Susan Glasser & Peter Baker: A History and a Warning

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If you haven’t joined us yet, I hope you’ll consider it. Thanks. Good morning, and welcome to the Bullework Podcast. I’m Shirley Sykes. Susan Glasser and Peter Baker’s new book The Divider is an extraordinary six hundred and fifty plus page look at the Trump presidency and includes three hundred original interviews, and it’s just loaded with dazzling details and anecdotes, but it’s not just a history.

It’s a pretty dire warning about what could lie ahead. Susan Glasser is a staff writer at the New Yorker Peter Baker is chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, and they join me today on the podcast. Good morning to both of you. Hey,

thanks for having us. Appreciate

it. Oh, I’m so glad to be back with you. Thank you.

Well, I appreciate it. I so I have to ask you. I have to ask you both. Now I have an answer, but there’s so much in this book. What’s your favorite story?

What’s your favorite anecdote? What’s the one that you think, man, that was when when you wrote it, you thought this is just this is gold.

Oh, man, you know, you’re starting out with the tough questions here. They’re There are a lot of classic Trump moments here, but for me, I have to say when we when we first heard the real story of how Donald Trump got Shinzo Abe to nominate him for a Nobel peace prize. For me, that really hit home because it’s just it’s just it’s got every ingredient of the the quintessential Trump story. Donald Trump, you know, bragged and bragged and bragged about his, by the way, non existent, nuclear deal with Kim Jong Un, and of course his love affair with Kim Jong Un, and he he would go in these rallies, he would say, can you believe it? The prime minister of ham has nominated me for a Nobel Peace Prize and then we learn in the course of reporting for this book that in fact, the reason Shinto Abe nominated Donald Trump for a Nobel peace prize is because Donald Trump had him to private dinner just the two of them at Trump Tower in the fall of twenty eighteen at which he asked Shinzo Abe to nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize for the purpose clearly of then bragging about it endlessly.

And to me, that just is the ultimate gift. You know, a fake nuclear deal a fake nomination for the Peace Prize. It’s got it all.

Okay. Peter, your favorite one.

It’s it’s hard. You’re asking us to pick between

our babies. You know, there’s the one that’s gotten a lot of attention, which I still think is interesting, is is his frustration with his general, my general, as he call them. And he says to John Kelly, he says, why can’t you be more like the German generals? And Kelly’s like, what? Which German gentleman?

The one in World War two Well, the the Nazi generals who worked for Hitler, you know, they tried to kill Hitler three times. Right? Which he Trump didn’t know. But I’m gonna sneak in another Anika, which I also think is fascinating when he once calls up king Abdulah of Jordan. And he said, hey, King, I got a great deal for you.

Yeah. I’m gonna give you the West Bank. And anybody knows about get the policy in politics in Jordan understands that the king of Jordan does not want another Palestinian population in his country. And he later told American French that I thought I was having a heart attack. He said I would doubled over.

I couldn’t breathe. But it also told you a lot about Trump and his lack of understanding of the politics of the Middle East and the history and culture of the Middle East and why this would in fact give Kingdom dual heart attack.

There’s so many to choose from, but you have actually put your finger on my personal favorite, which is, you know, Trump wanted the totally loyal generals like the Nazi generals under Adolf Hitler. I mean, The fact that he didn’t know the history was I mean, I guess that’s not surprising, but it is certainly underlines that. But his obsession with looking at your own generals and thinking, why can’t you be more like Hitler’s generals? I mean, that there’s something going on in his mind there that is extraordinary, leaving aside the fact that Hitler’s generals tried to kill Hitler — Yeah. — and leaving aside the fact that they lost world war two, that that’s the model in his mind for what kind of a military he wants.

Yeah. He wanted generals who saluted and said yes, sir, and basically didn’t didn’t think about what it was that they were saying yes, sir, to

Exactly. Okay. So before we dive into some of the details of all of this, I think there’s there’s two questions that we just have to address since we’re starting with the tough ones right away.

