TOP

Newt Gingrich

Chapters

The FRONTLINE Interviews

Newt Gingrich

Author, Understanding Trump

Newt Gingrich, a former Republican congressman, was the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 1995 to 1999. He is the author of several books, including Understanding Trump and March to the Majority: The Real Story of the Republican Revolution.

The following interview was conducted by the Kirk Documentary Group’s Mike Wiser for FRONTLINE on April 2, 2024, prior to Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race. It has been edited for clarity and length.

This interview appears in:

The Choice 2024

Trump’s Comeback

Text Interview:

Highlight text to share it

Trump Was Never Acceptable to Manhattan Elites

Let me start by just asking, because you've you’ve written three books about Donald Trump, you've written articles about him.What is it about Donald Trump that drew you to try to study who he was and how he fit into things?

Well, when you have somebody who basically comes out of the non-political world and in one jump becomes president of the United States, there's a lot worth studying.And I've always taken the position, whether it was with [Ronald] Reagan or with [Jimmy] Carter or later presidents, that if somebody has whatever it takes to become president, you sort of have an obligation to study them more than they have an obligation to study you.And in Trump's case, his entire career and his rise politically are so remarkable and so outside the American norm that it was a puzzle I simply wanted to explore, and it's so much more multifaceted than the political media is capable of covering that it—I really found it fun writing the books.

… One of the things that you've written about is that it matters that he came out of Queens.Why does it matter where he came from?

Queens is middle class; Manhattan is elite.Trump wanted to join the elite, and they'd never let him in.It didn't matter how much money he got, he would always be that guy from Queens.And so I think he carried with him around the country a very, very different attitude than if he had been a normal Manhattan elitist society member.And the fact is, he couldn't break in.He was anathema.

… And how did that shape him and his appeal down the road?

I think that he learned somewhere that he might as well just be Donald Trump because he was not ever going to be whatever mystical person would be acceptable to the Manhattan elites.And since he was going to be Donald Trump, he might as well just be successful.And if he was successful, he could have a pretty good life.I mean, if you look at the amazing estate out in Westchester and realize that that was only one of many places, the 18 golf courses, hotels around the world, 13 years on NBC in The Apprentice, he forged a path to achievement that was independent of all the normal going to the galas and being part of the hoi polloi [sic].He just concluded he had to be Donald Trump because he couldn't be whoever, whatever kind of person they would have accepted.

The Art of the Comeback

How much of a contradiction did you see there with this billionaire who's very successful in business and in media, but also identifying with white—with working-class Americans?Is he a contradiction?

No, he's a complexity.That's not a contradiction.He probably understands as well as anybody how rough and tough and ruthless the New York real estate business was and that there were no holds given, or no holds barred.And that's the world where he climbed, and so he was tougher, smarter, shrewder, more willing to work at the margins.

I think his most revealing book is The Art of the Comeback, where he opens—the very opening page: Atlantic City had gone sour.The economy was decaying.Interest rates were going up.He owed $900 million to the banks personally, and his wife called to say that she was filing for divorce.And on the opening page, he says, this is the moment where you either get depressed or you start planning a comeback, and this is the story of the comeback.

Now, a guy who has that kind of chutzpah is genuinely unique, and he's proven it over and over again.Virtually every national leader I know of would have crumbled under the total establishment assault that began in '15 and '16 and has been going on now endlessly for eight years.Trump somehow muscles his way through it.It's a remarkable historic achievement, whatever happens in the election.

Do you have a sense of where it comes from?Because he does—you're right: the scandal of the divorce, the bankruptcies; on the political side in the future, Access Hollywood, other things.What is it about him that keeps him going?

I think he described it in that opening page.He has no choice.If he wants to be Donald Trump, he's got to get up in the morning and be Donald Trump.And the morning he can't do that, he won't be Donald Trump.So he's probably as existential a figure as I've ever known personally.Almost in the same kind of way Reagan had a good bit of that; Nelson Mandela had it much more than Trump; [Aleksandr] Solzhenitsyn.You look at these people who are literally engaged in a high-wire act in which fame is on one side and the end of everything is on the other, and those are the kind of people who make history on a big scale.

… He writes about his dad talking about winners and losers, and it sounds like it was a tough family to grow up in and pretty demanding expectations.Do you think that that's part of what shapes him?

