The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World by Peter Bergen

Episode Date: May 31, 2022

The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World by Peter Bergen From a preeminent national security journalist, an explosive account of Donald Trump's collision with the American national security establishment, and with the world It is a simple fact that no president in American history brought less foreign policy experience to the White House than Donald J. Trump. The real estate developer from Queens promised to bring his brash, zero-sum swagger to bear to cut through America's most complex national security issues, and he did. If the cost of his "America First" agenda was bulldozing the edifice of foreign alliances that had been carefully tended by every president from Truman to Obama, then so be it. Very quickly, it became clear to a number of people at the highest levels of government that their gravest mission was to protect America from Donald Trump. Trump and His Generals is Peter Bergen's riveting account of what happened when the unstoppable force of President Trump met the immovable object of America's national security establishment--the CIA, the State Department, and, above all, the Pentagon. If there is a real "deep state" in DC, it is not the FBI so much as the national security community, with its deep-rooted culture and hierarchy. The men Trump selected for his key national security positions, Jim Mattis, John Kelly, and H. R. McMaster, were products of that culture: Trump wanted generals, and he got them. Three years later, they would be gone, and the guardrails were off.

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multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life, and experiences in leadership and character. I give you some of the secrets from my CEO Entrepreneur Toolbox that I use to scale my business success, innovate, and build a multitude of companies. I've been a CEO for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now. We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader, and how anyone can become a great leader as well. Or order the book where refined books are sold. Anyway, guys, we have an amazing author on the show today. His new paperback version of his book that came out in 2019 is out tomorrow, May 31st, 2022, The Cost of Chaos, The Trump Administration and the World by Peter Bergen.

He's on the show with us today talking about this amazing book of his. He is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and vice president for global studies and fellows at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University, a fellow at Fordham University Center on National Security, and CNN's National Security Analyst. Welcome to the show, Peter. How are you? Chris, thanks for having me on. Thanks for coming on. We certainly appreciate it. And congratulations on the paperback issuance of your book.

You've written a lot of different books, actually. How many books have you put out? This is my 10th book, if you count the ones I've co-edited with other people. But my 7th real book, when I say real book, non-edited volume. Edited volumes are real books, but they're not quite as personal. This book I updated and I revised. I finished it. It came out in 2019, as you mentioned. So a lot of other things happened. And originally in the hardcover for the title, it's trump and his generals and it really focused on that relationship because that was so critical the first two years you think about hr master think about jim mattis think about general kelly think about the generals that surrounded

general flynn that surrounded president trump when he came in they were all gone by year by the end of year two and i think that you can can see the Trump presidency changed over time. It became, you know, there was this cliche about the grownups in the room and they were trying to control Trump. Well, the cliche wasn't entirely wrong. And certainly, I think

if you look at the first two years, it was a more normal administration in a sense. I try and, I give Trump his due. I think he got some big things and I think he got a lot of big things wrong. Let's start with the big things

that he got right, in fairness. He built on the Obama plan to defeat ISIS, and it was very much an Obama plan that he amped up. He, of course, ordered the operation in which Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi died, the guy who founded ISIS. So that was certainly an achievement, and I was surprised that he didn't mention it more in the campaign. Operation Warp Speed is very much that the Trump administration made a lot of failures with COVID, which I'll get to in a minute. But they, on Operation Warp Speed, they gave Moderna $2.5 billion. They ordered $2 billion of doses from Pfizer. They didn't give them money directly, but they guaranteed a market for them. And this was a remarkable achievement. Within two months, Moderna had a usable RMNA vaccine. And these vaccines were

