The Bulwark Podcast - Steve Inskeep: Kevin Is No Lincoln
Episode Date: October 10, 2023Lincoln's political skills were a key part of his legacy, but the politics he practiced were not like today's base-oriented version. He didn't demonize people—and built a majority with people he dis...agreed with. The House GOP currently has lost sight of that. Steve Inskeep joins Charlie Sykes to discuss his new book on Lincoln, "Differ We Must." show notes: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/670070/differ-we-must-by-steve-inskeep/
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TreadExperts.ca Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast.
It is October 10th, 2023, and we are continuing to get our heads around the fact that the world has changed in so many dramatic ways. in my Morning Shots newsletter. I quote Ann Applebaum writing in The Atlantic saying,
don't be fooled into thinking that this is just a continuation of the same old cycle. This is something much worse. It is something uglier. It is as if ISIS has been reborn.
And so we're going to be talking about that at great length. We are joined today
by Steve Inskeep, co-host of NPR's Morning Edition, and the author of a new book out just last week,
Differ We Must, How Lincoln Succeeded in a Divided America.
And I have questions about that, Steve.
I have questions about Lincoln succeeding in a divided America because there was that whole Civil War thing.
There was a little Civil War thing.
There was like 800,000 Americans that died during that Civil War.
Yeah, it's pretty bad.
Yeah. Americans that died during that Civil War. Yeah, it's pretty bad. If you want to talk about this
now, I am happy to have that raised because I am not saying in this book that Abraham Lincoln
was a can-we-all-get-along guy or kiss-and-make-up guy or peace at any price or compromise at any
price. What Lincoln did, though, was when the South made war on the United States,
on the Union, when the South rose in rebellion, he worked to build as broad as possible a coalition
to uphold the Constitution. He didn't try to get along with everybody, but he talked with everybody,
he listened to everybody, he empathized and understood everybody he could, and he made
all the allies he could, which is what democracy is about. What are we looking for? And so you emphasize the fact that Abraham Lincoln was a politician
and was willing to get into the messy business of politics. He didn't mind sitting in a room
and cutting deals that might've been a little sketchy in different contexts.
Yeah. A little sketchy dealing with people that can feel morally perilous to deal with.
We do have a very negative image of politicians.
We have certain politicians whose behavior encourages us to have a very negative image of the profession.
But I think sometimes we disrespect the wrong things about politics.
We have this view, and I think this is true on the left and the right in somewhat different ways.
The parties are not the same, but they each have a variation on this, a feeling that if you talk
with the other side, if you deal with someone who differs with you at all, you are weak, you are
naive because they're never going to change their mind. You're even morally tainted by the association
with the other person. But the reality is that in a democracy,
that other person who is wrong still has a vote, which is the way it ought to be as long as we're
going to have a democracy. And so you have to deal with them because they are a person with power,
a little fragment of power, perhaps, but you have to deal with them on some level or outnumber them,
defeat them. And outnumbering them may call upon you to make allies that you
may not consider to be perfect. And I think Lincoln definitely understood that he needed
allies that he didn't agree with on everything, but maybe even just one out of 10 things they
could work together. Well, he also understood that politics and government were deadly serious
things. And we live in this very unserious time where, you know, you think
about the things that we have been debating, the kind of, you know, food fights we've been having.
Are you suggesting that it's unserious to overturn, say, the Speaker of the House of
Representatives without anybody lined up to be the replacement? Is that the kind of thing?
It's a radical thought. But I mean, we have an entire class of politicians that don't think
that politics is about actually doing anything. It's all about performance. It's all about the clicks. It's
all about the dopamine hits. And, you know, you go through all of the ephemera and the trivia and
just the personal back and forth. And you would think that this week would be one of those massive
reality checks. Look, the world is a deeply dangerous place. You know, we are seeing this
axis of evil rising up. And then maybe we have been
feeling that we could indulge this kind of politics of performative demagoguery because
we've been so complacent, right? That we can burn things down without consequences.
What's interesting about this book is the contrast between the politics of someone like Abraham
Lincoln and the politics that we are unfortunately having to endure right now. Because he understood that there were deadly consequences. It was not just a show. He just
couldn't say some, you know, throw some shit up against the wall and then go on cable television
that night, you know, to try to raise funds off of it. That was not what government was.
I mean, I've been very interested in the course of Kevin McCarthy, the former House Speaker,
because there have been a couple of moments this year where he acknowledged the seriousness of events.
There was a period in which he was trying to accommodate his right wing and accommodate his right wing and keep his job and saying things that appeared to be untrue and on and on and on.