Part of it.But I think it's hard for this generation of Americans to appreciate that that was pretty normal.These were people who lived through the Depression, who fought World War I and World War II, who saw themselves shaping history and who sort of thought they'd be winners, that that—and of course his father was very successful.And I think that they were demanding; you know, they sent him off to military school at one point trying to get his attention, and he promptly became captain of the cadets.And there's this great picture of him leading the cadets, marching down Fifth Avenue.

So I think that he—there's something, I don't know whether it's his mother or his father or just genetics.Somehow he acquired a zest for life that's very deep and very real and that allows him to sort of work his way through every challenge, including acts of amazing hostility.

I also think as a part of that, his interaction with Page Six was a big part of his learning, because Page Six made a specialty out of attacking Trump.They loved Trump, and they would attack him, and he would immediately counterattack.And he developed this rhythm of counterpunching, which he still does to this day.But I think it came almost entirely out of his Page Six experience.

Trump’s Understanding of the Media

You wrote, I think, that that wasn't just his personality, but that that was a learned response.What do you mean by that?

Well, he describes it in several of his books, which are, for any real student of Trump, they're worth reading.Even when they had a ghostwriter, the ghostwriter was writing what Donald Trump wanted, and the book is what Donald Trump wanted.

Trump, I think, had a sense of himself that he would be somebody, almost like the scene in On the Waterfront when Marlon Brando says, "I could have been somebody."Well, Trump didn't say it in the past tense: I can be somebody today, doing things today.And he was pretty good at calculating profit opportunities.He made a ton of money out of The Apprentice while becoming a bigger national figure, which an amazing number of Americans watched.I used to always tell reporters that if The Apprentice had come on immediately after Downton Abbey on PBS, they would have understood how formidable Trump was.But because it was on commercial TV, none of them had ever seen it, including the people who were covering him.It didn't occur to them to go and look at the original product.But he spent 13 years on television thinking about an audience.Only Reagan comes close to Trump in understanding media.And in some ways, Trump's experience was more direct.

Trump Was Interested in Politics by the 1980s

… The other thing that's interesting in his backstory is the move into politics, and early on he meets Roy Cohn.What do you think he gets from Roy Cohn being close to him?

I actually don't know.I don't know enough about the relationship.Clearly Cohn was somebody who saw the world as dangerous and who assumed that the establishment was the enemy, and I think Trump picked up some of that; it was compatible with his own view.

But I also think you have to go back and look.You know, Trump is actively thinking about politics by the late 1980s.Oprah [Winfrey] actually asked him in the 1980s, "Are you going to run for president someday?"And I think that there's a sense in the back of his head that if you want to prove to the Manhattanites that you made it, and they won't let you prove it inside their world, well, what if you just become president of the whole country?And I think there's a certain amount of that going on.

Plus, I think he was probably the most rigorous critic of the Bush wing of the Republican Party that existed.He thought the policies were wrong, and he thought that we had been doing the wrong things.And I think people in 2015 really underestimated how bold and how in a profound way radical Trump was compared to the old order.And I think that that was very deep and very real.

I always tell people it's not that Trump is a conservative.Trump is the most effective anti-left politician in modern history, and his reaction is just common sense.He thinks these things are stupid.It's not some William Buckley essay on conservatism; it's just, why would you do things that are stupid?

And you see that from way back, even from the 1980s?

I think in the late '80s, early '90s, he was already there.

Trump’s Politics Formed in the Locker Room and on the Golf Course

Do you know where that comes from, if it's not reading The Fountainhead and it's not reading Buckley, where his political—

I think it came from locker room talk.I think it came from people who—a lot of what Trump says is a combination of what you'd get at the golf club in the locker room and what you'd get hanging out with blue-collar workers.Those folks, you say to them, “Why don't we ship jobs to China?”Brilliant idea if you're in Manhattan and you're a billionaire, because it ain't your job; you're making tons of money.Terrible idea if you're a blue-collar worker.

And you had a series of these things.You know, why do we have a totally impossible green policy trying to force us into cars we don't want using totally insubstantial technologies to generate electricity?Because then we'll at least feel morally superior.Well, in the average golf locker room, people just thought, are these people totally crazy?

And so Trump, in a sense, represents this interesting blend of the insights of the average business executive and the intuitive insights of the average working American.