Okay. But what’s your favorite. Oh,

that’s my favorite. My my nazi gentleman was absolutely my favorite. I just think that is just so extraordinary. No. That is my personal favorite.

So diving into these really difficult questions, I have to ask you both of you. Why another book about Trump? It does feel as if, okay, you know, he’s awful, he’s terrible, he’s dangerous. We got it. Why another book?

Well, you know, what I would say is actually, this is the first book of its kind. I mean, the truth is nobody ever took a look at the full four year history of this presidency. Right? They did pieces of it. There’s some remarkably good books out there, but they all did a piece of it a year here or a topic there.

Nobody sat back and said, okay, what does this whole full year’s add up to? And the thrust of this is that the January sixth eruption explosion is not a one off. It’s not an aberration. It’s really the ultimate culmination of four years of war on the institutions of American government. Right?

He didn’t believe the military should be apolitical. He didn’t believe the justice department and the law enforcement system should be apolitical. He tried to bend the healthcare bureaucracy to his personal whim. And so to understand January six two thousand twenty one, you really got to understand January twentieth two thousand seventeen And every day in between, and that was the goal of this book, nobody has done that so far.

Susan, you wanna take a crack at that?

I agree. No. Look, Charlie, I’m glad you asked this because, you know, Peter and I were struck by the urgency of what in the aftermath of any other presidency would have been an act of history. This is history, but with an overlay of the present and possibly the future, at issue. So it’s a very ambitious project to do this in a short amount of time.

As Peter said, we did something like three hundred original interviews, all of them after Trump left office and his second impeachment in order to essentially take testimony, but it’s also you know, a pretty urgent, you know, guide to understanding the vulnerabilities in the institutions that Trump tested and tested over four years and he he found a lot of vulnerabilities. Remember that a second Trump term, that’s very clear takeaway. A second Trump term would be quite different from the first in part because he spent four years trying to understand the weaknesses in the institutions he wanted to blow up and understanding the kind of people he wanted to surround himself with, who unlike John Kelly, might be more inclined to offer kind of personal loyalty that Trump sees as the most important factor in in anyone who serves him. Well,

that’s why I wanted to ask you this question because it it it it reads it it there is a history there, but it really it has the real world relevance. Because as you pointed out in another interview, what’s passed is prologue, you know, that’s the ultimate case study of, you know, you can see what this next term would be like, what what is ahead of us. Okay? So you explain that the real story of this book, and it it’s the real through line of the Trump presidency is war on American institutions. So so let’s talk about this.

What and since my favorite anecdote had to deal with the military, the tension and the back and forth that you describe between the top figures in the US military is truly extraordinary. What what they were saying privately? Didn’t share with the public at the time, but how along they were about the experience of working with a commander in chief like Donald Trump. Yeah.

It’s exactly right. You know, Mark Miller, the chairman joint chiefs we have his resignation letter that he writes, but doesn’t send, and that’s, you know, in some ways, one of the biggest revelations we think in the book, his letter was something I think has never been I’ve certainly — Mhmm. — haven’t seen any example of it in the real world. American politics. Right?

A a letter to a president of the United States whose commander chief saying, I’m resigning because you know, you are doing great and irreparable harm to our country. You’re ruining the international order and you don’t believe in the values that we fought World War two for. But, you know, it wasn’t just Millie. I mean, it was it was his predecessor, Joe Dunford. It was Paul Sullivan, the Vice Chair of the Joint Chiefs.

Factors, every member of the Joint Chiefs. You know, there’s moment in the book, you ask about anecdotes where Trump is intent on having this military parade down the streets of Washington, DC. You know, the military didn’t like this. Even though in theory of celebrating them, they saw that as dangerous. And in fact, Paul Salvat, the Vice Chair of the of the joint chiefs says the president in the meeting, look, you know, I grew up in Portugal, which was at the time of military dictatorship.

This isn’t what democracy is doing. He says, this is what dictators do. Think about that. He’s in the Oval Office, Tom, the president of United States, this is what dictators do, and it didn’t dissuade Trump.