90% effective, even though they wane over time and finally i think on china trump really got the measure of triumph i might say trump and trump administration jim maddox wrote that you know oversold the defense strategy hr master oversold the national security strategy they both came to similar conclusions on china there's been a lot of wishful thinking about china over the years which is they as they as their economy grows they're going to liberalize. And it turned out to be precisely the reverse. They became more authoritarian as their economy grew. And I think Trump certainly got the measure of that and the Trump team. So I think those are the

positive things. I think the negative, the three big negative things I put in three buckets. One is he's the first president in history to consistently and publicly refuse to accept that he lost the election. And this doesn't help our politics at all. And there's no other president who's done anything similar. The second area, I think, with COVID, I think, and I'm quoting here Dr. Deborah Birx, who was his coronavirus coordinator. She told the Congressional Committee that 30 to 40% of the deaths under President Trump could be saved with different policies. And that's 400,000. So doing rough math, it's about 130,000 lives. And he didn't model good behavior. He almost never wore a mask.

He denigrated mask wearing. Before the vaccine, it's hard to remember, but the only way you could not get the virus in a pretty bad way was social distancing and mask wearing. And he didn't have federal guidance on masks. He denigrated masks. He encouraged social distancing, getting together long before it was really safe. Famously, he said, we're going to be together for Easter early in the pandemic and said a lot of misleading things about the pandemic. And when he had an opportunity to do something publicly, which I think would have been highly significant when he and Melania were vaccinated in the closing days of his presidency, he could have done that publicly. And given the amount of

vaccine hesitancy in the United States, I think that would have made a big difference. And then the final basket I would say is, you know, Trump came into office saying that he was a great dealmaker. I don't think, you know, I think the deals that he got involved in did not work out well. Beginning with the Afghan deal, the Taliban got everything they wanted and we got, we the United States got nothing. And of course, it was Joe Biden who went through with the deal, which I think was a big mistake. But here we have the Taliban. The UN issued a report on Friday, in fact, saying that al-Qaeda and the Taliban are very close. They say, this is an astonishing statistic, of 41 cabinet officials and senior officials in the Taliban government under UN sanction. There's no government in the world that I can think of where that's the case.

This deal was a terrible deal. We got nothing from it. Taliban got everything they wanted, which is the country. They remained allied to al-Qaeda. They didn't involve the Afghan government in peace negotiations. So that was one bad deal. Another bad deal was the whole, you know, the love letters that were exchanged between Trump. 27 love letters and meetings didn't produce a relationship that actually produced results. And in fact, the North Koreans continued with their program, continued testing short-range ballistic missiles, and they're in a better place than they were before Trump came into office. And the final deal that I think was pulling out of the Iran deal really was a mistake because according to Trump's own intelligence agencies,

the Iranians are really sticking to the terms of the deal. Jim Mattis, his own Secretary of Defense, was asked a very direct question by Senator Angus King in congressional hearings. Do you think this Iran nuclear deal is in the interest of the American people and national security? And Mattis had a very simple answer. He just said yes. He didn't say anything more because, of course,

the more he said, the more he'd piss off his boss. But it was a widespread agreement based on intelligence that they were sticking to the agreement. Trump pulled out after John Bolton came into office as the National Security Advisor. And Iranians went from enriching 4% of uranium, which is the agreement in the deal, up to 20%. Now, 90% is what you need for a nuclear weapon. But the point is they started, and they're closer to a nuclear bomb today. In fact, they probably have enough uranium for a nuclear bomb already, according to some reports.

I think if you take that all together, I characterize this as the most incompetent presidency of the modern American era. Because ultimately, what is the president, what's the commander in chief got to do? The commander in chief, his main job is to make the American people safe. And his policies on COVID. Look, when I finished this book, by the way, when I did the hardcover, I said, look, the president, Harry Truman, his reputation has greatly improved over time.

He took hard decisions, dropping the atomic bomb. David McCullough did a big biography, and I think that shifted people's views of Truman. So I asked the question, is it possible, and this is in 2019, is it possible that Trump, unlike every American president, he'd never served in public office or in the military. Every other president's either been in the military, served in public office, or done both. And so he came in, and I just asked the question, is it possible that his reputation will improve over time? Because he was getting something, I thought, at the time.

But then, you know, but I think the denialism around the election is something that no other president has done. And I think, and then his Trump never does any homework. He never trusts experts, and he always goes with his gut.

