republican.

And I mean, they issue some statements condemning the protesters, condemning the neo-Nazis, the Republican leadership.But as a whole, the party decides to move on from that moment.What do you take from that decision?How important was that?

By the time we get to Charlottesville, it's almost predictable that the party has made the bargain that it has made and that it's not going to pursue any more vigorous response to the violence and the white nationalist appeals which you saw being made in Charlottesville.They do deploy Tim Scott, Sen. Tim Scott, an African American from South Carolina, for some sort of sensitivity training with Donald Trump, which is, you know, almost entirely for media consumption.But from there, they pivot on, you know.They are attempting to kind of move onto their—to achieving their goals.… [T]hey have control of both houses of Congress and the presidency.There's really no reason, to their mind, no political advantage to dwell on what happens in Charlottesville.

What do you make of the stories that some people do object?They are attacked by Trump.They lose primaries.They're sort of pushed out of the party.I mean, what do you make of that, of that conflict inside the story of American democracy, of where the Republican Party is going?

It's really not that shocking that you see, you know, some Republicans who raise alarms take issue with Trump and Trumpism, and get pushed out of the party as a consequence.… In American history, whenever parties have gone through the kind of seismic changes that you see happening in 2016—well, 2016 through 2020—there are always individuals who can't reconcile themselves to it, the people who can't abide with, you know, what the new marching orders are.And, you know, that's more likely than not.

The more notable thing here is that so much of the party remains loyal; that you don't have mass defections from the party because of what Trump is and what he represents; that the Never Trumpers are vastly outnumbered by the Always Trumpers.And for the individuals who get primaried, you know, the individuals who get personally attacked, or he tweets about them, and they're embarrassed, or they suffer in their fundraising, and those kinds of things, that's kind of the cost of doing business.

The First Impeachment

… The Democrats try to impeach Trump. They're not able to succeed at it.And so, at first, I just wanted to ask you about the sort of Democrats' side in establishing the polarization that's going on between these two parties.Was America—as you watched it, was it becoming more polarized?

So one of the things that really defined, certainly, the early period of Trump's presidency was the fact that Democrats did not expect him to win any more than, like, most Republicans did, you know.But for Republicans, they never really had to figure out how to govern as a result of that.They just went along with, you know, what Trump was doing.And maybe that was a moral decision, but it wasn't a tactical and strategic one.For Democrats, they had to figure out how to navigate this landscape in which the most vile, misogynistic, xenophobic, racist, violent, volatile elements of his rhetoric and his campaign posture were OK with 60 million people.And so where does that leave you? …

It was very difficult for them to figure out what they would be outside of opposing—simply opposing Donald Trump.And into that vacuum came a kind of perpetual outrage system of the hyperexamination of everything that he did that was outside of the norm, or that was potentially a conflict of interest, or that was, you know, potentially dangerous in national or international affairs.And you know, you saw culturally this being taken up by late-night television hosts and comedians and those sorts of things, but none of which translated into an effective counterstrategy for dealing with Trump in the White House.

And so, especially for those first two years, it's really wracked by this question of who they are and what they should be.You know, one part of the party thinks that the party has to remain a kind of centrist, moderate, liberal entity, and another part of it thinks that the only way to beat Donald Trump is to move as far to the left as he has taken the Republican Party to the right.And so that is being hashed out.A battle was being fought in the time period between 2016 and 2018 to try to decide what it is that they should do.

And they eventually decide, whether it's political necessity or they have to or the moment, that they're going to impeach the president, and this is the first impeachment.And the result is this highly polarized moment.None of the House Republicans, including Liz Cheney and others who would later turn on the president, support it.Only Mitt Romney does in the Senate.He ends up being acquitted.When you look at this story of American democracy, of whether you can hold a president in check, what does that first impeachment reveal about American democracy?

So the first impeachment of Donald Trump revealed something that we probably should have already known about American democracy, a particular weakness of American democracy.But like lots of things, like lots of weaknesses, almost if you think of them as, you know, stress fractures, a lot of these stress fractures would never be noticed under normal circumstances, until you have someone like Donald Trump who highlights that vulnerability.

That being said, presidents have never faced a credible threat of impeachment, and certainly not conviction, when their own parties controlled Congress.And this has only been something that has been deployed by members of the opposing party.And even with Nixon, it was the threat that Democrats would impeach and potentially convict him.

And so the fact that Democrats, by the time that Trump was impeached, did have a majority, but they didn't have enough of a majority to convict him in the Senate, should have almost been a foregone conclusion, given that what he did was egregious and incredible and shocking to the sensibilities and, you know, met the definitions to the letter in the Federalist Papers for what impeachment—for what kinds of acts should generate impeachment.

