April 4, 2023

Hello, and welcome to Amanpour and Company.

Former President Donald Trump indicted.

We take a look at all the issues surrounding this historic moment in history.

Also ahead, a look back at conversations which illustrate how America got here.

Two journalists take us behind the scenes of the Trump White House in their book 'the divider.'

Also, historian Nicole Hemmer tells Walter Isaacson about the partisan reshaping of the Republican Party.

♪

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Sara: Welcome to the program.

I'm Sara Sidner in New York.

History has been made as Donald Trump has been placed under arrest and arraigned in Manhattan.

You can see him here, the Former President inside Manhattan's criminal, where he was processed this afternoon.

The first former U.S. president to face a criminal charge is.

It is worth noting that he is also the current front runner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.

The 34 charges against him are now out in the open, and the indictment has been unsealed.

Mr. Trump is pleading not guilty to all of them.

Joining me on this extraordinary day is Paul Rosenzweig.

He served in the department of homeland security.

Also with us is Renato Mariotti, a former federal prosecutor and legal commentator.

Thank you both for joining us.

I want to start with this, because this is information that has been happening all day long, and we had just gotten some of this.

What we are seeing from these charges, I want you both to weigh in on this 34 counts, all relating to falsifying business records and all seemingly having to do with that $130,000 payment made through Donald Trump's former attorney Michael Cohen, who was his, quote, fixer at the time, to a point po -- to a porn star, Stormy Daniels, before we went forward with the election.

This all seems to have to do with that.

Donald Trump's attorney saying, no big surprises here.

Is it a surprise to you that this is what this is based on?

Paul: For me, I think that one of the surprises I see here is that the underlying crime of the -- obviously you mentioned falsification and business records, but what makes it a felony is that it was done in furtherance of another crime, and that crime here, it appears to be election related.

Campaign-finance related.

There is a possibility we are going to see more of a reliance on potential tax fraud charges and so forth.

It also does contain a reference to federal election violation, which is because it is an open question under New York law whether or not that other crime, for purposes of New York law, can be a federal offense.

There are surprises here, but overall, it is not that surprising.

The number of counts is due to the fact that under New York law, if there are multiple crimes charged under one count, the results could be dismissal, so the prosecutors were careful to charge every separate instance separately.

Sara: Paul, can I ask you about this day?

It is historic.

I don't think it is a day anyone could have imagined happening the way it has happened to a former U.S. president.

This has never happened before.

Paul: That is correct.

One suspects that had Ford not pardoned Nixon, we would have seen an indictment of Nixon, but the carbon made that irrelevant.

We have never had a situation in which a former president of the United States has been charged with a criminal offense, never had a situation with which he has been arrested, fingerprinted, released, eventually subject to jury trial.

This is quite an extraordinary event.

Of course, on the other hand, we have had lots of instances of indictments and trials of vice presidents, Senators, members of the House of Representatives, and governors galore.

Perhaps the strangeness is that it has never happened to a president before.

Sara: Let me ask you now about what this means politically.

Here we are, we know that the Trump team has said they have raised millions of dollars on the backs of this, putting this out there that they were being politically prosecuted.

We have just heard from the attorneys from Donald Trump who have come out and said the same, that they were actually surprised that there were not more and varying charges here, that this was really related to what everyone thought it might be related to, which is some potential campaign-finance violations there.

Can you talk to me about the politics around this, Paul?

Paul: I think the politics are tied to the lack of any surprise.

This has been pretty much baked into everybody's understanding of Mr. Trump since 2017-2018, when the Stormy Daniels story first became public.

There is literally nobody in America who cares about this at all that was surprised with this information.

It will probably solidify his base, but it will not bring back to Trump any independent voters that might not think of returning to the Republican fold.

The bottom line is it is pretty much a wash politically.

Sara: I want to now ask you about the strength of this case.

I want to ask the question to Renato.

You are a former federal prosecutor.

I know you host a podcast.

I know you have not gotten a chance to really dig down and read into this, but the statement of facts is now 13 pages.

Does any of this look to you like a weak or strong case, or can you tell at this point?

Renato: We have to be cautious, because we do not know all the evidence the D.A. has.

That said, there are certainly concerns regarding this case.

As a starting point, as I mentioned earlier, there is definitely a focus on campaign-finance crimes here.

I think jurors are going to have trouble seeing this as a campaign-finance issue.

Obviously, as Paul said, I think a lot of voters understand the president was paying off Paramore's and so forth.

But the question is whether that is an expense related to his campaign.

There is some language in the indictment that explains a little bit about why the D.A.

thinks he has the evidence to prove that.

But I do think it is an open question that creates a risk for the prosecutors.

Another element that creates risk is in a falsification of business records case, there is not a false statement made to a victim.