And then he had learned early on, and I think The Apprentice really helped us, but he learned early on to talk in a language that was accessible by most Americans.I always tell people that Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave all of his fireside chats on radio to a dead upstate New York farmer who was illiterate, who he'd known as a child.And his theory was, if he could write the speech so that that guy would understand it, then everybody would understand it.Well, Trump has a certain similar pattern.He talks at a level which is almost perfect if you want to maximize the number of people who will understand you.

Now, if you're college-educated, you very much prefer the cadence of [former President Barack] Obama because Obama talks like a professor.But if you're not college-educated, you may not prefer having a professor lecture you.And so that's a big part of the gap here in the various appeals, and the way the two parties have been transformed, each by the other.

… There's another interview in 1980 where he's asked about the presidency, and he says that the problem is that if you have unpopular views that you won't be elected and that the guy with the big smile and no substance is the person who's going to be elected.Was Donald Trump sensing even in 1980 that the time wasn't right for him then?Because this is one of the questions about Trump, is whether he's changed or the times changed.

My hunch is, he wasn't rich enough.At that point, he was a rising young entrepreneur.You can't, I think, get around the impact of The Apprentice.He had both skills, an understanding of television as a medium, and nationwide name ID.I mean, when Trump comes down the long elevator in June of 2015, or long escalator, he's already well known by a significant part of the country, and they already like him because they tune in every week to watch him.So he's in that sense closer to Reagan than to any other modern candidate.

Trump’s Willingness to Court Controversy

He has a history of getting involved in controversies, starting with the Central Park Five, things that your traditional politician would stay away from or not wade into a racially charged moment like that.Why is he drawn to an event like the Central Park Five?

Well, I think he's drawn to lots of controversies.Remember, he personally fixes the skating rink in Central Park when the city had been unable to fix it for years.And he saw it as a controversy; he stepped in.He actually got it done and endowed it with the fund which maintains it.¹

Reuters: New operator chosen for NYC ice rink formerly run by Trump

I think Trump is attracted to action and looks—his ears prick up when certain tones and certain patterns show up.

I think if you think about a working-class bar, and a conversation in a working-class bar and the judgments that they tend to render, you're pretty close to Trump.And that's why he resonates with them.They think that he understands them.They think that he reflects their views.And I think that most of the time, virtually all the time, he says what he honestly believes.Sometimes he's wrong; sometimes he's right.He's right more often than not.I mean, the whole immigration thing, which really in a sense propelled him to the presidency and has a chance to propel him again.He had an instinct of where most Americans are, which is totally different from Harvard and Yale.

It seems like there's also an instinct that you've sort of helped us understand maybe of not worrying about what the elites, as he would see them, who have already rejected him would say, because when he does something like Central Park, he's going to come in for criticism but—that's a mystery to me, because he doesn't have any reason, he's not running for office, but he decides to wade into it.

Well, I think he always saw himself as an active citizen and as sort of a civic leader, and I think he did a lot of stuff in that sense.He takes over a golf course in the Bronx.He moves to a lot of places where we need leadership, and none of it's coming forward.I’m always struck.Reagan only made one movie that The New York Times liked, Kings Row.Not another one of his movies got a good review.And that taught Reagan that it was OK; that people went to—bought the ticket, bought the popcorn.He was doing just fine.And I think it made him almost like Margaret Thatcher, totally inured to ignoring this stuff.

Trump learned the same thing.He comments that he wanted to renovate a very important building, and he wanted to keep the facade, which was historic.And the engineers came to him and told him how much it would cost, and he said, "I don't want to keep it that badly.And so we're going to take the facade off."Well, the next day, The New York Times went crazy—big story, big editorial.He said the lesson he learned was that two days later, they'd sold most of the condos because the attacks on him had told people he was building a condominium.

And I think he drew from that the conclusion that it's better to be attacked than to be ignored and that the news media is not ever going to be your friend anyway, so you might as well just play with them.And you're not going to—there's no point, if you're going to be basically an entrepreneurial disruptor, there's no point in worrying about making friends in the news media, because they can't be.

And in the long run, he also learned it doesn't matter.The noise matters more than the prejudice.So I used to laugh because I've been close to Sean Hannity since 1990, and Trump's competitors in 2015 and '16 would go out and spend all day raising money so they could buy ads.Trump would go do an hour on Hannity.Now, he got more total exposure than all of his opponents combined, and he understood that.He'd call into Fox & Friends, you name it.And back then, even the networks that now hate him covered him because he was ratings.

