The FRONTLINE Interviews

Peter Baker

White House Correspondent, The New York Times

Peter Baker is chief White House correspondent for The New York Times. He has covered four administrations, beginning with Bill Clinton’s second term. He is the co-author of The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III.

The following interview was conducted by FRONTLINE's Jim Gilmore on Jan. 11, 2021. It has been edited for clarity and length.

This interview appears in:

Trump’s American Carnage

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Trump and the Republican Establishment

Let’s talk about the 2016 election and [how] Trump, the insurgent candidate from day one, calls for basically a hostile takeover.Does the GOP understand what they’re getting as a president, and if so, why do they buy into this guy?There is the extent [to which] the other candidates have made some pretty startling statements back then about who this guy is and what one is to expect.But does the GOP understand what they’re signing on for, and if so, why did we get to this point?

… Right, right.I think a lot of the establishment Republicans understood exactly what they were buying, or at least understood that they were buying something that they wouldn’t be able to predict.That was the whole concern all along, you know.… Jeb Bush said when he was losing to Trump, he said that he was a “chaos candidate” and he would be a “chaos president.”And so I think there was a lot of discussion even back in 2015 and 2016 about how volatile this person would be; how as an outsider he would, you know, be a disrupter.That’s what made him appealing to many Republicans, but to the establishment, he represented a real danger, and that’s why you heard other candidates call him names and use descriptions that you rarely hear, even in the harshest campaigns, words like “kook” and “xenophobe” and “racist” and “misogynist” and, you know, “bigot”; words like “crazy” and “dangerous.”Those are words that we don’t normally hear in a campaign.And yet, for all of that, he outshined all of them.He took all of them to the cleaners, if you will, and achieved what in fact Jared Kushner once called to me in an interview a hostile takeover of the Republican Party.

The role that the vice president was brought on to play, when Trump wins the elections and he’s moving forward as the GOP candidate, 180-degree difference in the type of person that he is.Was this the GOP’s way to balance it out?Did they understand that they were signing on to basically a Faustian bargain when they were getting behind Donald Trump?

Yeah.I mean, Trump didn’t want Mike Pence at first.He didn’t particularly like Mike Pence.He wasn’t his kind of person.He told his aides, “Look, I need a pit bull; I need an attack dog as my running mate.”And his aides said to him, “Look, you’re the attack dog in this race.You don’t need another attack dog.In fact, you need somebody who is the opposite of that.”And that’s how they sold Pence on to him.And I think that’s one of the values that Pence served for Trump was reassurance to the Republican establishment that was so concerned.Pence was a conservative, but he was also seen as reliable and, you know, responsible and mature in a way that Trump was not.

And so he helped Trump, you know, assuage some of the doubts, assuage some of those concerns.And he also played an ambassador role for Trump to the conservative Christian right, which respected Mike Pence as one of their own and didn’t particularly know or trust Donald Trump.It was Pence who told the conservative Christians, “Yes, he’s one of us; he can be trusted; he will do—he will pursue our policy goals, and we should stick by him.”

Do we have any understanding of what Pence thought of signing on with this president and what kind of ride he was going to be on?

Pence is a sphinx, you know.He has been, through all of his time with Trump, amazingly hard to read.You know, even in private, people who are friends of his, people who are advisers of his, colleagues of his say he never lets on anything other than complete loyalty to the president.He never even so much as rolls his eyes or says, “Yeah, I know,” or, “I’m trying to work on it.”There’s never an acknowledgement from Pence, even in the—behind the scenes that he is aware of just how erratic the president he is serving is.And yet clearly he knows that.You watch him, whether in public or private try to skate this line, try to thread this needle between being seen as disloyal to the president, which he knows is the kiss of death in Trumpworld, and yet not necessarily adopting all of the most radical rhetoric or conspiracy theories or, you know, provocations that the president does.

And it’s been—you know, for four years, it was a remarkable challenge for him, and one I think that led a lot of people [to] wonder, OK, who is Mike Pence?What is really going on behind the scenes in his mind?What is he really thinking?Because it does feel like a Faustian bargain.It does feel like, for a politician who considers himself to be a Christian first, a politician who at one point after a congressional race renounced the politics of negative campaigning because he thought it wasn’t honorable, for him to serve Donald Trump seems so unlikely and so incongruous.And yet he never acknowledges or never admitted, even in private, at least people we’ve talked to, you know, what the trade-offs were for him.

… Republicans viewed Trump basically in a lot of ways as a pen, it’s been said, the guy who will sign their bills.How did they misjudge him?

I mean, the difference between Republican officeholders and Republican voters, right?Republican voters saw somebody who was going to come into the china shop of Washington and start busting some glass, and they were OK with that; that was what they wanted.They were—they picked him because they resented the elites, they resented the establishment, they resented Washington of both parties, and they saw him as somebody who would stand up to them.

But for Republican officeholders, I don’t think there were a lot of illusions.I think that a lot of Republican officeholders understood and believed that he was a risk, a risk to them, a risk to the system, a risk to the office, a risk to the country.And yet they had, in some ways, no choice, because he was thrust upon them by the voters, by the base, by these core supporters who basically rejected everything that the establishment had told them, rejected what their own party leaders were telling them, and said, “You may not like him.He’s our choice.You have to live with him.”

So they tried to find ways of accommodating themselves.They tried to find ways of telling themselves, “Well, it’s not that bad,” or, “We can manage this,” or, “We can steer him in the right direction,” or, “We can accept the bad parts because we do get the good parts,” which is the policy goals that they preferred or the elections that they were winning.

