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John Bolton

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John Bolton

Former National Security Adviser

John Bolton served as national security adviser to Donald Trump from 2018 to 2019. He was previously the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and is the author of The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.

The following interview was conducted by the Kirk Documentary Group’s Mike Wiser for FRONTLINE on May 19, 2022. It has been edited for clarity and length.

This interview appears in:

Lies, Politics and Democracy

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Trump’s Rise

As we look back after what happened with Jan. 6, with where we are, when you look back at 2016, at candidate Donald Trump, do you see warning signs now that we should have paid attention to, that we missed in who he was and how he was running?

Well, you can always say hindsight is 20/20, and it’s dangerous to project back from what you know.Trump did say, in 2016, and was roundly criticized for saying he wouldn’t necessarily accept an election result that had Hillary Clinton winning, and he was condemned for that.All I can say is, my own experience starts in 2000 with 33 days in Florida, when Al Gore challenged the 527-vote outcome there.He didn’t do anything improper.He was perfectly within his rights to do it.But when I hear people say, “Oh, my goodness, when you raise claims about fraud in an election, and so on and so forth, it’s terrible, and you shouldn’t do it,” what Al Gore did for 33 days in Florida was drag the country through something that ultimately didn’t change the outcome. …

I think it’s important not to try and read too much into what Trump said in 2016, because when a lot of people would say that they were surprised at how far Trump went, others said, “Look back what he said in 2016.”Stacey Abrams said she was elected governor of Georgia in 2018.¹

New York Times: Why Stacey Abrams is still saying she won.

So you’ve got to see this by trying to dismiss the political coloration of all these things in retrospect.

I think that’s very useful.A lot of the people who were raising concerns at that time were the Democrats and were the Clinton campaign, who were making comparisons of Trump, you know, is he authoritarian?Are his supporters what she called the “alt-right” and “deplorables” at one point?When you look back at that response from the Democratic Party, how do you evaluate it?How did you evaluate it at the time?And were they making things better or worse?

Well, I think America today is suffering from a level of partisanship that you have to go back a long way in our history to find the equivalent of.And a large part of it is candidates attacking each other personally, but part of it is also attacking the candidate’s supporters personally.I got into politics at a very young age because I cared about philosophy and policy.Now I realize that’s sort of hopelessly idealistic.But that’s what it’s all about to me.And the personalization, you know, that’s part of it, too; there’s no doubt about it.But we’ve gone too far, and Donald Trump, I think, is the worst example of it because that’s all he knows.He has no philosophy.He doesn’t do policy.It’s all about him and those who oppose him.But there are plenty of others who contributed to the mess we’re in now.

Yeah. I mean, the reason I was asking is actually, this morning in The New York Times, Ross Douthat had a column where he said, the Democrats “have constantly talked about the threat to democracy while moving leftward to a degree that makes it … impossible to hold the center and has repeatedly cheered on unfit Republican candidates on the theory that they’ll be easy to beat.”²

New York Times: America’s Doug Mastriano Problem

Is that a perspective you would agree with?How would you characterize the Democrats’ role, especially in that 2016 period?

I think that it’s a problem that we see in both parties, and I think that there are different manifestations of it.I’m not saying there’s moral equivalence in every case.But I do think there’s a distinct movement away from discussions of issues toward what Saul Alinsky used to talk about, to look at it from the Democratic or left-wing side, of personalizing attacks, and I think it’s corrosive.

The Decision to Join the Trump Administration

You made the decision to join the administration in 2018, and that’s after a period of already great chaos.Charlottesville has happened.And we’ve sort of seen how Donald Trump was as a president.What went into your calculation for why you would want to go and join that administration?

Well, nobody’s ever called me naive.I think I’ve heard pretty much everything people had to say about Trump by the time I joined in April of 2018.But I felt that my job was in, obviously, the national security space.I felt that Trump, like every president before him, would have been impressed by the gravity of those responsibilities, the weight of the decisions that he had, and that he’d be performing in a disciplined fashion because of the importance of even relatively small matters for our national security.

And what I found out was that he wasn’t disciplined, and he didn’t assess the gravity of the responsibility.It was all about Donald Trump and his personal benefit, essentially political benefit, but not about bigger issues, because he didn’t think in bigger terms.

You think maybe he’s making incitements, like tweets, like he’s sending out there.But you think that maybe inside the White House it’s still a more serious process?Or by the time you went in, had your view changed?

I was worried about the process inside.I had been worried about what had happened during the transition.My feeling was that Trump, of course, himself had no experience in government and that during the transition and during the first year-plus of his administration within the White House, there were very few people who had experience in government.So I thought that there was a lot that was not happening that should have been happening, a lot of things that weren’t done, the lack of structure, the lack of discipline.But I nonetheless felt that although we were behind that it was still possible to try and create such a structure.

