The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Bob Woodward Does It Again -- Plus, The Race Next Door #5

Episode Date: September 9, 2020

Not a good day for Donald Trump. In fact a terrible one. Plus your questions for Bruce and me on TRND.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here with the latest episode of the Bridge Daily. Here we are Wednesday of week 26. Wednesday is the race next door day and we'll be getting to that shortly. But I got kind of a related thing to talk about first. You know it's been almost 50 years now since the Watergate story broke and leading to the resignation two years later of Richard Nixon as President of the United States. And who broke that story? Well, a number of news agencies were involved, but the most famous one, the one that gets most of the credit

for breaking the story, and deservedly so, was the Washington Post, led by two of its journalists, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. I've been lucky enough over those 50 years to have met both gentlemen and to have interviewed both gentlemen, and perhaps I've interviewed Bob Woodward more than anyone else. He's still at the Washington Post. Carl Bernstein is now at CNN.

He's been in a number of different news organizations over time. Still working hard as an investigative reporter, as is Bob Woodward. And Bob Woodward has been prolific at writing books. And most of those books break big news. And they break big news because Bob Woodward can get people to talk to him. And people, others say, how the hell does Bob Woodward do that? How does he get people to talk? Even when he's got a track record of showing that when he gets people to talk, it's usually to their disadvantage. Because they kind of spill the beans on things.

So today, we find out what Bob Woodward's latest book contains. It's called Rage. It comes out, I think, next week. But it's based on the ability that Bob Woodward has had, even though he has written critical books and pieces about Donald Trump in the past. He's had 12 interviews with Donald Trump this year. And they're incredibly revealing on a lot of different topics. And the topic that's most revealing is the issue of the pandemic. There's other stuff, lots of it.

But on the pandemic, among other things, while he was telling the world and telling the United States, and people were basing their decisions on what he was saying, that this was not a big deal, that it was a hoax, that it would pass, that it would disappear, all those things. You've heard all those things he said in February and March and January. Well, guess what he tells Bob Woodward in February? He didn't call it a hoax in February

when he was talking to Bob Woodward Woodward asked him because the day before on February 6 the president had talked to President Xi in China they were big pals then, right? Big pals. Trump loved Xi.

Well, Woodward asked him, well, what did you say? This is on February 7th, the next day. He asked him, what did you say? What did the two of you talk about? Here's one minute of the Trump-Woodward conversation on February 7th. Remember, he's telling everybody this is a hoax.

It's not a big deal. It's going to blow away. Here's what he said then. So what was President Xi saying yesterday? Well, we were talking mostly about the virus, and I think he's going to have it in good shape, but, you know, it's a very tricky situation. It goes through air, Bob.

That's always tougher than the touch. The touch, you don't have to touch things, right? But the air, you just breathe the air, and that's how it's passed. And so that's a very tricky one. That's a very delicate one. It's also more deadly than even your strenuous flus. You know, people don't realize we lose 25,000, 30,000 people a year here. Who would ever think that, right?

I know. It's pretty amazing. And then I say, well, is that the same thing? This is more deadly. This is 5% versus 1% and less than 1%. You know, so this is deadly stuff. So there you go. That's Donald Trump.

February 7th. A couple of conversations later between him and Bob Woodward, Trump basically says, I'm deliberately downplaying this story. That's why I'm not telling people. That's why I'm not telling people. That's why I'm not telling the public. He's saying because, I guess, he thought that would create a panic. Well, it might also create a mechanism to prevent the deadliness of the disease. But no, that's not what he did.

He says he downplayed it. Anyway, there's a lot more in this book, from his conversations with Trump, but also with his conversations with some people around Trump about what Trump is like in office. He talked to General Mattis. He talked to Dan Coats, the Director of National Intelligence. He's talked to a lot of people.

