Speaker 1: Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show
Speaker 1: where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news.
Speaker 1: I'm Noah Feldman. This episode comes at the end of
Speaker 1: one of the most tumultuous presidencies in US history, and
Speaker 1: this episode is coming out on January twentieth, the day
Speaker 1: Donald Trump will leave the White House and Joe Biden
Speaker 1: will become the forty sixth President of the United States.
Speaker 1: This episode also comes at the beginning of a new
Speaker 1: season here on Deep Background. This year on the show
Speaker 1: will be exploring the theme of power. Who has it,
Speaker 1: how do they get it, who doesn't have it? And why?
Speaker 1: How has power used? What is power in different realms?
Speaker 1: And how does power shape events. Over the course of
Speaker 1: the year, we'll be discussing many forms of power, well
Speaker 1: beyond the strictly legal or political or constitution. To start
Speaker 1: off this new season, given the January sixth attack on
Speaker 1: Congress and Trump's second impeachment, We're going to talk today
Speaker 1: about how power functions in the presence. To discuss this,
Speaker 1: I'm joined by Professor Douglas Brinkley. He's a professor at
Speaker 1: Rice University, the official US presidential historian of the new
Speaker 1: York Historical Society, a contributor to CNN, and a best
Speaker 1: selling author whose most recent book is American Moonshop. John F.
Speaker 1: Kennedy and the Great Space Race. Doug, thank you so
Speaker 1: much for being here today. Let's begin with the capital
Speaker 1: storming on January sixth. There's no immediate precedent for an
Speaker 1: event like this. My mind immediately went to the moment
Speaker 1: in the War of eighteen twelve when the capital was
Speaker 1: actually burned, but that was by a battle hardened force
Speaker 1: of British regulars who swept away the state militias who
Speaker 1: briefly tried to block them at Bladensburg, So it's a
Speaker 1: pretty different scenario. What did it call to your mind
Speaker 1: when you try to think about this bizarre event, an
Speaker 1: upsetting event in historical context. Well, no, I immediately did
Speaker 1: what you did. I pulled back and thought, gosh, what's
Speaker 1: going on here? And I did think for a minute
Speaker 1: about the War of eighteen twelve, and I did recall
Speaker 1: when Washington was attacked during nine to eleven, and our
Speaker 1: Pentagogue was hit, and the Capitol had been a target,
Speaker 1: and I remember scares of anthrax and the like, with
Speaker 1: some people running out of building but they were kind
Speaker 1: of frivolous comparisons. I mean here, the fact of the
Speaker 1: matter was a group of our fellows, citizens mob were
Speaker 1: going in and destroying the US capital on a hunt
Speaker 1: for the Speaker of the House and the Vice Press,
Speaker 1: with ostensibly the order to hang them or do something
Speaker 1: horrible to them. That was unprecedented, and that, to me
Speaker 1: is a day that will live in infamy. January sixth
Speaker 1: is not to be forgotten. Likely, just like we have
Speaker 1: a nine to eleven museum in New York City, there
Speaker 1: will be a museum by the capital to talk about
Speaker 1: what happened in that day when the insurruction occurred, and
Speaker 1: so I thought it to be an extremely frightening day
Speaker 1: for our democracy. That's a fascinating idea of a museum
Speaker 1: or an exhibit even in a museum, to commemorate those events.
Speaker 1: And it leads me to a question that I've been
Speaker 1: really puzzling over and I don't feel I have a
Speaker 1: good answer to it, and that is, will we achieve
Speaker 1: the kind of consensus on the meaning of those events
Speaker 1: over time that is usually the precondition for some kind
Speaker 1: of a public recognition in the form of a museum
Speaker 1: or a monument, because there is an impulse now to say, well, look,
Speaker 1: Donald Trump was the president, he spoke to this crowd
Speaker 1: before they stormed the capitol. He's been impeached under an
Speaker 1: article of impeachment that accused him of inciting insurrection. Those
Speaker 1: are two major words, incitement and insurrection. They're both invoked there.
