The Bulwark Podcast - Susan Glasser: The Fever Won't Break
Episode Date: January 3, 2024The Trump experience can't just be undone—we are a different country now, and we're not going back to the status quo before his presidency. Plus, watch Trump try to steal the idea of defending democ...racy from Biden, just like he stole 'fake news' from Hillary. Susan Glasser joins Charlie Sykes today.
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Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast.
I am Charlie Sykes.
It is 2024, and I'm still getting my head around the fact that this is the year.
We've been waiting for this year.
It is still January.
It hasn't really snowed here in Wisconsin, so maybe that's one of the reasons why I'm
having a little bit of cognitive dissonance.
So to sort all of this out, we are joined once again by Susan Glasser, staff writer
at The New Yorker, where she writes a weekly column on life in Washington.
And she's also a co-author most recently of The
Divider, the history of Donald Trump in the White House, which he co-wrote with her husband, Peter
Baker. Probably going to need to update that, do you think? You and Peter ever talk about, hey,
maybe when the paperback comes out, we're going to have to add like four or five, six, seven,
eight, nine, 10 chapters? You know, we weren't planning on doing a sequel,
Charlie, and I'm sure a lot of people feel that way. It's only the beginning of January. It's
nowhere near Groundhog Day, but here we are in 2024, ready or not, it's happening.
So let's put this into historical context. Before 2024, what do you think the most interesting,
eventful presidential election year in our lifetime has been?
I have an answer, but I'm interested to know what you will say.
Well, you know, I'm looking forward to hearing your answer.
I know there were certainly a couple of really extraordinary presidential elections when I was basically too little to remember them.
But, you know, you said in your lifetime, so I'm sure that 1976 or 1980 elections
were definitely both consequential and kind of action packed elections, right? There was the
contested convention, and the Republicans in 1976. In 1980, there was Ted Kennedy's challenge of Jimmy
Carter, and then Ronald Reagan's victory and the hostages. I mean, that was an incredible
election, but I was really just a kid in school and don't know if that counts.
This is just an indication of your extreme youth here, because I think that the correct answer
is 1968. See, this is why, because I'm so much older than you.
Yeah, I missed that one.
Well, I was there. I actually remember that. And that was the wildest presidential election year
that I think we've had really in the last century. When you think about it, you had assassinations, you had riots, you
had the incumbent president of the United States running for reelection, then dropping out. And
again, I was in Chicago for the Democratic National Convention where there were the riots.
We actually had the police riot led by Chicago's Democratic Mayor Richard Daley and, of course, the election of Richard
Nixon. But what I was thinking about was that as wild as 1968 was, this year is going to be wilder.
And we already know that. Usually at the beginning of the year, you have no idea what's going to
happen. You could never predict that Robert F. Kennedy was going to be assassinated or Martin
Luther King would be assassinated. You could not have predicted the Chicago riots. You couldn't
have predicted Lyndon Johnson would drop out. But this year, there are going to be so many
black swan events. Again, we don't know how it's going to play out, but it is going to be one of
the most extraordinary elections just in terms of the events, but also in terms of the consequences,
because it is a stark choice on the ballot in November. I mean,
talk about two different realities and futures for America on the ballot in 2024. I'm trying
to remember a year that we went into knowing it was going to be as consequential as this one's.
Sometimes we're taken by surprise. This one, you know, this is right in our face.
Yeah, that's right. This is the election
of what, you know, Donald Rumsfeld would call the known unknowns. It's not really a black swan in
that sense, which is meant to be the sort of come from totally out of the blue. We know already that
we are facing just a series of essentially unprecedented convergences between the courtroom and the campaign trail,
the scrambling of the political primary process, essentially, in a way that we've never seen.
It was your own news outlet just yesterday on the first workday of the new year, right,
Charlie, that pointed out that Donald Trump looks to basically win the Iowa caucus by
the largest margin a Republican has ever done so.