And that might work in a Manhattan real estate deal, but it does not work when you have a complex crisis. It doesn't produce good public policy, and it didn't. And I mean, that's not my opinion. The people who were serving him in the public health realm found him very difficult to deal with because he wouldn't accept kind of basic facts around the pandemic. When his real estate deals,

you don't really need to say basic facts. You just go file bankruptcy. It doesn't work. Yeah. His approach worked fine for a family real estate company that wasn't that big. And they were even that successful, but he,

you know, and the reason i i think that it's important right now to be having this discussion is not this is not his if you look at polling data in february 54 percent of the potential republican voters according to a poll by cnn said they would vote for trump governor desantis of florida came in at 21 and everybody else has also ran at 1%. Mike Pence is not registering. I think it's as likely as warm weather

in Mar-a-Lago this summer that Trump will run. By the way, that would be a pretty good way of it would be a lot harder. Some of these suits that have been filed against him, it's a lot harder if he's either a plausible candidate, is the candidate, or is running for president.

And so there would be that advantage. And plus, of course, he wants to run. And he has a good chance of winning the nomination and potentially winning the presidency because Biden is polling at 39 percent, according to the AP. And, you know, we're going to get new inflation numbers. They're going to be – and inflation is like a tax on – it's a particular tax on low-income, middle-income Americans. And it's also a tax on all Americans because everybody feels the effects of inflation, even if relatively well off. But particularly if you're lower-income, middle-income, Biden could lose the election to Trump pretty easily right now. If it happened tomorrow, it would be an interesting question.

Yeah, it definitely would. Your assessments really surprised me because it seems so stable for those four years. Really, there was stuff going on behind the scenes? So let me touch on a few things. I noticed you guys changed the title, I think, of the book from the hardcover to the paperback. What was the reasoning behind it? The hardcover was called Trump and His Generals. And I think the subtitle was what was the reasoning behind the hardcover was called trump and his generals um and i think the subtitle was the cost of chaos let me uh double check my my

covid brain is uh yeah yeah so the the hardcover was trump and his generals and the subtitle was the cost of chaos and and that was really the first two years the book was really about the first two years or maybe first two and a half years. So, you know, I was able to revise this and we thought that the Trump and his generals was like, it wasn't really an accurate account of what was in the revised version, which actually updated and revised. Do you cover the, let's see, you covered the Iran thing in there too as well. And then pulling another thing. It looks like you basically talked about jim mattis's general john kelly hr master and what they went through and then do you cover millie

in the updated version of the book or yeah because i work at a think tank new america which you mentioned in the intro and one thing i thought it would be an interesting research project to track what retired and active duty three-star and four-star generals officers were saying about Trump. Because we have a tradition in the United States of retired four-stars, the more senior you are, the more you stay out of politics or try to. And Trump really changed that. And it wasn't the insurrection on the Capitol Hill that really changed it. It was the events on June 1st at the White House, where for the first time since General MacArthur, one of Trump's heroes, cleared a group of men who were camped out when President Hoover was president. It was the first

time that armed force had been used against protesters outside the White House. And I think that was really an inflection point. General Milley was in uniform going to this photo op with, he apologized for it very clearly. Three days later, he did a graduation commencement speech on video for National Defense University. And he said, look, it was a mistake for me. And all the kind of chiefs, they can't, the active duty chiefs can't directly criticize Trump, but they all released statements saying we defend the Constitution. They made it very clear. And my team and I counted about 300 statements about Trump by three stars and four stars.