And so it was a trade-off that they, I think, went into with eyes open.Now, did they expect what would eventually happen in terms of Jan. 6?You know, obviously they would say no.But I think in their heart of hearts they always knew that that was a danger.They always knew that that was the ultimate risk that they were taking, and they were counting the days until the end of his tenure, hoping they could avoid something that would blow up just like that.

Trump and Charlottesville

Charlottesville.What does it portend?Trump backs white supremacists.It’s similar in some ways to Jan. 6.It’s a warning sign.It should have been a warning sign.But Pence, McConnell, the leadership, there are some statements that are somewhat negative; there are no repercussions for President Trump.So what does it represent, and how is it viewed, and how did they miss the warning?

Well, Charlottesville is an early indicator that this is going to be a president who doesn’t subscribe to the values that his predecessors in modern times did, who was willing to play footsie, if you will, with people who had in the past been seen as unthinkable, people who were on the fringe of society.And rather than denounce hate, denounce racism the way that any other normal politician would, he wanted to have it both ways.He played a game of moral equivalence in which, you know, “There are good people on both sides,” as if there was somehow equating white supremacists with the people who were protesting white supremacy.

And I think it was a warning sign to Republicans early on that this was somebody who was not going to play the game that they believe should be played.This is the Republican Party that had come out of the 2012 election thinking their biggest problem was the failure to appeal to the rising minority population in America.The demographics were changing in a way that the Republican Party had not fully grasped, and they needed to be better in reaching out to African Americans, Latino Americans, to gay Americans, to Asian Americans.

And instead, they now had a leader who was the exact opposite of that, who said, “All that politically correct stuff is bogus, and I’m just going to tell it like it is.”And that “tell it like it is” authenticity, if you will, really generated passion on the base.And so you saw these leaders kind of only very tenderly and, you know, gently trying to rebuke him.A few of them issued statements, including his own secretary of state, including his own chief economic adviser, including Paul Ryan.But in the end, there was no real consequence.And I think that you saw at the beginning of his presidency, in effect, a willingness to play to the most radical fringe elements of American society.

And the fact that there’s no consequences means that he takes the next step forward.He moves on down the line, and now he’s attacking people like Sen. Flake, anybody who comes against him, sending another message to the Congress that they had better beware because he’s growing in strength and his base is behind him.What’s going on?And how did the GOP leadership see that?

Yeah, I think through the first year of his presidency, there was still a willingness on the part of some Republicans to say, “Wait a second; I don’t agree here,” or, “Wait a second; the emperor has no clothes here,” and to speak out.And Trump responds by crushing them.He crushes Jeff Flake and Bob Corker.He crushes Mitch McConnell when McConnell briefly doesn’t do what he wants.And in the end, the collateral damage of those episodes sends a message to the rest of the Republican Party, which is that you cannot stand up against Donald Trump.If you do, you will pay a price.

And what you heard from people is, in the leadership, for instance, Paul Ryan, House leadership, they would have congresspeople coming to them on the floor on any bill and say, “Where does Trump stand on this?I can only do this is Trump stands for this because I can’t take a chance that he will be on the other side.”And it’s not that even they’re necessarily afraid of Trump; it’s that they’re afraid of Trump’s base.They are so wary of getting on crosswise with him and then having him turn loose his supporters against them, even in their own party, and he has more credibility with their voters than they do.

So rather than trust your own congressman, trust your own senator when he says, “Look, I don’t agree with the president,” they’re trusting the president against their own representatives.

Trump and the Passage of Tax Reform

So take us to the tax ceremony at the White House where everybody is singing the praises of the president.But do it through the eyes of McConnell and/or Pence, whichever.How are they viewing it?What is the game that they’re playing?

Well, I think Mitch McConnell decides by the end of 2017 that the best course forward for him is to get what he can out of Trump, steer him in the ways he wants to on issues like taxes and especially on judges, and then avoid everything else; look the other way, in effect, no matter how many, you know, wild things the president may do or say.And it’s sort of a marriage of convenience.And the president decides that he’s not going to go after McConnell either.Whether this is an explicit bargain or a tacit one, we don’t know.But the president in effect comes to this understanding that McConnell’s going to be his ally on most things, and where they disagree, he can allow that to happen because McConnell’s so important to him.

And the reason, by the way, is that the judges are so critical.To really understand this, you have to understand the judges.And Donald Trump became convinced that he won over the right and won the election in 2016 in large part because he promised to give them conservative judges, because he put out a list of candidates for the Supreme Court that he would pick from that had been drafted by the Federalist Society and other conservatives.The fact that the Antonin Scalia seat was still open when he was elected, he became convinced that was the sine qua non of this election, and therefore, more than anything, he would make sure he delivered on those judges, seeing that as the key to keeping his conservative base by his side and winning again in 2020.

So you had things like the tax bill, you have things like health care, and you have things this first year where he clearly doesn’t understand how Washington works, but the one thing he’s going to do is keep the party behind him through judges, and he’s going to crush anybody who speaks out against him.

Now, on taxes specifically, on the tax cut plan, this isn’t Donald Trump’s plan.He basically lets the Republicans on the Hill design their own plan and then happily signs it and takes credit for it, because he thinks that that’s going to be a selling point for him with Republicans and particularly in 2020.And you see a Mitch McConnell, and you see a Mike Pence, and what they’re clearly thinking at that point is, we’re going to get what we think is important on policy, we’re going to get these big policy wins, and we’re going to ignore the other stuff.And the other stuff is just noise.It’s damaging in some ways; it’s certainly discouraging; it’s demoralizing even to watch a president do some of the things that they’re doing.But it’s just Twitter.And if we can get good policy, it will be worth the price.It’s a real trade-off, but one that they’re willing to make.

