Susan Glasser: The Fever Won’t Break

Welcome to the Bulwark podcast. I am Charlie Sykes. It is twenty twenty four, and I’m still getting my head around the fact that This is the year. We’ve been waiting for this year. It is still January.

It hasn’t really snowed here in Wisconsin. So maybe that’s one of the reasons why I’m having a little bit of cognitive dissonance. So to sort all of this out, we are joined once again by Susan Glasser, staff writer at the New Yorker, where she writes a weekly column on life in Washington, and She’s also, co author, most recently of the divider, the history of Donald Trump in the White House, which he co wrote with her husband, Peter Baker. Probably gonna need to update that, do you think? You and Peter ever talk about, hey, maybe when the paperback comes up, we’re gonna have to add, like, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten chapters?

You know, we weren’t planning on doing a sequel, Charlie. And I’m sure, a lot of people feel that way. It’s Only the beginning of January. It’s nowhere near groundhog day, but, here we are in twenty twenty four, ready or not. It’s happening.

Let’s put this into historical context. Before twenty twenty four, what do you think the most interesting eventful presidential election year in our lifetime has been. I I have an answer, but I’m interested to know what you will say.

Well, you know, I’m looking forward to hearing your answer.

I know there were certainly a couple of really extraordinary presidential

elections when I was basically too little to remember them. You know, you said in your lifetime. So I’m sure that nineteen seventy six or nineteen eighty elections were definitely both consequential and kind of action packed elections. Right? There was the contested convention.

Yeah.

And, the Republicans in nineteen seventy six, in nineteen eighty, there was Ted Kennedy’s challenge of Jimmy Carter and then Ronald Reagan’s victory and the hostages. I mean, that was an incredible but I was really just a kid in school and don’t know if that counts.

This is just an indication of your extreme youth here because I think that the correct answer is nineteen sixty eight. See, this is why because I’m so much older than you may have Well, I was there. I actually remember that. And that was the wildest, presidential election year that I think we’ve had really in the last century when you think about it, you had assassinations. You had riots.

You had the incumbent president of the United States running for reelection. Then dropping out. And again, I was in Chicago for the Democratic National Convention, where there were where the riots, we actually had the police riot led by the Chicago’s Democratic mayor Richard Daily, and, of course, the election of Richard Nixon. But what I was thinking about was that as wild as nineteen sixty eight was. This year’s going to be wilder, and we already know that usually at the beginning of the year, you have no idea what’s gonna happen.

You can never that Robert f Kennedy was gonna be assassinated or Martin Luther King would be assassinated. You could not have predicted the Chicago rights. You couldn’t have predicted that Lyndon Johnson would drop out. But this year, There are going to be so many black swan events. Again, we don’t know how it’s going to play out.

But it is going to be one of the most extraordinary elections just in terms of the events, but also in terms of the consequences because it is a stark choice. On the ballot in November. I mean, talk about two different realities and futures for America on the ballot in twenty twenty four. I’m trying to remember a year that we went into knowing it was going to be as consequential as this one. Sometimes we’re taken by surprise.

This one, you know, but this is right in our face.

Yeah. That’s right. This is the election of what, you know, Donald Rumsfeld would call the known unknowns. It’s not really a black swan. In that sense, which is meant to be the sort of come from totally out of the blue.

We know already that we are facing just a series of essentially unprecedented convergences between the courtroom and the campaign trail, the scrambling of the the political primary process. Essentially in way that we’ve never seen. It was your own news outlet just yesterday on the the first workday of the new year. Right? Charlie Sykes pointed out that Donald Trump looks to basically win the Iowa caucus by

the largest merchant of Republican has ever done so. And it could

be that the the primaries are over for all intents and purposes after Iowa and New Hampshire.

And, of course, you know, layering on that. The fact that the Republican nominee may show up here in my hometown of Milwaukee as a convicted felon. We don’t know. We don’t know what the Supreme Court is going to do. We don’t know any of those things or or how the electorate will react to it.

