Jeremy Peters on His New Book “Insurgency”

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Now, earlier we heard about how Former President Donald Trump is in legal woes and if he tries to mount a comeback in 2024, the divided state of the GOP will loom large. Our next guest, “New York Times” correspondent Jeremy Peters explores this in his new book, “Insurgency: How Republicans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever Wanted.” And he joins Michel Martin to explain more.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Thanks, Christiane. Jeremy Peters, thanks so much for talking with us.

JEREMY PETERS, AUTHOR, “INSURGENCY”: Thank you for having me.

MARTIN: You start your book, “Insurgency,” with the mob attack on the capitol on January 6th. Why did you decide to start there?

PETERS: Because I think the title, “Insurgency,” as it implies, really gets at the galvanizing sentiments and emotions that have been driving the development of the modern Republican Party. It has always been a party defined by insurgency from Pat Buchanan to Sarah Palin, to the Tea Party, and then, finally, to Donald Trump. What I don’t think I foresaw was that the insurgency would turn as violent as it did that day, but it seemed to me that the events of January 6th were an unfortunate but very revealing manifestation of what Donald Trump had done by emboldening these insurgent elements that have always destabilized Republican politics.

MARTIN: Even now, as people are still being charged and prosecuted for what they did that day, even as so many of the officers who were hurt and nearly killed that day are still recovering from their injuries, there are people minimizing it. So, I’m going to ask you now, what is the problem? What is the phenomenon that you are describing here? Because you trace the origins of this. You chase it kind of repeat episodes in what resulted in that in your analysis, but what is the problem that you are describing here? How would you describe it?

PETERS: So, I think a lot of it starts with the misinformation and disinformation that we’ve seen just become a common and accepted form of the political discourse on the right. And, you know, this has always been there, and I start telling that story with the Obama birther conspiracy theories, and how that traveled from the fringes of the blogosphere through people like Jerome Corsi who has — who wrote several books about this and managed to get this absurd notion that somehow Obama wasn’t born in the United States and that his birth certificate was a fake injected into the mainstream conversation on the right. When Fox News picks it up, then it’s not just some fringy idea, it has legs. And that’s exactly what the conspiracy theorist pushing this wanted. They wanted mainstream credibility. So, I don’t think it’s far out of the realm of their reality to then start putting out untruths about every day facts, right? I mean, the whitewashing of the history of what happened on January 6th is entirely consistent with what the dialogue on the right has been about voter fraud, about this idea that the country is slipping away from conservatives, from white Christian Americans because it’s no longer the country that they grew up in, right? This notion of take our country back stems from the Coldwater days, really. I mean, and this was a sentiment that you heard and you saw printed on banners during the Tea Party, and it’s something that Donald Trump said in his campaign speeches and continues to say. So, I think it’s the denial of reality, the misinformation and coupled with this sense that their country isn’t theirs anymore and they have to fight to hold on to it. And this is — the people I describe in the book are very much folks we have seen consistently throughout the second half of the 20th century and now, the 21st century who always felt like they were one presidential election away from losing their purchase on social, political, and cultural power in this country.

MARTIN: What I hear you saying is the real issue is that you’ve got a group of people who believe things that aren’t true and don’t like the things that are true. So, it really has to do with what, ideas, with identity, with what? What’s the — I guess what’s your theory of everything here?

PETERS: It’s that sentiment that you just described has never really had as prominent a voice as it has now in Donald Trump. When I interviewed Trump for this book, one of the things that he said to me that I thought was fascinating in terms of his world view and how he sees media was he said — I brought up Fox News and their calling on election night of Arizona, which basically meant that the election was over for Donald Trump, and he said, well, it turns out a lot of people don’t like to hear negativity toward me. And then, he kind of delighted in the fact that Fox News had taken a real hit in its ratings after the election because what did it do, it told its viewers the truth. Well, its viewers didn’t want to hear that truth. And Trump understands that he — his political brand, his political survival, his strength as a leader depends on not just people believing things that aren’t true but also on his ability to completely block out any bad information about him. And he does this. He, like Rush Limbaugh before him, really is an enforcer of his own messaging, and the people around him from Sean Hannity on down really attack anybody who goes against that narrative. And you saw kind of the civil war happening within Fox News that I think was really emblematic of the struggle that a lot of conservatives had, maybe who thought to themselves, well, he did lose, we should move on, but we’re unable to because the political cost of that was so steep because of Trump’s insistence that they accept his lies.

MARTIN: So, in your telling of this kind of modern insurgency, when did it start?

PETERS: I think an interesting way to answer that question is to look at kind of the psyche of the modern Republican voter, and going back to Barry Goldwater in 1964, there was always a sense that when they lost elections, something was off. It wasn’t because voters had rejected their ideas or their leaders, it was because the other side had done something that was often nefarious to win. Back in ’64, when Goldwater lost and American — conservative society printed up bumper stickers that said, well, 24 million Americans can’t be wrong. So, it was kind of like soothing themselves with this notion that they had a lot of company. And that sentiment carries through to Richard Nixon’s silent majority, Ronald Reagan and Jerry Falwell’s, you know, moral majority. This idea that they represented the beliefs of the majority of the people is always central to the identity of the American conservative. And that’s why I think it’s been so hard for them to accept loss and defeat and why they rewrite that history and consistently have done so.

MARTIN: I have to say that one of the most fascinating people that you report on in the book is Sarah Palin, somebody who I — from reading your book, has not gotten nearly the attention she deserves, both as a kind of an object of this insurgency and as a player in this insurgency. And obviously, you know, the former vice-presidential nominee is in the news at the moment as we are speaking now because she recently lost a libel suit against “The New York Times.” So, tell me a little bit about Sarah Palin and why she’s such a pivotal figure in this for people who don’t remember her, who think of her as maybe a sort a momentary character on the scene.

