The Bulwark Podcast - Susan Glasser and Peter Baker: Trump's Hostile Takeover of the Government

Episode Date: December 30, 2022

During his four years in office, Trump kept testing the weaknesses in our Constitutional system — and January 6 was the culmination of his war on the institutions of American government. Susan Glasser and Peter Baker's book, "The Divider" captures the threat Trump posed. But as they told Charlie Sykes, their book is not just history: It's also a prologue if he returns to power. This encore episode was originally released in September. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. As we head into the New Year's weekend, we're sharing another entry from our Best of 2022 list, an interview with duo Susan Glasser and Peter Baker about their history of Trump's presidency, which is also a warning about a potential future should he return to the White House. They explain that the real story of the Trump presidency is a war on American institutions. Let's go back to when I introduced them back in September. Susan Glasser is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Peter Baker is chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, and they joined me today

on the podcast. Good morning to both of you. Hey, thanks for having us. Appreciate it. Oh, I'm so glad to be back with you. Thank you. Well, I appreciate it. So I have to ask you. I have to ask you both. Now, I have an answer. There's so much in this book. What's your favorite story? What's your favorite anecdote? What's the one that you think, this is just, this is gold? Oh, man. You know, you starting out with the tough questions here. There are a lot of classic Trump moments here. But for me, I have to say, when we first heard the real story of how Donald Trump got Shinzo Abe to nominate him for a Nobel Peace Prize,

for me, that really hit home because it's got every ingredient of the quintessential Trump story. Donald Trump, you know, bragged and bragged and bragged about his, by the way, non-existent nuclear deal with Kim Jong-un and of course, his love affair with Kim Jong-un. And he would go in these rallies, he would say, can you believe it? The prime minister of Japan has nominated me for a Nobel Peace Prize. And then we learn in the course of reporting for this book that in fact, the reason Shinzo Abe nominated Donald Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize is because Donald Trump had him to a private dinner, just the two of them at Trump Tower in the fall of 2018, at which he asked Shinzo Abe to nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize for the purpose, clearly, of then

bragging about it endlessly. And to me, that just is the ultimate grift. You know, a fake nuclear deal, a fake nomination for the Peace Prize. It's got it all. Okay, Peter, your favorite one? It is hard. You're asking us to pick between our babies. You know, there's the one that's gotten a lot of attention, which I still think is interesting is his frustration with his generals, my generals, as he called them. And he says to John Kelly, he says, why can't you be more like the German generals? And Kelly's like, which German generals? I mean, the one in World War II, the Nazi generals who worked for Hitler. You know, they tried to kill Hitler three times, right? Which Trump didn't know.

But I'm going to sneak in another anecdote, which I also think is fascinating. When he once calls up King Abdullah of Jordan and he said, hey, King, I got a great deal for you. Yeah, I'm going to give you the West Bank. And anybody who knows about the Palestinian politics in Jordan understands that the King of Jordan does not want another Palestinian population in his country. And he later told an American friend, he says, I thought I was having a heart attack. He said, I doubled over. I couldn't breathe. But it also told you a lot about Trump and his lack of understanding of the politics of the Middle East and the history and culture of the Middle East and why this would in fact give King Abdullah a heart attack. Well, there's so many to choose from, but you have

actually put your finger on my personal favorite, which is, you know, Trump, one of the totally loyal generals like the Nazi generals under Adolf Hitler. But his obsession with looking at your own generals and thinking, why can't you be more like Hitler's generals? I mean, there's something going on in his mind there that is extraordinary. And leaving aside the fact that they lost World War II, that that's the model in his mind for what kind of a military he wants. Yeah, he wanted generals who saluted and said, yes, sir, and basically didn't think about what it was that they were saying, yes, sir, too. Exactly. Okay. So before we dive into some of the details of all of this,

I think there's two questions that we just have to address since we're starting with the tough ones right away. Wait, but what's your favorite? Oh, that's my favorite. My Nazi general thing was absolutely my favorite. I just think that is just so extraordinary. No, that is my personal favorite. So diving into these really difficult questions, I have to ask you both of you, why another book about Trump? It does feel as if, okay, you know, he's awful, he's terrible, he's dangerous. We got it. Why another book? Well, you know, what I would say is actually, this is the first book of its kind. I mean, the truth is nobody ever took a look at the full four-year history of this presidency, right? They did pieces of it. There's some remarkably

good books out there, but they all did a piece of it, a year here or a topic there. Nobody sat back and said, okay, what does this whole four years add up to? And the thrust of this is that the January 6th eruption, explosion, is not a one-off. It's not an aberration. It's really the ultimate culmination of four years of war on the institutions of American government, right? He didn't believe the military should be apolitical. He didn't believe the Justice Department and the law enforcement system should be apolitical. He tried to bend the health care bureaucracy to his personal whim.

