WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:01.000 [MUSIC FADES IN] 00:00:01.000 --> 00:00:02.000 This is "In Conversation," from Apple News. I'm Shumita Basu. Today, two longtime politics reporters on why their book about the Trump presidency is both a history and a warning. 00:00:02.000 --> 00:00:03.000 [MUSIC FADES OUT] 00:00:03.000 --> 00:00:04.000 [TICKING MUSIC] 00:00:04.000 --> 00:00:05.000 There have been so many books written about Donald Trump and his time in the Oval Office. Members of his administration have written tell-all accounts, historians have done quick-turn-around books, and reporters have come out with deeper investigations. 00:00:05.000 --> 00:00:06.000 But there's one book that stands out from the rest in its effort to exhaustively catalogue what happened during the Trump presidency. It's called "The Divider$% Trump in the White House, 2017-2021." It's by journalists Peter Baker and Susan Glasser. Peter is the chief White House correspondent for "The New York Times" and Susan is a staff writer for "The New Yorker." The two are also married. 00:00:06.000 --> 00:00:07.000 Peter and Susan reported this book over the course of 18 months, after Trump had left office. They spoke with Trump himself and conducted over 300 hundred other interviews. 00:00:07.000 --> 00:00:08.000 The account here, and there are many damning stories, comes from by and large Republicans officials who worked willingly for Donald Trump. Those have always been the source of some of the most startling and alarming stories about Trump's conduct in the presidency and in the Oval Office. 00:00:08.000 --> 00:00:09.000 What they piece together in this 700-something-page book is the story of a president who was impulsive, uncurious, and intentionally divisive, and they say, given the fact that so many leaders in the Republican Party are still organizing themselves around Trump, this should all serve as a warning for what's to come. But I started by asking Peter and Susan to talk about what they learned from Trump's inner circle about how truly unprepared he was for the job of commander-in-chief. 00:00:09.000 --> 00:00:10.000 [MUSIC FADES OUT] 00:00:10.000 --> 00:00:11.000 It's important to remember he's the first president in American history who never served a single day in public office or the military, not a single day. So he had never confronted these issues in a real way, didn't know much about 'em, but didn't know much about most things. That was actually a quote from one of his own advisors: "He knew nothing about most things." He didn't know that Finland was not actually part of Russia, he didn't know that Columbia was in South America, he'd confuse the Baltics with the Balkans, he didn't know how World War I started, he didn't know how the Constitution worked. He asked his aides at one point, Hey, how do I declare war? Which of course sent them scurrying for the Constitution to show him that he doesn't declare war, that's Congress. And, you know, it would be one thing if he came in without knowing a lot of things. He's not the first president not to know a lot of things. Other presidents have come to office mixing up geography, or names, or details. They learn, though, they learn in the process, and President Trump showed no interest in learning. And instead, he in fact disdained expertise, he disdained the experts. He told us, not just "us" the authors but "us" the country, that he knew more than they did. I know more about war than the generals, he said, even though, of course, he never served. I know more about everything, he kept saying, and it was just his own, you know, need to prove his dominance in every sphere that made him sort of uninterested in actually learning. 00:00:11.000 --> 00:00:12.000 That was one striking thing: Donald Trump denigrated expertise. He had the entire resources of the vast United States government-- As everybody knows, he was very disdainful of the intelligence agencies, but it wasn't just that, he considered himself to be more expert than the experts on almost every subject. Peter was with him at the CDC at the beginning of the pandemic when he literally told the nation's public health leadership that he knew more than they did about deadly diseases because his uncle had been a professor at MIT. And by the way, not even a professor of anything related to medicine, [LAUGHS] a professor of physics. 