The FRONTLINE Interviews
Wesley Lowery
Political Correspondent, The Washington Post
Wesley Lowery is a national correspondent covering law enforcement and politics for The Washington Post. He also serves as a contributor for CNN and is the author of They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement.
Following is the transcript of an interview with FRONTLINE’s Michael Kirk conducted on July 10, 2019. It has been edited for clarity and length.
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Contrasting Obama and Trump
Talk about the difference between these two men, one a unifier, one a divider.
Certainly.In Barack Obama and Donald Trump, you couldn’t have two men who are more different, more diametrically opposed to each other.Barack Obama runs and is elected as a great unifier.He’s a college professor.He’s articulate.He’s academic, a policy wonk, someone who wants to build bridges to Republicans and had visions of a world where democracy works better.Donald Trump is a bulldozer, right?He’s a brash reality TV show host who’s crude, who has no real deep-held political beliefs …and in many ways is elected as a direct response to Barack Obama, right?If you have a country or a mobilized right that is infuriated by the Obama presidency, feels that their way of life is fundamentally threatened, there’s no more extreme response to that than to elect Donald Trump, a man who in every single way is Barack Obama’s polar opposite.
The Promise of Obama
… When Obama comes on the scene, maybe starting in 2004 with the famous speech, what does he believe he can bring to a nation that’s already divided in some ways?
I mean, Barack Obama, when he comes on the scene, clearly is playing to the nation’s desire for a [West Wing’s Aaron] Sorkin-esque unifier, right, that the country was so bitterly divided.You’d had the collapse of Wall Street, the recession.The 2000s were just miserable times economically for the United States of America.You had deeply unpopular wars still lingering on in Afghanistan and Iraq.You had George W. Bush, who begins as a benevolent figure in American politics, who by the end is pretty much derided by much of, certainly the left, but even many moderates in the country.
And so you had a country that was just deeply and bitterly divided.And here emerges Barack Obama, right?In the Democratic primary, the other choices were folks who everyone kind of knew.Was Hillary Clinton going to be someone who saved us from this type of political polarization?Was John Edwards, another known figure who’d been on a ticket before?
The idea of Barack Obama being unique in so many ways—unique with his funny name; unique with his skin color; unique with his message, “Look, I’m not a creature of Washington; I’m new; I’m just showing up; I’m willing to work across the aisle”—in the candidacy of Barack Obama, there was a promise of something different, something less divisive.What we know is that Barack Obama in fact ushers in the most divisive period we’ve seen in our modern politics, but at the time he truly represented the hope that perhaps our politics didn’t have to operate this way; the president didn’t have to be a polarizing figure.And after eight years of George W. Bush, there was a real desire from a lot of folks to have that type of person in the White House.
He essentially says: “My biography is my policy.I am a unified figure.I am black and white; I’m loved by white people, a white family,” and all of that stuff that he says.When he carries that promise in and you’re watching and hearing it at the very beginning, what do you think awaits Barack Obama?
You know, at the beginning, when you first hear Barack Obama, you first see him come onto the scene, there’s kind of a learned skepticism, right, that very often politics is a game of waiting your turn.And the idea that this new, young person is going to come onto the scene, most people end up a little skeptical of them.It’s really interesting to look back.Now, Barack Obama now is the most beloved political figure in the history of black America.At the time, he had a deep issue getting black voters who end up—who typically are very pragmatic.They don’t want to vote for someone who can’t win.
And so there was a real question when Barack Obama first emerges.He was clearly intelligent; he was clearly dynamic in the way he spoke; he could connect with people.But there was a real question of, can he really be elected president?Is this country willing to do this?
Now, that question and that calculus is one of the reasons I think he ends up getting elected president.When you have such a dynamic individual figure, people are able to invest themselves, their own identity in that person.If America is willing to elect this black man, then America must have moved on from all of these things we had dealt with previously at a time when so many Americans were so frustrated with politics—again, with the economy being where it was, with these unpopular wars, with this threat of climate change just now kind of coming onto the front burner of American consciousness.
What a lot of Americans wanted was a president they could be proud of, someone who they could say, “That person represents me.”And what better way to do that, what better way for America to feel good about itself than to elect a historic first, to take the black man at the head of the class and move him up and put him in the White House?
Sarah Palin and the “Forgotten”
At the same time that he’s running, [John] McCain has picked Sarah Palin as his running mate. Nobody knows anything about her, but one thing that we discover, those of us who are watching as closely as we can, is that she taps into something maybe a lot of us didn’t know was out there.It will eventually become the “forgotten,” the base for Trump. She’s out there, and she seems to be like an electrolyte or something. She’s getting things rolling in a part of America we hadn’t really paid attention to.Can you talk about what Sarah Palin, what we discovered about another part of America by watching Sarah Palin’s candidacy?
Of course. Sarah Palin comes onto the scene and has the ability to just electrify these crowds.She’s someone who almost no one had really heard of before. It’s unclear if even McCain’s closest advisers had heard of her before she was selected.And yet, when she spoke, when she stood at those podiums, you could see in the eyes of the people listening to her, they were identifying with her in a way that they weren’t when John McCain was speaking, when other Republican officials were speaking.She was speaking to this kind of forgotten America in a way that they were receptive to, that Sarah Palin sounded like the woman who picks your kids up from soccer practice, like the guy who sits next to you at the bar.And for so many Americans who felt so politically disaffected, that was what they wanted to see.They wanted to be represented by someone like them; that if D.C. was so smart, then why are things so terrible?
And what Sarah Palin represented was a divergence from that.She wasn’t another poll-tested academic, Ivy League.She was the mayor of some city you’ve never heard of in Alaska, and then eventually the governor.She was someone who could speak to troves of Republican voters who wanted something different.
She really electrified the ticket, but she also represented a continuation of a trade-off in Republican politics where Republicans have been, time and time again, willing to embrace either tactics or messengers who are objectively unqualified for what they’re supposed to be doing.Some of this goes back to the “Gingrich Revolution,” a lot of the bad-faith attacks around the Clinton impeachment or any number of other things that happened during [Newt] Gingrich’s stewardship of Congress.You see this now where John McCain, the great maverick of the Senate, is willing to put one heartbeat away from the presidency someone who very quickly revealed themselves not to have the policy chops to be able to run the United States of America, whether you agreed with her politics or not.
…And so what you see in Sarah Palin is one of the first major gambits by the Republican Party where it places winning above all other costs, right, that against a black candidate, well, we can have a woman candidate.Against a candidate who is mobilizing young people and minorities, we can have someone who’s going to reach out to these other disaffected groups and places.
It was a purely politics gambit, but it opened the floodgates to getting us to where we are today with Donald Trump as our president.
… Barack Obama over eight years, do you think he knew in that early moment about Sarah Palin’s America?
I don’t know that Barack Obama did know about Sarah Palin’s America.I think that Barack Obama had to be such a unique figure to be elected.I think if Barack Obama had been different at all in any number of ways, he could not have been elected.
But one of the things about Barack Obama is he’s someone who believes in the genuine goodness of America as the idea and America as a collection of people.Barack Obama is the guy who was convinced, if only he can get you in a room long enough, he can talk you into making the right decision.He needed in many ways to be a candidate who couldn’t be jaded by groups of people, towns, states that were never going to support him, were never going to work with him.He needed to be elected, to be a politician willing to try to cross the aisle and work with other folks.