What we do know though is that I think a lot of voters have this sort of sense of, kind of doom because this is the election quite frankly that a lot of Americans don’t want They do not want a replay of Joe Biden versus Donald Trump. I think a lot of people are in denial about that, but that’s what we’re going to get. Before we get into that, though. And I I wrote about this this morning in my newsletter. Now I’m fascinated by that extraordinary evasion by Nikki Haley when she was asked a very, very simple question about the the causes of the civil war, which she botched in a really rather epic way We are now in day seven of the new cycle about that faux pas, okay, that gap.

And it struck me that okay. And that was bad. It was really, really bad. I mean, I compare it to, you know, Selena Meyer, Billy, Madison, bad, miss teen South Carolina. Do you remember miss Teen, South Carolina?

People should look up the video on that. The Nikki Haley Soundbyte should go in the sound bite of great rhetoric for, you know, from South Carolina. But it is day seven. It feels like a kind of a throwback to the before times back in, you know, before two thousand sixteen, where gas actually mattered where if a politician said something stupid or offensive or ridiculous or untrue, then it would actually have real consequences because it no longer is the case. I mean, you know, there are some who probably don’t even remember when if you said something insensitive about rape, you know, it might end your political career.

If you talked about grabbing women, it might actually derail your candidacy. And so we’ve spent seven days talking about Nikki Haley, which has been I’m not criticizing that. But There is Donald Trump sitting there. The great reality of our times is that Donald Trump says something outrageous outlandish, untrue inflammatory every single day. And it’s become normalized.

We become numb to it. I mean, this is what Brian Class calls the banality of crazy. How do we cope with that? Because I I’m just going through all the nutty things that

Donald Trump has said in the last seven days, including telling people, you know,

you should rot in hell, Merry Christmas, which barely registered like a shrug, and you were all obsessed about Nikki Haley. So this is gonna be a hard year. Isn’t it, Susan? I mean, just to keep the focus on, do not be distracted by the squirrels when we have the orange wildebeast sitting right there. He’s not going away.

That metaphor. He’s gonna stick with me, Charlie. Of course, you’re right. You’re right. You’re absolutely right.

This is an age in politics where there appear to be Donald Trump rules and then rules for everybody else. And Of course, you know, for Republicans, they’ve enabled it. This is the mess that they have created. They have climbed into that hole that turns out to be a bottomless pit with Donald Trump. Since we’re doing metaphors.

And, you know, so that’s the world that they’re living in. And, you know, in many ways, there’s been this sort of pretend campaign, potemkin campaign aspect to the Republican race all along. Right? You know, there are all these candidates running except they’re too afraid of the real candidate, to even criticize him for the most part. In fact, they raised their hand, and Nikki Haley was shooting right up there in the first debate to me that was the defining moment that told me way back in August of last year, This isn’t a real campaign.

And these folks aren’t even competing to be number two. They’re not competing against Trump. He doesn’t have to debate them. He doesn’t have to follow the same rules as them. You know, the entire infrastructure of the party remains at his control.

It’s essentially a two incumbent race that we are looking at right now.

No. It is a two incumbent race. Let’s talk about this. The the Biden Trump rematch. Now you’ve written about this extensively.

You gave a very, very interesting so you were in Athens recently. And you gave an interview to a Greek newspaper, which I actually have here. So the two people who are gonna be facing off, they’re both elderly, but they could not be more different. So just talk to me about this contrast between Biden and Trump. You know, you talk about Biden, you know, being the creature of of Washington Trump’s, you know, obviously a product of New York, medium tabloid culture, Biden deeply immersed

in foreign policy, a very

shrewd politician in many respects. But you you said that Trump is astonishingly unaware of most things. Let’s just talk about that just to remind us that we’re we’re not talking about two parallel individuals here. What is Donald Trump? What is he astonishingly unaware of?