This is another blockbuster Woodward book. He talked to Dan Coates, the Director of National Intelligence. He's talked to a lot of people. This is another blockbuster Woodward book. He just keeps hitting them out of the park as a journalist. There's a lot of good journalists in Washington. We heard from one of them last week, Jeff Goldberg from the Atlantic. Anyway, that's how I wanted to set up our conversation today with Bruce Anderson. Now, a couple of things to keep in mind. We did this, we pre-recorded this podcast this morning before the Woodward book came out that's okay because that's not really what we're talking about but uh you should know that that's why it won't

come up in this conversation the other thing is just and it's one of those slight technical issues because i use the phone to connect with bruce each week um, I'm not even sure who it was at the moment, but somebody was trying to phone me during our conversation. So there's a couple of times you'll hear, you know, that kind of noise you get when there's another line ringing or trying to get through to you. So don't let that disrupt things. I don't think it will. It's fairly minor. But I thought I should tell you, because that's the kind of guy I am.

Anyway, a little preamble till you know what comes next. And here it is. All right, hail to the chief and hail to the latest edition of The Race Next Door. Bruce Anderson joins us from Ottawa, as he always does. The decision this week was to actually hear some of your questions, because they have been coming in a lot of good ones um i picked sort of four or five that are on a kind of a similar theme you'll get it as we go through these um and we'll uh we'll talk about it see what uh what we have to say so first of all first letter comes in from mary and tico and know, boiling her letter down comes to something like this. Trump's base has

become like a cult. Many of them are armed and he's encouraging vigilantes. Well, you know, I'm not sure that's totally true. I mean, some of them are armed and some of them, it's legal for them to be armed. Not only is it legal for them to be armed, but it's legal for them to carry arms, depending on what state, where they are, and what time of day it is, and all of that. But the encouragement by the candidate, in this case Donald Trump, has been pretty obvious in some of his speeches. And so there's a link there. This is the second half of her question.

And I want to bring Bruce in on any element of this question, because it's an interesting question, especially this point. This from Mary Antico Still. There is also evidence that Russia and possibly other states are again using social media to influence the election, and so far there's no evidence that Facebook will take any significant action to mitigate this. Now, this whole issue of social media, the impact it had certainly in 2016,

and what impact it may have here in 2020 is an important one, and whether or not Facebook especially, because it's usually the main target on this, has been doing anything other than a couple of small and obvious things that it's done and Twitter's done, whether they're doing enough to mitigate some of the issues surrounding social media and the campaign. So, Bruce, your thoughts first. Go ahead. Well, Peter, I think the question is really relevant. I do think that we've seen a lot of evidence that the Republicans and Trump specifically

are doing what they can to say, look, if you're scared, if you feel like there's not enough law and order, if you've got that kind of anxiety and you want to do something about it, it's hard to blame you. And that has fed, I think, a certain amount of vigilantism, no question about it. And on the social media side of things, I think it really was kind of frightening to look back at that 2016 campaign and realize just how much interference there was using social media channels and to recognize that the impact could be quite significant, could have been quite significant, probably was, and could still be because I don't think the U.S. administration has really done much to kind of ramp up their protections against it. And I think there's only mixed evidence that the companies that can get dragged into this, whose platforms are used in this way, have put in place the solutions. I was just watching a new Netflix documentary, I think it's called The Social Experiment, which if our listeners are not afraid to be scared by some of the things that are happening on social

media, then that's a good watch. I think it's worthwhile being concerned about this. I think we should be vigilant about it. The issue always boils down to how accountable should social media platforms be. Facebook and Twitter have always kind of maintained that, hey, we're not a news company. We're not accountable on those grounds. We don't have to prove what's said is right. But even they seem to be acknowledging that they have some responsibility on that front because they've taken down some posts, not many, and pretty straightforward stuff. A lot of other stuff is still up there. But does it still hinge on this issue of accountability on whether or not they should be at all? Well, I, you know, I tend to look at this as saying that companies certainly have some responsibility and that they'll only be able to do so much being companies, and then some of them

will only be inclined to do so much because they have other objectives, including shareholder value and profitability, that sort of thing. So that takes me to a place where I think governments really have to look at their roles as unpalatable as it might be for some politicians to advocate intervention that limits the way that social platforms are used, I think it's inescapable that there does need to be more effort there. There's no question that even today there was a story I was looking at this morning about the spread of a very disturbing video. And these things move around the world so quickly and have such dramatic impact that I don't think that we can ultimately count on companies to police themselves on this. I think what we know is that there are kind of dark

