The FRONTLINE Interviews
Susan Glasser
Columnist, The New Yorker
Susan Glasser is a columnist and staff writer for The New Yorker. She previously served as editor of Politico and editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy magazine. She is the co-author, with Peter Baker, of the forthcoming book The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017–2021.
The following interview was conducted by the Kirk Documentary Group’s Mike Wiser for FRONTLINE on April 26, 2022. It has been edited for clarity and length.
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Ted Cruz’s Approach to Trump
One of the moments that seems telling is back in Iowa when it's Ted Cruz and Donald Trump, and they’re running, and Cruz ends up winning the Iowa caucuses, but even back at that point Trump is saying Cruz was rigging the caucuses.He's asking for them to be thrown out.Can you help us in that moment of who Ted Cruz is and what he's up against with Donald Trump and what's going on all the way back in 2016?
Yeah, in 2016, Donald Trump was not only not the favorite of the Republican Party, but there were 17 candidates who run against Donald Trump.And it's a classic example, really, of someone who needed not a majority but the largest sort of plurality to win, and the others seeing him not as their biggest rival and basically refusing to drop out, refusing to unite.It would have been the moment to stop Donald Trump, if you were really so inclined and you saw him as the primary threat, of course was before he ever got the Republican nomination.And after that, for a variety of reasons, including the ingrained partisan tribalness of our system right now, Republicans essentially decided to hold their noses and embrace this nominee.
But Ted Cruz, more than anybody, with the possible exception of Lindsey Graham, was the anti-Trump candidate in the 2016 primaries, and that's been forgotten in his very aggressive effort to reinvent himself as the Trumpiest pro-Trump guy.But in 2016, he was the most anti-Trump anti-Trump guy.
And in fact, flash forward to the Republican convention, Ted Cruz almost blows up his Republican career by defying Donald Trump on stage.And it's the boos of the crowd that ultimately seem to have persuaded Ted Cruz that that was not a sustainable course for him, and he radically shifted.
And Donald Trump has one move when it comes to elections, and that's to say that they're rigged against him.It seems to have been a preemptive, almost psychological coping technique, and it goes back before he even entered politics.Donald Trump was talking about the rigged election when it came to television award season.He was talking about rigged elections in the 2012, 2014, 2016, 2018 and 2020 [elections].If you go back and look, he used the language on his Twitter feed of "rigged elections" all the way back to when he first began commenting on elections.
And Ted Cruz sees this firsthand.And Cruz, who's run as a constitutional conservative and was saying he was the “values candidate” with evangelicals, he must have seen what Trump represented firsthand in that moment, after Iowa and running up against him, and of course, the thing that Trump says and the conspiracy theories that he spreads about his family during that election.
Right.So Donald Trump attacks Ted Cruz in very personal terms.He criticizes his wife's appearance.He claims that his father was involved in some insane killing-JFK conspiracy.And can you imagine turning yourself into the slavish follower of somebody who attacks your wife and your father?
And yet Ted Cruz, for that reason—especially because he outlined his objections to Trump in very principled quote-unquote "terms" in 2016, it makes it all the more striking, as he was a constitutional conservative; that's always how he's presented himself.Cruz obviously is an extremely smart, Harvard Law-educated lawyer.He clerked; he worked.He cut his teeth in the 2000 Bush v. Gore pickup law firm that sprung up in Florida to advance the Republican nominee.And so Ted Cruz understood full well what are the legal and practical limits of the powers claimed later by Donald Trump.And that makes it all the more remarkable.
Some of Trump's other opponents were much more criticizing his character.And you in fact had a lot of correct psychoanalysis, I would say, of Donald Trump by the other 2016 candidates.Jeb Bush correctly said that Donald Trump was a "chaos candidate" who would be a "chaos president."I think that holds up pretty strongly over time.Lindsey Graham called him a "kook."Rand Paul said that he was mentally "unfit" to be president.But Ted Cruz, I think, stands out even in that group because of the very personal nature of the attacks Trump made on him.
Lindsey Graham’s Early View of Trump
The other character that you just mentioned is Lindsey Graham, because he's going to come back in the story at the election.What was Graham's place?Ted Cruz had been first a Tea Party senator coming into it; that was his lane.Who was Lindsey Graham, and what was his objection that he had to Donald Trump in 2015-2016?
Lindsey Graham is not a serious candidate for president in 2106 primaries, and he seemed to think it was kind of a big lark, and he had this famous run-in with Donald Trump in 2016—kind of his only moment, actually, where he broke through was a fight that he had with Donald Trump that resulted with Donald Trump giving out Lindsey Graham's phone number.And Graham, of course, maximized this for maximal cable TV excitement and ends up smashing a phone or whatever in real time.
But the bottom line was that Cruz and Lindsey Graham and the others, they saw quite clearly both Donald Trump's personality flaws as well as the kind of disdain for the rule of law and what we associate with traditional Republican principles.So if Cruz came from the sort of libertarian hard right, Lindsey Graham was known at that time as the wingman of John McCain.He was a sort of principled moderate who was willing and enjoyed working with Democrats as well as Republicans on things like immigration.He was very focused on foreign policy and national security.He and John McCain would fly around to hot spots around the world—Afghanistan, Iraq, the Baltic states, Ukraine.
And Graham was seen as a sort of modern-day version of what remained of the kind of sensible center in Washington, which was admittedly a dwindling perch to be in, and also very uncomfortable politically for Lindsey Graham in his home state of South Carolina, where he had had a couple of run-ins in the primaries trying to get reelected because of things like voting for Supreme Court nominees put forward by Democrats because he was of the old-fashioned view, at the time, that if a nominee is qualified, regardless of your ideological sympathies, that was your job as a senator: to approve qualified nominees.And that no longer applies in this very partisan era.
Is it fair to say that Lindsey Graham and the Republican establishment, whatever that means, were becoming increasingly panicked over 2016 as they're watching Trump take state after state?
I mean, look, Trump essentially had the nomination sewn up pretty early on.I mean, we forget about that because Cruz kept going all the way to the convention.John Kasich kept going all the way to the convention.But in fact, actually, it was quite clear relatively early in the primary process that Donald Trump had won.And certainly Lindsey Graham was not a serious candidate in those primaries and did not achieve anything significant from his campaign, except for a kind of a flamboyant viral video moment with Donald Trump.
And so there was a sense in the party that we're in big trouble.I think they, along with the rest of America, expected Donald Trump to lose in 2016.And Lindsey Graham, by the way, was on quite good terms with Hillary Clinton previously.And remember, she was his colleague in the United States Senate.She traveled on CODELs [congressional member delegations] overseas with Lindsey Graham and worked on foreign policy issues with him.And then, when she was secretary of state, Graham was the top Republican, I believe, on the appropriations subcommittee that dealt with the State Department's budget.
So again, this sort of performative civil war that we've had the last few years, that was not the world that we were living in in 2016.
Mike Pence as Vice President
The last character before we move on to the Trump presidency that I wanted to ask you about is another key player, which is Mike Pence.And how does he get pulled in to the Trump presidency, and what is the deal that he is making?And who is he as he comes into it?Because he'll obviously become important, not just in the presidency, but then in the run-up to Jan. 6.
Mike Pence's arrival in Donald Trump's orbit is one of those bizarre accidents that clearly has shaped our history.And Mike Pence, you can't really think of a guy who would be a worse fit in many ways for Donald Trump as a wingman than Mike Pence.He's stiff, moralistic, very proper in terms of how he deals both on a personal level and as a politician.His main qualities that we came to see were sort of unwavering devotion, whether it's to his church or, it turned out, to his president, more or less.
And he was a very unlikely candidate.According to our reporting for the book, Donald Trump was never happy with him as a vice presidential pick.He saw him as a weak candidate, not necessarily his first choice or even his second choice.It's a classic example in many ways of when the others were ruled out for various reasons, Mike Pence was the last man standing.
But one of the things that caused Donald Trump pause in 2016 about choosing Mike Pence was the fact that Mike Pence was in trouble even at home in Indiana.And that often tends to get sort of forgotten, but he was a very controversial and not very successful governor of Indiana who looked to have real trouble getting reelected were he to go ahead and do so.And he had had basically a tenure that was most notable for the national backlash from companies and individuals when there was restrictive anti-gay measures signed into law by him.