One small point on Obamacare, because you brought it up.What was McConnell’s point of view on the anger that he got from Trump after Obamacare?It seemed that Trump had decided he didn’t want to deal with the legislature aspects of the job; they would take care of it.But when they failed to push through the bill dealing with Obamacare, he changed his mind, and he threw his anger and his wrath at McConnell.What would have McConnell’s point of view been there?

This is, I think, a key moment.I mean, this point, in the summer of 2017, is the key moment where Trump goes after McConnell because he’s angry that the health care bill goes down.And McConnell’s angry at Trump because he doesn’t understand how it works.He says—basically he’s saying, “You come up here and get the votes then, because they aren’t there.I can’t force people to vote ways they’re not going to go.”And he looks at Trump and thinks, this dilettante has no understanding of how complicated it is to get bills through.And the president basically admits that.At one point he even says, “Health care policy, who knew it would be so tough?”Well, everybody, of course, knew it would be tough, except for Donald Trump, who’d never been in office before.

Now, this moment I think is key because there’s this flare-up between Trump and McConnell.Trump goes after him.And it’s after that that they come to this sort of peace deal, basically.Again, whether it’s explicit or whether it’s implicit, we don’t know, but this is sort of the last moment in the presidency where Trump very strongly goes after McConnell.It’s after that that he and McConnell come to an understanding, and for the next three years they’re more or less allied.Even when they’re not, even where the places where they disagree, they decide to do it in a way that doesn’t blow up the relationship, because they’ve decided that they need each other in very specific ways.Trump needs McConnell to get things through, particularly judges.McConnell needs Trump in order to try to keep the base behind him.

The First Impeachment

And that works even during impeachment, it seems.McConnell keeps the forces at bay, makes sure that they don’t have witnesses that come up.Talk a little bit about impeachment, what that says about this deal that’s in the works, and again, the warning signs.They were very clear on the abuse of power.They must have known exactly what the Democrats were selling.And yet they kept to the deal?

Yeah.Look, Mitch McConnell said at the beginning of the impeachment trial process, “I’m not going to do anything that’s different than what the White House wants.”He said it out loud.He said the quiet thing out loud: “I’m going to do what the White House wants in the Senate trial.”He had decided that he was going to marry his fortunes to Trump, no matter how unpleasant or painful that might be to him.And that meant that he was going to steer Trump through this trial successfully and do as little as he could to blow up his own members at the same time.

So he constructed the rules in a way that, you know, was meant to favor Trump as best he possibly could.He very carefully managed his caucus to make sure that people didn’t jump off the ship, and he got the president through this period.

But you’re right that I don’t think any Republican, or at least most Republicans who looked at the facts of that Ukraine scheme, most of them looked at that and thought, this is not right; this is troubling; this is not what we want a president to do.That doesn’t mean we think we’re going to throw him out of office for it.Some of them made a political calculation that it wasn’t worth it; some of them thought that it wasn’t, you know, offensive enough to warrant a constitutional remedy here.

But in any case, they weren’t—most of them were not fooling themselves into thinking that this was OK behavior.And they knew this was a warning sign.They knew this is a president who would use his office in any way he could to advance his own personal and political interests, and this Ukraine case basically showed it.They were presented with the evidence right there in front [of] them, and there was really very little effort to disguise what Trump was doing here, you know.He held back military aid while pressing Ukraine to give him what he wanted in terms of smearing his opponent.This is not complicated.But it was something where Republicans weren’t going to break with him over it, and it wasn’t going to—because it wasn’t going to galvanize the country enough against him.

But how will history view it?How will your chapter on this at some point define it, as the fact that Trump wins, he feels invincible?And you look at what happened afterwards, and he will repeat this scheme again in ever more damaging ways.

Yeah.I think if Bill Clinton came out of impeachment feeling chastened, feeling, you know, that he had escaped the bullet and feeling at least some shame over what he had done, even though he was also defiant, Donald Trump comes out of impeachment emboldened, angry, ready to take revenge.Retribution is on his mind.He doesn’t even wait 24 hours to make clear that what he will spend his time after impeachment doing is, you know, going after the people who, in his mind, tormented him.And the very first thing he does, he fires Alex Vindman and Alex Vindman’s brother, who didn’t have anything to do with it.And he fires Gordon Sondland.And he makes clear in public speeches that the people who went after him were evil, were bad people, were, you know, treasonous.

Then he begins even more systemically going after the instruments of accountability in government, these inspectors general who were part of the federal government, by law, who were supposed to be checks on the system, who were supposed to be scrutinizing the government.He begins ousting them one after the other.People who in any way stand up to him are going to be tossed out.

And the lesson he took from impeachment isn’t, “I shouldn’t do this.”It’s that “I don’t want anybody around who’s going to call me on it.”And that’s what the—that’s the lesson he took from impeachment.

Trump, Pence and Black Lives Matter

The Black Lives Matter demonstrations and Lafayette Park event.Talk a little bit about Pence’s relationship at that point with the president and the fact that he’s not there with him; he’s watching it on TV.What do we take from that and his view, if we know anything, of his view of Trump’s antics?

Yeah, Pence was supposed to go out with him, and there was some talk about Pence going out with him to Lafayette Square and to the church, and his staff held him back and said, “No, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”Now, what they might tell you is they did that for security reasons.You don’t want the president and the vice president at the same place when things are volatile.But really they recognized, I think, in the vice president’s office that this was, you know, a potentially bad visual, and the vice president didn’t—you know, shouldn’t be part of it, that he shouldn’t go along with this.

