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 the author of Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin's Russia and the End of Revolution and 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.
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The Republican Bargain With Trump
Let’s talk about the idea of, did the GOP understand the type of president that Donald Trump would be?I mean, in the beginning, certainly during that period of time, you’ve got a lot of the candidates coming out and making some pretty strong statements about who this guy is, and yet all of them eventually will toe the line.… So that said, who is this candidate?How does the GOP view him?Do they understand the bargain they’re making?
So, I think the Republicans understood very, very clearly the bargain that they were making with Donald Trump.And that, I think, is something that lends an extra amount of poignance and really pain to what has unfolded over the last four years, culminating in this final attack on American government, because you could do no better than to listen to Republicans in their own words condemn Donald Trump in 2015 and 2016 to understand what kind of president he would become.They understood it very clearly.
In fact, some of the most sharp and, I think, on-the-mark critiques of Donald Trump came from his fellow candidates in 2016, people who would go on to shamelessly lie and flatter him for the subsequent several years, people like Lindsey Graham, who called him a “kook”; Ted Cruz, who said that he was a “liar” and unfit to govern.Marco Rubio.Jeb Bush, who did not, I should say, change gears in quite such an abrupt way as the others, said that he was a “chaos candidate” and that he would govern as a “chaos president.”He was, of course, completely accurate, as were all these Republicans.
And so I think that’s one of the macro stories of the Trump presidency, is the extent to which Republicans, who absolutely saw him clearly for what he was, his ability to get them to toe the line, to lie, to act in not only a hypocritical but deeply cynical manner.Probably that’s the one thing where you can say that we political journalists might have had a hard time understanding what was going to follow—not Donald Trump, who I think we understood very clearly, and who, in many ways, has been absolutely predictable in the kind and nature of outrages he’s inflicted upon the American system, because, in fact, he told us all those things. But trying to understand that Republicans, having been so clear and articulate indeed, about the threat that Trump posed to American government, that they would be the ones who would have no compunction whatsoever at just completely flip-flopping.
So let’s talk about Pence for a second.He’s chosen as the vice president.Why?I mean, so, he’s the 180-degree difference from Trump.Trump is the guy stoking violence and racism and lying all the time, and then you’ve got this Christian fundamentalist, basically.What’s going on here?Why the choice of him?Was this a decision by the party that we were making a Faustian bargain, basically, but this is a way to lessen the pain?I mean, what was going on here?Politically, what was happening?
Oh, I think it underscores this smarmy moral hypocrisy from the very beginning, to choose someone who cloaks himself and his entire public persona in the false veil of sanctimony and yet gets in bed with the most toxically untruthful man who underscores none of the principles of these so-called evangelical Christians that they have brought to the public sphere.In many ways, it’s actually the perfect representation and summation of the Trump-era Republican Party, which talks in these, sort of, grand principles about things like patriotism and faith and duty and honor, and yet does the exact opposite again and again and again.
So, in many ways, it’s actually the perfect ticket to symbolize the marriage of Trump and the voting base that he ultimately would command.In fact, it was the evangelical Christians, the self-identified Republican evangelical Christians, who provided the highest margins, consistently, of support for Donald Trump throughout his presidency.
So, what was the role that Pence was playing, and do we know, sort of, what he really did think about his situation?
Well, he has been very, very disciplined, perhaps more than anyone else in Donald Trump’s world, at never, ever having any hint of public or private distance from the president until, of course, this final moment.There is this sense, for that reason, of a sort of Shakespearean tragedy that the revolution consumes even its most loyal servants.And so Pence was just rigidly disciplined, in public and in private.There are reliable accounts, of course, that there were major qualms, that Pence’s equally fundamentalist wife, Karen Pence, was distraught, reportedly, on election night, 2016, refused to kiss him when Trump and Pence were declared the victors in this incredible upset, and said something to the effect of, “Mike, well, you’ve gotten what you wanted now.”
And so, by the way, Karen Pence then did go on to speak and endorse Donald Trump, and speak out publicly and campaigned for him in the 2020 reelection bid.And I think her journey is the journey of much of the Republican Party.
How can that be?How can they support a man, if they understood exactly what he represented?
You know, to this day, that unfortunately, I think, is the story of the American tragedy that we have found ourselves in.That so many Republicans, knowing better, knowing full well, and perhaps better than we do yet, the nature of Trump’s public and private deception and corruption, would have embraced him is the story of how this happened.Without the Republican Party, Donald Trump would just be a septuagenarian shouting at the television.He needed these people to do what he has done, and they enabled him in a way that any administration requires the willing participation of not just one, not just a few dozen, but thousands and thousands of participants in this.And it was—it was a scam from the very beginning that they knew themselves to be the case.
… So Trump asked Pence, he wants him to reject the certification of the electoral votes in the several states that are in question.Talk about the position that puts Pence in, how he might have viewed that, and how Trump could imagine that he had the power to push the vice president to do something which was clearly unconstitutional.
Right.I think that’s the thing that we’ll be puzzling over for decades, when it comes to this post-election moment.It certainly was not a surprise that Donald Trump refused to accept the legitimacy of the election or that he refused to concede defeat, because, in fact, he’d been telling us that for months leading up to the 2020 election.I think what was a surprise was not only the lengths to which he went to pursue this attack on the legitimacy of the election, having been decisively defeated—this was not a close election, so that was a surprise—and the fact that so many Republicans, perhaps out of an error of thinking or perhaps out of deep, deep cynicism or some combination thereof, but that so many Republicans let it go on and on and on.