00:00:12.000 --> 00:00:13.000 You two had the opportunity to interview Trump on two occasions for this book. Tell us a little bit about what the experience was like interviewing him, what you feel like you gained from speaking with him. 00:00:13.000 --> 00:00:14.000 Well, [LAUGHS] it's a unique experience to interview former President Trump, of course. As you go down, as a journalist or historian, you're not looking for him to be a fact witness, because let's face it, he's not a reliable fact witness. He's not going to give you reliable, truthful, factual answer to your questions about what happened at this meeting or who made this decision or how this worked because he just, he changes a story all the time. Even in the course of our interviews, he kept changing his story from minute to minute. The first thing he told us at our second interview was directly contradictory to the first thing he told us at our first interview. So he literally is not a reliable fact witness. So, what do you get out of it? As a journalist or historian, what you get, I think, is mindset, mentality… One thing about Trump is he's pretty transparent about his motives. When he tells you he's going to do something, he tells you why in a way that other politicians might feel the need to disguise or [LAUGHS] at least have some sort of pretense of a more altruistic reason. He's the more-- much more likely to tell you what sort of base reasons motivate him, and that's one thing you get out of an interview with him. But it's a really challenging thing, unlike any other president. 00:00:14.000 --> 00:00:15.000 I mean, there's also quite a lot of stories in here that reflect sexist thinking from the president and racist thinking. Can you talk about some of those instances? 00:00:15.000 --> 00:00:16.000 Well, I think that is important to have a full picture of Donald Trump. Sometimes during the presidency, they were reported as one-offs, so you didn't quite know what to make of it. For example, the famous time when he was meeting with a number of senators and called several countries quote-unquote "[BLEEPS]hole countries." Well, one of the things I was struck by in doing reporting for this book, to try to understand and put that in context after Trump left office, we talked to some senior military officials who said that, in fact, that was the kind of language that Trump used not once, not twice, but all the time. Because I was saying, Well, you know, did you hear something like the "[BLEEPS]hole countries" remark? And I was really struck that they said "So much that we can't even give you particular instances." 00:00:16.000 --> 00:00:17.000 There's also this other thing that you write about quite a lot in the book, which is something that his aides certainly noticed, that it seemed like whoever spoke to him last [CHUCKLES] held a lot of weight in his mind. The last opinion he heard was often the one that he seemed to side with. What are we supposed to understand of that? 00:00:17.000 --> 00:00:18.000 Well, that's exactly right, he did often default to the last opinion he heard. He was influenced by people who were not even his real advisors at times, it would be his friends from business, or it would be just a random person who called him. And people began to understand that, they began to game the system, right? People learned that, in fact, it wasn't just even the last person to talk to him, sometimes the last thing he saw on television. So, for instance, you know, we'd quote people in the book as concluding that it was easier to get to Trump, to get him to do something or not do something, by going on Fox News than to actually call him directly, or to get Sean Hannity to say something at night, because they knew he would be watching. Even Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, figured out how to game his father-in-law, right? One way he did it, when he had bad news to deliver, he always tried to deliver twice as much good news, he said. It was a formula, a two-to-one formula. And in fact, he told him every time he gave him poll numbers, no matter how bad they would be, "Just add five points, it's okay. They don't capture your voters." So, everybody's trying to soothe the-- you know, figure out how to manipulate him, soothe him. When he got out of control, they brought in an aide that they called "the music man" because he would play show tunes that would calm Trump down. His favorite was "Memory" from "Cats." And that's what they would have to do. It's like a story from medieval times with the raging king, but it all happens to be true. 00:00:18.000 --> 00:00:19.000 [LAUGHS] Well, and to your point about who did he listen to, he listened to outside advisors and, you know, rich campaign contributors. Sheldon Adelson, the late casino billionaire and funder of Israeli causes, basically was the one who pushed Donald Trump to move the embassy, the U.S. Embassy, from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and he did so essentially pretty nakedly, as a pay-off where the vast contributions he made in the 2016 presidential campaign. Ron Lauder, Donald Trump's billionaire friend from New York City, was the one-- it turns out in doing our reporting for this book, he was the one who was behind Trump's obsession with trying to buy Greenland from Denmark. Many people remember that as a bizarre one-off Donald Trump Twitter fight in the summer of 2019, when he essentially, you know, was not on speaking terms with Denmark, who were so offended by the idea that a big part of their country would just be for sale. But actually, our reporting for this book found out that it was a year’s long obsession that had been fueled by Ron Lauder. 