The Dispatch Podcast - Almost Inevitable

Episode Date: January 8, 2021

Wednesday’s storming of the Capitol should not have come as a surprise to anyone who has paid attention to Donald Trump’s election-related conspiracy-mongering in the weeks since November 3. Politico’s chief political correspondent Tim Alberta has been interacting with Trump supporters for months now and joins today’s show to explain why Wednesday’s Capitol siege was almost inevitable: “What we saw at every step of the way was a coordinated and deliberate campaign” by the president, high ranking Republicans, and far-right media personalities “to deceive the American public,” Alberta tells Sarah and Steve. Show Notes: -“Jan. 6 Was 9 Weeks — And 4 Years — in the Making” by Tim Alberta in Politico. -American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump by Tim Alberta. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Uh, I'm looking into it. Stress less about security. Choose security solutions from TELUS for peace of mind at home and online. Visit TELUS.com. Total Security to learn more. Conditions apply. Welcome to our Friday Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isgird, joined by Steve Hayes and Politico's Tim Alberta this week.

Tim is the chief political correspondent for Politico. He writes a lot of long forms for the publications magazine and his beat, the Trump presidency, the Republican Party, and really, I mean, just everything that we need to talk about today. So without further ado, Tim Alberta. Let's dive right in. Tim, just so thrilled to have you joining us today. You just had this incredible piece that you wrote for Politico. And look, I love all of your pieces in Politico. And I always find them really informative.

The reporting from the ground is, I mean, there's no parallel to it out there right now. But this piece was more personal. It felt more emotional. It felt, I felt that you were writing this from a different place than a lot of your other pieces. And, you know, I want you to summarize it, but there's a point in which you talked about

how plenty of the people who stormed the U.S. Capitol complex on Wednesday really truly believed that Trump had been cheated out of four more years. that Vice President Mike Pence so unilateral power to revise the election results, that their takeover of the building could change the course of history. I know this because I know several people who were there and several more who planned to go. They bear responsibility for their actions, of course, but the point remains. They were conned into coming to D.C. in the first place, not just by Trump with his compulsive lying, but by the legions of Republicans who refused to counter those lives, believing it couldn't hurt

to humor the president and stoke the fires of his base. That, to me, is the paragraph that summarizes January 6th. Yeah, Sarah, and you know, you're right with what you said at the outset. I'm just, I'm angry, and I think a lot of people are angry, and I'm angry for a lot of reasons, but, you know, I'm angry mostly because of the lying and what you just read a moment ago. you know, it's, I just think it's absolutely contemptible what the president and what high-ranking Republicans in this country and what many conservative media personalities, what they've done over the last nine weeks. It's just, it's, it's despicable. Listen, if you want to pursue

legal avenues to challenge an election result, that's fine. But do it with integrity, do it with grace, do it honestly. What we saw every step of the way was a coordinated and deliberate campaign to deceive the American public. And it was done in ways both, you know, small and large. You know, it's Ted Cruz going on Fox News and lying repeatedly about poll watch. being thrown out of places and saying that no Republican poll watchers had access to see what was going on, even as the Trump campaign's lawyers were in court the same day, saying that, yes, we did have our poll watchers in those rooms. And of course, that's a relatively small

lie, but it's significant because you're convincing people who are millions of people watching you on Fox News that something was foul here. And then there are the big lies, you know, Sidney Powell standing at Republican National Committee headquarters and, you know, telling the world with the RNC insignia behind her that, you know, there was an international conspiracy to rig voting machines against the president. And then there's all sorts of lies, you know, that fall somewhere in between. But at the end of the day, where were the trusted responsible voices in the Republican Party these last nine weeks to stand up and say, listen, no, this is nuts, right? This is crazy. I voted for the president. I respect the legal challenges, as many of them said,