In a typical fraud case, -indicted back in my day, certainly as a prosecutor on the defense side trying many fraud cases, there you have fraud statements to another person for the purpose of tricking them out of their money.

Falsification of business records under New York law is really about falsifying internal company records.

It is just a case that does not have the same appeal to a jury.

I think the other issue to deal with are there witnesses.

Michael Cohen is a convicted liar and fraudster.

He has also developed his own podcast attacking Donald Trump and so on.

I do think there are issues with the Manhattan D.A. to work on.

This is not one of those obvious slamdunk kind of cases that people might say, like a classified documents case, that would be a stronger case.

But regardless, the former president will have to deal with it.

Sara: I want to stick with you, Paul, to remember back to John Edwards.

There are folks who will look at this from a legal perspective and try to make a comparison.

Is there one?

Paul: There is, and famously the John Edwards case resulted in a failure to Mr. Edwards.

One was actually expecting more out of the Bragg indictment then we have gotten.

At some kind of expression as somebody who lost money on this deal, rather than -- I have heard this described as a case of Trump lying to himself, lying to his him company.

That sort of does capture it in some ways.

It is a challenging case that may be even weaker than the Edwards case.

Sara: The accusation is not just Trump lying to himself, it is lying to the American public, trying to keep information away from the public using sort of what the government is saying falsifying documents or hiding payments.

I think that is the part where there are going after him.

By the way, each and every payment is a separate charge.

Every time a payment was potentially made to his attorney, Michael Cohen, that is a separate charge, which explains to some degree the 34 charges.

Paul: I was going to say that if the business record failure does not tie to the lying to the American public piece of it that closely, that is what makes this a challenging case.

I am surprised that there is nothing else in here.

Nothing like a large against -- or they catch and kill things we have seen in the National Enquirer.

No allegation of tax fraud or a false statement to the New York State ties king authority -- the New York State taxing authority.

As Renato says, we will have to see what the evidence proves out . But this is a pretty bare-bones statement.

Sara: When Otto, can I ask you what you see happening going forward -- Renato, can I ask you what you see happening going forward?

Donald Trump has pled not guilty.

And we know there is another court date that has been set in December.

Renato: Sara, I think one thing I would expect is that Trump's attorneys are to be filing a number of motions.

Those motions are going to be slowing down the case.

They are also going to toll a time for a speedy trial purposes under New York law.

That is going to potentially delay a trial.

I do not expect them to rush to a speedy trial in this case.

I think one of the interesting things I am looking for is the interplay between this case and the other cases we know are out there.

The Fulton County special Grand Jury for person did not exactly play her cards close to the best.

It sure seems like there may be an indictment there.

There are a couple of grand jury investigations that may result in charges.

There is definitely a potential that Trump is going to face legal wars on multiple fronts.

If that happens, his strategy may be to delay all this until after the election.

But unless he becomes president again, he will then be in a situation where he is facing multiple indictments.

It is a challenging situation, I can speak from experience, for lawyers to navigate on behalf of a client.

Sara: Renato, you spoke of the multiple other things the former president is facing, this being the first that has come out of the gate in the legal hemisphere, but there are others.

There is a look at the handling of classified documents, or the mishandling, if you will, of classified documents.

There is a case in the state of Georgia where prosecutors are looking into his attempt to an accusation that he tried to overturn the election result in 2020.

And there a bunch of civil lawsuits, a big civil lawsuit the state of New York has put forward, talking about how he has potentially manipulated his net worth.

I want to ask you, Paul, what kind of impact do these cases happen on -- have on Donald Trump's candidacy for president in 2024 when it comes to the Republican Party, at least?

Paul: In a legal sense, none.

Being indicted does not stop him from being a candidate.

Being jailed would not stop him from being a candidate, much less being elected.

In a practical sense, I tend to think the drip, drip, drip of charges, and I was absolutely right that there are likely more coming, is going to slowly but surely he rode the Republican Party's confidence in him -- the road -- erode the Republican Party's confidence in him.

But the vice the Republican Party is in at the moment, even with the leadership losing that confidence, Trump space is not -- Trump's base is not.

They are seeing this as evidence of a witchhunt, and as for rallying around him, even stronger.

-- and they are rallying around him even stronger.

But we might see more indictments.

I would say the arraignment today was not the worst thing that happened to Trump.

He lost an appeal in the D.C.

circuit, and Mark Meadows is going to testify in front of a grand jury now.

That probably scares him even more.

Sara: This particular case will probably come to fruition on mustering a trial, right during the campaign, potentially after he is already the Republican nominee, if that is what happens.

A lot to look into, gentlemen.

Paul and Renato, thank you for joining the program.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg spoke earlier about the historic arraignment of Donald Trump.

Here is some of what he had to say.

Earlier this afternoon, Donald Trump was arraigned on a New York Supreme Court indictment returned by a Manhattan grand jury on 34 felony counts of also playing business records in the first degree.