PETERS: Yes, we remember Sarah Palin for some of the more provocative and nasty things that she said about Obama, and some of the — you know, the false information she put out there, remember, the death panels which claimed were going to, you know, ration care through these boards of government bureaucrats, which was false. But she was also — and this is what makes her kind of a proto-Trump figure, somebody who felt disrespected by the leadership of the Republican Party and by cultural political elites in general. She wore that disdain from above on her sleeve, like a badge of honor. It goes back to, as I report in the book, an incident in Alaska when a prominent Republican referred to the people in her area near Wasilla as valley trash. This was a nickname given to people who lived where she did in this place called the Mat-Su Valley that wasn’t as prosperous as other — as parts near Anchorage. And they really resented it. But they also turned it around on the people who were condescending toward them, and that became a huge part of her political brand and that was also a huge part of Donald Trump’s political brand. This idea that the same people who hated him, whether it was the leaders of the Republican Party or, you know, cultural elites also hated his followers. And his followers really identified with that, thinking like, look, if Donald Trump, this powerful, rich, developer and television star can be attacked and subject to, you know, these same forces of disdain, what’s going to happen to us? And so, it was just as important for Trump and Sarah Palin to be hated by certain people as it was to be liked by their own people. And so, what you end up with is these outsider figures eventually taking power in the Republican Party.

MARTIN: One of the fascinating details in your book is that a lot of the lies in the campaign, in the 2008 campaign for which Sarah Palin is most famous, she didn’t write.

PETERS: Right.

MARTIN: That the McCain campaign actually came up with these attack lines, which is fascinating because then the nominee, John McCain, you know, the late Arizona senator, just seemed so uncomfortable with it. How did you understand that?

PETERS: Right. It’s definitely a complicating aspect to McCain’s legacy. Ultimately, as people who worked for him, whom I interviewed for this book said, he bears responsibility. He’s the one who chose her in a rather cavalier fashion, as I describe in the book, with language I won’t use on this program. But basically, he said, you know, screw it, let’s go for it. I like to roll the dice. I’m a gambler. She’s a gamble, let’s do it. From there, though, you know, you begin to see, as the title of the book implies, the insurgency really starting to bubble up and eventually boil over. And this is the story of the Republican Party, of establishment Republican leaders taking those insurgent elements, giving them a seat at the table, bringing them inside the tent, if you will, inside the big Republican tent, but then, ultimately, not wanting to share power with them and make them partners. But it’s also true that the insurgent elements from Pat Buchanan to Sarah Palin, it didn’t really have any interest in being faithful partners themselves, they thought rightfully, we bring the votes, we’re getting you folks elected, why aren’t we given a bigger role. And that was really Sarah Palin, that the misunderstanding by John McCain’s advisers of the power she had, of the appeal that she had with his voters, the people who would become his voters, and they hey weaponized it in a way that they thought they could control by writing her these speeches where she said, you know, Obama is paling around with terrorists, that we don’t like leaders who talk differently about folks in San Francisco as they do in Scranton. And that — those were not her words. They were words written by very clever strategists who knew how to activate those emotions of resentment in the kinds of voters they knew they needed to win.

MARTIN: Why do you think that so many people who see themselves as kind of Christian conservatives were willing to tolerate the former president’s behavior? Let’s say this was transactional, let’s say that the conservative, the white conservatives got their supreme court justices and they got their tax cuts, what more do they need? Why continue to support him or do they?

PETERS: Because their voters and their donors do, right? I think there’s an element here that needs to be dealt with up front, and this is something that I’ve actually heard from evangelical Republicans who are very disillusioned with Trump. They began to like him. They began to like the meanness and the incivility because as one person I interviewed, the leader of an evangelical women’s group, she told me, you know what, he’s a bully. We know that, but he is our bully. And I think that a lot of them liked the mean spiritedness of it. I don’t think all of them did. And I think it made a lot of them cringe, but they were willing to look the other way because of the policies and the judges they were getting. But a lot of them didn’t mind looking the other way or rather didn’t need to, they loved it. And the people forget, as I describe in the book that, you know, the moment, at first, when everybody declared Trump’s campaign dead as a doornail in 2015 when he attacked John McCain as a failed war hero, a phony war hero, Donald Trump did that at an evangelical conference and many in the audience laughed. So, there’s always been an element that wanted — an element of the religious right that really wanted their own, you know, mean spirited culture warrior as a leader.

MARTIN: Where does the country go from here? You know, there’s a popular sign that progressives sometimes put on their lawns, you know, it says there’s no Planet B, right? You know, it’s a reference to climate change, saying, look, you can trash the environment, you can befoul the water and the air, where are you going to go? Where’s the Planet B when it comes to a political system that doesn’t work, won’t accept the same facts, won’t agree on a certain set of rules, won’t really embrace representative democracy, believes that unless your side wins then everything’s a rug, where does this go?

PETERS: Well, as long as Donald Trump is the leader of the party shouting, no, don’t believe the results of the last election, we’re going to take this country back, I don’t see a peaceful resolution to any of this. I think that the likelihood of an incredibly nasty 2024 presidential campaign that could make 2020, you know, look like a dress rehearsal is very real because Trump is so far down the rabbit hole with his denial of reality of what really has happened politically to him. Because, remember, he sees this about him, and he’s managed to transfer some of that over to his voters who then see him as fighting for them because he’s going to help them “take their country back.” But, ultimately, because Donald Trump is — sees himself as a victim of circumstances that he didn’t create, I don’t see how he approaches this with any sense of rational thinking or reason. I think it’s all going to be about his own personal delusions and grievances.

MARTIN: Jeremy Peters, thank you so much for talking with us.

PETERS: Thank you.