The FRONTLINE Interviews
Jonathan Karl
Author, Betrayal
Jonathan Karl is the chief Washington correspondent for ABC News and co-anchor of This Week with George Stephanopoulos. He is the author of Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show.
The following interview was conducted by the Kirk Documentary Group’s Mike Wiser for FRONTLINE on April 27, 2022. It has been edited for clarity and length.
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Republican Response to Trump’s Handling of COVID
So I was thinking of picking up and starting in the spring of 2020, because two of the characters that we're especially interested in, McCarthy and Liz Cheney, are watching Donald Trump handle COVID.And they have some concerns.Can you help us understand who those two players are at that moment as they're watching the Trump press conferences and what they're seeing?
Liz Cheney and Kevin McCarthy are two of the most powerful Republicans in Congress.Of course, McCarthy is the Republican leader in the House.Liz Cheney is the number three Republican leader in the House.And they, just like Donald Trump, were looking ahead to the election in 2020.Obviously, there's a question of who's going to win the presidency, but there's also the question of what's going to happen with the congressional elections.Republicans had lost control of the House in 2018, and McCarthy and Liz Cheney, watching the pandemic unfold and watching Trump's handling of the pandemic, were deeply concerned not only that Trump would lose, but that there would be heavy losses for Republicans in the House.
And one of the low points among many low points in the pandemic is when Donald Trump comes into the briefing room for one of his daily press conferences—I was actually there as a reporter at this press conference—and raises the possibility of using disinfectant as a way to treat COVID by possibly—injection inside, you know—this idea of injecting bleach.1And you've got to keep in mind, this is after day after day of these press conferences, where Trump is increasingly off the rails, off-message.But this is worse than anything he's said so far.I mean, he's telling people that maybe injecting bleach is a way to handle the pandemic.So Liz Cheney and Kevin McCarthy after that press conference, the next day, just happened to be scheduled to have lunch with Donald Trump at the White House in that dining room right off the Oval Office.
And before they go into the meeting, before they go into the lunch with President Trump, McCarthy pulls Liz Cheney aside and says: "Look, we've got to tell him.We've got to get him off television.We've got to tell him to stop holding these daily press conferences.It's killing us.It's killing him.It's killing us."So they go in, and at this point, Kevin McCarthy and Liz Cheney are very much allies.They're on the Republican leadership team, and they are in complete agreement that Donald Trump is not only headed towards defeat in the presidential election, but that his handling of the pandemic and especially his communications around the pandemic is so atrocious that it's going to be devastating to the Republican Party, and they want him to stop.
And what happens in that meeting?
… There was a public portion of this, where McCarthy and Liz Cheney and several other Republicans have a meeting in the Oval Office with Trump that's before the lunch.So there is video of this.I mean, you see McCarthy and Liz Cheney and others with Trump, and then when the meeting is over, they go into the private lunch, and they go into this little dining room.And McCarthy—I've talked to—just about everybody who was at this lunch has talked to me, and the one consistent thing that they will all agree is that McCarthy was blunt and flatly told Trump that the press conferences that he was at that point holding almost every day, including Saturdays and Sundays, at about 6:00, you know, pretty close to prime time, being carried by all the cable networks and often being carried by the broadcast networks, as well, and McCarthy tells him flatly: "You've got to stop.It's hurting you.It's getting you off-message.They're seizing on things you say."And he placates him a little bit."They're taking them out of context.But it's not helping.Just don't do the press conferences anymore.It's not good for you.We have to get back on track.We have to get back focused on the campaign.Don't do the press conferences anymore."And you know, Trump kind of pushes back and says: "Look, you know, they love me.My press conferences—they're highly rated."You remember Trump had actually bragged about the fact that these press conferences were getting higher ratings than the season finale of <i>The Bachelor</i>.He loved the fact that everybody was tuning in, and he didn't really want to hear it.
But the upshot of the meeting is Trump actually started holding far fewer press conferences.Whether that was the upshot of McCarthy telling him that or the total embarrassment of the fallout from suggesting that people could inject bleach, whatever the reason was, Trump actually did significantly scale back those press conferences.
I mean, it's such an interesting meeting for us, because we know what's going to happen and we know what's going to happen with the relationship with the two of them, and they're in sync at that moment.But it is also revealing, because it does say—I mean, does it say something about McCarthy and how he operates between public and private, and how he's going to handle Donald Trump?
McCarthy—I mean, given what happens later, with that total breakdown of the relationship between Liz Cheney and Kevin McCarthy, this is fascinating, because here you have Kevin McCarthy and Liz Cheney—now, Scalise was there as well, so you had the full Republican House leadership team at this lunch.But it's really McCarthy and Liz Cheney in the White House, in the hallway outside of the president's private dining room before they go into the dining room, basically conspiring to try to constrain Donald Trump.And these two Republican figures, really important Republican figures in the House, are in total agreement on this point.So as—they would become the bitterest of enemies less than a year later, but at this point, they're entirely on the same page.They need to work together to try to constrain Donald Trump, to stop him from hurting himself and his own reelection chances, but also, more importantly to them, to stop him from further hurting Republican reelection chances.
Sowing Doubt Ahead of the 2020 Election
Before we get to the actual election and what he says right after the election results, one of the things you note in the book was that you write that there was a plan B, and that that was to accuse the Democrats of cheating and refuse to accept the results.And you said there was no secret about it.Can you describe what the warnings were in the summer of 2020?And if, you know, the thing we're especially interested in was how seriously were they being taken by senior leaders—McConnell, others inside the Republican Party—when Trump was making these kinds of statements in that summer and fall?
Donald Trump repeatedly, over late spring and into the summer of 2020, was saying that the only way that he could lose is if the election was stolen from him.And he was telegraphing.He was telling the world, making no secret of the fact that he was never going to concede this election; that he was going to insist, if he did not win, that there was fraud and that the election was stolen from him.I first saw an indication of this in the spring actually, before you get to the summer.
… In the spring of 2020, because the pandemic had effectively shut down so much of the country, and you had the first primaries going on, you had a situation where it was becoming clear that the virus could really impact people's ability to vote; that people would be facing a potential issue, where you either exercise your democratic right and expose yourself to the possibility of a deadly illness, or you stay home and you don't vote.A terrible choice.So some states were either delaying their primaries until the summer, and some were moving heavily and quickly to mail-in voting.And there were proposals by nonpartisan groups that, looking ahead to the fall campaign, to the presidential election, that there should be a mechanism to have universal mail-in voting so that nobody would have to face the choice of either voting or keeping yourself safe from a virus.
And I asked Donald Trump about this at one of his press conferences in the spring saying, effectively: "What is your plan to ensure that people will be able to exercise their democratic votes, even if the virus is raging in the fall?Are you in favor of this idea of universal mail-in ballot voting?"And I was shocked to hear his answer, which was a total screed against mail-in voting as being littered with fraud and terrible and you can't do it.
Now, that seems strange that I would be shocked, because he said that so much in the months afterwards, but this was really the first time that he came out against it in this way.… I had looked at a chart from the flu epidemic from 1918 about deaths.And if you look at the chart of how many people died, when the deadliest time for the flu pandemic of 1918 was actually in late October of 1918, which raised to me the question: Oh, my God, could we be facing a situation where this pandemic is actually not gone but at its worst point just when people are going to vote?And Trump was already focused not on finding a solution but on using that as an excuse, in case he were to lose.