But he doesn’t speak out.He doesn’t say anything behind the scenes, like, “Hey, you know, this is a bad idea.”He doesn’t reprove the president for doing it.He keeps quiet.And this is Pence’s modus operandi.When he sees something that would trouble him, he basically just tries to keep out of it himself and keep quiet about it so as not to rile, you know, this volatile president he works for.But he’s not a check on the president.You know, he may offer gentle advice, but if the advice is rejected, he’s not the one to stand—he’s not the one to throw himself in front of the car.

Makes him a bit complicit, though.

Well, this is what history is going to, you know, judge Mike Pence on, is whether he, you know—what responsibility he bears for an administration that did things that you think anyway he disapproved of, but hasn’t told us that he did.

Trump Alleges Election Fraud

Election night and Trump disputes the election results and says it’s all fraud.Talk a little bit about that.Here again, he has come up with conspiracy theories.He’s got a position that most Republicans cannot believe is true, and yet they go along with him.They agree with the fake claims.People like senators and such are there supporting him, including [Lindsey] Graham.And what happens is that his base that’s already turned off of mainstream media believes him, grows in anger.What is happening here?And again, why does the party, why does the leadership back him in these claims?

Well, there’s this theory at first that we’re going to humor him.Let’s let him make his complaints.He’ll get it out of his system.He’ll vent, and then we’ll all move on; that if we get to the point where the states certify, or we get to the point where the electors vote, or we get to the point where the Congress accepts it, at some point in the process the president will stand down and accept defeat, and even if he claims that the election was stolen, he will move on, and we’ll all be fine.

… I think there’s this feeling in the immediate aftermath of the election that these fraud claims were nonsense but just a way of letting him, you know, vent off steam and that they can live with that, in effect, because there’s not much choice anyway; they’re not going to stop him.And so rather than stand up to him and say, “No, this is wrong; you’re just making stuff up,” they’re humoring him.They say, “Fine, you’ve got these claims?Go to court.Go to the election authorities.Play out the process,” because they’re confident that the process will end up restraining Trump, where they themselves will not.

Now, what I think people didn’t fully recognize in the first few days after the election was just how far the president would take it, and how successful he would be at convincing so many Americans that there was something there when there wasn’t.

And that’s when it got out of control.Rather than just being a sore loser who’s complaining that he didn’t get what he thought he deserved, he becomes the fomenter of a whole new reality, and it’s a reality now some of the Republicans are stuck with because at least half to three-quarters of their own party, according to polls, is believing Trump on this.

And so the initial view, “Let’s just humor him, and then he’ll stop, and it’ll be fine,” morphs into, “Well, we can’t say anything about it because the people actually believe him.This Republican base believes him, and this is our base, too.”

And so at every step along the way they’re hoping somebody else will restrain him rather than doing it themselves.

Trump and Georgia

So, Peter, Georgia.The president’s attack on Georgian officials.Again, there’s complicity with people not backing off.Here we have some very brave Republicans standing up to the president against phone calls and abuse in the media all the time and death threats from the base.How do you define that event and the reaction of the leadership, of McConnell?

Yeah, it’s striking that basically in the end, it’s a handful of Republican officials in the states, in Georgia, in Arizona, in Michigan, who say, “No, we’re not going to go along with this sham.We’re not going to pretend that there’s fraud when there’s not just because it’s a president of our own party.”

And so you end up having them stand up against the president when members of Congress are not willing to do it.The people who are actually responsible for the vote, responsible for certifying the election are not willing to trade their sense of principle and duty on the altar of partisanship.And it’s an extraordinary confrontation.You have the president of the United States on the phone himself with governors, with state lawmakers, with election officials, even with an election investigator in Georgia, trying to personally pressure them into turning the vote his way.

“Find the fraud,” he says.“Find me 11,000 votes,” he says.

And it’s just an extraordinary thing.Any other president ever personally intruded on a state’s election process like that, it would have been an outrage, and you would have heard members of Congress of both parties, I think, speak out against it.But here you didn’t.Here you again had Republicans mostly keeping quiet on the Hill, putting their trust in Brian Kemp and [Brad] Raffensperger and these other Republicans in the states to do the right things without giving them any public support, once again thinking that the process will restrain Trump and that they themselves don’t have to do it.

The quandary that McConnell has, is involved in, is the fact that he’s afraid of losing the Senate, and the Georgia elections coming up are all-important, so he can’t piss off Trump.But Trump’s not on message.Do we know anything about how he tries to control them?Does he just give up about it?The situation that McConnell’s in.

Yeah, Mitch McConnell is in an awkward position from his point of view because he has these two races coming up in Georgia, these runoff races, and the control of the Senate will depend on it.And what he needs then is a united Republican Party, not a Republican Party that’s busy snapping at each other over Trump’s wild claims.And so he’s trying to push forward on these elections while more or less ignoring in public what the president is doing and saying.And privately he’s seething about it.Privately he’s upset about it because he knows it’s going to hurt his candidates in Georgia.And it’s not just random races; these two races will determine who controls the Senate for the next two years.It will determine whether Mitch McConnell is majority leader or minority leader.

And so it’s all-important to Mitch McConnell.And the president is not playing ball.The president is much more concerned about his own grievances and really doesn’t show that he cares too much about whether or not the party is going to win these races or not.When he goes to Georgia for rallies twice in this post-November period, most of his conversation is about himself.Most of his conversation is about these sort of made-up fraud claims and how unfairly he was treated.And oh, yeah, by the way, there are these Senate races, and you should come out and vote.

