Susan Glasser: The Fever Won't Break

[0] Welcome to the Bull Work podcast.

[1] I am Charlie Sykes.

[2] It is 2024.

[3] And I'm still getting my head around the fact that this is the year.

[4] We've been waiting for this year.

[5] It is still January.

[6] It hasn't really snowed here in Wisconsin.

[7] So maybe that's one of the reasons why I'm having a little bit of cognitive dissonance.

[8] 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.

[9] 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.

[10] Probably going to need to update that, do you think?

[11] You and Peter ever talk about, hey, maybe when the paperback comes out, we're going to have to add like four or five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten chapters.

[12] You know, we weren't planning on doing a sequel, Charlie, and I'm sure a lot of people feel that way.

[13] It's only the beginning of January.

[14] It's nowhere near Groundhog Day.

[15] But here we are in 2024, ready or not, it's happening.

[16] So let's put this into historical context.

[17] Before 2024, what do you think the most interesting, eventful presidential election year in our lifetime has been?

[18] I have an answer, but I'm interested to know what you will say.

[19] Well, you know, I'm looking forward to hearing your answer.

[20] I know there were certainly a couple of really extraordinary presidential elections when I was basically too little to remember them.

[21] But, you know, you said in your lifetime.

[22] So I'm sure that 1976 or 1980 elections, were definitely both consequential and kind of action -packed elections, right?

[23] There was the contested convention and the Republicans in 1976, in 1980.

[24] There was Ted Kennedy's challenge of Jimmy Carter and then Ronald Reagan's victory and the hostages.

[25] I mean, that was an incredible election, but I was really just a kid in school and don't know if that counts.

[26] This is just an indication of your extreme youth here because I think that the correct answer is 1968.

[27] See, this is why, because I'm so much older than the media.

[28] Well, I was there.

[29] I actually remember that.

[30] And that was the wildest presidential election year that I think we've had.

[31] Really, in the last century, when you think about it, you had assassinations.

[32] You had riots.

[33] You had the incumbent president of the United States running for re -election, then dropping out.

[34] And again, I was in Chicago for the Democratic National Convention, where there were the riots.

[35] We actually had the police riot led by Chicago's Democratic mayor, Richard Daly.

[36] And of course, the election of Richard Nixon.

[37] But what I was thinking about was that as wild as 1968 was, this year's going to be wilder.

[38] And we already know that usually at the beginning of the year you have no idea what's going to happen.

[39] You could never predict that Robert F. Kennedy was going to be assassinated or Martin Luther King would be assassinated.

[40] You could not have predicted the Chicago riots.

[41] You couldn't have predicted that Lyndon Johnson would drop out.

[42] But this year, there are going to be so many black swan events.

[43] Again, we don't know how it's going to play out.

[44] 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.

[45] I mean, talk about two different realities and futures for America on the ballot in 2024.

[46] I'm trying to remember a year that we went into knowing it was going to be as consequential as this ones.

[47] Sometimes we're taken by surprise.

[48] This one, you know, this is right in our face.

[49] Yeah, that's right.

[50] This is the election of what Donald Rumsfeld would call the known unknowns.

[51] 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.

[52] 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 political primary process, essentially in a way that we've never seen.

[53] It was.

[54] your own news outlet just yesterday on the first workday of the new year, right?

[55] Charlie, that pointed out that Donald Trump looks to basically win the Iowa caucus by the largest margin of Republican has ever done so.

[56] And it could be that the primaries are over for all intents and purposes after Iowa and New Hampshire.

[57] And of course, layering on that, the fact that the Republican nominee may show up here in my hometown of Milwaukee as a convicted felon.

[58] We don't know.

[59] We don't know what the Supreme Court is going to do.

[60] We don't know any of those things or how the electorate will react to it.

[61] 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.

[62] They do not want a replay of Joe Biden versus Donald Trump.

[63] I think a lot of people are in denial about that, but that's what we're going to get.

[64] Before we get into that, though, and I wrote about this morning in my newsletter.

[65] I'm fascinated by that extraordinary evasion by Nikki Haley when she was asked a very, very simple question about the causes of the Civil War, which she botched in a really rather epic way.