And it could be that the primaries are over for all intents and purposes after Iowa and New
Hampshire. And of course, you know, layering on that, the fact that the Republican nominee may
show up here in my hometown of Milwaukee as a convicted felon. We don't know. We don't know
what the Supreme Court is going to do. We don't know any of those things or how the electorate will react to it. What we do know, though,
is that I think a lot of voters have this sort of sense of kind of doom because this is the election,
quite frankly, that a lot of Americans don't want. They do not want a replay of Joe Biden
versus Donald Trump. I think a lot
of people are in denial about that, but that's what we're going to get. Before we get into that,
though, and I wrote about this this morning in my newsletter, you know, I'm fascinated by that
extraordinary evasion by Nikki Haley when she was asked a very, very simple question about the
causes of the Civil War, which she botched in a really rather epic way. We are now in day seven of the news cycle about that faux pas,
okay, that gap. And it struck me that, okay, and it was bad. It was really, really bad. I mean,
I compare it to, you know, Selina Meyer, Billy Madison bad, Miss Teen South Carolina. Do you
remember Miss Teen South Carolina?
People should look up the video on that.
The Nikki Haley soundbite should go in the soundbite of great rhetoric from South Carolina.
But it is day seven.
It feels like kind of a throwback to the before times back in, you know, before 2016, where
gaffes actually mattered, where if a politician said something stupid or offensive
or ridiculous or untrue, then it would actually have real consequences because it no longer is
the case. I mean, you know, there are some listeners who probably don't even remember
when if you said something insensitive about rape, you know, it might end your political career. If
you talked about grabbing women, it might actually derail your candidacy. And so we've
spent seven days talking about Nikki Haley, which has been, I'm not criticizing that, but there is
Donald Trump sitting there. The great reality of our times is that Donald Trump says something
outrageous, outlandish, untrue, inflammatory every single day. And it's become normalized. We've become numb to it.
I mean, this is what Brian Klass calls the banality of crazy. How do we cope with that?
Because I was just going through all the nutty things that Donald Trump has said in the last
seven days, including telling people, you know, you should rot in hell merry christmas which barely registered
like a shrug and you were all obsessed about Nikki Haley so this is going to be a hard year
isn't it Susan I mean just to keep the focus on do not be distracted by the squirrels when
we have the orange wildebeest sitting right there he's not going away. That metaphor is going to stick with me,
Charlie. Of course, you're right. You're right. You're absolutely right. This is an age in
politics where there appear to be Donald Trump rules and then rules for everybody else. And
of course, you know, for Republicans, they've enabled it. This is the mess that they have
created. They have climbed into that hole that
turned out to be a bottomless pit with Donald Trump, since we're doing metaphors. And, you know,
so that's the world that they're living in. And, you know, in many ways, there's been this sort of
pretend campaign, Potemkin campaign aspect of the Republican race all along, right? You know,
there are all these candidates running, except they're too afraid of the real candidate to even criticize him for the most part. In fact, they raised their hand
and Nikki Haley was shooting right up there in the first debate. To me, that was the defining moment
that told me way back in August of last year, this isn't a real campaign. And these folks aren't even
competing to be number two. They're not competing against Trump. He doesn't have to debate them. He doesn't have to follow the same rules as
them. You know, the entire infrastructure of the party remains at his control. It's essentially
a two incumbent race that we are looking at right now.
Now, it is a two incumbent race. Let's talk about this, the Biden-Trump rematch. Now,
you've written about this extensively. You gave a very, very interesting. So you were in Athens
recently, and you gave an interview to a Greek newspaper, which I actually have here. So the two
people who are going to be facing off, they're both elderly, but they could not be more different.
So just talk to me about this contrast between Biden and Trump.
You know, you talk about Biden, you know, being the creature of Washington.
Trump's, you know, obviously a product of New York media and tabloid culture.
Biden, deeply immersed in foreign policy, very shrewd politician in many respects.