impulses that some people have that find a place to lodge themselves on these platforms and that governments are going to probably need to do more or will need to do more to prevent the problems that those cause. Now, we call this segment the race next door, and obviously we're focused on what's happening south of the border and especially so on this issue for good reason. But is there also good reason to be looking at it just as rigorously on this side of the border? I think so. Maybe not in the sense that there are foreign agents and actors that are actively trying to disrupt our politics. There's probably some of that. But certainly in terms of some of the conversations that we see developing around race, around faith, around policing. There's evidence that these platforms

become hubs within which people can share ideas that are dangerous for society, dangerous for other people in society. You know, things like everything from vaccine resistance to the idea of what militias should do or people should do if they're worried about law and order, those exist in Canada as well. All right, moving on. Deb Broomfield from Owen Sound writes, I'm pleased to catch the weekly podcast featuring Bruce Anderson.

It actually features both of us, Deb, but that's okay. I'm baffled by the significant amount of people in the states who still support the American president, given his hateful and often untruthful rhetoric. I'm also concerned by the Republican House members and senators who remain silent or worse, support his claims. Could you offer some insight as to how the states has gotten to this state? That's from Deb Broomfield from Owen Sound. Bruce, you're featured here. Let's get your

featured response. Look, I think it's a great question. And I think a lot of people who've been associated with the Republican Party for years have been asking themselves a similar thing. How could their party seem to become so untethered to any kind of standards of behavior in terms of how they campaign? of what we saw during the 2016 race for the White House, where he would appear on a stage with, I think it was as many as 17 or 16 other candidates. And he would talk about the physical looks of other candidates and whether, you know, Carly Fiorina's face was something that people would be willing to accept. He broke all kinds of standards. He did it in part because there was a certain affection for his combustibility on the part of the news media, especially obviously Fox News, but also because he used Twitter to break through all norms of

conduct in a way that gathered attention and frankly revealed that there were a much larger number of people who were willing to tolerate those kind of extraordinary displays of disrespectfulness and that sort of thing. So since then, when we look at the Republican Party and the silence, relatively speaking, of a lot of what we thought were more kind of orthodox people in the Republican Party, you know, I think one of the answers that is increasingly difficult to look at is the role of Fox News and the role of those social media platforms and Twitter in particular, the idea that Republicans who don't like what Trump is doing and how he's leading their party, being afraid that he will target them or that Fox

will target them or that they'll end up being primaries or that they'll end up kind of losing touch with their base because their base isn't really Republican anymore. It's become the Trump party. And if I were Republican in the United States, that'd be the thing I'd be trying to fix. You know, I look at campaigns and administrations a little differently, not differently from you, but sort of differently in the way I watch them. Because it's nothing unusual in a campaign for candidates to stretch the truth on both sides of whatever the campaign may be, whether it's in the States or in Canada or Britain or you name it.

There's always a certain element of that. We watched in 2016 where Trump took it to kind of a new level, the art of the lie. But there was some expectation that, you know, after he won, that that was somehow going to be different. And there was even a sense from the people around him, don't worry, he's going to be different when he's actually president. Well, that first, you know, I was in Washington for the inauguration. And I, you know, I'd been there for the inauguration, the first inauguration of Barack Obama. So there was no doubt in my mind, it was obvious to anyone who was there, was watching, that there was a marked difference in the size of the crowd um now it's not that trump's crowd was an embarrassing size because it wasn't there were a lot of people there but it was nowhere near the same size as the obama crowd however

trump put his people out and he said himself that this was the biggest crowd in the history of U.S. inaugurations. Now, we look back at that now and go, you know, big deal. What a silly thing to say. But you know what? That was lie number one of what has apparently been more than 20,000, you know, misstatements or untruths or lies, call them whatever you want, by Donald Trump in his administration. I can remember being so disappointed in that that weekend.

