Columnist: The Link Between Trump’s Indictments and the KKK

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, HOST: Now, with the 2024 U.S. presidential race well underway, democracy continues to be tested. Trump’s latest indictment gets to the heart of the matter. What will be the consequences for a sitting president who spread lies about an election and attempted to overturn the results? Jamelle Bouie is a columnist for the “New York Times”, and he’s joining Walter Isaacson to assess the current state of U.S. politics.

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WALTER ISAACSON, HOST: Thank, you Christiane. And, Jamelle Bouie, welcome to the show.

JAMELLE BOUIE, OPINION COLUMNIST, THE NEW YORK TIMES: Thank you for having me.

ISAACSON: You’ve been writing some really tough columns in your “New York Times” column about Trump and the indictment. And yet, with all of these indictments, still more than 50 percent of Republicans say they’re going to support him, and you say he’s likely to become the nominee. How did we get here?

BOUIE: I think the answer to that lies just with the immediate aftermath of the January 6th attack on the capitol. As soon as most Republicans in Congress has said they were going to rally around the president, and really as soon as it was clear that Republicans in the Senate did not necessarily have the stomach to vote to convict him in the impeachment trial, then you’ve essentially set up the conditions for him to rocket back to the top of the Republican Party as the de facto leader. There is no serious effort in the wake of January 6th to really remove Trump from that position. And so, in the absence of that effort, in the absence of really any serious alternative to Trump for a political leadership in the party, you’ve kind of just have Trump.

ISAACSON: Yes. But there’s got to be a deeper reason. I mean, the Republicans wouldn’t be doing this if they didn’t feel somehow another that Trump has got a stranglehold on their party. Why does he have that? What’s the deeper reasons here?

BOUIE: I actually don’t think that the deeper reasons are all that complicated. I mean, there are certainly deeper reasons for the emergence of Trump, but in terms of his hold on the Republican Party, it’s basically two things. The first is that Trump won. He won at the 2016 election. Now, he did not win a popular vote victory but he did win the presidency and was a thorn in the side of liberals at Democrats and many other Americans for those four years. And both the winning and the extent to which in, I guess, the common parlance, the extent to which Trump “owned the libs,” really endeared him to a lot of Republicans. And the Republican Party, as we both witnessed over the course of that presidency, essentially reshaped itself around Trump. And the — sort of interesting thing is that Trump has both been electoral poison for the Republican Party, beginning in 2018, it’s basically been losing consecutive national elections, but I think for many Republicans, they don’t really see the alternative, especially given that Trump, even while losing, has generated massive turnout amongst low propensity Republican voters, right? In 2020, huge Republican turnout that no prior Republican nominee has been able to generate. And so, I think, in terms of Republicans who are looking at this in terms of just how do we win pure electoral strategy, they see Trump as their best bet. And when you add that to, again, the way the party culturally reshaped itself around Trump during his presidency, we kind of just have the ingredients for the domination we’re seeing right now amongst Republicans.

ISAACSON: Yes. And you say that there’s no alternatives. Of course, a couple people like Chris Christie or Isa Hutchinson, who are trying to take Trump on directly, some a little bit so, like Vice President Mike Pence, former vice president, but nobody’s been able to get any traction, including those who are trying to support Trump in a small way, like Ron DeSantis. What’s the cause of that?

BOUIE: Again, I really think that so much of not just this current situation with Trump likely winning the Republican primary but also, even going back to 2016 is a collective action problem among Republican office and Republican elites. And basically, the same thing is happening now. You had a collective action problem with Republicans after January 6th. They have this clearly transgressive president who did something unprecedented in American history, and we have an opportunity to basically knock him out of politics for the duration if we vote to convict in this impeachment trial. But Republican officeholders could not figure out a way to come together and make that result happen. They essentially deferred it. Maybe Democrats will be able to figure it out. Maybe someone else will be able to figure out. The core issue for Republicans is that at no point have they ever really tried to jettison Trump from their orbit. And because of his solid — rock solid core of support amongst Republicans, this essentially gives him a platform by which to make a bid for controlling the party, which is what he’s doing.