That’s right. That was in twenty seventeen, Charlie. That was in twenty seventeen. So again, the full four year story presents, I think, an even more alarming picture in many ways of the nature and seriousness of the threats that Trump posed to American ins institutions like that of a nonpartisan military.

No. Among the the the most jaw dropping things in the book is that the text of that letter from General Milli where he just lays out this resignation letter lays out the threat that he thinks that Donald Trump poses. I mean, it holds nothing back, but as we of course know, he didn’t send it, he didn’t resign, why not? Why did he not?

You know, one of the things is and I learned this a lot in reporting out this part of the book. The tradition in the US military is not of resignation in protest of our senior uniformed officers for a very good reason, which is to say that that could inadvertently, perhaps, contribute to the politicization of the military. Right? If, you know, if you had officers sort of defying the president or being perceived to defy the president, I also think that, you know, Milli was counseled by people like Gates, the former defense secretary to both Democrats and Republicans. And experts on the subject that this would actually potentially give Trump what he craved, which is, you know, an enemy of foil.

And you see that some of the public criticism of Meli now from Trump’s allies. And so the idea, instead, was to essentially join hands with all of the rest of the uniform chiefs and to make it clear to Trump that if he fired me, he was gonna have to fire all of them. That they were going to, as Willie told, advisors at one point, if we have to, we’ll put on our uniforms and go across the river altogether. Hold hand. What a scene that would have been.

Right? If all of the joint chiefs, you know, essentially stood in front of the president and said, you know, you do this and you fire us all. So I think there was a certain power in using what leverage they had to try to, you know, constrain Trump, from the inside, I should point out not from lawful orders, but their resistance was in the form of trying to make sure that he didn’t do something like declare martial law after the election, which we now know and did not at the time. But we now know from the litigations in a variety of other sources, Donald Trump was seriously, in fact, considering martial law and held a five hour meeting in the Oval Office on December eighteenth twenty twenty one with Mike Flynn and others at which he actively considered imposing martial law in order to seize voting machines and pursue his lies about the election. And so this wasn’t some sort of, like, fantasy fever dream fear of the joint chiefs.

But in fact, a reality that it was much closer than many Americans believed was possible?

Well, let’s just pull back

for

a second from the details of that. Why are we learning so much after the presidency. Why are the people who are speaking out now? Why did they not alert the electorate before the election? Why was this not reported?

Again, it does seem like there were a lot of people who now say, well, you know, I said this in private or I was concerned about this in private. Wouldn’t it have been helpful? Had they spoken out earlier when this might have made more of a difference?

Yeah, I think that’s a very valid question and one that they’re all gonna have to answer with when they’re all gonna have to struggle with in history. And I think that there was a frustration. There were junior officials, people who were not as high up as some of the ones that we write about in this book who did speak out and then tried to get their higher ranking colleagues to join them and and who basically refused. And you know, in some cases a handful of them did say something or at least here or there made a comment or two, but broadly speaking kept quiet. And I think that that was, you know, a choice that they made that they’re gonna have to answer for.

It’s not unusual though that we learn more after presidency is older. If you go back and look at all of the histories, of, you know, of presences. People are always freeer to talk, always more willing to talk. Partly, as you say, to reputation wash, right, to try to put their own spin on history for their own sake, justify what they did and so forth. But also because, you know, they at this point, in this particular I think they’re all concerned about what would happen if there is a second term.

And some of them are more willing to speak out now to make clear what happened in the four years that we did have.

Well, and I also want to point out that, you know, there are different motivations or different responsibilities by different kinds of characters in the administration. Right? So it would not have been appropriate for the uniformed military, the generals, to speak out in real time. If they weren’t going to quit, then, you know, their obligation absolutely was to continue their service and it would have been wildly inappropriate for them to speak out and and even you know, what they did do was in some ways unprecedented. Right?