And so he understood that.And this is why Hillary [Clinton] could outspend him two to one and lose, because he understood that earned media will drown paid media.And he was—was and still is—remarkable at getting earned media.

Gingrich and Trump’s Relationship

When does he first come across your political radar, that this is not just a developer; this is somebody in the political world?

Well, Callista [Gingrich] and I had known him for a long time.We belong to Trump National.I think he and I met in the late '90s when I was speaker.I came up to New York and spoke to a business group.There's a picture of Trump and me together.I think it was in '98.And then we did some things together in 2012.

But we knew each other socially.He'd fly in on his helicopter from New York and golf, and then on occasion, he and Callista and I would have lunch or dinner and just chat.It was friendship; it wasn't anything big.

And then we both ended up at a Romney event, helping Romney in the fall of 2012, much to Romney's nervousness.But I didn't think about him as a serious candidate until one of the guys on our team, Vince Haley, came in in August or late July/early August of '15 and said he had just watched on C-SPAN this amazing rally in Phoenix where Trump had literally turned the stage over to the father of somebody who had been killed by an illegal immigrant and stepped way back and let this guy go for like six minutes.

And Haley said the reaction of the audience, the sense of control that Trump had, he said, there's something serious here.Then Callista and I watched the first debate, which was [on] Fox, where Trump and Megyn Kelly get into a really nasty brawl.And immediately afterwards, all of the elites said Trump lost.Now, there were 16 candidates, and all the elites said he really hurt himself tonight, etc., etc., etc.And it was like virtually unanimous.

But I noticed, we were sitting at home, and I pulled up the various online Esquire and Time magazine, and you name it.Trump was getting 70% of the vote, and it suddenly hit me that if thousands and thousands of people out there were giving him 70% in a field of 16 that there was something happening that we didn't understand.And that's the point where I began really to get intrigued with, what is it that he knew that the rest of us didn't?And was that in fact potentially the making of a future leader who could actually take on our largely corrupt establishment and make profound change?

Some people have told us that the first moment that he really entered into politics was with Obama, with the birther question, which was something not a lot of other Republicans were talking about at that time.He seemed like he was sort of on the fringe.When you look back on that, was that an important part of his political rise?I don't know.I mean, you can make an argument that it helped establish a bond with the hard right.You can make an argument that it made it harder for him to transition into being a major candidate.I didn't pay any attention to it.I thought it was highly implausible. ...It's interesting, too, because you talked about the rejection of the elites in New York, and here he enters into politics and the Correspondents' Dinner, Obama is literally making fun of him in front of the gathered press, and so his entrance into politics, national politics, there's a sense of elite rejection, too.

But remember the lesson that being recognized, even negatively, beats being ignored, because Obama, in a sense, was helping create the myth of Donald Trump.I mean, what other Republican had Obama attacking him?

Trump’s Core Message: The Establishment Is Corrupt

What was it that he was selling that really got him the nomination, would eventually get him the presidency?What was the core of Trump's appeal?

The establishment is corrupt, has sold you out, and it isn't working.And then you can go from there to immigration, to jobs, to crime, to a lot of things.But the core of the Trump message is a profoundly revolutionary message, that the establishment in both parties, which has governed this country, has failed and that it stays in power by sheer corruption and that, in fact, it needs to be replaced.

You've read the stories about yourself that say you sort of paved the way for Donald Trump for a different style of politics.

I hope so. I hope so.

Tell me how you view that and how you think you saw you changing politics and the connection with Trump.

Well, I mean, in all fairness, I started studying Reagan in '65, and I began working with him in '74 and served eight years in Congress while he was president.So to whatever degree I evolved the Contract with America system, it was standing on Reagan's shoulders.And I think it's fair to say that there's a sort of a Reagan-Gingrich-Trump continuum that keeps evolving.We're all three outsiders.We're all three committed to changing the system.We're all three under constant attack.It's easy to forget how much, for example, Tip O'Neill disliked Reagan, despite all the later mythology, or how much the news media disliked both Reagan and his wife.

I think where I probably represented a turning point may have been in the '12 campaign when I took the media head-on.But that had been building for a long time.And I think what surprised me when it first happened, which again was the first debate, which was a Fox debate, was the intensity of response, that there is a country out there that's just sick of the news media; they're sick of being lectured; they're sick of being told they're inadequate, and they wanted somebody to stand up and fight back.