But you said that Trump is astonishingly unaware of most things. So let's just talk about that, just to remind us that we're not talking about two parallel individuals here. What is Donald Trump,
what is he astonishingly unaware of? Well, you know, it's very interesting. I was speaking with
the, you know, writer for the main newspaper in Greece, And she asked me about, you know, what's it going to be
like with Trump in the White House? And the thing that we've sort of forgotten or allowed ourselves
to forget, or it's written out of the narrative, or we just can't handle it anymore. So we just
kind of don't focus squarely on Trump. You know, Trump has been, in my view, like the, you know, kind of constant eclipse of
the sun. And, you know, it seems that, you know, almost everybody, the voters, the media, the,
you know, we're afraid to look at him squarely with our eyes because it's, you know, danger of
blindness or something. But Donald Trump, when he came into the White House, that was a big takeaway for Peter
and I when we were writing The Divider and re-interviewing and talking to 300 plus people
for that book. What did Trump's own appointees tell us? They told us he didn't know anything
about most things. That's a quote from a senior White House official. That's a Republican folks,
a senior White House official in the Trump White House. He didn't know anything about most things.
He didn't know who started World War I. He didn't know how America's nuclear weapons work. He didn't
know the difference between the Baltics and the Balkans. And by the way, he confused the two,
two of the leaders of the three Baltic countries while they were sitting in the Oval Office with
him. He was astonished and said publicly, he was shocked to find out that Abraham Lincoln was
actually a member of the Republican Party. I mean, you know, on and on the list goes,
but it's important maybe to remind people of these Republican Party. I mean, you know, on and on the list goes, but it's important maybe to
remind people of these basic facts. You know, I don't think of Donald Trump as a great thinker.
I don't think he's particularly brilliant as, you know, the stable genius. As you point out,
though, he is a very skilled and therefore very dangerous communicator. I think that a lot of folks
have underestimated that ability. And again, it eludes me because I have a hard time listening
to him. But talk to me a little bit about why you think that he is a dangerous communicator,
a skilled and dangerous communicator. Absolutely. Absolutely. I think Trump is
best understood as a sort of hybrid
media slash political figure. And, you know, in many ways, that was what he spent his time doing
in the White House. That was another big and astonishing takeaway for us, I think, in going
back and examining. Trump literally reimagined the job of president of the United States. He didn't
go to the office in the morning and, you know,
do meetings and, you know, oversee processes across the U.S. government. And he went and watched
television. And then he tweeted about it and he talked to people about it. And he spent his days
either up in the White House residence or in the small private dining room off the Oval Office,
where he had rigged up as his own sort of personal media center. He spent hours a day
while he was president and, of course, afterwards as well, watching television and reacting to that
and seeking to create his own news cycle. One of the most, I think, important insights came from another
Trump White House official who told me that having thought a lot about Trump,
they had come to the conclusion that Donald Trump most resembled, remember the character
in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, that little American boy who wants to live inside the television, that is Donald Trump.
And he's become very good at it. He is skilled at understanding a news cycle. Remember,
he's a niche communicator. He doesn't care what you think about him, or he does in the sense that
he needs enemies to thrive off of. And so to the extent you and those who subscribe to similar points of view are his enemy, sure,
he cares what you think.
But essentially, he's a niche communicator.
So he doesn't care that to many democratic suburban women, you know, the sound of his
voice is the sound of, you know, nails on a chalkboard.
He is communicating with his part of the American electorate, with his red America.
And he correctly understood in a way that so many people here in Washington, Republicans especially,
got wrong, got catastrophically wrong, the idea that he wasn't going to be exiled and disgraced
after January 6th. He was going to come back.
And here he is four years later, poised to re-consolidate power and control over his party.
Well, let me ask you that.
I want to go back to his TV and radio listening habits.