[66] We are now in day seven of the news cycle about that faux paw, okay, that gap.

[67] And it struck me that, okay, and it was bad.

[68] It was really, really bad.

[69] I mean, I compare it to, you know, Selena Meyer, Billy Madison Bad, Miss Teen, South Carolina.

[70] Do you remember Miss Teen, South Carolina?

[71] People should look up the video on that.

[72] The Nikki Haley Soundbite should go in the soundbite of great rhetoric, you know, from South Carolina.

[73] But it is day seven.

[74] It feels like kind of a throwback to the before times, back in, you know, before 2016, where gaffs actually mattered, where if a politician said something stupid or offensive or ridiculous or untrue, that it would actually have real consequences because it no longer is the case.

[75] I mean, you know, there are some listeners who probably don't even remember when, if you said something insensitive about rape, you know, it might end your political career.

[76] If you talked about grabbing women, it might actually derail your candidacy.

[77] And so we've spent seven days talking about Nikki Haley, which has been, I'm not criticizing that.

[78] But there is Donald Trump sitting there.

[79] The great reality of our times is that Donald Trump says something outwe.

[80] outrageous, outlandish, untrue, inflammatory every single day.

[81] And it's become normalized.

[82] We become numb to it.

[83] I mean, this is what Brian Klass calls the banality of crazy.

[84] How do we cope with that?

[85] Because I was 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.

[86] and you're all obsessed about Nikki Haley.

[87] So this is going to be a hard year, isn't it, Susan?

[88] I mean, just to keep the focus on, do not be distracted by the squirrels when we have the orange wildebeest sitting right there.

[89] He's not going away.

[90] That metaphor is going to stick with me, Charlie.

[91] Of course, you're right.

[92] You're right.

[93] You're absolutely right.

[94] This is an age in politics where there appear to be Donald Trump rules and then rules for everybody else.

[95] And of course, you know, for Republicans, they've enabled it.

[96] This is the mess that they have created.

[97] They have climbed into that hole that turns out to be a bottomless pit with Donald Trump, since we're doing metaphors.

[98] And, you know, so that's the world that they're living in.

[99] And, you know, in many ways, there's been this sort of pretend campaign, Potemkin campaign aspect of the Republican race all along, right?

[100] You know, there are all these candidates running, except they're too afraid of the real candidate to even criticize.

[101] him for the most part.

[102] In fact, they raised their hand and Nikki Haley was shooting right up there in the first debate.

[103] To me, that was the defining moment that told me way back in August of last year, this isn't a real campaign.

[104] And these folks aren't even competing to be number two.

[105] They're not competing against Trump.

[106] He doesn't have to debate them.

[107] He doesn't have to follow the same rules as them.

[108] You know, the entire infrastructure, the party remains at his control.

[109] It's essentially a two -incumbent race that we are looking at right now.

[110] Now, it is a two -incumbent race.

[111] Let's talk about this, the Biden -Trump rematch.

[112] Now, you've written about this extensively.

[113] You gave a very, very interesting.

[114] So you were in Athens recently, and you gave an interview to a Greek newspaper, which I actually have here.

[115] So the two people who are going to be facing off, they're both elderly, but they could not be more different.

[116] So just talk to me about this contrast between Biden, and Trump.

[117] You know, you talk about Biden, you know, being the creature of, of Washington.

[118] Trump's, you know, obviously a product of New York media and tabloid culture.

[119] Biden deeply immersed in foreign policy, very shrewd politician in many respects.

[120] But you said that Trump is astonishingly unaware of most things.

[121] So let's just talk about that.

[122] Just to remind us that we're not talking about two parallel individuals here.

[123] What is Donald Trump, what is he astonishingly unaware of.

[124] Well, you know, it's very interesting.

[125] I was I was speaking with the, you know, writer for the main newspaper in Greece.

[126] And she asked me about, you know, what's it going to be like with Trump in the White House?

[127] And the thing that we've sort of forgotten or allowed ourselves to forget or it's written out of the narrative or we just can't handle it anymore.

[128] So we just kind of don't focus squarely on Trump.

[129] You know, Trump has been, in my view, like the, you you know, kind of constant eclipse of the sun.