You did have General Milli, Chairman Milli, after the Lafayette Square photo op, giving a commencement address in which he apologized for participating in that photo op in his combat fatigues marching across Lafayette Square soon after to being violently cleared of Black Lives Matter, protesters. And and that was controversial in and of itself. But you know, so that’s one group of people. But then you have the very, very frustrating story, of course, of people like Mike Pompeo. The secretary of state who was one of the most obsequious of the Trump officials in public and in private.

Even he was so alarmed that he went to Millie’s house on the evening of November nine, twenty twenty, and said the crazies have taken over and teamed up with him on what they called land the plane phone calls in the desperate effort to constrain Trump and get the country to January twentieth and might come pay to this day has failed to acknowledge in public, the facts of that situation continues to lie and mislead the public in fact about his own role in this administration.

Well speaking of of historic relevance, you write in the book that that we can now see that Trump was dead serious about destroying the NATO alliance starting on day one of his presidency. I mean, that that, you know, again, this is one of those overriding issues when we’re seeing the western alliance in the Russian invasion of of Ukraine. This was not just a a one off or just throw off William of Donald Trump. This is a guy who was deeply, deeply skeptical of the most important American alliance. Yeah,

absolutely. I think that is one of the most important elements, especially as we’re facing a war in Europe between Russia and Ukraine. Imagine if United States had actually pulled out of NATO prior to that. Imagine if the Western alliance had basically fallen apart in the last four years at a time when Russia was intent on you know, a war of conquest. So that has great impact.

The fact that he pushed the allies to do more, spend more, that’s you know, not unusual. Other presidents did the same, but none of them treated the allies as if they were enemies the way President Trump did. And this this insistence on on trying to get out while being resisted by his aids, by the way, is a continual theme. You know aids would tell us that they would think they had talked him out or something only to have him bring it up again a week later or a week after that. It was a constant war.

There was never they set a single moment of truth when you know, he could be talked out of what they consider to be a reckless idea because he would continually bring it back up. Even things like family separation, even after he signed an order, in theories, ending it. He kept talking about bringing it back. So for these aids who felt like they were responsible for trying to keep him on what they considered to be within the guardrails, it was a four year struggle to do so because it never seemed to end. So

this is why it’s so relevant to what a second term might be like, as as you described in the book, I mean, at the Trump at the end of four years was much more disruptive, much more radical figure, not because he changed in any way, changed his mind, but because he began to understand how to open the door and I love this quote from a national security official who met with Trump every day and and told you that Trump was like that Velociraptor in Jurassic Park. Who who learns how to open the door to meet. Trump may not have no much coming in, but after four years, he’s figured out how to open the kitchen door Right? So that as shambolic as the first term might be, the second term would be qualitatively different, how much different. How much scarier and more dangerous?

Yeah. That’s right. That’s the last saproper thing. It’s just a chilling image. I have to say when you you contemplate that.

And of course, the point is not that Trump, you know, warned because he absorbed his briefing books or he is now an expert on health care policy. Obviously, that’s not the case. The point I think of the analogy is understanding the levers of power and how to get what he wants. A key takeaway, of course, is Trump’s constant quest to surround himself with more and more people who view their roles with him in in terms of personal loyalty, in terms of being a kind of a Victorian guard. And also, in furthering essentially a hostile takeover, not just to the Republican party, that’s been accomplished, but a hostile takeover of the government itself.

And you see that it wouldn’t take him four years next time to make sure that he didn’t hire someone like John Kelly or Jim Mattis in key roles, but

We’re even Bill Barr.

Or even Bill Barr. Exactly. I mean, you know, the number of people who’ve gotten off the Trump train. And but then again, somebody made a point of saying to us, and this was someone who served in the White House. Remember, there are no clean-cut heroes here.

You know, John Kelly, Bill Barr, these are complicated figures. They enabled Trump in many ways as much as they ultimately came to resist or detain him. And, you know, there’s also, as you pointed out, a lot of ex post facto justifications, both Bill Barr and Mitch McConnell have told others, well, Donald Trump really lost it after the twenty twenty election. He went crazy. You know, of course, that is very ahistorical.