Well, we, you know, is very interesting. I was I was speaking with the, you know, writer for

the main newspaper in Greece, and, she asked me about

you know, what’s it gonna be like with Trump in the White House. And the thing that we’ve sort of forgotten or allowed ourselves to or it’s written out of the narrative, or we just can’t handle it anymore. So we just kind of don’t focus squarely on Trump. You know, Trump has been in my view, like the, you know, kind of constant

eclipse of the sun. And, you know, it seems that, you know, almost everybody,

the voters, the the me that, you know, we’re afraid to look at

him squarely with our eyes because it’s, you know, danger of blindness or something.

But Donald Trump, when he came into the White House, a

that was a big takeaway for Peter and I when we were writing the divider and re interviewing and talking to them

three hundred plus people for that book.

What did Trump’s own appointees tell us? They told us he

didn’t know anything about most things.

That’s a quote from a senior White House official. That’s a Republican folks, a senior White House official, and the Trump White House. He didn’t know anything about most things. He didn’t know who started World War one. He didn’t know how America’s nuclear weapons work.

He didn’t know the difference between the Bulwark and the Balkans. And by the way, he confused the two to the leaders of the three Baltic countries while

they were sitting in

the Oval Office with him. He he was astonished, and said publicly

he he was shocked to find out that Abraham Lincoln was

actually a member of the can already. I mean, you know, on and on, the list goes, but it’s important maybe to to remind people of these basic facts.

You know, I don’t think of Donald Trump as a great thinker. I don’t think he’s particularly brilliant as, you know, the stable genius. As you point out though, he is a very skilled and therefore very dangerous communicator. I think that a lot of folks have of underestimated that ability. And, again, it it it eludes me because I have a hard time, you know, listening to him, but talk to me a little bit about why you think that he is a dangerous communicator, a skilled and dangerous communicator Absolutely.

Absolutely. I think Trump is best understood as a sort of hybrid media slash political figure. And, you know, in many ways, that was what he spent his time doing in the White House. That was another big and astonishing takeaway for us, I think, and going back and examining. Trump literally reimagined the job of president of the United States.

He didn’t go to the office in the morning and you know, do meetings and, you know, oversee processes across the US government. And he went and watched television.

Mhmm.

And then he tweeted about it, and he talked to people about it. And he spent his days either up in the White House residence or in the small private dining room off the oval office where he had rigged up as his own sort of personal media center. He spent hours a day Waleo’s president, and, of course, afterwards as well, watching

television and reacting to that and

seeking to create his own news cycle. One of the most, I think, important insights came from another Trump White House official who told me that having thought a lot about Trump, they had come to the conclusion that Donald Trump most resembled. Remember the character in Willie wonka and the chocolate factory. Little American

boy who wants

to live inside the television. That is Donald Trump. And he he’s become very good at it. He is he is skilled at understanding a news cycle. Remember, he’s a niche communicator.

He doesn’t care what you think about him. Or he does in the sense that he needs enemies to

thrive off of. And so to the extent you

and and those who subscribe to similar points of view are his enemy. Sure. He cares what you think. But, essentially, he’s a niche communicator. So he doesn’t care that to many Democratic’s suburban women, you know, the sound of his voice is the sound of, you know, nails on a chalkboard.

He is communicating with his part of the American electorate with his Red America, and he correctly understood

in a way that so

many people here in Washington Republicans especially got wrong or catastrophically wrong the idea that He wasn’t going to be exiled and disgraced after January six. He was

going to come back. And here he is,

four years later, boys to reconsolidate power and control over his party?

Well, let me ask you that. I wanna I wanna go back to his his TV and radio listening habits, but Part of me thinks that Donald Trump himself is surprised at his ability to come back from that because it is so unexpected when you think about it that that even Trump I think looks in the mirror sometimes, says, I cannot believe I get away with this shit. I cannot believe that I’ve been able to have this off. You know what I’m saying? He first said that thing, I could shoot somebody in the middle of fifth Avenue.

He was kind of marveling at it. I think he still probably marvels at his ability to pull this up, but let’s go back to his TV habits. One of the things that he has, and it’s I’ve I’ve described this as his reptilian instinct. He watches Fox News. He listens to talk radio.

He listens to to News Mac. And he figures out What are the hot buttons? What actually gives people the dopamine hit? And then he feeds it back to them. There’s a feedback loop at his rallies.