And so this was not a formidable, national figure.And Trump was making what he saw as a very calculated outreach to a significant portion of the Republican Party base that was not his natural constituency, to say the least: evangelical Christian voters who really are at the core and the heart of the Republican constituency.And it was a big ask, right?They were asking these voters to define their values somehow in a broad enough way to encompass a thrice-divorced, clearly not religious vulgarian, for lack of a better word, from New York and who had a past history of being pro-choice on abortion, was, as far as they knew, essentially a big-city Democrat who had opportunistically become a Republican.
And so Mike Pence was the envoy to that constituency.
And he chose to do it.
And he chose to do it.
Why?
Well, it's quite clear that he as well might not have expected Donald Trump to actually win.And again, throughout, this is the story of people making decisions based on outcomes that didn't end up happening.I've reflected upon that a lot, both in terms of how we think about politics or events in Washington, but also just in our own lives, right?People second-guess themselves, and they tend to make decisions based on their assumptions about outcomes, and all the time they are caught up when those outcomes don't pan out.
… As we go into the Trump presidency, there's the moment of the first joint address to Congress when he comes in, and later people say he was presidential, finally.And what I'm curious about is, how is he seen by the Republican Party at that moment and by the leaders of the Republican Party as they see this president who is a Republican, but who many of them were skeptical of?What do they think they can use him for?What is the deal that they're making with the man who's walking into that room?
It's hard because of everything that came afterwards, but there really was a sense in Washington among Republicans, as well as Democrats—foreign leaders picked up on it as well—a sense that Donald Trump couldn't possibly be the guy who had campaigned and improbably won the presidency, and that, in fact, he actually must inevitably become more presidential and that this must really be a kind of a front.They bought the idea of Donald Trump as a showman and that it was essentially a carnival barker's act and that either he would get with the program and be awed by the majesty of the office, or, if that were not the case, that he probably would at least let the grown-ups run things, and that he wouldn't seek to interpose himself.
Perhaps some of them on the Republican side thought back to Ronald Reagan, another outsider, who had been quite shocking to the party establishment—he was an actor; what qualifications did he have?—but who turned out to be, from their point of view, a successful president.And Reagan, in many ways, was actually the opposite of Donald Trump, right?He wasn't trying to swoop in and second-guess and undercut his advisers, and he certainly had a deep reverence for the American system, as he understood it.It's almost inconceivable that he would do something extraconstitutional.And he had a sort of a gauzy, old-fashioned kind of patriotism and demeanor that were radically different, it turned out, than Donald Trump.
But I think in the winter of 2017, there was still the sense that this was an act, that Donald Trump could be more presidential, or if not that, that he would hire essentially a team of grown-ups, that he would defer, perhaps, to Republicans in Congress.I think that's part of what they told themselves.He was sort of a policy and an ideological blank slate, so they could get what they wanted perhaps from him.
Mitch McConnell’s Deal with Trump
And one of those people who's also in the room and is going to become a key player who may have a very specific agenda, and that's Mitch McConnell.What did he want from President Trump, and how is he going to approach him?
So Mitch McConnell was deeply, deeply skeptical of Donald Trump from day one.But he is a practiced Washington player, and one of the things that initially I think both Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan saw was, we need to wrap our arms around this administration.We need to figure out how to sort of be the puppet masters, how to make it work.
Mitch McConnell even has his wife, Elaine Chao, who had been in the Cabinet under George W. Bush, she becomes the secretary of transportation and is in Donald Trump's Cabinet.And it's a fascinating, still somewhat untold story.Donald Trump, asked about this after everything that happened and after his public rift with Mitch McConnell, claimed to us in an interview for our book that, no, actually, Mitch McConnell called him up on the phone and, quote, "begged him" to have his wife in the Cabinet.Mitch McConnell, I think, does not agree that that is at all what happened.Obviously, his wife has her own professional career and had already been in the Cabinet in the Bush presidency, so she was not an outlandish choice for this role.
But it certainly says something that Mitch McConnell, despite what is very clear, already, skepticism about Donald Trump, decides with his wife that it's OK for her to go ahead and be in his Cabinet.
So he thinks he's wiring the new administration, perhaps.He's getting his arms around it.But here's the interesting thing.It doesn't work.Initially it doesn't work.And Steve Bannon and the kind of Trump revolutionaries, that faction in the initial Trump White House, they're very skeptical of Mitch McConnell.They see their war as much against Mitch McConnell as it is against the Democrats or the media.
And when Steve Bannon, even when he's forced out of the White House in August of the first year, he publicly goes on the warpath of Mitch McConnell.He appoints himself sort of the outside leader of the MAGA forces, and he is attacking McConnell.He is trying to get different choices through the Republican primaries for the midterm elections.He's opposing candidates that McConnell and others think are the safest candidates for Republicans.And he's publicly at war with him, very explicitly, by name.
And Donald Trump goes along with that.And it's really quite notable that in August of 2017, we remember that he's going after Kim Jong-un and threatening "fire and fury," but what's forgotten is that he's also going after Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham, by the way.He's trying to break the Republican resistance to him in the Senate, in the establishment, break independent power centers in Trump's Washington.
And basically, he succeeds.By early October of 2017, there is a crucial meeting that is brokered by John Kelly, who understands that this war between the president and Mitch McConnell is not helpful.And he gets Mitch McConnell to come to the White House.And McConnell basically uses it to pitch Donald Trump not just on a truce, but he pitches Donald Trump on "Here's how you and I can work together."And this is the foundation stone, I think, of this remarkable effort, largely overseen by McConnell in the Senate and by Don McGahn, the White House counsel in the White House, to approve and to basically reshape the federal judiciary.
Donald Trump has very little to do with it, except to make it happen, and of course then to take credit for it.
From that moment on, from that October 2017 meeting on, basically Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump made their truce.
… A lot of people talk about a bargain on the Republican Party.What was the deal, what was the bargain that they made?And in this case it seems like it was a very explicit bargain.Mitch McConnell, who had seen Charlottesville, who'd been critical of him, then walks into this meeting.I mean, is that what it is?He has a price, and the price is judges?
I think that's correct, yeah.I think that Mitch McConnell had a very calculated approach to Donald Trump, and what he wanted, and by the way what he got, is, give me the chance to remake the federal judiciary.Let's do this, number one.And number two, he wanted the president of the United States to stop pissing all over his Senate candidates.Mitch McConnell cares about one thing and one thing only, which is being Senate majority leader.Unlike everybody else in the Senate, he doesn't want to be the president.They all think they should be the president; they're all running for president.Mitch McConnell wants to be the second, better, more powerful coming of Lyndon Johnson.He wants to be the Senate majority leader, so he needs to keep his majority.
We now know what Mitch McConnell wants, and in exchange, what is Trump getting from McConnell after McConnell had criticized him on Charlottesville and they'd had a back-and-forth?What's at the other end of the deal that McConnell's giving Trump?
Right, well, Donald Trump, arguably, is the winner because he gets the Republican Party.Mitch McConnell gets judges, and he gets Donald Trump to stop bad-mouthing his candidates and the embarrassing loss that fall in the Alabama Senate seat, that's a deep red state, hasn't gone Democratic in many, many years, and Donald Trump and Steve Bannon bet on this incredibly flawed vehicle of Roy Moore, and of course lose, and it's very embarrassing.And Mitch McConnell could have told him so, right?
So I think that Mitch McConnell gets what he wants, but it's a classic example, right, that everybody's price was too low in the end, right, and Donald Trump walks away with the bigger prize.And Donald Trump, basically, he already commanded the sort of foot soldiers in the Republican Party, which is what powered him, gave him power over these politicians, even disproportionate to the level of support that Trump had.They were so afraid of Donald Trump and his base and Donald Trump and his Twitter feed.Grown men!For four years!We watched this.They were terrified that Donald Trump is going to tweet against them.
Donald Trump, he's a physical coward.He's not going to punch them.OK, he's going to swear at them a lot, and he did swear at them a lot.But you know what?What are they so afraid of?That's the enduring psychological mystery here.
Now, Mitch McConnell was afraid of Donald Trump doing exactly what he ultimately did, by the way, which is to destroy his Senate majority.But that was two years in the future.Donald Trump gets the party.Donald Trump is now the owner, lock, stock and barrel, of the Republican Party.It is under new management.It's under Trump management.
Lindsey Graham’s Evolving Relationship with Trump
Our other character is Lindsey Graham, who says in that spring that he's all in on Trump, who's friends with John McCain, who is a thorn in the side of Trump, repeatedly.It's one of a couple friendships where there is tension.Can you help us understand Lindsey Graham?Why does Lindsey Graham, the guy who in 2016 was so outspoken on Trump, what's he getting out of coming around?