And I flew out of the inauguration was on a Friday. The Saturday was the big Women's March. Sunday morning, 6 a.m., I flew out of Washington. And I flew right over the White House, or as close as they let you get to, right over the White House on that flight path out of Reagan Airport. And I can remember tweeting, because we're still low enough that you could tweet, I can remember tweeting at that point something along the lines of, you know, when a president of the United States and the people around him lie, it is creating tension on one of the main pillars of democracy.

Now, I thought this is one lie, okay, and it's bad, it should never have happened, and hopefully that's not going to be the situation. Well, it's been like unending to the point now where there are constant lies and dozens sometimes in a period of 24 hours. So he has taken that to a new level, and Deb Broomfield's point about people in his party, whatever that party is now, because I acknowledge what you're saying, Bruce, that it's more a Trump party than a Republican party. But nevertheless, they haven't said anything. They sort of stand by, nodding, and do nothing. Don't take a stand against it, with very few

exceptions. Mitt Romney, perhaps the most obvious one. Anyway, good question from Deb Broomfield, but it comes just before this question from Dave Arsenault. And let's see how we deal with this one. Dave Arsenault writes, this is seeming more, and he's talking about the race next door here.

This is episode five, so I think this was after four episodes. This is seeming more and more like a total hit job on Trump. You could try to be a little more fair and balanced. Why don't you mention some of the good things about Trump? Well, first of all, we're not here to be fair and balanced. This is a podcast, not a newscast. And after I was in the news business

for all those years, decades, that was, you know, I kept to the straight and narrow in terms of not offering my opinion. I defy anybody to say they can prove what my opinion was on any public policy issue or election issue. But on this one, I don't have any trouble saying the guy's a liar. You know, he lies. And that has an impact on the way he governs. You can't be fair and balanced about that. There is no sort of other side of that story. Either he's a liar or he's not a liar. However, you're quite right. We have not mentioned any good things about Trump

since the race next door started. So I hand that over to Bruce. Well, you know, with respect to Dave, I mean, I appreciate that he's got a different opinion than I do about Donald Trump. And that maybe this podcast isn't just going to be perfect for him. And so if that's the case, then there's another five or six weeks or however many we've got left and he can use his time differently. But I'm with you, Peter. Look, I've known you forever and I've known that you had opinions, but for many of those years, I didn't know what they were. And I respected that about you and how you conducted your business as a newscaster and a journalist.

For me personally, I do have opinions. I'm here to kind of express them, and I've written opinions in the past. And for me to say that Trump has been shockingly bad. A disaster as a president is not unbalanced. It is an accurate reflection of what I think the evidence shows, whether or not we're talking about how he's put lives at risk during this pandemic, how he's treated allies of America, including Canada, and kind of broken down systems of governance globally that mattered in terms of saving lives and keeping peace in the world, how he's handled issues of critical importance like climate change. I'm really at a loss to find a version of how I could describe his role as president where it would meet that test of fair and balanced without being ultimately just very, very critical.

I think he's earned it. What will be interesting here is when we get closer to the debates, when it's one-on-one, Biden versus Trump, how they perform, who scored well, who didn't score well, and some of that. Because I think that, and I think you've mentioned this before, Bruce, that while we're looking at any number of different polls right now, and they seem to give the edge to Biden on pretty much all fronts

except the management of the economy, it's really going to come down for some people, for that small group of people who will decide this election who are not locked in already it may well come down to those debates and on those debates uh you know we learned from the last time there are different ways of looking at who performed the best on those who scored well and and didn't. So it'll be interesting to watch those. And for Dave Arsenault, who I hope will stay with us on this podcast, it'll be interesting for you, Dave, to see how we score that,

because that may be the determining factor if we're dealing with a small pool of people who will make the decision on this election outside of those who are already locked in. The debate night may be the night that does that. Okay, Trevor Barry writes from Saanich, BC. Great area. And this one, Bruce, is really kind of up your alley. He starts off by saying he loves the sub-pod, the podcast within a podcast. And so his question is kind of lengthy, but let me try and boil some of it down.