00:00:19.000 --> 00:00:20.000 Wow. So, I do wanna definitely get into who Trump did listen to, who he didn't listen to, who tried to push back against him, but… You write about how his leadership style created so much dysfunction and, in fact, vitriol among staffers, and maybe you two can help set the bar somewhere, because I think most people's reference points are, frankly, from watching TV shows, "The West Wing," "Veep," right? They think they have a sense of how these things work in the offices behind closed doors. But what does a normal amount of disagreement look like among staffers and administration officials, and what was atypical, would you say, in the Trump years? 00:00:20.000 --> 00:00:21.000 Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, it's not that the Trump White House invented internal friction, obviously didn't, every White House has it on some level or another. But this one, like with so many things involving Trump, was on steroids, right? It was so much more. That's one reason we called the book "The Divider." He didn't cause the divisions in our country, but he is a manifestation of them, and he encouraged them. In fact, it was his main strategy for politics. And he not only divided the country happily, in other words enthusiastically, he also divided his own White House, and he divided even his own family. So, within the very first days, minutes, hours of his taking office, they were already divided into tribal camps at war with each other. People who were interviewed for jobs were told, Okay, I'll give you this job, but you have to be in my side against the other guys. You know, Reince Priebus and the RNC crowd versus Steve Bannon and the "Breitbart" crowd, versus Jared and Ivanka, the family-slash-New-York-liberal or, at least, -Democrat crowd or what have you. And it was just as dysfunctional as can be. It was the leakiest White House you've ever seen in the world, not because they thought they were serving the public good by providing transparency, which would be one thing, but because they were busy trying to knife-fight with each other, and they all were trying to figure out how to get ahead of the other one, and how to leak bad information about the other, not about the opposition, the Democrats even, just about themselves, about their own tribes within, and it was just remarkable. There's a scene in a book by one of the old Trump aides who is in the office with Kelly Ann Conway and she has him using her laptop to type up a statement and doesn't realize that while he's using her laptop to type up a statement, he can see what she's texting and he can watch as she is busily knifing her colleagues to reporters via text. It was endemic to that White House. 00:00:21.000 --> 00:00:22.000 It was also a tool for Donald Trump to maintain his power. He's a classic of the kind of toxic boss, divide-and-conquer syndrome, right? You know, the kind of boss who silos information and who makes sure that he pits his advisors against each other, because of course that means he always comes out on top. And I found that to be particularly true and really alarming when doing reporting on the national security piece of this. Obviously, the consequences are enormous, and one thing we learned was that the divisions were even deeper among those staff than we realized. H. R. McMaster was his second national security advisor after the first blew up, you know, after just 24 days. H. R. McMaster was an army general, Jim Mattis was the defense secretary, a retired four-star Marine general, and they had basically a toxic rivalry that was much worse than I think Peter and I understood until we were able to do the reporting for this book. And they did not disagree with each other that very much on policy, I think they both sought to do the same thing, but they disagreed over the tactic of how best to manage Donald Trump. And that's where they really had a rift that helped Trump, because H. R. McMaster, you know, he would say, Well, if the president demands it, we have to produce these options for leaving South Korea entirely with our military forces. And Jim Mattis and the first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, they thought that was nuts. They thought that H. R. McMaster was flirting with danger, because in presenting Trump with options that they weren't prepared for him to say yes to they thought, you know, My God, that could create a real catastrophe. 00:00:22.000 --> 00:00:23.000 Yeah, I was hoping I could ask you to tell the story of a meeting that was organized-- It was right after Trump had exited the Paris Climate Accord, Mattis scheduled this meeting with the president and a number of military folks, right? And the goal there was to impress upon the president the importance of allies, [LAUGHS] I think they even called it "Allies 101" internally, right? We were gonna brief the president on the importance of allies. Tell us about this meeting and how it went. 00:00:23.000 --> 00:00:24.000 Well, this is known as the famous or infamous meeting in the Pentagon Tank. And I think it was early on in the presidency in the summer of 2017, there was still a notion by Jim Madison-- Actually, his ally in this was Gary Cohn, who was Trump's first national economic advisor from Goldman Sachs, a lifelong Democrat. There was still almost the fallacy that they could