Well, Georgia Republicans were just livid about this because the messages that were being sent out were so contradictory.Either it was, “It’s so important to vote; you must participate because the Senate is on the line,” or, “You can’t trust the system; the system is rigged; it’s corrupt; don’t participate.”And all you needed to do was depress the vote by one, two, three percentage points, and that would be enough to hand the elections to the Democrats.

So for Mitch McConnell, this is an incredibly aggravating period, one that he didn’t see an easy solution to, because if he speaks out against the president, then all he’s doing, in his view, is disrupting the Republican unity even further.But not restraining the president means that the president is out there undermining his own candidates.

The Raffensperger telephone conversation: You listen to it, and it’s very similar to the phone call that got him impeached.He’s learned lessons, I suppose, from that incident, and now he’s going at it again, feeling there’s never any consequences.What is your view of it?Is it surprising?Is it what must have been—should have been expected because of what took place beforehand?

No, I think the Raffensperger conversation is not even the slightest bit surprising.The only thing that made it surprising was to actually hear it, right, to actually have a tape recording of it and hear it with our own ears.This is exactly the kind of conversation this president has all the time with people who he’s trying to leverage into doing what he wants.We just now have it played out in public for everybody to hear.It’s like the Nixon tapes suddenly being produced in real time.

And I think that it kind of was a wakeup call for some who might have not really assumed the president would do this kind of thing.But there was the president threatening criminal action, in effect, against a state official unless he delivers the election to him, an election that’s already been certified for the other guy.I mean, this is just unheard of.

And so even for Republicans, this is a terrible, terrible moment.Some of the Republicans who were backing him in these challenges of the electors said, yeah, that was not a good call.Marsha Blackburn from Tennessee, the senator, who was all on the Trump train, says, yeah, we all agree that call wasn’t helpful.Well, “not helpful” of course understates the, you know, the seriousness of that call, but I think it really demonstrated in this one moment just how far this president was willing to go to overturn the will of the public.

The GOP has been warned.They listened to this, and they don’t really, again, do anything to stop him.You’ve even got [Georgia voting system implementation manager Gabriel] Sterling making that amazing speech where he says, “People are going to die.People are angry.This is making people more and more angry, and it’s based on conspiracy theories with no facts behind it.Stop!”But they don’t.

They don’t.No.This is—look, we’ve always had conspiracy theorists in American life.We’ve always had fringe elements, and we’ve always had people who were dangerous and radical.What we haven’t had is a president in the Oval Office seeming to egg them on, seeming to encourage them, or at the very least not condemning them and trying to restrain them.And so the people out there who believe these wild, crazy theories feel emboldened because the president of the United States seems to agree with them.

And this period of the post-election up until the Georgia runoff is a period of increasing volatility.You see death threats.You see angry demonstrations.You see, you know, security for officials who had never had security in the past because they’re worried about their safety.I mean, it’s—you can feel the tension in the air.And you have a president who’s not only not doing anything to stop it, but, in the minds of some of the people carrying it out, appears to be on their side.

Pence’s Moment of Truth

So the Pence request.Trump says, OK, here’s my next stop.On Jan. 6, he’ll throw the vote back to the states, basically.It’s his next ploy.Talk a little bit about the position that it puts Pence in, how it perhaps should have been expected, the fact that he did not disagree with the president on any of these other issues.He’s now in a situation where he’s got to show up for the president one more time.Talk a little bit about Pence and that position that he’s in and what final decision he makes and why.

What’s remarkable about this is not necessarily that Mike Pence finally had a moment where he had to choose and force him to do something that would be—that would blow up his relationship with Donald Trump.What’s remarkable is only that it took almost four years for that to happen, and that it happened in these final days.He almost got out, in effect, with his skin intact, as he would view it.

And then finally comes this moment of truth.The president of the United States is telling him, “You need to use your position as the presiding officer of the Electoral College count to basically block Joe Biden’s election.Stop the turnover of power to the other side.”And this is just finally, finally the step too far for Pence.After all the provocations, after all of the scandals and the furors, after all of the remarkable things that Trump has done over the four years, he has finally put the onus on Pence in a way that he cannot escape.He cannot finesse this.You have a choice here.You either do what Trump is telling you, or you do what your conscience has told him he can’t, you know, he has to do, that he has no choice in this matter; he does not have the power to do what Trump wants him to do.

And I don’t think he even thinks that had he had the power that he should have done it, because I don’t think he thinks that these fraud allegations are true and that in the end, subverting a democracy in order to cater to the whims of an aggrieved president is not what democracy is all about.

And so for Pence, it’s the final reckoning.It’s the final moment where he has no choice but to pick a side.Either you’re going to do what Trump is telling you, or you’re going to do what your own conscience is telling you.And finally he decides.He has no choice.

Now, he tries to finesse this.Even in this late hour, he releases a statement saying, “I welcome,” in effect, “these efforts to question these results.”He agreed with them.It meant that he was welcoming and encouraging, in effect, the senators who were going to say, “Yeah, we object to these electors,” without necessarily throwing his lot in with them.

But when the moment comes where he has to actually get up there on the dais and rule as the presiding officer, he won’t do what Trump wants him to.And there is this remarkable confrontation between President Trump and Vice President Pence that goes on for hours in the White House.And Trump is just haranguing him and berating him: “You have to do this.After all the things I’ve done for you, how can you not do this?You were a loser until I came along and saved you,” in effect.