Speaker 1: And all of that is of course partisan in some
Speaker 1: powerful way. For us to get to a place where
Speaker 1: we say, you know, let's memorialize this would probably would
Speaker 1: be necessary to think of this as an outlying event
Speaker 1: that wasn't closely associated with one of the two major
Speaker 1: political parties. Oh, excellent point, and that's actually why I
Speaker 1: mentioned it. I think that day will come, you know,
Speaker 1: I think the country will unite that this was a
Speaker 1: really rotten thing that occurred, the insurrection. But I don't
Speaker 1: think it's a date that's easily forgotten to select. In
Speaker 1: April twenty fifth, when the Oklahoma City was bombed. Well,
Speaker 1: in Oklahoma City, they have a beautiful museum there. They
Speaker 1: have the empty chairs of all the dead, and they
Speaker 1: explain that event of Timothy McVeigh and right wing extremism
Speaker 1: quite well. It's a marvelously curated museum. That's an Oklahoma.
Speaker 1: This is in our nation's capital, where all the school
Speaker 1: kids come, where everybody goes to visit to study democracy.
Speaker 1: So this is going to be, I think, studied like
Speaker 1: Ford's Theater where where Lincoln was killed, as an anti site,
Speaker 1: a site where something went terribly wrong with our democracy.
Speaker 1: Your comparison to the Oklahoma City bombing is really an
Speaker 1: important one. I was lucky enough to have on the
Speaker 1: program professor Kathleen Bellew from University of Chicago in the
Speaker 1: history department there, who works on the white supremacy movement,
Speaker 1: and she treats the McVeigh bombing in Oklahoma City as
Speaker 1: a central event in the history of that movement. And
Speaker 1: she's been saying recently that she sees the capital attack
Speaker 1: as itself a manifestation of what is essentially the same movement.
Speaker 1: And I think to the extent that we do come
Speaker 1: to see it that way, you're going to be proven
Speaker 1: right that we can peripheralize the events of that day.
Speaker 1: The question that I have is what about the denial
Speaker 1: of the legitimacy of the twenty twenty election results that
Speaker 1: was closely associated with the attack. That goes way beyond
Speaker 1: the people who attacked the Capitol Right now, these numbers
Speaker 1: will change, but right now close to seventy percent of
Speaker 1: Republicans are telling posters that they believe that the twenty
Speaker 1: twenty election was illegitimate, and that too is going to
Speaker 1: have to be assimilated into the historical record in some way.
Speaker 1: In fact, that's a dispute about the very facts of
Speaker 1: the historical record. You know, who won the election. How
Speaker 1: do you anticipate that structure I would call it a
Speaker 1: structure of denial will work itself out over time. Well,
Speaker 1: it is a structure of denial, and that's a perfect
Speaker 1: way to put it. Noah, I worry about it. I
Speaker 1: have a feeling that there will be a lot of
Speaker 1: those people that will admit that the January sixth insurrection was,
Speaker 1: you know, shouldn't have happened. That it was a cantful
Speaker 1: of real zealots that were responsible. It didn't represent the
Speaker 1: Trump movement or the seventy million plus people that voted
Speaker 1: for Trump. But when you had that high a number,
Speaker 1: who thinks the election of twenty twenty was rigged? That
Speaker 1: really is a reprogramming or re education process. I don't
Speaker 1: know where to begin on that. All I can tell
Speaker 1: you is that twenty twenty was a model of how
Speaker 1: a free and fair election should be run. We ran
Speaker 1: a great election in twenty twenty. And why it disturbs
Speaker 1: me is I see that as one of our great exports.
Speaker 1: The American brand is all about we know how to
Speaker 1: do free and fair elections. It's why Jimmy Carter's ex
Speaker 1: president could go to Nicaragua or go to Panama and
Speaker 1: say I'm a former American president and I'll be judged
Speaker 1: whether you did a free or fair one here. We've
Speaker 1: made that our signature service for democracy in America. So
Speaker 1: the challenge that we don't know how to count votes
Speaker 1: is really a direct and central attack at the nervous
Speaker 1: system of what makes our democratic body politique work. And
Speaker 1: I hope more and more people will start dropping off
Speaker 1: of that stance and recognizing they were hoodwinked by talk radio, internet,
Speaker 1: post by hate sites, or just by a refusal to
Speaker 1: accept that their team had lost that maybe over time
Speaker 1: people will come to their senses, but there's always going
Speaker 1: to be a twenty percent of the American public that
Speaker 1: will always think that this was a fixed and rigged election.