And I remember, and I think it’s very important, to go back to this immediate period after Joe Biden was declared the winner of the election on the Saturday after the election, Nov. 7.Republicans, especially, I think, Mitch McConnell, already understood that Biden had won, that he had won decisively.And they have this very brief window of time when, had they done merely the expected thing, the normal thing, the thing that they themselves knew to be the case, perhaps they could have headed off this tragedy at the Capitol.Had they just recognized Joe Biden’s victory in that sort of 24 hours, 48 hours afterwards—it was that Monday, really, that Monday after Biden’s Saturday victory that I would identify as a key, key day in all of this, because that was the day when it became apparent that only a small number of Republican officials were going to recognize Biden’s victory, and I think that was the missed opportunity.
And, you know, privately, Mitch McConnell was absolutely clear that Trump had lost, that he had lost decisively, that there was no path forward.I think many Republican senators understood this absolutely to be the case.I think the administration, I think Trump and his White House understood this to be the case.But Republicans left Trump an opening in that period, and then he ran with it farther than I think almost anyone could have imagined.
So I think that’s one key precursor to what happened here.Obviously there’s four years of leading up to this, but I would really identify that.So Michael Pence, you know, it’s—
Let’s stop for one second.But Lindsey Graham, by the way, at that point, also goes pretty far, as well, basically backing the president and starting to sort of question the election himself.I mean, what’s going on with Lindsey Graham?
Exactly.So in the weeks that followed—so first you had this messaging, in effect, from Republican senators, rather than simply doing the right thing and saying: “OK, we know that Trump has lost.Congratulations, Joe Biden”—by the way, it’s not just our tradition that you say, “Yes, my guy lost.”It is our tradition, just like we tell our children in Little League, when they lose the game: “It’s not enough that you acknowledge that the other team won.The basic principle of fair play here is you shake the other person’s hand and you say, ‘Good game.’” And you say: “Congratulations.And you’re my president now.”
So I would say, even that, by the way, has not happened, largely from even the Republicans who have at least acknowledged reality, at this point.It is—it is just—it is a gross misuse and abuse of power at every step along the way, by them as much as Donald Trump.And so what happens is, I think, they still were in this mode of normalizing Trump.And I can’t speak to what’s in their innermost heads at this point in time, but did Donald Trump finally shock them?Did he finally go beyond their own pretty brutal private assessment of Trump?That’s a question for history.That’s a question for these people to answer.
But I do think, if you look at some of their comments to journalists, including private conversations that I had with senior-senior Republicans, it is clear that they thought that Trump was going to give it up.They didn’t understand how he could pursue a path forward, when they themselves knew there to be no path forward.And so it might be, in the end, that Trump doing the unthinkable did finally stymie them.
You know, they gave—there’s a famous blind quote, a background quote to <i>The Washington Post</i> in this period of time, in which a senior Republican is quoted, essentially saying: “What’s the downside in humoring him for a bit?He’s going to file these lawsuits, and he’s going to lose.And then, you know, the states’ votes would be certified later in November, and then the Electoral College will meet on Dec. 14, and they will certify Joe Biden the winner, and we’re done.”
And so I do think that even Republicans who had went along with this for so many years, they actually did think—I think many of them did not understand how far Trump intended to take this, and how dangerous this situation was, therefore.
So, the vice president and the position that he was put in, talk a little bit about that.
So, I think that, in this immediate period after the election in November and leading up to Dec. 14 and the Electoral College, it was not apparent that Mike Pence was in a worse position than any other Republican leader.And in fact, there’s some evidence already—we’ll wait for the fuller accounts of history—but there’s some evidence already to suggest that Mike Pence had actually scheduled a trip overseas that he was going to take in the immediate aftermath of the ceremonial—he thought—reconvening of Congress on Jan. 6, just to ratify the results.And so he was planning to go overseas, a final valedictory trip, maybe get out of town and the wrath of Donald Trump at losing.
But I think that up until Dec. 14, it seemed as though that was the key date, that when the Electoral College would meet and certify that Joe Biden had defeated Donald Trump by the exact same number of electoral votes that Donald Trump had defeated Hillary Clinton, that that was the end.So, I don’t know, and I don’t think that Mike Pence fully perceived the extent to which he would become the final focus of Donald Trump’s wrath and fury and attack on the system, until these terrible weeks after Dec. 14.
But he was.And what must he have thought?
Well, you know, I think that he—Mike Pence spent four years being the most sycophantic, the most disciplined, the most slavishly loyal person to Donald Trump in public and in private.And of course we can’t know what was inside his head, but he must have watched as person after person came close to Donald Trump and was destroyed by Donald Trump.You know, there is an opponent of Donald Trump, a Republican, who coined the phrase, “Everything that Trump touches dies.”And Mike Pence had to have been familiar with that.Mike Pence had to have understood that those who came into Donald Trump’s orbit would eventually be burned up by their encounter with him.This is a man who’s gone through more national security advisers than any since the position was created in the aftermath of World War II.He’s gone through four different White House chiefs of staff.He’s gone through more members of the cabinet in a single term than any modern kind of turnover.
And so Mike Pence must have known that, sooner or later, it might come to a bonfire of the vanities and that he himself would be burned up by this.And yet somehow, perhaps he thought that extreme level of devotion protected him in some way.
And what was his decision eventually, and why, to go against the president?
That’s right.So when it finally became clear that Donald Trump was going to pose this ultimate test of what he framed as loyalty, perhaps they both made misjudgments.Donald Trump perhaps had believed that Mike Pence was so loyal that he would do something even that was clearly against the Constitution.Now, we can talk about how did Donald Trump—did he actually believe that Mike Pence could do?It’s not what he would or wouldn’t do; it’s what he could or couldn’t do.