But then the debt ceiling approached and he made a deal, which is what is necessary.
It is the system we have
in politics. I won't even say, because I'm a journalist, that it was the right thing or the
wrong thing, but it is the normal and expected thing. It is the way the system is supposed to
work. This happened again on September 30th. The government is supposed to stay open. There are
serious things to deal with. He could not get agreement on his own side, so he made a deal with
the other side, which is the kind of thing that you do that is the normal unexpected thing in a democracy. It's recognizing
the seriousness of the situation. But the second of those times, he had just enough of his colleagues
in the House who had a different idea of things, that you should never compromise, that you should
never make a deal, that there's never a moment that the overriding needs of the country
are greater than my personal view of what my party should do, even if I can't really express
what that is. And here we are. This is the moment that has been coming for so long, and it's
probably going to get worse. Interesting, we bring up Kevin McCarthy today because Kevin McCarthy is
not willing to let this particular crisis pass. And I'm not a betting man
on these things anymore. My prediction skills are quite limited. A week after he becomes the first
speaker in history who's to be ousted, he's essentially saying he's willing to come back
because there's a crisis in the Middle East and I'm still here, which by the way, is I would say
unlikely, but not impossible because right now nothing is impossible, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this morning on the day that we're talking here, we spoke with Susan Davis,
our excellent congressional correspondent, who sounded skeptical that McCarthy could round up
the votes. There's still that hardcore that dethroned him once who could dethrone him again.
But there are also a few lawmakers who are saying, I'm not going to vote for anybody but Kevin
McCarthy. And who knows what could happen? We have no idea. Yeah. I mean, the key is how do you get to 218 or 217? I lose track of how
many votes you need given the vacancies. Nobody is really close to that. So let's come back to that
just a little bit later. And I also want to come back to Lincoln a little bit later, because this
moment that we're in right now, where we are watching the world order be, I would say, certainly
transformed. Any hope that the Middle East was going to become peaceful, that there were going
to be new accords, that we're going to usher in a new era of kumbaya, completely destroyed.
The world seems to be lining up behind Israel for the moment. We know that the retribution is
going to happen. On Monday, you spoke with Ron
Dermer, the former Israeli ambassador to the United States, and he put this in the context of
it being Israel's 9-11, which we discussed on the podcast yesterday. So tell me what he said.
Yeah, yeah. I've had an opportunity to visit Israel and the West Bank and Gaza over the years,
and I've interviewed Netanyahu over the years a number of times. I've tried to pay attention to that story. It really is striking what we learned about Hamas
over the weekend. I was last there in 2018, which was an occasion, you may recall this,
there were Hamas people lashing out then, and their efforts were so pathetic compared to Israel's
power that it was almost sad. There
were random unarmed civilians effectively marching into machine guns. There were people sending
kites over the Israeli lines, hoping some kind of incendiary device would set a fire. I mean,
really, really weak ways to lash out at Israel. And we discovered over the weekend that they were
far more capable, I think, than anybody thought, that they. And we discovered over the weekend that they were far more capable,
I think, than anybody thought, that they had developed more capability over the last couple
of years. The brutality of this is hard to get your mind around. The targeting of civilians
is hard to get your mind around. And I mean, I've been around. I covered the Pentagon on 9-11.
I get that people do what people do, but it's still, I never get
used to it. I never am unsurprised that someone would kill women and children or take hostages
in the way that Hamas has done. And then, yes, on Monday, we interviewed Ron Dermer, who's a
close advisor to Netanyahu, was the ambassador to the United States, is now their minister for
strategic affairs. And one of the questions in my mind going into this interview, Charlie, as it would have been
yours, I'm sure, is what about civilian casualties? How are you going to strike this
densely populated area without killing a lot of innocent civilians? And he effectively preempted
my question by saying, we're going to do something very, very forceful and we're going to kill
civilians and it's just going to happen and you better deal with it. You better accept it. And he
demanded the support of the world in spite of his expectation that civilians will be killed.
I'm hard pressed to think of another interview where someone has been that frank about the
reality of damage to civilians. And of course, the Israeli defense minister has said, we're cutting
off food, we're cutting off water, we're cutting off electricity to a couple million people. It is
an excruciating situation, the solution to which I certainly don't know. And there are hostages.