ISAACSON: Well, let’s talk about this latest indictment, the third indictment, the one that Special Prosecutor Jack Smith has brought. You talked about reading very carefully that indictment and there were parts of it that leapt out, you say in your column, including an exchange involving Patrick Philbin. Explain — he was the deputy White House counsel, explain why that leaked out to you.

BOUIE: That exchange leapt out to me because I thought it was just profoundly disturbing. It was about the likely consequences of what might happen if the White House were able to successfully overturn the election. And former deputy White House counsel essentially said, listen, if we do this, there’s going to be riots in every city in America. And the official with whom he is speaking, co-conspirator for, says, well, that’s why we have the Insurrection Act. And a casual reader might not recognize what’s happening here, but the previous year, the administration, or at least Trump, had wanted to use the Insurrection Act to basically use military force to put down protests related to the killing of George Floyd. And so, in that exchange, you get the sense that what was being seriously contemplated in the White House in the days before January 6th was both overturning the election, A, and then, once Americans understandably began protesting it, sending in the military to use force, potentially lethal force, to put down the protests. And then, to me, and I think what I wrote, is that it demonstrates just the profound contempt for American democracy, for America’s democratic institutions, for just the very idea of popular self-government.

ISAACSON: You’ve often written about reconstruction. You talk about the Insurrection Act and even the law under which Trump has been charged. It dates back to reconstruction. Explain that and tell me what you think the echoes of reconstruction or maybe even the perverse echoes of reconstruction are today.

BOUIE: So, the statute that Trump is being charged under comes from the — I believe, the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1870, the first of the Ku Klux Klan Acts. There are multiple of them passed in 1870, in 1871 by the Republicans Reconstruction Congress to provide the federal government the tools necessary to convict — or prosecute and convict people accused of attacking free and free blacks who are trying to exercise their right to vote. And basically, the statute says, right, that it is a crime to interfere with the exercising of someone’s constitutionally guaranteed rights. So, I think the echoes are kind of clear. Like the interfering with the exercising of someone’s constitutional rights in the late 1860s and early 1870s was not just attacking voters and preventing them from voting, from casting a ballot, but really attacking elected governments. The reconstruction government throughout the south faced like violent attacks from former confederates, from, you know, members of these vigilante groups like the Ku Klux Klan or the Knights of the White Lotus, there were a bunch of them. And to me, this is like a clear lineage. Like the Ku Klux Klan Act was passed essentially to defend democracy in the south. And it’s being used — at least part of it is being used today to defend one of the institutions of American democracy in the (INAUDIBLE).

ISAACSON: You’ve talked about the latest indictments, there have been three of them, there may be a fourth one from Georgia, and yet, the federal government in particular didn’t do much, didn’t really push a case that hard until in the past few months. We’ve had this spade of indictments. In some ways there’s a lot of pushbacks, especially from Republicans, that this is weaponizing the Department of Justice, that this should be decided at the polls and that this is going to open up a can of worms if we start indicting former presidents. What do you say to that?

BOUIE: I mean, I think it will open up a can of worms if it becomes the norm for outgoing presidents to attempt to seize power against the will of the voters, then, in which case, it will open up a can of worms, a bad one. But I think the bad-ness of it will have much more to do with the attempted coups, then prosecution after the fact. But to be perfectly serious, I think this is a ridiculous complaint. The former president of the United States, rather than accept the tradition of the United States, going back to the election of 1800, right, going back to our first real, highly contested and partisan election, which is for the loser to peacefully hand over power, the former president, Donald Trump, rejected that. Attempted to subvert it. And did so by inciting supporters to attack the capitol and by organizing with close aides and other supporters to try to subvert the process of counting votes and counting electors itself. That, to me, is more than worthy of prosecution, both for its own sake and it’s wrong, and for its deterrent value, to tell future officeholders who may be in the position of losing a presidential election that you cannot do this, that this is actually completely inimical to what we think American democracy is. I think if many Republicans weren’t so committed to defending Trump against all charges, they would recognize that this is simply not a precedent you want to establish. The ballot box is not actually the place to handle this. We handled Trump at the ballot box, he lost. And the fact that he rejected that loss and tried to unlawfully overturn it is what we are now responding to.