He figures out What are the lines that get the biggest applause? And then those lines, he repeats. And he keeps pushing the envelope to do it. And so If you don’t listen to that media, if you are not deeply immersed in that media, sometimes it sounds like he’s speaking a foreign language but it is an emotionally attuned language to what the base is hearing and wants to hear, and he gives them what they want to hear. And this is one of his his dangerous demagogic gifts, isn’t it, Susan?

Absolutely. I think that’s a very important insight, Charlie. He is both a creature of his electorate, you know, the avatar of the Maga World View, and also to a certain extent a prisoner it. Remember when he mentioned the vaccine, which, you know, he was inclined to take great credit for, though he clearly personally had nothing much to do with it. He did take the vaccine.

He understood it was the way out of the COVID pandemic. He mentioned it in twenty twenty one, at one of his early rallies and there were booze. Donald Trump did not mention that vaccine

Right.

Afterwards, and he was afraid of alienating his base as well as responding to what it is they want to hear from him. So when he calls, people vermin who are his enemies or, you know, immigrants coming into the country when he says that he is willing to consider termination of the constitution if he doesn’t get his way, that his campaign is about retribution and revenge. He’s doing so and he can be and is fairly confident that his electorate will go with him. And, you know, for me, that’s always been the scariest thing where others looked at January sixth and saw, oh my god. He’s gone too far this time.

And, you know, again, and it again, and again, the sort of corrupt Republican establishments peddles this idea and it gets amplified in the political presence. It’s just b s. You know, that January six moment was the shooting in fifth avenue moment and,

you know,

or to pick a different metaphor, it was the moment when Trump showed that he could take the vast bulk of Republican electorate in the country over the cliff with him. And having done so, he sort of blew up all the previous rules and he bound them to him even more fully. And, you know, remember, for me, the signal moment in that whole horrible, you know, twenty four hour period was what happened you know, I guess, about three o’clock the next morning, which is when they finally finished certifying Joe Biden’s electoral And two thirds of the House Republican Conference went along with Trump’s

Yeah.

False, untrue, and really pernicious lies about the election and refused to certify at two thirds of the House Republican Conference within hours of their capital being taken over. And so for me, I actually was under no illusions from then on. And I I feel like it never got the proper attention at the moment.

And also, it didn’t happen immediately though because, you mean, you had Mitch McConnell come out. You had Kevin McCarthy come out. What I think is really extraordinary, we’re coming out on the third anniversary now. Of of January six. And you saw this new poll that came out, the Washington Post University of Maryland poll showing that Republicans now not only back Donald Trump, but they’re very sympathetic to the rioters.

And so this is like Barack Obama talked about the arc of history Donald Trump has bent the arc of reality because we saw this in real time. We saw it on television. And yet Donald Trump has been such an effective demagogue that he has convinced tens

of millions of his supporters that what they saw didn’t

happen. That he wasn’t involved. I mean, how how did he pull that off?

Yeah. I mean, that’s right out of the, you know, sort of Erwellian dictator handbook. Right? Don’t believe your own lying eyes. I am the only one you can trust.

Donald Trump has said that before,

you know, who else has said that Vladimir Putin. I am the only one you can trust. Don’t believe your eyes. These are not traitors. They’re heroes.

They’re martyrs. I was just joking the other day, and yet it’s really sort of not a joke that, you know, well, if Trump gets, you know, return to office after four years, he’s gonna be passing a national holiday. You know, January six will be the day of the martyrs. I mean

I mean, he is making them, you know, in into the martyrs. Right? It’s not just revisionist history. It is the complete retconning of what happened. And you look at these numbers, people Will Saletan were mostly peaceful.

Look at the video tape. That, you know, Republicans no longer believe that Donald Trump, you know, instigated it when it’s, you know, this has been documented. It’s been laid out. You have the words. They are ignoring the evidence of their own eyes.