Yeah. There are hostages in Hamas's hands, which obviously complicate this tremendously. You know,
there was once a time when it was the Israeli policy that we do not
negotiate with terrorists at all. And I'm hearing a lot of that, again, that if we negotiate for
these hostages, we will simply have more hostages. So what do they do? What happens now? What are the
prospects you can rescue these people? I mean, this has been horrible, but it seems likely with your
description that it's going to become even more horrible. Yeah. I mean, one possibility is that
they do attempt to rescue, right? And again, I have no inside information. And if I did,
it would be probably wrong of me to talk about it in public. And I don't have inside information,
but we know that the Israeli military has a lot of capabilities. They, in fact, have a history of
rescuing hostages on more than one occasion. Netanyahu himself, part of his life story is
rescuing hostages who were held on a plane, being involved in that operation. It's the opening of
his biography, which I got a chance to talk with him about last year when that was published,
his autobiography. Entebbe. Yes, exactly, the Entebbe raid.
And that was a long time ago, but there have been other occasions over the years.
So I don't regard it as impossible that the Israelis would go in and try to get anybody
they can, but it's going to be very difficult for the very reason that Dermer was forecasting
civilian casualties, because it is a crowded urban area.
It's not an airplane alone on a tarmac.
You have no idea what situation you may be going into. But that's one way this gets solved is a rescue. But if it doesn't
get everybody, if that fails, then you have excruciating decisions to make if you were the
prime minister of Israel. Okay, let's talk about the prime minister of Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu
has been around a very, very long time. A veteran politician has had his challenges at the moment. You know,
he obviously is trying to rally the world around his support, but the failure of intelligence,
the failure to stop this attack is really extraordinary. And it would be extraordinary
for anyone, but especially for someone who's been around as long as Benjamin Netanyahu. So what is your sense? In Israel, are they looking at Likud and saying,
you had one job? You had one job, which was to protect us. And well, what do you think?
That is one of the reactions. And I'll just report here, our correspondent, Daniel Estrin,
is on the ground in Israel, really, really excellent reporter. And he immediately,
in talking with people who lost relatives and
talking with people who have hostages now in Gaza, has found extreme anger with the government. Why
would they allow this failure? I'm trying to remember back to the fog of 9-11 in the United
States. And there certainly was anger at the U.S. government for this failure. And why was George
W. Bush reading to a kindergarten
class, or whatever questions people asked. But I remember a very wise statement by Tom Ricks.
Maybe he's been on this program at some point, the writer about military affairs and now historian,
friend of mine, wonderful guy. He came on our air after 9-11, and he said, I'm not sure that I would
want to live in a country that was ready for 9-11,
meaning that the security that would have been necessary to prevent that and foresee this very creative and horrible attack would have made it almost a totalitarian state. That was his view.
He would rather live in a free country and face the risk than live in an unfree country and not
face the risk. I think there were people who had that perspective. And there were
also people, of course, who supported George W. Bush's response to the attacks. His approval
ratings were like 90% and remained that way for a year or two. This seems to be a different
immediate reaction. Netanyahu's own government had divided the country, was pursuing an agenda
that a very large number of Israelis opposed, that they were in the streets over for months and months and months, which he modified somewhat but would not abandon.
And that led to anger against Netanyahu.
And also, the idea of an attack out of Gaza is not a surprise.
The scale and ferocity is a surprise.
At least it surprised me.
I did not realize they had that kind of capability.
But if you're the Israeli military, that's what you're paid to know. And they knew just where the
enemy was. And so there is some anger. It is incomprehensible. Now, there's a long and
complicated history, which I don't want to go deep down the rabbit hole. But Israel has, in many ways,
well, encouraged Hamas in the past, that they saw Hamas as a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority,
which has been weak. And as a result, there's been a little bit of pussyfooting around with Hamas,
a little bit of appeasement of Hamas. So that policy now has been utterly discredited. Obviously,
a certain amount of naivete on the part of the Netanyahu administration, that they thought that
Hamas was not posing an immediate threat, that they gave work permits to people in Gaza somehow that that would lessen the pressure. So they obviously did
not understand what was about to happen in terms of the logistics of this attack, the missiles,
the hang gliders, the bulldozers, all of that. But they also completely misread the mood of Hamas.
I mean, so this is like a multiple cascading
series of failures, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't want to comment too thoroughly
on the history. I mean, there are people who will say Israel created Hamas. I can't verify that
sitting here. But in any case, Israel has dealt with Hamas. There's an argument to be made that
Israel needed to deal with Hamas because it's just a reality. They were there. They controlled some territory.
It's territory that Israel withdrew from in 2005 and did not find it in its continuing interest to have a troop presence literally inside of Gaza.