And I think—I don't know, and we've never discussed it.I have no idea whether Trump picked up directly on that or just intuited it, because he's pretty good at this stuff, but then he obviously expanded it.I wish I had been smart enough to think of fake news.

You're also credited or blamed with the idea of a more combative approach to politics, taking it to your enemy and being sort of direct on that.Is that part of your influence, and does Donald Trump pick up on that?

Well, there's a great parallelism.Grover Cleveland is the only other president to win, be defeated, and then get elected again.And Trump, of course, is trying, in a sense, to meet the Grover Cleveland model.Cleveland was a reform mayor of Buffalo who fought bitterly to reform Tammany Hall, which was the very corrupt machine that ran New York City.The term "they loved him for the enemies he made" was about Grover Cleveland.

I think Trump in that sense, and me to a much smaller extent, we represent the same pattern.I look, for example, at The New York Times. ...I mean, why would I pretend that they're a newspaper?They're a propaganda organ of the left.

Now, the fact that I’m willing to do that makes me, I guess, a change from the norm because historically, from the time Roosevelt was elected in '32, the Rooseveltian majority has defined American politics.And the great problem with the Never Trumpers is that they're Republicans who wanted to be part of the conservative wing of the establishment.Trump and I want to actually break up the establishment, and that makes it impossible for them to be comfortable.

But I think in that sense that there probably is a continuum, but it's a continuum both of the decay of the system, which is now more corrupt and more willing to break the law than any time in modern American history.You'd have to go back to the slave states to find a comparable attitude.And so what you have is a country which is increasingly hostile to the traditional establishment, and you have Trump as their—I tell people, the big thing to remember is he's not a candidate; he is the leader of a movement, and leaders of a movement have a totally different emotional bond than candidates.

Trump’s Advisers

Let me just ask you about two people who are involved in the campaign, who you know.One is Kellyanne Conway.Can you tell me who she is and how she contributes to Trump in that year?

Well, she was very important in '16 because she only came in and ran the campaign at the end.She is a remarkable student of American public opinion.She is a good political strategist.She also had a good ability to talk very directly with Trump in a way that he needs.And I think she was a very substantial asset.

And the other—the odd couple between them is Steve Bannon, who comes into the campaign at the same time.And what's his role in Trump?

I think Bannon had two great things.One was that he represented a very deep commitment to publicity and to how you make noise in a positive, effective way.The other was that he had an instinct that Hillary was going to run an increasingly dirty campaign out of desperation and that they had to be prepared to meet her.And I don't know it for a fact, but I suspect Bannon was partly behind Trump bringing all the women who accused Clinton to the debate as a way of totally cutting off what the Clintons thought was going to be a winning issue.And I was watching that night.It was unbelievable.And I would credit Bannon with that kind of decisive thinking.

Yeah, we've talked to Steve Bannon, and he credits himself, too, with that being a crucial moment in that campaign.Do you know Brad Parscale or have a sense of him?

Yeah, I think Brad's very, very smart.I think he was particularly important in '16 because his ability to organize social media, his ability both to raise money and to market Trump's ideas were very, very helpful.And he had a system big enough that he could actually work on a national scale.I found Brad to be very, very helpful in '16.

One other person we've talked to was Pastor Paula White.Are you familiar with her and her connection?

I know her.We've been on programs together.

Because she said that he had reached out to her, even during The Apprentice years, even before he'd entered into politics.Do you have a sense of her?

Well, I mean, she's a television evangelist.She has a very substantial following.She's an attractive person and an articulate person.And Trump is very heavily shaped by television.He really likes television, and he thinks in television terms.

… You talked to Donald Trump after Access Hollywood, I understand.Can you help me understand the crisis of the Access Hollywood tape and how he responds to it?

I never talk about conversations with Trump.

Then tell me how he does respond to it in that pattern of that guy who just was hit with bankruptcies and—

I think he was rattled for a couple days.I don't think it had occurred to him how really personal and how really vicious the system would get.And I think that was an early signal about how bad it would be.

But he pushes through.Is that just part of his nature?

What choice does he have?Again, you're from Queens.You're in downtown Manhattan.People around you are snotty.You going to go back to Queens, or you're just going to push through?