They’re ignoring what Mitch McConnell said, what Kevin McCarthy said. All of the evidence is put out And, I mean, this is the real danger. I wanna talk about a dangerous communicator that Donald Trump has managed to transform an historical event that everyone shared in and saw and to distort it almost beyond reality And I’m sure that he’s internalized the fact that I can say anything. I can tell people that up is down that red is blue, the black is white, and they will believe it if it comes from me. This is, I think, part of the challenge in twenty twenty four is to keep reminding yourself that if you’re not believing this, you are not the crazy ones.

Because it seems so insane.

Yeah. And, you know, for that reason, though, I have to say, I understand the impulse, right, and and we’re in the quote, unquote, primary season right now, but admiring the problem, as Barack Obama said, you know, is not necessarily getting us any closer to real insights about where this thing is headed. The Republican Party has been, for all intents and purposes, the party of Trump for quite some time, actually predating January six. And, you know, you can look at all the data points along the way. Remember that it was in the twenty twenty election that the Republican party choose not to have any platform at all.

It choose to be whatever Donald Trump said. And that was really, you know, for the first time that anyone could find in its history, there was no policy platform. There was just Donald Trump. So it’s not really a revelation, although it’s still shocking. And so we keep having to go back to this kind of foundational shock that the Republican Party is so debased and is pretend in all other aspects except in the mind of, you know, the the man of Mar a lago.

The real question, of course, for twenty twenty four is is They’re a scenario by which this conspiracy

theory driven party of enablers of Donald Trump

can win the presidency once again. He did so in a fluke in twenty sixteen by losing the popular vote, but winning in just enough of the right states to be able to win the electoral college, can he repeat that feat? That is the question.

Well, what do you think?

You know, the general election is the whole ball game here. There’s no scenario by which the Republican party saves us from this disaster that they have created. Right? And I think that’s part of the problem of even talking about the Republican primaries. And no, I don’t have any good answers.

It does appear once again to come down to a very small handful of American states that the election is going to be decided in.

I’m gonna stick with this question of of Trump as a communicator, because you and Peter are real students of Donald Trump One of the extraordinary things that he does is and I’m I’m I’m I’m certainly not trying to, you know, praise him here, but his very transparent and cynical projection you know, when there’s a term that’s applied to him, he turns it around and accuses the other, you know, his opponents of doing what he did. I mean, he he started off, you know, with taking fake news and turning that around against the media. He’s using words like fascists and things like that. And I wanted to get your take on this because I’m watching the you know, the cases play out disqualifying him from the ballot based on the fourteenth amendment. We have Colorado.

We have Maine. We will have others. It’s gonna go to the Supreme Court. I confessed to having very, very mixed feelings about all of this because I’m very, very sympathetic to the arguments. Be people like Judge Ludig that the fourteenth amendment, which, you know, bars insurrectionists from office would apply to Donald Trump.

I’m very, very skeptical about the way this is going to play out. Both legally and politically. But what I wanted to ask you about was that I think one of the great ironies of twenty twenty four is going to be that Donald Trump is going to because this is his brand. He’s gonna recast himself as the champion of democracy. You have Democrats and progressives saying democracy is on the ballot.

He is a threat to democracy. What you’re going to see, I think, what I think the real danger is. Particularly if more states try to kick him off the ballot, he is going to, then take that mantle, not just of demagogic populism, but also of democracy that is anti democratic to kick him off the ballot. And they think that you’re going to see him use that kind of rhetoric. And I wonder how that plays out, particularly because I know that Joe Biden and the Democrats wanna make democracy one of the cornerstones of their campaign.

What happens if Donald Trump decides that I’m gonna steal that. I’m gonna I’m gonna project that that I am the defender of democracy and that you are assaulting democracy because you’re trying to deny people a right to vote for me. It’s almost too easy for him. And my prediction is he’s going to do it. What do you think?

Absolutely. Of course. I don’t I don’t even think it’s a prediction. I think it’s a reality already, Charlie. He has very clearly signaled and in order to use this idea that it’s Democrats.