And so to understand January 6, 2021, you really got to understand January 20, 2017, and every day in between. And that was the goal of this book. Nobody has done that so far. Susan, you want to take a crack at that? I agree. No, look, Charlie, I'm glad you asked this because, you know, Peter and I were struck by the urgency of what in the aftermath of any other presidency would have been an act of history. This is history, but with an overlay of the present and possibly the future at issue. So it's a very ambitious project to do this in a short amount of time.

As Peter said, we did something like 300 original interviews, all of them after Trump left office and his second impeachment, in order to essentially take testimony. But it's also a pretty urgent guide to understanding the vulnerabilities in the institutions that Trump tested and tested over four years. And he found a lot of vulnerabilities. Remember that a second Trump term, that's very clear takeaway. A second Trump term would be quite different from the first, in part because he spent four years trying to understand the weaknesses in the institutions he wanted to blow up and understanding the kind of people he wanted to blow up, and understanding the kind of people he wanted to surround himself with, who, unlike John Kelly, might be more inclined

to offer the kind of personal loyalty that Trump sees as the most important factor in anyone who serves him. Well, that's why I wanted to ask you this question, because there is a history there, but it really has the real world relevance, Because as you pointed out in another interview, what's passed is prologue. That's the ultimate case study of you can see what this next term would be like, what is ahead of us. Okay, so you explain that the real story of this book, and it's the real through line of the Trump presidency, is war on American institutions. So let's talk about this. Since my favorite anecdote had to deal with the military, the tension and the back and forth that you describe between the top figures in the U.S. military is truly extraordinary. What they were

saying privately, didn't share with the public at the time, but how alarmed they were about the experience of working with a commander in chief like Donald Trump. Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, you know, Mark Milley, the chairman of Joint Chiefs, we have his resignation letter that he writes, but doesn't send. And that's, you know, in some ways, one of the biggest revelations we think in the book, his letter was something I think has never been, I've certainly haven't seen any example of it in American politics, right? A letter to a president of the United States, to his commander in chief saying, I'm resigning because, you know, you are doing great and irreparable harm to our country.

You're ruining the international order and you don't believe in the values that we fought World War II for. But, you know, it wasn't just Milley. I mean, it was his predecessor, Joe Dunford. It was Paul Selva, the vice chair of the Joint Chiefs. In fact, it was every member of the Joint Chiefs. You know, there's a moment in the book you ask about anecdotes where Trump is intent on having this military parade down the streets of Washington, D.C. And the military didn't like this, even though in theory it's celebrating them. They saw that as dangerous. And in fact, Paul Selva, the vice chair of the Joint Chiefs, says to the president in the meeting, look, you know, I grew up in Portugal, which was at the time a military dictatorship.

This isn't what democracies do. He says, this is what dictators do. Think about that. He's in the Oval Office telling the president of the United States, this is what dictators do. And it didn't dissuade Trump. That's right. That was in 2017, Charlie.

That was in 2017, Charlie. That was in 2017. So again, the full four-year story presents, I think, an even more alarming picture in many ways of the nature and seriousness of the threats that Trump posed to American institutions like that of a nonpartisan military. Among the most jaw-dropping things in the book is that the text of that letter from General Milley, where he just lays out the threat that he thinks that Donald Trump poses. I mean, it holds nothing back. But as we, of course, know, he didn't send it. He didn't resign. Why not? Why did he not? I learned this a lot in reporting out this part of the book. The tradition in the U.S. military is not of resignation in protest of our senior uniformed officers for a very good reason, which is to say that that could inadvertently perhaps contribute to the politicization of the military. Right. If you know, if you had officers sort of defying the president or being perceived to defy the president. I also think that Milley was counseled by people like