Speaker 1: And that's that twenty percent that Donald Trump will carry
Speaker 1: around in his hip pocket even as ex president. Well,
Speaker 1: speaking of Trump and carrying that twenty percent around and
Speaker 1: its structure of denial. Trump's decision that he will not
Speaker 1: attend the inauguration, I think, really underscores that he's trying
Speaker 1: to say, not just I don't like Joe Biden, but
Speaker 1: I don't think Joe Biden is genuinely the president of
Speaker 1: the United States. I was trying to explain to my
Speaker 1: kids why I thought it was such a big deal
Speaker 1: for the president not to attend an inauguration, And I
Speaker 1: tried to explain it hadn't happened since Andrew Johnson and
Speaker 1: that it was a central symbol of transition. And they
Speaker 1: looked at me. You know, they're fourteen and fifteen. They
Speaker 1: look at me blankly a lot as if you know, Dad,
Speaker 1: we don't know what you're talking about. And they just
Speaker 1: said to me, Dad, why would you ever have expected
Speaker 1: Donald Trump, under any circumstances to attend the inauguration of
Speaker 1: his success Right? That was a fair point that they made.
Speaker 1: How do you think about that decision? Is it something
Speaker 1: that will ultimately contribute to the delegitimation of the transition?
Speaker 1: You know, I have a fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen year old.
Speaker 1: I have three in high school right now, and they
Speaker 1: would all say the exact same thing to me. They're
Speaker 1: kind of on to the fact growing up. I think
Speaker 1: in the age of Trump that you're never going to
Speaker 1: have a sense of reconciliation. They grew up with neo
Speaker 1: Civil War and they haven't experienced a healing moment that
Speaker 1: we keep talking about. It's a tragedy at least. I
Speaker 1: first thought it was that Trump wasn't coming to the
Speaker 1: Biden inauguration because if he would have shook Biden's hand,
Speaker 1: it would have symbolically been omitted as difficult as it
Speaker 1: was for him that Biden and won. But after January sixth,
Speaker 1: I say good riddance. I think Trump at the inaugural
Speaker 1: would have been a distraction by not very forgiving of
Speaker 1: Trump for January sixth, when you have five people that
Speaker 1: are killed, and that you run a reign of terror
Speaker 1: through our capital against our representatives and people having to
Speaker 1: either catch COVID, have terror trauma, nightmare attacks, hiding in
Speaker 1: closets and corners. You know. So I've been asked a lot,
Speaker 1: as you can imagine. Noah from the press to talk
Speaker 1: about why did John Adams not show? While for John
Speaker 1: Quincy Adams or Andrew Johnson, the fact of the matter
Speaker 1: was after the Civil War, when Andrew Johnson refused to
Speaker 1: go to Grant's inaugural, He spent the inaugural in the
Speaker 1: White House, claiming he was doing paperwork, desk work, and
Speaker 1: so he was in Washington. He just refused to go.
Speaker 1: It stuck a bone in the throat of the nation,
Speaker 1: and we decided really collectively after that to make sure
Speaker 1: that the president's there for the transition. I found that
Speaker 1: moment of the transition sort of the crown jewel of
Speaker 1: our democratic process. It's the coronation, which legitimizes all of
Speaker 1: the mud slinging and debating and belittling and all the
Speaker 1: ugly side of American politics. He suddenly get the reward
Speaker 1: of the great hug, the great moment of friendship that
Speaker 1: emerges out of two adversaries. We see this in every
Speaker 1: sports game, right A team loses and then the coaches
Speaker 1: go hug each other, players talk to each other. We
Speaker 1: teach our young people to be good losers as well
Speaker 1: as winners. But Trump's refusal just sets him apart as
Speaker 1: a very small man, as somebody who's not well liked,
Speaker 1: doesn't really have any personal friends, a loner in his
Speaker 1: own way. And you probably not being on the inaugural
Speaker 1: stage was a good thing at the end, because I
Speaker 1: would have been looking for the blood on his hands
Speaker 1: if he was standing there, I would have been feeling,
Speaker 1: how dare you have the gall to even be here today?
Speaker 1: I got that angry at Trump over January sixth, Doug.