Under New York State law, it is a felony to falsify business records with intent to defraud and intent to conceal another crime.

That is exactly what this case is about.

At its core, this case today is one with allegations like so many of our white-collar cases.

Allegations that someone lied again and again to protect their interests and evade the laws to which we are all held accountable.

As this office has done time and time again, we today uphold our solemn response ability to ensure that everyone stands equal -- solemn responsibility to ensure that everyone stands equal before the law.

No power changes that interim principal.

Sara: We also heard from Donald Trump's attorneys, who spoke outside the court shortly after Trump's arraignment.

Take a listen.

To district Attorney has turned what is actually a political issue into a political prosecution, and it is not a good day.

It is not a sad day.

I do not expect this to happen in this country.

You do not expect this to happen to somebody who was the president of the United States.

Today's unsealing of this indictment shows the rule of law died in this country.

Because well everyone is not above the law, no one is below it either.

If this man's name were not Donald J. Trump, there is no scenario in which we would be here today.

Sara: The turbulence of Donald Trump's presidency is still making waves, from legal to political ramifications.

Next, a look at the days when Donald Trump was commander-in-chief.

Walter Isaacson interviewed journalists Susan Glasser and Peter Baker.

Their book goes beyond the scenes of Trump's White House, speaking to many of the key players and personalities in the White House, including Donald Trump himself.

In September, they spoke to Walter Isaacson about what they discovered and what it says about America democracy.

Walter: Peter, Susan, welcome back to the show.

Susan, this book is filled with all sorts of nuggets, but it also has a grand theme to it that is almost Shakespearean.

It is like it is out of Richard III.

It is about enablers and dukes who want to enable the tyrant and lose their moral compass.

Why are there so many people in Trump's orbit who tell you that they disagreed with -- they were horrified by some of these things, but they decided to enable him?

Susan: That is the enduring mystery of the last four years we went through with Trump in the White House.

You are right that it is the major theme of the divider.

Donald Trump, without these people, would have just been an angry old man capping at the television between golf games.

Instead, we have these cycles of drama.

Over time, Trump is perjuring himself not just in the interest of permanent chaos, and he certainly, as Jeb Bush called it, was a chaos president, but he also is looking for these qualities of loyalty and blind obedience.

He rages against the new group.

No one will ever be loyal.

There is an incredible thing you will appreciate as a student of Washington, where one of his most senior advisers told us, Donald Trump likes two people who will work for him, those who will work for him, and those who used to work for him.

Walter: So, Peter, the enabling is partly justified by some of the characters in 'the divider' by keeping them from doing even worse things.

In some ways, that does apply to General Kelly, am I right?

Peter: There was an enduring moral struggle, particularly wrong -- among those who did not subscribe to Trump beliefs and ideology, who felt like they were trying to do good.

They justified it by saying the person who comes after me will be worse, and I am here to protect the country or whatever.

There is something to that.

In some cases, you can see where they did make a difference and did stop some things from happening.

General Kelly is a great example.

If he had been chief of staff at the end instead of the middle with January 6 that happened earlier, it would've happened quite that same way.

I got to think that he's the kind of guy who would've thrown himself in the door of the oval office just to keep guys arguing from [INAUDIBLE] out of there.

But in the end, of course, it's also self-justifying.

It's a way of rationalizing a decision that they also feel uncomfortable with.

And so, they're finally thrown to the side by the mercurial king who's decided they're no longer useful to him.

So, I think that's one of the really Shakespearean aspects, to use your phrase, of this book and of this story.

Walter: Give me some examples, if you would, of somebody acting as an enabler but really doing some good, as you say, that in some cases there was the odious smell of truth of what they were talking about.

Susan: Well, that's right.

As one of the officials in Trump's on White House put it to us, there are no heroes here.

And I do think that's an important stipulation.

But you look no farther then Bill Barr, is probably one of the clearest examples of that.

Because by any stretch he wasn't just serving in the administration like some of the retired military officials, like John Kelly or Jim Mattis, who probably were determined to constrain Trump from the beginning in certain ways.

Bill Barr was not just an enabler, but a facilitator.

And of course, his intervention and shaping of the Mueller Report was very significant.

He went along with many things that critics would say were the outright politicization of the justice process, and doing things that other attorney generals would not do because they were seen as politicizing the Justice Department after Donald Trump's first impeachment.

Bill Barr went along with purges and things like that that really pushed the boundaries.

And yet, even Bill Barr got off the train when it came to the election denialism.

You know, he outright confronted Trump.

He publicly gave an interview and said there is no evidence of widespread fraud that would justify overturning the election or even the Justice Department looking into it.

He's written a critical memoir of him.

Does that make Bill Barr a resistant hero? Absolutely not.

But I think it's a classic example of what you're talking about, that you can also do the right thing in some circumstances even while enabling this.