And you were shocked but over that summer, as he's saying, "Maybe we need to delay the election; I'm definitely going to win," was there a feeling among Republicans that you were speaking to, people like Mitch McConnell, that this was dangerous talk from Trump that needed to be countered?Or what was the response of the party at that point?
Trump was making it abundantly clear that he was never going to concede, that he was going to cry fraud and a stolen election if he lost.This is alarming rhetoric to come from the president of the United States, especially one that was losing in the polls pretty seriously.But I heard no concern whatsoever expressed by any of the Republican leadership about this.Not a peep.It seemed that Trump was telling the world what his strategy was, which is either to win, which looked increasingly unlikely as his approval rating was going down, or to say the election was stolen and to refuse to concede.
This looked like a brewing constitutional crisis, and there was not a peep of concern that I heard, anyway, from any of the Republican leaders, not Republican leaders in the House, not Republican leaders in the Senate, not any of the significant leaders in Trump's own Cabinet.No concern at all did I hear.
The 2020 Election
And then we'll come to the moment after the election, when Trump walks out to the briefing room and says—starts this or continues this—and says, "Frankly, I did win this election."Can you take us into that moment and how important that was in what would happen on Jan. 6 and all that would follow?
I think the most dangerous speech that Donald Trump ever gave was not the one that he gave on Jan. 6.I think it's the speech that he gave at 2:30 in the morning on the night of the election, when he came into the East Room of the White House and declared victory—declared victory as the votes were still being counted; declared victory after he had just been told by his senior campaign advisers that it looked like he was heading towards defeat.Now, the votes were still being counted.There were no results.Networks had not projected a winner.But Trump knew that the trends looked bad.Trump knew that there were hundreds of thousands of votes still to be counted in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and Michigan.He knew the count was still going on in Georgia and in Arizona.And he came out, and he said, "Frankly, we did win the election."Now, to me, that was a dangerous speech because our entire system of government is predicated on the idea that we have an election; the votes are counted and a loser concedes; a winner is declared president-elect.
And he was directly challenging that.And more significantly, in that speech at 2:30 in the morning on election night, Trump said that he was going to go to the Supreme Court.And if you were a Democrat who was really worried about what Donald Trump might or might not do, and you saw that he had just rammed through a Supreme Court nominee in literally the days before the election, and he had now had three of his hand-picked nominees on the court—now with a clear, conservative majority, a clear majority of justices appointed by Republican presidents. And he comes out here with the votes still being counted and saying that he's going to go to the Supreme Court to get their help to decide this election for him. He was never going to be able to go to the Supreme Court.
He had no basis at all to get the Supreme Court to stop the counting of the votes and declare him victory.But in a country that was already on such edge and so divided, in a country that had seen violent protests through much of the summer, to see the president of the United States declare a victory that was not his to declare and to suggest that if it wasn't given to him, he was going to get the Supreme Court to give it to him, I think was a very dangerous moment, a very dangerous moment.
Republican Response to Trump’s Allegations of Election Fraud
And we're quite interested in that moment and in really just the two days that follow, where his sons are pushing it, and Steve Bannon is pushing it, and Alex Jones is pushing it.And it's not till the end of the week that you start hearing from other Republicans.And the question that—was that a moment of choice for the Republican Party, when he comes out and he says that?Was that a moment where things could have been different, when they had a choice about how they were going to proceed?
Let's back up just a few days, and I'm thinking because of the question you asked me about the summer.In the days immediately preceding the election, there was some real concern about what Donald Trump would do and how he would respond to a loss.It wasn't concern that was expressed publicly by Republican leaders or people within his Cabinet, but it was certainly one that was talked about privately.On the Saturday before the election, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley and the top military leadership actually convened a meeting, a call, a conference call with one representative of each of the five networks, television networks, and the message from Chairman Milley was that the Department of Defense, the U.S. military, was not going to be involved in any effort to overturn the election, was not going to take part in any election disputes.They were going to remain neutral.
And that seems like an obvious thing to say.But the fact that he had to convene top people at all the five networks shows that he was really worried that the military was going to be called in by the president in some kind of an effort basically to effectuate a coup, to prevent election results from going forward.
That was one item.The other is Mitch McConnell was having conversations with fellow Republican leaders in the days before the election about what to do if Donald Trump refused to concede.And there was discussion, a plan that never actually went forward, but this tells you the level of concern that they had. There was a discussion of the need to come forward and to make it very clear immediately after the election that the results of the election were going to be respected, because they knew that Trump was not going to accept defeat, and that it could be very tense in the U.S. And one of the plans was to make it clear, even if it's before a winner is formally declared, to telegraph that the results are going to be respected.
But that was the road not taken.Mitch McConnell, the Republican leadership and the Congress, as Trump started to challenge the election results, as Trump's top aides and people like Donald Trump Jr. were out there immediately … even before the vote counting was finished, were declaring fraud and a stolen election.Again, Republican leaders actually stood back and either said nothing or, in the case of Kevin McCarthy, actually went on television and repeated the allegations.I mean, McCarthy went on Fox News and flatly said that there was fraud all over the place after the election.
… But that decision for a month, you know, after he knew that this was a concern, after he knew it was a warning… what was that choice?Why did he make that choice?
McConnell, for days after the election, and then for weeks after the election, and then for more than a month after the election, said nothing publicly as he saw Donald Trump out there repeating allegations about fraud and a stolen election that McConnell knew were totally false and were lies.
And McConnell said nothing.He was deeply concerned about it.He told people privately he was concerned about it.But McConnell was focused on Jan. 5—not Jan. 6, Jan. 5.Jan. 5 was the Senate runoff elections in Georgia, where there was going to be a runoff for both Georgia Senate seats, and McConnell needed to win at least one of those seats to remain the Republican leader, to remain the majority leader in the Senate.And he was worried that by coming out and publicly criticizing Trump or disagreeing with Trump or picking a fight with Trump by saying there was no fraud, he was worried that this would cause Republicans in Georgia to become angry, and it would hurt his chances at winning those Senate seats.
So McConnell felt like he was paralyzed.McConnell felt like he had to kind of watch Trump play it out.In his mind, I believe he thought that Trump would eventually give it up.He would pursue all these lawsuits.There were more than 60 lawsuits by Trump and his allies.They all came back with losses.And McConnell thought that he could kind of watch that and that Trump would eventually give in.But he believed that if he came out and spoke about it publicly that it would backfire and it would hurt him in Georgia.It was a political calculation.It was a stone cold political calculation.If Mitch McConnell came out and said what he firmly believed to be true, that the election fraud allegation was all a lie, that picking a fight with Donald Trump was going to hurt him in the Georgia Senate races.So he stayed silent.
I mean, he must have been concerned at some level, because you say he was operating behind the scenes.He was contacting the attorney general.What was he trying to do behind the scenes?
McConnell believed that it was dangerous what Trump was doing, creating this idea that the election was stolen and suggesting that he could do something to overturn it.So McConnell, feeling that he couldn’t be the one that publicly pushed Trump on this, reached out privately to Attorney General Bill Barr—who, by the way, Bill Barr is one of the most popular Republicans among the Trump base.In terms of the Trump Cabinet, there's nobody more popular among the people wearing red hats at the Trump rallies.They saw him as the real tough guy, Trump's tough guy, and a real no-nonsense pro-Trump conservative.
