The FRONTLINE Interviews
Susan Glasser
Columnist, The New Yorker
Susan Glasser is a columnist and staff writer at The New Yorker. She previously served as editor of Politico and editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy magazine. She is also the author of Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin's Russia and the End of Revolution.
Following is the transcript of an interview with FRONTLINE’s Jim Gilmore conducted on September 17, 2019. It has been edited for clarity and length.
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Candidate Trump
… The Trump campaign announcement at Trump Tower: Do you remember what you thought when you first watched?
Well, I mean, remember, the context of the moment was certainly, this was not seen as the advent of the future president riding down that escalator.In fact, I was the editor of Politico at the time, and we assigned perhaps our youngest political reporter, also one of our most talented, but basically a guy, he was on his first full-time job after Brown, and we sent him up to New York to cover this, Ben Schreckinger.He then wrote a memorable piece two years later about what it was like to have this be your first experience of political journalism, because he then followed Trump throughout the wild ride that followed.
But, you know, what I remember about the beginning of the Trump campaign was, day after day after day, of what we thought at the time were campaign-killing moments, that not only didn’t kill the campaign but seemed somehow to give it life and strength.And of course his opening campaign speech in which he accused Mexicans of being rapists, if that wasn’t a campaign-killing moment, what was?
And so it was still treated largely, though, as a joke, I have to say, by us and the rest of the political media.It wasn’t seen as serious.Remember that Trump had considered running for president a few years earlier and had not taken it seriously and had not ultimately run.And so that was still the vein in which we’re operating.Another key moment, I think, for me, was the first debate in August of 2015, on Fox News.And, you know, that was a performance that anyone today would recognize as vintage Donald Trump—ranty, illogical, fact-challenged, very confrontational with the other candidates on the stage, of which there were many.It’s remarkable to think that he beat out [16] other Republicans.
And you know, at the time, essentially, look at the commentary after that debate.“It’s over.”“He can’t possibly go forward after this.”He had been rising in the polls, and then, when he rose after that, when he went up rather than down, when rather than killing his campaign this seemed to be a moment that crystallized the appeal that he seemed to have for the Republican Party, for me, that was a key moment, because I also realized, not only is Donald Trump somehow leading this Republican primary—and, by the way, he gained the lead in terms of the polls after that first Republican debate, and he never lost it the entire time.
But also, I realize that our instincts as a class of political commentators were now highly suspect; that what we thought was up was in fact down, and the reverse.And I did not trust my own instincts when it came to Trump from that moment forward, because in any other context, to me, that debate performance was disqualifying.
What is it about Trump’s biography, and who he is as a person, that makes him the perfect candidate for the scene in 2016?
You know, I think biography, in many ways, is destiny when it comes to Donald Trump.And a real key to decoding and trying to understand the otherwise incomprehensible, when it comes to Donald Trump, he’s such a figure that’s different than—than the other political leaders that we’ve had.And in the early winter of 2016, as it was clear that Trump was on his way to winning the Republican nomination, in fact, I convened a group of Trump biographers, and we had this meeting in the basement of Trump Tower, at the Trump Grill.And it was the first time this group of people had ever been together.
And that’s one of the interesting things about Trump.Unlike many other presidential candidates, he was a very well-chronicled, very much written-about, an investigative creature.And in fact, there were five full-length biographies, many of them very good, that had already been written about Donald Trump before he became a politician and a political figure.And those folks had actually never met each other until this lunch.
And it was a remarkable occasion for me, in some ways, as the template for understanding him ever since.And so of course at the time, I didn’t realize that it was semi-tongue-in-cheek.We talked about this as the kickoff of the new field of Trumpology, you know, the academic study of Donald Trump’s biography and personality.But in fact, it was the beginning of the field of Trumpology.
And the legendary Wayne Barrett, who was this incredible investigative reporter for The Village Voice, he was there—and actually it was not that long before he passed away—with an oxygen tank.He was already very ill, but he came to this lunch, which was incredible.He wrote the very first investigative piece about Donald Trump in the late 1970s, I believe in 1979, in The Village Voice.And you know what?Many of the elements were already there: the incredible ego unconnected with accomplishment; the questionable business dealings; the lavish, outlandish, and untrue claims.It was—it was really incredible how much of a throughline there is between Trump’s personality, his family experiences, his business dealings, and what we see as president today.
And what does it say about us, that in that moment, there’s something about this biography, this backstory, that connects with the voter base? …
Well, look, first of all, Trump is a representative of a unique and bizarre moment in American politics, but only for part of the country.And I think that’s a key facet to understanding that for all those he excited and brought into politics, and animated with this message of grievance and revitalization, there are those for whom his appeal is incomprehensible and the exact opposite.And that’s why he remains such a polarizing figure.And the notable thing, right, is that people made up their minds pretty quickly about Donald Trump, pro and con, and there was a very, very small in-between.And that remains the case, of course, four years later from that campaign.And it’s very unlikely that you’re going to change your mind at this point about Donald Trump.
But for a certain segment of the population, of course he was this creation of the media.He was, first of all, a creation of the New York tabloid media.And I think that’s one key to understanding, when you talk about biography as destiny, Donald Trump is absolutely a believer in the old-school theory of public relations, which is that as long as they spell your name right, all publicity is good publicity.And this man was, I believe, on the cover of The New York Post more days in a row than anyone else at one point, and you know what it was all about is about his own divorce and sordid goings-on that no one else could possibly wish to be on the cover of a tabloid newspaper in New York City, and yet he thrived and flourished on it and was a creature of it.
And, you know, New York never took him seriously until it took him seriously.And I think that was, of course, one moment when Trump could have been ruined by a real serious accountability and people taking him seriously.But in New York City, they saw him as a showman, theatrical.He always was being investigated, but always managed to avoid being pinned down or ruined.He went bankrupt.That didn’t seem to ruin him.And—so he was a media creature, first and foremost, coming out of the city.
And then, of course, he reinvented himself, and he was given a new lease on a failing career by NBC and The Apprentice.And so many of those folks in Middle America who voted for Donald Trump knew him as this utterly artificial creature of, you know, reality, which is really unreality, TV.
Trump and the Politics of Division
As he begins to emerge in the Republican field, which is deeply divided at the time, unlike Obama, he recognizes the division and really goes after it.He seems attracted to it.How does he recognize the division within the GOP during the campaign?
… He recognized that perhaps ideology was not actually the defining characteristic of the Republican Party and policy nuance.In that sense, he’s the exact opposite of many of our figures debating today.You know, if Elizabeth Warren has got a plan for everything, Donald Trump not only doesn’t have a plan for everything, but doesn’t care about having a plan for everything and sees his political appeal as rooted very definitively in message, feeling, gut instinct and persona, biography.
And, you know, he challenged, of course, many of the Republican Party orthodoxies, and he showed, frankly, that Republicans just didn’t really believe in them.And you know, the man who praised Vladimir Putin was the nominee of the Republican Party four years after Mitt Romney said that Russia was the greatest geopolitical threat that America faced.You know, the free trader ideology that was at the heart of the modern Republican Party and the business coalition that has sustained and funded it, he laughed in its face, and they voted for him anyway.
So, you know, in many ways, he showed that ideology is not really the driving factor, that tribalism in our politics perhaps is, because that’s the other thing that I think is often underappreciated about this outcome.It was remarkably tribal.It was remarkably consistent, in fact, with the already-existing Republican and Democratic divisions in our country.It was very similar in outcome, in terms of votes and numbers and map, to the outcome of the 2012 presidential election between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama.There were some key switches in a few key states, as we all know by now, but in many ways, it reflected the Republican coalition and the Republican vote that we know and the Democratic coalition that we know.
We’re still in the campaign at the moment, and so I want to switch back over to Obama for a moment.There’s the tragic shooting in Charleston, which seems to rip open old wounds.And I wonder if you could help me understand how deep our divisions are in that moment.
You know, I will never forget, and I’m sure most people won’t, the incredible, powerful image of how Barack Obama responded, and, you know, going to that church, and the president of the United States, the first African American president of the United States, singing “Amazing Grace,” and trying to be this healer and this reconciler, and recognizing perhaps, in a way that the optimistic Obama of eight years earlier had not, that this wasn’t a wound and a fissure in society that could be washed away by the historic nature of his own leadership and presidency, you know.So it was this incredibly poignant moment.