I often thought at the time, right, Donald Trump is like a mirror into other people's souls.Well, we now know a lot more about Lindsey Graham and what was in there than we did a few years ago.
And another metaphor that's been used—it's not necessarily a kind metaphor, but that I've heard from people in Republican politics—is the idea that actually Lindsey Graham turned out to be sort of a pilot fish.First he was attached to John McCain, so we thought he was like John McCain and that he shared John McCain's interests and he shared John McCain's policies and his ideology.Then he attached himself to a different fish, and then he became a Trumpist.And even though those were completely different policies and completely different sort of moral code, he turned out to be a pilot fish.
So what's interesting in that first year or so, before Lindsey Graham's transformation is complete, while John McCain is still alive and he's suffering from this terrible brain cancer that he finds out about I think in the summer of 2017, that first year of Trump being in office, and Lindsey Graham is already being wooed by Donald Trump.
That's the other thing we learned in reporting the book that I think is very relevant to this conversation, because we're talking about Lindsey Graham for the whole four years in Washington trying to understand it just based on what we're watching.But what I learned in doing this book that I thought was interesting was Donald Trump was calculating.Donald Trump pursued Lindsey Graham.He courted him.He found his measure.And I think that factor can be understated in Donald Trump.
Donald Trump has a pretty canny sense, and did, of who he wanted.Certainly he was probing constantly, testing, looking for vulnerabilities and weaknesses in others, looking for who was receptive to him and who wasn't.He reached out to both John McCain and Lindsey Graham not long after coming into office, but John McCain didn't want to have anything to do, basically, with Donald Trump.
And there's this scene in our book where Trump gives him his phone number.He says, "Here, call me anytime."And his aides say to John McCain afterwards, "OK, so, where's the phone number?"McCain says, "Yeah, I lost it; I don't know."He doesn't want to call Donald Trump.
Lindsey Graham, on the other hand, the outreach from Trump is met with great enthusiasm.And this, I think, in the fall of 2017, this courting of Lindsey Graham really begins in earnest because Donald Trump invites him to play golf, and that goes well.Not only well, but we spoke with someone who spoke with Graham after it, a White House aide.Graham was like, "It was like a first date"; that he was dazzled by the guy he had a date with.I mean, he really was dazzled by Donald Trump.
And Donald Trump knew what buttons to push with Lindsey Graham.He said, "Have you ever been on Marine One?" when they then took a trip together."Well, no, sir, I've never been on it.""Oh, well, why don't you come with me on my helicopter?And why don't you play golf?"And Lindsey Graham gave this incredible interview to Golf.com after he first played golf with Donald Trump, and he is gushing.1You wouldn't believe it."It's really something to play golf with the president of the United States on a golf course that he owns in Virginia, and the big flag is flying over it.And isn't this amazing?"
And he then claims that Donald Trump is the most amazing golfer, and so the Golf interview was great because it was like all these golf professionals saying, "Yeah, no way."
But he's dazzled.And as much as I was skeptical in my reporting over four years, that independent, successful public figures—I heard this from many, many U.S. senators, not just Lindsey Graham, over four years.They really—they apparently are much more dazzled than you would think at having this enormous amount of access and back-and-forth rapport with the president, because that's not normal.And most presidents, Democrat and Republican, have been much more standoffish.
It's amazing.And Peter [Baker] said there was even tension between McCain and Graham over this.
Yeah, so that was another thing.That was widely rumored, but both sides would tend to deny it at the time.And so one of the things in our book is definitely confirming what one might have suspected, but what they were at really pains to deny while John McCain was still alive, which was that there was a real rupture between John McCain and Lindsey Graham before John McCain died.And McCain was furious about it.
And by the way, he was really furious about the golf.That's the specific thing that he had a fight with Lindsey Graham over.He said, "Why do you have to play golf with him so much?Why do you have to like him so much?"I think McCain understood that there was a value in trying to manage Donald Trump and trying to get what you wanted out of him.They were very concerned about some of the reckless national security moves that Trump was always threatening to do—pulling out of NATO and withdrawing from Syria abruptly, things like that.
And so, I think McCain, if Graham had couched it in more pragmatic terms, it could have worked—uncomfortably, but it could have worked.But I think he saw that Lindsey Graham had actually developed a friendship with Donald Trump and seemed to like being with Trump so much and part of his entourage.And that's what ultimately did cause a rift with Lindsey Graham.And in fact, if you noticed, Lindsey Graham did not have a prominent role at John McCain's funeral in the Washington Cathedral.Instead, as if he almost wanted to underscore the symbolism, he gets Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump invited to McCain's funeral.
And when John McCain's daughter Meghan, who gives this incredible, kind of sobbing, powerful eulogy for her dad that is a rebuke of Donald Trump and everything he stands for, she sees Ivanka and Jared in the pews at the cathedral, and she's furious.And she later writes in her book, "I hope, basically, it was the most humiliating day of their life."
Trump and Charlottesville
… On Charlottesville, when you look back from knowing that Jan. 6 is going to happen and now looking back at it, should it have been a warning sign?And why did Trump say what he said about "both sides"?Why did he seem supportive of the side, the right-wing side, that was responsible for a lot of the violence?
I think if you look at the record, it's very clear that for Donald Trump there's almost nothing that would be disqualifying in American politics as long as you support him.And he saw, from the beginning, actually, predating Charlottesville, during his campaign, that among many groups that were supportive of him were white supremacist militias.They were extremely enthusiastic about his candidacy in 2016, as my colleague Evan Osnos wrote in <i>The New Yorker</i>, and Donald Trump never disavowed them because they supported him.2
2
The New Yorker: Donald Trump and the Ku Klux Klan: A History
And Steve Bannon counseled him—even after Charlottesville, he counseled him, "Well, the violence looks bad for us in the short term, but in the long term, it's good for you; you want to stay on the good side of these people.And by the way, this whole cause of taking down Confederate monuments, that's a good cause for you."And he told Donald Trump that back in 2017 during Charlottesville.He said, "You want to be against that.You want to be—you know, your people, your base are the Southern white guys, and that's what—you can help them; the culture war puts you on this side of the issue."Never mind that Donald Trump is some big New Yorker.Here he is talking about "our heritage."So "our heritage" is apparently Confederate.
And so if you look at the ruptures of 2020, it's very consistent for Donald Trump that politically he was told, as far back as 2017, by Steve Bannon, "This is the side you want to be on."And he was pushing on an open door—because Donald Trump saw everything through the very specific calculus of his personal interest, his personal political interest.What would benefit him politically?What would get him reelected?What did his base want?
And so I think those were the criteria that he applied to almost any problem, whether it was a race riot or a deadly pandemic.Those were the criteria.They were the same criteria.They didn't waver.
When you look back on it, did it create a moment of choice for the party leadership to say, "Which side are we on?"Obviously they were very critical of him in that short-term period; there were statements and other things.But wasn't there a moment of choice where they could have gone another way, they could have stood more—?What do you make of how the party responded to that and to the legacy, how long they stuck with it?
Actually, I think quite the opposite.I think what Donald Trump did is he came to Washington with no experience or background or understanding, and he took the measure of the people here, and he took the measure in particular of his own party, and what he learned is that they didn't have any spine for defying their own voters.In fact, they were kind of terrified of them.He realized that Washington is a giant hot-air factory.That's what we produce, is words, and if one set of words doesn't work, we produce a different set of words.
And so I think he came to understand—and Charlottesville was important in that understanding—that criticism without action is meaningless, fundamentally, in Washington and that the drawing of a series of redlines that Republican leaders had no intention of enforcing against Donald Trump, or even willingness to do so, that in the end he was free to disregard them.
And so again and again, they warn him about certain things, and then when he sees he can blow past it and nothing really happens to him, that encourages him to keep doing more.
… There are a few people who do make a different decision, like Jeff Flake, to a lesser extent maybe [Bob] Corker and [Mark] Sanford, who say, "We're going to stick to this, stick to resisting Trump."And what happens to them? … What's the lesson from those stories?
Right.So actually, again, the resistance to Donald Trump inside his own party ultimately, in some ways, helped benefit him politically, because he was able to show that what happens—you can resist, but that means you have to leave, that there's no place for you in the Republican Party of the future, the Trump Republican Party.And so by successfully purging these resisters or showing that they didn't really have a way forward, Donald Trump wins.