But Barr knew that there was no election fraud, too, and he reached out.McConnell reached out to Barr in late November a couple, two, three weeks after the election and said: "You've got to talk to Trump.You're the one that can do it.You've got to tell him to give this stuff up.You've got to come out and say there was no fraud. It's time for a peaceful transition.You're the only one with the credibility among the Trump base to be the one to come out and give that message, both personally on a one-on-one basis to Trump, and if that doesn't work, to say it publicly."And Barr did come out on Dec. 1—so, over three weeks after the election—and said that there was no fraud of any significance that would change the outcome of the election.
… So all of these crazy allegations about the election being stolen and the roadshow that Rudy Giuliani is running around the country trying to get state legislatures involved to say there was fraud and something needs to be done about it, all the lawsuits that were being lost, all the crazy conspiracy theories that are being repeated by Trump himself, by Trump's lawyers, by lawyers associated with Trump, all that's been going on for more than four weeks before Barr finally comes out and says flatly: "It's all bunk.There was no fraud, no fraud on the scale that would change the results of the election."It was a big moment.But it's also extraordinary to think that we went more than four weeks without a Republican of any stature, either inside the Trump Cabinet or in Congress, saying what everybody knew was true, which is that the election wasn't stolen.
And it's another two weeks before McConnell goes out.And what happens when he does finally deliver his speech congratulating Joe Biden?
… McConnell waited until there could be absolutely no doubt about the election results to come out to congratulate Joe Biden.It was on Dec. 15.That is the day after each state had certified its electoral votes, the deadline being Dec. 14.So the next day, all 50 states have certified their electoral results.Biden is the winner.We all knew that back in November, but, I mean, now that the states have sent in their electoral votes; it is all finalized.McConnell goes to the Senate floor and gives a speech where he congratulates Joe Biden.He also congratulates Kamala Harris and notes that she has made history as the first African American woman to be voted vice president.
And, you know, as far as McConnell's concerned, it's over.He has said it publicly, finally, belatedly, but with no qualifications.“Joe Biden is the winner.I congratulate him.”McConnell leaves the Senate floor to go back to his office, which is right down the hallway.And by the time he gets in his office, there's a phone call from Donald Trump.And Donald Trump, the president, is calling him, screaming at him, "Why did you do that?," basically accusing him of betraying him.He's still fighting the results.Even after the election results are certified, he's fighting the results.And McConnell told me that that was the last conversation that he had with Donald Trump, was after he gave that speech.
… There's also starting to be tension between Liz Cheney and Kevin McCarthy, and it starts over the lawsuit, the Texas lawsuit.And there's a question about whether he's going to sign off on this.What are the conditions of the two of them, and what's motivating Liz Cheney to be so strong in what she's saying to Kevin McCarthy, and how does it play out?
Liz Cheney never bought in on the election fraud stuff at all, and as she saw Trump continuing to push it, she became increasingly concerned. …There's a point of total absurdity here where the Texas attorney general decides to sue several of the states that Biden has won to say that their electoral votes should be thrown out because of alleged fraud, including Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia.And there's this big movement on the part of Trump's allies to get everybody on board to support this Texas lawsuit.
So the first thing they did was they get Republican state attorneys general to sign on.So several attorneys general from around the country, Republicans sign on to join Texas in this lawsuit.But then there's this effort to get members of Congress to sign what's called an amicus brief, a friend of the court brief, to say that they agree with the Texas attorney general that these votes should be thrown out from the states that Biden won.
Think about how crazy this lawsuit is.It's a lawsuit to basically say that the votes from these states that Biden won shouldn’t count, so the millions of voters in places like Michigan and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania—that their votes shouldn’t count because of these allegations of fraud.Just throw them out.
And of course, if you throw them out, what happens?Trump is left with the majority of electoral votes, and he wins reelection.
But it's a completely meritless lawsuit.It's one of the most ridiculous lawsuits.It'll go down in history as one of the most ridiculous lawsuits ever to make its way to the Supreme Court from a group of several state attorneys general.I mean, it's just insane.And Liz Cheney sees this effort to try to get Republican members to sign on to support this Texas lawsuit, and it's absurd.She believes it's dangerous, so she starts whipping her fellow Republicans in the House saying, "You cannot sign onto this.This is it.This has no merit.It's filled with nonsense, and it's dangerous.It's creating the impression that the Supreme Court can somehow overturn an election that's already been certified by the states."And she's making this case and making it with some passion to her fellow Republicans.
And she talks to Kevin McCarthy about it.And the impression that she gets from Kevin McCarthy is that Kevin McCarthy entirely agrees with her that this lawsuit has no merit.And McCarthy is not one of the Republicans that has signed on to support it, at least at this point.The filing goes in to the Supreme Court, and it's got well over 100 Republicans signing on to support it, but not Kevin McCarthy.
And then suddenly, a few hours later, there's an amended filing, and it includes the names of several more Republicans, including Kevin McCarthy.And Liz Cheney told me that McCarthy absolutely assured her that he would not sign onto the lawsuit.I've asked McCarthy about this.McCarthy says that he never actually said that, but it's possible that one of his senior aides told Liz that but that they were wrong.But the bottom line is Kevin McCarthy, after weeks of not saying anything about this, came on and fully went in with those that were trying to use the courts to overturn the election.
It raises a big question when you have about 100 representatives in Congress signing onto a lawsuit like that, and the question it raises is whether they believe it, what they're doing, because they’ve been watching what in your book you describe—the RNC press conference with Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, and they're referring to them as "the crazies" inside the White House, and they're watching this.So that's my question, is over this period—and you've got the elected leadership or the elected Republicans in Washington.What are they thinking when they're watching that?What are they thinking when they're watching the RNC press conference?Are they believing these allegations?
Very few people believed these allegations.The Republicans in the House, the Republicans in the Senate, for the most part—there are some outliers, but for the most part, they all knew that this was BS.Ronna McDaniel, who was the chairwoman of the Republican Party, actually made a point of not attending Rudy Giuliani's press conference that was held in the lobby of her building, in the lobby of the RNC.And not only that, not only was she not there, she was not even in Washington.She was back in Michigan.She instructed her staff at the RNC not to go to the press conference.
She felt that she could not deny the president's attorney the right to hold a press conference there—after all, he was the leader of the Republican Party, effectively—but she didn't want to be part of it and she didn't want anybody on her staff to be part of it because she knew it was all BS.And Kevin McCarthy knew that.Mitch McConnell knew that.We have now learned that even people inside the White House—we know that Jared Kushner did not believe these allegations.We know—we learned that Bill Barr didn't believe them.I mean, people all around Trump knew this was nonsense, but very few of them came out to publicly say it was nonsense.And the belief was that if they could just placate Donald Trump, if they could just show him that they were fighting and they were doing everything that they could possibly do that he would see that, and then once it failed, you know, he could concede.He could concede without saying he didn't fight.
And obviously that was never going to happen.The more Donald Trump was placated, the more extreme he got, and the more willing he was to use any means necessary to remain the president and to stop the election results from confirming Joe Biden as the next president.
And that brings us to the next part, which is in late December, which is the question of was this just Trump making noise about it and being upset about it, or was there actually a plan to overturn the election?And there's a meeting in the book, which is an interesting one, where there's Marjorie Taylor Greene and Gaetz and Gohmert, and I think Pence is even there.