But again, now, knowing what we know, four years later, it’s almost even hard to summon that moment.But the power of that moment, I think, was also very much informed by the parallel rise of Donald Trump and this backlash, and this racially tinged, divided rhetoric that has been a hallmark of Trump as a political figure.
And Obama being almost a figure of incredible animus and really the impetus, in some ways, for that attack, was attacking what he represented or attacking this new America.
Well, that’s right.To the extent that Donald Trump has an ideology, it could be said to be anti-Obamaism, and whatever Obama did, he said he would do the opposite, whether it was in foreign policy, attacking things like the Iran nuclear deal as the worst deal ever and saying, essentially, his policy was to get rid of it.It’s not clear what his policy was in terms of replacing it, but it was very clear that his policy was to do the opposite.
And on a long, long list of things, in fact, Donald Trump campaigned as the un-Obama.And I think that is the throughline as well to the incredibly negative and dark view of America in the Obama years that he sketched out for voters, almost a dystopic society that he would have to come in and save.And that was the theme of his address at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in the summer of 2016, and of course it was the theme of his “American carnage” inauguration speech a few months later.
But the energy—I mean, the hate crime that is what happened in Charleston, …that was something that existed under the previous administration; in fact was even a response to the previous administration.… Help me just understand where we are in that moment, that here you have sort of this great uniter, the great healer in many ways, in that scene, and there is this sort of brewing candidate in the background that’s speaking a very different language, in fact, looking at the same division and, in fact, maybe fanning those flames.
Well, that’s right.Trump sees these divisions in America, and rather than the sadness, the profound sadness that Barack Obama seems to articulate in that moment about his own failure, in some ways, to heal the wounds and to bridge the gap, Donald Trump sees and picks up on that same hatred and division and decides to fan the flames of it.And I think he sees that base as part of the reason for his success as a politician.
Remember, it’s roughly in this same period that Trump is doing things like attacking a Mexican American judge, which I think was one of the most, kind of head-spinning attacks of the early Trump period, when we realized that he was willing to shatter almost any norm, and especially those that concerned how our leaders talk about race in public.
The Rise of Bernie Sanders
… The Dems in ’16 and the rise of Bernie.So Bernie captures New Hampshire, and there’s something going on in sort of a populist wing of the Democratic Party.Help me understand that energy.Help me understand his rise.Help me understand his appeal.
Well, you know, 2016 turned out to be a different election than the experts and the consultants and the strategists for the candidates, for the most part, thought it would be.And there was a rise, clearly, in populist anger on the left as well as the right, reflected in the rise of Bernie Sanders at the same time really as the rise of Donald Trump.And those are not unconnected phenomena but spring in some ways from the same fact set.
And, you know, a key shaping experience for especially the younger generation of people who seemed most enthusiastic about Sanders was this incredible cataclysm of the 2008 financial crisis which had shaped their early adulthood and, in profound ways, that was reshaping American society, and that I think Americans in both parties felt that perhaps the establishment as represented by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama was out of touch with, that they didn’t really speak to it in their campaigns in a way that the electorate was hungering for.
Was this also in response to a disappointment with Obama?
Well, look, I think that, because of the unique nature of Trump and what he’s perceived to threaten in terms of American institutions and values, that debate about Obama’s legacy, to a certain extent, has been kind of submerged or repressed beneath the broader overlay of the incredible challenge that Trump represents to the system.But yes, I think that it’s—it would be impossible not to see the rise of Trump and the rise of Sanders in the context of some disillusionment with Barack Obama and his record in office.I suspect that that’s a debate that historians will be having for a long time, in part because we’ve sort of had this delayed reaction as we all understandably focus on the daily disruptions of the Trump era.
But I think the other context is a profound unease and discomfort and dissatisfaction with Hillary Clinton as a politician and as a putative Democratic nominee, in ways that—for reasons that are varied, I think, one of which definitely is gender-related.I think it’s impossible not to think that Americans’ views about whether the country was ready for a woman politician were affected by this and has always colored Clinton’s perspective and how she’s been received in the public sphere.
The other was her handling of this crisis for her campaign of her own making, which was not just the keeping of a private email server and thousands of private email messages that she chose to delete when she was secretary of State, but more than anything—people forget this, you know—it really was about her handling of this crisis.And it was a very contentious situation, even inside her own campaign.She just refused essentially a lot of the advice of her own advisers to come clean about this.
… And of course, ultimately, when these—more information came out from inside her campaign, for example, the speeches that she had given to big funders for lots of money before she was running for president to Goldman Sachs and the like, she refused, throughout her primary campaign, to release these in a way that suspected—that caused suspicions that there was something in there that was problematic for her politically, that she didn’t want to give Bernie Sanders this ammunition.
Well, you know, ultimately, when her campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails were hacked, those speeches came out anyway.And you know what?She would have been a lot better off simply to have released them and to have not handed an issue like this to Bernie Sanders.I suspect that none of our viewers today can remember anything particularly damning that was in her speech to Goldman Sachs except the fact of it and how much money she earned, which, by the way, was already public.
And so there was this concern with Hillary Clinton as a prospective Democratic nominee, I think, that was being reflected in the support that Bernie Sanders got in these early primaries, because people assumed, correctly, that she would end up being the nominee.
Russian Interference in the 2016 Campaign
… The Russians—so they’re seeing this division, both within the Democratic Party but also a real fissure in the country, and they begin to act.They’re starting with attacks, targeted attacks on the Clinton campaign, as we just got close to discussing, and then there’s also systemic planning around social media ads and misleading campaigns.Can you help me understand how the Russians entered the 2016 campaign and describe their ambitions?
So there’s two different ways to think about this.First of all is, what did we know at the time?And obviously we know a lot more now than we did at the time.But one thing that is very striking to me, as I try to go back, sift through the archaeological layers of our recent politics, the Russia hands I knew inside the U.S. government were blinking red from the early—from the spring, really, of 2016 on.They were extremely concerned about Russia’s behavior in regards to the campaign, and by the summer and fall, absolutely in a state of alarm that was not reflected in the public coverage, even as the hacking became public over the summer and early fall of 2016.It was clear there was Russian involvement.And yet the level of alarm in the Russia world that I knew from my time as a correspondent in Moscow—these are all the same people in and out of government.It’s a small fraternity of Russia watchers in Washington.I knew these folks, and they were extremely concerned with the level of alarm that didn’t really manage to penetrate more broadly.Now, going back to what we actually know now—we know a lot more, courtesy of the Mueller investigation and other journalistic reporting by news outlets like the Times and the Post and others, and there’s some important context that I think often gets lost.Number one, the Russian intervention in American politics in 2016 did not start out as a fully hatched plot to make Donald Trump the president of the United States.Even in the wildest fantasy scenarios of the Kremlin, a, that was a fantasy as much as it was a fantasy here.
The context that’s more relevant, but of course that’s often lost in our conversation, is the context of Vladimir Putin’s decision—shocking decision to illegally annex the Crimea from his neighbor Ukraine way back in 2014.And so you have this situation where that provokes a huge outcry in the West.And the decision to escalate in this manner is the first illegal annexation of territory since the end of World War II, and that provokes a furious response from Washington and European capitals that act in a fairly united way, led by Barack Obama, to impose stringent economic sanctions on Russia and to isolate Russia at a time where it was very significant to Putin’s own political standing inside Russia.
Now, he already came into this with a pretty strong animus toward Hillary Clinton.She had been the secretary of State when there was a huge outpouring of protests when Putin returned to the presidency in 2012, and he had unusually taken the step of having his government blame Hillary Clinton for these protests that greeted his official return to the Kremlin.And so you have two preconditions, basically, for this Russian intervention: number one, an animus towards Hillary Clinton; and then, number two, a desire to get revenge and to pay the West back for its sanctions as a result of the Russian takeover of Crimea and the ongoing war in Ukraine, which continues, by the way, to this day.
So that seems to be the reason that the Kremlin decided upon this cyberattack on the United States.And that’s really what it was.It was a cyberattack on the United States that had multifacets, that included its own troll factory and social media messaging run out of a boiler room in St. Petersburg, Russia, and then a more cloak-and-dagger operation that ultimately resulted in the hacking and damaging release of Democratic National Committee emails and the emails of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman right at the height of the 2016 campaign.