Speaker 1: One of the themes that I'm going to try to
Speaker 1: explore in this new year is power and how it's created,
Speaker 1: and how it weakens and how it grows. And I'm
Speaker 1: wondering whether you think when you wear your historian of
Speaker 1: the presidency had not just a starting of particular presidents,
Speaker 1: but of the presidency as an institution. Whether Trump is
Speaker 1: emerging from his presidency having strengthened the presidency as an institution,
Speaker 1: partly through his ability to be a populist and gain
Speaker 1: not the whole communities, but a substantial part of the
Speaker 1: community's support for his conduct, or whether he's weakened the
Speaker 1: presidency by especially the way he's leaving it, with the
Speaker 1: association with the attack of January six with the sore losrism,
Speaker 1: because I think a reasonable case could probably be made
Speaker 1: in either direction. And I really wonder how you think
Speaker 1: about it, And obviously we won't know for a long time,
Speaker 1: but it's an interesting question to ask in real time.
Speaker 1: It's a very interesting one, and I am of two
Speaker 1: minds on it. You know, I've always been a promoter
Speaker 1: of strong executive power because I write books like on
Speaker 1: Theodore Rooseville. So when tr said to himself, if Lincoln
Speaker 1: can use executive power to emancipate the slaves in the
Speaker 1: Civil War, I certainly can use the executive power in
Speaker 1: a vigorous way. And these incredible moments like when Theodore
Speaker 1: Roosevelt stands on the lip of the Grand Canyon and says,
Speaker 1: do not touch it. God has made it. You will
Speaker 1: only marit. Leave the Grand Canyon alone and send it.
Speaker 1: Wants to mine it for zinc, abstus and copper, and
Speaker 1: Roosevelt uses executive power to declare it as a national monument,
Speaker 1: which was really meant for sort of dinosaur bones or
Speaker 1: antiquities pottery, like a five acre sites. He declares six
Speaker 1: hundred thousand acres and today it's a million. So you
Speaker 1: share executive power. We wouldn't half the Grand Canyon without
Speaker 1: Theodore Roosevelt. And I can go through each president when
Speaker 1: they have moments of executive power that are usually quite admirable.
Speaker 1: I mean, Jimmy Carter are using executive power to pardon
Speaker 1: Vietnam veterans, so called draft dodgers, to try to heal
Speaker 1: the country, you know, as an executive power in a
Speaker 1: sense of a pardon. That probably was the correct thing
Speaker 1: to do. But I worry about executive power overreach. Like
Speaker 1: look how many executive much executive power Barack Obama used
Speaker 1: once plumbaxed after the Affordable Care Act, and then all
Speaker 1: we saw as Trump sent four years undoing the executive
Speaker 1: achievements of Obama. Now Biden is coming in. The first
Speaker 1: thing he's doing is undoing Trump's executive decrees. So we're
Speaker 1: kind of going to go back and forth to eat
Speaker 1: up a lot of clock. In that way. I have
Speaker 1: learned to appreciate Lyndon Johnson a little more. When Johnson
Speaker 1: had opportunities for executive power on a lot of things,
Speaker 1: he insisted to go through the Senate in Congress. But
Speaker 1: it's easy to say that I'm going to build a
Speaker 1: legislative record when you have an overwhelming percentage of the
Speaker 1: party with you. Biden's operating on a fifty fifty basis
Speaker 1: in the Senate, meaning it's just going to be really
Speaker 1: hard on any vote for him. But so, I really
Speaker 1: am not one of those people that have tried to
Speaker 1: reign in presidential power up until Trump, and now I
Speaker 1: see the real dangers of somebody who ignores or civic morays,
Speaker 1: our sense of decency, who treats the legislative branch as
Speaker 1: a whipping post, who abuses the judicial apartment. I think
Speaker 1: now maybe the time right we have to figure out
Speaker 1: how to curtail presidential power. For example, how do we
Speaker 1: curtail this pardon power that has gone crazy Now has
Speaker 1: nothing to do with justifying a judicial situation that had
Speaker 1: gone badly. It's now just pardoning cronies and would be
Speaker 1: personal friends that turned cons or criminals. And it's very
Speaker 1: unseemly to be doing that at the end. And so
Speaker 1: I think we might have to look at the twenty
Speaker 1: fifth Amendment ANEW. When people called for the twenty fifth
Speaker 1: Amendment to get rid of Trump, people said, well, it
Speaker 1: doesn't apply, not really doable. Well, why the reason I
Speaker 1: got when they said you can't use the twenty fifth.