And that’s the part that, for the last two weeks, has left me scratching my head over and over again.How did Donald Trump think Mike Pence was going to do something that is literally impossible to do?So we’ll leave that, again, you know, to history to explicate more fully.But I think Mike Pence clearly was wrestling with this beforehand.I think that the record will show that he was coordinating, perhaps closely, with Mitch McConnell, who had come out finally the week before and said: “You know, here I stand.I can do no other.”After years and years of accommodation, this was a red line that Donald Trump finally identified, beyond which a majority of his party’s elected officials would not go in the Senate.
And I think that Pence, as he was wrestling with how to speak about this publicly, he already understood that Mitch McConnell was standing firm with the Constitution.And he wrote this statement.I think he worked on it very intensively over a period of time.It seems that President Trump was continuing to privately lobby Mike Pence, as well as publicly pressure him.And so, interestingly, you have a very two-sided message, a very double-faced message from Mike Pence in the days leading up to this crucial confrontation on Jan. 6.
Mike Pence actually flies to Georgia, and he essentially seems to encourage and to egg on followers of Donald Trump in the fantasy, the myth and the untruthfulness of the claims about a rigged election.Mike Pence was never as fervent as Donald Trump, but he publicly fanned the flames of this big lie in the days leading up to the election.So perhaps Donald Trump took the wrong conclusion from Pence’s willingness to follow him, even into this really dastardly betrayal of the American electoral system.
And, you know, maybe that is why, when it came to Jan. 6, Trump, even though the rest of us had read the tea leaves very clearly, and we understood that morning—there was no suspense that morning.We knew that Mike Pence was going to do his constitutional duty and bang that gavel down on Donald Trump’s presidency.But Donald Trump seemed to act, right up until the very end, as if there was some chance that Pence would not conduct what he believed to be a betrayal.
And the anger that that created in the president, the way it’s been told by some people, is he was not happy with Pence.It’s just before, and he goes out onto that rally to speak.It feeds into the anger that he’s already feeling towards McConnell and the establishment, the GOP.And he makes this amazing speech.So define the anger, define the speech and sort of how you view the historic relevance or importance of that moment.
You know, I was watching Donald Trump’s speech to that rally, and it was so delusional.“We will never concede.We will never be defeated,” he said.It was angry.It was defiant.He directly attacked and criticized Mike Pence.You could see that he was coming to terms with, but had not come to terms with, what he saw as Pence’s imminent betrayal.He said, “Well, I want him to do the right thing, but I know that he’s probably not going to, and that’s going to make me look differently at him.”
So he was openly almost having one of his soliloquies in the middle of this speech, which is something that Trump had started doing in recent months, in his rallies before the election, as well.He was a man who understood that he was on the brink of losing his office and losing his power, and he would often talk about that, in these sort of weird asides in his rallies.And I think he did that in this final apocalyptic speech to the mob, as he sent them off to march on the Capitol—the fact that he was fulminating very publicly about Mike Pence in that.So that set the stage.
What was really amazing is that then Trump retreats back to the White House after telling the mob that he’s going to march with them to the Capitol and suggesting that he would do so.Of course he does not do so.And he goes back to the White House, and he’s watching this horror unfold on television.In the middle of it, he sends out a tweet attacking Mike Pence.I still can’t get over that.I imagine that Mike Pence can’t get over that.
The Assault on the Capitol
So, Susan, talk about the assault on the Capitol.Walk me through what you saw, what happened and how absolutely amazing it actually was.
You know, the attack on the Capitol was one of those unthinkable events that actually grows even more horrifying, I think, in hindsight than at the moment, when you’re struggling to understand the images that you’re seeing, struggling to understand the political implications of it, struggling to understand what is the actual level of risk that those people caught up in it are facing.
And, you know, my initial reaction was an extreme level of alarm, because I had been speaking over the last few weeks with senior national security officials, both current and former, and they were extremely worried.In some ways, they were actually more worried and more clear about the threats that Donald Trump posed to the constitutional order than many of the political figures.
And, you know, so they were really worried, because ever since last June, when there were the Black Lives Matter protests, and Donald Trump demanded overwhelming force in response to them, and Donald Trump used violent force and ordered it to be used to clear Lafayette Square, in order to hold a photo op, and then began reorienting his campaign around “law and order,” ever since that moment in time, Trump had demanded to invoke the Insurrection Act at that time and claimed that the peaceful protesters, the largely peaceful protesters around the country, were actually in a state of insurrection against the government.
The military, I think—this was, like, perhaps one of the most shocking things about everything that’s happened.They understood that Donald Trump, from that point forward, actually had the motivation to use the military as an instrument of holding onto political power and maintaining political power.So, I think they were extremely concerned from the election forward at what was happening.
So then you have this scenario, where McConnell and Pence are being rushed to a safe location, fleeing from basically those that had empowered them.
Well, that’s right.I mean, you know, there’s a long history.The revolution devours its own.You know, pick your metaphor here.These are the people who enabled this attack on American democracy.They finally drew a line.It wasn’t a line that they could hold, it turned out, and they were devoured by it.And remember, the incredibleness of this moment has overshadowed the fact that this was almost certainly the very worst day of Mitch McConnell’s life, because the day before, in Georgia, with the two Senate runoffs, Democrats won both of them.And that meant—and that morning, in fact, the morning of Jan. 6, that was the story: that Mitch McConnell was about to lose the job that’s the only job he ever wanted to have, Senate majority leader.He viewed that as the pinnacle of Washington power.He had made a devil’s bargain with Donald Trump to use that power over the previous four years to execute his own agenda, which wasn’t really Donald Trump’s agenda, which was an agenda of tax cuts and, in particular, of a sweeping transformation of the federal judiciary.He accomplished much of that.