[130] And, you know, it seems that, you know, almost everybody, the voters, the media that, you know, we're afraid to look at him squarely with our eyes because it's, you know, danger of blindness or something.

[131] But Donald Trump, when he came into the White House, that was a big takeaway for Peter and I when we were writing the divider and re -interviewing and talking to 300 plus people for that book.

[132] What did Trump's own appointees tell us?

[133] They told us he didn't know anything about most things.

[134] That's a quote from a senior White House official.

[135] That's a Republican folks, a senior White House official in the Trump White House.

[136] He didn't know anything about most things.

[137] He didn't know who started World War I. He didn't know how America's nuclear weapons work.

[138] He didn't know the difference between the Baltics and the Balkans.

[139] 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.

[140] He was astonished and said publicly he was shocked to find out that Abraham Lincoln was actually a member of the Republican Party.

[141] I mean, you know, on and on the list goes.

[142] But it's important maybe to remind people of these basic facts.

[143] You know, I don't think of Donald Trump as a great thinker.

[144] I don't think he's particularly brilliant as, you know, the stable genius.

[145] As you point out, though, he is a very skilled and therefore very dangerous communicator.

[146] I think that a lot of folks have underestimated that ability.

[147] And again, it eludes me because I have a hard time, you know, listening to him.

[148] But talk to me a little bit about why you think that he is a dangerous communicator, a skilled and dangerous communicator.

[149] Absolutely.

[150] Absolutely, absolutely.

[151] I think Trump is best understood as a sort of hybrid media slash political figure.

[152] And, you know, in many ways, that was what he spent his time doing in the White House.

[153] That was another big and astonishing takeaway for us, I think, in going back and examining.

[154] Trump literally reimagined the job of President of the United States.

[155] He didn't go to the office in the morning and, you know, do meetings and, you know, oversee processes across the U .S. government.

[156] He went and watched television and then he tweeted about it and he talked to people about it.

[157] 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.

[158] He spent hours a day while he was president and, of course, afterwards as well, watching television and reacting to that and seeking to create his own.

[159] news cycle.

[160] 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 Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, that little American boy who wants to live inside the television, that is Donald Trump.

[161] And he's become very good at it.

[162] He is skilled at understanding a news cycle.

[163] Remember, he's a niche communicator.

[164] He doesn't care what you think about him.

[165] Or he does in the sense that he needs enemies to thrive off of.

[166] And so to the extent you and those who subscribe to similar points of view are his enemy, sure, he cares what you think.

[167] But essentially, he's a niche communicator.

[168] So he doesn't care that to many democratic suburban women, you know, the sound of his voices, the sound of, you know, nails on a chalkboard, he is communicating with his part of the American electorate, with his red America.

[169] And he correctly understood in a way that so many people here in Washington, Republicans especially got wrong, got catastrophically wrong, the idea that he wasn't going to be exiled and disgraced after January 6th.

[170] He was going to come back.

[171] And here he is, four years later, poised to re -consolidate power and control over his party.

[172] Well, let me ask you that.

[173] I want to go back to his TV and radio listening habits.

[174] But part of me thinks that Donald Trump himself is surprised at his ability to come back from that.

[175] Because it is so unexpected when you think about it, that even Trump, I think, looks in the mirror sometimes says, I cannot believe I get away with this shit.

[176] I cannot believe that I've been able to pull this off.

[177] You know what I'm saying?

[178] When he first said that thing, I could shoot.

[179] somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue.

[180] He was kind of marveling at it.

[181] I think he still probably marvels at his ability to pull this off.

[182] But let's go back to his TV habits.

[183] One of the things that he has, and I've described this as his reptilian instinct, he watches Fox News, he listens to talk radio, he listens to Newsmax, and he figures out what are the hot buttons, what actually gives people the dopamine hit?

[184] And then he feeds it back to them.

[185] There's a feedback loop.

[186] At his rallies, he figures out what are the lines that get the biggest applause.

[187] And then, those lines he repeats.

[188] And he keeps pushing the envelope to do it.

[189] 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.

[190] And he gives them what they want to hear.

[191] And this is one of his dangerous demagogic gifts, isn't it, Susan.

[192] Absolutely.