And you’re not the only one.A lot of people have said that the reason that they joined the administration was that they could be guardrails.There was talk of “adults in the room.”When you look back on that, do you still agree with that theory?Do you think it was naive, that justification for being inside the White House?

Well, the guardrails isn’t exactly the rationale I was talking about.I felt, for example, that one of the mistakes that Trump had made was not withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal earlier.He had campaigned on that very explicitly, right up until the end of the 2016 campaign.And yet the people around him in the first year-plus didn’t want to withdraw, and they didn’t let him withdraw, because he didn’t know enough about government to figure out how to do it himself.

So I came in, and in less than 30 days, he had been able to announce the withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal.It wasn’t that hard to do.I’m afraid that what happened in those early months of the administration was that the so-called adults in the room were very happy to leak to the media that they were the adults in the room.And so it had engendered already a level of distrust and undermined the credibility of a lot of advisers that everybody else who came in afterward also had to cope with.It goes back to my concern, dating really to the transition, that it had just not been adequately conducted so that the damage was done.

It is possible, given it’s Donald Trump, you could never have had a structured, orderly transition or four years of administration.But I think that the potential for that was badly compromised by the time I got there.

Trump’s View of Authoritarian Leaders

One of the things that’s startling about the Trump presidency is the admiration that he expresses for a number of strongmen or authoritarian leaders, from Vladimir Putin to Xi to Kim to a long list.When you were inside the administration, did you see that firsthand, that he seemed to have a respect for authoritarian leaders?

It was very clear, and I don’t think there is a good explanation for why it is.I’m not a shrink; I don’t do shrink talk.I think that Trump thought of himself as a big guy, and he looked around, and he saw these other big guys.They sort of did what they wanted inside their countries.He probably wished he could do that.But he liked talking big-guy talk with them, with Erdoğan of Turkey of all people, that sort of thing.And I think that was an aspect of his behavior.People have said, “But doesn’t that show he has authoritarian instincts?”And I would just say, very clearly, he’s not smart enough to be an authoritarian.

But does he have respect for democratic norms and institutions?I mean, you’re a lawyer.You spent much of your life in government and understand the bureaucracy, understand the way that it works.Did he understand that?Did he have a respect for the norms and institutions of American democracy?

I don’t think he knew what the norms and institutions of American democracy were.He had never had any real experience with them in his prior life.Nobody told him what they were in the White House.And I think the central point that is clear throughout his tenure as president is that it was always all about Donald Trump, and for him, the only norm that matters is, "Does this benefit me?"

Do you think that there was a wider effect of the way that he talked about institutions publicly, the way that he admired authoritarian leaders?Do you think that it had an effect on American politics, on how, say, Republican voters understood American democracy?

Well, I think across society as a whole, faith in institutions has been undermined.It’s a process that’s been going on for decades.I think Trump was an aspect of it in many respects, a distorted aspect of it, carrying it to greater lengths in some cases than others have.But you can see the same sort of attitude on the Democratic side as well, people like Bernie Sanders, who are so left-wing that their level of respect for institutions is almost nonexistent.

Undermining Elections

That raises a quick question about the Democrats during that period, because you’re inside the White House when a lot of this is ramping up, when there’s talk about “Russiagate,” the dossier, impeachment from the very beginning.What do you see on the other side of the aisle?What is it like inside the White House?And what’s the political effect of the way that the Democrats approached the Trump administration?

Specifically on the Russia collusion point, I think it had a negative effect on our ability to make any progress with Russia on issues that many people would have thought important.This constant harping on the collusion pushed Trump in a very defensive direction.He didn’t want to admit that there was Russian interference in the 2016 election, which there quite clearly and obviously was, because he feared if he did admit Russian efforts to hack into information technology systems and the like, that it would undercut the legitimacy of his election, a very ironic point.

And yet, after all the hoo-ha on Russia collusion, there’s still no convincing evidence of it.In fact, the argument would be, the Russians are a lot more sophisticated than approaching Donnie Trump Jr. to try and establish collusion with the campaign.If Trump or anybody in his campaign colluded with the Russians, they should go to the slammer for a very long time, but there’s still no evidence of it that I find convincing.And yet the constant repetition of it in an effort, I think, to delegitimize Trump pushed him in directions that were very unhelpful, unhelpful to our efforts to do more to protect the integrity of election systems and our ability to talk frankly with the Russians.

That’s really interesting, because we say that Donald Trump undermined the integrity and the results of the 2020 election, but you’re saying the way that the allegations were being waged in, going back to 2017, 2018, 2019, you see it as an attempt to delegitimize his election, too.

I go back again to Al Gore’s challenge to George W. Bush in 2000.Many people in the Democratic Party said then, and say today, that George Bush won the presidency by a 5-4 vote, and by that they mean the Supreme Court decision that essentially brought the Florida recount to a conclusion.Now, as a veteran of the Florida recount, I can say that not only was the recount on Election Day a victory for Bush; the recount effort ended in a victory for Bush; several academic and media recounts in the years since then all showed Bush winning.And yet this repetition that the Supreme Court intervened somehow and tilted the election to Bush has the purpose and the intent to delegitimize Bush’s presidency.