And now here it was, that Donald Trump arguably had tanked those Georgia Senate races, had attacked the legitimacy of the election itself in a way that clearly seemed to affect the turnout of Republicans in that very competitive state.And so the morning of Jan. 6 dawns, with Mitch McConnell facing a reckoning for his own compliance and bowing down to Donald Trump.He loses his job that morning.And by the afternoon, his physical safety is in danger.He’s a polio survivor.He literally had to be almost carried out of the chamber and to safety by his security detail.The marauders are at the gates, and they are them.
Amazing.And with the vice president, as you have defined, after four years of kowtowing and supporting in every possible way this president, the irony of the “base,” Trump’s base chasing after him, chanting, “Hang Mike Pence, hang Mike Pence,” the irony there?
Mike Pence reaped the whirlwind.We all reaped the whirlwind for their very cynical, very cynical choice to embrace Donald Trump for the last four years.And the fact that it put him in direct physical danger and jeopardy—he was there with his wife and his daughter, who he had brought to witness this moment.They understood that it was a rupture, perhaps a permanent one, with Donald Trump.
I don’t think they were under any illusions that Trump was going to have a dramatic response to Pence’s decision to do his job according to the Constitution, but I imagine they did not conceive that they would be subject to physical threats of that nature.And, you know, there were reports that quickly emerged from Pence world that Pence was more furious than anyone had ever seen him before.This is, generally speaking, a very controlled man.Obviously, he’s been very controlled the last few years.Jim Inhofe, a senator from Oklahoma, gave an interview almost immediately in which he said he had spoken with Mike Pence during the riot and that Pence was as angry as he had ever seen him in his life.
And Trump never reached out to his vice president when he was in mortal danger.He obviously—Trump did not do anything to make sure that Pence or anyone else in the Capitol was secure and safe.And I think, for me, the indelible image actually is, when it comes to Trump, that video that he was urged by his own aides to put out, because they somehow thought it was going to quell things or that it was going to show the president doing something presidential.In fact, it underscored exactly the opposite.
As this mayhem was taking place on Capitol Hill, with the lives of the speaker of the House and the majority leader of the Senate and the vice president of the United States hanging in the balance, Donald Trump turned to the camera outside the White House.He looked those rioters in the eye, and he said: “We love you.We love you.”For me, that’s going to be the quote that I remember when I think about Donald Trump’s response to this horrible attack on the Capitol.
McConnell’s Break With Trump
And the McConnell speech, how do you view that speech before the mob broke into the Capitol?Why now?Why the break, finally?Is it basically sort of a declaration of war against Trump?But why did it take this long?And he’s saying thing in it like, “The Senate has a higher calling than endless spiral of partisan vengeance.”But there’s some context here.There’s the past that we’ve already started talking about.But if you can talk about that speech, the irony of it, I suppose, why he broke then, but give a little background of what this guy had done to sort of create this situation.
You know, so, Mitch McConnell’s speech took place right before the riot, and it was a very powerful speech in which, for once, he said all the right things.The question is, what does it mean to say the right things after you’ve done all the wrong things for so long?And, you know, at times it seemed to me that McConnell was even going to cry in that speech.At times it seemed that he was furious and just brokenhearted.
And I think one of the main targets in that speech of his ire were actually his own colleagues, who he understood had provided the pretext for this very damaging exercise in the first place.So he doesn’t ever mention Donald Trump’s name.That’s become standard fare, even among Republicans who criticized Trump.They are afraid even of uttering his name, which tells you something about the magic power that they continue to associate with this man.He never mentions Donald Trump’s name.
But he very clearly mentions his anger, disappointment and sense of betrayal at the self-serving senators, in particular. He doesn’t mention them by name, but Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, who had triggered this entire unnecessary—from McConnell’s point of view—catastrophe.And he speaks very directly to them in a line in that speech.And he says, essentially, you know, “It’s wrong to undertake the self-serving exercise of going through with this because you expect others to do the right thing, and I’m not going to go along with that.”He had pleaded with the Republican Conference in the Senate not to do this.He had spoken very clearly in a phone call, when it became evident that Donald Trump was going to pursue this route of attacking the Electoral College certification on Jan. 6.
McConnell had seen right away this was a potential disaster in the making.He had implored his senators in a private phone call that, of course, quickly leaked, because this is Washington, saying: “Don’t do this.Don’t do this.”Nonetheless, two very ambitious and very, very cynical young lawyers, I should point out, lawyers who knew better, lawyers—Josh Hawley had been a Supreme Court clerk for Chief Justice John Roberts.You know, the Ivy League did not come off well when you had a Harvard Law School graduate like Ted Cruz and [Yale Law graduate] Josh Hawley joining in this, and for reasons that were very clearly a naked personal ambition.
And so McConnell had tried to stop them.But instead, 13 members altogether of the Republican Conference had said before the vote that they were likely to go along with it, in effect saying to their colleagues: “Well, you take the tough vote.I’m going to get the political credit, and I know that nothing bad will happen.”But of course something bad happened.
Do you think that McConnell and Pence understood that it was all due to decisions they had made, that this was part of the Faustian bargain that they had made with an insurgent president?Do they deeply understand that, do you believe?