And so the more sanctimonious the speeches given by the Jeff Flakes of the world and the more that the crowd continued to cheer him, Donald Trump, on, in a way that was also very emboldening to him.
Donald Trump—I think people, though, make a mistake of thinking that because certain terrible things didn't happen right away that they weren't going to happen.And look, he was a guy who was kind of stumbling around in the dark.I mean, he really wasn't prepared for Washington.He really didn't know what he was doing.He didn't have a plan.He didn't have a cadre of loyal, experienced advisers who knew what they were doing in Washington.That takes time.
And so he's probing; he's learning.He hires one group of people.He discovers half of them are RINOs, as he would call them.They're not loyal to him.He gets rid of them.He gets another group of people.He learns over time.
And so it's not that he abandoned any of the really disruptive goals that he talked about from the beginning of his presidency, but his capacity to execute on any of them at any given moment was limited.
And Congress had a choice.These Republican leaders, for the first two years of the Republican, all-Republican rule, right, you had the House, the Senate and the executive branch run by Republicans.And I think it's very instructive, because Congress could have asserted its institutional prerogatives and interest much more.Our system in fact is designed—the concept of checks and balances is that one institution would countervail against another.Partisanship has practically destroyed that in the context of all-one-party rule.
Republicans no longer seem to be interested in asserting the institutional prerogatives of the House and the Senate because the party prerogatives, which is what Trump ended up being the leader of, the party prerogatives took precedence over that.And the result was that Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell let their own power ebb away.
And I would point you to actually the fight over the shutdown in early 2019, the end of 2018 and early 2019, as a key moment, basically, when Republicans and Mitch McConnell, to get Donald Trump to sign a bill he was threatening not to sign, to fund the federal government—it's the longest federal shutdown on record—he trades away the institutional independence of Congress.He basically says, "OK, you can build your wall.You can just steal money from the military construction budget, take money from the DOD and put it to your wall."And he does that by executive order, basically, by fiat, because Congress refuses legislatively, and he goes ahead and he does it anyway.
So Congress basically says, "We have no power here."And they don't fight him in court, and they don't seek to block that.And that's a huge moment.That's the moment when you realize congressional leaders are no longer willing to assert Congress' authority versus the president if the president is from their own party.
The First Impeachment
… That first impeachment does take place at a moment of great partisanship in the country and a feeling among Republicans that Democrats have been on a tear with "Russiagate" and with Mueller and then with Ukraine.Can you help us understand what's going on with that first impeachment and why pretty much everybody except for Mitt Romney on the Republican side doesn't go along?How do understand that first impeachment?
Well, I think, look, partisanship is the drug of choice here in Washington, and especially so in the Trump years.
And you know, they, the defenders of Trump, had a fairly calculated and successful strategy, which was to make the proceedings as partisan as possible.And there's a moment we recount in the book actually of running into Lindsey Graham, who made his first name nationally as an impeachment manager for the Republicans in the impeachment of Bill Clinton.And Bill Clinton was not convicted in that, and it was seen as sort of an overreach by the Republicans.But Lindsey Graham parlayed that.He was the folksy kind of Southern prosecutor.That played well in South Carolina.He did parlay that into a Senate seat.
And Lindsey Graham never forgot the lesson of that.And that was exactly when we ran into him within hours of the impeachment inquiry being launched into the Ukraine matter.He had just gotten off the phone with Donald Trump, and he said, "Just follow the Clinton playbook.It will work for you."And what he meant by that was, buy for time, play rope-a-dope, but most importantly, make it partisan.You know, make it about the other guys and what they're doing, and that it's constitutional overreach, and it's a bad process, and it's too fast and all these other things.And they were pretty focused on doing that, Trump and his defenders.
And so I think they gave enough safe space for people like Liz Cheney, people like Adam Kinzinger in the House of Representatives, Will Hurd.Those are three kind of moderate Republicans, or at least Republicans—Liz Cheney's not a moderate ideologically, but certainly from the point of view of institutionalists.They gave them the space that they needed to say, "Well, I'm not defending what Donald Trump did with Ukraine, but I feel uncomfortable about how the Democrats have handled this, or railroaded him, or not taken testimony, or gone too quickly."And so they gave a safe space for a partisan objection to the impeachment.And that was the case in the Senate as well.
I think that there's also, with people like Liz Cheney—who continues, by the way, to defend that vote, interestingly.So Adam Kinzinger, who's the other Republican who's broken dramatically with Trump since Jan. 6, he says in an interview for our book that it was the greatest regret of his time in Congress that he voted against impeaching Donald Trump, but that basically they built this off-ramp for people like Kinzinger, and they took it.
But also there are people like Liz Cheney who are very much believers in, or had been believers in, a maximalist view of executive power and the power of the president to wage foreign policy.And you can imagine, as the daughter of Dick Cheney, she's very focused on the idea and believes, along with her father, in the idea of an enormous power that resides in the executive office of the president to conduct foreign policy in the name of national security.
Now, Donald Trump conducted foreign policy in the name of Trump security.But I do think there was a strain of Republicans who have a very maximalist view, that essentially the foreign policy of the United States is whatever the president of the United States says it is.And so while that argument might appear absurd to us, or, you know, how can it be, even if there's a potentially corrupt intent to that foreign policy, but nonetheless, people will tell themselves whatever they need to tell themselves.And the partisan lineup of these votes suggests that each side was quite good at constructing an argument around it. …
And it raises, especially as we get towards the acquittal, it raises a big question, which is whether institutional checks and balances can work.Talk about polarization, if you're watching Sean Hannity on one side and the other side is watching Rachel Maddow, and you need the numbers you need in order to get a conviction, can our checks and balances work?Does Trump, as he walks out to celebrate that acquittal, does he recognize a weakness in the system and in its ability to contain him?
Absolutely.Donald Trump was very clear on what acquittal in the Ukraine impeachment meant for him.It meant that he was basically uncheckable, that he could do whatever he wanted as the president and nobody could stop him.And I think he was even very explicit in some ways about that.Part of the story of the early, disastrous American response or lack of response to COVID, I believe, is the story of Donald Trump feeling emboldened and unchecked after his impeachment trial.And he really spent most of February of 2020 focused on revenge, focused on settling scores, focused on purging his administration.
Mark Esper, the defense secretary at the time, told others that he believed that Donald Trump had become significantly more dangerous and unhinged after the impeachment acquittal.And I think the record shows that.We have an entire chapter that is February 2020 that is all about Donald Trump ignoring the pandemic and focusing on seeking revenge for impeachment.
Trump’s Response to Covid
… I want to ask you about, because we're interested in Cheney, she's starting to break with Trump over COVID.… And here's a situation where it's really life or death for constituents, for people in America.What is she seeing?What are the Republicans seeing from Trump in that period as he's addressing COVID?
Yeah, the thing about Donald Trump, and you saw it throughout the presidency, and it was—he has one template, and that is conflict, division, look for personal advantage.And that really was to deadly effect in the pandemic in the sense that he was disinclined to take public health measures from the beginning that he thought might compromise his own reelection, and that was the lens through which he viewed it.
And he also was surrounded by a new group of advisers in the White House led by Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, who I think played an extremely significant role in the sort of tragic unfolding of 2020.And they decided early on in the pandemic to essentially apply the culture war template to this public health crisis.
And there was no inherent partisan divide over mask-wearing at the beginning of the pandemic.And repeatedly, in fact, Donald Trump's pollsters tried to show him surveys and information that suggested exactly that: that basically there was strong support in red America and blue America for public health measures, for shutting down, for mask-wearing.And yet at every turn, probably in part vanity shaped Trump's initial response, but then political advisers like Mark Meadows did as well.And they believed that it was a useful foil to set himself up in opposition to those annoying experts, those scientists and doctors who were telling you what to do, who were invading your life, who were taking over your life.And why do they have to tell you what to do?And why don't you take hydroxychloroquine?And this was actually very consistent with the kind of ideology of Trumpism.
And so for many Republicans, it also worked as their default setting, and you had the mutually reinforcing echo chamber between Fox News and the Trump White House as well.So they start to promote these magical cures that are somehow going to stop COVID.They're promoting the idea that there are protests in these states, and in the Michigan state Capitol.And that's what inspires Trump to these "Liberate Michigan" tweets in mid-April, which is a really crucial moment. …
And from that day on, there was a side, and he chose which side he was on.And it was really from there forward that you had this kind of politicization of the virus.