Bob Gates, the former defense secretary to both Democrats and Republicans and experts on the subject that this would actually potentially give Trump what he craved, which is, you know, an enemy of foil. And you see that in some of the public criticism of Milley now from Trump's allies. So the idea instead was to essentially join hands with all of the rest of the uniformed chiefs and to make it clear to Trump that if he fired Milley, he was going to have to fire all of them, that they were going to, as Milley told advisors at one point, if we have to, we'll put on our uniforms and go across the river all together. Hold hands. What a scene that would have been, right? If all of the joint chiefs essentially stood in front of the president and

said, you know, you do this and you fire us all. So I think there was a certain power in using what leverage they had to try to, you know, constrain Trump from the inside. I should point out, not from lawful orders, but their resistance was in the form of trying to make sure that he didn't do something like declare martial law after the election, which we now know and did not at the time. But we now know from the investigations and a variety of other sources, Donald Trump was seriously, in fact, considering martial law and held a five-hour meeting in the Oval Office on December 18, 2021, with Mike Flynn and others at which he actively considered imposing martial law in order to seize voting machines and pursue his lies about the election. This wasn't some sort of like fantasy fever dream fear of the Joint Chiefs, but in fact, a reality that was much closer than many Americans believed was possible.

Well, let's just pull back for a second from the details of that. Why are we learning so much after the presidency? Why are the people who are speaking out now, why did they not alert the electorate before the election? Why was this not reported? Again, it does seem like there were a lot of people who now say, well, you know, I said this in private or I was concerned about this in private. Wouldn't it have been helpful had they spoken out earlier when this might have made more of a difference? Yeah, I think that's a very valid question and one that they're all going to have to answer with when they're all going to have to struggle with in history. And I think that's a very valid question and one that they're all going to have to answer with one they're all going to have to struggle with in history.

And I think that there was a frustration. There were junior officials, people who are not as high up as some of the ones that we write about in this book, who did speak out and then tried to get their higher ranking colleagues to join them and who basically refused. You know, in some cases, a handful of them did say something or at least here or there made a comment or two, but broadly speaking, kept quiet. And I think that that was a choice that they made that they're going to have to answer for. It's not unusual, though, that we learn more after presidency is over. If you go back and look at all of the histories of, you know, presidencies, people are

always freer to talk, always more willing to talk, partly, as you say, to reputation wash, right, to try to put their own spin on history for their own sake, justify what they did and so forth. But also because at this point, in this particular instance, I think they're all concerned about what would happen if there is a second term, and some of them are more willing to speak out now to make clear what happened in the four years that we did have. Well, and I also want to point out that, you know, there are different motivations or different responsibilities by different kinds of characters in the administration, right? So it would not have been appropriate for the uniformed military, the generals to speak out in real time. If they weren't going to quit, then, you know, their obligation absolutely was to continue their service, and it would have been wildly inappropriate for them to speak out.

And even, you know, what they did do was in some ways unprecedented, right? You did have General Milley, Chairman Milley, after the Lafayette Square photo op, giving a commencement address in which he apologized for participating in that photo op in his combat fatigues marching across lafayette square soon after it had been violently cleared of black lives matters protesters and and that was controversial in and of itself but you know so that's one group of people but then you have the very very frustrating story of course of people like mike pompeo the secretary of state who was one of the most obsequious of the Trump officials in public and in private. Even he was so alarmed that he went to Milley's house on the evening of November 9th, 2020, and said the crazies have taken over and teamed up with him on what they called land

the plane phone calls in the desperate effort to constrain Trump and get the country to January 20th. And Mike Pompeo to this day has failed to acknowledge in public the facts of that situation, continues to lie and mislead the public, in fact, about his own role in this administration. Speaking of historic relevance, you write in the book that we can now see that Trump was dead serious about destroying the NATO alliance starting on day one of his presidency. Again, this is one of those overriding issues, particularly when we're seeing the Western alliance and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This was not just a one-off or just a throw-off

whim of Donald Trump. This is a guy who was deeply, deeply skeptical of the most important American alliance. Yeah, absolutely. I think that is one of the most important elements, especially as we're facing a war in Europe between Russia and Ukraine. Imagine if the United States had actually pulled out of NATO prior to that. Imagine if the Western alliance had basically fallen apart in the last four years at a time when Russia was intent on war of conquest. So that has great impact. The fact that he pushed the allies to do more, spend more, that's not unusual. Other presidents did the same, but none of them treated the allies as if they were enemies the way President Trump did. And this insistence on trying to get out while being resisted by his aides, by the way,