Yeah, they go in to meet with Pence at one point.
Yeah, and Greene comes out and tweets afterwards.Can you describe that meeting, and can you answer the question of was there actually a plan to find a way to overturn the election?Were they serious about it?
By the way, the Texas attorney general's lawsuit lost.I mean, it was dismissed by the court 9-0.I mean, it had absolutely no merit whatsoever.So it didn't go anywhere.It was never going to go anywhere.
… So after the demise of the Texas attorney general's lawsuit, all the attention is focused on Jan. 6 as the last chance to stop Biden's election victory.And the focus is on what Congress can do and how there is a provision in the Electoral Count Act of 1887 for how electoral votes can be challenged by Congress.And it requires somebody in the House and somebody from the Senate to object and then there being votes in each chamber.It's a procedure that was never going to have a chance, but there's a strategy meeting at the White House to try to figure a way to rally support to get Congress to overturn the election results by voting to challenge and throw out the results in six of the contested states, states that Biden won that Trump claimed that he won.
And this strategy meeting includes the president's staunchest allies in Congress, including Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, Jim Jordan.They come together, and they have actually a series of meetings at the White House.They even meet with Pence at one point because the focus is, we're soon going to see—to try to get Pence to use his power as the person that's presiding over the counting of electoral votes, the person with the gavel, to use his power to overturn the election.But this is basically the last stand.They’ve lost on Election Day.They’ve lost the various recounts that were done in the states.They lost Georgia actually three times; the votes were counted three separate times.They’ve lost 60-plus lawsuits.Now, can they get Congress to overturn it?And if they don't have the votes to get Congress to overturn the election, can they convince the vice president to use this mythic power that they think he has, which he doesn't, to single-handedly turn the election for Donald Trump?
I mean, it is really an effort—it is really, truly an effort to overturn a presidential election.This has gone way beyond, you know, "We're going to go out there and make noise and tell people we won, and we're going to try to challenge results in the courts, and we want recounts in elections that are close."This is way beyond that.We've seen that stuff in elections throughout American history, and that's part of the process.This is an effort to overturn an election that has already been certified by all 50 states, an election that is absolutely not in doubt, an election where there were efforts over the course of several weeks to try to prove that there was fraud; that counting didn't happen in the way that it was supposed to happen; that rules were violated.Every single one of those efforts failed.
So now, it's "Can we use the blunt force of Republicans in Congress to turn over the election?And if we can't do that, can we somehow get the guy with the gavel?After all, he's our vice president.Can we get him to overturn the election?"That's what it was.
… One of the people who's at the center of this and who this puts a lot of pressure on is Kevin McCarthy.And you write about how he was operating behind the scenes and the confrontation with Mark Meadows and his decision to play an inside game and not an outside public game.
Can you describe what Kevin McCarthy's role was as Jan. 6 is getting closer and closer?
… Kevin McCarthy is not just the most powerful Republican in the House, the Republican leader.He's somebody who's very close to Donald Trump.They had developed quite a relationship.It was, in McCarthy's view, a very productive relationship.He felt that he was able to channel Trump towards a path to achieve some Republican goals, including obviously the tax cuts, cutting regulations, you know, various—he felt that he had a productive working relationship with Donald Trump.
But Kevin McCarthy knew as much as anybody that there was absolutely nothing to the allegations of widespread fraud.Kevin McCarthy knew as well as anybody that Donald Trump lost the election, that Joe Biden won.But he felt, as he always felt during the Trump years, that his best way to get to the end result that he wanted—which, in this case, was a peaceful transition—was to work the inside game with Trump, to try to manage his ego and steer him gently towards the right direction.
So McCarthy would privately tell his colleagues that Trump lost; he knows that he lost; he's getting there; this is difficult on him; we just need to kind of manage him, show him that we're pushing every last effort to ensure that he gets a fair hearing on his allegations about the election.But we just have to kind of manage him and coax him in the right direction.That's what Kevin McCarthy was trying to do.
And by the way, Donald Trump is still the president as he's challenging the election results and refusing to concede, and there's still important work that has to be done.There's a huge government funding bill that has passed, and if it isn’t signed into law by Donald Trump, there’ll be a government shutdown.There's a pandemic.There's a big pandemic relief bill that's needed to deal with the pandemic.There's a lot else that needs to get done, and all Donald Trump wants to talk about is the election.
Every meeting, I am told, every significant meeting in the White House, whether it was on the threat of Iran or how to deal with coronavirus or what to do with the government funding bill or anything, Trump would come back to the election and election fraud—every single meeting.Well, at one point, right around Christmas, government funding is set to elapse.Congress has passed a bill to fund the government past the inauguration, and Trump decides all of a sudden that he's going to veto it, and he announces on Twitter that he's going to veto it, which means that you'd have a government shutdown in the middle of a pandemic in the middle of a looming constitutional crisis over a president refusing to concede.Imagine what that meant and what that was looking like.
… McCarthy was out in California about to go under anesthesia to get elbow surgery when he finds out that Trump has tweeted his intention to veto the funding bill, to create a government shutdown in the middle of a pandemic in the middle of a constitutional crisis in December, right over the holidays.And he goes in, he has the surgery, and when he comes out, he engages in this full-on effort to try to coax Trump."No, no, you have to sign this.Your own people negotiated it.Republicans all voted for it.You need to sign this.If you don't, there's going to be a shutdown that's going to have terrible economic implications.It's going to be awful.It's going to make you look bad."And he's working—Lindsey Graham is involved in this effort.Steve Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, is involved in this effort.They're trying to convince Trump that he's got to sign this bill, and they know that the consequences will really be bad if there's a shutdown.They're always bad, but this would've been borderline catastrophic.And McCarthy gets Trump to sign the bill.Like at the last minute, he finally concedes and says he'll sign it.
But that's classic McCarthy.McCarthy believes that he accomplished something very good there.And he arguably did.He prevented a government shutdown by getting an increasingly irrational president to do what any rational human being would've done in that position, which is sign the bill.But he figures if he had gone out and he had publicly criticized Trump for it or he made it a public fight, Trump would've dug in; it would've backfired.And that's what McCarthy thinks in terms of the election fraud allegations and the refusal to concede.He just thinks that if he can placate Trump long enough, he'll get him to the right place.Of course, all it does is it gets Trump to more and more and more extreme positions, which culminate in Jan. 6.
I mean, and at one point, McCarthy has to make a choice, which they have this conference call on Jan. 1 in advance of Jan. 6, and Liz Cheney is advocating one position about certifying these results, and McCarthy either has another position or isn’t willing to articulate it.What's the difference between the two of them and how they see their role in that moment as Jan. 6 is approaching?
In late December, this effort to try to get Republicans in Congress to vote to overturn the election results is really gaining steam in the House among the House Republicans, and there's a major effort led by Trump's staunchest allies to get every Republican on board.Liz Cheney is leading an effort on the other side because she believes that, first of all, it's unconstitutional; it's basically against the law to do what they're going to do.She also thinks it's not conservative.
