Max Boot: “Extremists” in Control of the Republican Party

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Now, a recent poll suggests that nearly 80 percent of Republicans want Donald Trump to run again in 2024. “The Washington Post” columnist and former conservative Republican Max Boot hoped that people would no longer listen to the siren song of populism because he blames Trump for leading the growing extremism within the party. And Max Boot now joins Walter Isaacson to explore why so many Republicans are in his thrall and whether it will help or harm the GOP at the next elections.

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WALTER ISAACSON: Thank you, Christiane. And, Max Boot, welcome to the show.

MAX BOOT, CNN GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST: Good to be here.

ISAACSON: You have worked for a very long time, a traditional conservative Republican, and now you’re calling the Republican Party an existential threat to democracy. I mean, those are pretty strong words, meaning they threaten the existence of democracy. Why have you come to that conclusion?

BOOT: Well, I think all you have to do, Walter, is look at the events of the past year. These are things that we never thought we would see happening. But they happened. Of course, you had a president who refused to accept the election outcome. That is completely unprecedented in American history. That is the very foundation of any democracy, is that the loser has to accept the outcome. And Donald Trump has refused to do that. And not only did he refuse to accept the outcome, but, of course, on January 6, he incited a mob attack on the U.S. Capitol, again, another completely unprecedented event. Now, you would think, after Donald Trump had shown that he was willing to destroy American democracy in order to stay in office, you would think that, at that point, the Republican Party would disassociate itself from Donald Trump. But, of course, that is not what has happened in the many months since then. Instead, those who question or criticize Donald Trump are being driven out of the party. Of course, you saw the way that Liz Cheney lost her number three position in the House Republican Caucus because she kept calling out the big lie. She refused to repeat the big lie that Donald Trump won the election, and she wants to probe what happened on January 6, and that places certain her in a distinct, very small minority within the Republican Party, because the rest of the Republican Party has basically gone along with Donald Trump. In fact, there was just a new poll out which shows that something like 80 percent of Republicans want Trump to run for the presidency again in 2024, even though he has shown his willingness to wage war on our democracy. And that, unfortunately, places the Republican Party on the authoritarian side of a democratic-vs.-authoritarian divide. They are not just anti-democratic, big D Democratic. Right now, they are anti-small-D democratic as well.

ISAACSON: You have said that you have become a single issue voter. And your single issue is protecting democracy. What does that mean in practice?

BOOT: Well, in practice, that means voting for Democrats because unfortunately, at this point in time, we count on Republicans to uphold our democracy. You had a majority of Republicans on Capitol Hill, especially in the House, even after the horrible attack of January 6th, even after that, you had a majority that voted to overturn or not accept some of the electoral results of the election. They refuse to accept the results in some of the states that Donald Trump lost. And since then, the Republican Party has moved even further toward the big lie, which is now embraced by the majority of the Republican electorate and opposed by very few Republican elected officials. And, so can you imagine what would happen in 2024 if Republicans control both chambers of Congress and if they control many of the state legislatures? And once again, you see a result where Donald Trump loses the popular vote by a large margin, but he’s close in the Electoral College vote under those circumstances, can you be — have any degree of confidence that Republicans would actually recognize a Democratic victory? I’m very, very concerned that under those circumstances Republicans would actually carry out the kind of coup attempt that failed in January of this year. And so, to avoid that horrible scenario, which I think would really be the death nail for our democracy, I think it’s imperative to vote for Democrats right now. And I don’t care if you disagree with the Democrats on some issues, I disagree with the Democrats on some issues, but to my mind, you know, the size of the build back better bill is a lot less important than whether we will continue to be a democracy.

ISAACSON: You were born in Moscow. You came over here as a young child. You became a great scholar. You became a commentator. But you’re very familiar with authoritarian regimes. You write about it a lot and what I would call the collaborationist instinct. What is it about Republican Party that has made them into collaborationists?