When that effort meets the division that we’ve been talking about, what ensues, and what happens?
Well, and then there’s a third factor that I think is important, which is to say the Obama administration knew about this but wasn’t sure how to respond, and was divided over how to respond, and also, like the rest of us, was informed, and its decision making was shaped by the presumed outcome of the election, which was to say that inside the administration, the president, others believed that Hillary Clinton would beat Donald Trump in November 2016.So that shaped their decision making about how to handle this Russian attack on the United States in a way that I suspect future presidents would not make that mistake.And it was a mistake, but it was shaped by a classic failure of imagination.We all thought one thing was going to happen, and then something else entirely happened, perhaps because of the mistaken assumption that we made.
And so there was a very robust debate, I believe, inside the administration.Certainly many of the Russia hands that I knew, the people whose job it was to pay close attention to Russia inside the U.S. government, they believed that something nefarious was going on.And they tried to get attention for it with increasing levels of alarm over the summer.Remember, it was in the summer of 2016 when the DNC’s emails were released, and that had an enormous effect on American politics.It toppled the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee right on the eve of the Democratic convention.That is a significant impact on American politics right there.
And of course, at that time, unbeknownst to us, they also had obtained John Podesta’s emails, which they—Wikileaks had obtained this, acting, apparently, in concert with Russian intelligence, which then decided to hold onto them for a couple of months and to release them at the height of the campaign.So I think this debate inside the Obama administration, which culminates in early September with a couple of decisions—number one, Barack Obama decides he’s going to handle it privately, and he’s going to pull Putin aside at a global summit and basically tell him, “I know what you’re up to, and knock it off,” which he does do.Obviously, it doesn’t work.Number one.
Number two, at the same time, they decide not to be more publicly confrontational.And in fact, the Clinton campaign and its allies on Capitol Hill are begging the administration, at this point in time, to go public and to do more, and to blame and attribute this more specifically to Putin and to the Kremlin, this intervention.And the White House, fearing that it will be seen as a partisan move, declined, in part because there’s a big meeting on Capitol Hill, and Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate leader, essentially says, “No, I’m not going to sign onto that.”
And in fact, right-wing media is pretty skeptical of what we’ve been talking about.
Yeah.I mean, so this Russian intervention, even to the extent it was beginning to be publicly known in the middle of the 2016 campaign, is already being filtered through the very partisan lens in which even alarming facts are now filtered.
And then Trump, in the middle of all of this, sort of revels in the Russian influence, revels in sort of the attention and, in fact, calls it out specifically.Can you help me understand why he’s drawn to it?
Well, that remains one of the most enduring mysteries, I would say, to this day, of course.What is the motivation?And why has Donald Trump been so publicly, slavishly sycophantic towards Vladimir Putin since the very beginning of his political career?There would seem to be very little benefit to him, political benefit, of doing that.That’s not a position that the Republican Party espoused.Their nominee of four years earlier, Mitt Romney, was a noted Russia hawk.In fact, it was Barack Obama who was essentially on the losing end of that exchange back in 2012, when Mitt Romney warned that Russia was the greatest geopolitical threat to the United States, and Barack Obama, in the middle of their debate, laughed at him essentially and said, “Ha, the Cold War called, and they want their foreign policy back, Mitt.”
But Mitt was right.And so, you know, Donald Trump would seem to have no political benefit.And yet, from the very beginning of the 2016 campaign and his own emergence as a political figure, he was publicly admiring of Vladimir Putin, praised his strength, compared it to the weakness that he saw in Barack Obama and openly seemed to encourage and to ask for Russian intervention on his behalf, which, at the time, was treated like a laugh line.But we now know, because of the Mueller investigation, when Donald Trump said, “Hey, Russia, hey, Wikileaks, can you get me Hillary’s emails?,” that was the very day on which the attacks on the Hillary Clinton campaign emails began that ultimately led to the disclosure of her campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails.
And this transformation of the Russian threat to suddenly the Russian threat supporting, in fact, one candidate in our election.
Well, that’s right.Again, you know, what is the exact moment the Kremlin realized Trump could be president?It might well have been the same moment Trump realized that, which was the evening of the election itself.But they clearly realized and saw the opportunity in Donald Trump from the beginning of the primaries, and I think not only because he was supporting Putin so publicly, but also just because disruption, division, those are the kinds of themes that their social media campaign was hitting from the very beginning.
And I do think that you can say that, while they may not have put a lot of stock in Trump as a possible winner, it definitely was an anti-Hillary Clinton campaign from the very beginning.Probably if the Kremlin assumed, as the White House did, that Hillary Clinton would be the winner of the election, they were looking to land some blows.They were looking to weaken her, to soften her up, when she was president.
And the division, the discord—those are the bright shiny objects, too.
Absolutely.And there was a throughline here.Look at Soviet propaganda against the United States for decades.It’s very consistent with the kinds of themes that were struck by this troll factory; for example, playing on racial divisions inside the United States, and by the way, from left and right, and so there was also efforts on Bernie Sanders’ behalf in the primary.And that’s just been a staple of anti-U.S. propaganda from the Russians forever.
The Access Hollywood Tape
… [The] Access Hollywood tape, … the moment that that story breaks, you know, it appears to Washington, it appears to the establishment, it appears to the media that the campaign has got to be over.Can you help us understand that weekend?It was early October.
Oct. 7, Friday, Oct. 7, and we were sitting at Politico in our afternoon homepage meeting in our glass-walled conference room, and, you know, just another crazy Friday in the campaign.And actually, earlier that day, we thought we knew what the main news was, and it was actually the moment when the Obama administration decided, finally, to attribute these hacking attacks to Russia.And it was a significant moment.And you had Jeh Johnson, the Homeland Security secretary, and James Comey, the head of the FBI, putting out this statement, blaming this intervention in the election on Russia, which is something that Democrats on Capitol Hill had been clamoring for.
So that came earlier on Oct. 7.We’re sitting there, and we’re discussing, what are the big stories of the day?What should we be doing?And my colleague, my deputy, Blake Hounshell, is hunched over his computer, and he says, “Guys, guys, guys, you’ve got to see this.”And first he reads out loud the tweet, I think, from The Washington Post, announcing the news of this Access Hollywood tape, and we’re like, “Whoa!”Then he says: “No. No, no, no.We have to listen to it.You have to listen to it.It’s on tape.It’s his voice.That’s the power of this story.”
And we stopped our meeting entirely, and we listened, for the first time, to Donald Trump—and it’s clearly Donald Trump’s voice that’s audible—saying these unbelievable things.And of course we thought it was a knockout blow, just as we thought his craziness in the very first debate, in October of 2015, was a knockout blow.
And so it seemed like this moment when everything in the campaign would be different, and that this was cementing Hillary Clinton’s inevitable victory.And it was really all about how many Republicans would defect and how long would it be.And Speaker [Paul] Ryan, would he refuse to appear with Donald Trump?And what was Mike Pence going to do?We forget, even Donald Trump’s vice president refused to be with him, and [it] was unclear whether the vice president himself would actually support the president in the election.
The campaign’s response is to bring out the Clinton accusers and to double down.Why does that work?How does that rescue what we’ve just described?
Well, define “working,” right?That’s what’s so fascinating about this.And of course, I do think, in American politics, this is always true, and it’s been even more true in the Trump era: We tend to take narrow outcomes and analyze them, retrospectively, as if they were not narrow outcomes at all, but inevitable and the result of brilliant planning on the part of those who somehow were the beneficiary of them.And I think the Trump 2016 campaign is a fantastic example of that.
You know, I’ve covered, for many years, really, really terribly run campaigns that happened to win, and really, really well-run campaigns that happened to lose.Donald Trump’s was a really, really poorly run campaign that happened to win, and to run the table, in fact, of lucky outcomes.The debates are a very interesting example, because on points, on the merits, most people would say that Hillary Clinton won all of them, and yet it didn’t matter.And it was an amazing moment, when, just a few days after the Access Hollywood tape, Donald Trump brings these Clinton accusers in and has a press conference with them right before the debate itself and, you know, is seeking to rattle Hillary Clinton, which he also did on stage by almost physically towering over her and seeming to physically intimidate her.