But I will say this, I will say this because it's important, Donald Trump learned, even those who resisted him, like John Kelly or Jim Mattis, he learned from that behavior.

And arguably it just made him more effective and it empowered him in the end.

Walter: Tell me about the secretary of Homeland Security because she's the one of the people in the book who's a very complex character, as to whether or not she understands she's an enabler and when she decided to get off the train.

BAKER: Yes, I know.

She's a fascinating character.

Kirstjen Nielsen, of course, she is the target of enormous pressure by President Trump to take this action or that action on immigration that she tells him again and again, you can't do it. We don't have the authority it. It's not legal.

It's not constitutional.

And he just completely bullies her and pressures her.

Calls her up first thing in the morning, how come you haven't done this?

How come you have done that?

She told colleagues that if she ever wrote a memoir she would call it, 'Honey, Just Do It.'

And again and again, she was put in a position of telling him what he couldn't do.

And he wasn't one of those who was able to finagle him or manage him in the way some others did when she was telling him no.

You know, Jared Kushner often told the president no on some things.

But he always managed to find a way to do it.

That, you know, flattered his He always gave twice as much good news as bad news in order to soften that up.

That was never Kirstjen Nielsen's ability.

She ended up becoming the face of family separation because she did get bullied into signing a piece of paper that she had resisted for months.

And she ended up being the public defender of it even though she, herself, harbor great reservations about it.

It got to the point where they finally did reverse it.

And she made a suicide pact with Alex Azar, the secretary of Health and Human Services, to say, if he ever tried to resume that, which he was trying to do, that they would join -- jointly resign in protest.

But she didn't end up resigning in protest.

Ultimately, she was fired because she wasn't enabling Trump enough as far as he was concerned.

Walter: I was really, sort of, struck by Trump's ability to know what buttons to push on people.

More so than a lot of other politicians.

You know, he could understand how the tell snap somebody and get them into lying.

Lindsey Graham is a good example.

So, what was that -- call it a talent, almost, that he had?

Susan: Well, you know, when you talk about Lindsey Graham and some of the others who went from, you know, harsh critics of Donald Trump to shameless sycophants, Walter, I have to say, you know, I'm not enough of an expert on the male psyche to understand what on Earth some of these folks were thinking.

Especially because the abjectness of their, you know, devotion to this fickle master who, you know, is pretty clear at this point, right?

Donald Trump will abandon anyone and anything if it suits him and if it's necessary to him.

He's a very transactional creature.

And the love that Lindsey Graham professes is pretty one-sided.

Peter and I, would count this moment that we happen to run into Lindsey Graham on the street in Washington right at the very beginning of the mass that became the first impeachment on Ukraine.

And, you know, Lindsey Graham was just bragging to us.

And he was saying that he was a, you know, lying mother bleep, you know, on the street.

And yet also, he's so much fun to hang out with.

And he seemed dazzled as if he was, you know, a kid in the cafeteria and the big football player, you know, decided to have lunch with him, or something.

Walter: Donald Trump gave you two interviews.

He gives interviews to people doing his books, even though he knows that these books are not going to be particularly favorable.

Why does he do that?

And he'd seem to contradict himself between different interviews.

I mean, what's it like being down there in Mar-a-Lago when he's being interviewed?

Susan: You know, Walter, that is is the question.

I have to say, when Peter said, well, we're going to have an interview with Trump, I said, really?

Are you sure? Is that going to happen?

He wanted to do this.

Donald Trump, of course, is a believer in the old New York tabloid school of publicity, which is to say, no publicity is bad publicity as long as they spell your name right. He also -- Walter: He was, in fact, told somebody in the presence of his aides that as long as they don't call you a pedophile, it's good Susan: Yes, not the normal definition of good publicity.

He's obviously supremely cocky and self-confident when it comes to his own abilities to talk and to convince.

And you know, mostly, an interview with Donald Trump is a misnomer.

It's not an interview like this.

It's Donald Trump rambling on.

There is, in fact, you know, in person, what's striking is how much it's almost like he's at one of his rallies.

There's never a noun, a verb, and a period, right?

There's no clear-cut sentence.

No matter what you want to talk about, he must have brought the conversation every single time back to the 'rigged election.'

You know, we were in for the second interview, his now famous private office in Mar-a-Lago where the FBI search took place and they uncovered the classified documents he had brought with him from the White House.

Well, when we were in there, you know, the amazing thing is as soon as we sat down, the very first thing he told us was a lie about something he told us in the first interview.

Now, that goes to the question of Donald Trump like, was the first story untrue?

Was the second one untrue?

Who knows, right?

And that's sort of the point.

He has no shame.

No constraints.

In some ways, that brazenness remains his superpower because he's often not called to account for it.

Walter: You know, you talked about how you got all this reporting after he left the White House. And that raises sort of a journalistic issue, you know.