somehow manage Trump or just educate him into being a part of the international system. Well, this meeting probably disabused them of that notion. Trump went in there, they wanted to give him a tour around the world to explain to him the international order that had more or less prevailed since the end of World War II. Trump had other ideas. He was ranting and raving in particular about his generals, about the leader of the U.S. forces at that time in Afghanistan, who wasn't there to defend himself. That even made the generally reserved chairman of the joint chiefs, Joe Dunford, furious. And Trump was accusing them of being leakers. He said "You are f-ing leakers." Dunford said "We are not f-ing leakers." Trump demanded to withdraw all troops again from Afghanistan, they explained what the potential consequences of that would be. It was extraordinary conflict-filled meeting. We interviewed a number of participants in this meeting. We asked them all, Well, was that meeting in the Tank the worst meeting that you had with Donald Trump? Again and again and again, they gave us the same answer. They said, No, absolutely not, that was par for the course. It wasn't the worst, it was the first worst, or it was one of many. 00:00:24.000 --> 00:00:25.000 "The first worst," yeah. That's a memorable description there. 00:00:25.000 --> 00:00:26.000 After it was disastrously over, Rex Tillerson stood up to leave, and he turned to Gary Cohn, who saw that Tillerson was quite upset. Cohn asked him, you know, something along the lines of "Are you okay?" and Tillerson, the room was clearing out, as it turned out, it wasn't empty enough, but Tillerson turned to Gary Cohn and he said "[BLEEPS] moron," meaning Donald Trump. Others, including Trump son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who hated Rex Tillerson, overheard. 00:00:26.000 --> 00:00:27.000 So, what was the takeaway for officials who were hoping that the president could be educated on norms and precedents? 00:00:27.000 --> 00:00:28.000 Well, I think in the end, basically, they had to understand-- they came to understand that Trump was his own person who was never gonna be somebody who would care about the norms and traditions. In fact, if he was told it was a norm and tradition, that encouraged him to do the opposite, it encouraged him to break it, 'cause he saw himself as a disruptor and he just hated being penned in. He hated the idea that he would be like others, and he didn't care much if he was violating norms and standards, or even ethical boundaries and, at times, the law. In fact, again and again, he told his immigration people "Close the border," "Just close the border." Never mind he doesn't have authority to do that, it would be disastrous economically. And when he was told, You can't do that, it's illegal, he would just say, Do it anyway. He said this to his Secretary of Homeland Security all the time, he said "Honey, just do it." That was his phrase. He said it so many times to her that she joked with her aides if she ever wrote a memoir, she would title it "Honey, Just Do It." At one point he tells his immigration officials to do something, they say he can't do it, he says, Well, then I'll just pardon you. Go ahead and do it anyway. So his-- he has no respect for the boundaries that other presidents understood were the guardrails of their office. 00:00:28.000 --> 00:00:29.000 [GENTLE STRING MUSIC] 00:00:29.000 --> 00:00:30.000 This brings us to another consequential moment in Trump's presidency, June 1st of 2020. Demonstrators gathered outside the White House to protest the murder of George Floyd. This was in the early days of the social justice protests that took off across the country that summer, and Trump wanted to put a stop to them. 00:00:30.000 --> 00:00:31.000 Donald Trump had been demanding that they take evermore extreme action, and they had been debating for days whether to invoke the 19th century Insurrection Act, which would've enabled Trump to demand active duty military be deployed to put down the protests and to bring order, as he saw it, back into the streets of cities around America. 00:00:31.000 --> 00:00:32.000 But Trump's advisors, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Mark Milley, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, and Attorney General Bill Barr, wouldn't allow it. 00:00:32.000 --> 00:00:33.000 And so on that day, June 1st, 2020, he had called his advisors into the White House that morning. There had been a huge fight over it. Milley and Barr and Esper had all sort of joined hands and said, No, Mr. President, we'll deal with this using the National Guard, using civilian law enforcement. 