BOOT: You know, that’s a great question without an easier or obvious answer, but there is no question that going back for decades, Republicans have been showing increasing contempt for the truth, increasing willingness to engage in conspiracy theories like the, you know, birtherism nonsense that helped to bring Donald Trump to power. And you have seen them being willing to flop Democratic norms to win power. You saw a small example of that in 2000 when the George W. Bush campaign went all out to win a closely contested election over Al Gore. You saw it, you know, more recently with Mitch McConnell who was been willing to bend the rules into pretzels in order to, for example, avoid confirming Merrick Garland as President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee and during an election year and in 2016. And then, you know, McConnell turns around and confirms a Trump Supreme Court nominee just days before the 2020 election. So, I think there has just been a general and growing contempt for Democratic norms within the Republican Party and a growing receptivity to extremism, to conspiracy theories, to racism, nativism, xenophobia. And Donald Trump came along and turbo charged all of those trends. And I think it’s accurate to say that, you know, prior to Trump, the Republican Party had a substantial extremist minority. Right now, however, the extremists are the ones who are in control of the entire party and there’s been a shameful advocation of responsibility on the part of the elites, people like Senator McConnell, who know better but refuse to stand up for what they believe is right.

ISAACSON: You work for Mitt Romney, you work for John McCain, and then, for Senator Marco Rubio against Donald Trump.

BOOT: That’s one I regret it.

ISAACSON: Yes. So, tell me why you regret it? I mean, he — what has happened to him? How has he succumbed to that wing of the party that you were so frightened about?

BOOT: Well, this — you know, this has been one of the monumental disappointments of my life. A lot of people in the Republican Party that I once believed in have failed the test of Trump, they have the failed the character test of Trump, including folks like Paul Ryan, but also certainly, Marco Rubio, who I thought stood for something better in 2015 and 2016. And I remember when I was cheering him, when he was saying that there’s no way that somebody like Donald Trump should be allowed to get his hand on our nuclear weapons. He was saying that Donald Trump was unqualified, unfit to be president, and I applauded that. So, I was shocked when he endorsed Donald Trump. And now, he’s become more Trumpy over time and he actually is emulating Trump in a lot of his cheap shot attacks on the media. Basically, I just think that he sees it as, to his political advantage, to be Trump’s lickspittle, which is probably true in Florida and certainly true in Republican politics but it’s really disappointing to see. On the other hand, I will add that I’m, you know, still very proud of having worked for Senator Romney because he is somebody who has passed the character test. He has stood up to Trump. He has called him out. He voted to impeach Trump. So, you know, I think Mitt Romney still represents the best of the Republican Party. And unfortunately, Marco Rubio represents the worst.

ISAACSON: You’ve talked at times about Republicans either pretending to be or acting out as if they were the stupid party. I mean, almost intentionally. And the senator from here in Louisiana, Senator John Kennedy, somebody went to Vanderbilt and Oxford, University of Virginia plays that role. Explain that phenomenon where people have to sort of pretend if they’re going to be Republicans not to be abdicated or —

BOOT: Well, this is kind of the cost of being a populist party. And, of course, what you’re saying at this great educational sorting out on American politics where it used to be the case that college graduates backed the Republican Party. Right now, college graduates increasingly migrate to the Democratic Party and the Republican Party has become kind of a blue-collar high school graduate party, very strong in rural areas, very weak in high-income urban areas. And so, Republican politicians basically adjust themselves to these trends. And some of them, you know, really represent the base. I mean, folks like Marjorie Taylor Greene who is, you know, I would say, out of her mind. I mean, she is somebody who has embraced QAnon conspiracy theories, has compared, you know, vaccine mandates to the Nazis, just saying completely crazy, crazy stuff. But then, there are others like John Kennedy and many others who are much smarter, better educated, know better, but they nevertheless feel compelled to play this corn-pone act. And Ted Cruz is another great example. All this kind of IV league populists who pretend to be a lot dumber than they are because that’s what the Republican Party wants. And it’s — unfortunately, it’s a very destructive and corrosive trend because they wind up, you know, embracing conspiracy theories about the election and then, they also refuse to acknowledge, for example, the science of climate change, which is not really open for debate anymore and yet, Republican Party remains in denial about the terrible threat to our planet.

ISAACSON: What about Tucker Carlson, somebody you know? To what extent do you think he’s just cynical? To what extent do you think he really believes this? And how dangerous do you think his campaign against believing in vaccinations has been?