And so they pulled away and built their walls.
And Hamas is there, and you have to deal with them in the same way that you would have to deal with any group of people or just realities like the weather. I mean, it's a reality that there are these people who live there
and feel that Israel is, or many of them feel that Israel is an illegitimate state and also know as
just a matter of literal fact that they don't have equal rights, don't have freedom of travel,
don't have a very free economy and are surrounded by walls. So you have this group that you need to deal with.
And they did make an effort when possible to deal with Hamas and to deal with Palestinians in the
West Bank, at least economically. This was part of Netanyahu's policy during his prior prime
ministerships and part of what he's at least spoke for in the present one, that he was happy to
encourage prosperity for Palestinians, but less and less
willing to allow anything that looked even remotely like independence for Palestinians.
I don't blame him for trying to deal with Hamas just as a reality, but they did not see the attack
coming, that's for sure. So this is a far-right government, and since we're going to be talking
about politics and the messy business of politics, Netanyahu presides over a far-right government that has engaged in, you know, has pushed policies
that are really torn this country apart. I mean, there was actually talk about the possibility of
maybe metaphorical civil war, but you had people in the security services, people in the military
who were saying that, look, this is weakening the country. This is making the country more vulnerable. This was as divided a country as we have seen since, I think, 1948. You may have a different
impression. So to what extent did that contribute either to Hamas's perception that Israel was weak
and divided or to the reality that, in fact, Netanyahu and his small circle had become so
isolated from the security services or
people in the military that they weren't listening, that they weren't paying attention,
that they had become disconnected from this apparatus. What do you think?
I am reluctant to draw that conclusion as many people instantly did because you want to report,
you want to be based on facts. But the reality is that the government did have a giant distraction, a very divisive distraction. I think about this often in terms of the United States. I
even think of it in terms of the story of Lincoln. We create these giant distractions for ourselves,
and we really need to be worrying about other things. Why did we spend the spring in a pointless
debate over the debt ceiling when we needed to be paying attention to China? Why did we almost have a government shutdown when we needed to be paying attention
to things? Why did we then have a deposing the Speaker of the House and freezing the House of
Representatives when there might be a crisis any minute and suddenly there was one? Why are we
having a lot of the arguments that we have over cultural memes and social media messages when
there are other more serious things to argue about? This is a question that I have. My research about Lincoln makes me think about this
too, because Lincoln tried to focus on one central goal. He's the president of the United States.
There was a rebellion. He wanted to focus on that. He wanted to keep people united on that one goal,
preserving the union. He tried to shove other controversies to the side, not always successfully, but he was trying for the one big goal. And while I am reluctant, as I said, to say
the distraction in Israeli society made them more vulnerable, it is no doubt, though, a distraction
from serious threats that they were aware were in the neighborhood.
I thought it was interesting what Ambassador Dermer told you when he was describing this forceful response. He said,
the last time we saw something like this was when ISIS came out on the stage. You saw that in the
trucks with these fighters wearing the jihadi banners, going in indiscriminately, mowing down
people. This is an interesting analogy that what we are seeing is kind of ISIS writ large. We're
seeing this new style of just pure, raw terror, aren't we?
I don't know what to make of the civilian casualties here.
Like I said, no matter how often it happens, I never get used to it.
And there is a bit of an analogy here as well,
because we're talking about a group that has an identifiable strip of territory
that they control, and that complicates the challenge of addressing it.
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Let's talk about Lincoln.
What I find fascinating about this is, of course, we feel that we live in these incredibly
divisive, dangerous times, which I think is true.
I do think that there's a challenge to national unity that is as great as anything we've seen
in decades.
And so I think it's very valuable to look back at other moments of crisis and division in
American history and how we got through it. It often does feel that the decade that seems
most parallel to what we're going through right now might be the 1850s. What do you think of that
analogy? This is the country bubbling, bubbling, bubbling and the divisions becoming you know
more and more raw. I think there's a little something to that analogy. I mean This is the country bubbling, bubbling, bubbling, and the divisions becoming more and more
raw. I think there's a little something to that analogy. I mean, this is the third book I've
written on 19th century America. I wrote a thing about Andrew Jackson, the Cherokees, John Ross,
the Cherokee chief. I wrote a thing about an 1850s presidential candidate, John C. Fremont,
and his wife, Jessie. And now I've written this Lincoln book where a lot of the action takes place in the 1850s.