00:00:33.000 --> 00:00:34.000 According to this reporting, Trump reluctantly agreed to put Attorney General Barr, a civilian, in charge of the response at Lafayette Square. What ended up happening was police and National Guard members used tear gas and rubber bullets to clear peaceful protestors out of the area. President Trump then walked across the square to a church, where he did a photo op holding up a bible. He was flanked by an entourage of advisors and family members. That group included Defense Secretary Mark Esper and General Mark Milley, who ultimately ducked out before Trump ever got to the church. But Esper reportedly turned to Milley and said "I think we've been duped." They claim they never knew about or wanted to be a part of that photo op. 00:00:34.000 --> 00:00:35.000 [MUSIC FADES OUT] 00:00:35.000 --> 00:00:36.000 The whole country has seen the leader of America's military wearing combat fatigues as if we're actually at war with ourselves, and it was a disaster for the Pentagon leadership, an absolute disaster. There were calls for both Esper and Milley to quit, you know, in protest of this, there was lots of agonizing handwringing, even people who hadn't spoken out against Trump, like Jim Mattis, the former defense secretary, spoke out and said this is an outrageous politicization of our military. 00:00:36.000 --> 00:00:37.000 And so, Milley wrote up a resignation letter. Susan and Peter obtained a draft of it. 00:00:37.000 --> 00:00:38.000 And he wrote that Donald Trump posed a quote-unquote "grave and irreparable damage to the country," that he was ruining, quote-unquote, "the International Order," and also that he believed that Donald Trump did not, quote-unquote, "subscribe to many of the values that the United States fought for in World War II." This is just a document unlike any other document I have ever seen. Basically, the leaders of our military considered the president of the United States to be the greatest threat to national security that existed at that time. 00:00:38.000 --> 00:00:39.000 But Milley never actually sent that resignation letter. 00:00:39.000 --> 00:00:40.000 Milley makes a very consequential decision. He tells his staff, you know, [BLEEPS] it, I'm just going to fight Trump from the inside. He doesn't mean that he's going to disregard lawful orders as a military officer, what he meant was that he was going to resist, from the inside, further efforts. And he was very worried, even then, about the 2020 election and the idea that Trump might actually seek to use the military as part of his electoral struggle, which might have seemed overly worried or paranoid at the time but as events would later play out, actually, it was unfortunately quite prescient, and Donald Trump ultimately did contemplate seriously imposing some version of martial law after the 2020 election in order to overturn the results. 00:00:40.000 --> 00:00:41.000 You know, I wanna come back to that notion of "I'm gonna stick around and fight this from the inside," because it's commonly heard-- you report it as being a commonly-held sentiment by a lot of these folks. Can you talk a bit more about why you understand these people stayed in the jobs that they did, even though they had such deep misgivings about the president and, it seems at times, even their role. 00:00:41.000 --> 00:00:42.000 Right, that's a very insightful question, because that was the through line in all of these interviews, almost all these interviews that we did. We did 300 interviews for this book, all after Trump left office. It was meant to go back and look at what we could learn that we couldn't learn at the time, because people were freer to talk once he left. And the constant theme we heard from so many of them, not the true believers obviously, but the ones who otherwise went in because they were public-service-minded or they were just regular Republicans, or where they worked for the military or what have you, was that exact conundrum you mentioned: at what point do you say, I can't work for this guy anymore, I don't believe in what he is doing, he's reckless, he's dangerous? Versus: If I leave, they told themselves, the person who would come next would be more compliant, more willing, to do the things that I think are unethical or illegal or reckless or what have you. And you know, some of that's self-justifying, right, because they like the big job and the big title, and some of these people had titles they never would've gotten from any normal president. And some of it is true. And I think that, you know, what we found in our research time and time again where you can make specific, you know, conclusions that "Had this person still been in this office, X wouldn't have happened," or "Had somebody else been in there, Y might have." Like, one big example, of course, is January 6th. If John Kelly, who grew to really loathe President Trump and did what he could, he thought, to keep him from violating the law and other things, had still been White House chief of staff at the end, he might not have stopped January 6th, but he would've thrown himself in the, you know-- his body in the doorway of the Oval Office to keep the people Susan just talked about from coming in there and urging martial law. That would've absolutely been the kind of thing he would've fought against, whereas the guy who was chief of staff at the time, Mark Meadows, was what one Republican told us-- he-- they called him The Matador, because he kept waving the flag, "Come on in," in effect, to all these fringe characters who were filling Trump's head with all these nonsensical farfetched fantasies about what had happened in the election and what he could do about it. So, I think it does make a difference when there are people there, but you could see why each one of them was sort of struggling with where that line is that they didn't cross, or they wouldn't wanna cross. 