I believe they deeply understand that this is part of the Faustian bargain that they made.These are not idiots.They’re not stupid people.Unlike Donald Trump, where there is a mystery, I think, about whether he actually has managed to delude himself into an alternate state of reality, Mitch McConnell is a die-hard realist.He’s a realist who comes out of decades spent counting votes.You don’t B.S. yourself about whether you’ve got a vote or something, you know.You have to be a realist to rise to become majority leader of the United States Senate, because in the end, you learn very quickly: Did you count on somebody for their vote and they weren’t with you?Was your vote count wrong?And so this is a man who absolutely understands what was happening and the fact that he himself played a role in it.
So after the attack is over, and they come back, and they have the vote, half of the Republicans in the Congress vote against the electoral votes being counted.How will history view that moment in the Congress?
I think it’s the most shameful day in American history that I’ve witnessed since I was born.I really do think that.You know, there have been terrible mistakes, accidents, the invasion of Iraq.I was there for that.Nine eleven was a failure of intelligence, and many other things besides.But this was a calculated failure of America’s political system that didn’t have to happen.And I think, in particular, history is going to judge very, very harshly those who experienced this assault on the U.S. Capitol, the first time there’s been a violent takeover of the U.S. Capitol since 1814.And that a majority of the House Republican Conference would continue ahead with the attack on the American electoral system after that is something that made a terrible, terrible day in American history even more painful.
And, you know, look, the truth is is that every mob has those who have different roles.It’s not just—you can’t just condemn those wielding flagpoles as weapons.You have to look at the role of the men in suits.Every revolution has men in suits who go along with it.And the role of the men in the suits was played very painfully by 140, nearly, members of the House of Representatives and seven members of the United States Senate.1
They understand the lies.They understand the perpetuation of violence that the lies have allowed.They understand the damage to democracy, and yet they still go forward?And then these stories come out, the fact that they were just afraid for their children and wives?What does that say?
Look, every generation discovers for itself what leadership means and what’s necessary to lead, because every crisis moment is different, you know.A previous era had its Vietnam War, its Watergate, its McCarthyism.And, you know, it’s never too late to do the right thing.Every day, these people have a chance to wake up and do the right thing.And, you know, that remains, I think, the enduring mystery of the Trump era, is why so many people who knew better did wrong for so very long.
And I think back, in particular, to Mitt Romney and his decision a year ago, almost exactly a year before this attack on the Capitol, and his decision to become the only Republican senator who voted for Donald Trump’s conviction in the impeachment trial, in the matter of Ukraine.And you know, it was apparent, even then, that history was going to regard this as a pretty brave and principled act, and that notwithstanding the cry of the mob, which at that time was still a metaphorical cry of the mob and not an actual physical cry of the mob, that Mitt Romney had made a choice that was going to put him up there with Margaret Chase Smith and other individual members of Congress who, over history, had acted on conscience.
What’s unconscionable, I think, is the idea that their actual House was invaded by these mobsters, and so many Republicans chose to continue with it.And, of course, in the days since the attack, we’ve seen the continuation of their enabling of Donald Trump.There are no public defenders of Donald Trump’s actions, for the most part.Perhaps there’s a few extremist House members who are actually defending it.But by and large, it’s not that the Republican Party is openly saying, “Donald Trump did the right thing.”They know he did not do the right thing.
But what’s interesting is actually how consistent their enabling of Trump has been, even after the attack on the Capitol, because what you hear is: “Well, we shouldn’t impeach him for this.We shouldn’t impose other sanctions, because the country is clearly very divided, and we should unite now and move on, even as Trump continues to attack the election results and to divide the country.”And so, that actually was much of their strategy throughout the 2020 election, a small fringe of Republicans who were openly cheering on Trump and encouraging his attacks on democracy, but a much larger majority of these Republican elected officials who did not publicly defend Trump himself but enabled him to keep going by simply attacking Democrats.
The First Impeachment
The impeachment.Romney was, as you said, the only one.The rest of the GOP, including McConnell, supported the president, refused to bring other witnesses to the hearings.They heard the case that was pretty clear-cut, about the abuse of power, about the attempts to steal an election.What were they thinking?What did they understand or not understand?Why did they hold the line?And how will history eventually view that moment in time, now that we’ve been through Jan. 6?
Well, I would point to a couple of things.First of all, I have spent the last two months thinking many, many times about Adam Schiff’s closing remarks in that impeachment proceeding, in which he said: “By letting Donald Trump off, you are enabling his attack on our elections.He attacked the election in 2016,” Schiff said, “and he will do it again.And you are now responsible for that.”And over and over again, that speech has echoed in my head over the last couple months.
The other thing, I think, that explains almost everything you need to know about that Senate decision to acquit Donald Trump, without even having any witnesses, is the statement by Lamar Alexander, who was a retiring senator, who had spent a long career in the Senate and actually was Mitch McConnell’s best friend.And Alexander, in the end, cast a deciding vote to make sure that it was a trial with no witnesses, to make sure that it was a sham.And then he went along with the rest of the Republican Conference in the Senate, and he voted to acquit Donald Trump, a man who he said, in a public statement, he believed was guilty.And I think that that tells you so very much, that a man who devoted his life to the Senate, who was seen as a man of integrity and rectitude, would choose to vote to acquit Donald Trump of something he said publicly he was guilty of.And he also said that many other members of the Senate agreed with him.
And there were other members of the Senate, in fact, who came out publicly and said they agreed with Lamar Alexander, people like Rob Portman from Ohio, a moderate establishment Republican who went along, over and over again, with Donald Trump for four years.In many ways, it’s the Rob Portmans and the Lamar Alexanders who bear as much responsibility as the Ted Cruzes and even the Mitch McConnells.