And so that made politicians like Liz Cheney increasingly in the minority.What side can they possibly be on, especially when they come from a state of wide open spaces where there's much less need for social distancing because all of Wyoming is socially distant, right?And it's—I think it's the single biggest gap Trump state in the country.I think it's something like a 70-, 80-point gap between Democrats and Republicans there.
But the truth is, Liz Cheney didn't become an overnight objector to Donald Trump.Liz Cheney's views about Donald Trump, her private views about Donald Trump, I don't think, were very different in 2017 than they were in 2020.She endorsed Donald Trump for reelection in 2020 because I guess that was a political calculation that she made, that that was the only way for her to win reelection.But it's not that she opposed him or that she said she couldn't vote for him.Quite the opposite.She did not vote to impeach Donald Trump.She did not challenge him publicly on many of these things that she clearly had qualms about all along.And in fact, she publicly endorsed him and told people to give him four more years in office, even after the pandemic is unfolding.
So even after all these things happened, it would be one thing to say, "OK, well, I'm not going to try to remove him from office," but that doesn't mean that you would then tell people to give him four more years in office.
So that makes her metamorphosis as a politician, I think, all that more remarkable now that she has very openly and definitively broken with that wing of her party.
Trump’s Claims of Election Fraud
… When Trump walks out at the White House on the night of the election or the morning of the night of the election and makes clear at that point what he's going to be saying about it.… What does Trump say after the election, and what is the decision that Republicans are facing in those hours?
Yeah, I mean, this night is this incredible night, but in many ways Donald Trump has been foreshadowing it throughout the election year.It's another example, in fact, where he's told us the unthinkable over and over again, but because it's unthinkable, it's been very hard to process and for people to realize that he really meant what he said.
So the very first time Donald Trump tweets that it's going to be a rigged 2020 election is in the end of May of 2020.That's his first rigged-election tweet in regards to 2020.From May all the way until Nov. 3, Donald Trump tells us over and over again, in every possible way, "There's only one outcome of this election that I will accept, and that is me winning.And if I lose, I will not lose.It will not be fair."
He is as clear a communicator when it comes to that as any politician has ever been, right?Is there anyone in this country, like left, right or center, who didn't know that Donald Trump said it was going to be a rigged election unless he won, right?He said it.He said it in the debates.He said it in writing.Every single day on his Twitter feed.He said it at the White House in September of 2020.He was asked directly, "Will there be—can you commit, sir, that there will be a peaceful transfer of power?""We'll see," says Donald Trump."We'll see."The only president of the United States never to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, which is at the core of our entire system of government, right?
So the evening of Nov. 3, he's been telling us in every way possible, "I will not accept losing," and now, boom, since 11:40 p.m., which is when Fox News called Arizona for Joe Biden, since 11:40 p.m., the data points have been murky, but suggesting that certainly it looks like Joe Biden is going to win, and it definitely doesn't look like Donald Trump is going to be winning in any kind of big way.
And Donald Trump, I think it's about 12:45 in the morning, is when he makes his choice, and he sends out a tweet, and what does he say?He basically says, "Stop the counting.It's not fair.No other votes should be counted.I won.That's it.It's over. " …
… They must have realized that they weren't going to be able to push it themselves with Alex Jones and Steve Bannon and Trump's kids; that to push this forward, did they realize they needed the party to go with them.
Yeah, I think that's an extremely important point.Nov. 5 was a very important day for Trump and whether his challenge to the election was going to go forward or not, and this is as it becomes clear that he really has lost.Rather than giving up, you see in the course of that day that both Trump and his sons, although not his daughter Ivanka and not Jared Kushner, but Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump and Mark Meadows and Trump himself, they're deciding not only to fight, but interestingly, as the evidence now becomes public, you see they're deciding to do something even more than file lawsuits and try to look for evidence of miscounted ballots.
They make a decision, or they start to look very seriously, even before the election has been called for Joe Biden, they're already talking about essentially trying to steal the election.They're talking about overturning Biden's victory, not waging lawsuits or stopping the count.They're actually already assuming that Biden has won and Trump has lost, and they're looking for ways to go to Republican-run state legislatures and see if there's a way to stop or reverse the outcome in the Electoral College.
They're already thinking about that while the rest of us are just sitting at home looking at absentee ballots in Pennsylvania.What's breathtaking is that they're already talking about Jan. 6 on Nov. 5.They're already talking about the Electoral College and state legislatures.That's breathtaking.
And then another key factor, I think, was that Jared Kushner and Ivanka, they say, "We're out of here."And this has not been really reported, but I think it's significant to understand and significant in our book, is the revelation really of how absented these two were, and in this crucial period, right?They were the ones who worked in the White House.They were the ones who had been at Trump's side.Jared Kushner had been running his campaign along with others.Jared Kushner had been dealing with the pandemic.He had been a crucial adviser.And yet, at this, the biggest fight of Donald Trump the fighter's life, they decide, "We know the election wasn't stolen.We know it wasn't rigged.And we're going to move to Florida."
And that left the door wide open.And the Don Jr. tweets, they begin on Nov. 5, that very same day, and the effort to bully and to control Republican senators and elected officials to stay in line with Trump, don't break with Trump, keep going, keep going.Even though they didn't really have a strategy, they knew that they needed the Republican Party to remain with him, and that's why they really lobbied people not to congratulate Joe Biden, not to end it.
And so if you want to look at decision points, to me Monday morning, Nov. 9 was the outer limit of the decision point.I know people will put it later and say Dec. 14.I disagree.This isn't even in our book per se, but like, waking up that morning and seeing only Mitt Romney and Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski were the only ones who congratulated Joe Biden on that Sunday, and waiting for what should have been the flood of all the rest of the Republicans on that Monday morning.You had all world leaders issuing their traditional congratulations to Joe Biden.Even Benjamin Netanyahu, to Donald Trump's fury, actually does congratulate Joe Biden, and actually the controversy in Israel was that he did it later than the other Western leaders.
But the whole world has endorsed Joe Biden's victory.And when I saw on that Monday morning that the rest of the Republicans had not done so—and where was Mitch McConnell?Joe Biden was their colleague in the United States Senate for 36 years, you know?And they knew what was right.There was no evidence at that time, none whatsoever, nor was there ever at any point in the future.
And they made this decision to stick by Trump.So I think that if you want to look at decision points, that was the moment.Jan. 6 was not inevitable, because on Nov. 9, or Nov. 8, had the Republicans in the Senate en masse said, "Congratulations, Joe Biden," I don't see how Donald Trump could have gone forward with this.
The Republican Response to Trump’s Claims
It's an amazing period.It's an amazing compressed period of when somebody could have made a decision.And of course the person who comes to mind the most is Mitch McConnell.And what is the decision that he is making in that moment, that he's not going to say anything for an entire month?
… Mitch McConnell, again, he very clearly from the beginning did not like Donald Trump, did not support him, was very dubious, was very concerned, even.There's some evidence from his advisers to suggest that from the very beginning he was worried about Trump as an actual threat to democracy—not just that he didn't like him, but that actually he understood him as a threat to democracy.And yet he seemed to choose partisan calculation again and again.
And that's what happens here, too.He chooses partisan calculation and a mistaken view of what he thought would happen, right?That's—a decision-making being shaped by assumptions that didn't get borne out, I think, is really one consistent theme of how Trump manages to keep going.
And so in this case, McConnell sees that control of the U.S. Senate is undecided coming out of the Nov. 3 election, and it's going to come down to two Georgia Senate races, runoffs, that are going to be held on the same day in early January.And this is all a result, by the way, of the Democrats' better-than-expected performance in Georgia and the fact that Joe Biden won Georgia and Donald Trump lost Georgia.And on the basis of that turnout, the Democratic Senate candidates had outperformed expectations in Georgia, and so they were going down to runoffs in January.
And Mitch McConnell made a very clear, very partisan calculation that he needed Trump to not be at war with him and to get the turnout of Republican voters in Georgia in January.And that was a mistake.
And the consequences of—
So he lost the races—
—of that?
Yeah.No, Mitch McConnell made an epic mistake, because they lost both races.Trump essentially did depress the turnout among Republican voters.Spent two months talking about how rigged elections were and how it was a scam that you couldn't trust.McConnell loses the majority.That was the whole rationale for not speaking out sooner and recognizing Joe Biden's victory.
And because Donald Trump takes it so far, McConnell actually already had to break with him in December after the Electoral College.Dec. 14 comes.Joe Biden's victory is reaffirmed.The next day McConnell sees what a threat is ongoing by Trump, and at this point he finally says, "I'm done; I've had it."He goes to the floor of the Senate, and he congratulates President-elect Joe Biden.