So when you get into this business in close races, and we do have a lot of close races in a divided political entity here, that kind of approach breeds cynicism all the way around.It also ties into Russian efforts, to say, well, they were favoring Trump over Clinton.Maybe they were, if you look at the full body of it.But what they really favored was undercutting the legitimacy of American institutions, eroding the trust that people have, calling all of that into question.And when you have that kind of disarray in civility in politics, it endangers all of our institutions.So there’s a lot of blame to spread around here.

The First Impeachment

I want to ask you about the first impeachment and the politics of it.But before I ask you about that, the actual events of what happened, were they a warning sign?How do you understand the phone call, the requests, and what did they reveal about Donald Trump? …

As I became aware of what was happening between Trump on the one hand and Rudy Giuliani and a whole cast of other characters on the other, it became clear that somebody had put into Trump’s mind that the authorized security assistance to Ukraine could be used as leverage to achieve political benefit for Trump by investigating what he thought was happening there, both with respect to the 2016 election and the missing Hillary Clinton server and efforts to undermine his 2016 campaign, as well as efforts with respect to the 2020 campaign involving Hunter Biden and a whole series of allegations.

I tried to stay as far away from Rudy Giuliani and his merry band as I could.The president’s entitled to do political things.All presidents, especially those facing reelection, have legitimate First Amendment interests in running the most successful campaign that they could.It just didn’t have anything to do with the functioning of government.And what became clear in the summer of 2019 was that by trying to withhold the security assistance from Ukraine, Trump was not engaged in an anti-corruption campaign in the Ukraine.He was engaged in, in effect, trying to shore up his reelection prospects.And my focus, at the time, was to free up $250 million of security assistance, authorization for which was going to expire at the end of the federal government’s fiscal year, on September the 30th.So all of this raised a lot of questions.But in my mind, and in the mind, I think, of Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, all three of us agreed we needed to get that money to Ukraine, get it obligated before the fiscal year ended, and that’s where our focus was.

It eventually becomes public.And you write in your book that “the hysterical mood of many impeachment advocates … resulted, quite literally, in driving away House Republicans who might have been inclined to at least consider the articles of impeachment.”What do you mean by that?

Well, I think if you look at the history of the Nixon impeachment that ultimately led to his resignation before a House vote, before a Senate vote, but because it became clear that had he been impeached and had there been a trial in the Senate, two-thirds of the Senate would have voted to convict him, that didn’t happen easily.It took time.It was not clear at the outset it was going to result in that kind of result, but the Watergate Committee hearings in the Senate and other proceedings brought it around to that point.

With respect to the Ukraine impeachment effort against Trump, there was no effort whatever at bipartisanship.This was purely political.The timing and the subject matter were political.Nancy Pelosi wanted a rifle-shot approach.She wanted only the Ukraine being discussed, and they wanted to do it quickly because—and they said this publicly—they were afraid of disrupting the Democratic presidential primary process.You can’t have senators tied up in Washington when they need to be in the snows of New Hampshire.

So I felt that, from the beginning, what they were doing was guaranteeing a partisan response.I’m not saying that excuses Republicans from their conduct, but both tribes returned to their corners in the ring.And that’s what ultimately resulted, was a partisan squabble.Nancy Pelosi says, in justification of this strategy, Donald Trump will always be impeached.That, I suppose, is a profound statement in her mind, but what she ignores is that Donald Trump is also forever acquitted, and I think that the strategy that they pursued amounted to impeachment malpractice.They got a result that enabled, emboldened Donald Trump.It didn’t constrain him.He had just beaten impeachment.He thought he was bulletproof.And I think that did have an effect on his future conduct, and not a good one.

It is an amazing consequence, and it’s pretty clear, from the books that have been written and from people that we’ve talked to, that he did see it that way.Did it reveal something bigger about whether our constitutional checks and balances can function in a polarized America?

I think if you look at what’s happened in polarized situations before, there have been some pretty, pretty ugly incidents.I mean, Andrew Johnson escaped conviction by one vote in the Senate.You don’t get much closer than that.And the 1876 election in the Reconstruction period was probably the most dangerous that we had since the 1800 election, when there was a tie in the Electoral College.These things have happened before, and we have made it through.And we made it through the 2020 election as well.You know, the Constitution was written by human beings.It’s no more perfect than human beings are.But it’s still the world’s oldest written constitution, and we’re still chugging along.

Since we talked about the Democratic side, my last question on impeachment, was you offered to testify if it went to trial in the Senate, and they did not go down that route.We’ve talked about the Democrats’ role in this.Did you feel like the Republicans didn’t take their position seriously because of the polarization?What was your feeling about that, about how it was handled in the Senate?