The reason we cut it off at three stars and four stars is to get to a three star position or a four star position. Usually it's pretty, it's quite hard. But yeah, one star. So we kept it at that level. These are the leaders of the U.S. military either. And there were about 300 statements, 250 of them were critical of Trump. And a lot of them came up. And what was very interesting, Chris, after the White House incident where he held up the Bible and the protestors had been cleared was Admiral Mike Mullen came out and criticized Trump by name. Now, Mullen hadn't said anything about Trump at all. He was a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs. John Dempsey,

another chairman of the Joint Chiefs, had never said anything about Trump at all. He was a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs. John Dempsey, another chairman of the Joint Chiefs, had never said anything about Trump publicly. Powell came out. He, Colin Powell now, of course, just recently died. Colin Powell came out very strongly against Trump and had made other public statements. But you had a bunch of very senior retired officers criticizing Trump and then also active duty

criticizing him obliquely, not by name, but saying, hey, we protect the Constitution. So I see the White House event as being the kind of moment when he lost the military. And this is the guy who wrote the book called Trump and his generals, because when they came to office, no modern American president had an active duty three-star on his staff, H.R. McMaster, as a national security advisor, a retired three-star, General Mike Flynn, who McMaster succeeded, Mattis, a four-star at defense, John Kelly, a four-star retired

at both the Department of Homeland Security and chief of staff. But the military turned against Trump then, and so when the January 6th insurrection, I think, happens, General Milley, just responding again to the question about Milley, released a very unusual public statement. He sent a note to the two million members of the armed services, which is the active duty National Guard and Reserve, just saying President Joe Biden is going to be the 46th president of the United States. And we don't condone any of this insurrection. And this is a guy who came into office very much besotted by the military. He wanted to have a big military parade in Washington. He went to a military-style boarding school in Vietnam when he was a teenager

and then, of course, avoided service in the Vietnam War. But he's always been very interested. General Patton, General MacArthur are two of his heroes. And he really lost, I think, the support of a lot of the senior officers. Do you think that in the last days of, I think after he lost the election, they installed a couple of his goons to head over the Pentagon? And the move almost looked, to a lot of people that were watching and reporting it, the move almost looked like he's going to try and seize the government.

He's going to pull a coup. You've been watching, I think it was H.R. McMaster was his first general, and you watched how corny it was to have him announce it and talk to him on some couch. I think it was at Mar-a-Lago in the Trump Tower. And you could just see that, I don't know, the kid-like adulation of authoritarianism in Donald Trump. I've got my generals or something.

There was a comment that he made about that. There was just – Well, he definitely referred to them as my generals. Of course, I don't think he – I think he misunderstood a lot of what the U.S. military stands for because the U.S. military is not an authoritarian. It's not in the business of supporting authoritarian leaders and they they swear an oath to the Constitution not to a particular president. I think he really misunderstood. I don't have this in my book, but Mark Espo, who was his secretary of defense, who did come out with a book recently, talked about Trump wanting to shoot at protesters. This is somebody who didn't understand the ethos of the military.

It's very much opposed to the kinds of things that Trump, some of the things that Trump wanted. And I think he just misunderstood the military. He hadn't been around, he had no experience really in the military. Going to a military style boarding school doesn't mean that you understand the ethos of the US military. And he'd never, he didn't serve in Vietnam. He took five confirmants. He is, I don't, there don't seem to be people in his family. It's not like he was coming out of a family that had experience in the military. So I think he just misunderstood the military. And they began to throw away from him. And Mark Esper, during that run up to the White House, demonstrations outside the White House, talked about dominating the battle space,

which was a very unfortunate thing on a conference call with American governors. But he himself, I think Esper, who was a West Point graduate, shortly after that White House event said, hey, there's no world in which the Insurrection Act can be invoked against these protesters. And I think he, like pretty much any other person who served in the military at any level who became part of this administration, put some distance between themselves. And I don't think, I think you used the word goons about people that Trump put in at the end. He didn't, he wasn't putting in goons, I don't think.