So by the way, he could have done that in November, when it would have made a difference to stop Donald Trump's attack on the election that he made this series of flawed decisions based on flawed assumptions.
And in that period, too, as the lie about the election is growing and there's warnings—from Georgia, from Gabriel Sterling, whose warning on Dec. 1, that this is going to be violent, somebody is going to be hurt, and McConnell throughout that period is not weighing in one way or another.On the big picture, aside from the Georgia election, what was going on in a month of silence from McConnell and the Republicans?
I mean, behind the scenes, I think there was a growing sense of alarm among McConnell and other very senior officials in Washington in this period of time.And our reporting suggests that he was privately speaking with Bill Barr in this period of time, who also was growing very alarmed at Donald Trump and ultimately has this spectacular public break with him.While McConnell was speaking with him, according to our reporting, he was also even speaking with Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.And there was, again, a real sense, among those senior Republicans who did not subscribe to Trump's rigged election conspiracy theories, there was a growing sense of fear, actual fear, that he was going to take this all the way, and a sort of silent conspiracy in a way to "What can we do to manage him?What can we do to stop this?"McConnell was very wary of becoming the public lightning rod for Trump.So part of his calculation, which was not wrong, which was that if I criticize Trump publicly he will simply attack me and he will prove that he is the center of gravity and the power in the Republican Party.
So he's not wrong about that.That's a similar calculation that you saw from George W. Bush, who has always opposed Donald Trump but has always been wary of speaking out, in part because he knew that Trump would use that effectively to his own benefit.
But privately, also McConnell and these others initially got very bad and incorrect intelligence from the White House about Donald Trump.They were told by Jared Kushner—again, according to our reporting—they were told by Jared Kushner very clearly, "Just give him time.He just needs to do these lawsuits.He just needs to get comfortable with it."
Also Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, was very actively conducting a misinformation campaign.He was speaking out of both sides of his mouth.And so while he was enabling some of the wild conspiracy theorists to have Donald Trump's ear, and he was texting with them, and he was helping to promote the election lies, he was also explicitly telling McConnell and others, including Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he was actively telling them, "It'll be OK; it'll be over.I'm working.I'm doing my best to land the plane."But he really wasn't.He was really trying to crash the plane into the Capitol.
… Just to go back quickly to two of the characters who we started with, to Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham.What is their role, these two men who had been opponents of Trump and … who have joined with him over the course of his presidency?What role do they play in this period, and how central are they?
Yeah, those are great characters, actually, for Jan. 6, because they both behave in like a sort of utterly perfect Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham ways, right?Like Ted Cruz opportunistically decides right at New Year's that he is going to join and in fact lead the effort in the Senate to object to Joe Biden's electoral votes, and this is a very huge blow to Mitch McConnell.Mitch McConnell has staked his leadership of the Republican Conference in the Senate on stopping all the senators from objecting, because the way the rules work is that House members can object, but if they just object themselves, it doesn't matter.So you need, to challenge any state's electoral vote, you have to have at least one senator join in objections for the House members.
So the most fervent people pressing the electoral objections for Jan. 6, it was a group of very hard-right Republicans in the House of Representatives.These were the Freedom Caucus people.These were Mark Meadows' people.So now basically the Freedom Caucus is running the White House, right, and the plot is being hatched.There's a Dec. 21 meeting in the White House that is Mark Meadows and Donald Trump and all the leaders of the Freedom Caucus and the people who are going to press the attack on the electoral votes on Jan. 6.That's actually now coming out of the White House, or part of the White House, right?
The chief of staff of the White House, the keys of the White House have been turned over to the most radical group in the House of Representatives, the Freedom Caucus.And that's Mark Meadows.He's the guy who founded the Freedom Caucus.That's who Donald Trump turned to to be his chief of staff.
Well, the senators have always been a different matter, and even those like Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham, who kind of sucked up to Trump for four years, they also like to pride themselves on still having some measure of independence, right?They weren't quite as much acting directly at his behest.
And so Mitch McConnell really staked his leadership on this, and he has a very emotional conference call with the senators on Dec. 30, and he pleads with them on this conference call."This is the most important vote I've ever taken," he says."I've voted on war; I've voted on impeachment.On Jan. 6, it's going to be the most important vote I've ever taken, to uphold the integrity the Constitution," as he saw it.
And already there's one guy in his conference who decides to defy him: Josh Hawley, who's this very young, Ivy League-educated, but reinvented himself into kind of like populist firebrand from Missouri.So Josh Hawley sees, wow, I can be the hero of the Trumpists and the MAGA hero, especially because they all think it's duped; it can't succeed; it's a crazy idea.
So this is the Republican Party.You can get all this enormous benefit from it, and you know that the responsible thing will be done anyway.
And Mitch McConnell's furious about it.But Ted Cruz is also furious about it.He's jealous of Josh Hawley, and he immediately says, "Well, OK, well, wait a minute.Me, too, me, too.I'm going to also lead it."
And he comes up with this cockamamie proposal, completely outside of law, history, precedent, that somehow there should be a 10-day period where Mike Pence should send these votes back to the state and we should have some kind of a commission.Can you imagine that?Like we should just decide and have a commission that's not based in any law or anything, and then that will investigate the results, and somehow, who knows?
And Ted Cruz does this to the fury of Mitch McConnell, and he gets 10 senators right away to agree with him.So Mitch McConnell has failed once again.He knew that his Senate was the last firewall to stop the craziness of attacking the election on Jan. 6, and on Dec. 30, his firewall is broken, his own conference is divided and Ted Cruz is the guy who's bringing this group of Republicans along with him.
Lindsey Graham actually does an even more Lindsey Graham thing.Lindsey Graham is actually against the challenge to the votes on Jan. 6, and he has been publicly cheerleading Donald Trump's rigged election, the election was stolen from me, ever since a couple days after the election when he was sort of chided by Don Jr. and the tweets.
He's been on the team, and he is puffing up these fake claims of fraud and everything.But he tells Donald Trump privately the day before Jan. 6, "No, I can't go there.I'm sorry.It's been a great ride, sir, but the ride's over.I'm done.And you can't do this.There's no basis for Mike Pence to overturn this election.You had a good ride, but that's it."
And Trump is mad at him.And then, of course, Jan. 6 happens, and one of the most memorable things, when Congress comes back into session and literally is walking over the broken windows of their own building and the sort of desecrated shrine of American democracy, right—and all these senators love to give these sort of like gauzy speeches about the Founding Fathers—here they are, literally walking over the broken glass of their fathers, Lindsey Graham gets on the floor.He's overcome with emotion, whatever, and he gives a speech, and he says, "Count me out.Count me out."And he says, "I can't do this.I've been along with you.It's been a great ride, Donald Trump, but I'm done."
And it's like, I don't know, what time was it, 2:00 in the morning, 1:00 in the morning?And you think, finally, finally, finally!And of course, two days later, who is back with Donald Trump?Lindsey Graham.
Pence and the 2020 Election
… And the last character, of course, who's really crucial in this period is Mike Pence.Can you help us understand what pressure he was under and why he makes the decision that he does after all of those years of being vice president to this man?
Yeah, I mean, Mike Pence is a fascinating character here.And, you know, for four years he is the very picture of devotional silence when it comes to Donald Trump.And he is as steadfast and inscrutable and silent as you can possibly imagine.And no matter what the outrage, he doesn't bite.There's never any daylight between him and Donald Trump.He's in the room all the time and yet, as somebody said, it didn't really matter, because even in the room he was just like he was in public.There was no way to see any independent signs of life there.
And one other Trump adviser, we were asking this question, "Well, what about Mike Pence?"He said, "Look, you have to understand that, yeah, he was in the room, but he's not just vanilla, this guy.He's boring vanilla.He's like not Häagen-Dazs vanilla.He's not Ben & Jerry's vanilla.He's like Stop & Shop vanilla, like generic, bland, unmemorable by design."
And so for four years you can't tell that he made any impact whatsoever.He has his agenda, and for him, getting Trump to send the right message to evangelical voters, having him be an envoy to that part of the base.The Kochs had been important political financiers and patrons of Mike Pence in Indiana, and when he was in Congress, they continued to sort of tend to that wing of the party, if you will.
But there's really no discernible impact that Mike Pence has made, but he's also gone out of his way not to give Donald Trump any concerns about his loyalty.I think that Donald Trump incorrectly thought that he was bought and paid for, that he was essentially owned in just the way that he had owned much of the rest of the Republican elected leadership in Washington.