This is what he tells his audience. Democrats are stealing your freedom weaponizing the deep state against me, perverting the way the government is actually supposed to be run-in favor of their own political interests which, of course, is what Trump did when he was in office. And, you know, these tools of production and appropriation are the tools that Trump favors in his political handbook. And, you know, remember that fake news, which was associated him more than perhaps, and anyone else, he stole that.

That was an act of larceny from Hillary Clinton and media analyst who used the

fake news in the aftermath of the twenty sixteen election to point out how Trump and some of his enablers had functioned in the course of that twenty sixteen campaign, Trump, then very candidly, I think, seized upon that phrase, and now it’s associated with him.

He put on

that on people, which, by the way, step back and think about it. This is a guy who the Washington Post found made more than thirty thousand lies misleading statements untruth in the course of his presidency And he’s the one accusing other people of fake news. Right? And I so, of course, you’re going to see him saying that he’s a victim because he’s always a victim of whatever. And this democracy narrative, I think it already plays into what the Republican electorate is predisposed to believe.

Remember, that it was Republicans and Fox News and, you know, they spent years saying that Barack Obama

was some, you know, constitution destroying tyrant

in the making. And so that created all these sort of awkward contortions in twenty sixteen, actually, when they then had to flip and have the party support Donald Trump, you know, an actual constitution denying autocrat in the making. So I think that rhetoric is gonna be very powerful and, you know, there’s a big gap as you know between the kind of legalistic world of the constitutional lawyers. And what happens when that gets translated into the political world. And this whole year is gonna be about that clash between our kind of legal culture with Trump in the courtroom and our political campaign culture.

Okay. So let’s talk about Joe Biden. Who is clearly struggling in in the polls. His his popularity is well, I would say that he’s pulling below, other presidents at point in their presidency, and he’s pulling lower than that of the Democratic party. So what is your read on why Joe Biden his supporters and his defenders say he’s been a really, really good president, or he’s accomplished a lot.

And yet he is going into twenty twenty four with some of the lowest approval ratings we have seen.

Well, that’s right. I mean, look, Charlie. It’s not simple. We tend to contort ourselves. Joe Biden, I think many Democrats and independents are the reason for these less than stellar poll ratings.

It’s not Republicans. They already weren’t supporting Joe Biden. It’s Democrats and independents whom Biden needs in order to win reelection. Why is that? Do they mostly dislike his policies?

No. It’s very simple.

They believe he’s too old or

they’re concerned about his ability

to carry out a second term, and he will be eighty six years old at the end of that second term. And I think it’s a lack of enthusiasm, a concern, about his ability to take on Trump or Republicans. There you know, there’s a variety of factors that add up, but really, in the end, It’s all under the simple umbrella of their concern about whether he should be president again for another term.

Well, in your urine column, you pointed out that, Biden’s theory of the case is what seems to be that the only he. He’s the only one that can defeat Trump, but Obviously, that argument is harder and harder to sustain as the polling gets worse and worse. I guess the question is, though, does Donald Trump solve Joe Biden’s problems. And by that, I mean, okay, so you have Democrats and young people, etcetera. We’re not that enthusiastic because Biden is old But when they are faced with the prospect of Donald Trump, does that re energize the party?

Does that turn this around. I mean, that’s obviously what they’re thinking in Will Saletan. What do you think?

Yeah. You just summed up I think what their strategy is, which is make it about Trump, make it a choice once it’s a choice on Trump and not a referendum about Biden. Ron DeSantis will have no choice, but to come home to Biden and looking at the bigger threat of Donald Trump. I’m sure that’s true for the overwhelming majority of Democrats. The question is in the six or whatever key states, will enough Democrats or independents stay home who he needs in order to win those states.

And, you know, that’s where the incredible risk factor I just keep coming back to of choosing to run again when you’re eighty one years old and anything can happen at any moment. There’s a there’s a hubris in it. It’s understandable. The office does that to most presidents of whatever party, Angel Biden has been essentially a large chunk of his adult lifetime seeking this office only to become a very unlikely president late in life And, you know, of course, he convinces himself. I am the only one who can do this because I’m the only one who’s done it before, but I think it’s an act of hubris.