Now, again, I think that was the brilliance of his campaign but ends up being some of the downfall of his presidency, is that he is so concerned by what might happen, how destabilizing it might be if he was seen as going rogue, the black socialist president who was making unilateral decisions and not getting Republican buy-in, that it paralyzed him at points.
When he had the House and the Senate and yet was unable to pass some of his agenda, and suddenly was now having to work with Republicans, and instead of forcing tough votes going back to these bargaining tables over and over and over again, again, that desire to be this unifier is why Barack Obama becomes our president, but it also undermines his ability to accomplish everything that was on his list during his presidency.
The Rise of the Tea Party
… If he doesn’t know they’re out there, he will soon know they’re out there, around what we call the Tea Party summer, as he tries to get the ACA [Affordable Care Act] moving in that summer recess, and all of a sudden, the town meetings have erupted, and they’re populated by this group called the Tea Party.Starts as an economic dislocation group, but very quickly something else rises up inside of them when you see those posters of Obama’s face on a gorilla body or Zulu king or Hitler, or whatever they start to do out there.Talk a bit about the rise of the Tea Party and what impulse that’s responding to.
So when Barack Obama is elected president, you have a chunk of the country that’s elated, that believes it has solved American racism, has atoned for its previous sins and believes this message, this hope and change that is going to come.And you have another section of the country that is infuriated, that is scared, that believes the country has fundamentally changed in ways that it may never come back from.
And this frustration, this pain, this anger, partnered with real economic frustration and hardship, partnered with real change in the way our economy fundamentally works and change in what our country fundamentally looks like in terms of who is here and our skin tones and our diversity, and there needed to be an outlet for this type of expression.
In our politics, the party out of power is typically the more mobilized party.And so, as the Democrats took office and Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi and Barack Obama begin working on the ACA, begin working on the economic recovery package, are talking about taking big steps on immigration, on climate, Republicans are seething.And it’s not just Republican lawmakers; it’s rank-and-file Joes and Janes living across the United States of America who are hearing about all of this change and activity in Washington, and what they know is their lives don’t feel any better today than they did yesterday, and that when they’re turning on Fox News, they’re hearing that this is the end of the world; this is socialism; the country is being broken down; and Obama’s a dictator, that members of his Cabinet are corrupt and are criminals.
The anxiety and the frustration and the fear channels itself into what we end up calling the Tea Party, these roving bands of local activists, meet-up groups, rallies, where the speeches and the rhetoric is loosely tied in to a message of economic frustration and anxiety, but is really a smorgasbord of Republican grievance.It’s people who are showing up because they’re upset with what the leadership of the country looks like.They’re upset with the ideas that they’re hearing.They’re upset with the caricatured versions of Barack Obama they have been taking in every single day through conservative media.
And so the Tea Party becomes this powerful force within the right that—and what’s fascinating with the Tea Party is, its first target, despite Obama being the factor that brings them all together, their first target isn’t Barack Obama.There’s nothing they can do; he’s the president.So the first thing they do is go after the Republicans in Congress, to push them further right.You start to see these litmus tests.You have members of Congress who have been solid conservatives for decades, for their entire careers, who are now suddenly facing heated primary challenges because they’ve taken a wrong vote here or a wrong vote there, or they have unsatisfactorily kissed the ring of this new insurgent activist movement.
And it fundamentally alters and changes the Republican Party.It pushes it from where the party was under John McCain towards where it wanted to go under a Sarah Palin.And at the time, the Republican establishment thought it could appease these people: Sure, we’re going to have a few crazies in Congress.They might get a Senate seat, but look, we’ll put up with them, and we’re still the adults in the room, right?And that was very clearly what Speaker [John] Boehner thought on the Hill.It’s what [Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell thought.It was what [Chair] Reince Priebus thought, the RNC [Republican National Committee]; that, look, every party, every political movement has its people on the fringes, but this energy is good for us because we’ll tell them who the candidate is, we’ll tell them what we’re going to do, and they’re going to be so upset at Obama, they’re going to come along with us.And [if] we have to deal with a viral controversy here or there because of a rogue candidate or a rogue member of Congress, so be it.
What the Republicans didn’t realize at that point was that, you know, they may have thought they had their hands on the wheel, but it was a self-driving car; that once this energy had built among the grassroots, there was no controlling it.And these Republican leaders who thought that they knew what was happening in their party in fact clearly had no clue.
Trump and the Birther Movement
One of the things that grows out of that energy, I guess, and that impulse, is the birther movement, and the standard-bearer of the birther movement of course becomes Donald Trump.Give me a sense of what that’s really all about.
From the very early days of the Obama candidacy, there was an effort.It begins with kind of whispers and blog posts, and then insinuations made by some cable TV host or talk radio host, that there was something different, something “other” about Barack Obama, the skepticism of him, that he must have done something wrong.He must have cheated.He must not be what he says he is, because how could he be, right?There’s this hyper obsession around his college transcripts because “could he have really gotten into all those schools and done so well at them,” right?There’s the disparaging way his work in Chicago was discussed: A community organizer—what even is that?
And then there’s this obsession with his origin, with where he’s from, where he was born.And this became a very simple and in some ways effective means of otherizing then-candidate Obama: Well, he’s not even from here; he’s not one of us.Prove it.Prove you were born here.
Now, it was clear that President Obama was born in the United States.It was clear that he was eligible to be elected president if the voters so chose.But why the birther movement was so powerful was because it spoke to all types of other anxieties that many white Americans had about Barack Obama; that there was something about him that was just different; that there was something that was sinister; that he must have cheated; that he must be bending or breaking the rules.
And as folks in conservative media, perhaps most famously Donald Trump, begin beating the drum around this idea.It gained steam.It becomes the first of what ends up being a countless number of, on their face, insane conspiracies about Barack Obama throughout his terms as president, because, again, there was such a large population that was looking for some reason to distrust this man who looked and sounded so different from our politics.
You know, one thing about Donald Trump—and there’s a lot to be said about his politics, about his rhetoric, about how he operates—but he’s remarkably shrewd and understanding what things will speak to the masses; that when he picks his fights, no matter how bad faith, no matter how objectively false the underlying claims are, he knows that the fight he is picking is one that is going to resonate with millions of people across the United States.There are people in this country today who don’t believe Barack Obama was born in this nation, and a lot of those people are showing up to vote in every election.
And Donald Trump was able to tap into those types of people as early as the Obama candidacy and ends up riding that wave, that willingness to embrace the conspiratorial and that willingness to embrace the most base-level impulse, the most nativist impulse of the American populace.Donald Trump rides that to the presidency.
Division Under Obama
So wherever we are in his presidency, year two, I guess, maybe, the unifier, the grand “My biography is a recipe for making America great again,”…the division is alive and well in the face of whatever Obama’s trying to do.
Certainly, that even as Barack Obama was insisting that we were this unified nation, that we were going to be able to come together and work together, the nation remained splintered; it remained divided; that you still have forces in deep opposition to his agenda and to his very candidacy, much less his presidency.And those forces never went away.Those people who were mobilized by Sarah Palin didn’t disappear when Barack Obama got elected.In fact, as John McCain gives his concession speech in 2008, Barack Obama’s name is booed, not once, but multiple times, and he has to plead with his own supporters that they shouldn’t boo the first black president the moment after he’s been declared.