And Pence is finally at the point where he has no choice in his mind but to resist.And he tries to explain his position to Trump.He tries to do it in his normally soft-toned way.“It’s not that [I’m] betraying you.It’s just that the law says this; the Constitution says this.I have no choice.This is what the lawyers have told me.I have no choice in this matter.”It’s just not—it’s just not persuading Trump.Trump doesn’t accept that, and he forces Pence to explain his position in front of these lawyers that Rudy Giuliani has gathered who are trying to take the other side.And Pence doesn’t budge in the end.He doesn’t denounce the president.He doesn’t directly confront him.He doesn’t—as far as we know anyway—tell him to his face what a lot of other people might have told him to his face.But he quietly, in his own soft way, refuses to go along.

But how much of the responsibility lies with his actions in the past four years?He finally stands up, but he didn’t stand up time and time again, which empowered the president to keep pushing, because that’s what he always does.

A lot of people will still say that Mike Pence bears responsibility for the Trump presidency because he didn’t stand up for three years and 11 months, right; that he stood by and, in effect, did not directly condone, and at least didn’t do anything to stop various outrages up until now.The pro-Pence side would be, look, he had to maintain his credibility so that he could be there at the moment of truth when it really mattered.And when it really mattered, he finally did in fact stand up and save, you could argue—this will be the argument—he stood up and saved democracy when it came to that final reckoning.And this will be the debate that history has about Mike Pence for a long time.

The anger, though, that now Trump has towards Pence, he brings that out onto the stage with him.He attacks his vice president.Talk about that speech and the significance of it and what you think is the most important thing to understand about Trump’s speech.

Yeah.So Trump is speaking on the Ellipse to this rally of his supporters, and he’s trashing his vice president.He says, “I hope Mike Pence does the right thing.I hope he’s not listening to those RINOs and stupid people.”Well, he already knows what Mike Pence is going to do at this point.

So in effect what he’s doing there is a, making one last effort to pressure his vice president into violating his conscience and doing what the president wants him to do.And by galvanizing the crowd, he’s telling the crowd that Pence is the one who can save us; Pence is the one here who needs to be brought back to our side.

And the crowd takes it up.They side with Trump over Pence.They see Pence in—because Trump is presenting it this way, they see Pence as somebody who’s becoming a traitor, who’s betraying the president and betraying our cause.And it’s with that message that Trump sends them off to the Capitol.

The Attack on the Capitol

And the elements of that march and the attack on the Capitol, when you watched it, what did you see?

When I saw what, the rally speech or—?

No, the post-rally speech as the crowds end up at the Capitol and start breaking down the barriers.What were you watching?What were you seeing?What’s significant to understand about what’s taking place there?And what amazed you the most about what you were watching?

It was heartbreaking, you know.I was a foreign correspondent for four years, and it looked to me like the kinds of things we used to cover in far-off autocratic countries where a crazy crowd, you know, is storming the citadel of democracy and threatening the elected leaders in the very moment they’re deciding or they’re finalizing the election results.That is as stark a moment as you can see.You have the Confederate flag being flown inside the Capitol.You see people with shirts saying “Camp Auschwitz” or, you know, the abbreviation for “Six Million Weren’t Enough.”You see people dressed up in crazy costumes and, you know, carrying the podium across the Rotunda and breaking glass and pummeling police officers.This is the law-and-order crowd, supposedly, and they’re pummeling police officers.

Now, this is an enormous breakdown of security.Everybody knew that there was going to be this rally this day.Everybody knew that organizations like the Proud Boys were dangerous, and yet for whatever reason—there will be a lot of investigation here—for whatever reason, the police were not prepared for this.They did not set up an adequate security for the Capitol.

I have to say, when I was watching it, like a lot of people, I thought, well, you know, it will be loud and—you know, it will be loud, and it will be—it will be exercise, but I didn’t imagine they’d actually manage to get in, not only into the building, but into the chamber; that the vice president would have to be evacuated, that the senators and congressmen would be cowering under desks and fleeing into the tunnels and ripping off the hand sanitizer pole from the wall to use as a club to defend themselves; that there would be armed police officers with their guns drawn, barricading the door of the House chamber to protect our elected representatives.And it was just mindboggling.It was just unthinkable.And yet wholly predictable.

And yet wholly predictable.This was the inevitable outcome of what we have been seeing for four years, even if we didn’t see it coming.And I think that that’s the thing that will cause us to reflect for a long time: How did we get to this point?It didn’t just fall on us out of nowhere.This wasn’t just a, you know, random explosion that had no precedent.This was the culmination of four years of a remarkably polarized time in our country.

And you just don’t know where it goes from here.It’s not over just because the Capitol is now back under control.The anger and the hate and the volatility and the conspiracy-mongering and the fear-mongering and the racism and the—all of that that fueled this event is still out there, and how our leadership of both parties confronts that is going to be the defining test of the next few years.

During this, McConnell and Pence are both basically dragged to secure places on the Hill.They’re fleeing from those that empowered them.The irony?

Yeah.Yeah.Yeah.Exactly.In Pence’s case, you know, he’s fleeing from a crowd that had been part of the reason that Trump became president in the first place, and they’re racing through the Capitol chanting, “Hang Mike Pence, hang Mike Pence.”And there’s a gallows built outside of the Capitol.And some of these people are carrying zip wires, which suggests that they’re planning to hold people hostage, you know.It’s a—it’s a remarkable moment, obviously.

… This is the ultimate moment that shows in politics when you play with matches, you’re going to light a fire.And the fire almost consumed them.

Is it the cost that both men had to pay because they had backed an insurgent candidate and president, that they’d made a Faustian bargain that this was well worth it?Is this basically what you get?