[193] I think that's a very important insight.

[194] Charlie, he is both a creature of his electorate, you know, the avatar of the MAGA worldview, and also to a certain extent, a prisoner of it.

[195] 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.

[196] He did take the vaccine.

[197] He understood it was the way out of the COVID pandemic.

[198] He mentioned it in 2021 at one of his early rallies and there were booze.

[199] Donald Trump did not mention that vaccine afterwards.

[200] And he was afraid of alienating his base as well as responding to what it is they want to hear from him.

[201] So when he calls people vermin who are his enemies or 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 and 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.

[202] And, you know, for me, that's always been the scariest thing, where others looked at January 6th and saw, oh, my God, he's gone too far this time.

[203] And, you know, again and again and again, the sort of corrupt Republican establishment just peddles this idea and it gets amplified in the political press.

[204] And it's just BS.

[205] You know, that January 6th moment was the shooting in Fifth Avenue moment.

[206] 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.

[207] and having done so, he sort of blew up all the previous rules and he bound them to him even more fully.

[208] And, you know, remember, for me, the signal moment in that whole horrible, you know, 24 -hour period was what happened, you know, I guess at about 3 o 'clock the next morning, which is when they finally finished certifying Joe Biden's electoral victory and two -thirds of the House Republican Conference went along with Trump's false, untrue, and really, pernicious lies about the election and refused to certify it two -thirds of the House Republican conference within hours of their capital being taken over.

[209] And so for me, I actually was under no illusions from then on.

[210] And I feel like it never got the proper attention at the moment.

[211] And also, it didn't happen immediately, though, because, I mean, you had Mitch McConnell come out.

[212] You had Kevin McCarthy come out.

[213] What I think is really extraordinary, we're coming on the third anniversary now of January 6.

[214] 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.

[215] And so this is like Barack Obama talked about the arc of history.

[216] Donald Trump has bent the arc of reality because we saw this in real time.

[217] We saw it on television.

[218] 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.

[219] I mean, how did he pull that off?

[220] Yeah, I mean, that's right out of the, you know, sort of Orwellian dictator handbook, right?

[221] Don't believe your own lying eyes.

[222] I am the only one you can trust.

[223] Donald Trump has said that before.

[224] You know who else has said that, Vladimir Putin?

[225] I am the only one you can trust.

[226] Don't believe your eyes.

[227] These are not traitors.

[228] They're heroes.

[229] They're martyrs.

[230] 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, returned to office after four years, he's going to be passing a national holiday, you know, January 6 will be the day of the martyrs.

[231] I mean, he is making them, you know, into the martyrs, right?

[232] It's not just revisionist history.

[233] It is the complete retconning of what happened.

[234] And you look at these numbers.

[235] People will say they were mostly peaceful.

[236] Look at the videotape that, you know, Republicans no longer believe that Donald Trump, you know, instigated.

[237] it.

[238] When it's, you know, this has been documented.

[239] It's been laid out.

[240] You have the words.

[241] They are ignoring the evidence of their own eyes.

[242] They're ignoring what Mitch McConnell said, what Kevin McCarthy said.

[243] All of the evidence is put out.

[244] And I mean, this is the real danger.

[245] You want to 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.

[246] And I'm sure that he's internalized.

[247] the fact that I can say anything.

[248] 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 2024 is to keep reminding yourself that if you're not believing this, you are not the crazy ones, because it seems so insane.

[249] Yeah.

[250] And, you know, for that reason, though, I have to say, I understand the impulse, right?

[251] And we're in the quote -unquote primary season right now.

[252] 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.

[253] The Republican Party has been, for all intents and purposes, the party of Trump for quite some time, actually predating January 6th.

[254] And, you know, you can look at all the data points along the way.

[255] Remember that it was in the 2020 election that the Republican Party chose not to have any platform at all.

[256] It chose to be whatever Donald Trump said.

[257] And that was really, you know, for the first time that anyone could find in its history.

[258] There was no policy platform.

[259] There was just Donald Trump.

[260] So it's not really a revelation, although it's still shocking.

[261] 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 the man of Mara Lago.

[262] The real question, of course, for 2024 is, is there a scenario by which this conspiracy theory -driven party of enablers of Donald Trump can win the presidency once again.