But part of me thinks that Donald Trump himself is surprised at his ability to come back from that. Because it is so unexpected when you
think about it, that even Trump, I think, looks in the mirror sometimes and says, I cannot believe
I get away with this shit. I cannot believe that I've been able to pull this off. You know what
I'm saying? When he first said that thing, I could shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue,
he was kind of marveling at it. I think he still probably marvels at his ability to pull this off.
But let's go back to his TV habits. One of the things that he has, and I've described this as his reptilian instinct,
he watches Fox News, he listens to talk radio, he listens to Newsmax, and he figures out what are
the hot buttons, what actually gives people the dopamine hit, and then he feeds it back to them.
There's a feedback loop. At his rallies, he figures out what are the lines that get the biggest applause.
And then those lines he repeats.
And he keeps pushing the envelope to do it.
And so if you don't listen to that media, if you are not deeply immersed in that media,
sometimes it sounds like he's speaking a foreign language.
But it is an emotionally attuned language to what the base is hearing and wants to hear,
and he gives them what they want to hear. And this is one of his dangerous demagogic gifts,
isn't it, Susan? Absolutely. I think that's a very important insight, Charlie. He is both
a creature of his electorate, the avatar of the MAGA worldview, and also to a certain
extent, a prisoner of it. Remember, when he mentioned the vaccine, which, you know, he was
inclined to take great credit for, though he clearly personally had nothing much to do with it.
He did take the vaccine, he understood it was the way out of the COVID pandemic. He mentioned it in 2021 at one of his early rallies, and there were boos.
Donald Trump did not mention that vaccine afterwards.
And he was afraid of alienating his base as well as responding to what it is they want
to hear from him. So when he calls people vermin, who are
his enemies or immigrants coming into the country, when he says that he is willing to consider
termination of the constitution if he doesn't get his way and that his campaign is about retribution
and revenge, he's doing so and he can be and is fairly confident that his electorate will go
with him. And, you know, for me, that's always been the scariest thing where others looked at
January 6th and saw, oh my God, he's gone too far this time. And, you know, again and again and
again, the sort of corrupt Republican establishment just peddles this idea and it gets amplified in the political press.
It's just BS.
You know, that January 6th moment was the shooting in Fifth Avenue moment.
And, you know, or to pick a different metaphor, it was the moment when Trump showed that he could take the vast bulk of Republican electorate in the country over the cliff with him. And having done
so, he sort of blew up all the previous rules and he bound them to him even more fully. And,
you know, remember for me, the signal moment in that whole horrible, you know, 24 hour period was
what happened, you know, I guess at about three o'clock the next morning, which is when they finally finished certifying Joe Biden's electoral victory.
And two thirds of the House Republican conference went along with Trump's false,
untrue and really pernicious lies about the election and refused to certify it. Two thirds
of the House Republican conference within hours of their Capitol being taken over. And so for me, I actually was under no illusions from then on. And I feel like it never
got the proper attention at the moment. And also, it didn't happen immediately,
though, because you had Mitch McConnell come out, you had Kevin McCarthy come out.
What I think is really extraordinary, we're coming on the third anniversary now of January 6th, and you saw this new poll that came out, the Washington
Post, University of Maryland poll, showing that Republicans now not only back Donald Trump,
but they're very sympathetic to the rioters. And so this is like Barack Obama talked about the arc
of history. Donald Trump has bent the arc of reality because we saw this in real time. We saw it on television. And yet Donald Trump has been such an effective
demagogue that he has convinced tens of millions of his supporters that what they saw didn't happen,
that he wasn't involved. I mean, how did he pull that off?
Yeah. I mean, that's right out of the, you know, sort of Orwellian dictator handbook,
right?
Don't believe your own lying eyes.
I am the only one you can trust.
Donald Trump has said that before.
You know who else has said that?
Vladimir Putin.
I am the only one you can trust.
Don't believe your eyes.
These are not traitors.
They're heroes.
They're martyrs.
I was just joking the other day, and yet it's really sort of not a joke that, you know, well, if Trump gets, you know, returned
to office after four years, he's going to be passing a national holiday.