… The idea that Congress is going to overrule the decisions of millions of people at the state level she thinks is crazy, not conservative, not constitutional, not legal.So Liz Cheney writes this lengthy memo addressed to all her fellow Republicans explaining why she thinks this is the wrong thing to do, and she quotes extensively from the various lawsuits that the Trump legal team has lost to buttress her argument that there was no real fraud.And it's very clever because the judges that she is quoting from are all Republican appointees.These are conservative judges.These are conservative judges making the case that Trump's efforts have no merit.So Liz Cheney is really pushing this with a passion and an aggressiveness to try to convince her fellow Republicans not to sign onto an effort to overturn the election on Jan. 6.
Kevin McCarthy is not actually taking a position on it.And there's a conference call with the full House Republican Conference, all the Republican House members.And they're debating this, and Liz Cheney is making an impassioned argument, "Don't sign on.The election is over.Biden has won.This is unconstitutional, this effort.Don't do it."Trump's allies are making the case, "No, there's all fraud.We've got to sign on."And finally, one of the Republicans on the call asks Kevin McCarthy, "Kevin, what should we do?You're the leader.What's your opinion on this?"
And McCarthy, instead of giving an answer, pushes back and says, "What?You want to give me your vote card and I'll vote for you?Do what you want to do."He says that this is not his role to tell people what to think or how to vote, which is a strange thing for the Republican leader, because Republican leaders—well, party leaders in Congress always are telling their members how they think they should vote.That's the process.Not on every bill, not on every issue, but on most issues, there's a party position."We think you should support the tax cut; we think you should oppose the effort to do X, Y or Z."That's what you do.
But McCarthy refuses to say how he will vote on the election challenges or to give any advice to Republicans who are hearing these arguments about what they should do.And in fact, as the days go on approaching Jan. 6, McCarthy never actually says flat-out how he is going to vote on this effort to challenge the elections until Jan. 6 comes.
It's an amazing moment, and just as amazing a moment from a journalism perspective is you running into Kevin McCarthy the next day on Jan. 2, because it's so revealing about the way he approaches things and how he thinks about it.Can you tell me what happened?
I saw Kevin McCarthy on the National Mall on Saturday, Jan. 2.It was a beautiful day.It was right before sunset.It was cold, but it was a very nice day, and I took a walk with him on the Mall.And I was very interested in what he was going to do as Jan. 6 approached and how he would handle this election challenge.And I asked him.He didn't give me an answer.And I said, "This is a real opportunity for you," because McConnell has spoken.He's spoken out forcefully against it.All the living former Defense secretaries that day had just written an op-ed, Republican and Democrat, coming out against this idea and calling for an orderly transition.But the one significant voice in the party that had said nothing about it was Kevin McCarthy, and he was the leader of these House Republicans that were pushing to overturn the election.And I said, "This could be your chance to make history because you can come out.You may be the person they’ll listen to.If you come out and give a speech from the House floor and say there's nothing to the fraud charges, Joe Biden won, we should congratulate him on his victory and get back to doing the work of the people, it could really have an impact."And I actually really believe that it could have had an impact.And I didn't know what McCarthy was going to do.And he was dismissive of the idea that it would make any difference, that it would make a difference.
And to emphasize my point and to exaggerate my point, but to make my point, we're walking on the Mall towards the Lincoln Memorial, and I pointed out, I said, "Who knows?If you do this effectively, maybe there’ll be a statue of you out here someday.I mean, you will be the one that told the truth and convinced the Republican Party to stand down and to recognize what losing candidates in every presidential election in American history had done until that moment, which is concede.And, you know, this could be a big moment."And he laughed at me, and he said, "Where's the statue for Jeff Flake?Where's the statue for that guy from Tennessee?," meaning Bob Corker, the Republican senator from Tennessee.Both of those Republicans had challenged Donald Trump during the early part of the Trump administration, and both were rewarded with obscurity.Neither one ran for reelection, facing likely defeat in Republican primaries and were basically not heard from again on the public stage.
And his point was that challenging Donald Trump as a Republican always backfired, and what he had done by working the inside game was actually more effective.And Kevin McCarthy continued to play that inside game, and he was playing that inside game when the Capitol building was attacked.And in fact, Kevin McCarthy continued to play the inside game even after the Capitol was attacked when the protesters, the rioters, the insurgents, whatever you want to call them were finally cleared out of the Capitol building and Congress came back in at 8:00 in the evening of Jan. 6 to get back to the work of certifying the election results.
There was a big question, which is would the Republicans continue to challenge the election results, or would they, after this searing experience of seeing the Capitol itself attacked by Trump supporters, back down?Well, a lot of Republicans did back down, particularly in the Senate.Kevin McCarthy decided to continue to challenge the election results, even after the attack on the Capitol.
The other bulwark in this attempt—there's the House, and then there's the Senate.And Mitch McConnell's trying to keep any senators from joining in the effort.And there's a moment you recount about his plan to stop Josh Hawley from going forward with his announced plans.I think it's revealing about McConnell's power at that moment.How did that play out?How did McConnell's attempts to keep the senators from joining this effort work?
Under the Electoral Count Act, which governs how the election is certified on Jan. 6, one of the provisions is that the only way that you can have a vote of Congress of challenging election results is if you have at least one member of each chamber to sign onto the effort.So the Republicans in the House—there were well over 100 of them by the time you got into December that were already signed onto an effort to challenge the election results.But no Republican in the Senate had yet said that they would join this effort.So if no Republican in the Senate joins it, nothing is done.The certification goes forward.No harm, no foul.McConnell was focused intently on ensuring that no Republican would sign onto this effort.And he actually went and told his fellow Senate Republicans that he believed that this would be the most important vote that they would ever cast.
It's really an amazing statement from Mitch McConnell, because again, it's getting at what Liz Cheney was getting at when she was trying to convince House members not to sign it, which is by signing onto this, you are saying that Congress should have the power to overturn the votes of millions of Americans in the states.It's, McConnell believed, unconstitutional, and it's not conservative.It's exactly what conservatives are against, the idea of Washington taking power away from the people and the states.So McConnell was passionate about this and telling his senators, "You cannot sign onto this.Do not sign.Under no circumstances can you sign onto this."Well, Josh Hawley announced he was going to sign on, so the cat's out of the bag.
So now there are going to be counts in both chambers about throwing out the electoral votes for Joe Biden in the contested states.And McConnell is furious.He convenes a conference call of all Republican senators, and on the call, he demands to know from Josh Hawley why he did what he just did.Why is he saying he's going to join this?How can he justify this?And it's a conference call.We're in the Zoom days of the pandemic, and there's no answer.So he repeats the question, and one of the senators says, "Maybe he's having some technical difficulties speaking up," and still no answer.And finally, somebody says, "Sir, I don't believe Sen. Hawley is on the call."
He didn't even bother to call into the meeting of Republican senators to justify what he did.And once he did what he did, of course, the other very conservative senators who were trying to—had ambitions themselves of winning support among the Trump faithful piled right on.And pretty soon, you had 14 senators saying that they were going to join this effort to challenge the election results.
The last character before Jan. 6—in some ways, maybe the most important one—is Mike Pence, who's put under just tremendous pressure, and it's so interesting watching him because you've watched him for—I mean, you've seen him up close, but we've watched him from afar.And he seemed like the silent guy in the back, the guy who was always talking, praising Trump, who's been a loyal soldier for all this time.And the relationship goes in a completely different direction.Can you help us understand what happens, the pressure that's on him and why he does what he does?