Whereas NAFTA became a huge political hot potato four years ago due to Trump, whereas free trade is often used, rightly or wrongly, as a talking point against climate action policies, such as border carbon adjustment, whereas Biden's team seems to be embracing build back better, and whereas the lack of blanket traditional campaigning opportunities due to COVID will lead even more to niche messaging,

to interest group influencers and targeted policy advocacy circles through online platforms. Therefore, I'm wondering about your thoughts. Is NAFTA III on the table with Biden? Does carbon pricing have a place in the U.S. trade deal discussions in this campaign? And can Biden point to the European Union as another example of a trading bloc demanding more from import supplier jurisdictions and trading partners? That's getting a little deep in the weeds here. about whether NAFTA, given the whole issue around that has surrounded the free trade debate in this country, perhaps more on a very public issue in terms of public debate in Canada than in the States, but certainly an issue in the States as far as legislators are concerned.

Is it on the table with Biden? Does it present an issue that Canadians should be watching very carefully? Well, I think it's a great question Trevor asks, and I've been thinking about it myself a fair bit because I work, as you suggested, in a lot of the fields around carbon and trade issues and energy and climate change and policy that's in that space. And I guess what I see is if Joe Biden wins this election, I think that Canada can look forward to a more reasonable conversation between our longer-term view of what we need to do to fight climate change, one that's more aligned with the values and perspectives of most Canadians and, indeed, most Canadian politicians. But I also think, so that's the good news. I think the challenging news is that, especially coming out of the economic carnage that is caused by this pandemic,

that Joe Biden is going to be expected to do a lot of things that kind of fit the America first economic agenda instinct that Donald Trump tapped into, the idea that America should buy America, that, you know, this kind of soft encroachment on the idea of free trade that sometimes isn't quite so soft. The difference might be that Biden will be saying he wants to do things to win the race, to attract all of the capital that cares more about decarbonization. And we in Canada have to do that, too. We have to compete for that. What I saw the other day was $40 trillion of capital that is looking for places to invest that care about decarbonization. Trump's not interested in that. Biden's very interested in that. opportunity, I think, to pitch itself and skill set and the ability of the country to contribute in that way. But I think Biden is going to try to compete in that space and not just do things that Canada likes in every instance. Here's the last question, and it kind of um it kind of dovetails with the whole nervousness on the part of a lot of people want to see trump gone in the sense that in 2016 they didn't think they didn't

think he was going to happen to start and they they misread we misread we all seem to not understand what was actually happening on the part of many voters in the United States, and Trump won. And so the concern this time around by those same people is that, is the same problem going to come up again this time? So Rob McKenzie writes from Toronto, I have a question for Bruce. Many of us in Canada are appalled by Donald Trump's performance in office the past four years and were hoping he would lose four years ago. But obviously, many professional and amateur pundits misunderstood the sentiment of a large number of voters or simply chose to ignore them. I realized after the election that I had unwittingly tuned into

people that simply reinforced my opinion, something I'm trying to avoid doing this time around. I now wonder if we're back in the same echo chamber. For example, excuse me, NPR, that's national public radio reported that the TV ratings for the democratic convention were higher than for the Republican one, which immediately suggests the Democrats have stronger support.

Not sure that's true, but nevertheless, that suggestion may have been taken by some. But I imagine this statistic ignores how many people watch bite-sized clips online, perhaps a more relevant figure. And it's easy to criticize Donald Trump's inability to read a teleprompter and his meandering and chaotic impromptu speeches, but does any of that really matter to people who voted for him last time? A lot of political analysts read the population incorrectly to an almost unbelievable degree last time. I think that's kind of overstated.

I mean, you know, there's different ways to look at some of those poll results. Some of them were actually pretty darn accurate because they had Hillary Clinton ahead a couple of points. Well, in fact, she was ahead a couple of points. However, what can Bruce say about things that are being done differently this time? Well, I think Rob's written a really great letter, a really great question. I think there is a lot more caution being taken. Sometimes I think maybe too much caution being taken by analysts who are looking at polling data this year, but it's better that there's more caution than there was the last time. I think that there was a general tendency to make a bit of an error in imagining the standards that voters expected of their politicians or were