[263] He did so in a fluke in 2016 by losing the popular vote, but winning in just enough of the right states to be able to win the electoral college.

[264] Can he repeat that feat?

[265] That is the question.

[266] Well, what do you think?

[267] You know, the general election is the whole ballgame here.

[268] There's no scenario by which the Republican Party saves us from this disaster that they have created, right?

[269] And I think that's part of the problem of even talking about the Republican And no, I don't have any good answers.

[270] 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.

[271] I'm going to stick with this question of Trump as a communicator because you and Peter are real students of Donald Trump.

[272] One of the extraordinary things that he does is, and I'm certainly not trying to 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.

[273] the other, you know, his opponents of doing what he did.

[274] I mean, he started off, you know, with taking fake news and turning that around against the media.

[275] He's using words like fascist and things like that.

[276] 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 14th Amendment.

[277] We have Colorado, we have Maine, we will have others.

[278] It's going to go to the Supreme Court.

[279] I confess to having very, very mixed feelings about all of this because I'm very, very sympathetic to the arguments, people like Judge Lutig that the 14th Amendment, which, you know, Barr's insurrectionist from office would apply to Donald Trump.

[280] I'm very, very skeptical about the way this is going to play out, both legally and politically.

[281] But what I wanted to ask you about was that I think one of the great ironies of 2024 is going to be that Donald Trump is going to, because this is his brand.

[282] He's going to recast himself as the champion of democracy.

[283] You have Democrats and progressive of saying democracy's on the ballot, he is a threat to democracy.

[284] 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 it's anti -democratic to kick him off the ballot.

[285] I think that you're going to see him use that kind of rhetoric.

[286] And I wonder how that plays out, particularly because I know that Joe Biden and the Democrats want to make democracy one of the cornerstones of their campaign.

[287] What happens if Donald Trump decides that I'm going to steal that?

[288] I'm going to, I'm going to 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.

[289] And my prediction is he's going to do it.

[290] What do you think?

[291] Absolutely.

[292] Of course.

[293] I don't even think it's a prediction.

[294] I think it's and already used this idea that it's Democrats.

[295] This is what he tells his audience.

[296] 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.

[297] And these tools of projection and appropriation are the tools that Trump favors in his political handbook.

[298] And remember that fake news, which was associated in him more than perhaps and anyone else.

[299] He stole that.

[300] That was an act of larceny from Hillary Clinton and media analysts who used the term fake news in the aftermath of the 2016 election to point out how Trump and some of his enablers had functioned in the course of that 2016 campaign.

[301] Trump then very cannily, I think, seized upon that phrase.

[302] And now it's associated with him.

[303] He turned that on people, which, by the way, step back and think about it.

[304] This is a guy who the Washington Post found made more than 30 ,000 lies, misleading statements, untruths in the course of his presidency.

[305] And he's the one accusing other people of fake news, right?

[306] And so, of course, you're going to see him saying that he's a victim because he's always a victim of whatever.

[307] And this democracy narrative, I think it already plays into what the Republican electorate is predisposed to believe.

[308] 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.

[309] And so that created all these sort of awkward contortions in 2016, actually, when they then had to flip and have the party support Donald Trump, you know, an actual constitution denying autocrat in the making.

[310] So I think that rhetoric is going to be very powerful.

[311] 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.

[312] And this whole year is going to be about that clash between our kind of legal culture with Trump in the courtroom and our political campaign culture.

[313] So let's talk about Joe Biden, who is clearly struggling in the polls.

[314] his popularity is, well, I would say that he's polling below other presidents at this point in their presidency, and he's polling lower than that of the Democratic Party.

[315] 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 2024 with some of the lowest approval ratings we have seen.

[316] Well, that's right.

[317] I mean, look, Charlie, it's not simple.

[318] We tend to contort ourselves.

[319] Joe Biden, I think many Democrats and independents are the reason for these less than stellar poll ratings.

[320] It's not Republicans.

[321] They already weren't supporting Joe Biden.

[322] It's Democrats and Independents whom Biden needs in order to win re -election.

[323] Why is that?

[324] Do they mostly dislike his policies?

[325] No, it's very simple.