And maybe one of the reasons I've come to dwell on that part of history is because I feel the parallels as a news reporter covering the news today. It was an increasingly divided time,
an ideologically divided time, a culturally divided time, an economically divided time,
and a time when people were arguing
over questions like equality and who belongs in America and who does not. And you can feel the
similarities to today when you read the rhetoric that people use. The issues are different, but
somehow the approaches and appeals to other human beings are the same. I want to do one caveat
before we go on,
and that is people say, well, you think we're heading for a new civil war. And at this time,
I do not, because I feel that so many of our disputes are almost about nothing. They're
pointless. They're performative, to use your excellently chosen word. And it's just hard to
see people going to civil war over whose's House Speaker or, you know,
over the debt ceiling. It's just, it's hard to see some of these things being as gigantic
and cutting through society as slavery. But political violence, I think, is very possible.
It's not a civil war, civil war. So it may not be a civil war between states, but among,
within the states, between red and blue. I mean, so what is the context of January
6th? Because that was a violent uprising, and we do have this buzz about secession.
Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, I think the idea of some political violence is very possible because that's
really a lot of American history. Even if you set aside the giant Civil War where people raised
armies and set armies against one another.
The more than a decade after the Civil War included tremendous political violence across the southern United States as black people gained the right to vote and then progressively lost the right to vote
and got to serve in office and then progressively were kicked out of office,
often through various kinds of violent uprisings and terror campaigns.
And we could go all through history, I mean,
labor disputes that become violent, the civil rights movement, tremendous violence in the 19th,
we could just go on and on. There's a lot of political violence in this country. I think that
more of it is to be expected because of that history. And because of January 6th, I'm not
saying it's all going to be peaceful and all going to work out. I'm just making that limited claim that it's hard to see. I do not at this time foresee the events
that would break the country apart. Check back with me in a year and I'll let you know.
Okay. So we started off talking about Lincoln's political skills because, and I want to talk
about in terms of, you know, the, that he was a politician. And this is something that I think is,
that's what's interesting about your book that you focus in on that at a time when politics is in very, very bad order. So what were
Lincoln's political skills? I mean, you talk about how he wouldn't ostracize people. He didn't have
this puritanical approach to politics where he thought that he should separate himself from
people that he disagreed with. So talk to me a little bit about that, because the flip side,
of course, is that this is the man that presided over the absolute division of the country in which we killed
hundreds of thousands of one another. So how do we reconcile those two things?
Absolutely. I mean, he did not virtue signal. He was not about showing that he was the most
proper person with the most progressive views. He did not demonize people. He was arguing
over the greatest moral issue, arguably, that the country has ever faced, slavery. And he considered
slavery a moral outrage, but he didn't act like he was morally superior to other people or even
tell his supporters to. There's a quote from a speech in 1854. He's in the free state of Illinois,
so he's talking to an audience
that at least notionally opposes slavery, but they probably got relatives and cousins back in
Kentucky and other places that practice slavery. And he actually says, if we were in the place of
slave owners, we might do exactly as they do. And if they were in our place, they might do exactly
as we do. Essentially, he was saying
people are shaped by their environment. They're shaped by their circumstances and their interests.
And slaveholders had, in many cases, inherited a centuries-old system, which they naturally
defended out of self-interest. So I think there's something really powerful in that
that's really useful. I mean, I got a chance to
talk just the other day about this book in a church, and I was thinking about that idea of
all of us as being flawed, none of us being perfect, all of us having imperfect beliefs on
race or anything else that probably will be outdated in 10 years anyway, whatever we think
is proper now. But what Lincoln was willing to focus on, rather than the individuals,
was a system that degraded human beings and corrupted human beings and had to change.
So that was one thing. I'll mention another thing. Having taken this kind of modest view,
that he wasn't morally superior to everybody, he thought about who he was speaking with.
He empathized with them, and he considered their interests,
their self-interest in many cases. He had this view of humanity that everybody is
guided in some sense by self-interest, which sounds really grim, but it's also understandable
because if we don't look after our interests, then somebody has to. And so he would shape his
arguments to appeal to that. No, that's interesting. I mean, you point out that he spoke carefully.
He did not demonize his opponents.
And he shied away from the most radical responses to slavery because he had this, you know,
this is their self-interest.
This is our self-interest.
He had the moral principle.
But he was careful not to do that.
In practical terms, I could certainly imagine him today being accused of
being too squishy, too soft, too willing to not, because he was an incrementalist. He wanted to
abolish slavery, but he was very pragmatic and in some ways kind of conservative in his approach to
it. People use the word conservative, and I don't think they use the word squish, but people talked
about him that way at the time.