What an uncomfortable moment and an uncomfortable sort of setting to create.What does it tell us about him?What does it tell us about this campaign?
Well, it tells us something that we’ve seen to be, I think, a true observation, which is that Donald Trump will do anything to win.And a lot of his success is because he’s willing to blow past and to disregard norms of behavior, of speech and of basic dignity that we just haven’t seen before in a politician who’s been so successful on the national stage, Democrat or Republican.And the willingness to brazen through something like this is extraordinary.And in the end, it was a signal moment not only of his campaign, but, I would argue, of his presidency, because it also offered him the clarity of seeing those around him, and seeing who was really with him and who wasn’t really with him, and who should he trust, and who would be there with him no matter what he did, and who wouldn’t be.
And of course many Republican politicians showed how craven they were.And they were against him, and then they were for him when he won the nomination.And then Oct. 7 happened; they were against him again.And then he won the election, and they were for him again.So my guess is that, no matter what he says about them publicly, Donald Trump probably doesn’t have a very high estimation of those craven, flip-flopping and hypocritical Republicans with whom he’s forced to surround himself these days.
Trump and Party Loyalty
So he secures the nomination.He wins.He makes this much more partisan, much more polarizing than just a choice of voting for him.It’s about, you know, are you red?Are you blue?Are you for Hillary?Are you against Hillary?And this is really a very clear decision that forces a lot of those Republicans we just talked about to jump behind him in a way in which he had lost them during the Access Hollywood.
Right.Well, it’s also important, I think, to realize that Donald Trump is not about party loyalty.He doesn’t care about red and blue except that—to the extent to which he now identifies red as being him.And he’s about personal loyalty to an extreme degree.All politicians want that from their followers, and especially from their advisers and their party members, but they often don’t get it.They realize that it may last only as long as their own political popularity lasts.
Donald Trump has conflated Republican Party loyalty with loyalty to himself to an extreme degree, and has been remarkably successful over the last several years in what amounts to really a hostile takeover of the Republican Party that was actually quite united against him in 2016.And I think that is one of the signal aspects of Trump as a political figure, that we will look back upon and marvel.How did a party with such a long and illustrious political tradition abandon its basic principles and unite behind a president who would seem both to be flouting those principles and also, with his personal behavior and characteristics, to be so anathema to what so many of them claimed to believe?And yet they’ve fallen in line behind him with remarkable speed and unanimity, and with very, very few attempts to publicly challenge him after Oct. 7, 2016.So it was a key moment.
But the other key moment that happened, I think, was not the debate a few days later.It was unquestionably in my mind the decision by James Comey, just a week later, to intervene in the election in his own way.
The Reaction to Trump’s Win
Let me ask you about Obama, who’s watching the election and views it as a repudiation of the promises of the last 12 years.Turns out there is a red America; there is a blue America.Divisions are very real and very powerful.Do you think he didn’t want to see it, or didn’t see it?How do you think he’s making sense of election night?
You know, Barack Obama, in a very different way, was also not a very partisan figure in the sense of party.He did not dedicate a lot of his more or less successful two-term presidency to building up the Democratic Party in his own image or any other.He was not the kind of president who saw as his legacy the installing of Democratic officeholders at every level.And, in fact, even though he himself won eight years in office, the Democratic Party suffered in that period of time a hemorrhaging of officials at lower levels of government that, again, I think was something that enabled Trump to succeed once he came into politics.
And so, you know, Obama in his own way was also not a very partisan figure.He recognized these divisions in America.In fact, in 2008, he campaigned in essence on a post-partisan platform of sweeping them away and pledged to be the kind of governor that was not proven to be possible in our—in our partisan politics.So by his second term, obviously he understood that that wasn’t possible, and he turned to a very different strategy of governing, which is to say he abandoned hopes of passing bipartisan legislation and moved towards exercising executive power and exercising the power of the bully pulpit.
Let me jump to inauguration, which isn’t usually how things go.There’s the carnage speech, which we talked about earlier.There’s the president’s debate about the crowd size.There’s the Women’s March that’s happening immediately after, really that same day.And the press is also coming down pretty hard on Trump.You’re covering this time period.…But I’m curious to hear what you see coming to town, and the transformation, this wave that’s happening.
You know, Washington, in this period, was just completely beside itself, and there were a lot of uncannily accurate predictions for how the Trump presidency would play out, and then a lot of really, really bad ones.And actually, the Trump biographers had a pretty accurate sense that personality was destiny with Donald Trump and that he would be exactly more or less what we’ve seen.
And then there were a lot of people, for opportunistic or other reasons, many Republicans who insisted that somehow, Donald Trump would pivot to being presidential and, you know, that there were going to be these adults in the room, in his Cabinet, who would guide him and shape his decisions, and that really, he would be sort of a public, avuncular, spokesman type.He loved to be on TV.He’d like to talk about things, but that he really wasn’t a detail man, and he would let this more professional Republican infrastructure take over.
That didn’t prove to be the case.And so if you are ever in doubt, pick biography and pick personality when it comes to analyzing Trump.That’s one thing we’ve learned as Trumpologists over the last few years.But this was a period where there was still significant uncertainty.For example, in the foreign policy world, I heard over and over and over again, in the first year or so of Trump’s presidency: “Don’t pay attention to the tweets.Just pay attention to the policy.It’s inflammatory.It’s rhetoric, and it doesn’t really mean anything.He’s a showman.”And this was what key foreign leaders were told, you know.
I remember hearing from foreign ministers of close allies of the United States that this was essentially the advice they were getting from their advisers and consultants here in Washington.The smart ones among them disregarded that advice and understood that this was going to be a highly personalized government, and that Trump himself, far from being uninvolved and uninterested in the details, would swoop in and out in ways that would prove to be very, very disruptive.
The Trump Transition
I feel like we’ve been talking about team sports, and then, all of a sudden, we’re now talking about the individual athlete, which is Trump, which is everything sort of circulating around him and his instincts and his gut.
Well, that’s right.And from the very beginning, of course, there was this like, head-spinning turnover inside his White House and his Cabinet, which again, if you knew anything about Donald Trump’s past, this was a highly, highly predictable situation.He had an entire reality TV show that ran for many seasons in which the signature move was firing people.… There will always be people in Washington who rationalize and justify until the moment when they can no longer do so, and then they move on, and they come up with a different rationalization.But in fact, that’s been a trademark of the Trump presidency since day one.His first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, lasted 24 days on the job, the shortest tenure of any national security adviser since the position was created.
… There’s a certain chaos that’s pretty unique to the Trump campaign when they really arrive in town, and you have this sort of building Resist movement outside that’s huge; that’s the Women’s March; that’s in the airports here and on the streets at the Mall.And so I’m just curious if you’ve seen anything like that.
Right.And from the beginning of his presidency, Trump saw the challenges to him very much as challenges to his legitimacy as president itself, and so that is very much how he came to identify the question of the Russian intervention in the election, as a questioning of his own election as president.And so he, from the very beginning, refused to treat this in a way that I think any other president would have, which is as a serious attack on the U.S. and its election integrity, but chose to view it in very personalized terms.
Not a surprise, perhaps, to Trump watchers, but it had very profound consequences, not only for the country, but also for his presidency.And from the beginning, he remained obsessed with Hillary Clinton, his campaign opponent.He continues, to this day, years later, to refer almost always in his speeches to his opponent of four years ago rather than to have moved on in any way.So he’s almost frozen in time in this incredible election-night upset.He often recounts it in almost astonished detail, you know, like, talking about watching the TV and then it broke for us, and then this happened.Any one of his rallies for the subsequent three years is very likely to include the scene of the president of the United States recounting with awe the moment at which he became the president of the United States.
And so, you know, even questions about the turnout at his inauguration were, I think, seen and filtered through the lens of “They don’t think I’m really the president.”
Trump and the Media
Let me ask you a little bit about the media around this period of time, because there’s a war that’s sort of developing, and we saw it certainly during the campaign, but this is much different.This is the president; this is the press.He’s going up against them in, really, his first news conference.Late-night TV hosts are weighing in.Conservative talk radio, of course, represents another part of this.But thinking about sort of the critical press at this moment, what does it represent about Washington?What does it represent about where the media is in early ’17?