[326] They believe he's too old or they're concerned about his ability to carry out a second term, and he will be 86 years old at the end of that second term.

[327] And I think it's a lack of enthusiasm, a concern about his ability to take on Trump or Republicans.

[328] There's a variety of factors that add up, but really, in the end, it's all under the simple umbrella of they're concerned about whether he should be president again for another term.

[329] Well, in your end column, you pointed out that Biden's theory of the case, is, well, seems to be that only he.

[330] 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.

[331] I guess the question is, though, does Donald Trump solve Joe Biden's problems?

[332] And by that, I mean, okay, so you have Democrats and young people, et cetera, who are not that enthusiastic because Biden is old.

[333] But when they are faced with the prospect of Donald Trump, does that re -energize the party?

[334] Does that turn the this around.

[335] I mean, that's obviously what they're thinking in Wilmington.

[336] What do you think?

[337] Yeah.

[338] You've just summed up, I think, what their strategy is, which is make it about Trump, make it a choice.

[339] Once it's a choice on Trump and not a referendum about Biden, Democrats 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.

[340] 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.

[341] And, you know, that's where the incredible risk factor I just keep coming back to of choosing to run again when you're 81 years old and anything can happen at any moment.

[342] There's a hubris in it.

[343] It's understandable.

[344] The office does that to most presidents of whatever party.

[345] Joe Biden has spent essentially a large chunk of his adult lifetime seeking this office only to become a very unlikely president late in life.

[346] 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.

[347] But I think it's an act of hubris.

[348] You said that this campaign is like Biden and Trump are competing in different elections.

[349] This is part of this post -truth world that we live in.

[350] What do you mean by that?

[351] Well, you know, we've talked a little bit today already about the alternate realities for the Republican electorate in which January 6th was a, you know, day of peaceful protest and, you know, martyrs were arrested by the evil deep state in furtherance of the rigged election and the complicated conspiracy theory involving Venezuela, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, often I've 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.

[352] And, you know, Joe Biden, meanwhile, there's a very compelling narrative that his core party supporters hear 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.

[353] And my guess is if you offered 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.

[354] They would be like, are you kidding me?

[355] There are actually people who think that Joe Biden has been this good, responsible, bipartisan -leaning centrist president?

[356] Like, on what planet are you living?

[357] And so it's just taking this unfortunate political reality of two Americas, of Blue America and Red America, and, you know, putting it on, you know, kind of Trumpian steroids.

[358] 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 2015.

[359] and we thought that the first term was shambolic and dangerous.

[360] Talk to me a little bit because you have looked at this very carefully and you have studied it.

[361] How would Trump 2 .0 be different than his first term as president?

[362] Yeah.

[363] Imagine Trump without the constraints.

[364] Imagine Trump enabled, facilitated and surrounded by, not kind of representatives of the national security state seeking to constrain him, but, you know, cheerleaders like Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon and the rest.

[365] I think it's Trump without the constraints.

[366] And radicalized.

[367] Well, he feels far more radicalized than he was back in 2016.

[368] I mean, there was a lot of bad.

[369] I mean, obviously, I have been arguing this.

[370] 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.

[371] Yeah, termination and retribution, I think, are the key words for understanding both Trump's campaign message and his agenda.

[372] 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.

[373] So in our kind of mind game here of Donald Trump in the White House in January 20, 20, 25, 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.

[374] have spoken.

[375] Or he hasn't been convicted and still faces these court proceedings.

[376] And so we're starting office with a built -in, essentially constitutional crisis.

[377] Also, he having survived, not one but two congressional impeachments, he will fear no impeachment.

[378] 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.

[379] But with conviction, for all intents and purposes, impossible, that's not a constraint Trump would face.

[380] So you have no fear of Congress, no fear of the courts, and a new savviness and kind of cadre of experienced MAGA revolutionaries coming into office with him, which is a big difference from how he came into office after 2016.

[381] Would he pardon himself?

[382] And what happens if he does?

[383] 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.

[384] We have a constitutional crisis right from day one?

[385] Yeah, right from day one.

[386] Absolutely.

[387] Absolutely.

[388] And how can a president govern this whole country in such a circumstance?