Pence is a profoundly conservative guy, both in terms of his politics, you know, politically conservative, but conservative in how he lives his life and his approach to his personal and professional life.As vice president, Mike Pence was entirely loyal.He never crossed Trump about anything, never uttered a single word of public criticism of Trump going back to the campaign in 2016.Never.Never anything critical.He was the loyal lieutenant.He was the only person in the Trump administration that Trump couldn’t fire because he was elected vice president.But even so, he never used that independence.He was always fully faithful and supportive of Donald Trump.
… But Trump became consumed with the idea that Mike Pence could single-handedly overturn the election because he was presiding over this final certification of the electoral votes.And he started talking about it privately at first, and then eventually he's talking about it publicly.He says it on Jan. 4, two days before Congress comes together on the 6th when he's campaigning in Georgia.Trump says, "I hope Mike Pence is going to do the right thing.I really like him.If he doesn't, I won't like him so much."That was what he said publicly.But privately, it was more intense.I mean, the pressure was on.He kept on telling Pence to his face, "You can do it.You're the one person who can save the election," because Trump saw that this effort to get Congress to vote to overturn the election wasn't going to work.There wasn't enough support in Congress for it.They had lost all the legal cases; that hadn’t worked.They'd lost the recounts; that didn't work.
So the only thing he had left really was this idea that Pence could bring the gavel down and say, "You know what?Pennsylvania, your votes don't count.There was fraud.Michigan, your votes don't count.There was fraud," and thereby leaving Donald Trump with more electoral votes than Joe Biden.This was his crazy idea.I mean, it's absurd.But not only was Trump taking it seriously; this group of legal advisers that he had around him, people like John Eastman, were telling him, "Oh, we absolutely can do this.Pence, of course he can do this.Pence is the one that can make this happen."So Trump was really, really laying it on heavily with Mike Pence and had a series of meetings with him.
There's one on Jan. 4 in the Oval Office.You can actually see pictures of this meeting, because the White House press corps was outside waiting for the president to depart on Marine One to go to Georgia to a campaign event.And you can see Pence is in the Oval Office; Trump is in the Oval Office; Pence's chief of staff was in the Oval Office; these lawyers advising Trump were there.And this is all an intense argument: "Mike, you have the power to do it."And Mike Pence really, for the first time that I can document, flatly tells the president, "No, you are wrong.The vice president, me as vice president, I don't have the power to overturn electoral votes; that one person cannot determine who the president is; that my job is ceremonial.I count the votes; I preside over the session.It's a formality."
And Trump absolutely does not—won't take it.Then, on the morning of Jan. 6, Trump still hasn’t given up on the idea that Pence will do this.He's still clinging to this idea.And he calls up Pence in the morning before Pence is to go up to the Capitol to preside over the session.It was reported by <i>The New York Times</i> that Trump told Pence, "You have a choice.You can either be a patriot, or you can be a p----."2Patriot means turn the election over to me; being a p---- means being afraid to use your power.I thought that was kind of a crazy thing.I had doubts of whether or not it really happened that way.So when I interviewed Donald Trump, I asked him in March of 2021 after he had left the White House, I said, "Is that true?"And he told me he wouldn’t dispute it.He effectively confirmed that he said to Mike Pence on the morning of Jan. 6, "You have a choice of being a patriot or being a p----."
2
New York Times: Pence Reached His Limit With Trump. It Wasn’t Pretty.
And if you listen to the speech that Donald Trump gave on Jan. 6, there's been so much attention to when he says, "Fight like hell," and, "I'm going to come up with you, and we're going to go to the Capitol."But look at that speech, at how many times he invokes the name Mike Pence, over and over and over again.He is telling that crowd not once, not twice, not three times, but many times that the thing they want most, which is to "stop the steal," to keep Joe Biden from becoming president, that the thing they want the most, that the one person that can make it happen is Mike Pence.
So is it any surprise, that as those Trump supporters are attacking the Capitol, that some of them are chanting, "Hang Mike Pence"?I mean, the president himself has said that that's the guy that can do it, and he didn't.
And as absurd as it might’ve been or as illegal as it might’ve been, I mean, Pence had the power to throw it all into chaos.
Pence absolutely had the power to throw it all into chaos.One of the haunting questions that I asked over and over again in reporting for my book on this was: What would've happened if Pence did what Trump wanted?And there is no good answer.Some people, cavalier, say, "Well, he would've gone to the Supreme Court, and they would've thrown it out."It's entirely unclear that the Supreme Court would've had the authority to intervene on a dispute between effectively the Congress and the executive branch on this issue, because the Congress doesn't give the court a role in this.It very clearly defines a role for Congress in the counting of the votes and a role for the vice president in presiding over that count.It doesn't say what would happen if the vice president doesn't do what he is instructed to do.
And I really believe that if Mike Pence had done what Trump wanted him to do, it's not that Trump would've therefore won the election.It's that the certification of the election that is supposed to happen under a system and a process that is clearly defined in the Constitution would not have happened, and there would've been ambiguity about who the president was.There would've been chaos in the country.There almost certainly would've been violence in the country.I mean, Pence defied Trump once, and it was the most important defiance of a president ever done by a vice president.You could call it a moment of courage.I don't know if that's accurate.He was certainly under incredible pressure.
Really, all he did was what he had to do, if he was not going to break the law.But it was a courageous act in that, you know, he was defying not just Trump, but all his supporters that were out there demanding that he do what Trump said he could do.And when he didn't do it, some of them wanted him killed.Literally.They wanted him executed.
Another detail I wanted to get from you was that he mentioned Liz Cheney, and Dick Cheney is watching, presumably, and sees this.What does he perceive about the danger to his daughter at that moment, and what happened?
… Liz Cheney is on the floor of the House when her phone rings, and it's her father, the former vice president.And he's been watching Donald Trump give this speech outside the White House and attacking her, and he warns her not to give the speech that she had planned to give on Jan. 6, which was a speech saying that the election fraud was nonsense and that Joe Biden legitimately won, and that the idea that Congress can overturn an election is unconstitutional.It was going to be a forceful speech; it was going to be a strong speech.Dick Cheney agreed with every single word of the speech—he had read it ahead of time—but he thought that it was going to provoke Trump's supporters to go after his daughter, and he told her not to give the speech.
As it turned out, Liz never had the opportunity to give the speech because not long after that phone call, the Capitol building was attacked and Congress was evacuated, and the evacuation happened before Liz Cheney had a chance to give that speech.
Jan. 6 and the Aftermath
There's another detail from that day that may be disputed, maybe not, is the phone call between McCarthy and Trump.What do you know about that phone call and what happened between them?And where was Kevin McCarthy on that day?
Kevin McCarthy was in the House as the Capitol was being attacked.He was in the chamber as the Capitol was breached.And with these attackers coming in and, in some cases, making it clear that what they wanted to do was they wanted to go after the congressional leaders, the top congressional leaders were evacuated from the Capitol building.Speaker Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, Chuck Schumer were taken out by their security detail to a facility not far from the Capitol that is set up as a place where Congress can operate if something were to ever happen to the Capitol building.McCarthy is actually the last leader left in the Capitol.He doesn't want to leave.But finally, there were reports of gunfire off the House chamber.Turned out that one of those reports was not true.It wasn't gunfire.But there were reports of gunfire.McCarthy is finally convinced that he has to get out of the Capitol and go off to this location, this secure location.