Well, I think in both the House and the Senate, both parties retreated to their corners.Every witness before the House, with maybe one exception, was subpoenaed.And I said, “Look, if you issue a subpoena, I’ll respond to it.We’ll see what the White House does.”They subpoenaed my deputy, Charlie Kupperman.The White House immediately sent him a letter directing him, although he was a private citizen, but directing him not to testify.So Charlie Kupperman did what I think a rational person would do when the legislative branch of government is saying, “Come up here and testify,” and the executive branch of government is saying, “Don’t testify,” he went to court, and he said to a judge, basically, “So tell me who I’m supposed to obey.”And what happened?Both the legislative side and the executive branch side came in and said, “Court, you don’t have any jurisdiction here.”

And then the House withdrew its subpoena to Kupperman, to moot the case, which they did, and they never issued me a subpoena.I mean, this is what I mean about impeachment malpractice.I, as a lawyer, a litigator, I cannot explain what they thought they were doing, but they mishandled it.So then it comes over to the Senate, where the outcome is already cooked.A clear majority, indeed as it turned out all but one Republican accepted the argument that whatever Trump had done with respect to Ukraine, his conduct did not rise to the level of an impeachable offense, which was their argument why they didn’t need any witnesses.

You know, one goes back to the House.What were they thinking?Why were they so rushed?They were rushed because of the Democratic presidential primary schedule, and that, by my definition, is political.So they engaged in a political process against what they thought was an illicit political performance, and they achieved the precise opposite of what they sought.They didn’t constrain Trump; they emboldened him.

Let me ask you about that period after that acquittal, going into the 2020 election, I don’t know if it’s a tweet or a quote—he said, “When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total, and that’s the way that it’s got to be.”And he threatens to adjourn Congress.And are you becoming concerned during that period after the acquittal in 2020 as we’re going into the election?

Well, let’s be clear.During that period, Donald Trump was trying to put me in jail.³

Politico: Trump: Bolton should be jailed over White House memoir

He had ordered the Department of Justice to file a lawsuit first to stop publication of my book on the grounds it had not been through the prepublication review process intended to make sure there’s no classified information in the book, and then failing that, he launched a suit to recoup the proceeds from the book because I hadn’t gone through the process.And then he got the Justice Department to convene a grand jury, which even Justice Department attorneys kind of sheepishly admitted to my publisher, when they subpoenaed them, that they were going through the motions.So was I concerned about the sort of bigger picture?No. Actually, I was trying to avoid what I thought was a utterly impermissible politicization of the Justice Department.And ultimately both the grand jury and the civil case were dismissed because they were utterly without merit.

That’s the sort of abuse of authority, if you’re concerned about a president, if Nancy Pelosi were really worried about abuse of authority, and the author had been anybody probably other than me, that would have been something to investigate.

The Decision to Leave the White House

I didn’t ask you about your decision and about leaving the White House.By the time you left, by the time that moment happens, has your opinion of the president changed?Had your calculation about whether it was worth being inside or outside changed?

Well, my opinions changed throughout the entire 17 months I was there.And I think, especially because my concern was in the national security area, a lot of what was going on really didn’t have partisan implications one way or the other.But at some point, it was just impossible to try and perform in a way that was really accomplishing anything.I had thought about resigning any number of times before.You can see the pattern in the Trump administration with among the highest turnovers of advisers and Cabinet members of any recent presidency.And I finally got to the point where the resignation letter that I had had on my home computer for a long time, I finally just pressed the send button, and that was it.

Let me ask you one other thing, because you said that people inside the White House were not educating him about democratic norms and institutions.Why not?

I think that there was a lack of structured briefing for Trump, both in the transition and during the early days of the administration, because too few people had ever been in the government before, and they didn’t reach out to get a better understanding of how things were supposed to run.

Not that there’s any perfect system.Every president has his own style—that’s understandable.But the fact is, running the bureaucracy is a huge job.It’s a huge job.And if you don’t have a process that helps provide the president with information, provide the president with alternatives, your chances of success are going to be considerably diminished, especially in Trump’s case, where he didn’t think he had to know very much.He thought everything was a personal evaluation of the—for example, the head of state across the table from him, that he could size up in a few minutes or less and that that personal relationship would be the dominant factor in U.S. policy.Now I happen to think that’s wrong, but it was something Trump firmly believed, perhaps from the outset, but certainly by the time I got there.

Was he centralizing power over that time as he’s replacing advisers, bringing in sometimes less experienced people, as he’s coming to understand his powers as president?Was he becoming more powerful or more of a central decision maker over those four years?

I think, actually, his power was diminishing, and I think this is in part because coming from his business background, where he really ran a fairly small organization, that his concept of running the government didn’t extend much beyond the physical boundaries of the West Wing.The way you influence government, the way you extend presidential power, the way presidential policies get implemented most effectively, is to reach into the bureaucracy, put your people down, as far down as you can, tell them exactly what their goals and objectives are and then delegate responsibility so that all the decisions are not coming across your desk.