[389] 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, which is a real sharp break and departure from our previous presidencies and traditions.

[390] In other words, previous presidents were partisan or, you know, actually represented, you know, the interests of one faction of the country.

[391] but they at least aspired to rhetorically govern for the whole country.

[392] And Trump did not do that already.

[393] 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.

[394] It's a recipe for rift and disunion.

[395] So for the last seven or eight years, we've been asking ourselves, well, when does the fever break?

[396] When do we return to normal?

[397] I mean, that was Biden's promise, right?

[398] That we could go back to some sort of pre -Trump status quo.

[399] But even if Biden wins again, even if Trump goes down, what will it take for us to return to normal?

[400] Are we ever going to return to normal?

[401] No, this is our new normal, Charlie.

[402] We're not going back to the status quo anti -Trump.

[403] And if anything, the persistence of that metaphor, I think, has been sort of crippling to the political discourse.

[404] And frankly, cynical Republicans have used that again and again here in Washington.

[405] You know, they sort of encourage the idea that there is going to be a moment of a fever breaking or, you know, the other metaphor I heard a lot was the jailbreak.

[406] You know, when are Republicans, the presumption being, oh, well, they really don't like Trump, but what are they going to do?

[407] You know, you and I have having this conversation on a day when the remaining holdouts on Capitol Hill among Republican leaders are endorsing Donald Trump one by one today.

[408] That's their very first act of the new year.

[409] Tom Emmer, 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?

[410] There's no line.

[411] Absolutely.

[412] What we have learned is we have got to let go of the fantasy of the fever breaking.

[413] We have to, you know, the story of the last year in Republican politics is not the story of challengers emerging to Donald Trump.

[414] It is the story of how he has re -cemented his power over this party.

[415] To be a Republican today is to be in a state of, you know, subservient and enabling of Donald Trump, who is truly a kind of generational figure for that party.

[416] I just want to read something that you said.

[417] The Trump experience is one that cannot simply be undone or attributed to a sort of for -your accident.

[418] It is a different country because it went through that.

[419] The Republican Party was radicalized and all those people who went along.

[420] I watched it happen.

[421] People in Washington who were normal and said they would never go along.

[422] Then they became Trumpified.

[423] And they are now going along with things that would have been unthinkable to those same people in 2015.

[424] I think they're going along with things that would have been unthinkable even in 2021.

[425] So as you point out, you know, there are cycles of history.

[426] 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.

[427] So this is, we're talking to a Greek journalist about all of this.

[428] 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 that I'm not sure we've, we've experienced since, say, 1860 to go back to something that's actually older than me. I did find a date.

[429] Charlie, you know, for our first conversation of the new year, this is already, I feel like it's getting my blood pressure going and I might need to actually just crawl back in the colors and pretend it's still 23.

[430] Of course, you're right.

[431] Yeah, you're right.

[432] The fact that it's not normal.

[433] I mean, I keep thinking about, you know, going back to 1968, how sometimes there are periods, that leave a hangover for generations.

[434] I mean, you could even argue that we are still in the shadow of the 1960s fighting some of that out.

[435] There are people who came into politics in the late 1960s who had a dominant role until very, very recently.

[436] And unfortunately, you have people who are coming into politics thinking that this new abnormal is, in fact, the normal.

[437] And they're going to be in politics for the next 30 or 40 years.

[438] So, again, to your point, there's not going to be the fever -breaking.

[439] there's not going to be the jailbreak, and we're just going to have to deal with that.

[440] And that's kind of the disillusionment of this year.

[441] By disillusionment, I mean, the illusions that perhaps this was temporary, they've all evaporated, haven't they?

[442] Well, we'll see.

[443] Our capacity for illusions, our capacity collectively for amnesia has always been one of the, you know, kind of signature act.

[444] aspects of American politics, and it's going to be fully tested this year.

[445] Susan Glass is a 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.

[446] Susan, it is always great to talk with you.

[447] Thank you so much and happy New Year.

[448] Well, happy New Year to you, Charlie.

[449] It's been great to, you know, sort of get a reality check to start the year off.

[450] Thank you.

[451] 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 the bulwark podcast is produced by tady cooper and engineered and edited by jason brown