Is there a problem with journalists, sort of, waiting until the events are over and then telling us what we needed to know?

Peter: Well, you know, Walter, you know as well as anybody, I think, how hard it is to do reporting in real time.

And we did -- I would say, Susan and I incurred all four years of his presidency, did everything we could, as did our colleagues at the 'New Yorker' and 'The New York Times,' to uncover and dig up as many stories about what was going on in real time as we could.

And I think we put out an awful lot of things in public during those four years for the public to understand and know.

And then, of course, what we discovered is, and we've always learned in every presidency, is there's more to be learned.

And there always is and always will be, by the way.

And some things are hard to get in real time that people begin to talk about after a president leaves office.

That's true of ordinary presidents like Obama or Bush or Reagan or Clinton, but it's especially true of this particular president.

And so, I think it was important for us to go back and try to learn what we tried to learn at the time but couldn't after he left office, because it's too important to leave it there undiscovered.

Walter: Yes, I have to say, I'm kind of mystified by this.

It's a canard, really, that you see on the left, Walter, among critics of Donald Trump.

You know, are they -- do they want history to have stopped?

it's a weird critique in the sense that, first of all, you would hope the idea that journalist withheld stuff before the 2020 election.

Well, Donald Trump lost the 2020 election by millions of votes after, you know, enormous amount of important, critical, real-time reporting.

In many ways, actually, because the Trump White House was so riven by infighting and suspicion and backstabbing, you had a lot of real time reporting that came out of that White House that we don't get.

For example, out of the Biden White House or the Obama White House before that.

And it often takes longer in many more conventional or normal presidencies.

But more importantly, that's actually the reason Peter and I wanted to do this book. Because we understood that we're going to want to understand from historical record as much as possible.

This is a crisis for American democracy and for the institution of the presidency.

It is a, you know, a five-alarm fire.

And you want to understand a lot.

And frankly, just the 300 original interviews that we did along with other things convinced us there was a lot more still to learn.

People are still writing books about the Nixon presidency today and turning up stuff.

I imagine that they'll be still turning up stuff about the Donald Trump presidency for decades to come.

Walter: You called this a five-alarm fire for American democracy.

Why is it that his supporters stay so loyal to him when so much has come out?

Yes, that's the enduring question, right?

And I think it's one that's really essential to our democracy, essential to understanding our society at this particular moment in this history because it is -- it's a very curious thing.

All the facts, of course, are on one side, and yet some, you know, 70% of Republicans will agree with him that the election was somehow stolen.

And, you know, it goes beyond facts at this point.

I guess this goes to sort of gut belief.

If the other side says it's true, it must not be true.

And it's sort of a mirror of our society right now that so many people are willing to go along with this guy who's telling them things they ought to know any way is not true. They're certainly told is not true, but are not willing to accept it.

They don't trust institutions.

They don't trust the media.

They don't trust even their own Republican Party.

you know, the vast majority of which knows that Donald Trump lost that election.

You know, he's managed successfully to reshape even the ballad this year so that multiple states have people running for statewide office who are subscribing this notion the election was stolen, even though of course, it wasn't.

And I think that that's a real mark of peril in a society where truth actually matter and it should matter.

Walter: This gets into the larger question of enabling which is, it was not just a few wanna-be dukes and the Richard III court that are enabling him.

It's now an entire segment of the population.

You know, we've met the enemy and it's us.

There are so many people willing to enable him now, as you said, 70% of the Republican Party, people all over.

What is this instinct that causes us to want to enable a strongman?

Susan: Well, I think you're right to put it in that big framing, Walter.

Because it seems to me that what Trump did and in some ways our book is a study of a leader walking down a checklist of the texts for democracy.

What would a would be, a wanna-be strongman and authoritarian leader do?

He -- you know, Peter and I lived in Russia during the first four years of Vladimir Putin's tenure in office.

You know, what did he do?

He went after NTV, the first and only ever independent national television network, first thing.

Challenged what, you know, Donald Trump and the United States refers to as the enemies of the people.

Why do you do that?

So, that there's no independent power center, no independent voice.

Putin, of course, had a different history, a different country, different tools at his disposal, but the checklist is the same in so many countries.

In Turkey, under Erdogan.

In Hungary, today, under Viktor Orban.

Donald Trump has the classic instincts of a would-be authoritarian.

And he's been empowered and enabled by, I should say, a minority of our country, but a large and significant enough minority.

We're talking, perhaps, about a little bit more than a third of the country that has gone along with the full Trump.

Not just the, you know, partial Trump, but the full Trump.

And that's a lot.

That's millions and millions of people.

Walter: Susan Glasser, Peter Baker, thank you so much for joining us.

Sara: Former President Donald Trump is still campaigning to be president and is the current favorite for the 2024 Republican nomination.