It ignores the facts. Donald Trump did not start talking about the rigged election after he lost the election. But before, he lost the election when Bill Barr and Mitch McConnell did not publicly challenge him on that because in fact, they wanted to win and they wanted Republicans. To win. So I I think that that’s also to correct the record.

You know, it’s never late to do the right thing, but that doesn’t mean that you get a free pass for all of the stuff that you did before. Peter,

you wanna weigh in on Trump two point o, the velociraptor presidency? Yeah.

I know. I think that, again, one of the reason we write the book, it’s not just history, it’s pro log. And if you wanna understand what a second term is is gonna be like, look at this book and see all the things you wanna do, talk about doing, try to do, but it wasn’t able to do for this reason and that reason and assume that the second term would be the, you know, accomplishment of those things. Now maybe some people like those ideas, that’s fine. But it it it’s I think it’s a very telling blueprint of what another Trump presidency would be like.

Okay. So I feel like I’m about to hand out bottles of crazy pills here because we’ve gone through all of the people that you’ve talked to in different departments who work for Donald Trump who are now speaking out about how dangerous it was, how reckless it was, you know, how narcissistic he was. We we have his former national security adviser talking about how unfit he is. You have the former attorney general describing, you know, the fact that he has, you know, become detached from reality. And yet, it hasn’t moved the needle at all.

Feel free to push back on me, but Donald Trump is still the I would say close to prohibited favor to be the Republican nominee. So your your your thoughts of that because I I sense your first deep frustration in the book of the things I’ve heard you say about just watching the the Republican Party and the Republican electorate. Knowing all of this, being told all of this. These voices coming not from MSNBC, but from within the Trump White House, these trusted aides, Trump appointees, and yet they stay with him.

Well, you’re right. The testimony is coming from inside the room. The vast majority of these interviews that we conducted from for our book, the vast majority of the testimony in the January six investigation. These are Republicans, these are Trump appointees, people who actually served in the administration willingly of Donald Trump and yet come out again and again with these striking almost unbelievable testimony of dysfunction and threats to the constitutional order repeated demands of, you know, illegal actions by Donald Trump. And yet, the hardcore Republican fan base of Trump has been fact impervious, impervious to the testimony of Republican officials.

I’m really struck by the fact that Donald Trump remains not just popular with the Republican base, but that he has carried them so far down the road of conspiracy theories and and lies. It’s it’s something that, you know, demands ever more inflammatory and potentially dangerous positions. Right? So the Donald Trump of twenty twenty flirted with queuing on and said, well, I don’t know about it, but, you know, hey, I think they like me. Now he’s openly embracing this conspiracy theory.

Right? And There’s

no pushback.

That’s where the risks go up and up and up and what you see from the institutional Republicans today, the Mitchell McConnell’s in the lake is they simply just won’t talk about Donald Trump to pretend as though he doesn’t do these things. So they’ve abandoned all efforts to push back in a meaningful way. And, you know, I think that, you know, some people look at the fatigue that Trump encounters even among some Republicans today. They look at the kind of shrinking back of his poll numbers to a hardcore base if maybe a third or a little bit more of the Republican party who are the most fervent Trump supporters. But remember, that’s how he won the Republican nomination in the first place.

Back in the twenty sixteen primaries, he wasn’t supported by a majority of Republicans quite the contrary. In a multi candidate field. A fanatic, thirty three percent of the republican party, plus some others, is more than enough to walk away with the Republican nomination again in twenty twenty four.

Do you see any signs of any sort of crack in this Republican support for Donald Trump, Peter?

Well, you know, look, I don’t think there’s going to be a moment where suddenly we snap our fingers and we see wholesale defection. There had been it would have been in January six. Right? What else could have been as big as that? Right.

So, no. Even if he’s indicted, even of fees put on trial, you could see that actually, you know, encouraging the base to feel like he’s a martyr, that he is a victim, that is all hoax, all witch child that these things he likes to say. But I do think that there’s an argument for corrosion or fatigue

possibly. You know, without going too far the NBC poll recently asked the question, are the Republicans? Are you more do you identify more as Republican? Support of the Republican Party or support of Donald Trump? Thirty three percent not said Donald Trump.