Questions About Russia and the Steele Dossier Change Trump’s Approach to Washington

He gets elected, and from the very beginning, there's these questions about Russia, and he's briefed on the dossier.And he didn't come from Washington.He'd only been really in national politics for those two years.Do you think it's an adjustment as he's dealing with, even during the transition?

I think he's still dealing with it.I think in a healthy society, he would have fired the FBI director the day he walked in and told him the vicious personal things that were all lies.He would have just said, “If you believe any of that, you need to resign today.”Go back and look at it.It's crazy.What they did to Donald Trump is the most despicable assault on any American president in our history.… This is a guy who lived in a chamber of lies, and I'm surprised he's not angrier than he is.

Does it change the way he approaches Washington as he comes in?

Sure.It makes him more determined to reform it.It makes him better understand what a cesspool it is.

Trump’s 2016 Inaugural Address

Can you help me with the speech, the inauguration?Future President Joe Biden is behind him.He gives that speech talking about, you know, they've helped themselves and not helped you.Is he talking about Joe Biden and the people behind him on that dais?

Absolutely.And we now know a fair amount of it's true.

So what was his message that day?

His message was that all these people you just defeated are the people who have been making your life miserable while they profited, and I'm now going to change that, and we're going to focus on helping you.We want your life to be better, and we're prepared to take on the establishment to make it better.

Have you ever seen a moment like that with the elite of Washington behind an incoming president with a message like that?

I don't know.I've never thought about, for example, Herbert Hoover being behind FDR, which had to be an amazing moment.I was there for Reagan's inauguration.Jimmy Carter's right behind him.Reagan said some pretty strong things.

Does Trump Change as President?

Help me understand the adjustment of the real estate developer, The Apprentice, the reality TV star, and now the president of the United States.How is he—does he change over the period of time that he's in office from the beginning?How does he operate as a president?

I think he learns and grows.I think he has a much better understanding of the mechanisms of power and of the kind of information he'll be getting than he did in '16.I think if he wins this time that his ability to run the government will be dramatically higher and his confidence will be dramatically higher.

What was his governing philosophy?What was it that he was trying to do and how he operated as a president?

Well, he's made hundreds of speeches, and I think you can find a lot of it there.If I were to summarize it, I think Trump believes that the American system, when it is run honestly and legitimately and when it is focused on protecting Americans, enables the greatest explosion of economic wealth and the greatest range of personal opportunity in the history of the human race.And that's why it's "Make America Great Again."I mean, it is an argument that there have been periods in our history when we've been unbelievable and that we need to get back to being unbelievable.

In all of the turmoil that goes on inside the White House, chiefs of staff coming and going, tweets—I mean, is that part of the method, or is that a distraction from what he's trying to do?How do you make sense of that seeming chaos during his presidency?

Well, if you think of it as churning, once you have a guy who is pushing and shoving and trying to figure out how the mechanisms work and who—part of the challenge is that there's the large elements of government he doesn't know very much about when he first gets there.He knows an immense amount now, but he didn't then.So part of it is, people who are really smart and who have spent their whole lifetime in government arrive, and they slip from explaining things to Trump that he just needs to know as a matter of the functioning of government to trying to change Trump.And every time that happens, they get fired.

He has no interest in being changed.He's not there for somebody else to define for him who he's allowed to be.He's there to have people who help him be who he is.And that's hard, and it's very difficult, and he is a very aggressive, very intense person.And therefore, it's an endurance contest.

But if you look at his current political team, they seem to have figured out how to work together with remarkable efficiency and, in the Obama phrase, with no drama.

… What do you make of his response to Charlottesville and where it fits into Donald Trump's presidency and how important it was?

I think he did not understand initially that seeming to be evenhanded would be interpreted as being on the side of the haters, and I think it took him about two days to understand what people were telling him, and then he shifted, because that had not been his intent.

COVID and the 2020 Election

As you get into 2020, we've talked to people who are close to him.They say the polls were looking up, that the election, that they think, you know, Brad Parscale thinks that the election is going to be going his way.And into the middle of that, of course, COVID happens.Why is COVID such a crisis for Trump's presidency, and how do you look at his response to it?

Well, it would have been crisis for any presidency because it was a pandemic, and we don't have very many pandemics, and they are shattering events, and people lose their lives.Families get worried, and people panic.