Well, so it is clear that Donald Trump, from the very beginning of his presidency, sought to make the media a very explicit target and enemy and focus of his administration.And, in fact, Steve Bannon, a week before the election, spoke first about the media as the opposition party.And actually, I remember being on BBC on Inauguration Day with Michael Wolff, who would go on to write this sort of sensationalistic tell-all account of the early dysfunction inside the first year of the Trump administration, Fire and Fury.And a key source for that book, as for his subsequent book, was Steve Bannon, who was the architect, I think, of this strategy of attacking the media as the opposition party.And we had a huge and heated debate among Wolff and Ben Smith, the editor of Buzzfeed, and myself about this, and I sort of said that kind of classic media line of, you know, “Look, we’re not the opposition; it’s our job to write without fear or favor of any administration.”And [Washington Post editor] Marty Baron would soon come up with this line that we’re not the resistance; we’re just doing our work.
And it was a very calculated and explicit political decision made by Trump and his advisers.And that’s important, because to this day, there’s a big debate about Trump and his tweeting and his attacks on people and whether he simply has no discipline or self-control and just is a—[has] got anger-management issues and is just popping off at things that make him angry as he watches hours and hours of Fox TV every day, or does he have any purpose or strategy?
And it seems to me that, you know, he can pop off at his opponents and also have very clearly political strategies.That doesn’t make him some brilliant chess master, but clearly, his attacks on the media were a very consciously done thing from the very beginning of his administration.Perhaps he thought the Democrats were too weak of an opponent, and he needed something more.
People forget this, but the very first time that Trump referred to the media as the “enemies of the people” was in February of 2017, just weeks into his administration.And, you know, for someone who spent four years in Russia and the former Soviet Union, this was beyond shocking.The phrase “enemies of the people,” “vrag naroda” in Russian, is the explicit term by which Stalin sentenced millions of people to the gulag and to death in the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s.And Donald Trump, maybe he didn’t know that the first time he used that phrase.He’s certainly been made aware of the historical resonance and connotations of this phrase, and he’s chosen to use it over and over and over again.
The Mueller Investigation
Let me ask you about another battle that he’s drawing out.… This is the special counsel being appointed after the Comey firing.The investigation is now in full force.Battle lines are being drawn.And I wonder if you can help us understand what does Mueller represent to Washington, and what does Mueller represent in this fight?And then what is the developing legal strategy that we see here that the president is sort of working on?
It can be hard to reconjure just how extraordinary May of 2017 was.This felt like the apogee of Watergate happening in the first few months of the Trump presidency.And with all that’s come later, we’ve forgotten the incredible shock value that it still held for the president of the United States to fire the director of the FBI in what was a clear and apparent effort to shut down an investigation of himself and his campaign.
And because this act of monumental obstruction occurred within full view, it somehow oddly seemed to lose the power that having done so in secret, on tapes that were only revealed later, would have done so.Had Richard Nixon done something like that, it would have ended his presidency in an immediate knockout blow.Had any other president done this, it’s probably fair to say it would have ended their presidency in an immediate knockout blow.And the fact that Trump not only survived that but that we’ve somehow even lost the power and immediacy of that moment is really something.
But this was the time when the Russia investigation, which had already, again, been an irritant to Donald Trump, had already clearly been driving him crazy, and he felt that it was casting questions about the legitimacy of his presidency, he himself is the one who escalated and in effect created the Mueller investigation with that act of firing James Comey.
And he goes on the offense, the president does, pretty early on.
Yeah, he goes on the offense always, because that’s his default play.You can be pretty sure, in fact, that if some big controversy erupts that Trump will go on the offense.
And he’s up against Robert Mueller, who is a longtime figure in Washington and represents something completely different, completely different about this town and completely different, in some ways, about the era that we’re in.Can you help me understand that, the contrast between those two?
Well, so he gets these two adversaries who are very different in some ways, even though they were friends, James Comey and Robert Mueller.Comey is the fired FBI director, and Trump had this notion that because Comey was seen as responsible in some ways for Trump’s own victory, that his decision, very ill-advised decision in hindsight, to go public and say that he was reopening the Clinton email investigation with just weeks to go before the 2016 election, and then, of course, then closing it not that long thereafter but in a way that felt very belated and never gave the real sense of clearance, Trump seemed to believe that, because Democrats hated Comey, for many of them believed that he had tilted the election at the last minute towards Trump, in a very close situation, so the president thought, I think, that he would get plaudits from Democrats for getting rid of this enemy of theirs, even though it also suited Trump’s interest.And he hoped, by doing so, to shut down this Russia investigation.That didn’t happen, of course, and it was treated as this grievous Nixonian-like sin, and that made Trump even more furious, especially because then Comey then decided to go public, and had this very sanctimonious view of it.He had contemporaneous memos of his conversations with Trump and of his real-time concerns about the president’s—what he perceived as the president’s efforts to pressure him.
And so he emerges publicly as a sort of Trump foil and foe.At the same time, Robert Mueller is appointed by his own attorney general, Jeff Sessions, to be the special counsel investigating this.Mueller is immediately set up as, you know, sort of St. Bob, this creature of incredible rectitude, the un-Trump in every possible way, a career G-man who will somehow, if only allowed to do his work, resolve this all.And Democrats and Republicans alike basically invested in building up Mueller as this figure.
Yes, a lot of hope is put on Mueller.He’ll finally take this guy down.
Yeah.And also, even those within his own party, I think, built up Mueller in an effort to try to stop Trump from doing anything more disturbing and alarming.And now that we have the Mueller report, we see that, in fact, even his own staff essentially tried to constrain Trump from firing Mueller throughout the investigation in ways that probably saved Trump, actually.Trump himself didn’t really save him, but I think those around him who tried to stop him from firing Mueller, certainly you could say, might have saved him.
But Trump was furious about it.And that, of course, was the beginning of his rift with Jeff Sessions, as well, his first attorney general.Sessions, Republican senator, had been Trump’s first ally on Capitol Hill.He had been there in the Trump campaign from the very beginning, and Trump showed no compunction about turning on him, and waged this unbelievable public campaign of insults and berating him that went on all the way until the day after the 2018 midterm elections, when Trump felt confident enough and just dumped him.
Yeah.And he beat him up for a very long time.
We forget about that.
Trump and the Health Care Debate
Let me ask you about health care for a moment.This is what is decided would be done first.This is unified government.This is Paul Ryan’s baby.They’ve been talking about repeal and replace, as a party, for many years, but it turns out they’re not as aligned as they believed and as Trump believed.And Trump sees this and begins to make a shift as well, and goes out on his own.… What does Trump learn about Washington during health care?And what is sort of happening with the GOP and Trump at this moment?
Well, one thing Trump learned is something that he already felt instinctively, which is that he hated [Sen.] John McCain.And of course John McCain had already been a subject of great derision and disdain on the part of Donald Trump, even during the 2016 campaign.McCain was fervently opposed to Trump, refused to support him as a nominee, even though he himself had been the nominee of the party in 2008, and essentially was seen, I think correctly, as sort of the last gasp of the Republican Party as it used to be before Donald Trump—B.D.J.T., as we may come to know that era.
And, you know, it was a shocking thing, when Trump had attacked John McCain in the primaries and said, essentially, that he didn’t respect him because he had been a prisoner of war of the Vietnamese, which is just a mind-blowing thing to say for a man who suffered for years, and torture, at the hand of the North Vietnamese, rather than take the offer that they made him to be released.But as an admiral’s son, he felt he had a duty to remain in prison along with his colleagues who were also imprisoned and suffering greatly in Hanoi.
And so, you know, again, to take this almost sanctified biography of John McCain and to trash it, from a man who had dodged the draft in Vietnam himself, how could such a man become the nominee of the Republican Party, become the president of the United States?So there was already this great rift.And in the early months of the Trump presidency, McCain had played true to form, and had been very critical of Trump at a time when other Republican senators were wary of doing so.And he had proceeded, nonetheless.