You know, January 6th will be the day of the martyrs.
I mean, he is making them, you know, into the martyrs, right?
It's not just revisionist history.
It is the complete retconning of what happened.
And you look at these numbers. People say they were mostly peaceful. Look at the videotape that, you know,
Republicans no longer believe that Donald Trump, you know, instigated it when it's, you know,
this has been documented. It's been laid out. You have the words. They are ignoring the evidence of
their own eyes. They're ignoring what Mitch McConnell said, what Kevin McCarthy said.
All of the evidence is put out. And I mean, this is the real danger. You want to talk about a dangerous communicator
that Donald Trump has managed to transform an historical event that everyone shared in and saw
and to distort it almost beyond reality. And I'm sure that he's internalized the fact that I can say anything.
I can tell people that up is down, that red is blue, that black is white, and they will believe
it if it comes from me. This is, I think, part of the challenge in 2024 is to keep reminding
yourself that if you're not believing this, you are not the crazy ones because it seems
so insane. Yeah. And, you know, for that reason, though, I have to say, I understand the impulse,
right. And we're in the quote unquote primary season right now, but admiring the problem,
as Barack Obama said, you know, is not necessarily getting us any closer to real insights about where this thing is headed.
The Republican Party has been, for all intents and purposes, the party of Trump for quite some
time, actually predating January 6th. And you can look at all the data points along the way.
Remember that it was in the 2020 election that the Republican Party chose not to have any platform
at all. It chose to be whatever Donald
Trump said. And that was really, you know, for the first time that anyone could find
in its history, there was no policy platform, there was just Donald Trump. So it's not really
a revelation, although it's still shocking. And so we keep having to go back to this kind of
foundational shock that the Republican Party is so debased and is pretend in all other aspects, except in the mind of, you know, the man of Mar-a-Lago. there a scenario by which this conspiracy theory driven party of enablers of Donald Trump can win
the presidency once again? He did so in a fluke in 2016 by losing the popular vote, but winning
in just enough of the right states to be able to win the electoral college. Can he repeat that
feat? That is the question. Well, what do you think?
You know, the general election is the whole ballgame here.
There is no scenario by which the Republican Party saves us from this disaster that they
have created, right?
And I think that's part of the problem of even talking about the Republican primaries.
And no, I don't have any good answers.
It does appear, once again, to come down to a very small handful
of American states that the election is going to be decided in.
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I'm going to stick with this question of Trump as a communicator, because you and Peter are real
students of Donald Trump. And one of the extraordinary things that he does is and I'm
certainly not trying to praise him here, but his very transparent and cynical projection.
You know, when there's a term that's applied to him,
he turns it around and accuses his opponents of doing what he did. I mean, he started off with
taking fake news and turning that around against the media. He's using words like fascist and
things like that. And I wanted to get your take on this because I'm watching the cases play out,
disqualifying him from the ballot based on the 14th Amendment. We have
Colorado, we have Maine, we'll have others. It's going to go to the Supreme Court. I confess to
having very, very mixed feelings about all of this because I'm very, very sympathetic to the
arguments of people like Judge Ludig that the 14th Amendment, which bars insurrectionists from
office, would apply to Donald Trump. I'm very, very skeptical about the way this is going to play out, both legally and politically.
But what I wanted to ask you about was that I think one of the great ironies of 2024 is going to be that Donald Trump is going to, because this is his brand,
he's going to recast himself as the champion of democracy.
You have Democrats and progressives saying democracy's on
the ballot. He is a threat to democracy. What you're going to see, I think, what I think the
real danger is, particularly if more states try to kick him off the ballot, he is going to then
take that mantle, not just of demagogic populism, but also of democracy, that it's anti-democratic to kick him off the ballot.
And I think that you're going to see him use that kind of rhetoric. And I wonder how that plays out,
particularly because I know that Joe Biden and the Democrats want to make democracy one of the
cornerstones of their campaign. What happens if Donald Trump decides that I'm going to steal that,
I'm going to project that, that I am the defender of democracy and that you are assaulting democracy
because you're trying to deny people a right to vote for me.