Now, that’s easy to argue that’s just partisan politics; a group of Republicans gathered in Arizona with John McCain, they’re going to be upset their guy lost that night.But just think about that.A decade removed, what would have to be going through your head in this moment where the nation has, no matter your politics, come to this massive milestone in our history, and how disaffected and angered and partisan do you have to be to, when that person is invoked, to begin booing?I think that that moment should have been the warning of everything else that was to come afterwards.
Obama and the Trayvon Martin Killing
Let’s talk about Trayvon Martin and the meaning of that, the stakes for Barack Obama when he hears about Trayvon Martin, especially against the backdrop of the things we’ve been talking about.
So what’s interesting about Barack Obama on issues of race is that he was cautious to a fault.He didn’t want to be the black president; he wanted to be the president, and he spent most of his campaign assuring white people he wouldn’t be the black president.His most full-throated address on race is to condemn his own pastor, right?This was no black radical; this was no black freedom fighter.This was just like a black guy.And you understand why he did that and why he had to do that.Even as relatively moderate and center left as Barack Obama was, everything he did was painted as this far-left and encroaching socialism, right, radical and extreme.
But as his presidency played forward, there was a need for him to engage on issues of race because many black Americans were starting to get frustrated with, you know, they thought they finally had their guy in the White House, and here he was too polite to ever invoke his own skin color.
And when Trayvon Martin is killed in 2012, it felt like a unique moment in time.It had been—it had been a little while since a full national kind of racial incident this way.And the facts of the case themselves were so upsetting to black Americans.Here’s a teenager walking through the neighborhood where his father lives, committing no crime, bothering no one, who is followed, confronted, and ends up in a physical altercation with a stranger where he ends up killed, and then the person who killed him is allowed to go home that day—isn’t arrested, no charges are filed.There was frustration; there was outrage.Not knowing any additional facts of the case, most people knew that if Trayvon Martin had been the person who killed George Zimmerman, he probably would have been arrested that day.
And so, for so many black Americans, they said: “What’s going on?What’s happening here?”
When Barack Obama initially addresses the Trayvon Martin incident, there was a frustration that he didn’t go far enough, that he didn’t talk about it in a way that was full-throated enough.I think he was given a question at a press conference, and he—and he kind of did an Obama-esque, “Well, there’s a process, and we’re monitoring, and of course it’s terrible for the family.”And that felt lacking.Trayvon Martin’s death created and necessitated an urgency.The nation felt like it was at this moment where it had to grapple with this question and this case.And so, to have the president just barely engage, it felt very empty.
So ultimately, you know, the president comes out again and addresses this issue more full-throatedly.He says, you know, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon Martin.”He talks about what it’s been like to be a black man, you know, and the feeling that maybe he’s being followed around in a store, or wondering if his kids are going to be safe, and that he understands and gets that dynamic that’s at play for so many black Americans.It was what a lot of folks wanted from the president.For the first time, to see the most powerful person in the country saying, “I understand your experiences in a way that no previous president ever could have,” it was a moment of true grace for this president; in many ways, a moment of courage for him.
And he’s immediately met with an outsize backlash.This case becomes a rallying cry for all types of folks on the right.George Zimmerman becomes a martyr.The folks, the conservatives say that Barack Obama has politicized the case by saying that if he had a son he’d look like Trayvon Martin—which, by the way, is objectively true; they kind of look alike.
And it showed and it underscored the complications, the difficulties of the first black president weighing in on issues of race; that by his very presence, by his very willingness to discuss, he himself was bringing the partisan guns to the fight.And suddenly an innocuous statement became deeply inflammatory to half of the country, no matter what that statement was.
Obama and the Right-wing Media
It gives us the opportunity I think to talk right here about the power of right-wing media, the power of Fox, the power of Mark Levin, Glenn Beck, the way the dog whistles get blown by everybody.And it was almost like, especially when you go pull that stock footage together, it’s almost like this was the starter’s pistol.They all said: “All right, here we go.Now we’ve got him.”
Certainly.I mean, to watch the coverage from the right-wing media of the Obama years now is to experience true hysteria.To see Glenn Beck every day and the things he was saying about the president, to listen to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, you would have thought the nation was collapsing.Now, at the time, the economy was finally recovering.The Congress was taking steps and passing legislation, something that hadn’t really been happening.
Yet Barack Obama became this villain.He became someone who could be demagogued.And these viewers and these listeners were just barraged with constant attacks on him.Glenn Beck says that Barack Obama is a racist against white people; you’re hearing these Fox News anchors speculate about, you know, does Barack Obama even love his country?Look, whether you love Barack Obama’s policies or not, he’s probably not—I mean, it’s pretty clear he’s not racist against white people, nor does he hate America.
Yet, for all of this time, for both legitimate, political disagreements, as well as the ability to seize on his race and his ethnicity, Barack Obama became this conservative bogeyman, and millions of dollars were raised by all types of folks and organizations in campaigning against him.A singular hatred of him powers the Tea Party, which is one of the most—one of the strongest political movements of our time.
Barack Obama is one of the most beloved figures in American politics, but is also one of the most hated figures in American politics, and that dynamic gives us where we are today.
Immigration and the Republican Party
In some ways, that bubbling group that we call the “forgotten” now, the Palin people, the Tea Party people, the birther people, at some critical moment around 2013 become the immigration people.As an issue, it gets lit up.A [Steve] Bannon/[Jeff] Sessions/[Stephen] Miller meeting at the “Breitbart Embassy” saying the “autopsy” is baloney…The way to do it is call BS on what’s going on on the border.
Certainly.You know, so after the Republican defeat in 2012, after Mitt Romney loses to Barack Obama—which was a real shock for a lot of Republicans.Republicans, in part because they were consuming this conservative media, thought there was no way that Barack Obama could win, right?“This guy’s so terrible, there’s no way he can get elected president again.Glenn Beck says he’s a racist against white people!”
And so a lot of Republicans were truly shocked and shaken when Barack Obama easily defeats Mitt Romney in 2012, and it forces a reckoning in the Republican Party.And the old heads and the powers-that-be come together, and they write a report that talks about the demographic challenges facing this party moving forward: The nation is changing, and that this is a party that is still wedded to some ideas and some structures that just aren’t going to work if it wants to expand its base.
The Republican Party faced a crucial decision point.It was either going to embrace a platform that would expand its tent and allow it to attract immigrants and black Americans and brown Americans, or it was going to double down on being an exclusively white party; that it was going to appeal to white racial grievance and be fine with a base that is almost exclusively white.
The leaders of the RNC and of the GOP wanted to take the first course.They wanted to expand.They wanted to soften on immigration.They employed complicated and intense outreach programs in urban Detroit and urban Cleveland, trying to attract black voters and brown voters.But that’s not what the base wanted.That’s not what most Republican voters wanted.
This was some of the brilliance of Bannon and of Trump, of Stephen Miller, was that they recognized an anxiety that had been building in the heartland for years; that there had been an uptick in immigration since the mid-2000s and that this fight was playing out locally in place after place; that you had local politicians who were talking about immigrants coming in and taking jobs at places that had been majority white, had started to see small influxes, whether it be of refugees or other immigrant groups; that this was creating real tension across America.