ISAACSON: The effects of these indictments, however, have been to rally, it seems, Republicans to the side of Trump. It’s partly because he’s gone up in the polls after these indictments, after it seems that the Biden administration is going after him. Do you think that this backlash is a consequence?

BOUIE: I don’t know how we could have avoided this rallying around Trump as long as, again, Republican officeholders and Republican elites and the Republican establishment is willing to support and back Trump. That, to me — I guess I’m repeating myself a little bit, but that, to me, is the critical variable here. If high level Republican officials had responded to the indictment by saying, this is the right thing to do, I don’t think we would’ve seen the same rally around effect. The reason I say this is that after the 2022 midterm elections, there’s about a week — about a week or two-week period where after this surprising loss in the Senate and this near lost in the house, Republicans were openly talking about how Trump was a political loser, how they needed to find someone else, the (INAUDIBLE) for the party, how they needed to move past Trump. And what did we see in terms of his standing with Republican voters? It began to decline. It began to decline because voters took the signal. And so, the only way we could’ve avoided, in my view with this backlash, is for Republican officeholders to take a stand against Trump. And the ideal, the optimal point to have done that, was right after January 6th. That was — it was a slim period of time, but that was the critical moment for Republican officeholders to just, you know, dust their hands of Trump once and for all and move on. And once they decided not to do that, I think they more or less set in motion this current chain of events.

ISAACSON: You say that it’s difficult for Americans to really believe that democracy as we know it could be in trouble. Why are Americans having trouble understanding that this is a threat to democracy?

BOUIE: I think it’s partially a product of our good fortune, you might say. I mentioned earlier that the United States has had peaceful transfers of power since 1800, we have the oldest continuously and operating constitution among democracies. We are the oldest democracy, if you want to use that term broadly. At least the oldest country where governments are determined by some degree of popular sovereignty. And so, I think we’ve just gotten used to this idea that this is where it’s always going to be, but it’s not. And I will say that I think there are some Americans, and not just, you know, immigrants, recent or otherwise, from countries that have been authoritarian states or have been autocracies, but we have — they’re putting Americans whose heritage are in this country that have a very real recognition of the fact that democracy is not guaranteed. You know, black Americans in this country, to go back to a reconstruction discussion, experienced democracy for a short period of time in the 19th century and then lost it for nearly a century, and are continuously working and fighting to ensure that their ability to participate in American democracy isn’t restricted or revoked. We have this homegrown experience with autocratic government, with authoritarian government, with attacks on democracy that I think should inform our sense of actually how durable the American democratic experiment is. It’s not as durable as we’d like to think and require real vigilance to protect it.

ISAACSON: This whole set of indictments about Trump seems to play into something larger, which is a real deep division, underlying divisions in our society based on resentment. How do you think the outcome of this situation, whether or not he gets convicted or acquitted or pardoned, how do you think that’s going to play into the divisions and what can we do to heal some of those divisions?

BOUIE: You know, that is a question I’m not sure I really have a great answer for. My view of the current situation is that it’s going to be a lot of just having to push through it as much as possible. We know, at the very least, that a majority of Americans reject the idea of the president can try to overturn the election, they rejected Trump twice, in fact, just one of times accounted (ph). And if next year — if next year’s presidential election it is Trump v. Biden again and Biden wins again with the majority of the vote, then the American public will have rejected him again. And I think that will likely lead to increased division. There will likely be plenty of people who feel that this was an unjust result, that it shouldn’t have happened, that for whatever reason Trump is entitled to power. And I think the response to that is just going to have to be, again, to push through it. I’m not sure that there is something we could do at this moment to sort of bring in those Americans, groups of voters who have become completely devoted to Trump’s political power and political authority. So, I feel this is a very unsatisfying answer, but it’s the best one I have. Sometimes you are simply in political situation where there aren’t a ton of good options and you just have to do your best to work with the materials you have.

ISAACSON: Jamelle Bouie, thank you so much for joining us. Appreciate it.

BOUIE: Thank you.