And so then you have this dramatic moment, Obamacare.Repealing and replacing Obamacare had been the Republican Party mantra for years, predating Donald Trump.It was actually at the core of their campaign themes, going all the way back to 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016.This was what Republicans said.And then, when the moment came, not only could they not replace Obamacare, they couldn’t repeal it, and that’s because they didn’t really have a plan that people thought was a viable, realistic plan to replace it.
And so there comes this key moment, this vote in the Senate.And it’s late at night, as the Senate often holds dramatic votes late at night.And nobody knows what the outcome is going to be.And then John McCain walks onto the floor, and he takes his thumb, and the last minute, he goes like this, and that’s how he votes.And it was one of those rare moments where—of true suspense in our political life.And the gasps were real on the floor of the Senate, as well as from all those of us watching at home, as I was, at that moment.And Donald Trump has never forgotten that.And even to this day, even after John McCain has passed away with a fatal brain tumor, Donald Trump will often refer to that moment, in his political rallies, in his speeches.The bitterness will never go away.
And the animus that he feels towards the party at that time—I mean, it is so specific to the relationship with McCain.Help me understand that.
Yeah.It’s very specific.He feels that, you know, this is a rival center of power, and in that sense, as with many of the autocrats I’ve covered around the world, he sees that he needs to break, destroy or co-opt that rival center of power.And of course, that’s what he proceeds to do.And Mitch McConnell—people forget this because of where we are now—but in the summer of 2017, and even into the fall, Mitch McConnell was a rival of Trump, or at least that’s how Trump saw him, and Trump is publicly attacking him and berating him.And Steve Bannon, even after he’s been fired by Trump, is attempting to organize a rebellion of the party and to mount essentially his own renegade slate of Republican primary candidates, looking ahead to the 2018 midterm elections.
Trump and Charlottesville
… Let me ask you about Charlottesville and the president’s reaction to what happens there.… Can you help us understand sort of how he speaks about the tragedy, and then how he really doubles down?
Yeah.I mean, this is one of these signal moments of the Trump presidency.It’s August of 2017, and I think that’s a month, in some ways, when the last shreds of the kind of Republican establishment explanations for the Trump presidency are being dismantled one by one.First of all, earlier in the month, you have “fire and fury” against North Korea and Donald Trump announcing what appears to be a nuclear-tinged threat that, if North Korea doesn’t do what he wants and come to the table and talk about getting rid of his nuclear weapons, then he’s somehow going to take them on in some kind of explosive, even apocalyptic confrontation.
He’s also talking about military intervention in Venezuela.… He’s already fired his first chief of staff.He’s already fired Steve Bannon, his chief strategist.There’s a sense of volatility, of disruption, of the wheels of government, as we know it, coming off, and that we’re really having a government of not the people, but of the man.And so it’s in that context that then there’s this white supremacist march in Charlottesville that unfolds, and from the very beginning of his campaign and of his presidency, Trump himself, whatever you think of him, has drawn the support of white supremacists and those who seek to advance racism in the country.
And these white supremacists, many of them were supportive of Donald Trump, and there was meant to be, in this liberal university town, a peaceful counterprotest, and of course it turns deadly.And it’s a terrible day in America.It’s a terrible day in America, reminiscent of when the Nazis marched in Skokie, Illinois, where our cherished values of free speech collide with our notion of ourselves as an accepting, tolerant and non-racist country.
And Donald Trump, instead of seeking to console a country that’s confronting this horrible spectacle, fans the flames of division and speaks of good people on both sides of this horrible march, and they freak out in twos.
And the Republican establishment’s response to this, and the calculation they’re making, and what they’re learning about this president?
Yeah.Yeah.I mean, this is part of—in hindsight, we now understand that this is part of the process by which Trump has bound the Republican Party to himself.It’s by getting them to accept and to make excuses for the unacceptable, or that which previously would have been unacceptable.And so, sure, there are a few statements condemning him, a few senators who say it’s wrong, it’s unhelpful; even a couple people in his own Cabinet, Jews, [chief economic adviser] Gary Cohn and [Secretary of Treasury] Steve Mnuchin, who object.Trump is mad at them for doing so.And ultimately Cohn leaves, in part—you could say, his relationship with Trump was always suspect, because he was sort of a New York Democrat who had been brought into the administration as a chief economic adviser, very much at odds with Trump’s protectionist “America First” rhetoric.
But this was a key moment, because really, nobody did quit, and even those statements against the president were fewer and fewer.And now, when he says similarly astonishing and racially divisive things, you don’t even get those statements anymore.
Is the president changing in all of this, or is he sort of remaining—
Well, look, Trump obviously has always used racially tinged rhetoric.He has always been divisive.He has always trafficked in insults and personal conflict.That has been his staple as a—as a public figure, predating his political career.But there has been an escalation, and that’s something that I think can be hard to see, because we’re in this sort of eternal present of this news cycle, right, of where there’s so many outrages, it’s hard to fixate on any individual one.
But I actually—I undertook the exercise recently of looking at all of Trump’s statements and tweets in August of 2019, and comparing them with August of 2017, which we remember, in hindsight, as this very particularly shocking month of the early Trump presidency, between fire and fury against North Korea and Charlottesville.And it turns out that there are way more Trump tweets, more than double, than there were in 2017.And not only that, but the volume has been turned way up.The outrage cycle seems to require greater and greater fuel to keep it going and to sustain it, perhaps because people have tuned Trump out more, perhaps because Trump also has fewer constraints on his presidency.He’s gotten rid of staffers and advisers who at least tried to put him in the framework of a more traditional presidency.
And for whatever the complicated reasons, the nature of his attacks and his use of social media has really escalated in a way that is kind of dramatic.For example, there were something like 14 individual attacks on people that the president made via Twitter in 2017, and even that was pretty shocking, you know.This is the president of the United States.This is the Oval Office, and he’s calling people dogs and losers.We tend to forget that.We shouldn’t forget that.That’s never happened before. …
Trump Centralizes Power
You’re describing sort of an arc of defiance, of a feeling that he’s emboldened.
Yes.
And I think of Access Hollywood, and I think of Charlottesville, and I think of this kind of trajectory of the establishment and the advisers that are sort of holding him back, seem to be fading away, losing their power. …
That’s right.So first of all, Trump has consolidated power to a remarkable degree, and that is where there is a striking consonance with that of emerging authoritarians in other societies.Obviously our country is very different.Our institutions are very different.They’re more robust, and they don’t give as much authority, especially in domestic politics, to an individual executive, no matter how strong or authoritarian-minded.But that being said, Trump has made many of the same moves that we see with leaders like [Recep Tayyip] Erdogon in Turkey or Vladimir Putin in Russia, which is to systematically go after, undermine, attack, and co-opt any potential rival centers of power.
And that’s where you see all of these leaders of this type, including Donald Trump, going after the independent media; going after the judiciary; going after an independent institution like the Federal Reserve—Donald Trump doesn’t have the power to fire the chairman of the Federal Reserve; going after the legitimacy of institutions that might challenge his political views, such as what we previously saw as the relatively apolitical intelligence agencies in the United States or law enforcement in the United States.
And so again, you know, it’s a different country, a different history, thank goodness—deeply rooted traditions of democracy and of independent institutions.But the moves in some ways are right out of the playbook that we’ve seen around the world.And so this is all happening in a way that is so dramatic that we kind of lose the thread of how significant it is.And the Donald Trump of today, I think, is in a much stronger position, in many ways, than he was at the beginning of his presidency.
But the country’s political divisions, you know, haven’t necessarily changed all that much.And he’s always been a minority president.He’s maximizing the powers that come with the office.He’s maximizing his correct read on the weakness of the Republican infrastructure that he inherited, and he’s used that very successfully to take power over them.What he hasn’t done is persuaded a larger chunk of the American public to support him.
And in that sort of takeover that we just described of the Republican apparatus, he ventures into the Roy Moore campaign [in the Alabama U.S. Senate race] against McConnell’s wishes.And I wonder, during that time period, since this is post-health care, what is he learning about the power of the party, and what has the party learned about him?
Well, Donald Trump, from the beginning, as a politician, has made a calculation.And I know people hate it when you use that word, “calculation,” in regards to Trump, because he seems to be so ignorant and so uncalculating.But nonetheless, I think it is a political calculation that the Republican Party was weaker than it seemed, number one; number two, that it was about getting the number of these politicians, and that they could essentially often be bought off or persuaded, and that therefore, keeping his support high from the Republican Party base itself was going to be the political strategy of his presidency.
