Bill Kristol: Trump’s “Authoritarian Vision” for a 2nd Term

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Next, both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump have managed to seal their party nominations, but Americans across the country will continue to take part in the primary process until the final contests in June. As the presidential race heats up, former longtime Republican Bill Kristol warns of the danger of a Trump second term. And he joins Walter Isaacson to discuss what’s exactly on the line.

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WALTER ISAACSON, CO-HOST, AMANPOUR AND CO.: Thank you, Christiane. And Bill Kristol, welcome back to the show.

BILL KRISTOL, EDITOR-AT-LARGE, THE BULWARK: Great to be with you, Walter.

ISAACSON: Let me quote something you wrote in the column in which you said, the United States is closer to constitutional failure today than it was on January 6th. Explain that.

KRISTOL: Well, I think the guardrails held on January 6th, the individuals held to by Pence, let’s give them some credit, and, you know, at least a good chunk of Republicans in Congress and the House, unfortunately not a majority, who voted to seat the electors. And so, for that, of course, the Democrats held. And so, the system worked, sort of, on January 6th. The trouble is once Trump is re-nominated after January 6th, there are fewer guardrails, certainly within the Republican Party. And in a way, the public has now been inured to the idea that — I mean, what does it say when they’re willing to re-nominate Trump after January 6th? One thing to make the mistake of nominating would be for January 6th. It says that they don’t care. And so, it says to every Republican out there that, hey — and not just Republicans perhaps, you know, go ahead, take a shot, you know, if you don’t win, try to overturn it anyway. Invent kind of crazy conspiracy theories about how the elections were stolen. You won’t pay any price. And I think that’s — in that respect, as I say, we’re further down the road away from the rule of law, away from a basic respect for truth than we were even on January 6th.

ISAACSON: You are among the Republicans who’ve led the resistance to Donald Trump. Now, that he’s apparently the nominee, there’s no stopping him, what are you going to do?

KRISTOL: I mean, I’ve been an ex-Republican, honestly, for a while, and I will remain an ex-Republican for 2024 and do my best to help stop Donald Trump from getting a second term as president, which I think would be much more dangerous, actually, than his first term. So, I’m still never Trump.

ISAACSON: And by the way, when you say you’ll do everything to stop him, does that mean you’re going to be campaigning for Joe Biden?

KRISTOL: Yes, unless — and there were some — if Joe Biden steps aside, maybe a younger Democratic nominee, something I’ve been pushing ineffectually for about a year, and now I can do that.

ISAACSON: Do you think that’s still a possibility?

KRISTOL: I think it’s a very outside possibility, but no, but I’m actually involved with the Republican voters against Trump. We did this in 2020, we’ll do it again in 2024, in swing states, getting people who have been Republicans. And in this case, getting people who’ve actually voted for Trump before to say, look, I voted for him, maybe he did some good things, but we can’t have a second, given what we now know after January 6th, given what we know of what he said about what he would try to do as president, if he’s in there again, we can’t run that risk. So, hopefully, we’ll move some swing voters in some key states who, you know, are not diehard Democrats, are not diehard Biden fans. So, a lot of them say, you know, I’m not crazy about Biden for this reason or that, but they hopefully will not — will understand the real danger of a Trump second term.

ISAACSON: The real danger of a Trump second term, explain that to me. What do you — why do you think it’ll be more dangerous in the first time?

KRISTOL: Because when he took over in 2017, he was sort of disorganized, didn’t know Washington that well, and then brought in people, as he himself has complained about later, who were more established with Republicans, who constrained him in some very important ways. I’d say especially in foreign policy, the McMasters and the John Boltons and Jim Mattis and Mark Esper, I mean, all of them didn’t quite let him do what he wanted to do. I mean, if you think of the Ukraine impeachment that you see one after another, a foreign service officer and people up to the national security adviser, John Bolton, saying, wait a second, sir, you can’t do that. And it actually did stop him from doing what he wanted to do. When it came out, he got impeached, though, not convicted. And then, in many other areas. One can certainly not approve of Bill Barr’s performance as attorney general. He wasn’t willing to do what Trump wanted after November 3rd. And the same, you know, in other parts of the government. All of that, I think, you can’t count on at all in the second term. So, I think some of the guardrails won’t be there or the internal ones, so to speak, won’t be there, will be much weaker. And then, he’s got people around him who have really thought through how to achieve what I would call, you know, as an authoritarian vision of transforming the American government, major think tanks and a lot of money, a lot of work being done, and they’re not being done by — these are not foolish people — I mean, they may be foolish in their goals, but they’re not — they know something about —

ISAACSON: So, give me some examples —

KRISTOL: A lot of them tried to do stuff in the first term, it got thwarted, and now, they’re going to come back with really — you know, the real plans of how not to be thwarted. So, I think it’s much more dangerous this time.