willing to tolerate from Donald Trump. I can't help but trace that back to thinking about, well, reality TV, where did it come from and why did it start to thrive? And why did Donald Trump have such a popular show? And I kind of think about that phenomena as being a situation where people like being shocked by shocking behavior, whether it was on the talent shows where somebody was kind of treated dismissively for having tried to sing a song, or whether it was Donald Trump saying you're fired to people who were trying to prove their worth to him. But slowly but surely, I think we've been headed towards a world where we were shocked when Donald Trump said, I could shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue and my supporters wouldn't care. And that just seemed like such a

crazy exaggeration of the affection that voters would have for him, except here we are a few years later. And I don't know if that's literally true. I doubt it. But there's more truth to it than any of us or many of us ever really expected. So what are we doing differently this time? I certainly think that the analysts, the ones that I follow, the data that I look at personally, very focused on the electoral college, on the six, seven, maybe eight now swing states that will determine who wins the electoral college race rather than the national polls. I think that's really important to do. And I think it's important as well to look at how the campaigns are approaching it. You know, there was a good story in The New York Times the other day that said the Trump campaign has spent $800 million already and is having trouble raising the money that the Biden campaign is.

And that $800 million didn't do much to move votes in his direction, didn't maybe do anything to move votes in his direction. So I think the whole question of how money works and what to look for in the polls and how to understand how the different issues play out is crucially important. And for me, the most interesting thing in the last little while was the story about Trump's reported comments about veterans. Just bearing in mind that there are, I think, about 20 million Americans who are veterans, and that that, for Trump, has been an audience where he's had a roughly 15-point advantage in the past. And whether or not he has done something that will shake that advantage, I think is something I'll be watching. Yeah, I think we'll all be, we'll all be watching

that one because it does, you know, as, as Rob mentions, we all kind of learned a lesson the last time round. And some of the things that, that Trump said in that last campaign, especially about women in a, you know, particularly gross kind of way, we figured it was going to have a huge impact on him. As it turned out, it didn't. And as Michael Cohen suggested, those kind of things actually encouraged people to support him.

They thought, well, it's kind of cool that you had a president speaking that way. I'm not sure of that, but let's face it he won uh the military one seems to me and i hesitate saying this because we've been wrong so many times that this one just may be one foot over the line of acceptance on the part of some of his support. We'll see how that plays out. I do know that, you know, for those who are still questioning the Atlantic piece, I don't question at all. I know Jeffrey Goldberg. I've had dinner with Jeffrey Goldberg. I have enormous respect for him as a journalist, as do most other journalists that I'm aware of. This guy is rock solid.

And I have no doubt whatsoever, 100%, that the sources he has are sourcing from the front, so to speak, in the fact that they heard directly what Donald Trump was saying. And I believe everything that's in that report is 100% accurate. Will it have an impact? Well, as you say, Bruce, we're going to find out. And it won't take long. It's going to be in this next week. We're going to see the first real indications

of whether or not that particular article had an impact on support numbers. All right, we have covered a fair amount of ground, some of it on kind of the same theme, this issue of Trump and the Trump Party versus the Republican Party and the way the media is handling this whole story. But as Bruce says, we've got weeks to go on this, and that means there are going to be a lot more questions, I'm sure, from you. So don't hesitate sending them in. The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com.

The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com. We'll do this at least once more in the next little while, because I think it's a good use of time and a good connection with those of you who are watching this as closely as we are. Bruce, thanks very much. Good to talk to you, as usual. And we'll talk again next Wednesday. All right, Peter.

Good to talk to you. That's week five of the race next door. Interesting one. A long one. Longer than usual. But I can only blame you guys because you wrote the letters. And as I said, we love to hear and read your letters and respond to them when the opportunity arises. So once again, the Mansbridge podcast at gmail.com, the Mansbridge podcast at gmail.com. Tomorrow, Thursday, I'm not sure what we're going to do.

Friday, the weekend special, once again, use that address. Send us your comments and questions and whatever you may have, whatever take you may have on the issues that are confronting today outside of the Race Next Door. We'll keep those questions to the Race Next Door podcast

within a podcast. Anyway, that's it for this day, this Wednesday of week 26. I'm Peter Mansbridge. This has been the Bridge Daily. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll talk to you again in 24 hours.