And as he's leaving, he has a phone call with Donald Trump.And he tells Trump he's got to get out there and to publicly make a statement that everybody needs to go home.These are his own supporters that are inside the Capitol building attacking the place; that Trump needs to come on and tell everybody to go home and to stand down.And Trump is not listening to him.And Trump says to him, "Kevin, they're just upset because they believe it more than you," meaning that they believe the election was stolen more than Kevin McCarthy.McCarthy, according to the account of the call that I have, which I am firmly confident in, gets angry with Trump and says, effectively, "Who are you to say that?I've been fighting for you."And he had been, right?
I mean, McCarthy hadn’t crossed Trump at all.And McCarthy becomes angry, and he tells Trump that there's just been gunfire off right near his office, that he is evacuating as they were speaking, and that he's got to get out there and stop it.It's one of the most tense conversations that the two men ever had.But McCarthy spoke a little bit about this publicly.As a matter of fact, I reached out to McCarthy on Jan. 6 and first asked, you know, where he was and was he OK.And he said yes.And I said, "Can you come on ABC and talk about this?"And I connected him to our control room, and he went on, and he did an interview with George Stephanopoulos, and he said that he had called Trump, and he had begged him to come out and talk publicly.And he said, "And he told me he will, and he's going to."But he acknowledged that this part of the phone conversation, that he was pleading with Trump that he'd come out and do something to stop the riot.
And of course, Trump didn't.I mean, you know, hours go by.Yeah, there's a tweet from Trump about the Capitol Police, but he doesn't do anything.He doesn't come before the cameras.He doesn't do anything until the attack on the Capitol was underway for about three hours when he releases a video statement.It was hardly adequate.He said, you know, he says, "This is what happens when people see that an election's been stolen."He was justifying their anger.
And then at the end of the video clip, he says, "Please go home."But then he adds, "We love you.""We love you"!That's what he says to the people that had just then, still ongoing inside the Capitol, rampaging through the Capitol building.
When they get back—
"We love you; you are special.""We love you; you are special."These are people that have assaulted the U.S. Capitol building, have attacked Capitol Police officers, are trying to stop the proceedings of Congress, and Trump does tell them to go home but then immediately adds, "We love you; you are special."
They do get back.And the simmering tensions between Liz Cheney and Kevin McCarthy—which in some ways you think of as being finalized months later—but you describe a difference of opinion between the two of them about how to proceed after Jan. 6.What happens between Liz Cheney and Kevin McCarthy on that very day?
The first real break between Kevin McCarthy and Liz Cheney happens when Congress comes back into session at 8:00 on Jan. 6.Liz Cheney is working while Congress has been evacuated to try to convince everybody that was signed onto this effort to throw out and challenge electoral votes from the states Biden won to drop those challenges.After all, we've just seen the Capitol attacked; now it's time for everybody to come together and call for a peaceful transition.
And Liz Cheney is talking to McCarthy about that, and she believes McCarthy is with her.Even though McCarthy had supported this effort, thinks that now McCarthy must obviously agree that we've got to stop and we have to come together.And she has a conversation with Kevin McCarthy and based on that conversation believes that McCarthy is going to do what she believes is the right thing, which is saying, "Drop all the objections; congratulate Joe Biden; call for a peaceful transition."So McCarthy, after Congress comes back in, steps up to give his speech to the House.Liz Cheney is in the House listening to Kevin McCarthy, waiting for him to say what she believes he's going to say.But instead of calling off the effort to challenge the electoral votes, McCarthy makes it clear that he still is going to support the effort to challenge Biden's victory.
And before McCarthy is done reading his speech, Liz Cheney, in disgust, stands up and walks out of the chamber.And that's the beginning of the end of that relationship.It would go through many other twists and turns in the weeks and months afterwards, but that's a decisive break.Liz Cheney sees that even after the building was assaulted, McCarthy is unwilling to stand up to the Republicans who are trying to overturn the election and to say what Liz knows that Kevin knows, which is that it's all bunk; the election wasn't stolen; it's time to move on.
… It felt on that day and on those days after watching Lindsey Graham, watching McConnell's speech, watching the funders saying that they're not going to be supporting people who voted to overturn the election, it felt like a turning point, like maybe the party was going to go a different way.What happened?What changed?
Republicans, by and large, were entirely horrified by Donald Trump's behavior on Jan. 6.I mean, not all.Obviously he's got his cabal of people, particularly in the House, who would follow him no matter what he did.But the thing that really solidified it for a lot of the people who had been the president's supporters was the fact that he did nothing to stop the riot while it was undergoing, the fact that he didn't come out until way too late to tell people to go home, the fact that he didn't condemn the attack on the Capitol.
And there was a real sense that he was done.There were conversations late on Jan. 6 into Jan. 7 that perhaps the Cabinet would come together and invoke the 25th Amendment, which would allow the Cabinet to remove the president from power because he was mentally unfit.There were conversations that impeachment, which was clearly going to happen, could lead to not just the House impeaching Donald Trump, but to the Senate actually voting, Republicans in the Senate voting to remove him from office, to convict him.
And I think very few what you would consider Republican leaders thought that Donald Trump had any future at all after that; that basically he'd be lucky if he made it to Jan. 20; that he might be removed from office, or he might be forced to resign.But whatever it was, he was certainly never going to be the leader of the Republican Party again.And you saw some incredibly forceful speeches, I think none more forceful than what Mitch McConnell was saying about Donald Trump, blaming the attack on the Capitol entirely on Trump and describing him as effectively a traitor to the Constitution.
Now, McConnell had made a decision that he wasn't going to vote to convict him.But if you listen to the speech and you didn't get down to the point where he says that he's not going to vote guilty, you would've thought that this was a speech of somebody voting to convict Trump and to remove him from office.Lindsey Graham says he's done with Trump.McCarthy gives a speech on Jan. 13 as the House is debating impeachment.He's against impeachment, but he makes it clear he believes that Trump is responsible for the attack on the Capitol.
These Republicans thought Trump was a spent force, that he was done, that his behavior was entirely inexcusable, and that he needed to be exiled and done away with.
What happened after that?Well, a lot of those Republicans came right back into the Trump fold.They saw that Republican voters around the country, a lot of them Trump voters, still supported Trump after the attack on the Capitol.Those are their voters.Those are the voters that they need.And they made a calculation that they needed to basically do what they’d been doing before, which is placate Donald Trump.I mean, Kevin McCarthy makes a visit to Mar-a-Lago on Jan. 28.This is, you know, barely a week after Trump has left office.Three weeks after the attack on the Capitol, and he's going down to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Donald Trump.And you see that famous photograph.
Now, McCarthy at that time privately told people, "Well, I didn't know they were going to take a picture.I didn't release the picture.It was Trump that released the picture.I was down in Florida anyway.I didn't go down specifically to meet with Trump.I figured while I was there, I'd go and see him."But that picture became a powerful symbol that Donald Trump, who had left office in disgrace, eight days later was back in.The most powerful Republican in the House was going down, as a lot of people said—McCarthy said it was the wrong characterization—but a lot of people said to kiss his ring.Trump is back.
It was so fast.One of the details in the book, which is when he's threatening to leave the Republican Party and go independent, and Ronna McDaniels—is that how you say it?
Ronna McDaniel, yeah.
—doesn't say, "We'll see you later," or, "Good luck," but tries to keep him within the party.Was that a turning point within this story that showed his power?