Any president has only a certain amount of time in the day and only a certain number of things that can be decided, and the more things you insist on deciding yourself, the less your influence is going to be.I don’t think Trump had the slightest idea about that.

The Lafayette Square Incident

So by 2020, you said you were occupied with other concerns that were coming from Trump.But there’s also in that period, talk about military, use of military force in the streets.We now know from books there was talks about shooting protesters.There’s the Lafayette Square moment.And you are well aware of other countries, how they conducted themselves.Were you concerned at what you were seeing in 2020 with the talk of the use of military in the streets, with the image of Lafayette Square?

It’s very hard to know from the outside exactly what was going through people’s minds in the White House, but I thought that this was fairly typical of Trump.He believed that his reelection was the only priority that mattered to him and that therefore, whatever it took to do that, he was prepared to do.What was, I think, shocking, even to the people who were still in the administration at that point, was that there didn’t seem to be any end to his imagination about what he could do.

And this goes to the question, when his advisers are there with him, are they prepared to say no, and how does he respond?And by that time, it was down to a very few people who were still standing up to him.And most of them—Mark Esper, Bill Barr—left shortly after the election.I think that was part of the trajectory of the entire four years of Trump’s term.Normally, in an eight-year presidency, by the time you get to the seventh and eighth year, the quality of the people around the president, I’ll be polite here, isn’t as high as it was at the beginning.That happened double time in the Trump administration.And by the very end, he was surrounded by fifth-raters.

It’s clear from whom we’ve talked to that there were a lot of people who were unhappy with Donald Trump, from yourself to Mitch McConnell to other senior Republican leaders.And yet in 2020, you do come out and say, you know, that you wouldn’t vote for Trump, but others do not make that decision.Why do so many Republicans who share your feelings about him not go public in 2020?

A lot depends on the individual circumstance.I think Trump had an intimidating effect.I think people made a calculation that they’d rather have Trump in the White House for a second term than Joe Biden, even people who had opposed Trump in 2016.I went in the other direction.I voted for Trump in 2016, because I thought compared to Hillary Clinton, it was the best choice for the country.In 2020, I wrote in the name of a conservative Republican because I thought both Biden and Trump were unacceptable for other reasons.

Part of that, in my case, was because I had seen Trump up close and personal, and I didn’t think he was fit to be president.And I feared that in a second term, freed from any political constraints, having no prospect at reelection, there’s just no telling what he could do.People on the outside, including in Congress, saw only things that they thought were beneficial—appointment of judges, economic decisions on taxes, certain foreign policy decisions—that they knew would go in the other direction under Biden.

What they didn’t fully understand, I think, was that those decisions were not based on Trump’s philosophy because he doesn’t have a philosophy, and not based on policy, because he can’t go from A to B.They were based on Trump thinking, these were decisions that benefited me politically.And what I tried to say to people was, “You cannot count on that pattern continuing into a second term.”But I don’t think, by definition, that was an argument that persuaded many people.

The 2020 Election and Initial Claims of Fraud

By the time you get to the moment in that morning hours after the election, where he says, “Frankly, I did win this election,” and it’s the beginning of the claims that he won the election, are you surprised at that point, as you’re watching that?What are you thinking in that moment?

Well, I thought this is typical Trump.He hates more than anything in life being called a loser.So his answer to losing the election—and I do think, deep inside, he knows he lost—but his answer to it is, “I didn’t lose.It was stolen from me.”And he rolled out the bag of tricks that many other candidates, Democrats as well as Republicans in recent years, have used to try and explain the loss.

What then followed, however, was a potentially very destructive pattern of behavior, basically deceiving people into doing things that could have been quite destructive had they been carried through.But the real message is, they weren’t carried through.The system was stressed, and it held.

You wrote, I think on Nov. 7, that the Republican Party now faces a character test on how to respond to these claims.⁴

The Telegraph: Donald Trump's disgraceful behaviour risks doing lasting damage

What is the test that the Republican Party faced at that moment, which is very early on, right after he’s making the claims and at a point where a lot of people are saying, “What is going on?,” right?They haven’t spread to the base at that point.What did you mean by that test, that it’s a test for the party?

Well, I was thinking very much about what happened in Florida in 2000, when, in a very close election, one state, shifted by a few hundred votes, could change the outcome.And for over a month, we went through a very difficult period and potentially a very dangerous period.But we followed the process and came to an outcome where the Supreme Court had made the final decision.That’s what I thought should be very much on Republican minds.We had seen an effort in Florida to find votes.Remember that phrase in Georgia?“Find votes.”“Go to Palm Beach County and get more votes counted,” because it was a heavily Democratic county, “and get the 537-vote Bush majority reversed.”