Speaker 1: It wasn't meant for that. It was done after John F.
Speaker 1: Kennedy's death. And if it was just somebody was incapacitated, well,
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty seven when we passed the twenty fifth Amendment,
Speaker 1: mental illness wasn't treated seriously. If you want to look
Speaker 1: at books about what it was like to be treated
Speaker 1: for mental illness in Georgia and Alabama, it is horrific. Now,
Speaker 1: I think we all agree that Trump has some sort
Speaker 1: of a narcissistic disorder malignant self love. We're all not
Speaker 1: supposed to say so because we're not psychiatrist. But I
Speaker 1: believe we had a very sick man operating in the
Speaker 1: White House for the past couple of years, and his
Speaker 1: behavior since the election warranted the twenty fifth Amendment to
Speaker 1: be put into action. I would think somebody having losing
Speaker 1: their sense of mind and inability to think rationally would
Speaker 1: be a reason to evoke the twenty fifth. I just
Speaker 1: want to push back gently on the twenty fifth Amendment.
Speaker 1: There and here, I think I'm wearing my constitutionalist hat.
Speaker 1: You know, the language of the amendment is unable to
Speaker 1: discharge the duties of the office, right. It doesn't say
Speaker 1: anything about diagnosis of mental disease or defect, which I
Speaker 1: agree it has evolved tremendously since then. But unable is
Speaker 1: as constitutional language goes pretty clear. And I don't think
Speaker 1: that Donald Trump was unable to discharge the duties of
Speaker 1: his office. He was unable to discharge them in a
Speaker 1: way that I found satisfactory or that was morally acceptable.
Speaker 1: So entirely apart from our attempts to make sense of
Speaker 1: his psychological state, which as you say, is a challenging
Speaker 1: thing to do from the outside, but you know, reasonable
Speaker 1: judgments could certainly be made. I don't think the twenty
Speaker 1: fifth Amendment says that if the president has a narcissistic
Speaker 1: personality disorder, that that authorizes the removal of that president.
Speaker 1: And I actually think that's a good thing, because presidents
Speaker 1: should be removed if they've committed high crimes and misdemeanors.
Speaker 1: In my view, this president did, and there were in
Speaker 1: fact two attempts to remove him, or one and a
Speaker 1: half if you count the last impeachment, which won't be
Speaker 1: tried if it is tried, until after he's out of office.
Speaker 1: But that's a political process that's kind of overt and
Speaker 1: the twenty fifth Amendment to the extent that the president resisted,
Speaker 1: it just sort of seems like a not as good
Speaker 1: version of impeachment. Right, you would still need two thirds
Speaker 1: of the House and two thirds of the Senate in
Speaker 1: order to remove a president who insisted that he was
Speaker 1: capable of discharging the duties of the office. So to me,
Speaker 1: I mean, I think that impeachment isn't doing what it
Speaker 1: should do because of some lack of virtue on the
Speaker 1: part of the Senate. But I wouldn't use the twenty
Speaker 1: fifth Amendment as a stopgap to replace it. So I
Speaker 1: wonder what that approach makes you think. I agree with
Speaker 1: what you said about the twenty fifth. I just think
Speaker 1: we were caught in a two week period here where
Speaker 1: what if Trump started ordering federal troops to put down
Speaker 1: protesters or use a nuclear weapon on Iran? What was
Speaker 1: their way to curtail him? These would have been highly
Speaker 1: irrational acts caused by his inability to admit that he
Speaker 1: lost due to his narcissistic disorder, and we would have
Speaker 1: no recourse because you wouldn't be able to get two
Speaker 1: thirds of the Senate, and you can't do it in
Speaker 1: time because there's only a couple of weeks left and
Speaker 1: twenty fifth doesn't allow for it. So what you're saying
Speaker 1: is you're just suck that last week or two. And
Speaker 1: I'm thinking that we need to find a way never
Speaker 1: to be held hostage by an American president in the
Speaker 1: last days of office, and we may need to think
Speaker 1: more seriously of what is mental disorders at least have
Speaker 1: a talk about what's new in science since nineteen sixty seven.