You said that this campaign is like Biden and Trump are competing in different elections. This is part of this post truth world that we live in. What do you mean by that?

Well, I you know, we’ve talked a a little bit today already about the the alternate realities for the Republican electorate in which January six was a, you know, day of peaceful protest and, you know, martyrs were arrested

by the evil deep

state and furtherance of the rigged and the complicated conspiracy theory involving Venezuela, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Often I found in recent years. It’s not just Trump, but many Republican politicians speak in a kind of unintelligible code to those of us who do not spend our days marinating in the same media misinformation environment. And, you know, Joe Biden meanwhile, there’s a very compelling narrative that his core party supporters here from the White House about what a great president he’s been and, you know, how responsible and the bipartisan infrastructure act and the, you know, this and that. And and and my guess is if you offer that narrative to a garden variety, maybe not even a really partisan, Republican voter in somewhere like Ohio or Montana they literally would not know what you’re talking about.

They would be like, are you kidding me? There are actually people who think that Joe Biden has been this good, responsible, bipartisan leaning Centra’s president, like, on what planet are you living? And so I it’s just taking this unfortunate political reality of two Americans, of Blue America and Red America, and you know, putting it on, you know, kind of trumpian steroids.

I was listening to one of your podcasts recently, and you said we’ve come a long way since Donald Trump wrote down that escalator in twenty fifteen. And we thought that the first term was shambolic and dangerous. Talk to me a little bit because you have looked at this very carefully and you have studied it, how would Trump two point o be different than his first term as

president?

Yeah. Imagine Trump without the constraints. Imagine trump enabled, facilitated, and surrounded by not kind of representatives of the the national security state seeking to constrain him, but, you know, cheerleaders like Steven Miller and Steve Bannon and the rest. I think it’s Trump without the constraints.

And radicalized. Well, he feels far more radicalized than he was back in twenty sixteen. I mean, he would there was a lot of bad. I mean, obviously, I have been arguing this. But it feels like here is somebody who is far more focused on what he will, you know, accomplish the retribution.

And that he won’t take no for an answer.

Yeah. Termination and retribution, I think, are the key words for understanding both Trump’s campaign message. And his agenda. And I would just also point out that our theoretical scenarios here for Trump being in the White House again, all involve in some way the resolution

or not of these four criminal cases

against him.

So in our kind of mind game here of Donald Trump in the White House on January twentieth twenty twenty five, he’s either been convicted of these very serious felonies and one election anyways, which, again, whoa. So that’s Trump without any

fear.

Of the legal system because the people have spoken, or he hasn’t been convicted and still face these these court proceedings. And so we’re starting office with a built in essentially constitutional crisis. Also, he having survived not one but two congressional impeachments. He will fear no impeachment. He will not fear the thing that the founders envisioned as the main check and constraint on a rogue president, which was congressional impeachment and conviction.

But with conviction for all intents and purposes impossible. That’s not a constraint Trump would face. So you have no fear of Congress, no fear of the courts and a new savviness and kind of cadre of experienced manga revolutionaries coming into office with him, which is a big difference from how he came into office after twenty sixteen.

What he pardoned himself? And what happens if he does? Because there’s a lot of legal scholars who believe that the pardon power is nearly absolute, but it does not extend to self pardoning. Have a constitutional crisis right from the from day one?

Yeah. Right from day one. Absolutely. Absolutely. And how can a president govern?

This whole country in such a circumstance.

Already, I think one of the things that historians will

look back on the one Trump term that we’ve already had and say is that it was remarkable the extent to which Trump defined himself as the president for only a part of America. Mhmm. Which is a real sharp break and departure from our previous presidencies and traditions. In other words, previous presidents were partisan or you know, actually represented, you know, the interests of of one faction in the country, but they at least aspired to rhetoricly govern for the whole country. And Trump did not do that already.

And I think that a second term for the reasons that you just stated would just be so clearly a challenge to half or more of the country that did not support Donald Trump. It’s a recipe for Rift and disunion.