This was a time, if we were going to have a recount, where we had to follow the procedures as we had insisted that Gore follow the procedures.And whether we would do it or not remained to be seen.A lot of Republicans out in the states, where pressure was put on in state legislatures and state election officials, they did pass that test.But a lot of people took the easy way out and said the election was stolen based on insufficient evidence.

You know, you’re not guaranteed an outcome when you’re in an election or in an election contest.You’re guaranteed a process to prove the argument, if that’s what you want to make, that the election was stolen, and Trump failed every single time.When you exhaust the process, that ought to be it.That was the character test.A lot of Republicans passed it.Unfortunately, a lot did not.

Were you talking to Republican leaders at that time, or Republicans in Congress or other Republicans?And did they believe that there was merit to the claims?

I think almost nobody in Congress, not among the Republicans, I think almost none of them really believed the election was stolen.I think, though, they were intimidated; they were scared.That’s not a compliment, to be sure.It’s a little bit better than believing the falsehoods.But I think sitting still in the White House, Trump had an enormous intimidating effect.And unfortunately, we saw the extent of that, up to and including January the 6th, which was one of the worst days in the history of our country.Notwithstanding the extent of Trump’s effort, he failed, and I think that’s the important conclusion.

Liz Cheney Pushes Back on Trump

But one of the people who does stand up is Liz Cheney.Can you help me understand who she is, just to place her as a character in this?And then we can talk about why she might have made a different decision than other Republicans.

Well, I’ve known Liz for over 20 years.I think she’s a person of integrity and character.I knew and worked with her father in a number of different positions, and I think they share the same determination.And I think what they really share, and to me is most important, is that their involvement in politics is for philosophical reasons.They’re not doing this for career.They’re not doing it to make money; that’s for sure.They’re doing it to advance a philosophy, which you can agree with or disagree with, but that’s the purpose they’re there.And I think what turned out, and I would say I was disappointed in this, was that too many Republicans looked at this as their jobs instead of how to govern the country.

Were you talking to her in that time period?

Sorry. What time period is this?

This is between the election and Jan. 6.

You know, I talked to her a number of times, how many in that period I don’t really recall.I was talking to a lot of people at that time.

Yeah, I’m just wondering if you can help us understand, just from any of the interactions you might have had with her, what she would be saying, what she would be thinking in that period.

Not really.I mean, I think things were moving very quickly, and a number of steps at points at which people thought, well, Trump will stop here; for example, that once the electors had been certified by the respective states—this was well before January the 6th—once that happened, it would be over.A lot of people believed that.A lot of people said they were telling Trump that that’s it; it’s over now.But because of his own unwillingness to admit that this could be happening to him, obviously it didn’t.

And I think there’s no clear point at which people made a decision really one way or the other.It was the idea, I think, of challenging the electoral votes on January the 6th that really focused people’s attention in a way it had not before.In particular it focused attention on Mike Pence, who was under enormous pressure by Trump and others to do something that the vice president had absolutely no constitutional authority to do.And Pence withstood the pressure, and really, at that point, that was the end of it.

Mike Pence’s Role in the Administration

Let me ask you about him, because you’ve been in meetings with him.I don’t know if you knew him before the administration or not.But what was Mike Pence’s role inside the Trump White House?Because he’s often portrayed as somebody who’s sitting there, nodding along and who doesn’t challenge Trump.But who was Mike Pence?

I knew Mike Pence going back to his days in the House of Representatives and always had a lot of respect for him.I think the country doesn’t really know how much it owes to Mike Pence for what he did in the White House.We used to joke that he was the only one who couldn’t resign because he had been elected.And there were many times when all of the rest of us would leave the Oval Office, and he and Trump would be there alone, and at the end of that, he would come and say, “Here’s the decision,” and it turned out to be the right decision.

So as I say, the country really does owe him a debt of gratitude.He’s not going to talk about it.He now has his own political ambitions.But I think his integrity was something that was very important during this whole time.

So what is it about him that would make him able to resist that pressure?Because that pressure is tremendous.It’s public tweets.I mean, we know what will happen on Jan. 6, threats against him as they’re chanting his name.And it’s a multi-day effort to convince him.And [John] Eastman is brought in, and there’s legal arguments made on him.What is it about Pence?Why do you think that he makes the decision that he does?

Well, I think he thought about things very deeply.I do think his religious faith was very important to him and helped steady him and his family in difficult times.And he was never afraid to reach out and ask people for their opinions and get advice and challenge people’s assumptions.And so from experience in politics himself, having been a governor, after serving in the House of Representatives, he knew what leadership was about, and he was trying to do the right thing as the Constitution provided, not whether it was in Donald Trump’s personal political interest, which was the standard Trump was following.

But he must have known there would be a political consequence of going against President Trump.

Well, I’m sure he did.He’s a good politician.But he did the right thing, because his measure was not that he owed loyalty to Donald Trump, he owed loyalty to the Constitution and the country, and he tried to see, by those lights, what he should do and followed them and did the right thing.