but then they left out the most important part, which was that you guys are lying about all of this other stuff, and it completely delegitimizes not only the election process, but the after election process, the transition process, this next president, this next administration coming in. You are doing significant long-term damage to the country and we could we could see it coming in that sense guys i mean just to wrap up my rant here you go all the way back to september and the spokesman for the president's re-election campaign matt wolking he tweeted out in response to a a department of justice uh inquiry that was announced into nine ballots being accidentally discarded in lezern county pennsylvania uh

at an elections office, run by a Republican, and an investigation opened by a DA who was a Republican, and they were transparent about it, reported it the right way. They found out that there was nothing foul about what happened. It was an intern who accidentally threw away some mail, basically. And the DOJ announced that there was this inquiry opened in the Central District of Pennsylvania. and Matt Wolking, a spokesman for the president's campaign, came out and tweeted, quote, Democrats are trying to steal the election, unquote. And it only after, you know, 36 or 48 hours of just taking a beating from me and some others in the media, did this guy finally take that tweet down, but only after it had been retweeted and shared hundreds of thousands of times all across the internet and not just Twitter, but Facebook, Reddit, you name it. And I tweeted at him repeatedly and said, this is going to get somebody hurt. This is going to get somebody killed.

I mean, you can only play with matches so many times before somebody gets burned. And, of course, you know, tragically, that's what happened this week. And you had mentioned where were the Republicans who could have said something all along this time? And Steve, that's something you and I have been talking about a lot. Yeah, I mean, you know, this is one of the things that we were saying in the immediate aftermath of the election when the standard line from virtually every Republican was the president has a right to this process. The president has a right to the process. And look, as a descriptive matter, of course, they were correct. And that was always correct.

What they didn't do, and I think what they needed to do, and this is totally clear. consistent with the points that Tim just made is also say there is no evidence the election was stolen. We say that from the outset. And they not only failed to do that, pretty much across the board, many of them took active steps to amplify the president's craziest allegations, including long after those allegations were, uh, those claims were, were, uh, debunked. Um, you know, we had our fact checkers working overtime, knocking things down almost in real time, not by any, any magical formula,

by doing good, solid reporting. Um, and you had people like Ted Cruz. I mean, I think Ted Cruz, the example going on on fox as well as you know the many of the fox news personalities and hosts themselves um you know last week sean hannity gave his show to a guest host uh who basically went through a series of these outrageous conspiracies um and and provided them additional oxygen It was the sort of conservative media entertainment complex in addition to Republican elected officials that so badly misled these rank-and-file Republicans, grassroots conservatives, and I think set the stage for what we saw at the Capitol. Tim, let me ask you a little bit more about where we are now. So we your piece, let me just first emphasize what Sarah said. any of you listening haven't read Tim's piece.

We'll put it in the show notes. Please make a point to go read it. I think it will help you understand this moment, you know, as all of Tim's reporting has done all along. This one in particular, I think, helped you understand this moment better than just about anything that's out there. You know, we're now a couple days after this attempted insurrection. And you had, even after what we saw at the Capitol and the violence and the mobs, you had the president and his top supporters, in some cases, continuing to work to overturn the election, Rudy Giuliani, leaving voicemails for Senator Tommy Tuberville, an hour before the Senate reconvened, trying to get him to delay this process. It became clear, I think, as you looked at what Giuliani was doing, as you looked at what others were doing, that the rally on Wednesday morning and everything that happened after was part of a plan to delay this process. That's what they were trying to do.

And I think if you look at where we are now, it becomes clearer and clearer in hindsight that, you know, this was something the president was actively involved in and was trying to do as part of his effort to remain in office. Am I overreating that, looking back on it? No, no, I don't think so at all, Steve. I think that's exactly right. there's no way to sort of reconstruct the events of not only the last nine weeks, but the last 72 hours or so specifically, last 96 hours, and not see it as anything other than the president helping to mastermind an effort to not have Congress be able to sort.

certify those results on on the sixth, you know, as, as they're constitutionally bound to do. And I have to say, like, we become numb to so much of this at a certain point. And, you know, I just don't think we should ever become numb to the fact that as the sort of nucleus of that plan that we're discussing to delay the certification was the president of the United States leaning on his vice president. I mean, under any circumstances, it would just be breathtaking and jaw-dropping. But leaning on his vice president, the one guy in the world who's been sort of unfailingly loyal to him and who has compromised himself in so many ways, ways to retain that loyalty and to subjugate himself to this president. And what does Trump do?