So for the last seven or eight years, we’ve been asking ourselves, well, when does the fever break? When do we return to normal? I mean, that was Biden’s promise. Right? We could go back some sort of pre trump status quo.

But even if Biden wins again, even if Trump goes down, What will it take for us to return to normal? Are we ever going to return to normal?

No. This is our new normal Charlie Sykes not going back to the status quo, anti trump. And if anything, the persistence of that metaphor, I think has been sort of crippling to the political discourse, and frankly, cynical Republicans have used that again and again here in Washington. You know, they sort of encourage the idea that there is gonna be a moment of of fever breaking or, you know, the other metaphor I I heard a lot was the jailbreak you know, when are Republicans the presumption? Oh, well, they really don’t like Trump, but what are they gonna do?

Never gonna ask. You know, you and I find this conversation on a day when the remaining holdouts on Capitol Hill among Republican leaders are endorsing Donald Trump one by one today. That’s their very first act Of the new year.

Tom Emma, whose bid to be speaker was derailed by vicious attacks from Donald Trump. Then turns around and goes, thank you, sir. May I have some more and endorses trump? There’s no line. Absolutely.

What we have learned is we have got to let go. Of the fantasy of the fever breaking. We have to, you know, the

story of the last year in Republican politics is not the story of challengers emerging to Donald Trump. It is the story of how he has re cemented his power over this party to be a Republican today is to be in a state of, you know, subservience and enabling of Donald Trump, who is is truly a kind of generational figure for that party.

I just wanna read something that you said. The Trump experience is when it cannot simply be undone or attributed to a sort of four year accident. It is a different country because it went through that. The Republican Party was radicalized and all those people went along I watched it happen. People in Washington who were normal, since they would never go along, then they became trumpified, and they are now going along with things that would have been unthinkable to those same people in twenty fifteen.

I think that going along with things, it would have been unthinkable even in twenty twenty one. And so as you point out, You know, there are cycles of history, and I think you made a great point here that the whole point of a democracy is that each generation has to make it its own. So this is you were talking to a Greek journalist about all of this. And, again, in case we were under the illusions about the fragility of this liberal constitutional republic that we have. We’ve had it tested, but we’re about to experience a test I’m not sure we’ve we’ve experienced in, say, eighteen sixty to go back to something that’s actually older than me.

I did find a date. Charlie, you know, for our first conversation of the new year,

this is already I feel like it’s getting my my blood pressure going and I I I might need to actually just crawl back in the cars and pretend it’s still PD twenty three. Of course, you’re right. Yeah. You’re right.

The fact that it’s not normal. I mean, I I keep thinking about, you know, going back to nineteen sixty eight, how sometimes there are periods that leave a hangover for generations. I mean, you could even argue that we are still in the shadow of the nineteen sixties fighting some of that out. There are people who came into politics in the late nineteen sixties who had a dominant role, you know, until very, very recently. And unfortunately, you have people who are coming into politics, thinking that this new abnormal is in fact the normal And they’re going to be in politics for the next thirty or forty years.

So, again, to your point, there’s not going to be the fever breaking. There’s not going to be the jail break, and we’re just going to have to to deal with that. And that’s that’s kind of the the disillusionment of this year by disillusionment. I mean, the the illusions that that perhaps this was temporary, they’ve all evaporated. Haven’t they?

Well, we’ll see. Our capacity for illusions, our capacity collectively for amnesia, has always been one of the, you know, kind of signature aspects of American politics, and, it’s gonna be fully tested this year.

Susan Glasser’s staff writer at the New Yorker where she writes a weekly column on life in Washington, also the co author of the divider history of Donald Trump in the White House, at least the early history, which she co wrote with her husband, Peter Baker, Susan. It is always great to talk with you. Thank you so much and happy New Year.

Well, happy new year to you, Charlie. It’s been great to, you know, sort of get a reality check to start the year off. Thank you.

And thank you all for listening to today’s Bulwark podcast. I’m Charlie Sykes. We will be back tomorrow, and we’ll do this all over again. Bohrk podcasts is produced by Katie Cooper, and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.