Liz Cheney, as we’re getting up towards that Jan. 6 moment, she writes a 20-plus-page memo that quotes all Republican judges on why the fraud allegations are not legitimate.There’s an op-ed signed by a lot of the former secretaries of defense.Why doesn’t that convince the majority of the House Caucus?It’s such a powerful array, you would think that it would.And maybe in a different time, it would have.But what did you think that that said about the party and the politics?

Well, I don’t think it said good things.I think when you enter into political activity, you’re not guaranteed to win.And if you’re not prepared to accept losing when in fact that is what happened, then you’re rejecting the notion of constitutional government.You’re saying, “I get my way whether I won or lost.”And this is a continuing problem for the Republican Party.

I think Trump is increasingly in the rearview mirror.I think he will increasingly be less important.I don’t think he’s going to run for the nomination in 2024.But this obsession about Donald Trump and the 2020 election will never leave him, because he doesn’t want to be known as a loser.And he continues to be able to intimidate some people.This is a problem within the party we’ve got to resolve.I don’t know exactly when that’s going to take place.I think a lot of people rightly say, “Let’s just put Trump behind us and move ahead.”I think that’s probably the best way to go but for the importance of removing the doubt that’s been cast on the integrity of our Constitution.And that is the damage, more than anything else, that I think we need to find a way to cure.

It’s not being helped by people who, in the media or in the other political party, who keep trying to say, “Trump is the Republican Party,” because I think Republicans know that’s a way to anathematize everybody by using Trump.Trump is not the whole Republican Party, not by a long shot.

I think you’ve said that you didn’t think that Trump was capable intellectually of pulling off a coup.But in this period, you have something like Mike Pence, where if he couldn’t have overturned the election, could have thrown the system into chaos.There were efforts to organize alternative slates of electors.There’s the case in Michigan of one canvassing board member who if they had changed their vote would have thrown the vote in Michigan into chaos.How dangerous a moment was that?And how serious was the situation that we were in?

Well, I think it’s important not only for history but for events over the next several years to try and assess accurately how stressed the institutions were.Not to whitewash it, but not to get hyperthyroid about it either.The fact is that time and time again, despite a lot of efforts on the part of Trump and his supporters, the efforts were defeated.And so to get to a point where the election was actually in real jeopardy, you would have had to have had hundreds of on-off switches go the other way, and they did not.

So the idea that somehow this was a crisis so grave that you need substantial changes in constitutional structures and other things overstates the risk, and therefore overstates the remedy.I do think that had Trump been elected to a second term, that the dangers would have been much greater, because by that point, he was so convinced that he could do anything that he wanted.And had he gotten reelected, had he actually been able to overturn the election, then I think there would have been no constraints on him at all.But it’s important to understand exactly where the stress points were, and why Trump’s efforts failed again and again and again.

You’ve said that you don’t think that he’ll run again or that if he did, he wouldn’t win.But given what you just said, and given the fact that he’s been underestimated in the past, if he does come back in 2024, and he does win, how dangerous a moment would that be?

Well, I think it would be a very dangerous moment.Every time Trump is challenged and he prevails, it simply convinces him that he can do whatever he wants.I think, ironically, in the primary season of 2022, his efforts to endorse candidates have had some effect—that’s for sure—but not necessarily this positive effect, and they have had, in states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, the follow-on effect of convincing many people in those states that his involvement in their elections has been detrimental.

All of this goes to show, I think, that his influence will continue to decline.But it’s also why, in the Republican Party, we’ve got to do more to pierce this myth that somehow the 2020 election was stolen, because it’s corrosive.And anything that undermines our party’s faith in the Constitution, I think, is particularly damaging, because the Democratic side’s idea of a living Constitution is no Constitution at all.

The Republican Response to Jan. 6

There’s a moment, right after Jan. 6, where it looks like maybe the party is going to reject Trump, Lindsey Graham gives that famous speech.And we now know that, inside the Republican Caucus, McCarthy is blaming the president and is talking about whether he should resign.Then not long after that, Kevin McCarthy arrives at Mar-a-Lago and has a picture with President Trump.When you look back at that moment and at the choice the Republican Party was faced with, and how it decided how do you understand the importance of what happened in those weeks after Jan. 6?

Well, I think Jan. 6 really showed what the potential danger of Trump’s continuing influence was.And I think it’s caused enormous divisions within the party and a lot of division about how to handle it.But I come back to the basic point that people should not be in politics to get a job.Ronald Reagan used to say, for example, he wanted people to join his administration, all of whom would take pay cuts to do it.That’s a way of saying that being involved in politics, whether it’s electoral politics or serving in the executive branch, is to advance your philosophy.And sometimes that means being defeated.It means, in my case, the first election that I ever really got involved in was Barry Goldwater in 1964, and you may have noticed, he was defeated pretty badly.But it didn’t stop me, because defeat is part of political life.