And that's what's so fascinating about it, because he didn't understand, I guess, anything about Mike Pence.He looked down on him.I think the record is kind of clear: He thought that his religion was a sort of weird personal quirk.He thought that he was sort of a goody two-shoes guy.
And so one thing that happens after the election, even before the real pressure on Jan. 6 begins, is they cut Mike Pence out pretty systematically of these rigged-election meetings.And Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, seems to be—he wants to be Trump's one indispensable man.And Pence had certainly had an enormous amount of access to Trump over the years.That now begins to shut down.
And when they're talking about the Dominion voting machines and martial law, Mike Pence, he's not in any of those meetings.He's not included in the "Stop the Steal" meetings.And Pence doesn't break with Trump publicly in this period.In fact, he goes down to Georgia; he campaigns for the two Senate candidates there.He makes you feel that he's sort of on board with it without endorsing some of Trump's wilder claims, right?
So he's kind of careful in his language.He actually doesn't say, "It was stolen; all mail-in ballots are invalid; Dominion voting machines," but he makes you encouraged to think that he's kind of on board.
But behind the scenes he's being cut out of this new phase of the Trump White House, even before the real screws get put to him.And obviously, after Dec. 14, everybody understands that's when you're supposed to give up.No president has ever not given up after the point at which the Electoral College has met and voted and there's a clear outcome.This is a very clear outcome.
That's the absurdity I feel like it's really important to convey to people.This was not a close election in the Electoral College.Three hundred and six votes is the exact same number of votes that Donald Trump said was a landslide for him in 2016.
And so Dec. 14 is the time that Mike Pence gets put in the barrel, because when Donald Trump decides to keep fighting, fundamentally the only real fight that he can have is on Jan. 6 and when Mike Pence is in the chair.
And what pressure does he put on Mike Pence?How intense is it?
I think that he put intense pressure on Mike Pence.I think we're only beginning probably to understand the full contours of that pressure.Obviously, the investigation remains ongoing, and we'll learn more information, but what we already do know, both that's public and what we've been able to turn up in reporting our books, suggests that it was enormous pressure; that Donald Trump was engaged in directly feeding bogus legal theories to Mike Pence and forced him to sit in the Oval Office and listen to this kind of wacky, very conservative law professor John Eastman walk through his argument to Pence.
That's an extraordinary scene.That's in the Oval Office.Trump has asked Eastman to fly to Washington, to the White House, to lobby the vice president in person to do something that Trump's own White House counsel has told him is not legitimate; that the vice president has told him is not within his powers.And Trump is making Pence sit there in the Oval Office and essentially defend his own interpretation of the Constitution and his duties against this law professor.
And that was a scene that played out, I believe on Jan. 4 in the White House, just two days before.And there's tons of emails and phone calls and people being asked and failing to do something to stop Trump from going head after the vice president who, for four years, has done everything in his power not to break with him.
Jan. 6 and the Aftermath
… And it ramps up onto Jan. 6, and the attacks continue from Trump as you get towards the actual attack on the Capitol.And maybe you can help me with that day and in particular on the response of some of the people that we've been following as they see the attack.You've already talked about Lindsey Graham and what he did.But for Mitch McConnell, for Kevin McCarthy, for some of the others as they see the events play out on that day, what is changing?Does it feel like something changes on that day?
We began our Jan. 6 chapter actually with Mitch McConnell in the morning of Jan. 6.He thought that Jan. 5 was the worst day of his life, because not only did they lose both Georgia Senate seats, but what people don't really appreciate is that Mitch McConnell lost the chance to be the longest-serving House majority leader in history, in American history.He was two years away from beating Mike Mansfield's record.And this means everything to Mitch McConnell, for whom being the Senate majority leader was his highest goal.Unlike the others, he didn't aspire to be president.He aspired to be majority leader, and not only a leader, but to be a legendary majority leader.
So Donald Trump loses him the majority, as he sees it, and loses Mitch McConnell the chance at immortality in the record books.And this was a gutting blow to Mitch McConnell.It also showed the folly of his post-election strategy, right?He was wrong.He knew that Joe Biden had won right away, and he made a political calculation not to endorse Biden's victory in November when it might have made a difference, instead to hold off until December.That was a mistake, and he now sees it as a mistake.
He spent the previous week working intensively on a speech that he plans to give on the Senate floor that would reaffirm his belief in the sanctity of the Constitution and that would chide his Republican members, like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, in very specific terms.He wanted to tell them: "You are bringing our democracy past the brink and pretending to rely on others to do the right thing, as if there are no consequences for this reckless path that you have put us on.Well, I don't take that route, and you are playing with fire," essentially, is what he wants to lecture his own Republicans.He spent a week working on this speech, and he's very emotional already.But again, remember, people woke up in Washington, and they thought this is Donald Trump's day of reckoning.It was terrible how he got here; it was insane that he had burst through all the barriers and the constraints.But that morning the Democrats had retaken the Senate, and the sense was that as awful as it was, Congress was going to come in at 1:00, and basically it was going to finally put an end to this rigged-election charade, and it was going to finally say, "It's over.Donald Trump, you're done."
And so that was the context for everybody on the morning of Jan. 6.And so then when the mobsters come, and Congress doesn't even do its duty, and they're forced to gavel both the Senate and the House out instead of ratifying and finalizing the election, this was just beyond devastating to Mitch McConnell.He spent most of the afternoon at Fort McNair with the other congressional leaders.They were evacuated there.That's the same place that they would go in the case of an attack on the United States.
And so this is a domestic terror attack, and they're taken there.And McConnell is furious.And they're on the phone with the Pentagon saying, "Get us troops, clear the Capitol."But his focus, even more, all the leaders want to come back to the Capitol and get it over with, but McConnell especially wanted to come back.And he told one person he spoke with that afternoon, he said, "I don't care if there's not a window left in the United States Capitol.I don't care if they're still shooting at people.I'm going to be there at 8:00 in prime time and vote this guy out."He wanted it to be in prime time.
And Kevin McCarthy?
He was just as angry as Mitch McConnell.Kevin McCarthy was just as angry as Mitch McConnell.The bluster and the veneer disappears when there's people invading your office.Kevin McCarthy's office was—the windows were smashed in minutes after he was evacuated from it.He left a fellow member of Congress behind in that office, who grabbed a ceremonial sword off the wall to defend himself.
Kevin McCarthy was desperately trying to get Donald Trump on the phone.He got him on the phone.While he was on the phone with him, Ashli Babbitt was shot.He heard the gunshot.He didn't know what it was, but he heard the gunshot.He was furious.He had a screaming, expletive-filled, yelling phone call with Donald Trump at the very beginning.
So that would have been around 2:30 p.m. You know, Kevin McCarthy was under no illusions about Donald Trump at that time.He blamed him.
And Lindsey Graham is going to have his moment after that.It did feel like when you were watching it, like, "Oh, is this finally it?"You've had Charlottesville, and you've had these other moments.Is this finally the moment where the party is going to turn on him?Is that what it felt like, or was there already signs of Trump's strength in the party even in those early hours?
Yeah, I'm so glad you mentioned that, because I think that's the thing.Once again, for four years, people kept thinking, this is it.This is the moment that Donald Trump is finally going to face some accountability or—pick your metaphor—the curtain will be pulled back; the Republican Party will make a jailbreak.That was the kind of rueful phrase that you often heard in Washington, right?Is this the jailbreak?Is this the moment when the Republican senators are all just going to run away from Donald Trump?And of course, the jailbreak never happened.
Jan. 6 seemed like that moment to some people, right?It seemed like, well, finally.He lost the election.He's brought this violence even inside our own house.Republicans have every opportunity now to finish him off.Obviously, Mitch McConnell thought this is the moment to finish him off.Perhaps Kevin McCarthy did, too.
And yet I must say that the truer guide—it didn't take a couple days.People in the chattering classes, perhaps, it took a couple days, but it actually only took a few hours, because the most important indicator of Donald Trump's continued hold over the Republican Party was not what happened in the months and weeks after Jan. 6.It was the fact that 147 members of the Republican Party in the House and the Senate voted to object to Joe Biden's election, even after the riot.That same day, 147 members.That's two-thirds of the House Republican Conference and seven Republican senators.