So large number, but it is the lowest number since they started asking that

question in twenty nineteen. So you could see that theoretical possibility people becomes tired of this. Like, yeah, I like the guy. I like his policies. I voted for him.

But

I’m just tired of re re fighting twenty twenty. Let’s move on to a new generation. That’s the theory anyway, at least, of some of the anti Trump Republicans.

So I actually caught your discussion at the Texas Tribune Festival when you were in a very, very hot tent, by the way.

And and, you know, we were It was

it was really warm, but you were soldiers there. But I I I thought it was interesting. You had to interview Donald Trump for this book. And and Susan, you describe what it’s like to interview the Donald. Could you just talk to me a little bit about that?

It was hot. My goodness. It was, like, something like ninety seven degrees.

I felt I felt for you. I had to do I had to do a session down there, but was in an air conditioned room. We’re

being punished. Yeah. Yeah. In some way. Mhmm.

You know, going to see Trump, we we had two interviews at Mar a Lago for this book, a total of about three and a half hours over those two sessions. With Donald Trump not quite sure why he did it. He clearly is not a big reader of my new Yorker comps. Yes. But, of course, Donald Trump remains supremely self comp and that he can convince anybody of anything or at least he enjoys so much the effort of doing so.

You know, Trump in many ways is the parity version of himself, even in private, he was like a live action version of his now banned murder feet. Right? You know, ranting, random insults hurled at almost any person that we asked a question about. Mitch McConnell is you know, stupid terrible Mike Pence, you know, political suicide. There’s also the kind of rambling nature.

It’s not really an interview is a misnomer. You don’t get to ask a question and hear an answer and then move on. It’s all essentially a monologue where there’s no noun, no verb, no period, I I don’t think there was a single period really in the in the entire two interviews that we had with him. At that session, she Shervin, I think, was, you know, trying to be charitable and said something like, well, many people say that Trump in private is is more charming. Than he is public.

And I have to say, I was prepared for that because I’d heard that word used so many times over the years. My experience was not that. Charlie a. Not charming. Absolutely.

We’ve defined deviance down. He he’s certainly he’s not he’s not yelling and ranting and raving and breathing fire out of his mouth at the enemies of the people in the way that he is in his rallies. He was perfectly civil. He was, you know, a host offering us a diet coke and, you know, being solicitous about our trip down there. Absolutely.

But this is a completely self absorbed, narcissistic guy whose monologues are all about, you know, thousands of dead people voting and rigged and insulting people.

So rambling

a rambling old man who would be yelling at the TV set in between golf games. Right? Step that he might be the next president in the United States.

Absolutely. You know, there was a kind of heavy Napoleon and Elba vibe to the whole Mar a Lago thing except, you know, if no Napoleon was also a banquet hall greeter.

Peter, you over the years, you’re you’re the White House correspondent, you’ve interviewed Donald Trump. Is that your experience? Like, you’ve interviewed to be in the White House, I assume.

Yeah. For sure. And it’s it’s an interview with him is a is a challenge for a journalist who’s trying to get answers to specific questions. I remember going in once interviewing in the Oval Office, and very specific idea of what I wanted to ask. It was there with my colleagues, Mike Schmidt and Maggiehaven.

And, you know, you’re asking this really tough question about the Trump Tower meeting with the Russians and how, you know, what that was all about. But then he kinda, like, wanders off in this rambling as soon as it says, what a stream of consciousness kinda way to a whole other area, which is completely newsworthy too, where he says, yeah, by the way, that Jeff Sessions guy, I never would have appointed him attorney general. If I had known he was gonna recuse himself, this is terrible. Like, okay. Well, do I stick with my original?

Questioning because I really wanna nail them down. Pretty good. Yeah. Yeah. On the facts on this, that’s kind of an important too.