So, how did the party get here?

We want to take a look at another conversation Walter did with historian Nicole Hemmer in September.

Her book 'partisans,' looks at how politicians were remade in the 1990's.

She speaks about having paved the way for Donald Trump presidency.

Walter: Welcome to the show.

Nicole: Thank you for having me back.

Walter: I covered the Ronald Reagan campaign back in the 1980s, when I was young, and we thought this was the beginning of a new era of conservatism.

Reading your great book, I realize that in some ways, it was the end of a certain era of conservatism.

Why do you make that argument?

Nicole: So, Ronald Reagan's victory really was a sea change in American politics in many ways, but he was very much a cold war president.

He was someone whose rhetoric and policies had been shaped by this existential struggle with the Soviet Union.

And when the Cold War ended, it created this space for a new kind of conservatism to emerge, and it's that conservatism that, over the course of the next quarter century, would become dominant in Republican Party.

Walter: Yes, we see with Trump a conservatism of resentment in many ways, whereas with Reagan, I remember him as sunny, as optimistic, and even, oddly enough, as pragmatic.

And tell me about what Reagan really stood for.

Was that a facade, that sort of happy, cheerful optimism, or was he really somebody who had a different brand of conservatism than we see today?

Nicole: It really was a different brand.

He was someone who thought that America had real promise, and the way that you sold the American promise was through that happy warrior persona.

It's not to say that he was popular everywhere.

His popularity was largely among white voters, not black or Latino voters.

And it's not to say that he never played into the politics of resentment.

But overall, his campaign, his presidency, was about a kind of big tent Republicanism and mourning in America.

And it's that that the Republican Party moves away from really quickly after the 1980s.

You get a harsher, more resentment-driven politics with somebody like Pat Buchanan, which looks very different from Ronald Reagan's.

Walter: Reagan governed somewhat as a pragmatist, which I think surprised people.

I remember when he put, for example, Jim Baker to be secretary of the treasury.

Did that cause some problems on the right for him?

Nicole: Oh, it caused huge problems.

So, there were many conservatives who celebrated the election of Ronald Reagan as, now we finally get our chance to put our policies in place.

And when Reagan would do things like -- you know, he passes one of the biggest tax cuts in American history, but then he follows it with two of the biggest tax hikes in American history.

And he would appoint people like Sandra Day O'Connor to the Supreme Court, someone conservatives had real questions about.

And so, there was a group of conservatives known as the new right, who spent the entire Reagan presidency just pummeling Reagan for those compromises, for that pragmatism.

And it's something we kind of don't remember about Ronald Reagan, but that was a core part of how he kept his popularity so high.

Whenever he started to do something unpopular, too hardline, he would back away when the public turned against it.

Walter: When you talk about those sorts of partisans who took them on, whether they'd be religious ones like Pat Robertson or political fundraisers like Richard Vickery, they took him on because he didn't really push social issues.

Why did the Republican Party at that point decide that social wedge issues, which Reagan never really hammered home, were an important part for the party?

Nicole: So, people like Richard Vickery and then Robertson and Pat Buchanan really believed that those wedge issues were where all of the excitement and the activism was for the base.

That you could expand the base, that you could attract white Democrats to the Republican Party by leaning into issues of culture, of race, of religion, and of resentment against the rising power of women and people of color.

And, you know, they were starting to make that argument in the 1970s, but because Reagan wasn't quite playing along as much as they would like, it really took that next push for Reagan to get out of office and to have the space, to begin to push that politics of resentment.

But they really believed that that's how you would win elections, by polarizing them and by really leaning into that sense of loss and resentment.

Walter: But I do remember there were a lot of dog whistles that Ronald Reagan did during his presidency, things that sort of verged on stoking up racial resentment, talking about welfare queens, that sort of thing.

Was that to play to the hard right, or was that something that was in his nature?

Nicole: It was definitely something to play to the hard right.

It was, you know, something that he did in his campaign.

He went down to Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers had been killed in the 1960's, and gave a speech on states' rights.

There were all of these ways that he was trying to appeal to say the people who voted for George Wallace in 1968 and 1972, the segregationist governor of Alabama.

But it is important that Reagan felt he had to use a dog whistle rather than a bull horn to attract those voters.

And that's what you see in the 1990's.

You see politicians put down the dog whistle, pick up the bull horn, and make much more explicit racist appeals.

So, some of the attempts to attract voters through racism, that was the same.

It was just done in a very different way.

Walter: One of the values of your book is that it shows how things changed and brought us to the era of Trumpism, moving from Reaganism to Trumpism. And you say Reagan didn't exactly pave the way for Trump, it was partly a reaction of Reagan that paves the way for Trump.

Explain that shift from Reaganism to Trumpism.

Nicole: So, it's a big shift that's triggered by a lot of different factors.