BOOT: Well, the last question is the easiest to answer. I mean, what Tucker Carlson is doing is incredibly dangerous. He has the number one cable show in America reaching millions of people every night. And when he’s not propagating the great replacement conspiracy theory beloved of white supremacists, he’s undermining vaccines. And so, he is really doing great damage to the American body politic and to American health. I mean, he is endangering people. What he’s doing is highly irresponsible. It’s a disgrace that Rupert Murdoch and Lachlan Murdoch are paying him to do this. This is just a bane on America. You asked, you know, Walter, the tougher question, does Tucker actually believe all this nonsense that he peddles? I don’t know the answer to that. I mean, I remember Tucker from, you know, decades ago and we were both working at the “Weekly Standard” and he was a — seemed like a smart sensible writer. But pretty clearly, he’s gone off the deep end, whether out of ideological conviction or simply because it’s so lucrative for him to do so. But either way, he’s become a demagogue and truly a menace to America.

ISAACSON: From a historical perspective, why is this happening, this sort of populist anti-science, anti-truth sentiment, not just Donald Trump but throughout the Republican Party and not just Republican Party? It seems to have permeated elements of society. What’s causing it?

BOOT: Well, big picture, I would say, it’s probably one of the effects of the economic transition that we are going through right now. Where you’re going through a transition from an industrial to an information age economy, and that has produced some very big winners, you know, like all the billionaires who run these major websites. And it’s also producing a lot of losers. People who have been left behind economically and, you know, those shuttered industrial towns throughout the Midwest. And it’s also producing great disparities of wealth and, you know, we have — in the U.S., we have one of the highest levels of income inequality among advanced industrialized democracies. And so, you know, I think that there is a lot of misery out there, a lot of dissatisfaction. There’s also been, you know, frankly, a lot of perceived failures on the part of the elites in Washington, whether the Iraq War, Afghanistan War, you know, the financial and economic crash in 2008 and 2009. So, there’s a lot of dissatisfaction and kind of a lot of people on both the left and right trying to feel like we want to blow it all up, and that was, you know, a lot of the impetus, of course, for Donald Trump’s staggering and surprising victory in 2016. But I would think — I would hope that we would learn something from the last four years, which is that demagogues in populous like Donald Trump, they don’t have the answers. They’re very good on capitalizing on misery but they can’t actually ameliorate it They don’t have the answers. I mean, Donald Trump promised that all the trends of deindustrialization that have been going on for decades would miraculously be reversed under his presidency, that the trade deficit would disappear. That’s all nonsense. None of that happened. The trade definite actually got wider. There was no change in the deindustrialization. So, I would hope that after the experience of the Trump presidency, people would wise up a little bit and not listen to the siren song of populism.

ISAACSON: We’ve had a recent spike in the coronavirus. It now seems to be tamping down a little bit. But you said that instead of blaming Biden for the recent spike, it’s really the Republicans more to blame. Why is that?

BOOT: All you have to do is look at the numbers of people who are getting vaccinated. About 90 percent of Democrats have gotten vaccinated compared to only 58 percent of Republicans. There is huge and unwarranted skepticism of vaccines on the right, which, again, is being fed every single night by Fox News channel which glorifies vaccine resisters, even though, by the way, you know, well over 95 percent of Fox’s own employees are vaccinated. It’s just this horrible catering to these anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists, anti-Washington populists. And it’s utterly shameful the extent to which the leadership of the Republican Party has connived on this, where, you know, you have Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader, screaming no vaccine mandates. Well, guess what? We already have vaccine mandates to attend any school in this country including at any red state that you want to name. Your kids have to have proof they’re vaccinated against polio, diphtheria, tuberculosis, various other diseases. So, why is adding a COVID vaccine suddenly so controversial? It shouldn’t be. This is just this animus against science and elites in — against the Democratic Party, which is now in charge in Washington, this is — these are just the sentiments that have run amuck and they’re endangering our country. They are killing people and they are making it very hard for President Biden to achieve the kind of levels of vaccination that we need to achieve in order to stop the pandemic, and that’s — you know, I think he’s doing a good job with his mandates, but I think it’s really shameful, the extent to which the Republican Party, especially in states like Texas and Florida, is trying to undermine those mandates and they are endangering people’s lives to score political points.

ISAACSON: Max Boot, thank you so much for joining us.

BOOT: Thanks for having me.