He basically not only puts it all on Pence, but sort of throws him under the bus and says, you know, I'm going to be really, I'm going to be really disappointed with this guy. He's going to let you down if he doesn't do this, right? And the and the, the, the subtext there very clearly is, you know, that that Pence has the power. Well, shoot, it's not even the subtext. It's a text because Trump's tweeting it out saying, oh, you know, the vice president, he can, he can reject these electors. He can do whatever he wants, which is, of course, insane. But like, to see the president sort of build that effort that you're describing, Steve, to build it around the idea that the vice president of the United States can just unilaterally discard the Constitution, it's just something that I feel like we're going to need some time to process. again, like there's just, there's so much deception, there's so much deplicity that we become

numb to it in the moment. And obviously, you know, we're going to be dealing with the events of January 6th for a long time in this country. But I just personally can't get over that aspect of it, the president's treatment of his vice president in that moment. Well, and there were direct consequences to that. The rioters, the insurrectionist, storming the hall, of the Capitol were shouting, where is Mike Pence? Yes. We want Mike Pence. I mean, they were looking for Mike Pence.

They weren't looking for Mike Pence because they were particularly interested in, you know, the vice president or because they have long followed Mike Pence's career going back to his talk radio days. They were looking for Mike Pence because the president told them to look for Mike Pence. He told them that that's who was responsible. It's grotesquely. irresponsible behavior from the president. Going from the afternoon to that evening, everything that we saw unfold Wednesday afternoon, then you have the president's lawyer continuing to try to get senators

to delay the president himself on the phone to senators, trying to get them to continue to delay. And then you have these votes. And you have Republicans in one state objecting 138 House Republicans, listing their names as objectors. Did that number surprise you after what we saw transpire throughout the day? Yeah, a little bit. It did. Because, look, you know, you saw on the Senate side, you saw a significant scale back in the number of senators who were,

willing to participate, right? You know, so, so just to put this in context, you had two states that were ultimately, uh, debated, right? You had Arizona and you, which was at the beginning of the roll call when it was all fun in games. And then, uh, after all of the chaos and the capital, and when they reconvened, a number of the other states that, that they were planning to have debates over. So, um, Georgia and Michigan and Wisconsin, um, I think I might be missing one. but they withdrew the senators who had been planning to force a debate, including Howley, they all withdrew, and therefore the House members who were registering their objection, they didn't have any senator to co-sign it, so there was no debate. But then when they got to Pennsylvania,

the state that had been sort of the lynchpin to the plan all along for Republicans in both chambers, Howley did lend his name to that objection. And so they had the they went ahead and had the debate, obviously. Now, the interesting thing is that even as the number of senators signing on and voting to object to the results, when fell off of a cliff between those two, so Arizona, there were seven and Pennsylvania, I believe there was just the one with Hawley. I'd have to go back and check. I want to be sure of that.

but the number of House Republicans who voted, ultimately to object, it went up. It went from 121 with Arizona to, as you said, I believe it was in the 130s with Pennsylvania. So, yeah, I was really surprised, actually, because, you know, for everything that these guys had just witnessed, I mean, they've got Capitol police pointing guns at the doors to the House chamber, just a couple of hours earlier trying to keep terrorists out who want to come in and do God knows what to these people and they're still just just for political purposes willing to take a vote to basically placate some of those same terrorists. I mean, it's just like, yeah, it's kind of astonishing, actually. Your job for a long time now, and I've so enjoyed all of your reporting for so long,

is to cover the conservatives, to cover the Republican Party. How, and those two things maybe aren't the same anymore. After this week, how does someone like Mitt Romney stay in the same political party as Josh Hawley? Oh, boy, that's a good question. And I don't mean that in a sort of, you know, flip it. How can you do that? I mean, no, in a very practical sense, are we about to see two different parties, or will the sort of Romney, sasses of the current Republican Party identify as independence, but caucus differently?