If you were a radical abolitionist, you might be suspicious of Abraham Lincoln and what he really stood for and the fact that he would also be like friends with slaveholders.
And he also had views that we would consider objectionable, like maybe black people should move to some other country and be free there.
There's a lot there to object to.
But he was also a constitutionalist. He believed in the
Constitution. He believed the Constitution limited what he could get away with in terms of attacking
slavery in states that practiced it. So he wanted to do the maximum that was politically and legally
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So the story's in the book.
I mean, the book is, you know, differ, we must.
And you use 16 encounters
with 16 different people that he disagreed with, that he was willing to sit down with. So let's
talk about some of these 16. You talked about Joshua Speed years before the war. Another one
of these face-to-face encounters was Frederick Douglass in August, 1863. So what were they
differing about? How did that go? Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass in August 1863. So what were they differing about?
How did that go?
Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass
in the midst of the Civil War.
Yeah, this is one of my favorite encounters.
Douglass, and I guess we should clarify
because people get confused.
There's Stephen Douglass,
the senator that Lincoln debated
in the Lincoln-
Not to be confused.
Exactly.
Really not good views on slavery.
And Frederick Douglass, who escaped from slavery and became a writer and orator and had an extra S on his name,
and was just an amazing figure because he was working both the inside and the outside.
On the outside, he was very critical of Lincoln for the reasons we just said.
Why are you so slow to abolish slavery?
Why are you not doing more?
Why do you not understand what obviously is necessary as the South goes to war? But on the inside, he supported Lincoln's Republican Party,
which he knew was anti-slavery, not as radical as he wanted it to be, but he was pragmatic too
and said, this party has a chance to win, which they did win. And this party is in power and so
they can do things and I support them. And when Lincoln did finally issue
the Emancipation Proclamation, Douglass took part in helping to recruit black men for the United
States Army. He then felt that Lincoln's administration was failing to provide equal
treatment, equal pay and other things to those black men. So the black soldiers were not being
paid the same as the white soldiers? Barely more than half. And they couldn't be promoted as officers the way that white men
could. And they had other disadvantages. Douglas went to Lincoln at the White House to protest,
to tell Lincoln off. And they ended up having a really remarkable discussion that Lincoln handled
in a very effective way. Okay. So he basically explained the politics. He said he would fix it,
which he
eventually did. How do we know about that conversation? It's a private conversation.
It's a private conversation. This is true with all of these. And in fact, I might have chosen
other meetings had there been better records of just what was said. In this case, there's a
documentary record that includes several accounts by Frederick Douglass himself. He wrote a
contemporaneous letter like a day or two
afterward to the head of military recruiting, the guy who was basically his boss as a recruiter.
And so that seems like a fairly reliable source that has a lot of really fascinating detail.
And then he spoke about it other times. He talked about it in speeches a few months later.
He wrote an article about this decades later in the 1880s,
I believe. So there are differing accounts that give different details and you have to sift it a
little bit and you have to be a little bit careful. There are other things as well, documents that
came out of that meeting that can be used to produce the context. But that was a challenge
with all of these 16 meetings. How much do I believe? How long after the meeting did somebody
write down an account of it? How do I reconstruct believe? How long after the meeting did somebody write
down an account of it? How do I reconstruct Lincoln's view of it? Sometimes Lincoln left
an account of it, but of course Lincoln did not live to write a memoir. So some of these meetings,
we don't have Lincoln's side at all. And then I try to do this with all my history. I try to choose
occasions where I can document things that happened reasonably well so that we can have
a fact-based discussion rather than speculating. So speaking of speculation, and this of course is a hypothetical
that we wondered about for a very, very long time. If Lincoln had lived, would reconstruction have
played out differently and how would it? Because that was such a disaster. The country was one of
the ugliest periods in
American history. I know we try to gloss over it. There's a big debate about how we teach it in
schools, but the degree of political violence, the backsliding on racial equality, it was horrific.
Just give me your thoughts about if Lincoln had lived, which of course we don't know the answer
definitively. Yeah, I guess I should spend just a few seconds explaining the thing that was wrong
with Lincoln being killed, aside from him being killed. He was replaced by a vice president who
turned out to be politically very different than him. Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, W.E.B. DuBois
has this great history of what he calls black reconstruction that has a very long and sympathetic
chapter about Andrew Johnson that ultimately scourges him because he deserved it.