ISAACSON: So, what do you think they’re going to do?

KRISTOL: The things Trump tried to do after he lost the election from November 3rd to January 6th, what he tried to do in the Defense Department, what he tried to do in the Justice Department, what he tried to do in the intelligence agencies, I think those are all things he will now try to do from day one. Will he transform America on January 21, 2025 into a Orban-like, a Hungary State or something like that? No, of course not. And we have many, many more structures and institutions that will slow him down, so to speak. But over a year or two years, three years, with the kinds of appointees he might put into justice and defense, all these barriers we kind of take for granted. The criminal division of the Justice Department is not going to be used to go after your critics, or that contracts are not going to be given out in other departments simply to friends. All the things that have happened on the margins of American politics for decades and for centuries, and that we’ve mostly pushed back successfully against, that those are the abuses we think of, right? The scandals, Teapot Dome, Nixon and the Justice Department, Nixon trying to use the CIA, those scandals will become kind of the routine for Trump. And I think especially in the national security agencies, a lot of these things are, as you know, Walter, I mean, they’re customs, they’re — some of them are in – they’re in — their procedures and practices. Some of them are executive orders. Not that many of them really are in law. And, you know, the ways in which generals get promoted or made generals in the first place, general offices in the first place in the U.S. military, the degree to which, you know, you could certainly start picking Trump- friendly generals for key positions. And obviously, same with the intelligence agencies with civilians. So, I think it’s — it would be a dangerous series of steps down the road, away from the rule of law and away from the kinds of barriers that we put in place over decades, centuries, really. Civil service is something that explicitly — they’re explicitly targeting.

ISAACSON: Yes. But I would think a lot of Trump people would agree with you. Say, man, there’s a deep state, there’s a whole civil service, there’s a whole way that the military and people in this deep state have thwarted, people who want real change in this government and we’ve got to sweep that away. That seems to be the either threat or the promise of what a second Trump term would be.

KRISTOL: For me, that’s a dangerous ideology. Things need to be reformed. Our civil service rule is perfect. I’ve actually served in the executive branch and I’m in favor of a certain — a little more flexibility for managers, maybe a little ability to remove people who aren’t doing a good job, you know, the appropriate legal procedures, but not for the presidents who arbitrarily decide, as he tried to in the first term, think of the things you tried to do. Anyone who’s — certain people are just going to be separated from the military because he doesn’t like their sexual orientation, their sexual identification, and then their gender identification. And, you know, that didn’t happen. It didn’t happen because there were a lot of barriers in place to just having a president snap his fingers and fire people from the civil service or from military service. But again, if they get to work on that on January 21, 2025, you know, a few months later, they can remove a lot of those barriers. So, yes —

ISAACSON: That’s what Trump sort of said when you mentioned Viktor Orban, the authoritarian leader in Hungary, comes down to Mar-a-Lago last week, and Trump said, I want to be that way. I want to be able to just order. And he orders, and he gets things done. Isn’t there a desire in this day and age around the world for some stronger leaders, given the dysfunction of this democracy?

KRISTOL: There absolutely is. And there are elections after elections, and sometimes the authoritarians do well, sometimes fortunately they do lose, as here, 2020. But the dysfunction is not solved by dictatorship or by arbitrary rule. That makes things even worse. There are reasons — one of the worst things about Trump is that it makes it harder to pursue sensible reforms, because, honestly, what has to defend the status quo against these kinds of attempts an arbitrary power. But the status quo does need to be reformed. To be fair Joe Biden has done a fair amount of reforming. He’s pursued a pretty activist agenda. He’s gotten a lot of stuff through Congress. So, it’s not as if we’ve seen — entirely seen dysfunction in the Biden era. And he’s got bipartisan support, let’s say, for aiding Ukraine in foreign policy. And there, it’s Trump himself and Mike Johnson, his speaker of the house, who’s stopping a policy that has bipartisan support of helping Ukraine against Putin get through. So, you know, they complain about the dysfunction, but then they add to the dysfunction.

ISAACSON: You talk about Ukraine quite a bit. And I know you’ve been very strong in our need to stand as stalwarts with Ukraine. Do you think that can be an election issue?

KRISTOL: The conventional wisdom, as you know, is American voters don’t vote on foreign policy, especially since the Cold War. They don’t know much about it and so forth. I would say I don’t quite agree with that in general, but I really think that might not be the case this time. I do think people have a sense that what February 24, 2022 was the beginning, perhaps, of a new international era or at least a challenge to any hope for a sort of stable and, you know, freedom friendly international order. You know, I was talking to someone very close to Nikki Haley the other day. This person said that she, Governor Haley, was surprised how much voters responded to her on Ukraine and not foreign policy. That was one of the main differences, obviously, she had with Trump — has with Trump. And she would sort of mention it in the list of differences that she has. You know, Trump’s character is a problem. He’d spent too much money in the deficit. And then, it turned out the thing that people really had the sense of is what Trump has said about NATO, what he has done in terms of his courtship of Putin and approval of dictators, that that really, for — you know, presidents can make a lot of other mistakes, but that’s something where once that unravels, you can’t put it back together. And that’s an area where, as you know, after the president has so much power, it’s a little harder for Congress to stop him. It’s not like, you know, proposing a spending bill that doesn’t go through. So, anyway, I think foreign policy could be more of an issue in this campaign than people have expected. And Joe Biden began his State of the Union speech last week with Ukraine, right?

ISAACSON: You were a leader in the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush and Dan Quayle. How did that Republican Party, a large part of it, become the pro-Russia, pro-Putin party?

KRISTOL: I mean, I think Trump is the main answer. He won in the nomination. That — and I think it might have been an aberration or what could have gotten beyond that. Then he won the election. Then he was president for four years. Then he won renomination. OK. (INAUDIBLE) with renomination. Then he lost. Then he lied about the election and tried to overturn it. January 6th happened. And now, he’s the nominee again. It’s really astounding, obviously, if you step back and think about that. But it means it’s his party. I mean, no one can say after three straight nominations that, oh, my God, where’s the old Republican Party?

ISAACSON: Wait, wait, wait. Let me ask deeper. Why? Why has the party done that? It’s not just him, it’s the voters in almost every primary.

KRISTOL: I think what elected Trump was mostly domestic issues, but he did have this set of America First views. I also think, honestly, in fact, in neither party, under President Obama, really after Romney’s defeat, I guess you’d say in 2012, did much to make the case for American world leadership. We were tired after Afghanistan and Iraq and all that. President Obama didn’t do what he said he would do in Syria. We got kind of used to, as a country, saying, well, these problems are too hard for us to deal with. I think that made it a little easier for Trump to make his America First case or to sell that to people. And here we are. Now, to his credit, I think President Biden has really forcefully resisted that and has done so pretty effectively.

ISAACSON: He gave a very fiery State of the Union speech. Do you think that was effective, or do you think that a sort of calmer message should be the message for the campaign?

KRISTOL: I think it was pretty effective. I don’t know if it’ll change things fundamentally when speech comes — you know, can come and go pretty fast. But no, I think he’s right to really put the stakes out there, and that’s what he did at the beginning of the speech with Ukraine and with January 6th. Then he got into a more standard, you know, State of the Union laundry list. But I think he needs to make people — look, he needs the votes of some people who aren’t, you know, loyal Democrats, who have doubts about his age. You can’t just — some of my Democratic friends think he can overcome people’s doubts by yelling at them, they shouldn’t have doubts. That doesn’t work very well. You know, say — and he has — I mean, he obviously isn’t going to say what I can say, which is, gee, you know, it would be better if there’s younger Democrat, but he can say, look, I am what I am. He’s begun saying this in a way, right? I am old, a little old, but I think my experience puts — stands me — you know, put me in good stead. And here are my core policies, and here’s why they’re so different from those of Donald Trump. He needs the votes of people who are a little bit hesitant and reluctant to vote there.

ISAACSON: A lot of the Republicans against Trump, whether it be Nikki Haley or Former Attorney General Barr, they say, yes, but Biden’s so much worse. What’s your opinion of Biden? You know, do you think that it’s hard for a Republican to vote for Biden?

KRISTOL: It shouldn’t be, really. He’s been a pretty good president, and he’s been a pretty moderate Democratic president. I mean, you know, AOC is not running the country, Joe Biden is. And in fact, the Democratic left is kind of upset about various things that Biden is doing. So, he’s much more of a Hubert Humphrey Democrat than he is of a, I don’t know, left-wing Democrat, I think. My doubts about him have more to do with how strong a candidate he’ll be for reelection, and that’s mostly age. But I think as president, he’s been very much in the tradition of mainstream Democrats. And I think Republicans, everything is so polarized, I guess their central scent is a pure Republican elected official, even not a such a Trumpy one, to go on and on about how horrible Biden is and the left’s running everything. And here’s something you don’t like that’s happened on a college campus, and I don’t like some of the things that have happened on college campuses. And Joe Biden’s to blame for that, like he does not — you know, as if he runs the faculty at Amherst or something. I mean, there is a kind of derangement syndrome, I think, on the right, which has spilled over even to some in the center, I got to say, about Joe Biden.

ISAACSON: Bill Kristol, thank you so much for joining us.

KRISTOL: Thanks, Walker.