You know, I'm thinking back to 1854 at the start of the Republican Party. By 1860, they'd won an election. Yeah, so, Sarah, it's interesting. I mean, because if you were talking to SAS or Romney right now, I'm quite sure what they would say is that, well, why should I be the one that leaves? Right? This is my party. Just because some of these knuckleheads have tried to hijack it, and in some cases have successfully hijacked,

it doesn't mean that I should run away, that I should be the one to cry uncle. By the way, your use of knucklehead means you actually really have talked to Mitt Romney. Well, yes, that's true. You know, it's a family program. We're trying to keep it clean. you know if we were going back to the bainer days the language would be more colorful um but but you know and honestly it's funny because sarah like you could even take it back to the bainer days right i mean

there was a real sense of of fracturing and splintering you know seven eight 10 12 years ago in the party uh at the you know at the end of the bush administration when you started to see the beginnings of and i don't need to you know shamelessly plug my book but this is like a lot of what i was writing about is you could see the beginnings of this fracture. And in many ways, you know, Ted Cruz and Susan Collins, like these people aren't from the same planet, much less the same party, right? So, I mean, what really, what really did these people have in common other than the letter next to their name? I don't think that this is a new phenomenon. Obviously, it's more, it probably feels a bit more urgent to some folks now given the events of Wednesday. And

I think you're right. Like it does sort of presents, I think some sort of an existential dilemma for a lot of Republicans, including, you know, not just, I mean, we focus on people in Congress, obviously, but just at the ground level. Like I've talked with some local Republican officials in Michigan in the last couple of days who are like genuinely sort of vexed. Like they don't know exactly how comfortable they feel operating inside the Republican Party moving forward. Like, And, you know, somebody listening to that might say, oh, gosh, now they're uncomfortable, like they've been willing to put up with the last four years. Listen, I hear that, but at the same time, you have to understand the psychological impact of seeing terrorists storming the U.S. Capitol in the name of Donald J. Trump, right? Like, this is for a lot of people, just a new thing that they're having to grapple with, and they should have to grapple with it, right?

And we shouldn't just mock them and scorn them for having had this revelation. When, when, so I've been doing some reporting. I'm sure you're doing some additional reporting and looking at what's to come. You know, we at the dispatch had our very first editorial on Wednesday night, Thursday morning, calling for Congress to impeach the president to remove him from, ban him from office. Forever, you've seen other publications on the center right make similar calls. Wall Street Journal has an editorial out today calling on the president. to resign. There are, based on my reporting, there are a couple of different movements. Democrats are all in on impeaching the president. Nobody should be surprised by that. I believe there is

a group of Republicans, both in the House and the Senate, who are not only open to impeaching and removing the president, but strongly in favor of impeaching and removing the president. And there is a separate, I don't know if I should call it a group, there's a separate, a separate group that is in favor of pushing or approaching the president to resign. I wonder, as we think about what's coming over these next few days, what you think of the prospects of that, of the former in particular. We saw 138 House Republicans vote to object. Is it possible that there could be a sizable group of more than a dozen or maybe a couple dozen Republicans who would in light of what we've seen and having had 48 hours to think about everything favor impeaching the president,

joining with Democrats, if the Democrats are smart and write an article of impeachment that is narrow and something that Republicans could join on to? Or is it or is it just is that is that crazy to think? You know the thing is the my fear uh with this entire situation is that uh every minute that we are removed from the events of Wednesday afternoon that the the sting of it is going to be less intense and uh that a lot of Republicans who, on Wednesday afternoon and Wednesday evening who were angry with the president, who were furious with the president, who were disgusted with the president, and who, you know, if articles of impeachment came on the floor that night would have probably been willing to vote for them,