The end of the Cold War really is important because the Cold War required you to celebrate democracy, right?

Because that was the difference between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Almost as soon as the Cold War ends, you have partisans like Pat Buchanan who are saying, is democracy really all that important?

And raising questions about the very form of government that had been celebrated for so many years.

You also have a very different media environment.

In Reagan had been an actor, but he had some real political experience by the time he became president.

You see a new generation of presidential candidates who have no political experience, but who have a platform and a base in media, and that's really different too.

So, I think that the pessimistic politics, the anti, small-D democracy politics, and that fairly strongly media driven, emotion driven, resentment driven politics is a major difference between the years of Reaganism and the years of Trumpism.

Nicole: Something you just said really struck me, which is to turn away from democracy.

And I guess I didn't really catch it when I was covering politics in the 1990's, but that's what it's culminating now, is this sense that democracy is not some grand value in and of itself, as Ronald Reagan believed, and that you can be anti-democracy.

Nicole: That's right.

And it feels strange to say that, because I think that -- especially for Americans, you grow up believing that is the thing that everyone believes in.

We might have a lot of different political disagreements, but certainly, we agree on democracy as a form of government.

And what you begin to see over the course of the 1990's is a real questioning of that, and a questioning of not just whether democracy is the best form of government, but whether everyone in the U.S. essentially is fit for democracy.

We had actually gone through this period in the 1960's where the United States really opened up, in terms of voting rights, in terms of immigration.

And by the 1990s, you have books like 'The Bell Curve' that argued for genetic differences and intelligence based on race, books like 'Alien Nation' that say that only white people should be allowed to immigrate to the United States because only they are fit for democracy.

So, even when you have the people who are more or less pro-democracy, they are pro-democracy for a much smaller group of people, and that's an important shift in both rhetoric and policy going into the 1990's.

Walter: So, how important was the race card in driving that?

Nicole: Oh, it was hugely important.

One of the things that Pat Buchanan says as he's looking at the political landscape in the 1990's is that where Reaganism went wrong was that it didn't push hard enough into issues of culture and race, and he puts those issues right at the heart of his politics.

He helps lead a new nativist movement in the United States, that anti-immigrant politics of the 1990's, which is very much based on the idea that the wrong kind of immigrants are coming to the United States.

Immigrants are coming from Africa, they're coming from Latin America, and those aren't the right kinds of people to come to the U.S.

And, you know, it's an area of high white resentment.

You hear about the angry white male as one of the political types of the 1990's.

These groups that are in militias.

And racial politics are absolutely underpinning those movements in the '90s.

Nicole: When you talk about Pat Buchanan, of course, he is a -- Walter: When you talk about Pat Buchanan, of course, he is a media-based politician.

He grew up on the type of screens you and I are on right now.

As a TV commentator.

To what extent did a new form of media, well before social media, well before Twitter and Facebook, but sort of an interactive media and its own right, which was cable TV and talk radio and people phoning in, to what extent was that driving force?

Nicole: It was enormously important changing the politics of the 1990's.

And I love that you used the word 'interactive,' because that was what was new about so much of this media, that you could call into the media you were listening to, that you could call into Larry King live and talk to somebody like Rosborough, who announces his presidential run in 1992 on Larry King's show.

And that you could feel like you are part of this new media.

And this new media was also, in part, because it was more segmented.

It was really focused on blending entertainment and politics.

And it was training both a generation of pundits and a generation of politicians to think of themselves not just as people delivering the news or delivering a form of politics, but as entertainers meant to outrage and to keep viewers and listeners engaged through anger and through emotion.

Walter: Well, the primary one of those was Rush Limbaugh, who was a great entertainer but stoked up resentment, stoked up anger, stoked up that sort of populism and faux populism, almost malicious.

And one of the really interesting scenes in your book is sort of the awkward relationship between him and George W. Bush -- George H W Bush, the elder Bush, who is such the opposite of the type of trend you are talking about.

Nicole: They're such different people.

It becomes really interesting when you see the two of them together.

Rush Limbaugh, by 1992, when George H. W. Bush was struggling with his reelection campaign, was a juggernaut.

He was a powerhouse.

No one had ever seen a media figure like him.

And Bush was very concerned that if he didn't win over Rush Limbaugh, he was not going to win reelection.

And so, he courts Rush Limbaugh, through Limbaugh's -- Limbaugh had a television show at the time, and Roger Ailes was the producer of it, who would go on to found Fox News. And Ailes and Limbaugh, they go to the White House, George H. W. Bush carries Rush Limbaugh's bag, he sleeps overnight in the Lincoln bedroom, and he tells that story again and again because it is when he's sort of dubbed the leader of the conservative movement.

And when you begin to see politicians, even presidents, turn to conservative media for help with their campaigns.

Walter: Let me drill down a little bit more on the basic theme of this book, which is, to my question, why?