is a continual theme. Aides would tell us that they would think they had talked him out of something only to have him bring it up again a week later or a week after that. It was a constant war. There was never, they said, a single moment of truth when he could be talked out of what they considered to be a reckless idea because he would continually bring it back up. Even things like family separation, even after he signed an order in theory ending it, he kept talking about bringing it back. So for these aides who felt like they were responsible for trying to keep him on what they considered to be within the guardrails, it was a four-year struggle to do so because it never seemed to end. So this is why it's so relevant to what a second term might be like. as you described in the book, I mean, at the Trump at the end of four years was much more disruptive, much more radical figure, not because he changed in any way or changed his mind, but because he began to understand how to open the door. And I love this quote from

a national security official who met with Trump every day and, and told you that Trump was like that velociraptor in Jurassic Park, who learns how to open the door. I mean, Trump may not have known much coming in, but after four years, he's figured out how to open the kitchen door, right? So that as shambolic as the first term might be, the second term would be qualitatively different. How much different, how much scarier and more dangerous? Yeah, that's right. That velociraptor thing, just a chilling image, I have to say, when you contemplate that. And of course, the point is not that Trump learned because he absorbed his briefing books, or he's now an expert on healthcare policy. Obviously, that's not the case.

The point, I think, of the analogy is understanding the levers of power and how to get what he wants. A key takeaway, of course, is Trump's constant quest to surround himself with more and more people who view their roles with him in terms of personal loyalty, in terms of being a kind of a Praetorian guard, and also in furthering essentially a hostile takeover, not just to the Republican Party that's been accomplished, but a hostile takeover of the government itself. And you see that it wouldn't take him four years next time to make sure that he didn't hire someone like John Kelly or Jim Mattis in key roles. Or even Bill Barr.

Or even Bill Barr. Exactly. I mean, you know, the number of people who've gotten off the Trump train. But then again, somebody made a point of saying to us, and this was someone who served in the White House, remember, there are no clean cut heroes here. You know, John Kelly, Bill Barr, these are complicated figures. They enabled Trump in many ways as much as they ultimately came to resist or disdain him. And, you know, there's also, as you pointed out, a lot of ex post facto justifications, both Bill Barr and Mitch McConnell

have told others, well, Donald Trump really lost it after the 2020 election. He went crazy. You know, of course, that is very ahistorical. It ignores the facts. Donald Trump did not start talking about the rigged election after he lost the election, but before he lost the election when Bill Barr and Mitch McConnell did not publicly challenge him on that because, in fact, they wanted to win and they wanted Republicans to win. So I think that that's also to correct the record. You know, it's never too late to do the right thing, but that doesn't mean that you get a free pass for all the stuff that you did before. Peter, you want to weigh in on Trump 2.0, the velociraptor presidency? Yeah, I know.

I think that, again, one of the reasons we write the book, it's not just history, it's prologue. And if you want to understand what a second term is going to be like, look at this book and see all the things he wanted to do, talked about doing, try to do, but wasn't able to do for this reason and that reason, and assume that the second term would be the accomplishment of those things. Now, maybe some people like those ideas. That's fine. But I think it's a very telling blueprint of what another Trump presidency would be like. Okay, so I feel like I'm about to hand out bottles of crazy pills here. Because we've gone through all of the people that you've talked to in different departments who work for Donald Trump, who are now speaking out about how dangerous

it was, how reckless it was, you know, how narcissistic he was. We have his former national security advisor talking about how unfit he is. You have the former attorney general describing, you know, the fact that he has, you know, become detached from reality. But Donald Trump is still the, I would say, close to prohibitive favorite to be the Republican nominee. So your thoughts on that? Because I sense your frustration in the book and other things I've heard you say about just watching the Republican Party and the Republican electorate, knowing all of this, being told all of this, these voices coming not from MSNBC, but from within the Trump White House, these trusted aides, Trump appointees, and yet they stay with him. Well, you're right. The testimony is coming

from inside the room. The vast majority of these interviews that we conducted for our book, the vast majority of the testimony in the January 6 investigation, these are Republicans. of Donald Trump and yet come out again and again with these striking, almost unbelievable testimony of dysfunction and threats to the constitutional order, repeated demands of illegal actions by Donald Trump. And yet the hardcore Republican fan base of Trump has been fact impervious, impervious to the testimony of Republican officials. I'm really struck by the fact that Donald Trump remains not just popular with the Republican base, but that he has carried them so far down the road of conspiracy theories and lies. It's something that demands you know, demands ever more inflammatory and potentially dangerous positions, right? So the Donald Trump of 2020 flirted with