Well, I think that this has been the defining—this has been the profound bargain that the Republicans made over the last four years, which is that they wanted the benefits of having the crowd behind them without fully reckoning with the dangers of empowering the crowd in the first place; that they, you know—you saw Trump again and again refuse to denounce people who got violent, people who were racist, people who were in some ways a threat because they liked him.He was asked about QAnon: “Well, I understand that they like me.”This is his response.And as long as they like him, he’s OK with that.There’s no line he’s going to draw there.

And in effect, he brought the Republican Party along with him to say, OK, we’re going to accept these most radical elements of American society because they’re on our side.And there is a cost to pay.

And the significance of, as the vice president is in the bunker, the president sending out a tweet still condemning him?

The vice president has just been evacuated for his safety into the bowels of the Capitol while marauding protesters or mobsters are looking for him because they want to confront him or do worse, and the president of the United States is sending out a tweet castigating Mike Pence for not backing him on his effort to overturn the election.

And while Pence is there sheltering in place, hiding from the crowd, in danger of his life, he doesn’t hear from the president; the president doesn’t call and say, “Hey, are you OK?What can I do?”No call.No call from the president’s chief of staff.No call from the White House, other than his own staff.And days will go by afterwards, and the vice president would still never hear from the president.

And he was angry.Finally Mike Pence was angry.You know, we don’t see him angry very much.He was angry on this day.He was angry.You can see it even when they finally gathered again in the Senate chamber and he reads the statement about how this is—democracy will not be cowed by, you know, the forces of violence.You could see in this soft-spoken guy anger that you had not seen for four years, and part of that anger was directed at Donald Trump.

Sen. Jim Inhofe said afterwards, “I have never seen Pence so angry.”He said to him that, you know, “How could Trump do this after all I’ve done for him?,” in effect.And there was this feeling on the part of Mike Pence that he had been a loyal soldier for four years, he had done everything he’d been asked, he had never betrayed the president in any way, and the only thing he did on this day was do his constitutional duty as he saw fit, and because of that, he was thrown under the bus.

And so it was the inevitable break, probably, but it was a final break.

McConnell’s speech before the doors were broken down: Why finally does he take a stand?And put it into context for us.In his speech he says, “The Senate has a higher calling than an endless spiral of partisan vengeance.”Define the importance of that speech, but also put it into context about what Mitch had done for the past four years.

Yeah.So before the—before the doors are broken in, Mitch McConnell gives the most forceful renunciation of President Trump of the last four years.It’s a remarkable speech.Had there not been the mob attack on the Capitol, this would have been the biggest news of the day, that Mitch McConnell finally says, “That’s it, no more, we are done.”He says, “This is the most important vote I will cast.”It is not enough to say, well, it’s a meaningless protest vote.This matters.If you go down the route the president is telling us to go down, it is a death spiral.That’s his words: “death spiral” for American democracy.We never heard Mitch McConnell say anything like that in the last four years.He had finally had enough.

And part of it I think was anger over the Georgia elections just from the night before.Remember, he had just lost control of the Senate, and it was Donald Trump’s fault as far as he was concerned.And all of the sort of seething and resentment that Mitch McConnell had been feeling all these weeks and months, all of that finally came out.

Now, a lot of people say this is the, you know, you’re reaping what you sow; you didn’t do anything beforehand; this speech wasn’t enough to say at this last moment what you should have said before.But it was the most powerful speech we’ve seen Mitch McConnell give in the Trump presidency.And I think as far as he was concerned, he was done with Trump.And as far as he was concerned, he thought the Republican Party should be done with Trump.

Republicans Contest the Electoral College Votes

After all is said and done, half the Republicans in the House vote against the electoral votes being accepted.How will history view that?They had to know the truth.They had to know that they were backing a lie or multiple lies.By perpetrating this lie, they were only feeding into the violence that they had just had to deal with very personally, which will also mean it might lead to more violence.How will history view that moment, the early-morning moment that we all watched?

Yeah, that’s interesting.And there’s a difference between the Senate and the House, right?In the Senate, the Republicans washed their hands of him and said that’s it, and half of the senators who said they were going to block the vote changed their mind after the violence and said, “That’s it.We’re not going to do that.That’s enough.”The vote’s 93-7 on the first vote against Trump.

In the House, you still had most Republicans go along with Trump on the effort to block the election.Now, there are some who genuinely believe that he was robbed, that genuinely believe something bad happened, who are genuinely conspiracy theorists in some cases.And there are some who thought, well, maybe there was something that happened, but we don’t know; we need to have a commission to look at it.But most of them, I think—I think most of them know that this is all, you know, so much, you know, chafe thrown up to justify, you know, a loss that the president refuses to accept, and they will go along with it anyway.

Why they go along with it talks to the structure of politics today.The structure of politics is that if you’re a member of the House, you are more concerned about angering people in your own party than you are about trying to reach out to the middle, much less people on the other side.Your districts are drawn in a way that the biggest threat will usually come from your base, not from the other side.And so this is the ultimate manifestation of that; that we are, whether we’re—if we’re a Democrat, we’re more concerned about a challenge from the left in a primary than we are about losing to a Republican on the right.If you’re Republican, if you’re Republican, you are more concerned about being primaried, to use the phrase that we use in Washington, from the right than you are that you might lose an election because of the middle.And in fact, you heard Donald Trump Jr. say this at the rally right before the mob attacked.He said, “This is no longer your Republican Party; this is Donald Trump’s Republican Party.”That was his phrase: “This is Donald Trump’s Republican Party.”It is a party of personality.It is a party of an individual, not a party of ideas or a party of principle.What Donald Trump Jr. is saying, it is a party that’s controlled lock, stock and barrel by my father.And he says, “We’re going to come get you.We’re going to come after you if you vote against us on this.We are going to primary you if you come after this.I’m going to be in your backyard”—that was his phrase—“I’m going to be in your backyard in two months.”