It's almost too easy for him.
And my prediction is he's going to do it.
What do you think?
Absolutely.
Of course.
I don't even think it's a prediction.
I think it's a reality already, Charlie.
He has very clearly signaled and already used this idea
that it's Democrats. This is what he tells his audience. Democrats are stealing your freedom,
weaponizing the deep state against me, perverting the way the government is actually supposed to be
run in favor of their own political interests, which of course is what Trump did when he was in office. And, you know, these tools of
projection and appropriation are the tools that Trump favors in his political handbook. And,
you know, remember that fake news, which was associated with him more than perhaps anyone
else, he stole that. That was an act of larceny from Hillary Clinton and media analysts who used the term fake news in the aftermath of the 2016 election to point out how Trump and some of his enablers had functioned in the course of that 2016 campaign. then very cannily, I think, seized upon that phrase. And now it's associated with him.
He turned that on people, which by the way, step back and think about it. This is a guy
who the Washington Post found made more than 30,000 lies, misleading statements, untruths
in the course of his presidency. And he's the one accusing other people of fake news, right?
And so of course, you're going to see him saying that he's a victim because he's always a victim of whatever. And this democracy know, they spent years saying that Barack Obama was some,
you know, constitution-destroying tyrant in the making.
And so that created all these sort of awkward contortions in 2016, actually,
when they then had to flip and have the party support Donald Trump,
you know, an actual constitution-denying autocrat in the making.
So I think that
rhetoric is going to be very powerful. And, you know, there's a big gap, as you know, between the
kind of legalistic world of the constitutional lawyers and what happens when that gets translated
into the political world. And this whole year is going to be about that clash between our kind of
legal culture with Trump in the courtroom and our political campaign culture.
So let's talk about Joe Biden, who is clearly struggling in the polls. His popularity is,
well, I would say that he's polling below other presidents at this point in their presidency,
and he's polling lower than that of the Democratic Party. So what is your read on why Joe Biden, his supporters and his defenders say
he's been a really, really good president, or he's accomplished a lot, and yet he is going into 2024
with some of the lowest approval ratings we have seen? Well, that's right. I mean, look, Charlie, it's not simple.
We tend to contort ourselves. Joe Biden, I think many Democrats and independents are the reason for
these less than stellar poll ratings. It's not Republicans. They already weren't supporting
Joe Biden. It's Democrats and independents whom Biden needs in order to win reelection. Why is that? Do they mostly dislike his policies? No, it's very simple. They believe
he's too old or they're concerned about his ability to carry out a second term. And he will
be 86 years old at the end of that second term. And I think it's a lack of enthusiasm, a concern
about his ability to take on Trump or Republicans. There's a variety of factors that add up, but really, in the end, it's all under the simple theory of the case is, or seems to be, that only he, he's the only one that can defeat Trump. But when they are faced with the prospect of Donald Trump, does that re-energize the
party?
Does that turn this around?
I mean, that's obviously what they're thinking in Wilmington.
What do you think?
Yeah, you just summed up, I think, what their strategy is, which is make it about Trump,
make it a choice. Once it's a choice
on Trump and not a referendum about Biden, Democrats will have no choice but to come home
to Biden. And looking at the bigger threat of Donald Trump, I'm sure that's true for the
overwhelming majority of Democrats. The question is, in the six or whatever key states, will enough Democrats or independents stay home who he needs
in order to win those states. And that's where the incredible risk factor I just keep coming back to
of choosing to run again when you're 81 years old and anything can happen at any moment. There's a hubris in it. It's understandable.
The office does that to most presidents of whatever party. And Joe Biden has spent essentially a large
chunk of his adult lifetime seeking this office only to become a very unlikely president late in
life. And, you know, of course he convinces himself, I am the only one who can do this
because I'm the only one who's done it before.