QAnon and said, well, I don't know about it, but you know, hey, I think they like me. Now he's openly embracing this conspiracy theory, right? And there's no pushback. That's where the risks go up and up and up. And what you see from the institutional Republicans today, the Mitch McConnell's in the lake, is they simply just won't talk about Donald Trump to pretend as though he doesn't do these things. So they've abandoned all efforts to push back in a meaningful way. And I think that some people look at the fatigue that Trump encounters, even among some Republicans today. They look at the kind of shrinking back of his poll numbers to a hardcore base of maybe a third or a little bit more of the Republican Party, who are the most fervent Trump supporters. But remember, that's how he won the Republican nomination in the first place.

Back in the 2016 primaries, he wasn't supported by a majority of Republicans. Quite the contrary. In a multi-candidate field, a fanatic 33 percent of the Republican Party, plus some others, is more than enough to walk away with the Republican nomination again in 2024. Do you see any signs of any sort of crack in this Republican support for Donald Trump, Peter? Well, you know, look, I don't think there's going to be a moment where suddenly we snap our fingers and we see a wholesale defection. There had been. It would have been in January 6th. Right. What else could have been as big as that? So, no, even if he's indicted, even if he's put on trial, you could see that actually encouraging the base to feel like he's a martyr,

that he's a victim, that this is all a hoax, it's all a witch hunt, all these things he likes to say. But I do think that there's an argument for corrosion or fatigue, possibly, you know, without going too far. The NBC poll recently asked the question of Republicans, do you identify more as a supporter of the Republican Party or a supporter of Donald Trump. 33% said Donald Trump. It's a large number, but it is the lowest number since they started asking that question in 2019. So you could see the theoretical possibility that people become tired of this. Yeah, I like the guy. I like his policies. I voted for him, but I'm just tired of refighting 2020. Let's move on to a new generation. That's the theory anyway, at least of some of the anti-Trump Republicans. So I actually caught your discussion at the Texas Tribune

Festival when you were in a very, very hot tent, by the way. It was really warm, but you were soldiers there. But I thought it was interesting. You had to interview Donald Trump for this book. And Susan, you describe what it's like to interview the Donald. Can you just talk to me a little bit about that? It was hot, my goodness. It was like something like 97 degrees. I felt for you. I had to do a session down there, but I was in an air-conditioned room. Going to see Trump, we had two interviews at Mar-a-Lago for this book, a total of about three and a half hours over those two sessions with Donald Trump. Not quite sure why he did it. He clearly is not a big reader of my New Yorker columns. But of course, Donald Trump remains supremely self-confident that he can convince anybody of anything, or at least he enjoys so much the effort of doing so. Trump, in many ways,

is the parody version of himself, even in private. He was like a live action version of his now banned Twitter feed, right? You know, ranting, random insults hurled at almost any person that we asked a question about. Mitch McConnell is stupid, terrible. Mike Pence, you know, political suicide. There's also the kind of rambling nature, not really an interview is a misnomer. You don't get to ask a question and hear an answer and then move on. It's all essentially a monologue with there's no noun, no verb, no period. I don't think there was a single period really in the entire two interviews that we had with him. At that session, Jake Sherman, I think, was

trying to be charitable and said something like, well, many people say that Trump in private is more charming than he is in public. And I have to say, I was prepared for that because I'd heard that word used so many times over the years. My experience was not that, Charlie. Not charming? Absolutely. We've defined deviance down. He's not yelling and ranting and raving and breathing fire out of his mouth at the enemies of the people in the way that he is in his rallies. He was perfectly civil.

He was a host offering us a Diet Coke and being solicitous about our trip down there. Absolutely. But this is a completely self-absorbed, narcissistic guy whose monologues are all about thousands of dead people voting and rigged election and insulting people. He's a rambling old man who would be yelling at the TV set in between golf games, right?