And this is the reality of the Republican Party today, that, in these House districts anyway, more than the Senate, in these House districts, to defy Trump was, and even after that violence, was seen still as more politically risky than the other way around.

A Split in the GOP

So where are we now?You’ve got a Republican Party in a civil war basically.Does McConnell at some point regain power?Does Trump’s ability to control the party continue?What happens now?

Well, it’s a good question.We don’t know.I think Trump has diminished the power that he will continue to have after leaving office.I think, you know, with 74 million votes, he could have left office still as a power broker in the party.He could have been a kingmaker.He could have been the most powerful voice going forward.He could have either run again or at least helped determine who would run again in 2024.But after this, a lot of Republicans are done with him.At least a lot of elected Republicans are done with him.They want nothing to do with him, and they say that he has, you know, damaged his own ability to shape the party going forward.

Now, that doesn’t mean that he’s lost complete support.You know, there are still a lot of Republican base voters who are on his side here.And you saw that when the Republican National Committee gathered shortly after the mob attack on the Capitol.They still reelected his choice for chairman, and many of them still defended him, or at least weren’t willing to condemn him, or found excuses for why he shouldn’t be blamed, or chose to go after his opponents rather than focus on his own actions.

So I think he has split the party in a deep and lasting way.And the question is, what happens now?Does he from outside of power still continue to be a dominant voice?If he doesn’t have Twitter, that’s a real handicap for him.That’s one way he managed to, you know, crack the whip over other Republicans because they were afraid of a tweet.He will still have access to public, you know, communications, of course.He can go on Fox or OAN[N] or Newsmax.He can give a press conference, have a rally, but being deprived of Twitter will be, you know, a handicap for him trying to exert power going forward.

But we don’t know.We don’t know where this party’s going to be.Is Donald Trump Jr. right and it’s the party of Donald Trump, or is it not?

Biden and a Divided Nation

And what does Biden inherit?How will this affect his ability to govern in the next four years in a country that is a mess at this point?

Biden has inherited a broken country.He has inherited a country that is divided and consuming itself politically, and a country that is devastated by a pandemic that is killing more people per day than died on 9/11, and a country that is reeling from the economic and cultural and societal effects from that.And it’s hard to think of a president who’s come to office with a deeper, more fundamental challenge than he has.

Now, President-elect Biden’s inclination is to be a conciliator, to be somebody who works with the other side.He considers himself friends with Mitch McConnell.And I think in a different era, he would be, you know, a leader who could force bipartisan agreement on at least some areas.But the country is so divided right now, things are so ugly, and rather than being a moment that shocked the system enough to bring us back together, the mob attack on the Capitol seems not to have, you know, unified us beyond all agreeing that we didn’t like that particular event, you know.

We already see on the far right, you know, efforts to try to convince people that this was actually an antifa false flag operation, justifying these.You see people saying, “Well, yeah, I don’t think what Trump did was good, but boy, I don’t like what the other side is doing.And what about Black Lives Matter?And what about this, and what about that?”And so people pretty quickly go back to their partisan corners, you know, even after an event as shocking as this.

There was a poll that showed that most Americans, a substantial majority of Americans blame Trump for what happened, or say he shares a good deal of the blame for what happened.But then asked whether he should be impeached as a result, the result came back 48% said yes, 49% said no.In other words, Republicans said no and Democrats said yes.We were right back to where we started.And it’s, I think, a testament to where we are right now.And that’s the country that Joe Biden is inheriting.

Five people died.The Capitol building was taken over.There were people slamming cops in the head with flags, and even that will not convince his base that something is awry here?

I think it convinced a number of people that something is awry here.And I think that this, you know, really undercut his ability to go out of office saying, “Hey, I’m a victim here.”He’s not going to be able to do that.For a lot of Republicans, you know, they’re going to be just very glad that he’s gone.They’re exhausted.They just don’t want him around anymore.

But the idea of accountability through impeachment, that becomes once again a partisan battle.That becomes, “Ah, they’re out to get us just because they’re out to get us.They’re trying to take advantage of the moment.They’re the mob here, the Democrats who are trying to go after him.”And that is kind of like sort of gives people who don’t like Trump a reason to go back to where they started in their own party because there’s the other side.A lot of the people—a lot of the power that Trump has had has been in his enemies, because the people who support him will say, “I don’t particularly like Trump for this reason or that reason, but boy, I really don’t like those other guys.Those other guys are much, much worse.They’re socialists, or they’re this or they’re that.Cancel culture,” whatever complaints they have.And they make a value judgment that no matter how bad our guy is, the other guys are worse, and that has kept a lot of people on his side for so long.And we’ll see how that changes after he leaves office.

Thank you, Peter.Is there anything we missed or any other statements on this whole thing you want to make that you’d kind of thought about?

No, I think that’s it.I never thought we’d see anything like it.I mean, you know, again, it’s one of those things where it’s like it was wholly predictable and yet still so shocking as to be unbelievable.

As you said, after four years of corruption and conspiracy theories and lies, it’s kind of what we should have expected, I guess.

Well, what did you think was going to happen, right?This is the foreseeable consequences of all the things that have happened in some ways.And yet we like to think as Americans that it can’t happen here, that we’re different, we’re exceptional.This happens in podunk countries around the world; it can’t happen in the United States of America.But it did.

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