But the political reality was always that there was very little chance that he was going to be convicted, no matter what he did, because Democrats did not have a two-thirds majority in the Senate. …

For all its reputation in American politics and maybe in American society, impeachment has always been a fairly toothless solution to a presidency that's out of control.

I guess to the extent that there was a threat, it was just to have been impeached would be a black letter.And now he is acquitted.And what message does that—would that send to somebody like Donald Trump?What message does that send about the checks and balances at that moment when he holds up the paper and he's sort of celebrating his acquittal as a victory?

After the acquittal and the impeachment trial, there's really a kind of divided sense.There are people who are hopeful, who express hope that he will be chastened by the experience.That's not really—Susan Collins, you know, being primary among them.I don't think that's the prevailing sensibility.Generally speaking, this is seen as something that will embolden him, because if he could strong-arm a foreign nation into being part of the American presidential election, hoping to discredit a potential opponent, and that doesn't result in him being pushed out of office, it becomes a question of whether anything will.

And in a bigger sense, it's a kind of theme in Trump's life.He had always been able to flout the rules.He had always been able to get around things.When <i>The New York Times</i> published his tax returns, you saw that, for years and years, he had been able to operate in ways that seemed to be contravening American tax law and suffered no consequence for it.… Each time, that seemingly emboldened him to do more of the same.

And so the acquittal and the impeachment trial really just fit into this bigger pattern, in which he became more audacious and more contemptuous of the rules that other people had to abide by, and more confirmed in the belief that those normal rules do not apply to him.

Trump’s Response to the Black Lives Matter Movement

… What is his—what's his response to George Floyd?

… The whole nation saw this man's life extinguished over the course of nine excruciating minutes, and that was an indictment of the system.It was an indictment of the society.It was an indictment of all the dynamics that made it possible, even probable, that something like that would happen.And Trump's reaction was to offer the same sort of response that he offered about protesters at his rallies, which is to crack down on them, to use violent force, to not actually think about the moral argument the people are making or the position people are taking, but to use force.

There's no—nowhere in there is there—in Trump's response is there any recognition of the moral weight of what happened. …

I mean, I think you're right, because it's like—and it does—it may not even matter what his own personal response is.It's what does he do as the president of the United States, and how does he respond?And obviously, his response is not in solidarity with the protesters or with people who are saying, "We have to learn from this moment."

Or empathy.It wasn't solidarity with empathy or any of—this was like an international indictment.Like the whole world saw what American police do, at least in that moment, and there was no recognition that the moral authority of the country had been damaged by that video or the fact that it happened or the fact that there was a lineage of these kinds of actions that connected to that moment.None of that.You know, what we saw was the most simplistic, ham-fisted crackdown, bring in the military helicopters, you know, implicitly threatening the lives of protesters—you know, just nothing that conveyed any sense of leadership, like the understanding of the problem beyond use of force.

… He talks about antifa, the radical left, agitators.There's a political rhetoric of an "us versus them" rhetoric that he's using, that the enemies are—the radical left or antifa are the protesters in the streets.He seems to be inflaming it.What is he doing when he's using language like that?

… Traditionally, presidents have at least deployed the rhetoric of unifying the country.And that was something that was not central to Trump's political rhetoric, because his strength was derived from weaponizing the grievances that one part of the country had about other parts of the country.

And so in a moment like that, that desperately called for someone being able to stand above the fray, the only thing that Trump was capable of doing was getting into the fray and inflaming it even further, and that was evidenced by his reaction to what happened.It's evidenced by his fallback, you know, not talking about the fact that regular, fairly apolitical American citizens saw that video and were sickened by it.His rhetoric went to trotting out the familiar sources of contempt, you know?"This is about antifa.You know, this is about the radical left.This is about the people who you—you already hate and think want to destroy the country."

And in the midst of that, there was really no mechanism for the country to navigate.There was no path for the country to navigate its way to anything resembling reconciliation.

Let me ask you this, because the enemy, right—antifa, the radical left, and in terms, even compared to 2016, of an existential threat faced by the other side.I mean, what does that do for democracy?What does that do to a country that has elections and, you know, results of elections?What is that kind of rhetoric that you see in that moment?Does it pose a threat to democracy?

So the belief in democracy, at least in a partisan democracy, is that your group represents the best interests of the society.At the very least, they represent your best interests.But you have the best ideas and that you're going to move the society forward, but your ability—ability to do that is dependent upon you convincing other people that you have the best ideas, and that your opponent, at least in theory, has ideas that you disagree with, but they are also trying to move in the best direction of the broader society.… That's a healthy kind of democratic compact.