But Johnson was an interesting guy. He was a poor white man. He was in favor of the poor. He had a very populist mindset and was pro-union at a time when it was very hard and the state tried to leave
the union. But at the end of the Civil War, when he became president, he was turned away from all
of that and was played upon by Southern sympathizers,
essentially, to put his prejudice first, his prejudice against black people first.
And he was a deeply racist figure, right? I mean, he was viciously.
Fantastically racist. And honestly, a lot of people, even the so-called good people in this
era are often racist by our standards, but he was a particularly bad one. And he wanted the South to remain as close
to the past as it had been without technically slavery. But he was not willing, for example,
to allow black men to vote. It seems clear to me that Lincoln as a president would have approached
things differently. He also, as we noted, said things that just by definition are racist to us,
but was in favor of equality, was in favor of all the equality that you could get away with
politically at any given time, was talking about getting black men the vote in the very last speech
of his life, and had committed to people like Frederick Douglass that having staked out a
position he was not going to back up. It might still have been a
disappointing and violent period that might have turned out about as it did, because Lincoln would
not have been president forever. But he definitely would have taken a different approach and a more
supportive approach to equality in those almost four years that he should have had left as president.
And circling back to the fact that he was a very, very skilled politician, and I know you gave an interview to a Boston NPR
affiliate and talked about the central understandings that Lincoln had about politics
was that you needed a majority. You needed to actually win elections. And you brought this
around with the interviewer to talk about what's happening with the House of Representatives, that
House Republicans seem to have lost the narrative, right?
Yeah, I mean, it's incredible.
They don't seem to understand that you need a majority to get anything done.
And that means you need to make some compromises you might not like.
Yeah, I feel that they blew it three times here, really, Charlie.
And the first is the way they ran in 2022.
They expected a much bigger majority, but didn't run the right kind of candidates and
the right kind of campaign to get that. So they had a very small and vulnerable majority. McCarthy
ended up getting a majority for the speakership, but not, it turns out, in a stable or lasting way.
And then that's two. And then the third is Matt Gaetz. I mean, congratulations to him. He achieved
his objective, but he doesn't have a majority either, which is why nobody knows what's going to happen here. Matt Gaetz may not care about
having a majority. So in the same interview that I was very interested in your comments,
one of the dilemmas these days covering American politics is, and I'm going to ask you as a
prominent member of the media, how do we cover Donald Trump? It is a unique problem. I mean, you said you're
happy to say the former president is alleged to have committed a crime, but I'm not going to try
to pretend that I don't already know that he tried to overturn the election that he lost.
I know how difficult it is to deal with someone who lies as aggressively and consistently as
Donald Trump does. But do you think, and I'm asking you to put your media critic hat on now,
has the media figured out how to cover Donald Trump?
Have they learned anything from 2016?
Because I'm not convinced they have.
Well, I mean, you may be right about that.
I mean, Trump drives a lot of clicks
and a lot of attention,
and it's very tempting to go into that.
I think that first you need to cover Trump.
And there are some people who will say, don't cover him.
Don't pay attention to him.
We got some criticism when I interviewed Donald Trump in 2022.
And I asked him some hard questions and he hung up on me.
But I think it was right to cover Trump.
I think it was right to talk to Trump.
Because, I mean, think about this for a minute.
Like we were just talking about Israel and Hamas.
I'm going to cover Hamas.
I've been to Gaza. I've talked to Hamas guys. Why would I not talk to them? They are doing things
that we need to pay attention to with lives at stake. That doesn't mean I'm carrying their
propaganda, but I want to understand what's going on over there in every way that I possibly can.
And in the same way, of course, I'm also going to talk to an American political figure, even if he attempted to overturn his 2020 defeat, which he obviously did. And I'm going to
cover him. But I want to cover him and anybody. This goes for Joe Biden. It goes for anybody.
I want to cover them in context. I want to pay attention to what they're saying and failing to
say. I want to pay attention to what's true and false. And when I present all of that on the air,
I want to make sure that it comes with enough information and enough context that anybody
listening can understand who's lying and who's telling the truth, and they can make their own
judgment about who makes sense. Okay, so I should remember this, but what did you say to him that
made him hang up on you? It was a series of questions having to do with the 2020 election.
Yeah. I don't know that it was any one question particularly, but he made a number of false statements and I kept correcting him and
then asking further questions. And he didn't like that. And we were scheduled for 15 minutes and he
hung up after a little less than 10. Okay. I just wanted to play a little bit of that.
How come when he went to speak in different locations, nobody came to watch, but all of a
sudden he got 80 million votes.
If you're forgiving me, maybe because the election was about you.