Yeah, I know, I know. And in Marcus Burr, he's a West Point graduate. He, yeah, he's not, I mean, I'm just saying, he's certainly a normal administration. He never would have become Secretary of Defense. He wasn't Jim Mattis. And then there was also Chris Miller,'s a retired special operations, uh, Colonel, he was also promoted after Esper was fired by Trump and in a normal

administration also, he wouldn't have got the job, but Chris Miller certainly served as a special operations, uh, Colonel ran natural counterterrorism center, had a senior job doing counterterrorism in the lighthouse. I would just be careful about using the word goons what i would say is that in a normal administration a secretary of defense is like leon panetta or yeah you know a bob gates or somebody who's like a pretty much a really well-known household name or or has some real gravitas and based on their career and that was not the case at the end of the trump administration it was harder and harder for him to find and just for me to clarify when i

meant goons i was referring to mark esper because we're friends on linkedin and talking about having on the show there was right before january 6th there was two or three people that they installed that had no business being over at the pentagon yeah and they believed the people that interfered with sending the National Guard out to the January 6th thing. Those are the goons that I'm referring to. Yeah. I can't remember. People that would have said it were Trump loyalists who, you know. Yeah.

And the question was, a lot of the press was saying, what are these guys over there doing? Why would you send these guys in the last few days of your presidency, last couple weeks of your presidency? What are they mucking about? And I think one of them was the author of the order that told the National Guard to stand down on January 6th, or to make it so that the response wouldn't come there. Well, even on that,

there was a good reason why you wouldn't necessarily want, there was a discussion about having the National Guard at the Capitol, and I think there was also a discussion like, the national guard at the capital and i think there was also a discussion like maybe it wouldn't make sense for the national guard to be at this event yeah because of the message it would send that turned out to be the wrong decision but you could also see why like having armed people around the capital might there might be a reasonable debate about that yeah so you talk in your book about how the Pentagon, with some of the generals, they slow walked his stuff.

They ran a little interference. And, of course, he had to deal with the Pentagon. Do you think that really helped keep us from falling to an authoritarian takeover, that delineation line that we have with the Constitution and where our military people do say allegiance to whoever the presidency, the commander-in-chief, but it is also to our Constitution. And I believe that is the beyond and all the Constitution part. Yeah, I think the military turned out to be a big break on any plans that Trump might have had to stay in office. They just weren't going to go along for the ride. And also the judiciary as well.

50 lawsuits were filed by Rudy Giuliani and others who are supporters of Trump, and they all got thrown out. The system worked. Now, will the system work again if Trump's back? It fails if he runs and fails to win. Will he claim fraud or if he wins? I don't know. I think the system maybe, the system did work, but the difference is now you have people being voted in as Secretary of State who seem to embrace, and then they have Secretary of State in state offices and they have a role in elections.

Yeah. So you could see that the system is potentially more amenable to these claims of fraud from a system point of view. Yeah. It's interesting and I'm glad you document this stuff so that people can really look at it because everyone, the Trump administration was such a PR machine. Half the time they would do stuff where they would, Obama did something and they would just write off it, oh, we made that happen. And they ran such a PR machine and the truth lies somewhere in between. Certainly Trump was very successful using Twitter, but I don't think that, I think I'm

not confident that the PR machine for the Trump administration particularly worked that well. No one believes Sean Spicer when he's the largest normal crowd in history. Yeah, it was factually not correct, but what's so fascinating about the country at large and i'm zooming out past trump is what really matters to people are facts it's narratives and so people are all persuasions are looking for facts that fit their own narratives or facts pretend facts that fit that narrative and as human beings we're very strongly programmed to tell our stories all the time, which we believe, and we find things that fit into it. And unfortunately, that has become more pronounced.

15% of Americans in polling believe the QAnon conspiracy theory that there's a satanic cult running the country. And that number goes up, I think, to 21% of Republicans. So personally, I'm not one of those people. And I just passed Comet pizza just two days ago newsflash there isn't a basement in comet pizza where groups of pedophile democrats are plotting to take children somebody from north carolina i think came to washington believing that with the rifle and started shooting at comet pizza. And so that's obviously a very extreme version of this. But I think that the issue around truth, three quarters of Republicans in recent polling don't believe that Joe Biden legitimately won the election.