00:00:42.000 --> 00:00:43.000 Yeah. I mean, I guess my question here would be why are there only two options? Why is the option to stay and try and quietly do what you can, or to leave, which understandably people would feel conflicted about? I guess-- You know, the conclusion that some might draw about the people who stayed in the Trump administration is: what good does it do to privately hold these concerns but not express them publicly or in some other way? You know, why wait to write the tell-all book, right? And I can't help personally but feel kind of cynically about it. So, what do you see as the options that are truly available to the people who are in the administration? 00:00:43.000 --> 00:00:44.000 [PETER LAUGHS] 00:00:44.000 --> 00:00:45.000 Look, I think that is on point, right? It's enraging to see somebody like Bill Barr, you know, sort of-- especially having done so much to facilitate Donald Trump, to then come out and say-- you know, to write a very scathing memoir about Donald Trump. On the other hand, especially on the national security side, some of these officials unequivocally stopped even worse things from happening such as withdrawing from NATO, which was something that Donald Trump was far closer to doing than was understood at the time. So, I think that's really important to say that. However, I also agree that I too remain-- Even after 300 interviews that Peter and I conducted for this book after Trump left office, it never ceases to amaze me how so many of these people who were treated so badly for Trump, especially in the political side of the House and the kind of domestic policy side of the House, what are they so afraid of? Reince Priebus, his first chief of staff, great example of that, the guy was literally humiliated by Donald Trump. He was dumped as chief of staff via tweet, he was left standing in the rain on the tarmac while the rest of the White House motorcade left him at Andrew's Air Force base. Again, you couldn't be treated as more of a worm, you know, than Donald Trump treated Reince Priebus, and yet, he has never publicly denounced him. And so, of course, that's infuriating to people. And again, the enablers here sometimes became the resistors, but they were also the facilitators of Donald Trump. Without these people, he just would've been an angry old man shouting at the television in between golf games. You know, that's the bottom line. 00:00:45.000 --> 00:00:46.000 Well, that brings us to the lasting effects of Trump, right? I actually really like the way that you write this in the book, you say "Trump emerged from a seven-million-vote defeat, two impeachments, and the January 6th insurrection as the dominant force in the Republican Party." I realize this is the million-dollar question, but after having conducted all these interviews in a master reporting in this way, what is your conclusion as to why that is, truly? Why some of these people are sticking with him? Why the party is aligning itself with him into the midterms and seemingly into 2024? 00:00:46.000 --> 00:00:47.000 Well, you're right, that is the million-dollar question, and it's so important to understand that. Our book doesn't try to plumb the depths of voter feelings, but it does try to get at where Washington is, right? And the reason that the Washington Republicans have stuck with him, by and large, is because they saw what happened when they didn't. Look, there were ten House Republicans who voted to impeach him the second time, only ten. Given that they had, you know-- stepping over the broken glass in the Capitol, only ten dare to do it, and all ten basically paid the price. They either got defeated in primaries or driven out of office, decided to leave out of frustration. The others all saw it happen and of course they're going to look at that and the first priority for almost every officeholder is to keep the office, whether it should be or not. That is the reality of politics. I talked to a Republican senator once who didn't like Trump-- I would say if you put them on truth serum, two-thirds of the Republican office-holders would tell you they don't-- they really don't like Trump and they think he's dangerous in some ways. But this Republican senator says, Look, they did a poll in my state and 88% of Republicans in my state still like him, what do you want me to do about it? And it is true that Trump proved that he could go into individual Republican states and districts and have more of a connection with their own constituents than they did. It used to be the Republican office-holders would bring a presidential candidate and they would offer the credibility to the candidate with their local constituents who they knew better. It's the other way around. Trump has more of a command over them than they do over their own constituents, and they all have adopted accordingly. 