Why did the Republican Party and the conservative movement scatter away from Ronald Reagan towards a new form of grievance and resentment?

Was that because there was real grievances to be had?

Nicole: There were real changes that were happening in the world in the 1990's.

I mean, the end of the Cold War certainly changed what geopolitics looked like.

But on the ground, that meant things like a deep recession in the early 1990's.

It meant people who were working in manufacturing jobs we're finding those jobs disappear as the U.S. moved to a service economy.

And so, there were these real changes alongside with changing demographics.

The U.S. was becoming a much less white country.

There were women who are suddenly in the workforce and in high powered jobs.

And all of that change and all of that uncertainty really did open up a space that if you wanted to, instead of offering sort of the happy warrior conservatism of an earlier era, you could say, you know what, things are bad and it's somebody else's fault, and we are going to find those people and we are going to hold them accountable.

And we are going to make them pay a price for you losing power in this country.

And that form of politics, especially when mixed with those new media, had real power in the U.S.

Walter: Let me push back a little bit though on these grievances, which you kind of describe as sort of growing from sort of bad resentments and other things, which is partly true.

But there was a consensus, even in the era of Reagan, whether it be people like Ronald Reagan or George H. W. Bush, or for that matter, Bill Clinton, that free trade was great, that immigration was good, that the free market and open ideas and even globalization was a good thing, that sort of trade.

Well, that left a lot of people behind, and those people, including myself, who believe that, we turned out to be wrong in some ways and how that hollowed out a middle class in America.

So, those seem like legitimate grievances against an establishment that leads you away from Reagan towards Trumpism.

Is that fair?

Nicole: I think it's absolutely fair that there were real grievances.

And sometimes when the two parties have consensus, there are a lot of people whose voices aren't being heard.

The question is, what do you do with that sense of resentment and loss, the very real pain of loss?

Do you try to pass programs to ease the economic hardship caused by certain trade deals, or do you point to immigrants from Mexico and say, oh, they are actually the problem?

It's them and the fact that they are not white and they are not American, they are to blame.

And so, it's a question less of where people really hurt and a question more of, how did you address that hurt?

How did you approach that hurt, and what type of politics did used to try to remedy it?

Walter: So, Donald Trump's ascension, according to your book, and which you just said, wasn't really a sudden transformation.

It was something a long time in the making, but it wasn't something that stems from Reaganism, it was something that stemmed from the 1990's.

How did it end up leading to Trump?

Nicole: So, all the conditions where there by the time Donald Trump ran for president in 2015.

So, you can think about things like birtherism and the kind of racist conspiracies that have their roots in the 1990s. The fact that he was a television star who had no political experience running for president, the fact that he was eligible as somebody who could be a presidential contender was made possible by people like Pat Robertson and Pat Buchanan who had run for office without ever having held office before.

And I think that the politics of nativism, which were so central to Trump's campaign, the calling for the border wall, that was something Republicans were used to since the 1992 campaign when Pat Buchanan first called for the Buchanan Fence, this wall on the border, and really leaned in to the racist politics of nativism when it came to immigration.

So, all of those things we associate with Donald Trump and his campaign in 2016 really do have echoes with this earlier era.

Walter: So, what does all this mean for the future of both the Republican Party and for the ability of American democracy to work and, in some ways, have some civility to it?

Nicole: So, I think it's important to understand this, because Trump is not an exception, which is to say that the problem isn't just Donald Trump, it is this much bigger change that has been happening on the right for a quarter of the century.

And if you don't address some of the root causes of that change, the media incentives, the way that populism and resentment really work in politics, if you don't begin to address some of those larger structural issues, you are not going to solve the dangers to democracy in the U.S.

simply by ensuring that Donald Trump never becomes president again.

There's something much deeper that has to be addressed and an affirmative case for democracy that has to be made.

The assumption that democracy is the best form of government is not really a shared belief in the United States anymore.

And so, you have to go back to those root arguments and start there as we talk about politics.

Walter: Nicole Hemmer, thank you so much for joining us.

Nicole: Thank you so much for having me.

Sara: While eyes around the world focused on the former U.S.

president in a Manhattan court room, a major setback for Vladimir Putin was taking place across the Atlantic Erie at Finland's flag was raised in a native ceremony outside their headquarters in Brussels, making them the newest member of the alliance, a historic shift with enormous implications.

It is my great pleasure to designate Finland this instrument of access to the North Atlantic Treaty.

Thank you very much.

With receipt of this, we can now declare that Finland is the 31st member of the North Atlantic trade organization.

[APPLAUSE] Sara: This is incredibly significant because Finland shares the longest European border with Russia and fought against the Soviet Union during World War II.

Putin has repeatedly complained of NATO's extension before his troops invaded Ukraine.

Today, that has just doubled.

That is it for our program tonight.

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