This is obviously very corrosive to our body politic. If this becomes just a feature of the way our politics happen, that's difficult. And everybody knows John F. Kennedy isn't really running the... I saw one of the guys at a Trump thing and the guy said, yeah, John F. Kennedy is running the presidency right now and John F. Jr. is running the vice presidency. Everybody knows that's not true. It's FDR who's actually running everything. So I just want to correct that for everybody. And the world is flat. So there, and it's not flat. It's more like a rolling bumpy thing.

I don't know what that means. But Peter, this has been pretty insightful. I'm glad you called it out and made the assessments and set the record straight so that people can see how dangerous our world would become. I remember watching CNN on Trump's inauguration night or Trump's election night the day after. And CNN had two Italian journalists on the show. And they go, you just elected Silvio Brescoloni. And way to go.

You elected his twin. And here we are with what you've talked about. We may do the second round of Silvio Brescoloni. Yeah, and didn't Berlusconi himself, I i think got a second one yeah and no one prosecuted him either so he had his own uh merrick garland i guess he had what were referred to as bunga bunga parties which i yeah uh but one thing i i think in trump's defense i would say is i thought it was fascinating that george w bush gaffe about it. And Trump didn't make this huge unforced error that George W. Bush did make in Iraq. I'm not quite sure what that means.

Every president, we have a very strong presidency. It's a very, it's an imperial presidency in many ways. And, you know, the founder in chief, there's a reason why it's important about who we put in, who we vote for. But, yeah, let us see. 75 million Americans voted for Trump. He's very popular still in lots of parts of the country. And the Democrats need to... One of the easiest things in politics is to say we need better communication.

I don't think that's... I think, what do Americans care about? They care about inflation. They care about crime. And if politicians are talking about other things, well, I think they care about the kinds of things that we saw unfold in Texas, the massacres. And I thought it's interesting that Biden has really moved,

who I think fundamentally is a centrist Democrat, definitely was not embracing the defund the police move because I think that, you know, even in Minneapolis, where that movement to some degree began, in Minneapolis, that failed, even in Minneapolis, where that movement to some degree began, in Minneapolis, that failed. The defund the police. I think we all know what a, you know. Let me ask you this, based on your book and your assessment in writing the book, and of course, going back and reconciling after January 6th, because that's a hell of a seminal moment. I think your book came out in December 2019 on the hardback.

Do you think that if Trump were to win an election again, or let's say, for instance, the House of Representatives in 2022, the GOP takes the House, appoints him Speaker of the House, they impeach the Vice President and President like they've talked about doing, reinstalls him. Do you think if he gets the presidency presidency again are we going to be even more in danger than we were as his original presidency well i think that's a loaded question and i'm going to answer it in a different way if you do the thought experiment where covid hadn't happened i think trump would have comfortably won i think you're right yeah yeah i think and and then this whole the all the you know kind of denialism about not he would have won It would have been a kosher victory. And I think it was his incompetence. When I wrote the hardcover, one of the conclusions I said was like,

every president since FDR has said something really big happened on their watch. That they either rose to the occasion or they didn't. And, you know, even Bill Clinton had a mostly pretty, but I grew up on his watch and he had the embassy attacks and the USS Cole. He responded. George H.W. of course had 9-11. You know, George H.W. had Saddam invade in Kuwait. Usually there's a crisis and presidents are graded on how they respond to the crisis, not just like to what business as usual.

And so if you go back to the end of 2019, Trump seemed to have some wins and some losses, but he wasn't the guy that failed rather dramatically on the COVID pandemic. And he wasn't the guy who consistently approaches this terrible lie that we election. And that makes him a very different person. And I think anybody listening to this can draw their own conclusions. One thing that always used to bother me was who wrote the book Fear? It's one of the Watergate people. Woodward. Yeah, my brain's gone out the door.