And what’s interesting is that America’s white majority has never been good about integrating with other folks.There are studies that show that once a neighborhood, if it’s 10 families, starts to get to only six or seven white families, the white families think they’ve lost the neighborhood and start leaving, while most other groups are pretty much fine, you know, with a more racially diverse group.
So what you saw is you saw across the country folks who were seeing a bodega move in down the street or an apartment building opening, different-color kids showing up at soccer practice.And they were experiencing extreme anxiety about that.The country itself felt like it was changing.And are these people here illegally?Did they skip a step in line?Did they follow all the rules?Again, the economy for so many Americans had still been so frustrating.So all of this is happening while people have real questions about their own security.
And so instead of embracing a big tent of Republicanism, what Donald Trump does is he says, “Let’s play to those anxieties and those frustrations, that, no, we shouldn’t be welcoming more immigrants; we should be keeping them out.”He remarkably does this thing on the campaign trail—he calls them “angel families,” I believe—where he campaigns with the families of people who have been killed by illegal immigrants.
And it just—it’s striking to see these families used in this, this politically opportunistic way.But it spoke to real worries and frustrations that had been coaxed and caramelized over the course of a decade across America, where white Americans were truly convinced they were losing their country.and the only opportunity they had to stop it was to elect this man who says he was going to do something about it.
Obama and Race
Let’s talk a little bit about Ferguson and Black Lives Matter, the rise of a movement that didn’t exist before, and paradoxically, comes along in a black president’s time.Wait a minute, right?What is that a signal of?
So I think that the rise of Black Lives Matter during the second half of the Obama presidency signals the frustration of many of the young black voters who had made up the Obama coalition.Many of those folks who end up being activists in Black Lives Matter were people whose first votes ever were cast for Barack Obama.These are people who are in their 20s by his second term, which many of them were 18 and 19 during his first term.
But having a black president did not solve racial injustice in America.One thing I always say about protest and street protest is that people take to the streets when other political activity has failed them.So very often in response to a protest, people say: “Well, why don’t they go vote?Why aren’t they doing a voter registration drive?”By the time someone is in the streets, it’s because voting hasn’t worked.It’s because the crisis is urgent, and the only thing they have left to do is to place their body in harm’s way because this has to be addressed today.
Most of the people who were out in the streets in Ferguson and Baltimore, if they voted, they voted for Barack Obama.But there was a frustration.I remember talking to activists who said: “I voted for Barack Obama twice, and Trayvon Martin’s still dead.Michael Brown’s still dead, and Freddie Gray’s still dead, and Sandra Bland is still dead.”It was the sense that simply having representation, even at the highest levels, didn’t necessarily mean that these issues were going to be addressed.
Now, this combines with Barack Obama’s own hesitance to jump head first initially into issues of race and a bit of his flat-footedness around these issues.I think that folks gave him a pass around Trayvon Martin, in part because he eventually does come out and speak more full-throatedly, but by the time you get to Michael Brown in 2014, there’s a sense that: “Well, we waited for the process to work out last time, and we got screwed.This didn’t work for us.We didn’t get justice, and so now we’re not going to sit here calmly.We’re going to take to the streets, and we’re going to tell people we want something different.”
And I think that energy in and of itself is a means of political action, but it also is a means of political pressure.
The longest meeting Barack Obama ever held in the White House during his tenure was in July 2016 about police shootings.He summonsed a group of activists, of police representatives, of civil rights groups and held an hours’ long, a daylong summit, roundtable, where they all just talked.That meeting doesn’t happen were it not for the thousands of people who were in the streets.The policing plans and the guidelines that the White House eventually puts out that many police departments around the country have now started to implement, none of that happens if people don’t take to the streets in these cities.
And so, in many ways, Barack Obama had to be pushed towards more embracing this conversation.
Now, every political movement, every political uprising sparks both supporters and detractors, and I think Black Lives Matter pushes many Trump-skeptical Republican voters into his arms.It’s unsurprising to me that the year after there were riots in Charlotte, that North Carolina votes for Donald Trump.It’s unsurprising to me that as there’s unrest around policing in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania votes for Donald Trump; that as Ohio grapples with the death of Tamir Rice and the police in Cleveland who make up a big chunk of the blue-collar voters in crucial Cuyahoga County feel under attack, it’s unsurprising to me that Ohio votes for Donald Trump; that if you were a voter who was inclined to be scared of the world you thought Barack Obama was ushering in, frustrated by kind of the racialized conversation about black lives and white lives, someone who is skeptical of this seemingly increasing skepticism and scrutiny of the police, Donald Trump represented a return to an America that was more comfortable to you, one where the police were unambiguously heroes, a world where you didn’t have to talk about race all the time, where you didn’t feel like you were being shamed for being a white man.
And so, as much as Black Lives Matter mobilized the core of young black and brown activists who are still major players in our politics today, it also scared a lot of white voters who for the first time were having to grapple with the thought that perhaps this nation is not as systemically and structurally fair as they thought it was, and rather than grapple with that truth, decided to deny it.
The Trump Candidacy
So at about exactly that time, as it happens, as they say in journalism, down the escalator comes a man who’s about to tell us about Mexico not sending their best people.
You know, I think about this every once in a while, still.I remember sitting at my desk at The Washington Post.I had a TV at my desk watching the spectacle, because the conversation before this was essentially about how no one should take Trump seriously; there’s no way he’s really going to run.There’d been a great piece by McKay Coppins, I think for BuzzFeed at the time, where he’d embedded with Trump and basically wrote that this guy’s a buffoon and a faker and he’s never going to run.I remember when my colleague, Bob Costa, started doing reporting on Trump, there were other political reporters who were openly mocking him: “Well, The Washington Post thinks this is someone worth writing about, but we don’t.”
And then here came Trump down this escalator, and you couldn’t help but think, like, good God, he’s actually going to do this.This is exactly how Donald Trump would start his presidential campaign, coming down an escalator at Trump Tower.
And it was always clear that if Donald Trump ran, it was going to be in a relatively freewheeling style, that he wasn’t going to be—you know, he wasn’t going to hold himself to the conventions of normal party politics.But I think even with that understood, very few people were ready for him to lean in as far as he did in those first comments.
When he steps to those microphones and starts talking about the Mexicans coming over the border, rapists, murderers, and some of them, he supposes, are good people, it spoke to the way he was going to attempt to activate this nativist core of our populace and of our electorate, how he was going to be willing to shamelessly campaign on racialized politics.
For decades, Republicans have had to play a coy game where they know that their support is largely coming from white voters, at this point almost exclusively from white voters; that white voters in many cases are mobilized by fears of other types of people, but that they know that they can’t just come right out and say the thing.And so it becomes fears about crime or entitlement programs, welfare spending, right?It’s voter integrity as a means to keep college students and black people from being able to register to vote.
Donald Trump erased all that pretense.He said: “Vote for me so the Mexican rapists don’t come here.I’m going to stop Muslims from coming to this country.”In statement after statement, Donald Trump napalmed years of Republicans insisting that there wasn’t some secret racism at the heart of all their policies.He said: “No, no, there is.We don’t want these people here.”
And in some weird, twisted way, it was remarkably refreshing.But I think so many Americans, especially the Americans who were surprised by this election, were convinced that that message couldn’t be appealing.Could the American populace truly be attracted to something so nakedly prejudiced?Well, of course it could be.But most Americans didn’t want to believe that.