But I think it's an act of hubris.
You said that this campaign is like Biden and Trump are competing in different elections.
This is part of this post-truth world that we live in.
What do you mean by that? already about the alternate realities for the Republican electorate in which January 6th was a
day of peaceful protest and martyrs were arrested by the evil deep state in furtherance of the
rigged election and the complicated conspiracy theory involving Venezuela, etc., etc., etc.
Often, I found in recent years, it's not just Trump, but many Republican politicians speak in
a kind of unintelligible code to those of us who do not spend our days marinating in the same
media misinformation environment. And, you know, Joe Biden, meanwhile, there's a very compelling
narrative that his core party supporters hear from the White House about what a great president he's been and,
you know, how responsible and the bipartisan infrastructure act and the, you know, this and
that. And my guess is if you offer that narrative to a garden variety, maybe not even a really
partisan Republican voter in somewhere like Ohio or Montana, they literally would not know what
you're talking about. They would be like, are you kidding me? There are actually people who think
that Joe Biden has been this good, responsible, bipartisan, leaning, centrist president? Like,
on what planet are you living? And so it's just taking this unfortunate political reality of two Americas, of blue America and red America, and, you know, putting it on, you know, kind of Trumpian steroids.
I was listening to one of your podcasts recently, and you said, we've come a long way since Donald Trump rode down that escalator in 2015.
And we thought that the first term was shambolic and dangerous. Talk to me a
little bit, because you have looked at this very carefully and you have studied it. How would Trump
2.0 be different than his first term as president? Yeah. Imagine Trump without the constraints. Imagine Trump enabled, facilitated, and surrounded by not kind of representatives of the national
security state seeking to constrain him, but cheerleaders like Stephen Miller and Steve
Bannon and the rest.
I think it's Trump without the constraints.
And radicalized. Well, he feels far more radicalized than he was back in 2016. I mean,
there was a lot of bad. I mean, obviously, I have been arguing this, but it feels like
here is somebody who is far more focused on what he will accomplish the retribution and that
he won't take no for an answer. Yeah, termination and retribution, I think, are the key words
for understanding both Trump's campaign message and his agenda. And I would just also point out
that our theoretical scenarios here for Trump being in the White House again all involve in some way the resolution or convicted of these very serious felonies and won election anyways,
which again, whoa, so that's Trump without any fear of the legal system because the people
have spoken, or he hasn't been convicted and still faces these court proceedings. And so we're starting office with a
built-in, essentially constitutional crisis. Also, he having survived not one but two congressional
impeachments, he will fear no impeachment. He will not fear the thing that the founders
envisioned as the main check and constraint on a rogue president, which was
congressional impeachment and conviction. But with conviction, for all intents and purposes,
impossible. That's not a constraint Trump would face. So you have no fear of Congress,
no fear of the courts, and a new savviness and kind of cadre of experienced MAGA revolutionaries coming into office with him,
which is a big difference from how he came into office after 2016.
Would he pardon himself? And what happens if he does? Because there's a lot of legal scholars
who believe that the pardon power is nearly absolute, but it does not extend to self-pardoning.
We have a constitutional crisis right from day one? The pardon power is nearly absolute, but it does not extend to self-pardoning.
We have a constitutional crisis right from day one?
Yeah, right from day one.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And how can a president govern this whole country in such a circumstance?
Already, I think one of the things that historians will look back on the one Trump term that we've already had and say is that it was remarkable
the extent to which Trump defined himself as the president for only a part of America,
which is a real sharp break and departure from our previous presidencies and traditions.
In other words, previous presidents were partisan or, you know, actually represented, you know,
the interests of one faction of the country, but they at least aspired to rhetorically govern for the whole country.