And he stuck with that.So he’s never pivoted to the center.He’s never pivoted to being the uniter or to trying to make deals with Democrats.He’s offered the false hope of it several times.Whenever there’s a crisis, he will dangle often the idea that he’s talking with Democrats, and he’s going to come up with some big infrastructure bill; he’s going to come up with a transformative gun control proposal.It doesn’t happen, because that would risk something he’s unwilling to risk, which is his basic calculation that his extraordinary popularity with the base of Republican voters is the only thing that’s keeping Republican officials and officeholders in line with him.And so he’s, for most of his presidency, remained popular with something like 90% of the Republican Party, and I think that explains a lot of what we’re seeing.
Trump and the Culture Wars
Let me ask you about another controversy he weighs into around this time period, which is the NFL kneeling.This is sort of wading from the political to the cultural, and he reframes the conversation entirely.Why does he do it?What is in it for him?
Well, look.Donald Trump plays racial politics more than any president I can remember.And this came right after Charlottesville.And we pivot from that one racially divisive moment to a culture war that, in its own way, is also another racially divisive moment.And the fact that it speaks to his football-watching, white, un-college-educated male base of Republican voters, I mean, it seems like it’s tailor-made for him.
… But also, you know, a question of, this is worth the time of the presidency to wade into these arenas?Is it about just bolstering the numbers on his side again?
Yeah.I mean, look, I think that’s another insight that we begin to have much more clearly by the fall of 2017 and into 2018, which is just how much this is a television presidency, and this is a Fox News television presidency, more than any of us could actually conceive.At the beginning, it wasn’t just that people talked about Trump pivoting to being presidential or that his adult-in-the-room advisers, like [Secretary of Defense] Jim Mattis and [Secretary of State] Rex Tillerson would constrain him.It was also just the very notion of the grandeur of the office, I think, that people thought would somehow have some kind of an effect on Donald Trump.
I don’t believe that anyone really thought the president of the United States is going to wake up in the morning, spend hours on Twitter, and he’s going to sit there in his bathrobe watching Fox.And then he’s going to get up, and he’s going to go to the Oval Office, not until 11:00 in the morning by all accounts many days, and he’s going to sit in his study off the Oval Office, and he’s going to watch more TV.And then he’s going to invite some people in to his study to watch more TV.And he’s going to eat cheeseburgers and drink Diet Cokes and hang out and shout at the TV, and sometimes he’ll tweet about it.
Michael Cohen
… The raid on Michael Cohen really rattles him.This is when [Rudy] Giuliani is hired.This is when, you know, the undermining of the investigation really comes up to a pretty elevated level.What’s at stake here?
So in the spring and summer of 2018 is when Trump looks to be under more and more pressure from investigations, from the Mueller investigation and also from prosecutors in the Southern District of New York.And they have made, I think, a really aggressive move in going directly after Donald Trump’s fixer, Michael Cohen, and there’s this dramatic raid on Cohen’s office, and he proves to be not only a pressure point against Donald Trump, but a weak link, and he flips on Trump in a pretty dramatic way.
And again, you would think, for most other politicians, this could prove to be fatal, but so far, at least, not for Donald Trump.Michael Cohen is the fixer.He literally knew where the bodies were buried in the Trump Organization.He chooses to cooperate with prosecutors.He is the one who, in the days before the 2016 election, is undertaking a series of hush-money payments to Trump’s former paramour, Stormy Daniels.And that succeeds before the election, again.The context here is that, at the time, had that come out, it certainly would have had some kind of an effect, and Trump himself, according to Michael Cohen, is completely familiar with the hush-money payments, and in fact is directing them and is directing the negotiations that lead to them.
… But understanding sort of what’s threatening the presidency at that moment, do you think he understands it, maybe for the first time?
Yeah.I mean, there is also happening in this exact period is the trial of Paul Manafort, who had been the campaign chairman and sort of a link between the Trump campaign and Russian contacts, it appeared, from his longtime work with the pro-Russian oligarch and pro-Russian president of Ukraine.And so now Paul Manafort is the first high-profile trial of Trump’s inner circle, or at least his campaign leadership.And again, he’s the highest-ranking campaign official to be put on trial in decades.I mean, this is a very significant development.And Manafort’s longtime deputy, Rick Gates, has turned on him, and has turned state’s evidence for Mueller, and has very damning details about basically a career grifter who is making astonishing sums of money from corrupt foreign governments, and lying about whether he’s a registered agent of that government, and hiding the money, and not paying taxes on it, and is very unseemly.And these details come out at the exact same moment that it’s clear that Michael Cohen, Trump’s fixer and kind of right-hand man from the Trump Organization, is also turning on him.
The walls appear to be closing in.
The walls appear to be closing in, and Donald Trump becomes more and more publicly obsessed with what he’s calling the “witch hunt” against him.He’s tweeting about that.He’s obsessing about that publicly and privately, and he’s looking to his supporters on Capitol Hill and others to try to create a counternarrative, which he begins to do much more aggressively in this period, to question the murky origins of the investigation itself in order to undermine its legitimacy.
Trump and Immigration
…There’s the decision to end DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals].There’s an increase in the numbers at the borders throughout this period of time that we have been talking about.There’s the “zero tolerance” policy that’s launched.Can you help us describe the administration’s ongoing work on immigration?Some say these are campaign promises that the president is delivering on.Others say immigration really signals a certain message to his base.Help us understand the immigration question.
Yeah.I mean, you know, all those things are true in their own way.You know, immigration has been central to Trump’s identity as a political figure since the moment he rode down that escalator in Trump Tower and started talking about Mexicans and rapists.And of course, the signature campaign promise of 2016 is one that will never be fulfilled, and a lot of this inflammatory rhetoric, and all the talking, and even the government shutdown, is an effort to distract us from that basic simple fact.No matter what, in 2020, we know now already, Donald Trump will go to the polls, and his voters will not be able to say that he fulfilled his promise to them that not only will he build a big, beautiful wall on our border with Mexico, but that Mexico will pay for that wall.
Folks, Mexico is not going to pay for that wall.Donald Trump will never fulfill that campaign promise.And so in some ways, right, all of this is an effort to distract us from the lie and the con that was at the heart of that campaign promise.And also, immigration has proved to be this way of dividing the country and signaling to his supporters that he really wants to go back to a vision of a whiter, more male, less globally entangled vision of America.The America of his youth in the ’50s and ’60s seems to be the America that he’s peddling a certain form of white nostalgia for.
… Why is he so confident and defiant on this issue now, given that he hasn’t delivered on the wall, and he’s fired, you know, quite a few folks from DHS under what we call the “Mueller purge”?
Yeah.I mean, he has sort of “acting” everyone at the Department of Homeland Security.He hasn’t been able to execute this policy in a consistent or competent way.But it has nonetheless remained at the heart of his political agenda.And interestingly, it seems to be, because he believes and his instincts tell him, that politically it remains a winner with him, a winner for him with his political base, even though he not only hasn’t delivered on his basic promise, but he never will.He doesn’t talk about Mexico paying for the wall anymore.What he talks about is that he’s going to build this wall or that he has already built this wall.It’s a fantastic wall; it’s a great wall.
He even proved to be willing to shut down the federal government over the advice and counsel of his Republicans on Capitol Hill, because he saw that as so central to the political image he wants to project.
What is he doing here?
Yeah.I mean, I guess what I’ve learned, again and again, we have these questions about what’s going on in that mind.And you know, I feel like we’re—the emerging science of Trumpology is, at its most successful, is when we look at Trump’s specific actions and when we look at what he says.And in some ways, that’s where we see this remarkable throughline and a certain amount of consistency.And so, even if we can’t get inside his mind, I think we have an enormous documentary record of what kind of a political figure he is.
Leading up to the midterms, in ’18, he returns to the caravans and sort of drums up conservative media to cover the caravans and this growing crisis that’s headed our way.Ultimately, it doesn’t really deliver in that election.