What we've seen increasingly in the United States has been a variation of that, wherein your opponents not only have bad ideas, but they're operating in bad faith, and if left to their own devices, will generate not only bad outcomes, but existentially bad outcomes.And so in his campaign rhetoric, Trump would often use a phrase that, you know, "If this happens, we won't have a country anymore."And there were all these different contingencies."If we don't stop the illegal immigration into the country, we won't have a country anymore," or, "If we don't stop antifa, if we don't stop"—there's always a fearsome element that threatened the continued existence of the United States.

Now, of course the irony is that, you know, kind of taking the line from FDR, what you should be fearful of is that level of fear, of the ability to be manipulated in that way, of the ability to think that these other people who pay taxes to the same government that you do, that serve in the same military that you do, that vote in the same elections that you do, that these people, as opposed to being citizens who understand politics differently, are actually some sort of nefarious element trying to destroy the country.

And it's the rhetoric that was deployed against Communists during the Cold War or against Nazis in World War II.And it's being deployed internally, that, you know, America's continued ability to stand as this shining city on a hill is dependent upon us defeating this enemy, except that this enemy also happens to be someone who might live next door to you.That's extremely dangerous for democracy.

The phrase he issues in a tweet, he says, "When the looting starts, the shooting starts." And he says, "Oh, I didn't know the history."But what is he tapping into?What does it reveal about American democracy, for a president of the United States to use that phrase?

Trump had run on this kind of rehabilitative rhetoric of law and order, and it was never quite clear what that meant, and it didn't have to be.You know, he was running, at the time of—at a time of historically low crime. ….But he had cultivated a sense of panic among his following, such that in saying that you would provide law and order, he appeared to be a kind of savior, you know, saving people from a problem that really wasn't that prominent in the first place, but nobody is reading the fine print on this.

And so when you have something like the unprecedented surge of protests that you saw in the aftermath of George Floyd's death, he went back to the thing that he knew, you know."When the looting starts, the shooting starts," meaning that they would not hesitate to use lethal force in the protection of property, oblivious to the fact that this was a conflict that was created by the use of lethal force in the first place, so that again, people weren't reading the fine print.

And so that language only further certified, in the minds of his followers and kind of the like-minded, that there would be violence necessary to subdue these people who they disagreed with on the other part of the political spectrum.

When you see the protesters cleared out from in front of the White House, the president walks out and holds up a Bible, you know.At that same time, there's the helicopters hovering over protesters in Washington.There's images from around the country.When you see that scene, what does it say about the state of American democracy, that demonstration that the president does?

The interesting thing here is that there's really no protest that I can think of that represents as big a threat as the president of the United States calling in a military helicopter to break it up, especially a nonviolent protest, as this protest was.But even outside of that, the deployment of military hardware of the president of the United States in Washington, D.C., lends itself to all sorts of authoritarian implications.This is not calling out the National Guard; this is not the local police.… This is a sense that we are walking right up to the line of military suppression of dissent.

And I think that, you know, one of the things that people noticed was that that event happened right around the anniversary of Tiananmen Square.And had you been able, in 1989, to miraculously show people the images of Washington, D.C., in 2020, no one would believe that that was happening in the United States.They would say, "These are images of, you know, the authoritarian Chinese government."But the parallels were very easy to see in those two instances.

And yet there's not even the kinds of statements that we saw after Charlottesville.In fact, there's, you know, Tom Cotton's editorial about sending in the troops.There's lionization of Kyle Rittenhouse.The couple from St. Louis is invited to the convention.I mean, where has the Republican Party ended up by 2020 on the scale of democracy and authoritarianism?Where are they?

Going into the 2020 election especially is notable, you know, that there is like very little soul-searching, that, you know—around the question of how is it that you have an American citizen asphyxiated for nine minutes on the street of a major American city, and, you know, the energy is around people who were contemptuous of the protesters.That's who we see lionized on the right.We see this immediate attempt to posthumously discredit George Floyd, as if he had made any statement other than to beg for his life.

And so by that point, the party is pretty close to meeting the definitions of authoritarianism, or at least tolerating the authoritarianism of the president.And this is something that people begin noticing; you know, notably, American democracy is downgraded on all the international indexes that measure, like, how free societies are or how authoritarian the governments are.You know, we begin to see the United States sliding on that scale in the course of these years, and this is almost directly a product of the kinds of dictatorial behaviors we see being tolerated by the Republican Party when it comes to Donald Trump. …

Republican Response to Trump’s Claims of Election Fraud

So let's go to the period after the election.We've talked a little bit about that initial choice that the Republican Party made, and one of the key people who makes a decision about how to respond is Mitch McConnell, who gives no credit to the claims of fraud or that Donald Trump won the election, but who decides that he's going to remain silent until the middle of December.What is—what are the implications of that decision that a Mitch McConnell makes to remain silent?