Obama after Charleston
By this time, of course, Obama has himself, I think, certainly by his actions in the 2012 election and the executive orders in the face of the midterms, it seems like he’s decided, OK, the unification thing, maybe it’s not going to happen, and these guys really are the enemy, and they’re really determined to crush me, and I’m just going to go out and punch them in the nose.We interviewed Steve Bannon for a long period of time, and he says at one moment, “The greatest thing I’ve ever seen in politics, the guy I loved the most was Barack Obama coming out with those executive orders and saying, ‘I’m going to punch you right in the nose; here I come’”; that something fundamental had changed in the way Barack Obama was operating.
I’m going to offer you a scene that we think acts in some ways as a eulogy for his presidency by a man who’s smart enough to be one eye on the history books, one eye on where we are now, and that is the moment he sings “Amazing Grace” in Charleston.That may be all wrapped up in those tragic murders, but also in his actions of singing and all of it, he kind of decided to let it fly.I don’t know.You tell us what you think the meaning of that moment is.
That moment was truly one of Obama’s greatest in that he was doing the thing that he’d set out to do.Barack Obama wanted to be the unifier.He wanted to be the leader who helped us through trying times, and so much of his presidency he’d been foiled.Time and time again, he’d been obstructed; he’d been interpreted in bad faith; he’d been attacked unfairly.
Yet here was a moment where the nation needed its president, and for one of the first times in the nation’s history, the president was completely prepared to provide the comfort needed to black Americans.The nine people killed in Charleston were victims of a racial terrorism that dates back throughout our entire history as a nation, and at times has been encouraged and stoked by the occupants of the Oval Office.Yet here was a black man named Barack Obama who very well could have been one of those worshipers, and he shows up in Charleston, and he shows black Americans again that he’s one of them; that he knows their cadence and their hymns; that he’s comfortable when the organ kicks in midway through the speech.
Now, no speech brings those nine people back.No, you know, no hymn chorus by the president soothes those families.But for that moment, it felt like the president was reminding us of his moral authority, that in a struggle between good and evil, between Dylann Roof and the praying black Americans, the government of the United States was firmly planted on the side of the massacred Americans.And that’s not something that’s always been true.And many people would argue that was something that soon was no longer true.
And so there’s just an importance in those words, in that hymn, in that speech, in that appearance.There’s an importance to the way the president was able to show Americans again that he was more than just this symbolic figure, but that he himself truly was a black American and understood, and could understand, the fear and the pain in the hearts of so many black Americans.
Obama Gives Rise to Trump
As he watches Trump run—run on immigration, run on race, run on the wall, run on “lock her up,” run on division—I know you can’t put yourself in his head, but what can you imagine Barack Obama is thinking when he sees this guy?...
You have to wonder what Obama was thinking, you know.And I sometimes think that he must have at some point realized that he’d underestimated the intensity with which so many Americans hated him; that there can’t be Donald Trump without millions of Americans so infuriated by the Obama presidency, so disaffected, so frustrated, so angered by the prospect much less the rate of change, that they’re willing to elect a television show host to become their president.
You’ve got to think at the beginning Barack Obama was probably sitting there like all the rest of us wondering what in the world’s going on, and is this really—this is a fun sideshow until they give it to Marco Rubio or whoever the new savior of the moment was.But it became clear pretty early in that primary that Republicans weren’t going to outmaneuver Donald Trump.They were scared of him.And you just have to think that’s got to be depressing for Barack Obama.Whether you agree with his policies or disagree with his policies, Barack Obama was clearly, and is clearly, a decent man, loves his nation and his family, who was taking steps to do what was best for the nation as the way he saw it, was someone who did genuinely and truly want to work across the aisle and mend divisions.And in response, he faces a torrent of blowback.And then the nation hands the keys to the car to a carnival barker, a full repudiation of his time in office, and allowing this man to undo much of his legacy.
I don’t know if he would have thought this during the campaign, but after Trump is elected, you’ve got to imagine there was some real soul-searching happening in the Obama home about what in the world has just happened.And you know, the question for a long time is, would the nation elect a black president?But the question facing us was no longer, would we elect a black president?It is could we survive the blowback to having a black president?And I’m not sure that’s something Barack Obama thought about before the rise of Donald Trump.
Trump gets elected, and in some ways when you think about what we’ve been talking about, he’s elected to be president of Donald Trump’s America, not Barack Obama’s America.…
Certainly.You know, there’s such little overlap between the two coalitions, the folks who elect Obama and the folks who elect Trump.And it speaks to how deeply divided our nation is, that you have two candidates receive tens of millions of votes, a race that’s separated by just a handful of votes in a handful of states, where Donald Trump doesn’t win the popular vote.In fact, most of the votes in most of the most populous places go to Hillary Clinton, who herself was not a beloved candidate.
But it speaks to how different these two men were, and not just who they are themselves, but who they attracted, who they spoke to, who they could mobilize.And I’m not sure that there’s anything the Obama administration could have done to satisfy the eventual Trump voters.But it’s clear that Obama’s stewardship of the nation contributed to the levels of dissatisfaction.
It’s interesting about the Trump coalition, because it’s not just cyclical voters who always show up, but he mobilizes many people who weren’t regular voters; that his cult of personality and celebrity creates a new coalition of people who aren’t devoted to political party or ideology; they don’t really care about all this Paul Ryan/Grover Norquist tax cut stuff; they don’t really care about small government.They care about Donald Trump.They like that guy; they want him to be the president, and they want to beat the Democrats, “Crooked Hillary.”
And the institutions of our politics don’t always know what to do with that.The Republican Party had no idea what to do with that.I don’t think the Democrats knew much of what to do with that, or the Clintons.And I think that throughout the Trump presidency, we’ve seen folks failing to grapple with what do you do with someone completely unwilling to play by your rules?
You see this in big ways—on massive policy issues, on foreign policy, how we interact with other countries; domestic policy, where trade policy is one thing, and then it’s something else.You see this in small things where the journalists don’t know how to deal with the White House Correspondents’ Dinner because, is he going to follow the rules or not?And should we have him here?Should we—and because so many of the players are married to the rules of the game.Donald Trump isn’t.
The only thing Donald Trump cares about is Donald Trump.
Trump’s Promises and His Agenda
You know, we all thought he was going to pivot.He had to pivot; everybody pivots.When they get in the Oval Office, they pivot.But I think we knew with the “Carnage in America” speech.… And then the Muslim ban or the travel ban, or whatever you want to call it, hits right away, like a gut punch.And now there’s no more doubt about where Donald Trump is coming from and where he wants to go.Your thoughts about what that’s about?Is it more than just “I promised the base I would do things like this”?Is there something else afoot here?
So I think that one of the crucial mistakes people make about Donald Trump is that they don’t take him seriously, is that they believe he’s a child who can be controlled.And you see this time and time again.I remember being at drinks with a high-ranking Republican official during the primary and this person telling me: “Well, you know, even if he wins, he’ll have to listen to the RNC.He won’t be able to put his pants on without the RNC donors”—this thought that Donald Trump could be controlled.And then he railroaded them and took control of their entire party.