This was such an amazing moment.Donald Trump has a little goodbye party for himself at Andrews Air Force Base, and then he walks up the red carpet into Air Force One.And when he gets to his little office in the front of the plane, there's a phone call from the chairwoman of the Republican Party, Ronna McDaniel.McDaniel was in Michigan, couldn’t make the goodbye party, but she's calling because she wants to wish him well and say, "You accomplished a lot as president.We did a lot together.Good luck."And instead of having a gracious phone call, Trump lays into her and says that, you know, "You failed to fight for me.Republicans abandoned me.The election was stolen.You did nothing about it.I'm leaving.I'm done.I'm leaving the Republican Party.I'm creating my own party."
I got this account from multiple sources, including a source that directly witnessed the phone call.Trump said he was leaving the Republican Party as he boarded Air Force One for the last time, in his last flight as president to go to Florida, and Ronna McDaniel responded by pleading with him not to do it, saying, "If you do that, we all lose.If you do that, you will destroy the party.You will destroy all the people who have worked for you."And he said, "I know, but you deserve it, because you failed to fight for me."Basically, the way the message was summed up to me that Donald Trump told Ronna McDaniel was, "If I lost, everybody deserves to lose."
And you have to understand, Donald Trump is not threatening that he might leave the party.He is telling the chair of the Republican Party that he has made a decision to leave, that it's over, that it's done.Then what happened is, over the course of the next four days as Trump is in Mar-a-Lago, the Republican leadership is absolutely freaked out that if Trump leaves, the party will fragment and there will be no majority.There will be no hope for the Republican Party.So they play hardball with Donald Trump, and they make what amount to a series of threats.The RNC had actually been paying Trump's—many of his legal bills.So the first thing they said was, "Those legal bills?We ain't paying them anymore.That's going to be you that's paying the legal bills."
Then they threaten to make his most valuable political asset worthless.Trump had been renting out—his political organization had been renting out the mailing list.Basically, it's a list of emails of the 40-plus-million regular people who had donated or in some way supported Trump in his efforts.And anytime candidates for offices big and small would rent the ability to use that list to send out fundraising appeals. And McDaniel said, "If you leave, we own that list, too."It was jointly owned."We're going to give it away for free, which means nobody will ever pay you a dime for it."
So he was faced with the idea of losing, effectively, millions and millions of dollars.And within four or five days, Trump backed down, and he said he would stay with the party.But I think that Republican leaders always had that in the back of their mind, that if we take on Trump too forcefully, he could walk away, and if he walks away, he will bring millions of voters with him, and you can kiss the idea of a Republican majority goodbye for a long, long time.
The last story, just to finish, is McConnell and what happens after the moment of Jan. 6.There's how he handles impeachment; there's how he handles the commission.He has to take a different tack than Liz Cheney.What does he do in that period, and why does he reach a different approach than a Liz Cheney does?
McConnell gave his incredibly forceful anti-Trump speech.I think it's probably the most forceful speech that any senator has ever made against a president of his or her own party in the Senate, the speech that McConnell gave during the impeachment trial, or right after the impeachment trial.He makes it clear that he's done with Donald Trump and that Donald Trump had betrayed the country, betrayed the Constitution; that he was responsible for the attack on the Capitol.But after McConnell gives that speech, he believes that Trump is basically done as a political force, that there's no way he could come back from this, and he believes that the best way to respond to that is to basically ignore Donald Trump and to stop criticizing him.Just ignore him, and he'll go away.
So as there's a move forward to create an independent commission to investigate Jan. 6 along the lines of the 9/11 Commission, which investigated the Sept. 11 attacks, would be bipartisan, would be independent.It's got lots of support in the House.It actually has a lot of support in the Senate.McConnell actually comes out against it, forcefully against it, and tells fellow Republicans not to vote for it.Why did he do that?It wasn't because McConnell was suddenly supportive of Donald Trump again.McConnell made a political calculation that if we were still talking about Donald Trump, it was bad for Republicans.So a commission investigating Trump and Jan. 6 was just going to bring more attention and would remind more people about Donald Trump and his role, and it was just not good for Republicans.
… So Liz Cheney is horrified that Mitch McConnell has basically tanked this idea of independent commission to investigate Jan. 6 and shocked that he would do this after all that he'd said about Donald Trump.So she sends him a text message invoking a statue that hangs above Statuary Hall, which every member of Congress walks through as they head towards the House Chamber from the Senate.And it's a statue of Clio, the muse of history.And she writes about how Clio, the muse of history, is there writing in her book, keeping track for history of all the actions of those below.So she's saying that history is recording our deeds, and you have just committed a great sin against history.History is going to remember what you did by standing against this effort to get to the truth of what happened on Jan. 6.
And McConnell didn't answer her and didn't—she didn't hear from him for sometime, until weeks later, Liz Cheney gets a call from Mitch McConnell.And she assumes, when she sees that it's Mitch McConnell, that he's calling to explain and say, "Look," maybe even express some regrets that he didn't support this commission.But instead, McConnell is calling her to tell her to knock it off, basically, saying, "You've got to stop talking so much about Donald Trump.It's hurting the Republican Party.It's going to hurt our chances in the midterm elections.Just stop talking about him."And that was the last really productive conversation that Liz Cheney had with Mitch McConnell.
At the end of all this—the decisions that now McConnell has made, McCarthy has made, the Republican National Committee has made; that they're not going to reject Trump, and in particular they're not going to reject the claims of election fraud, the things that led to Jan. 6; they're going to say it was "legitimate political discourse"; they're going to censure somebody like Liz Cheney—what are the consequences, not for the Republican Party but for American democracy, for our faith in elections, for where we are as a country?What's the consequences of this story?
We've taken for granted that we have a democracy where we come together and we hold elections, presidential elections every four years, congressional elections every two years; that political parties, political candidates fight it out, have disagreements, hard campaigns, sometimes nasty campaigns, negative campaigns.But at the end of those campaigns, voters come together.They cast their votes; the votes are counted.The winner wins; the loser concedes.That's the way it's been.That's American democracy.But the results of all this are that we've seen people's faith in that process eroded to the point where an alarming number of Americans no longer trust election results, so no longer believe in that process.
And if you don't believe that our disagreements, which can sometimes be very serious and heartfelt disagreements, can be legitimately adjudicated through a vote, then what are you going to do?If you don't have faith in that system, what means do you have to fight for what you believe in?And the real danger is that we're left with no choice but to try to resolve our differences through force, through violence.I think that's why we saw the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, because those people had taken to believe the extreme rhetoric that the election was illegitimate; that this was, as some of Trump's allies put it, a "1776 moment."We went to war against England because we didn't believe that the system was legitimate, that the colonists had a say in how they were governed.And now you have an increasing number of people who believe that they don't have a say, that elections are not legitimate.
And by the way, because of the way Republicans have responded, the way Trump and his supporters have responded after Jan. 6 to try to change election laws in the states that they control, you also have an increasing number of Democrats who have doubts about the legitimacy of our elections, because they believe the Republicans are putting in place measures to do what they were accusing Democrats of doing in 2020: stealing the election.So you have, again, across the political spectrum, an alarming number of people who no longer have faith in the very basics of what democracy is, which is you vote; the votes are counted; and a winner is announced.And without faith in that system, it's frightening to think what the alternative is.
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