Well, there are two things that happen.You know, one, that decision keeps Mitch McConnell out of the crosshairs of Trump and Trump's people.But more perniciously, that gives a lead time for the most fantastic and outrageous conspiratorial ideas to really just start circulating.And for any of the official elements of the kind of Republican establishment who have some capacity to blunt that, it's questionable whether or not they could even stop it, at that point, because, you know, Trump's grasp on the party had metastasized to such a degree at that point.But the fact of it is that most don't even try, and these ideas begin circulating, you know, in the body politic unchecked.

And in that same period, too, you're seeing there's marches where—that had turned violent in places.This is before Jan. 6.This is in November and December.There's threats to local election officials.There are threats to even members of Congress who were Republicans, who have spoken up against what the president is saying.… Is it surprising to see violence in that period as the lie about the election is spreading?

By the time the returns come in, and it becomes clear that Joe Biden has won the election, it would have been surprising had you not seen violence.… Everything had led to a moment wherein Trump's people were completely unmotivated to accept anything other than unqualified victory as valid.And if, in fact, this is an invalid election, and the people who are claiming power represent an existential threat to the nation, then why wouldn't you commit acts of violence to defend the country?

And we've seen, you know, this word "patriot" used in a very strategic sense.You know, people on the right and on the far right have been using the word "patriot" to describe people who agree with them, and by implication, the anti-patriotism, or subversion of people who were on the other side of the political spectrum.

And so here we are.None of these people in this crowd believe that the election was legitimate, and they have been given an increasingly defined sense of targets.These are people in the Republican Party who have conceded that Joe Biden won.These are administrators.These are people who—volunteers who worked the polls during the election in key places, you know, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Milwaukee.And these are Republicans, in some instances Republican secretaries of state, who want to certify elections in which Joe Biden won, especially in Georgia and Arizona, places that the Republican Party thought that they would have at least strong—a strong chance of winning.

All of these targets are there.And in what world would there not have been violence directed at these people, or at least the threats of violence?

… Liz Cheney ends up on one side, and she's going to go against the president, and Kevin McCarthy is going to go along with the president.What is the implications of two political leaders reaching different conclusions about how to respond to these claims of a stolen election?

I think that, you know, it's important to ground the fact that, you know, Liz Cheney was very much a Republican, conservative in good standing prior to, you know, this moment.And she takes a different position post-November 2020 from Kevin McCarthy, who himself, you know, flirts with the idea of denouncing Trump's election-rigging rhetoric and then quickly backs away from that and reconciles himself, goes to Mar-a-Lago to essentially kiss the ring of Trump and, you know, regain his good standing.

And Liz Cheney doesn't do that.She goes in the opposite direction.And from the outside, it appears that, you know, there aren't a ton of policy differences between the two of them, but what appears to be the key difference is that Cheney recognizes how dangerous this moment is, not simply for her political prospects or for people who are being yelled at or people who are being threatened, but this is really how societies find themselves enmeshed in protracted bloodshed.This is how democracies fail.

And there's a sense that we are playing with, you know, explosive elements in this.And I'm not sure that other Republicans made that calculation.And not in the sense of, you know, can we stick it to the Democrats with this, but in the sense of, if you discredit the system, this will ultimately be bad for Republicans, too.

Pressure on Pence

The other person who's in the middle of all of this is Mike Pence, the vice president, and Trump wants him to sort of unilaterally throw out the votes and believes that that's possible and—whether that would be legal or not.People have told us it would have sent the country into protracted chaos.What does that conflict reveal about American democracy between Trump and the vice president?

I think one of the things that we have typically thought about American democracy was that it was rooted in these ironclad precepts of the Constitution, and that it was enshrined in various parts of election law in the United States, and that there really isn't that much wiggle room, you know, if you wanted to damage the machinery in any particular way.That's wildly untrue.

The fact that Mike Pence didn't have the authority to throw out votes that he thought were suspicious had nothing to do with Donald Trump's ability to pressure him to do so.And if he'd made an attempt to do so, the entire system would have found itself at odds, and we would have plunged into a constitutional crisis immediately.And what we learned from that is that a good deal of American democracy relies on simple good faith, that the people who are operating the controls of the system will adhere to the norms.But there aren't really checks for a lot of the most dangerous things that could happen in that system. …

It only took an intensely self-absorbed, relentlessly ambitious and politically amoral sensibility like Donald Trump to highlight that fact.