And if all you care about is keeping your job, honestly, then you’re not living up to the philosophical standards you should follow.And I think the Republican Party has been successful when it’s adhered to a philosophy and not tied itself to one individual.Ronald Reagan, as popular as he was personally, was mostly popular because of the policies that he advocated.That remains the way to success in the Republican Party, not being for or against one person, not being for or against what one person’s idiosyncrasies dictate, but by following our philosophy.

What did it say about the party and about Liz Cheney when she was voted out of the leadership very much because of this issue, because of Jan. 6 and the 2020 election?

Well, I think it was a big mistake.You know, in a real constitutional democracy, people shouldn’t follow a man on a white horse.That’s what the caudillos do in authoritarian societies.What we should focus on is advancing the policies that are consistent with basic Republican principles.Trump doesn’t have basic Republican principles.And the only principle he has is Donald Trump.That’s not a reason to push somebody out of the party leadership or out of the party.The old saying is politics is about addition and multiplication, not division and subtraction.Donald Trump’s great at division and subtraction, not so good on addition and multiplication.

You use the word “authoritarian.”Is there an authoritarian element of the Republican Party now, I mean, in this world that Liz Cheney has rejected, that says Jan. 6 was “legitimate political discourse”?It this a part—it’s not the Republican Party, but is it part of the Republican Party now?

Now look, there are authoritarian tendencies in American politics that extend throughout history.It has traditionally been the Democratic Party that has favored the strong executive.It’s the idolization of Franklin Roosevelt and the buildup of power in Washington, the diminution of state power.So the push toward greater centralization of authority in the federal government and in the executive branch, over the past century, has been Democratic. …

So when we talk about authoritarianism, let’s look at the philosophical side of it.It’s Republicans who favor limited federal government and who favor spreading power back to states and localities.It’s the Democratic Party that for 100 years has pushed for more authority in Washington.

… We’ve talked about what would happen if Trump came back, but what is the danger if this polarization continues, if these trends in either or both parties towards authoritarianism, towards questioning elections—we’ve talked about election legitimacy being questioned in 2016 and then 2020.What’s the risk for American democracy of where we are?

Well, I think the civic culture of any democratic constitutional system is important.And it was certainly important to the framers of the Constitution.They understood that.And we’ve seen it come into disrepair in recent years.But it’s a mistake to say that because it’s bad now, it’s not going to get better.It would only take one major crisis for the country to be able to pull back together.But it depends on both sides.I mean, there is plenty of blame to go around here.And if we don’t change that, if we don’t change the way we approach, for example, Supreme Court nominations, if we don’t change an effort to delegitimize the Supreme Court, if you don’t get the right quote-unquote “result” from an opinion, these are the kinds of things that can have pervasive and lasting effects.

But I think it’s a big mistake to look only at our current circumstances today.We’ve had worse circumstances.We fought a civil war, and the Constitution held.But people need to focus on that and not on the ephemera of particular events, and not on this or that individual, to the exclusion of the broader problems that we face.

Thank you.That’s was very helpful.Let me just see—Michael?

One question, Mr. Bolton.Going backwards a little bit, just so we can be a little more specific in the film, and notwithstanding what you just said, we’re watching closely the actions of Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy and Mark Meadows, Lindsey Graham, obviously Liz Cheney, who we’ve talked about.When you think about Meadows, McConnell, McCarthy, all men serving effectively and with a philosophic underpinning—not so much McCarthy, maybe—but when you look at these men, and you see that they appear to be enabling Trump in all the kind of crisis moments, where it feels like it could have gone the other way, what do you attribute what they did to—why did they do it?Why did they keep going?I realize they mature in their thinking as time goes on, from early days through Charlottesville, and then up into 2020 time.But could you help us understand sort of specifically, what’s the calculation, do you think, in these otherwise good and effective men?

I think part of the answer is that where you stand depends on where you sit.And it’s one thing for myself, as an example, as a private citizen, having avoided the grand jury and ultimately his efforts against me because of the book, I can say that the only damage he caused me was some legal fees, which I was happy to pay given the outcome.But a private citizen can say a lot of things, and no president of either party can affect it.When you’re responsible for positions in the legislative branch or elsewhere, you have to take into account more than your own personal views.

Now, having said that, I wish a lot more Republicans in the House and the Senate had stood up and told the truth.Of course the election wasn’t stolen.The worst part of the outcome for Republicans who supported Trump in 2020 is the Democrats outsmarted us.That’s what burns the most for them.If there was so much illegal activity, why wasn’t the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee in court in July and August of 2020, going after the illegality then, not waiting until the day after the election, saying, “My God, we’ve lost.I guess we better find some illegal activity”?This is incompetence on the part of the Trump campaign, the RNC and Trump himself.And that burns people up, too.

So there are a lot of motives involved.But—so what’s the answer?The answer is, try and determine what the truth is.The truth is, Trump lost the election, period, closed quote.

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