And that actually was the truer guide.If you didn't listen to anything, any words that came out of any person's mouth and all you did was look at the math, that actually would have been a more accurate account of where the Republican Party was at at the end of the day.And it was 3:40 a.m., Jan. 7 by that time, when Mike Pence finally reads out "And the winner is Joseph R. Biden Jr. of the state of Delaware," and bangs down the gavel, and it's over, finally.
The Second Impeachment
And then there's this moment which is the second impeachment, which is the moment where—the first impeachment seemed bound to fail from the beginning, but there's the second impeachment.And one of the questions that we have is obviously it does attract many more Republicans, like I guess 10 in the House, and more votes in the Senate.But was it already, even by whatever day that was, was it already seen as a partisan maneuver?Did the Democrats contribute to the way that it was seen by that point, that it was yet again Democrats versus Republicans and not institutions at play?How do you understand that?
Yeah, I mean, it's very interesting.It was quite different than the first impeachment.First of all, it was immediately apparent, even on Jan.6 itself, the movement for a second impeachment was very swift.And Jamie Raskin was already working on the language of an article of impeachment while evacuated and taking shelter in the House Ways and Means Committee room with a couple of his colleagues from the Judiciary Committee.They were sitting on their phones, typing out drafts.And then in another corner of the room, Ilhan Omar and other members were also working on a version of an impeachment resolution.
And so we were told that by 10:00 p.m. that evening the House Judiciary Committee staff already had legal language for an impeachment draft.And it was very quickly apparent that that was going to proceed in the House.So the question was, what would Mitch McConnell do, and what would the Republicans in the Senate do?
And I think there was a brief window of time where it was possible that McConnell would have agreed to go forward.Ultimately, he claimed essentially that it was for logistical reasons that he didn't.He said there was no possible way to actually have a trial once the House took a week to approve the impeachment resolution, to move it through its committees and to vote it on the floor of the House.That was done exactly one week after Jan. 6.So that would have given the Senate one week until the inauguration of Joe Biden, and McConnell's argument was that it wasn't possible to call the Senate back and to have even the facsimile of a fair trial in that period of time.
And by making that decision, he effectively then made the subsequent post-inauguration impeachment partisan because it gave an enormous argument to Republicans who simply would say, "Well, we don't believe that impeachment is a remedy for someone who's already left office and that we don't believe impeachment applies."And so that was the equivalent of "It's a rushed process" for the Ukraine impeachment.So the equivalent this time for partisans who were angry with Trump but didn't want to vote for impeachment was, "Well, it's not applicable."
So it was partisan, but much less so, certainly, than any other impeachment that we've seen.Remember, never in history has a Senate impeachment trial resulted in the conviction of an American president.And so the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump did produce a bigger vote to remove the president and to convict him than ever before.
… Can you help me break down McConnell?Did you think he was actually, based on your reporting, was he actually in play, and how did he go from where he was on Jan. 6 to the famous moment where he says, "Oh, well, if he was nominated again, I'd support him"?How did that play out for Mitch McConnell?
You know, I think that Mitch McConnell, the record is pretty clear and well documented that he personally loathed Donald Trump.He told others that he believed that Donald Trump was crazy to the point of derangement, according to our reporting.
I don't doubt that.I think that he seemed to really believe that.I think he believed Donald Trump was a threat to the country.I think that he thought initially and incorrectly that Jan. 6 would be the end of Trump in the Republican Party.I think that was not only something he welcomed, but wanted to see happen.
I think, however, Mitch McConnell is good at counting votes, and the votes that matter to Mitch McConnell are the votes of his Republican Conference in the Senate; that his power is derivative of them.And I think he subsequently made a vote-counting decision that it was not possible for him to retain his power in the Senate over his conference while breaking with them on such an issue, and so he chose not to.
And Kevin McCarthy makes a pretty strong statement on the impeachment vote.Doesn't vote for it, and not long after finds himself at Mar-a-Lago.What's his journey, and how does he end up there?
McCarthy didn't even wait for the end of the impeachment trial.That visit to Mar-a-Lago is at the end of January.The impeachment trial isn't even done yet, and he's already seeking the favor of the leader.
Again, I mean, McCarthy is a weak figure who is not a profile, forget in courage, is not even a profile in leadership to do what he has done.And his membership is even more extreme, the Republicans who will decide whether he can be their leader or be speaker of the House if they take back control, and he has chosen to blow with them into the extreme fringes.
It tells you everything you need to know that Kevin McCarthy has taken a tougher line on Liz Cheney than on Marjorie Taylor Greene.The QAnon adherent is less anathema to him than the principled, career conservative who objects to an unconstitutional attack on the election.And that's where the House Republicans are at today.
How does that story play out with Liz Cheney?Because it seems like at first McCarthy thinks he can have her part of the caucus, that he just needs to keep everybody together and he can be a glue.And obviously by the time you get towards the end of the spring, he's made a turn, and Liz Cheney is on her own.What was he coming to realize about his own caucus?Or what was that moment?
Yeah, I think that McCarthy, it was almost a nature of a personal betrayal and a personal falling out between him and Cheney.He felt that he could, as you said, straddle the gaps in his own caucus and keep her faction somehow still in the Republican Conference if she could just shut up about Trump and Jan. 6, and she was not willing to do that, and I think he took that as a personal affront.And I think she thought he had made a disastrous choice and put the party more firmly in Trump's hands in some ways than it had been before Jan. 6.
Do you think they had a choice after Jan. 6, that McConnell, McCarthy, the leadership of the Republican Party had a choice about where they were going to go with Trump and with the lies about the election and about the integrity of American democracy?
Yeah, I think one of the lessons of the Trump presidency, to me, is that there's always a choice, and it's never too late to do the right thing.And you can't predict the future, and so it's better to do the right thing in the moment in time.And again and again and again, political actors made calculations about Trump that ended up enabling and empowering Trump and letting him continue as he probed and found the weaknesses in the system.And even those who sought to stop him or obstruct him or slow him down, whether people inside of his White House at very senior levels over time or Republican leaders on the Hill like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, Liz Cheney, all of them in their own way thought that they were opposing him at key moments, but in fact they were enabling him to go forward.And had they found a way to act in a concerted and united way, there were many, many steps along the way when this could have been avoided.
What are the consequences for, maybe for the Republican Party but for democracy of what that choice is and of the choice that they made about how they understand the election, how they understand Jan. 6, the Republican National Committee saying "legitimate political discourse" and censoring Cheney?What's the consequence for where we are and for our country?
The consequences for the country are vast.I mean, I think that what we learned over the last few years is that Trump and Trumpism is not just a switch that we're going to turn off at some point and walk away from.It's now a part of this American story.It's something that we live with the consequences of.
And having shown how easy it is to shatter norms and rules and to act with impunity inside a system that is not really built to constrain a rogue president, but in fact to empower the president, this is a template for not only potentially Trump's return, but for future presidents who may seek to use the tools and powers of constitutional democracy to erode democracy, to dismantle democracy, to act against it.
Many of the countries around the world that had democracies that have been subsequently taken over by authoritarian leaders have used elections; they have used challenges to the laws; they have used the institutions to take power and then changed the nature of those governments.And that's what's happened in Hungary in recent years.It's what's happened in Turkey.Even Vladimir Putin in some ways has had a very legalistic approach to the dismantling of democracy inside Russia.
And many of the things that Donald Trump sought to do or the weaknesses that he exposed are not dissimilar to the weaknesses in other countries.And it is not inconceivable to me now, in 2022, that you could see the further dismantling of American democracy.And had you told me that in 2015, I wouldn't have believed it.
Even without Trump, you now have a majority of Republicans who don't trust elections, who may not accept the results of an election.You have efforts at local levels to change who's counting the votes.It seems like a scary moment for democracy, partly because of the decisions that have been made that we've been talking about all the way through.
Yeah, I mean, I think there has been a systematic effort to create the conditions for the future attacks on democracy.We live with the legacy of not just Jan. 6, but of 2020 and the Trump presidency, regardless of whether Trump himself is going to be actively on the scene or actively pursuing the presidency again.
We can't roll back the clock to Nov. 5, 2016.We're just never going to be in that moment again historically, because all the vulnerabilities that Trump exposed, all the weaknesses in the Republican Party, all the choices that people made, they can't be undone.Those people are much more radicalized as a party and institutionally than they were four years previously.
And I think that suggests that we're going to be looking at a long-term kind of conflict about visions for the country and a willingness to use the tools of power and the tools of democracy in a very much more aggressive way than we saw in essentially the postwar consensus that governed American politics.That period is over.
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