But Pence did not go along with it, and [Trump] goes out the day of Jan. 6, and we now know that he's been told this, that people were trying to get into the speech who had weapons, and he tells his supporters to "fight like hell."What do you make of that?Is this an American president, appealing to a mob over the constitutional process in a moment like that?What does it say for the president of the United States to say, you know, "We're going to go down to the Capitol. I'm going with you, and we're going to fight like hell"?

Yeah. I think this is a call to arms, you know.What we saw in that speech on Jan. 6 from Trump was a call to arms, you know, from his people.If you believe that the system is operating, you know, as it should, why are you telling people to go there, and what do you want them to do when they get there?Why are you specifically, as we now know—why are you specifically allowing people to keep their weapons?

What could reasonably come—at the very least, this is not a prudent decision, knowing that these people could potentially commit acts of violence.At the very worst, it's an incitement to a potential coup d'état.

Jan. 6 and the Aftermath

The Republican Party's response—because Jan. 6 happens.The attack happens.In the House … the majority of Republicans still vote to not certify the states.People have told us that some of those members who might have certified were actually afraid of violence towards them.What does the Republican Party's response that day reveal?

I think the refusal to certify the votes marked an almost final capitulation.It was the end stage to surrender; that there was no point at which the danger to democracy would supersede the danger to their own political ambitions or the tolerance for potential physical danger that they might be in, being mindful, however, that members of Congress vote to send the armed forces into places where they may get killed in defense of the country.

And so the argument that people were fearful for their own safety doesn't really hold up.The quickest way to assure their safety would have been to not run for Congress, but if you hold that office, then you have taken an oath to uphold American democracy, and sometimes that requires risk.

But the fact that having seen just how dangerous that moment was, people still gave more oxygen to the canard that the election had been rigged by voting against certification—meant that they were either unaware or terminally unconcerned with the potential implications for American democracy.

… At the end of it, Kevin McCarthy goes to Mar-a-Lago and meets with the president.How important was the decision being made in that moment after Jan. 6 by the Republican Party about how they were going to respond to Jan. 6; how they were going to, as a party, understand what happened?You know, how important was that trip to Mar-a-Lago and what it represented?

I think the crucial thing after Jan. 6 was that first, Jan. 6 had happened on the fly.People didn't know who was going to win the election.They began organizing and plotting for this in the aftermath of Joe Biden winning the election.But the behavior after Jan. 6 was far more significant, and the reason it was far more significant is that it was laying the groundwork well in advance for how the party and how a significant portion of our government would respond to a similar challenge in the future.

If there is no real consequence, and there's no exile for a political figure who has orchestrated this kind of violence, and this person remains not only within the fold, but still effectively, culturally, the leader of the party, that only means that it's more likely that, given more lead time, likely more resources, more advantages, given what we saw with Republican legislatures passing laws that would facilitate this kind of thing, that we would find ourselves in a moment where we actually did have an election that was determined to have one victor but in which another person is able to claim power. …

What is that decision that they're making to eject a Liz Cheney, to eject somebody—to reject somebody who is saying the election wasn't stolen, that Jan. 6 was something that we need to learn from?

Yeah, I think the decision that people are making in kind of tossing Liz Cheney overboard is the decision to continue down the road toward authoritarianism or potential authoritarianism.It becomes that simple.You know, it's not really in dispute that Joe Biden won the election, but if you can sow confusion in the minds of people, and you can use physical force and intimidation and witness your colleagues, many but not all of whom are in the Democratic Party, having to flee for their lives, and that doesn't suggest the need for a changed behavior, it almost certifies that we will be back in this situation again.

So how dangerous is this moment for American democracy?

I think that we are in among the most dangerous moments that we've seen in American democracy.I don't think that it's difficult to make that calculation.I'm not making the argument that this would necessarily be expressed by a civil war.But when we look at the politics that preceded the American Civil War, you know, we see a kind of narrowing, a kind of sorting into irreconcilable, distinct positions.Now one of those positions, in that instance, happened to be the moral position that slavery needed to be contained and ultimately abolished.

But the politics themselves indicate the way that a society finds itself moving toward unthinkable levels of violence.If we look at the Cold War, if we look at World War II or World War I or the War of 1812 even, we don't see, you know, the same sort of social polarization and disruption on the scale that we see now.I think this is as dangerous a moment as we have seen.

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