And Trump did not do that already. And I think that a second term, for the reasons that you just stated, would just be so clearly a challenge to half or more of the country that did not support Donald Trump. It's a recipe for
rift and disunion. So for the last seven or eight years, we've been asking ourselves,
well, when does the fever break? When do we return to normal? I mean, that was Biden's promise,
right? That we could go back to some sort of pre-Trump status quo. But even if Biden wins
again, even if Trump goes down, what will it take for us to return to normal?
Are we ever going to return to normal?
No, this is our new normal, Charlie.
We're not going back to the status quo anti-Trump.
And if anything, the persistence of that metaphor, I think, has been sort of crippling to the political discourse.
And frankly, cynical Republicans have
used that again and again here in Washington. You know, they sort of encourage the idea that
there is going to be a moment of fever breaking or, you know, the other metaphor I heard a lot
was the jailbreak. You know, when are Republicans, the presumption, oh, well, they really don't like
Trump, but what are they going to do? You know, you and I have this conversation on a day when the remaining holdouts on Capitol Hill among Republican leaders are endorsing Donald Trump one by one today.
That's their very first act of the new year.
Tom Emmer, whose bid to be speaker was derailed by vicious attacks from Donald Trump, then turns around and goes, thank you, sir,
may I have some more and endorses Trump. There's no line. Absolutely. What we have learned is we
have got to let go of the fantasy of the fever breaking. We have to, you know, the story of the
last year in Republican politics is not the story of challengers emerging to Donald Trump. It is the story of how he has
re-cemented his power over this party. To be a Republican today is to be in a state of,
you know, subservience and enabling of Donald Trump, who is truly a kind of generational figure
for that party. I just want to read something that you said.
The Trump experience is one that cannot simply be undone or attributed to a sort of four-year accident.
It is a different country because it went through that.
The Republican Party was radicalized and all those people went along.
I watched it happen.
People in Washington who were normal and said they would never go along, then they became Trumpified,
and they are now going along with things that would have been unthinkable to those same people in 2015. I think they're going along with things
that would have been unthinkable even in 2021. So as you point out, you know, there are cycles
of history. And I think you made a great point here that the whole point of a democracy is that
each generation has to make it its own. So this is, we're talking to a Greek journalist about all of this. And
again, in case we were under any illusions about the fragility of this liberal constitutional
republic that we have, we've had it tested, but we're about to experience a test that I'm not
sure we've experienced since, say, 1860, to go back to something that's actually older than me.
I did find a date.
Charlie, you know, for our first conversation of the new year,
this is already, I feel like it's getting my blood pressure going,
and I might need to actually just crawl back in the cars
and pretend it's still 2023.
Of course, you're right.
Yeah, you're right. The fact that it's not normal. I mean, I keep thinking about going back to 1968, how sometimes
there are periods that leave a hangover for generations. I mean, you could even argue that
we are still in the shadow of the 1960s, fighting some of that out. There are people who
came into politics in the late 1960s, who had a dominant role, you know, until very,
very recently. And unfortunately, you have people who are coming into politics,
thinking that this new abnormal is in fact, the normal, and they're going to be in politics for
the next 30 or 40 years. So again, to your point, there's not going to be the fever breaking,
there's not going to be the fever breaking, there's not going
to be the jailbreak, and we're just going to have to deal with that. And that's kind of the
disillusionment of this year. By disillusionment, I mean the illusions that perhaps this was
temporary, they've all evaporated, haven't they? Well, we'll see. Our capacity for illusions, our capacity
collectively for amnesia has always been one of the, you know, kind of signature
aspects of American politics. And it's going to be fully tested this year.
Susan Glasser is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she writes a weekly column on life in
Washington, also the co-author of The Divider, A History of Donald Trump and the White House, at least the early history, which she co-wrote with her husband, Peter Baker.
Susan, it is always great to talk with you.
Thank you so much and Happy New Year.
Well, Happy New Year to you, Charlie.
It's been great to, you know, sort of get a reality check to start the year off.
Thank you.
And thank you all for listening to today's Bulwark Podcast.
I'm Charlie Sykes.
We will 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.