McConnell, after all, was the leader of this conference, and he had a situation where the majority of the conference, at many times, wished to go along with Donald Trump or felt the enormous political pressure to do so.Lamar Alexander was not a leader.Rob Portman was not a leader.They were the followers who make outrages like this possible.
The Lessons of Charlottesville
Another moment is, of course, Charlottesville, where Trump backs the white supremacists.A warning sign of what’s to come?Again, Pence’s and McConnell’s sort of responsibility for not—I mean, the Republican Party, to some extent, there were naysayers; there were people that sort of came out, but there were no penalties for Trump.And again, Trump was given the ability to sort of move forward, realizing that he was in control of the party, and they were not going to cause a problem.So what are the lessons from Charlottesville?
Yeah.I think Charlottesville was a key moment in defining Donald Trump’s ability to conduct outrageous things without sanction, without penalty, without accountability; that the story of his presidency, at least right now, I think, does appear to be the story of a man who got away with more and more and more as he understood that there were no practical limits or constraints, except for norms that he was willing to violate, except for public opprobrium, which he didn’t care about.
And so Charlottesville was shocking at the time but actually the template for much that followed.And, you know, when I worked in Russia as a correspondent, and I was there for this key period, which was the first four years of Vladimir Putin’s tenure, which was essentially the four years in which he was dismantling Russia’s very fragile emerging democracy and systematically actually going after the institutions that might have stood in his way: a recentralizing power in the Kremlin; the independent media; elected governors; oligarchs and wealthy businessmen.He went after them one by one by one.It was very systematic, and it was very effective.And, you know, there was a Russian saying that one of my friends there told me at the time, to explain why it was that Putin, on year three, was engaged in even more outrageous acts than Putin in year one: “The appetite grows while eating.”
And to me, I thought about that when I thought about Charlottesville.Donald Trump got away with Charlottesville, and that very directly, I think, led to Jan. 6, 2021.
So, Trump gets hit pretty hard by the Democrats for Charlottesville, but the GOP doesn’t.And so he moves forward.He’s backed by right-wing media.And he starts attacking people like Flake and others.He goes after people.He goes on the offense again.I mean, is this an example of what you’ve been talking about?
Yeah.I think that, again, history will go back to August of 2017 as a key moment in the Trump presidency, not only in the unleashing of Donald Trump and him doing something truly, profoundly shocking and outrageous in seeming to endorse a white supremacist mob in Charlottesville, Virginia.It’s also the month that he talks about unleashing “fire and fury” on North Korea.It’s also the month that he talks about unleashing a military option in Venezuela.It’s also the month that he’s just fired his very first White House chief of staff, just at the end of July, I believe, by Twitter—something we’d never seen before.And he’s seizing control.Steve Bannon, the architect of many of the outrageous policies of Donald Trump, is finally banished from the White House, but Bannonism, in some ways, now reigns supreme at the White House.
And what happens, that up until the late summer of 2017, there had been this continued resistance to Donald Trump on Capitol Hill and among Senate Republicans, not by any means all of them, but there was a much more adversarial relationship than would come later.Mitch McConnell was still holding the line on things like making sure that sanctions to Russia were still in place, which Trump had wanted to lift at the beginning of the administration.The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at this time, was Bob Corker, you know, who considered Trump to be an unguided missile and started speaking publicly about that.
And Trump became even more on the offensive against them after Charlottesville, and that fall, in fact, became the process by which the final co-opting of the Senate and the bending of these Senate Republicans to Trump’s will occurred.
Including McConnell, including Pence?
Including McConnell, including Mitch McConnell.
Then there’s the tax bill ceremony.Just for a moment, what does that show about—Pence and McConnell’s role in that, and how that groveling of the leadership of Congress, to this president?
So, you know, the tax cuts and the judges became the justification, the all-purpose justification, for the Senate Republicans who abandoned their principles to Donald Trump.This became what they got in return.And I think that Donald Trump is the ultimate transactional political figure.He brought that sense of transactionalism.Certainly he is not an ideologue, in that sense.He came from the real estate world, which is: “Tell me what your bottom line is.Tell me what you need from me to get this done.”
And he understood, correctly, what was the bottom line for Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan and these Republicans on Capitol Hill.Their bottom line was, “Give us what we want.”The tax cuts were what they wanted.The judges were what they wanted.And I think Donald Trump thought, This is a good deal for me.In return, I get ownership, lock, stock and barrel, of the Republican Party.
In June, the Black Lives Matter protests in Lafayette Square—so, that event.One of the aspects about it that I’d like to ask you about, because we have a lot of coverage of the other material, is the vice president wasn’t there.The vice president didn’t follow after.Instead, he was watching it on television.What’s your thought about that?Was he trying to distance himself?Where is Pence at this point, his position on what Donald Trump was doing at that point?
You know, Pence was just missing in action, which tells you a lot about his approach to the vice presidency.Remember, Pence had been assigned by Donald Trump in the beginning days of the coronavirus crisis to be the head of the task force.And, you know, that was both a focus of Pence’s work but also, of course, his greatest failure.And if you want to talk about going along with folly and going along with dangerous policies, there’s no better example than what Mike Pence had been doing for the previous few months, and would continue to do, which was botching, in a historic and deadly way, the worst American response to a public health crisis, a once-in-a-generation public health crisis.
And, you know, you can say: “Well, Donald Trump tied his hands.Donald Trump made it impossible for him to be effective,” and the record may ultimately support that.But on paper, Mike Pence was the man who was in charge of America’s [White House] Coronavirus Task Force.And as we speak, hundreds of thousands of Americans are dead because of the failed incompetence, in many respects, of that response.And that was Mike Pence’s job on that day.