If I can just move on to ask, are you telling Republicans in 2022 that they must press your case on the past election in order to get your endorsement?
Is that an absolute?
They're going to do whatever they want to do.
Whatever they have to do, they're going to do. But the ones that are smart, the ones that know, you take a look at, again, you take a look at how Carrie Lake is
doing running for governor. She's very big on this issue. She's leading by a lot. People have
no idea how big this issue is and they don't want it to happen again. It shouldn't be allowed to
happen and they don't want it to happen again. And the only way it's not going to happen again is you have to solve the problem of the presidential rigged election of 2020.
Mr. President, one more question. I want to ask about a court hearing yesterday on January 6th.
Judge Amit Mehta, he's gone. Okay. So interestingly, Steve, my one and only time that I interviewed
Donald Trump, he didn't hang up on me, weirdly enough, back in 2016.
But one of the points that I tried to make with him, and I was trying to get my head around,
you know, this was when he was making fun of Ted Cruz's wife and how she was ugly. And the thought
that came to my mind was that, and I asked him about this, I said, you're running for the office
that Abraham Lincoln once held. Because in that moment, I had the contrast. And
this is how that exchange went. Is this your standard that if a supporter of another candidate,
not the candidate himself, does something despicable, that it's OK for you personally,
a candidate for president of the United States to behave in that same way? I mean, I expect that
from a 12 year old bully on the playground, not somebody who wants the office held by Abraham Lincoln. So we both had our Trump encounters, our Trump-Lincoln encounters here. So Steve,
having studied all of this and immersed yourself so deeply in the 19th century American history,
while you're covering what we're going through right now, how optimistic slash hopeful are you?
What will it take to get out of this moment? For Abraham
Lincoln, it took a horrific civil war. What's it going to take for us? What do you think?
I think that it requires persistent application of the principles of democracy.
Lots of people walk around saying they're worried about democracy.
We don't need everybody to be an ally in that cause. We do need a majority to be an
ally in that cause. And that may call for difficult compromises or reaching across to make allies. I
mean, I think about someone like Liz Cheney, who ultimately lost her job over this, but worked with
the committee that was investigating January 6th and produced a voluminous public record of it
on a bipartisan basis, even though she was dealing with people who, if the issue were different,
they'd be profoundly on different pages. And I think there were even people who kind of despised
Cheney for things that she had said on various issues over the years. You need to build a
majority. That means reaching out to lots of different kinds of people. If you think about this from a democratic perspective in 2024, Democrats are going to lose the Senate unless
they do reasonably well in a number of States that are more conservative and even support
senators who progressives can't stand. And if you think about it from a Republican perspective,
Republicans are likely to lose the presidential election unless they can persuade
suburban voters who used to be Republicans that they're not way too extreme. And so each party
really has a coalition building problem, and whoever's the better coalition builder is likely
to win. But when we talk about democracy, we're not just talking about majorities, are we? We're
also talking about the rule of law. We are a liberal constitutional democracy. And one of the key things that I took from your book about
Abraham Lincoln was he was a very good politician, understood the need for majority, but he was also,
as you point out, a constitutionalist. And we're going to be stress testing the rule of law and
whether or not the constitution does have the guardrails that the founders thought they
were putting in place to deal with someone like a Donald Trump. Yeah. And honestly, I mean,
ultimately, Charlie, I think you know this really well. The guardrails are great. We have lots of
them. But ultimately, the guardrails are people. We need people in institutions to support the
institutions. We need a public that broadly understands that we have constitutional institutions. We may have to swallow things that we hate. I mean, Lincoln even said the Fugitive
Slave Act of 1850, a horrible law. He said, okay, I hate it, but it's the law. It's constitutional.
I'm not going to argue about it. It is the law. Lincoln said another thing, though, that I think
is kind of inspirational. When he was elected and before he was inaugurated and Southern states were
beginning to claim that they had left the union, he said, there's no way that I can accept this
because my job, my constitutional responsibility is to, quote, run the machine as it is. That is
our first obligation as citizens. We have inherited this machine. It's worked up to now,
and our first job is to run that machine as it is. The book is Differ We Must, How Lincoln
Succeeded in a Divided America. Steve Inskeep, of course, is co-host of NPR's Morning Edition,
and it's Up First podcast. Thank you so much for joining us on the Bulwark Podcast today, Steve.
It's an honor, Charlie.
Thank you so much.
And thank you all for listening to today's Bulwark Podcast.
I'm Charlie Sykes.
We'll be back tomorrow, and we'll do this all over again.
The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.