Except that he might be the next president of the United States. Absolutely. You know, there was a kind of heavy Napoleon and Elba vibe to the whole Mar-a-Lago thing, except, you know, if Napoleon was also a banquet hall greeter. Peter, you, over the years, you're the White House correspondent. You've interviewed Donald Trump. Is that your experience? Like you've interviewed him in the White House, I assume. Yeah, for sure. An interview with him is a challenge for a journalist who's trying to get answers to specific questions. I remember going in once to interview him in the Oval Office and very specific idea of what I wanted to ask. It was there with my colleagues,

Mike Schmidt and Maggie Haverman. And, you know, you're asking this really tough question about the Trump Tower meeting with the Russians and how, what what that was all about but then he kind of like wanders off in this rambling as susan says what a stream of consciousness kind of way to a whole other area which is completely newsworthy too where he says yeah by the way that jeff sessions guy i never would have appointed him attorney general if i had known he was going to recuse himself this is terrible like okay well do i stick with my original questioning? Because I really want to nail him down on the facts on this. That's kind of an important too.

So you got to go off with him in his rabbit hole, right? And trying to really get him to elaborate. All of this is hard. He's not a fact witness. You cannot rely on him as a fact witness as you're trying to reconstruct history or scenes. What you do is you use it to understand mindset. And that's one thing that's rather remarkable about him as a president. No other president has ever been quite as transparent as he is, sort of telling you exactly what he

thinks, no matter how politically unwise it would be to admit the things that he tends to admit. So that's the value of an interview, not to actually establish facts, because you can't assume that anything he's saying is factually true, but to try to understand mindset and how he's thinking. So, and we have only a couple of minutes left, but one of your previous books was about James Baker, the man who ran Washington. I'm just curious to ask you, what does a guy like James Baker think about what's happening now? Do you have any idea? I'll just throw that out for you. No, look, that was actually one of the interesting sort of backdrops to

finishing our work on the biography of Secretary Baker was that it was taking place during the rise and then the presidency of Donald Trump. The book came out in September 2020. And of course, we kept asking Baker about Trump as this all played out. And his agony in many ways was sort of the story of the Republican Party and how they ended up with a standard bearer who they first didn't like and also who moved the party away from what we presume to be its ideological foundations. Baker told us in no uncertain terms, he thought that Trump was quote unquote crazy, nuts. He was absolutely in disagreement with so many of his positions on

things like free trade and immigration. And yet Baker voted in the end for Donald Trump, not once but twice in 2020. Essentially partisanship overwhelmed those objections. Many people in his life lobbied Baker family members and others to vote against Trump. The Bushes, with whom Baker's career was intertwined, voted against him, publicly spoke out. Baker did not do so, although in his mind, you know, he drew a distinction. He said, oh, I never endorsed the guy. And he has spoken out very strongly against the rigged election claims and the big lie. He absolutely understood that there was no such thing as a voter fraud that would have disqualified Biden from being president. So it's a classic story in some ways of the Republican establishment and why they have gone along with a man who they also view with such disdain.

So, Peter, I mean, James Baker has nothing to be afraid of. He has nothing to gain. He's not going to get a job. So what is it, just muscle memory that you just always vote for the Republican? A little bit. Yeah, look, we're in a tribal era. We're a tribal moment in our country where we stick very strongly to our camp. Right.

I mean, look at these poll numbers. Poll numbers have not changed very radically in the last 15 years. You know, it used to be that a president could go up and down anywhere from like 25% to 75% over the course of a four-year term because we changed our minds depending on how he was doing, right? George W. Bush went all the way up to 90%. John F. Kennedy, after Bay of Pigs disaster, went up to, I think, 70% or 80%. We rallied around the president. Basically, since Bush's second term, each president has been basically within a very small range for the most part of 10 points, let's say, up and down, because we've made up our minds. We know what we think about them. We like them, we don't like them, and we're not open

to changing our minds very much anymore. I think that's where Baker and a lot of Republicans are. It's our team versus their team. And I don't like my team's leader right now, but I don't like the other team any better. And so I'm going to stick with my team. The book is The Divider, Trump and the White House, 2017-2021. Susan Glasser, staff writer at The New Yorker, Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times. Thank you both so much for coming on the podcast today. Hey, thank you. Thank you for this great conversation. Thank you for listening to The Bulwark Podcast. As we head into the holiday weekend, I want to wish everyone a very happy new year. We have one more selection from our best of 2022, so we'll be back Monday and we'll do this all over again.