Trump’s Allegations of Election Fraud
… Trump disputes the election results as fraud immediately.He uses the media.He continually throws out fake claims, and the base believes.So, I guess the area that we haven’t covered is the extent of the lies and how they grow, and the fact that the GOP does not push back, as you’ve defined, and the fact that McConnell does not push back.How does that define a new reality and allow the base to take this as the truth, take this as their religion, especially when the right-wing media was backing it as well?It didn’t matter what the elite media was doing, because they had already been—that’s been discounted, because it’s all “fake news.”So, the effect on the crowd, the effect of this process and how it starts immediately on election night, or really before, with Trump’s claims that this was a farce?
Yeah.I think that obviously, the assault on truth is a hallmark throughout the Trump presidency, and that is the precondition for the disaster that befell the country after the election.These were millions of Americans, 74 million Americans, ultimately, it turned out, who voted for Donald Trump, even knowing what had transpired in his presidency and that he was the most historically untruthful president of this or any other lifetime.
And so, you know, this was a significant minority—still a minority of the country, but a significant minority of the country that chose to vote for Donald Trump, even knowing the extent of the lies and having already been preconditioned to believe in them, or at least not to actively enough disbelieve in them, to suppress their disbelief because of partisanship or for whatever other reasons they had for voting for him.
So the preconditions had already been laid.And Trump had already been undermining the legitimacy of the election for months.In fact, this fall, in September, I went back, and I looked at this question of, you know, how much and how often and how frequently had Trump been speaking about the rigged election, or undermining it?And remember, this is in September, before he got the coronavirus, before the debates, before everything that would happen later.
And the people at Factbase, which is an online tracker of all of Trump’s public statements, came back with an answer for me.And I think it shocked both of us, because it was already 700 times, and this was in September.And I think that tells you, you know, the groundwork had been laid for what happened on the election night.And that meant that even when Fox News, which bears as much responsibility as any other outlet for offering Trump a microphone and a platform for distributing lies and hate on a massive scale to Americans, when even Fox News called the election on Saturday the 7th of November for Joe Biden, even that was not enough to stop their own hosts, night after night after night, from lying about the results of the election and undermining them.
Do you think McConnell and Pence understood the dangers that their not speaking out—how this lie was growing—do you think they actually understood the danger and how complicit they were?
I don’t know if Pence and McConnell understood the danger of their not speaking out, but I know they understand that now, and I know that they understood that at some point.Maybe they actually believed this notion that they could just humor Donald Trump, that they could get him under control.And remember that this fallacy of the adults in the room has shadowed the entire administration of Donald Trump.Even though it was proved to be a fallacy, I think that they were always focused on, “Well, I stopped him from doing this bad thing or that bad thing,” and not focused on all the bad things that were allowed to happen.And so, you know, it doesn’t matter whether they knew or not.It matters that they should have known.
The Republicans Lose Georgia
So, Georgia, Trump goes on the attack on Georgian officials.Graham jumps in.Loeffler and Perdue back the president’s point of view.What does this say, when you look at the moves that were made and how other officials agreed to go along with it, how does that play into this history that we have been talking about and how the very rocky road that we were going down, due to the president’s inability to understand that he had lost the election?
So, I think Georgia became a reason and a rationale for Mitch McConnell and for other Republicans to go along with Trump’s lies.And it ultimately was very consequential, because had there not been two Senate runoffs in Georgia, had control of the Senate not been hanging in the balance from Nov. 3 all the way until Jan. 5, I think you would have seen potentially different decisions made by Senate Republicans and by Mitch McConnell.
And they had this idea that we need Donald Trump; we still need Trump.Look at how effective he is in generating Republican turnout.Look at how much the base of the Republican Party still loves and responds to him.They like Donald Trump more than they like us Republicans.They like Donald Trump more than anything.So, I think they were focused on how much they needed Donald Trump.
But that failed, of course, to account for the thing that actually quickly became obvious to Republican strategists with whom I spoke, which is that needing Trump—he had once again imposed an impossible bargain on them.Donald Trump, the cost of Donald Trump’s support in the Georgia elections was refusing to accept the outcome of the elections and Joe Biden as president, and yet the campaign that Mitch McConnell and the Republicans wanted to run was a campaign based on the threat of Joe Biden having control of all three branches of government.And they were not able to make that because of, once again, a Faustian bargain that they had made with Donald Trump.
The phone call to [Georgia Secretary of State Brad] Raffensperger: It’s very much, of course, similar to the phone call that got him impeached originally.Is it surprising?Is the way that he is sort of, again—nobody seems to cause a fuss about it, another definition of how the GOP has been beaten by him?I mean, the significance of that phone call and what it means?
You know, that phone call came out.Obviously, it was the sort of beginning of perhaps the most extraordinary week in Washington than any of us can remember.It comes out on Sunday.At the same time, within hours, an extraordinary op-ed is released by all 10 living former secretaries of defense, including Dick Cheney, warning about Trumpian overreach and warning that he should not try to misuse the military for his purposes and declare martial law.So, it’s a very unnerving combination of events, in which you could argue that the establishment of the GOP recognizes too late that the barbarians are, you know, not only at the gates but essentially inside the gates, right?You know, we’ve all seen that movie, and we all know that it’s too late to undo the damage.
And, you know, so you could say, well, the story of Republicans after the election was that they failed at a national level, and they continued to be complicit with Trump, but that Republican judges and Republican state and local election officials turned out to be the bulwark against Trump.And you did have this remarkable rift that emerged.These were Trumpists.The governor of Georgia was a complete and total Trump supporter.Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state of Georgia, was a complete and total Trump supporter.This elections security official in Georgia who became a public figure, Gabriel Sterling, who warned of violence before it happened, he was a Republican.