And either Fear or one of his recent books, I think it was the last one with Trump. Trump would say, you will know me in the second term. And he kept saying that. And that used to just make my skin crawl. And I agree with you. I think Trump would say, you will know me in the second term. And he kept saying that. And that used to just make my skin crawl. And I agree with you. I think Trump would have won. I think Americans care about their pocketbook more than everything. That's why people vote for fascism and authoritarianism. The trains run on time. Yeah, well, that's a complicated question. There's a whole set of circumstances why Mussolini did well in Italy and why Hitler did well in Germany. But yeah, they came out of the Great Depression, right?

So, I mean, front and center of people's concerns at the time. But we're not in the Great Depression right now or anything close. It could be we're going into a recession. So, yeah. People blame the guy, the person who's the president for the economic situation, but for which, of course, easy money from the Fed and COVID itself and supply chain issues in China and the invasion of Russia into Ukraine, all these things are because inflation is happening everywhere.

It's not one thing if inflation was only happening in the United States, but it's a global phenomenon. It's hard to say, but Biden will get stuck with it. He knows that. And that's what did Jimmy Carter. And there's no, if I was a betting man, I would say, you know, right now it's highly unlikely that Biden would win an election against Trump if it was today. Yeah. I don't think he would win. I don't think he's going to win no matter what it is. And I'm a moderate Democrat. The yeah. And I was thinking very heavily the other day that Jesus, this is turning into like the Jimmy Carter era.

And then I don't know. It's really interesting to me. He's a good president. He does what he's supposed to do. He does the empathy thing. But it's almost like we've become a nation that embraces people like Trump. We're the Kim Kardashian, Jerry Springer sort of nation, where we want white trash politics as opposed to just somebody do the job well. And sometimes I wonder if that's going to be our downfall. I don't know. I have always found Neil Postman, who wrote Amusing Ourself to Death, Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. Neil Postman wrote this in 1985. He says, our politics, religion, and news have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even

much popular notice. The result is that we're a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death. And I think that he wrote that in 85. And I think that gets to what you're saying, which is we are, the politics is fundamentally a pretty boring business of compromise and votes. And so people want something more exciting. And it's only Trump delivered that. And I think you're right about Biden. And Biden has been, I think think a competent president in terms of getting COVID relief passed and trying to get the economy in shape but and trying to get infrastructure passed which is popular but but yeah he doesn't it hasn't translated now in fact if you look at Biden's favorable ratings they never recovered from the Afghan debacle yeah he he dropped now of course

the reasons now are very different but again he dropped i think to like low 40s immediately after that because he seemed projected to like a total feeling of incompetence and and they're not feeling but it seemed very incompetent and and he didn't recover from that he hasn't recovered from that so we'll see of course a lot of things can change the next year or two and i think on ukraine he's done a very good job of doing precisely what Trump tried to do, tried to undermine, which is build up the NATO alliance, confront Putin. And I think he's done that quite skillfully. Yeah, it's interesting what you were saying about that gentleman who wrote that in the

80s. I was thinking, I was just looking up here, when was Newt Gingrich, Speaker of the House, and it was in the 90s. He sure nailed it, because i think that's when some of our politics went downhill on the went out of his way to blow up what he saw part of this i think is about cold war which is there was such agreement between both sides of confronting the soviet union that that papered over a lot of our differences but yeah i was a very young relatively young reporter uh covering capitol hill for cnn we were making a documentary and back in the day the speaker of the house would get like three people at his press conference and newt gingrich got 300 people come to the journalist company was press conference and he was a phenomenon he was planning to really blow

up the old system which was the tip o'neill reagan we may disagree with each other, but we're going to work together. And Newt really succeeded in that. And was an early embracer of Trump and that kind of politics. And that kind of politics is largely defined. See, there's going to be a new book by Dana Milbank coming out in August called The Destructionist, a 25-year crack-up of the Republican Party. Jenny's going to unpack a lot of that. But we know, yeah, and then John McCain contributed to this

by embracing, you know, the governor, Sarah Palin. She wasn't a serious politician. She was a good politician, but she wasn't really a serious person. Yeah, I think Newt traced back a lot of this to Newt and the people that he brought in and his view of how to change in Washington. Yeah. It'll be interesting to see how it shakes out. I'm going to just strap myself in and go for the ride.