they will have now had the time in the space to sort of recalibrate politically and think about the fact that, you know, their constituents back home are still overwhelmingly supportive of him, maybe not nearly as supportive as they were 48 hours ago, but still, you know, quite supportive nonetheless. So I think it's hard to imagine any groundswell of Republicans suddenly supporting impeachment. Could you see maybe, I mean, look, if this were Vegas, like, where would you set the over under? I mean, maybe, maybe 10 of them in the House. But even that would seem like a lot to me. I don't know. I mean, I just, at the end of the day, you know, the easiest out in the world for anyone in this situation is to say, look, the guy's leaving office in 12 days, right?

You know, what's the point right now? And of course, there are a lot of good answers, good rejoinders to that, you know, to that rhetorical question. I was going to say, I've got answers. Yeah, right. I mean, I think, yeah, I think a lot of us would. But, you know, that's a pretty easy out that I think most of these folks would take, even if in their heart of hearts, they know that something is deeply wrong here and that he doesn't deserve to stay in office. I do think that that sort of provides just a comfortable escape hatch.

Let me, Sarah, before I turn it back over to you, let me make a brief counter argument. And you both can tell me if you think I'm crazy. We saw overnight Ted Cruz give an interview to, I think it was a local Texas station in which he criticized the president pretty harshly for his rhetoric on Wednesday and then claimed to have been a consistent critic of Donald Trump and his rhetoric over the past four years, setting aside the fact that that's fantasy. I take it as very interesting and potentially revealing about the politics of the moment because we know after having covered Ted Cruz or in Sirius' case work for Ted Cruz, he is a very political person, thinks about politics and positioning, you know, I don't, it's probably enough fair to say all the time, but a lot. and he sees in this moment after having led the objector crowd peril for his position and his standing

and now sees that the winds have shifted so much that he's willing to make in public an argument that's inconsistent with his history over the past four years. years. And you look at what you're hearing from some others on Capitol Hill who have been pretty supportive of the president reconsidering that or, you know, willing to speak out about their colleagues in a way that's sort of blunt. I find it very refreshing. You had Mike Gallagher on Fox News the other day saying, in effect, we warned them that this would have consequences and these are the consequences. Thomas Massey spoke to our Haley Bird for her newsletter coming out on Friday and said, in effect, they all knew this was

wrong. And I think he tried very hard not to criticize his colleagues, but in the end said they were afraid of Donald Trump, so they made arguments they knew were false. You're starting to see people speak up in a way that we really haven't seen for four years. Couldn't that be an indication that things have turned enough that there could be Republican support for impeachment and removal? You're not persuaded. You think I'm wishcasting here.

No, it's not that, you know, Steve, the thing is everything you just said is perfectly logical and perfectly linear and it's not crazy at all. But I just, you know, again, even the folks who are beginning to become less afraid of Trump, they're still afraid of his base. And I think that that's been the animating characteristic for so many of these lawmakers over the last four years. There's been so much written and so much said about their fear of Trump. And it's true to a degree they are scared of Trump. But they're much more scared of his voters. And until these folks have a very, very good sense that their voters have, especially in, you know, deeply Republican areas of the country, that they have

turned on the president. I don't think they're going to be willing to turn on the president because elected officials are reactionaries. They're not leaders. They're not going to be the ones trying to sort of change the public's view of Trump, right? They're looking around right now. They're sticking their finger in the wind. They're watching Fox News. They're talking with, you know, their staff at the local offices back home. They're trying to figure out how people are processing all of this. They know how they feel about it, but they want to know how their constituents feel about it before they get over their skis. So I mean, look, I wish I was wrong on that, but I just don't think I am. I'd be very surprised to see, again, some sort of a,

like, could you, again, could you see a handful of these folks come out and, and sign on to an impeachment effort? Sure, I think you could see a handful, maybe even more than a handful, maybe a dozen or so, but that would surprise me. And it would certainly surprise me to see, like I said, any sort of meaningful number, any real grounds for all of them come out. Because I just think that at the end of the day, they think that they would probably catch health about it back home. And they're probably right to some degree. Even if Trump's lost, you know, 10, 15, 20 points off of his approval number back home, if you're in a, you know, a safely Republican district, that still means the president's got 70% approval in your district, right?