These were people who, knowing everything they knew about Donald Trump, actually voted for Donald Trump not only in 2016 but also in 2020, and yet they held the line against him when it came to an attack on actually our system of democracy itself.And that’s where history is going to judge these federal elected officials differently, because they were willing to abandon democracy for Donald Trump.And many officials around the country were not.
And that moment by Sterling, when he made that speech, and he said, “People are going to die,” they were warned.
They were warned.He said, “People are going to die.”People didn’t listen.Donald Trump has always benefited from not being taken seriously.There was an extraordinary statement the other day by Mick Mulvaney, who served as his third chief of staff and was ousted in the middle of the pandemic.Mick Mulvaney, who was a former member of Congress himself, came out of the right-wing Freedom Caucus that provided much of the energy and support in Washington behind Donald Trump.Mick Mulvaney went on television, and he said, “Well, I was terribly wrong.”He had written an op-ed in <i>The Wall Street Journal</i> after the election, and he said: “Don’t worry.If Donald Trump loses, he will concede and leave office gracefully.”He wrote that in <i>The Wall Street Journal</i>.It wasn’t true.It wasn’t true at the time, and, of course, it turned out to be catastrophically not true.
But Mick Mulvaney said on television the other day, he said: “Well, you know, what’s really shocking about this mob is that they took Donald Trump literally.I never thought I would see that.”And Donald Trump has benefited by not being taken seriously enough.And I think that was the crisis among some Democrats, as well as Republicans, after Nov. 3.They just could not believe that Donald Trump would do the unthinkable thing and follow through on his own words.And that left them very vulnerable, because that failure of thinking led to catastrophic failures in strategy and tactics, in responding to Donald Trump.
A Divided GOP
So, the state of affairs right now, we’ve got a GOP in civil war.What happens now?Does McConnell remain in control, in some way, of his caucus?Will Trump come back and still dominate the GOP?I mean, where are we, as far as the GOP is concerned?Well, answer that first, and then I’ll follow up.
You know, we are still in the middle of the crisis.We’re not at the end of the crisis.I think the instant response in Washington was the view that Donald Trump had just torched his political standing in the Republican Party afterwards, that it made his ability to come back and be a candidate again, which he had been talking about since the election, that that was no longer possible; that the political aspirations of his very entitled children were probably going to go up in flames as a result of this; that his business would suffer, as indeed it already seems to be suffering, as a result of this; and that it was a catastrophic bonfire, not only of American democracy but also of Donald Trump’s own political standing.
However—dot-dot-dot—however, there is an alternate view, which is that the ability of Trump to continue to command a fanatic group of supporters who are willing to follow him, even into armed rebellion against these United States of America, would mean that he would remain a factor, regardless of whether he was accepted in polite Republican circles or not.And I think that, to that end, you saw different calculations in the House and the Senate.But the calculation in the House was very clearly by nearly 140 House Republicans that Donald Trump would not, in fact, destroy his political standing with this terrible, terrible incident, whereas you did see in the Senate, where Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley started out with 13 senators supporting their vain attack on the Electoral College, you ended up with seven senators.So, essentially, six senators changed their minds as a result of this attack on democracy.
So, you know, it’s a mixed story so far.Part of the Republican Party thinks that Trump is dead and over politically, and part of the Republican Party thinks, well, maybe Trump is in trouble, but Trumpism will live on.
Biden and a Divided Nation
But the country remains in a dangerous place, and you’ve got Biden coming in to take control.What’s he left with, and his ability to govern for the next four years, how difficult a job is that going to be in a country where the GOP is split in half, and you’ve got people ready to attack Washington at a future date?
You know, Joe Biden, the theme of his inauguration is “American Unity.”That was a theme that they planned to have, even before the attack on the Capitol.It is aspirational in the extreme, especially considering that I don’t believe we’ve seen the kind of national renewed sense of purpose and togetherness and just a coming together around mutual abhorrence at what happened.We have not seen that happen, frankly.It has now been a number of days since this attack on the Capitol, and the response is very different than it was after previous national tragedies.This is not like what we saw after 9/11, unfortunately.It is not American unity.
And in some ways, it reminds me more of the initial response and the wrong thinking that we all took when there was the terrible tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut, and the shooting of little children in a school.And in Washington, Barack Obama wept from the podium of the White House.And we believed—many people believed, in both parties, that this was finally the reckoning and the moment when America would have to come to terms with its terrible legacy of gun violence and do something about it.This is exactly what had happened in Australia in a previous generation after a terrible school shooting—after a terrible shooting led to the banning of many kinds of guns.
This is not what happened, of course, politically, in the United States.And actually, the opponents of gun control saw themselves with an enormous political benefit from the massacre of innocents.And we don’t know yet exactly how this will turn out, but the fear is, that what looked initially like the bonfire of Trump’s vanities and ambitions could somehow end up fueling this movement of Trumpist rejectionism and anti-democracy.
And one last thing, since we’re here.This was an administration, from the very beginning, that was rooted in anger, in division, in conspiracy theories.Should anybody be surprised at where we’ve ended up, how it ended?
Anyone who was paying attention for the last four years is not surprised at this—saddened, shocked, horrified, afraid for what comes next—but you can’t be surprised when someone does exactly what they tell you over and over again that they’re going to do.You have to listen.When the president of the United States, the most powerful man in the world, tells you that he’s not going to accept the results of the election, it was a failure of thinking on a massive, massive scale for Democrats and Republicans alike not to understand that this moment was, if not inevitable, extremely likely.
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