So you gotta go off with him in his rabbit hole. Right? And trying to really get him to elaborate, oh, this is hard. It’s not a fact witness. You can’t rely on him as a fact witness as you’re trying to reconfigure struct history or scenes, what you do is you use it to understand mindset.

And that’s one thing that’s rather remarkable about him as a president, nor the president has ever been quite as transparent as he is sort of telling you exactly what he thinks no matter how politically unwise it would be to admit the things that he tends to admit. So that’s the value of a near you not to actually establish facts because you can’t assume that anything he’s saying is actually true. But to try to understand mindset and how how he’s thinking. So

I know we have only a couple of minutes left, but you’re you’re one of your previous books was about James Baker, the man who ran Washington. I’m just curious to ask you, what does a guy like James Baker think about what’s happening now? Do you have any idea

why?

I’ll just throw that out for you.

No. Look, that was actually one of the interesting sort of backdrops to finishing our work on that biography of Secretary Baker was that it was taking place during the rise and then the presidency of Donald Trump. The book came out in September twenty twenty. And of course, we kept asking Baker about Trump as this all played out. And, you know, his agony in many ways was sort of the story of the Republican party, how they ended up with a standard bearer who they first didn’t like and also who who moved the party away from what we presumed to be its ideological foundations.

Baker told us in no uncertain terms, he thought that Trump was quote unquote crazy, nuts, He was absolutely in disagreement with so many of his positions on things like free trade and immigration. And yet, Baker voted in the end for Donald Trump not once but twice in his in twenty twenty. And he essentially, partisanship overwhelmed those objections. Many people in his life lobbied Baker family members and others to vote against Trump. The the bushes with whom Baker’s career was intertwined, voted against him publicly spoke out, Baker did not do so, although in his mind, you know, he drew a distinction.

He said, oh, I never endorsed the guy. And he has spoken out very strongly against the rigged election claims and the big lie. He absolutely understood that there was no such thing as voter fraud that would have disqualified Biden from being president. So, you know, it’s it’s a classic story in some ways of the Republican establishment and why they have gone along with a man who they also view with such disdain.

So Peter, I mean, James Baker has nothing to be afraid of. He has nothing to game. He’s not gonna get a job. So what is the just muscle memory that you just always would for the Republican? A

little bit. Yeah. Look, we’re in a tribal era. We’re a tribal moment in our country where we stick very strongly to our camp. Right?

I mean, look at these poll numbers. The poll numbers have not changed very radically in the last fifteen years. People you know, it used to be that a president could go up and down anywhere from, like, twenty five percent to seventy five percent over the course of a four year term because we changed our minds depending on how he was doing. Right? George w was all the way up to ninety percentage.

Jonathan Kennedy, after big big disaster, went up to, I think, seventy or eighty percent. We rallied around the president. Basically, since Bush’s second term, each president has been basically within a very small range for the most part ten points, let’s say, up and down. Because we’ve made up our minds. We know what we think about them.

We like them. We don’t like them. And we’re not open to changing our minds very much anymore. And I think that’s where Baker and a lot of Republicans are. It’s our team versus their team.

And I don’t like my team’s leader right now, but I don’t like the other team any bit better. And so I’m gonna stick with my team. The

book is the divider Trump in the White House two thousand seventeen, two thousand twenty one. Susan Glasser’s staff writer at the New worker Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times. Thank you both so much for coming on the podcast today. Hey,

thank you.

Thank you for this great conversation. The

Bologuard podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio production by Jonathan Seary. I’m Charlie Sykes. Thank you for listening to today’s Bologuard podcast ask, we’ll be back tomorrow. We’ll do this all over again.

You are worried about the economy. Inflation is high. Your paycheck doesn’t cover as much as it used to, and we live under the threat of a looming recession. And sure you’re doing okay, but you could be doing better. The

afford anything podcast explains the economy and the market detailing how to make wise choice on the way you spend and invest.

Afford anything talks about how to avoid common pitfalls, how to refine your mental models, and how to think about out how to think. Make smarter choices and build a better life. Afford anything wherever you listen.