President Trump set out to appease his base after being elected.He had made them a series of promises, and he knew that it was important that they see him at least attempting to enact on those promises.At the time, he’s got folks like Steve Bannon in his ear who are pushing him and prodding him: Let’s do this.Executive orders.Let’s just ban Muslims.Let’s just change the way immigration works.Let’s just do it all right now in this flurry of activity, and they won’t be able to stop us.
At the time the Republicans controlled the Senate and the House.The Democrats had very few political ways of stopping the president.And you see this with what we now know as the Muslim ban, this hastily enacted decision with so little foresight that, you know, the head of the Department of Homeland Security hadn’t read the document when it’s enacted; that the airports didn’t know it was coming and were unequipped.They didn’t know what to do as people were arriving: Should we keep these people?Should we not?How do we handle this?It was an absolute fiasco.
What’s been remarkable about the Trump years, beginning with the travel ban, is not the extent to which Donald Trump has pursued his agenda, because no one should be surprised that Donald Trump is setting out to do the things he said he was going to do.It’s that because of the failure to cross his Ts and dot his Is, he’s tripped over himself and undermined his ability to do these things.The travel ban ends up getting thrown out in part because of the sloppiness and the haste with which the Trump administration puts it together; that there’s reason to believe that if they had just been more rigorous, they would have been able to have this thing avoid these court challenges and then be overturned.
But what we’ve also seen is that these actions that Trump does to appease his base and to excite his base have incited the resistance against him.The travel ban is one of the most important days of the Trump presidency, not just because of the policy itself and what it says about us as Americans, much less the people themselves who are now imperiled, unclear if they could come to the United States, but it was the thousands of people rushing the airports.It was the day when it felt like democracy may be crumbling at its seams, and what might still be here when we wake up in the morning?There’s going to be 7,000 people at La Guardia and at DCA and at Dulles?Are they going to start storming the gates and seizing refugees from TSA agents?
It was a moment in which the American populace looked its president in the eye and said, “No, you’re not doing this, not in our name.”And that has been one of the key dynamics of the Trump administration, moments where the president has done the things he said he was going to do, and the American people have said, “No, we’re not going to let you do this.”
Charlottesville and the Aftermath
Let’s talk about Charlottesville, speaking of Donald Trump doing things he may not have said he was going to do, but surprising some of us.What’s your take on the 30,000-foot view of the meaning of Charlottesville and the aftermath?
So what we’ve seen in this era—and it’s not just Charlottesville; we’ve seen this in Portland and Seattle, New York, here in D.C.—has been the public rise of these far-right groups who Trump has played footsie with.He uses some of their language.He doesn’t—he plays coy about whether he knows who they are, what they’re doing.
But to be clear, these are Nazis.These are white supremacists.They’re people who fundamentally want a different nation than the one we have.And the Trump presidency has empowered those people.It’s made them feel emboldened.They’re showing up in public.They’re acting out.The spikes we’ve seen in hate crimes and racially motivated violence come in part because people who hold this type of racial animus now feel as if their views are being validated, being further reinforced from the pulpit of the presidency.
Charlottesville was a clash between these forces, the forces of these far-right groups and then counterprotesters of them, folks who say, “Why are there Nazis in our streets?We’re going to go get them out,” people who feel the need to protect their communities, their livelihoods.
Charlottesville speaks not only to that dynamic, but to a broader dynamic about how we grapple with our own history, the fight we’ve had over Confederate monuments and imagery in our country, in our town squares; that these rallies, these protests all center around the suggestion of the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue.And so here are these dynamics playing out in the American street, far-right Nazi protesters clashing with these anti-racist protesters who have come and shown up to say that you all are not welcome here.
We see time and time again videos of the far-right protesters beating black attendees of the counterprotest.A man drives his vehicle into the crowd, killing Heather Heyer and wounding others.This was an incident that was clearly the tail of these far-right, white supremacist powers emboldened and out of control.And yet, in response to it, the president equivocates.He says, “There are very fine people on both sides.”
You know, when the KKK shows up in your town, when the Nazis march through your town square, when there’s a lynching, you don’t look at the group of people and start trying to equivocate the two sides between them.The Nazis are always the bad guys.The Klan, always the bad guys.There’s never a nuanced argument about why the person’s hanging from the tree.
And the failure of the commander in chief to grasp with moral clarity the need to condemn these far-right gatherings, these far-right movements, shows why these very people have been so empowered under his presidency, why they feel comfortable coming out of their cages and gathering in public places, why they feel emboldened to commit attacks like we’ve seen time and time again, because they know that the politics of our moment is attempting to appease them or, at the very least, is willing to look the other way.
Trump and the Culture Wars
And so when he does something like agitates to get the NFL controversy going, the Colin Kaepernick, that speech he gives where the arena wakes up and says, “Yeah!,” what’s up?Just pure, old-fashioned demagoguery or a real fine-tuned sense of “Let’s go after the soft spots in the culture”?
I think this is the brilliance of Donald Trump, is that he never passes up the ability to engage in demagoguery in a way that will strengthen his support and his base; that he wades into cultural wars that he knows are red meat to the people who support him.When you look at the Colin Kaepernick protest and the other NFL protests, it’s very hard to kind of objectively walk through what happened and end up on the side of Donald Trump, right?Of course these men have the right to protest, whether you agree with it or not.In fact, the very flag and anthem that is being invoked in this stands for the ability to engage in these protests.The men who have protested—and women; there have been other athletes as well—have pretty well stated why they’re doing this; that this was an outgrowth of Black Lives Matter, a frustration around issues of racial insensitivity in policing and racial disparities in police use of force, an issue that has been well debated well before Colin Kaepernick.
And yet what Donald Trump knows is that most Americans aren’t sitting in nuance.They’re not engaging in this.What they see is a millionaire athlete who isn’t standing for the national anthem.And so these voters are attracted to the idea that Trump is willing to say, you know, “Screw those SOBs.”They’re attracted to the idea that he’s willing to pick this fight, no matter how immature, no matter how bad faith.
This is the exact type of thing that speaks to a person who would be a Donald Trump supporter, the idea that these other people, these minorities, are victimizing themselves and trying to change America from what it really is, this belief that America can’t possibly be as bad as Colin Kaepernick says it is, and so he must be the bad guy.
You couldn’t craft an issue that more speaks to Donald Trump’s base and that he was more primed and prepared to exploit for his own political ends.
… Let’s talk a little bit about Roy Moore, as long as we find ourselves in the South at that moment.What does it tell us about Trump’s viability as we head into 2020 as a candidate, that in Alabama, in that moment he tested his reach, he tested his power, he tested whatever, and a guy named Mr. [Doug] Jones won.
I think one of the lessons of Alabama is that many of these races are still winnable for Democrats if they’re willing to play the game and show up.Here you had a case where despite the Republican candidate being credibly accused, repeatedly, of preying on children, and the president himself refusing to withdraw support of that candidate and attempting to force Moore through and into the Senate, enough voters in Alabama were willing to either stay home and not vote or to cross over and vote for Doug Jones that it presents the Democrats with a pathway forward.
Roy Moore was in many ways a candidate reminiscent of Donald Trump—shameless; a showboat; he would ride into his events on a horse; accused of some terrible sexual crimes, completely unrepentant for them.And there’s a worry in our politics that what does it mean, what does it say to us if our politics are run by shamelessness?And I do think there’s a real grappling we have to do with the extent to which that’s true.