I think history will record that the public health service of the United States did an extraordinarily bad job.… I think without COVID, he would have won reelection handily.And COVID just created a mess, and people were worried.They felt insecure.They were worried physically.The economy was a disaster.And the amazing thing is that he came through it as well as he did.

Was there anything he could have done, that he should have approached it in a different way and it might have had a different outcome?

Yeah, but it would have required a level of knowledge that no one had.I did a podcast with [Anthony] Fauci in February, and he was very reassuring: This isn't going to be a big deal.Now, you know, what are you supposed to do if you're president?You turn to the guy who supposedly knows.He first tells you it's not a big deal; then he tells you to panic.In retrospect, if you look at people like [Florida Gov. Ron] DeSantis who refused to close their state, they were right.And I think had Trump said, “I'm not going to cripple a generation of children by closing the schools,” the teachers’ union would have gone crazy.It would have been just a total meltdown.

No Middle Ground

When you look back at that election, the rhetoric on both sides, I mean, Biden says it's a battle for the soul of the nation, and Trump is phrasing it in existential terms as well.Is that what it is in American politics?Is that how Trump sees that election?

That's where we are.That's an accurate explanation of where we are.You have two alternative universes fighting for control, and there's no middle ground.

How does Trump see the stakes from his perspective?I mean, if Biden sees it as authoritarian versus democracy, what does Trump see the stakes when he phrases it in that way?

What he sees is pretty personal and pretty direct.He sees a totally corrupt Justice Department, a totally corrupt New York state attorney general, a totally corrupt New York district attorney, a totally corrupt Fulton County district attorney, all waging war on him personally and trying to put him in jail.Now, that focuses your attention. ...

I just tweeted today, the Senegalese actually had an honest election, and the reform candidate won 10 days after he got out of jail.And I just said, we may end up in the same place.

Trump's campaign says that it was the indictments that sort of turned the tide in the primaries and in this polling.Do you think that they actually—

No, he would have won anyway.But what happened was, the indictments forced Republicans to say, “OK, are you with these corrupt people trying to destroy Trump, or are you with Trump?”Well, that was an issue no challenger could get in the middle of, because if you say, “Well, I'm for Trump,” then why are you running?And if you say, “Well, actually, I think the Justice Department has a good case,” you'll be driven out of the party.

I mean, I think virtually, I would guess that—you’d have to check the numbers, but I would guess that over 80% of Republicans believe the Justice Department is totally corrupt, that there is no such thing as the rule of law right now.²

Reuters: Most Republicans believe FBI, Justice Dept. trying to 'delegitimize' Trump - Reuters/Ipsos poll

You just have to hope they don't notice you.

And has that happened over the years of Trump?

It's been a direct response to Trump's existence.

How much of it is—as you're talking about, it's very personal, right?Like, it's about Donald Trump.

Well, it is very personal.It was his mug shot.If they could, they would put him in an orange suit and put him in chains.This isn't a game.He has the full weight of the judicial system of New York, the judicial system of Fulton County and the judicial system of the United States all trying to destroy him personally.That's pretty personal.

Is that a good campaign in this year for him, to run on that?

It got him the nomination.The general election will not be about that.The general election will be the economy, immigration, crime, weakness in foreign policy, and just weirdness.

How high are the stakes for Trump, for the country, going into this election?

This is probably the most important election since 1860.

Why?

You have a Democratic Party increasingly controlled by the weird wing of the party.You have a corrupt political machine across the country that is deeply dependent on taxpayer money to survive.You have a willingness to break the law routinely, which we're watching constantly.And I think if you get four more years, then you get millions of illegal immigrants.You get four more years of this, I think the American experiment is going to be in enormous trouble.

Latest Interviews

Get our Newsletter

Stay Connected

Jon and Jo Ann Hagler on behalf of the Jon L. Hagler Foundation

Koo and Patricia Yuen

Funding for FRONTLINE is provided through the support of PBS viewers and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Additional funding is provided by the Abrams Foundation; Park Foundation; the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; and the FRONTLINE Journalism Fund with major support from Jon and Jo Ann Hagler on behalf of the Jon L. Hagler Foundation, and additional support from Koo and Patricia Yuen. FRONTLINE is a registered trademark of WGBH Educational Foundation. Web Site Copyright ©1995-2025 WGBH Educational Foundation. PBS is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization.