“The Divider:” When Trump Went to War With Washington

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, HOST: Now, the latest in a string of legal challenges facing former President Donald Trump. He is being sued by New York’s attorney general on expansive fraud lasting over a decade. And the turbulent years of his presidency are the subject of a new book, “The Divider.” Journalists Susan Glasser and Peter Baker go behind the scenes of Trump’s White House. Speaking to many of the key players, including to Trump himself. They tell Walter Isaacson what they found and what it says about American democracy.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

WALTER ISAACSON, HOST: Thank you, Christiane. And Peter Baker, Susan Glasser, welcome back to the show.

PETER BAKER, CO-AUTHOR, “THE DIVIDER”: Thanks for having us.

SUSAN GLASSER, CO-AUTHOR, “THE DIVIDER”: Thank you so much.

ISAACSON: So, Susan, this book is magisterial. Filled with all sorts of nugget. But it also has a grand theme to it that’s almost Shakespearean. It’s like out of Richard III. It’s about enablers and dukes who want to enable the tyrant and lose, sort of, their moral compass. Why are there so many people in Trump’s orbit who tell you that they disagree but they were horrified by some of these things but decided to enable him?

GLASSER: And that is the enduring mystery, isn’t it, of the last four years that we went through with Trump in the White House. And I think you are right that it is a major theme of “The Divider”. You know, Donald Trump without these people, he just would have been and angry old man shouting at the television, right, in between golf games. And instead, we have these cycles and cycles of drama. And what was striking to me was that over time, Trump is purging himself and purging himself not just in the interest of permanent chaos. And he certainly, as Jeb Bush called him was a chaos presidency. But he also — he’s looking for these qualities of loyalty and blind obedience. He doesn’t find them. He rages against a new group. And of course, no one will ever be loyal enough. There is this incredible quote, Walter, that I think you will appreciate as a student of Washington, where one of his most senior advisers tells us, Donald Trump likes to kinds of people who work for him. Those who will work for him, and those who used to work for him.

ISAACSON: So, Peter, the enabling is partly justified by some of the characters in “The Divider” by keeping them from doing even worse things. Let’s start with General Kelly who, in some ways, that does apply to him, am I right?

BAKER: You know, I think that’s — you put your finger on a really important theme we saw in almost every interview we did. There was this enduring moral struggle, at least among people didn’t, you know, fully subscribe to Trumpian beliefs and ideology. To believe that they were trying to do good, they justify their presence in an administration they otherwise wouldn’t support because they said, if I let them, the guy that who comes after me — the person who comes after me will be worse. And I, you know, I’m here to protect the country or whatever. There’s something to that, you know. There’s something to that. In some cases, you can see where they obviously did make a difference or 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 6th 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.

ISAACSON: 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.

GLASSER: 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. You know, 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.

ISAACSON: 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 father-in-law. He said I always — 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.

ISAACSON: 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?

GLASSER: 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.

ISAACSON: 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?

GLASSER: You know, Walter, that is the question. I have to say, when Peter said, well, we’re going to have an interview with Trump, I said, really? Really? Are you sure? Is that going to happen? He wanted to do this. And so, we did it. 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 —

BAKER: 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 publicity.

GLASSER: 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 not a conversation. 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.

ISAACSON: 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?

BAKER: Well, I think — 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 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.

GLASSER: 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? You know, the day that Donald Trump left office, not only is it — it’s just — 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. We were surprised by many of the things we learned. 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.

ISAACSON: 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?

BAKER: 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 percent 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. Wishing — you know, all — you know, the vast majority of which knows that Donald Trump lost that election. But in some cases, they obviously are not willing to say it or willing to even pretend that he — they didn’t. 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.

ISAACSON: 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 percent of the Republican Party, people all over. What is this instinct that causes us to want to enable a strongman?

GLASSER: 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. You know, and 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.

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

BAKER: Thank you.

GLASSER: Thank you, Walter. It’s really an honor. Thank you.