But the lesson certainly with Democrats is that they’ve got to put someone on the ballot in every one of these states, in every one of these cases; that if Doug Jones hadn’t been on the ballot, they wouldn’t have won that race; that the Democrats fielded a good candidate for Senate in Alabama, even though that state was not one they were supposed to win.
And I think that one thing that Democrats have thought a lot about and has come up often in the Trump years—we saw this in 2018 in the midterms—is the sense that for too long the Democrats have been willing to cede too much of the country to the Republicans; that you had Republican members of Congress in districts that Hillary Clinton won by 15% and 20% of the vote; that there was this belief that demographics and cities were destiny for the Democrats, and so that it didn’t really matter if a few California districts that we really could win if we tried that hard were held by Republicans.Didn’t really matter if the burbs of Philly or of Boston or, you know—and I think that the crisis that the Democratic Party has faced in the Trump era has forced it to contest and compete in every place in a way that’s probably healthy for our democracy and is starting to see a flip of seats that we might not otherwise have ever imagined would have gone that way.
Now, it took an act of God to get Doug Jones elected in the Senate.It took a perfect storm of these accusations, a uniquely unlikable candidate, a uniquely qualified and acceptable candidate, and enough Alabama Republicans who said: “You know what?I’m just going to sit this one out.”
But the pathway forward to breaking Trump and by and large the Republicans’ stranglehold on our politics, for the Democrats, is to pick off seat by seat, place by place, and wait for some of these Republican candidates to self-destruct.That’s exactly what happened with Roy Moore.
The Democrats and the 2020 Election
Let’s imagine it’s January 2020, the Democrats’ growing pains, trying to resolve a very divided nation.… And how much do we appeal to the broken America and acknowledge it and say, “All right, we’re just going to go get the anger of the broken Americans on the Democratic side and we’re going to elect a president that way”?
The Democrats have been locked in a battle over the fundamental trajectory of their party.How do they defeat Donald Trump?Do they do it by picking off white voters at the margins, winning back some of the Union vote?Do they do it by getting the center?Or do they defeat Donald Trump and his mobilized base by mobilizing a base of their own?A bigger one, a larger one.Young people, minorities, liberals.And it’s unclear.No one knows which of these paths will be the right one.
Thirty thousand votes in three states and Hillary Clinton is the president.Now, how do you get those votes in Pennsylvania?In Florida?In Ohio?Do you get those votes in the rural and exurbs, the suburbs?Do you get those votes in the cities?Because the strategy you choose fundamentally changes who you nominate to be your candidate, but also the rhetoric and the ideology of that candidate.
Is there a Democrat in this field who can excite Democratic voters so much that it doesn’t matter if a single Donald Trump voter comes over?Or is the pathway to victory convincing 10%, maybe even 5% of Donald Trump voters to come back and vote for the Democrats?
No one quite has the answer yet, and they’re going to kill themselves until the day before the election debating it.But it’s—it’s like the fundamental question facing the Democrats at this moment.Everyone on the left agrees there’s a crisis.Now, what do we do to get out of it?
And the stakes are going to be higher.The wrong choice gives you four more years of Donald Trump, four more years of Supreme Court appointments, four more years of executive orders pushing through policies of immigration issues on the border, of shaky relationships not only with our foreign adversaries but also with many of our foreign allies.And so if you’re a Democrat, you’re spending a lot of time thinking about, what is our best bet?How do we beat this guy?
A Divided Nation
So we’ve had a decade now, Wesley, of two change-oriented presidents, one a uniter, one a divider.Where do we find ourselves right at this very moment as a country?
So after a decade of change presidencies, of two of the most politically destabilizing administrations we’ve seen in modern politics, we find ourselves bracing for even more; that four more years of Donald Trump can only be expected to be as chaotic and drastic as the first four.But we also know that if the mobilized left is victorious, that Democrats win, we’re not going back to a politics as usual of the ’70s and ’80s, not that those years were as calm as I think we remember them to be in the first place.Because what we know is that our nation has two mobilized movements; that there remains a fundamental fault line in our populace and in our population that isn’t going to disappear, no matter who the next president is.
And so, while we saw our unifier president Barack Obama become one of our most divisive figures in politics, and then we’ve seen him replaced by an openly and eagerly divisive figure Donald Trump, the only safe assumption is that no matter who is elected president next, they are going to face and have to grapple with this deep divide in America, and that it could shape their entire presidency.
Circumventing Traditional Media
… So starting with Trump and the birther moment when the Post and even Fox News are reporting what they say about Obama’s birth, it’s also the moment Trump starts becoming actively engaged on Twitter.What role do you think Twitter, social media, the sort of changing landscape plays in that birther movement for Trump especially at that moment?
Of course.I think that in that moment where suddenly candidate Obama and eventually President Obama are being wrapped in all these conspiracies—the birther movement, first and foremost—there was a bit of a failure by the traditional media.There was a sense that we are the gatekeepers; this isn’t real until we write about it.And we already wrote about that thing; we dismissed it; we said it wasn’t true.
And I think that there was a failure to appreciate the extent to which these online communities were forming and these online ecosystems were forming; that if you were someone who spent all day in your car listening to Rush Limbaugh and got home and watched Glenn Beck at night and then opened your Facebook page and saw a bunch of Breitbart links, it didn’t really matter to you that The New York Times and The Washington Post had said that birtherism wasn’t true.Didn’t matter how many Pinocchios that FactCheck had gotten of Donald Trump’s latest talk show appearance.
And I think that the media underestimated the extent to which decades of Republican campaigning delegitimizing their media, saying you shouldn’t trust the media, had undermined our own ability to serve as referees in this public conversation.
And so here, in a moment when a man in Donald Trump and a party apparatus in the Republicans were actively smearing the man who would become the president of the United States with clearly false and racist allegations, we had no real power to stand up to them and stop it, because enough Americans were skeptical of what the media had to say about it, and enough Americans were predisposed to believe these terrible things about Barack Obama.
And for Trump and Twitter, when did he recognize that?How did it help his political rise?
So what’s fascinating about Donald Trump is that he has all of the social media power in the world, but also really values traditional media.He’s someone who still likes to see his name in print.He likes to print out the articles and then write them up and send them back to reporters.He cares about what The New York Times says about him.He cares about what the TV talking heads are saying.
But what he also knows is that he can communicate directly with millions of people, people who aren’t sitting and watching CNN or Fox News all day, people who aren’t reading all of the fact-checks or all of the articles.And so he knows he can shape the narrative using his own built-in platforms.
What we have to remember about Donald Trump is that he, for decades, had been streamed into our living rooms and our homes.He was a celebrity in a celebrity-obsessed nation; that almost every American knew the name Donald Trump, and what they knew of him was a TV caricature, this billionaire.Didn’t matter that maybe he wasn’t as rich as everyone thought he was or he said he was.Didn’t matter that perhaps his businesses were underwater, if not bankrupt, because for so long, our popular culture had reinforced this very specific image of who Donald Trump was.
He’d crafted that deliberately.And because of that, he had a reach and a following that it’s hard to imagine is ever going to be replicated by another political candidate; that he already had access, direct access to millions of Americans who had spent years being told that this man was brilliant and that was why he was rich.