Anything more you want to tease out on the book, Peter, before we go out? Thank you for having me on the show. I think, just to return to one of the themes we discussed, I do think that Trump really lost the support of the senior military, which that is not, that's also something new in this country. I'm not, I don't know enough about American history, but when your own chairman of the Joint Chiefs is publicly taking you to task to the armed forces, I think that is new.

And one thing that we have to be very careful of in this country is there is a reason that the U.S. military so widely has very high approval ratings, apart from all the obvious things. They're also regarded as nonpolitical. And if you do the thought experiment where, let's say, Kamala Harris as president in the next cycle. And there are a bunch of retired four-star and three-star taking her to task publicly. It's a slippery slope. The more that these senior guys, and they are mostly guys, get involved in politics

in one way or another, that is a kind of a norm which we need to think about pretty carefully. It's a norm you don't really want to erode. But it began to erode. It's been eroding for a while. Admiral Crowe, you may recall, Chris, was the first chairman to, he was retired to endorse Bill Clinton. It's pretty routine. Every time now you have any candidates running, you have hundreds of retired generals and admirals signing up one side or the other. And maybe that's a reflection of how divided we are as a nation and the kind of increased polarization. Because, of course, the military, they're also American citizens, and they're going to be affected by the politics just as much as anybody else. But if I'm leaving, like, the final

thought would be it's not a great position for the military to be in to be seen as increasingly politicized, even if they're taking the positions that a lot of people think are correct. That is a slippery slope. Yeah. You know, I mean, that's the one thing, one that I was watching was that's really the one thing that separates us from nations that either have the like Myanmar or Egypt where the military steps in and interferes or coups or basically takes out someone they don't feel is doing the job. There's a kind of, I don't know if you call it a thin line, but there's definitely that line of separation with our military. And I think there was concern with what was it? It was General Milley or the new general who they were concerned about the QAnon sort of infection in the ranks of the military.

Well, Lloyd Austin, who's the Secretary of Defense, you know, certainly has been concerned about extremism in the ranks. And I think, you know, that's something that they're, you know, being very, you know, pretty proactive about. The country, you mentioned Myanmar and Egypt, I would say even more. You know, Pakistan is a sort of quasi-democratic society in which the military has pretty much a lot of veto power over who gets in or out. And yeah, that is not a place you want to be.

And I don't think we will be because I think the military showed that it had absolutely no interest in going down this path. It's wearing a constitution not to a person. It was very chilling to hear general milley's it was recounted by someone say at biden's inauguration we landed the plane and it was he was sweating and up until that moment and then i i believe general milley had also told depending on people

to stand down in case there was a call for some sort of much like what echoed with what they did with nixon when nixon was drunk walking around the White House talking to portraits of Washington and Lincoln. And so I don't know if you touch on that in your book. No, I don't. I'm aware of the reporting. I don't know. Yeah. Interesting stuff.

It's been wonderful to have you on, Peter. Thank you very much for coming on and spending some time with us today. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Enjoy your Memorial Day. There you go.

You too as well. Also, give us your plugs, your.com so people can find you on the interwebs and get to a better place. PeterBergen.com is my personal website. There you go, guys. Order it up. It comes available on paperback, the updated paperback tomorrow, May 31st,

2022, if you're watching this 5 to 10 years from now. People are still watching our stuff from 12 years ago. The cost of chaos, the Trump administration and the world, and hopefully people that are watching this 12 years from now, we're still here. So we'll put that in the time capsule.

Thanks to Peter for being on the show with us. Thanks to my audience for tuning in. Be sure to go to youtube.com, Fortress, Chris Foss, go to goodreads.com, Fortress, Chris Foss,

all those places those crazy kids are playing, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, all those places you can find the show. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.

Chris, thank you.