Like that, you know, that's just a risk that a lot of these folks aren't going to be willing to take. Tim, while we have been talking, the president just tweeted, to all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the inauguration on January 20th. I don't think a lot of people at this point find that surprising or are particularly disappointed with that news. You know, of all the norms that have been broken in the last four years, I think that's what I'm good with now. I'm sure Biden is heartbroken. But I wanted to get your reaction to that in the context of something you ended your piece with, the piece that we started this podcast talking about.

Your job is to cover conservatives and Republicans, like I said. And you said someone asked you whether you could still cover the GOP objectively after this week. Five people at this point are dead. One of them is a federal officer who gave his... life defending those members of Congress of both parties. And you ended it by saying you're not totally sure. I'm wondering if you could expound upon that a little. Well, the thing is, Sarah, I guess it depends on your definition of objective. Not to play the Bill Clinton game here, but there's, I mean, look, there's a, to, to my, to, to my.

mind, there's always been sort of a difference between being fair and being objective. Because being objective means to sort of completely suspend any sort of, you know, I'm not probably going to articulate this quite right, but to suspend any sort of emotion or any sort of, I mean, put it this way. Like, referees are supposed to be objective in football because they're not thinking about the last play, right? They're not, to be objective means that you're just watching the play in front of you and you're not making calls or throwing flags based on what happened a couple of plays ago. Like, that's pure objectivity, right? Like, it's just, like, in the moment, fair or foul, ball or strike, safe or out. I know I'm mixing between baseball and football there, but you get the

point. But that's objectivity, right? Now, fairness is, to me, is different because you can be to a certain level objective, but also recognize that, you know, covering, to be fair in covering Ted Cruz a year from now is absolutely to never let him off the hook for what he just did, right? Covering Josh Howley a year from now is to be sort of constantly reminding readers and sort of giving great contextual significance to the fact that this guy did one of the most selfish, cynical, hurtful things in the history of the U.S. Congress, right? And so objective, you know, I'm not entirely sure anymore that any of us who are really doing our jobs well and who are, you know, who are intellectually honest people, I'm not sure any of us can sort of abide by what the AP style book defines as objectivity in reporting anymore. And I know that probably is going to make some people pull their hair out when they hear that. But it's just like, you know, how do you cover objectively, you know, terrorists laying siege to the U.S. Capitol when they're incited to do so by the President of the United States?

I mean, is it like, can you really, can you really cover that? in a way that is dispassionate and just the facts, ma'am, and he said, she said, like, I don't think you can and I don't think you should, right? Like, I, I think that, I think that good journalism, especially at moments like this, is defined by a certain moral clarity and a certain, you know, righteous indignation about what we've just seen and why we saw it and who's responsible for it. So, you know, listen, Sarah, I've lost a bunch of Republican sources over the last nine weeks. I'm going to lose some more and I'm going to sleep great at night because of it. It's not going to bother me for a moment because this party has just, in many ways, gone over a cliff. And the people who could have stopped it have refused to stop it. And until there is a real sea change from the bottom up in the GOP, I'm going to,

keep covering these guys the same way that I have. And if they don't like it, then, you know, too bad. Tim Alberta, thank you so much for joining us. Tim's book, American Carnage on the front lines of the Republican Civil War and the rise of President Trump. Of course, detailed so much of what has already happened and predicted so much of what has been happened in the last several months. Thank you, Tim.

Thanks for your reporting. We'll talk again soon. All right, Sarah, Steve. God bless you guys. Thanks for having me. You know what I'm going to be able to be. Thank you.