And so what he was able to do was he was able to use social media to circumvent traditional media and in moments of controversy, in moments of frustration was able to communicate directly and to undercut legitimate reporting about him by simply denying it, because who are you going to believe, some reporter you’ve never heard of or Donald Trump, this guy you’ve been following for years?
And he does this time and time and time again with an efficiency and with a genuine smarts that show how he understood these platforms and understood his audience, his fans who become his base in a way that most political observers just didn’t get.
In the Black Lives Matter moment, how important was the availability of cameras that everybody’s holding?
It was interesting.As I reported on Black Lives Matter, I would get questions a lot: Why have the police started killing black people all the time, all of a sudden?And I’d always respond that, well, it’s not as if this just started happening.What happened in 2014, though, was that you had two technological advances that allowed us to see these interactions in ways we had not previously.It was that every American citizen, every global citizen now had publishing power; that with smartphones and social media, someone could record a video that was happening right in front of them and within moments the entire world could see it.
We forget this now because the aftermath became the story, but one of the things that made Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson so impactful were images of his body laying in the street, taken on the cell phones of local residents.The reasons we think about and remember Walter Scott is because of the video of him running away and being shot in the back.The outrage over Philando Castile is because his girlfriend is on Facebook Live in the moments after he’s been shot, and we are watching this man die, and we are watching it moments after it happened.
What that did was it empowered black and brown Americans to document unimpeachably behavior and treatment that they have always said they experienced, and it forced white Americans to see things that their eyes never would have seen, seeing that “Wait, the police did just shoot that guy in the back”; “Oh, the way that officer did approach that car seemed hostile and unnecessary,” right?It forced people who may never experience that treatment, who may always be skeptical of the victim in a police shooting, it forced them to grapple with, well, but what if—what if one or two of these is unjust?Can all of these people be wrong?Can every video be missing the context?Could every case?
And that was a lot of the power of the Black Lives Matter movement, was that, again, these weren’t new ideas; this wasn’t a new crisis.It was that this publishing power that Americans now had forced us to have this conversation.
Russian Interference in the Election
Go to 2016, as Trump is running, there’s what’s now pretty well-established Russian interference.There’s leaks to divide the Democratic Party.There’s fake news.There’s troll farms.When you look back at 2016 in terms of our story of division in America, what was going on, and what was the weakness that they saw?What was our weakness in our ability to respond to it, and how does it fit into this story of division?
What the Russians recognized and exploited with brilliance was that our nation and our populace is deeply divided along partisan and racial lines, and because of that, with just a few well-placed email hacks, counterintelligence briefings, they were able to fundamentally shift and change the narrative of our presidential election, because what they knew is that there’s essentially nothing you could say about Hillary Clinton that Republicans wouldn’t believe, and they also knew there was basically nothing you could say about Donald Trump the Democrats wouldn’t believe.
Now, in terms of Hillary Clinton, their efforts seemingly destabilized much of the campaign, the hacking of these email servers, where you now saw weeks and weeks and weeks of discussion around John Podesta’s risotto recipe and internal squabbles and interactions.
… You know what’s interesting about the Russian playbook here is it wasn’t just about mobilizing Republicans against Hillary Clinton, although that was certainly part of it.A big part of it was also about suppressing excitement for Hillary Clinton.And so when you see what the Russians did, they were trying to drum up frustration among young black voters around Hillary Clinton’s previous comments about superpredators, for example, knowing that when a bunch of young black activists said, “We don’t like Hillary Clinton,” it would keep many of their followers from showing up at the polls.
Again, if Hillary Clinton had just kept the Obama coalition, she would be the president.She didn’t need increased turnout.She didn’t need to win new group.If she could have just gotten the voters who showed up in 2008 and 2012, she would be the president of the United States.
And so the campaign against Hillary Clinton was not only about convincing people to vote for Trump; it was about convincing people to not vote for Hillary Clinton.And what we saw the Russians do was exploit those divisions in our politics to further demonize Hillary Clinton and to further prop up Donald Trump, especially at his moments of deepest crisis.
The DNC email is published right after the Access Hollywood tape; that in what feels like the lowest moment of Donald Trump’s campaign, where his own closest advisers, what every Republican of any note is telling him, “Drop out, get out,” suddenly this gift-wrapped present comes from Russia, and it changes the course of the entire election.
The Media Landscape Under Trump
During the Trump presidency, as he comes in, and he feels under assault from the media, who he calls “fake news,” how does the media landscape change during the Trump presidency, on Fox, on MSNBC, newspapers, that was different from what it was before?
Sure.You know, I think there was brilliance in the way Trump battled the media, as much as I think it was, and is, disgusting, as much as I think it imperils the safety of journalists, is that Donald Trump knew that we make an excellent whipping boy, because no one likes the media.I don’t like the media, and I’m in the media, because everyone defines the media as whatever part of it they don’t like.
He also bet on us to be precisely as self-obsessed as we are.And so Donald Trump would say, “These people are fake,” and we would run around at our newspapers and on television saying, “Donald Trump says we’re fake!,” and telling anyone who would listen that this powerful man doesn’t think you should trust us, which retrospectively probably didn’t help us in terms of having people trust us.
There was a real hesitance among a lot of media initially wanting to even take Donald Trump seriously.… There was a lot of equivocating.Was the statement he made technically a lie?Was it technically a falsehood?How do we handle this?And look, there’s a good-faith academic argument to be had about the usage of our language.But Donald Trump was fundamentally a different candidate than ones we have seen in our modern history, and is a fundamentally different president than ones we have seen in our modern history, and I think that forces, or it should force us, to think differently about how we engage him.
I think that there is an argument to be made for more coverage that is people- and policy-centric and less coverage that is theater-criticism–centric; that every time we are debating on cable news whether or not Donald Trump looked presidential today is a day that Donald Trump has won, because his policies and his implementation of these policies have been, at best, chaotic; that the actual running of the government has time and time again been a complete circus, by the accounts of his own employees.
And yet our political media is so trained to fall into the cycles of how it operates, the theater-criticism elements of it, covering it like a sport or like a play, like a movie, instead of like real-life decisions that affect people’s real lives to discuss the optics before people discuss the implications.And I think that in many cases Trump’s presidency has forced the media to reconsider.
I think beyond that, it’s forced the media to think about how easily it can be played when you have a bad-faith operator.When Donald Trump as president of the United States would step to a microphone and say something objectively false that he knew was false, knowing that every headline the next day would say “Donald Trump says X,” he knew that it didn’t matter if the story says, “And by the way, what he says isn’t true.”He knew that the headline mattered more than almost anything else.
And it took our media, which is so wedded to its conventions and its traditions, such a long time to get that perhaps if the president is lying to everyone, we shouldn’t broadcast that lie.And there’s still a debate about whether or not that’s how we should operate or what we should do.
I think that what we forget sometimes is that institutions are very hesitant to change and very hesitant to evolve and that the media is one of our major institutions; that we’re not particularly equipped for sudden and drastic change, to all of a sudden handle one president or one candidate different than we might have always done it, and in fact, that we’re actively resistant to that.
But what the Trump era has required of us is a willingness to tell the truth, but also to make deliberate decisions every single day of what headline we use, what context we provide, and to grapple with this idea that perhaps the president saying something does not in and of itself make headline news.
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