00:00:47.000 --> 00:00:48.000 And I will say that the subtitle of this book, it says "Trump in the White House, 2017 to 2021," it does read like a potential part one, right? It's a possibility that Trump is-- at least he has declared his intention to be back in the White House in 2024. So, what are some of the key insights from your reporting that you are mindful of as we think about the possibility of Trump being back in the White House again? 00:00:48.000 --> 00:00:49.000 Right, exactly. We wanted to do this for history, but it may not be just history, it may be prologue. What I would say is look at the book in terms of all the things he wanted do, talked about doing, but didn't do because of-- he couldn't figure out how to get his team to do it for him, and assume that that's what he's gonna try to do in his second term with a more compliant, deferential team that believes in what he's doing. So, getting out of NATO, as Susan said, is a very real, live possibility in a second term, as an example. Pulling out of South Korea, a very real, live possibility in a second term. All sorts of things he tried to do in terms of immigration, closing the border and other things he talked about doing and was-- and couldn't do because his team told him it wasn't legal, it wasn't proper, would be reckless. Maybe even hitting Iran. He talked about striking some of these missiles that Iran was testing in mid-air, or striking the bases from which they were doing it, even though his own generals told him they didn't have legal authority to do it, it would be a war crime. These are the kinds of things he didn't do, couldn't do, in the first term, but wanted to do and might have more success at doing it a second term. 00:00:49.000 --> 00:00:50.000 You know, it strikes me that there are two very different feelings you might have at the end of reading this book, or reporting out this book, in your case, and one is concern for all of these things that you just laid out as a possibility for 2024. The other possibility is feeling maybe somehow assured about what the office is capable of withstanding when it comes to dysfunction and chaos. What of these feelings are you left with? 00:00:50.000 --> 00:00:51.000 [LAUGHS] Well, the bottom line is that Donald Trump was a real stress test for American institutions. And in many cases, what he showed is that we were actually just one man away, in many cases, from him doing things that really would have exploded the balance of our constitutional democracy. Had there been a different attorney general in office, had there been a different chairman of the joint chiefs, had there been a different Republican secretary of state in Georgia, had there been, you know, just a small handful of people-- a different vice president-- You know, these are not things that should make us feel good about our norms and institutions, but should make us realize how fragile they are and how highly dependent they are on a small number of individuals. So I think it's pretty hard to take the overly optimistic and glossy perspective on this. 00:00:51.000 --> 00:00:52.000 [PETER LAUGHS] 00:00:52.000 --> 00:00:53.000 Peter, what about your last thoughts on what you're feeling at the end of this reporting journey? 00:00:53.000 --> 00:00:54.000 Well, I do have hope. I think we should be hopeful. I-- Look, I think America has been through remarkable traumas in its past. We went through a civil war, we survived McCarthyism and the rupture over Vietnam and civil rights, and so many moments of trauma and difficulty. And so, I think that, you know, we're in a period right now that is difficult. There are cycles. We'll come through it. How it will happen, I don't know. Again, Donald Trump didn't create the divisions in our society, but he is a manifestation of it. And he was an exacerbator of-- an accelerant of it. That's why we called the book "The Divider," because every other president in our lifetime, at least the ones that I've covered, all these gave voice to the aspiration that we should unite. They didn't always do it. They obviously did, you know, play the politics of division 'cause they wanted to win office, no question about it, but at times, at least, they understood that being president meant something about the country as a whole. That's not something that President Trump felt. He never even aspired to that. And so that's the challenge that we're in right now. It's not unique to him, it is unique to all of us as Americans, and I think that we will eventually find our way because we have in the past. 00:00:54.000 --> 00:00:55.000 [MUSIC FADES IN] 00:00:55.000 --> 00:00:56.000 Peter, Susan, I really enjoyed speaking with you both. Thank you so much for your time. 00:00:56.000 --> 00:00:57.000 What a great conversation. Thank you for such thoughtful questions. 00:00:57.000 --> 00:00:58.000 Thank you so much. It was great. A lot of fun. 00:00:58.000 --> 00:00:59.000 You can read Peter Baker and Susan Glasser's book, out now, called "The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017–2021," on Apple Books. You can find a link on our show notes page. 00:00:59.000 --> 00:01:00.000 [MUSIC FADES OUT]