I’m glad you’re bringing that up, because I think this is a really, really key moment.And again, I can’t believe that we’ve sort of forgotten about this.Donald Trump, in the week before the midterm elections, decides to say that the United States is under the threat of invasion from a caravan of essentially poor migrants, women and children, you know.Obviously, they weren’t invading the United States.And he uses this militaristic language, and then he actually orders up an actual militaristic response.
You know, it’s extraordinary and unbelievable, and yet [has] gone without really being remarked upon as much.He orders thousands of actual U.S. military forces to the southern border of the United States in order to counter a migrant caravan that’s still hundreds of miles away of women and children.And I mean, this is basically crazy.Jim Mattis, the Defense secretary, does not quit over this, by the way, although he is reported accurately to have been opposed to it.It’s only a month later that he quits in a dispute over Trump’s mistreatment of allies when it comes to our joint efforts in Syria.
But the establishment of this country goes along with the fake proclamation of an invasion of our southern border a week before the election in a transparently politically context.And to me, this was one of our most telling kind of naked-emperor-in-the-room moments: “Yes, sir, you look wonderful in that uniform today.Yes, sir, there is an invasion, and we’ll send the troops to stop the invasion.”
And some people seem to even believe this.
There was a woman in that New York Times story a week before the 2018 election in Minnesota who told the reporter that she was very worried because the president had said there was going to be an invasion at the southern border.And in Minnesota, they have a lot of lake houses that are empty, except in the summer, and she was worried that those migrants were going to come thousands of miles and take over those empty lake houses in the middle of the Minnesota winter.And I thought, how is this happening?
Yeah.And the outcome of the crisis as a political strategy?
Yeah.You know, it didn’t obviously produce the results that Trump wanted.There are structural factors in American politics, of course, that—that really weigh.And in the end, Democrats, as predicted, won back the House in a fairly clear-cut victory in 2018.Republicans, who faced a much more favorable map in the Senate, when only one-third of the Senate is up for election—and this was a pretty geographically favorable territory for Republicans—they managed to hold the Senate.So we end up with divided government.That’s a very standard result, in many ways, for a very unstandard political moment.
Left-wing Populism
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Let me ask you about the rise of AOC [Rep.Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] in those midterms.You know, Dems seem to be leaving the comforts of the center to fight in a more partisan manner against the president, a more aggressive manner.In sort of the growing opposition to the administration, what does AOC represent?
Well, you know, we talked a little bit about the rise of left-wing as well as right-wing populism.And that’s always been, I think, a striking and kind of underreported aspect of this moment.This is a moment when the extremes on both sides of our political spectrum flourish.And that, of course, is happening not only in the United States but elsewhere, you know.Britain, for the last two years, gridlocked over Brexit, is a very similar phenomenon.There’s a broad middle that supports a particular outcome, and yet it’s the extremes in British politics that are empowered and that make a deal that people favor impossible.
And I think that is very similar to the kind of dynamic that you now see emerging in the Democratic Party and that is clearly a factor not only in the 2018 primaries that brought figures like AOC—and remember, she toppled a very senior Democratic congressman in the primary in order to win that congressional seat—but you now see that as a factor that will clearly play a role in determining who is the Democratic nominee in 2020.
The Mueller Report
The Mueller report is released.After two years governing under the cloud of the special counsel investigation, an incredible buildup on the left to the report’s release, there is a pretty anticlimactic response.And I wonder if you can help me sort of understand how the report is released and then the president’s claim about exoneration.
Right.So the president claims complete and total exoneration in a report that does not exonerate him at all, and you see the power of the big lie.And arguably, it has much more power than it would have had even a few years ago in American politics and American society after the battering that the truth has undergone already over the last few years.You also have some very ruthless moves by both Trump and his Justice Department that help to shape the situation in which the Mueller report was received, and he finally fires Attorney General Jeff Sessions after the midterm elections, and he brings in Bill Barr.
And Barr really, I think, did Trump an invaluable service in terms of how he chose to handle the Mueller report and release it.… He gave Trump a crucial time boost and a window in which Trump was able to shape perceptions about what was in the report, and then delaying its actual release until much later—very, very stark contrast to the handling of the Starr report in the Bill Clinton investigation and ultimately impeachment of Bill Clinton, which, you know, it came up to Capitol Hill, and essentially within days, it was being released to the public without Democrats or Republicans knowing what was in it.And again, he was an independent prosecutor.Very different statute governing him than the statute that was governing Bob Mueller, who was a special counsel and an employee of the Justice Department.But we saw that structural difference, I think, make an enormous political difference, number one.
Number two, the public [is] inured already in some ways to these accusations, because they have dripped out slowly over time as opposed to being all collected in one revelatory bombshell report that lands all at once, and then, you know, Congress itself has been disorganized, stymied and divided politically over what to do about it inside the Democratic-run House of Representatives.And that also, I think, has been problematic.
And then, number four, very, very different conduct between Ken Starr, who was a fervent and articulate proponent of the damning nature of the facts he had assembled against President Bill Clinton, versus Bob Mueller, who took a very, very different interpretation of his role, believed that the report should speak for itself, and when he finally belatedly did testify, more than 100 days after he handed in his report, essentially refused even to restate many of its findings.He also seemed to be struggling as a witness and with the facts of it, and not in command of the situation in a way that simply let the air out of the balloon.
The 2020 Election
… Now, leading to 2020, help us understand sort of the greater—if we can zoom out from the debates at the moment, the Democratic debates at the moment—the larger division, and the division we’re experiencing now, but the division, also, as we move towards the next election.How does this compare to where we were in ’16?What’s different about this particular moment after this first term of the Trump administration?
So look, very few people will be unaware of the stakes going into the 2020 election.It has become commonplace, and yet, nonetheless, it’s true to say that 2016, if it was nothing else, was a very, very powerful reminder that your vote matters and that you can’t predict outcomes, and so you shouldn’t try.And showing up is a key facet of democracy.And in the end, the Democratic coalition, not enough people in the right places showed up on Election Day in 2016.And so elections have consequences.
We don’t know what the outcome of 2020 will be.But certainly, this notion that elections have consequences has been drummed into everyone, right, left and center, for the last four years.So I think people know what the stakes are going into this one.
And what are they?
Well, I think that four years of Trump can, to a certain extent, still be seen as an outlier in American politics, and particularly a disruptive one, one that may well change the trajectory of our politics in certain ways.But nonetheless, were we to have a more conventional president of either party following Trump, historically, it would be seen, perhaps, as more of an aberration, or the unique character and personality of this president, would be reflected upon.
If Donald Trump becomes a two-term president, especially if he were to win a more clear-cut mandate in November of 2020 than the very murky mandate he received in November 2016, remember, like George W. Bush, in his first election, Donald Trump was not supported by a majority of Americans on Election Day.He lost the popular vote and won the Electoral College.That was the situation, essentially, of George W. Bush in 2000.And Bush was very, very conscious of that as a potential limiting factor on his presidency, and it was only when he won reelection in his own right, and more definitively, both the popular vote and the Electoral College in 2004, that that reshaped how he thought about the Bush presidency.
Were Trump to win reelection in 2020 by winning the popular vote and the Electoral College, it would make it much, much harder, essentially impossible, to view him as an outlier.
… You know, let me ask you one more then, which is, why do you think Trump can get away with all of the crazy at this stage in the game? ...
Well, look, there’s two main reasons.Number one, in our system, there is no accountability for the president except what amounts to, in effect, a death sentence.Impeachment and removal from office is the only constitutional way in order to impose accountability on the president.Other than that, it’s been norms of behavior, the constraints of the office, the checks and balances provided by the other branches of government, Congress and the judiciary.If those are unable or unwilling to impose constraints on the president and accountability on him, then it doesn’t exist.
And so in many ways, President Trump’s flouting of what we see as established norms of the presidency, what recourse has there been?And so has he really gotten away with it?Well, the system, in fact, predestines that he will get away with it and that the ultimate prescription is either impeachment and removal, or it is removal by the voters themselves and by his own political party.And that’s been the previous pattern in which presidents who have gone past what we see as acceptable boundaries of presidential behavior, that’s been the only way in the past that they have been removed, essentially, by the political process.The political process, up until now, whether it’s on Capitol Hill, the potential impeachment process, or whether it’s with the voters, has so far not spoken.And so we’re awaiting that verdict.
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