Speaker 1: You know, if you have somebody is truly a sociopath
Speaker 1: in the White House and the idea you can't remove
Speaker 1: them with the twenty fifth and your only recourses impeachment, Well,
Speaker 1: how do you do impeachment when you only have two
Speaker 1: weeks left when that sociopath starts acting out. What I'm
Speaker 1: most concerned is this limbo period we've been in right
Speaker 1: now where our country is sort of held hostage to
Speaker 1: his mental whims and fancies, and that to me was dangerous. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's an important comment on just the nature of the
Speaker 1: tremendous power of the presidency, especially in the nuclear era,
Speaker 1: where the president can just do tremendous damage. And what
Speaker 1: you're saying, if I understand you correctly, is we don't
Speaker 1: really have a good mechanism constitutionally for how to fix that,
Speaker 1: and now we need to focus on that, and maybe
Speaker 1: we need to think about amending the twenty fifth or
Speaker 1: adding something that would enable us to act those circumstances
Speaker 1: that we might look into that We'll be right back.
Speaker 1: So let's turn out to this part in question. Nobody
Speaker 1: in the Guilder presidentialist Darian says thought more about this
Speaker 1: than you, because you thought about Ford and you thought
Speaker 1: about Carter. So you and you also edited extensively the
Speaker 1: Nixon tapes, so you've got a deep understanding of the
Speaker 1: run up to Watergate, it's aftermath, and then the reconciliation
Speaker 1: processes that did or didn't take place in the years
Speaker 1: that followed. And I guess I'm wondering if you would
Speaker 1: reflect on your deep knowledge of that period to think
Speaker 1: about what should Joe Biden do with respect to the
Speaker 1: hard question that he faces, which is, on the one hand,
Speaker 1: there's an argument for reconciliation and moving on, and on
Speaker 1: the other hand, there's an argument for historical accountability. And
Speaker 1: obviously the reconciliation prevailed in the middle set in these
Speaker 1: but there are lots of voices saying that this time
Speaker 1: accountability should prevail. Well, you're right, and you know there's
Speaker 1: a consensus, as you know, that Gerald Ford did the
Speaker 1: right thing with Nixon, and that was not the consensus
Speaker 1: at the time. Ford paid dearly for the partnering of
Speaker 1: Richard Nixon, and in fact it may have cost him
Speaker 1: the election in nineteen seventy six or certainly contributed to
Speaker 1: his loss. But later decades later, most people said Ford
Speaker 1: did the right thing. Ted Kennedy awarded Gerald Ford the
Speaker 1: Profiles and Courage Award, with Kennedy Senator Kennedy then saying
Speaker 1: I was wrong. I was so angry at you, but
Speaker 1: in retrospect, you were right. President Ford and Biden situation
Speaker 1: is going to be different. If I were giving advice
Speaker 1: to Joe Biden, I would let Nancy Pelosi work with
Speaker 1: Schumer on what's going to happen with impeachment. If I
Speaker 1: were by night stay out of it for one hundred days,
Speaker 1: I would try to craft one hundred days where impeachment
Speaker 1: doesn't infect the Biden administration, because I do believe he
Speaker 1: is inheriting such a difficult situation. With four hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty thousand COVID deaths number rising. I'm not convinced we
Speaker 1: have a logistical strategy for getting shots and arms two
Speaker 1: shots and arms across the country this spring. So I
Speaker 1: think he has one hundred days to work with Mitch McConnell,
Speaker 1: try to work with Republicans on a COVID nineteen economic
Speaker 1: stimulus relief bill, and a kind of martial plan on
Speaker 1: getting the COVID vaccines out. After that one hundred days,
Speaker 1: I would hope that we might be able to have
Speaker 1: a Congressional Commission report presented to President Biden, which will
Speaker 1: have gaps in it, obviously, but might be able to
Speaker 1: point out how culpable is Trump for what happened on
Speaker 1: January sixth, And I think Buying at that point's going
Speaker 1: to have to decide whether the evidence is so egregious
Speaker 1: that he has to let Schumer move forward in the Senate,
Speaker 1: or if not, Biden may need to try to now
Speaker 1: get control over his own Democratic Party and say, let's
Speaker 1: cool our jets. What if we do a Senate censor.
Speaker 1: What if we write a you know, I write a
Speaker 1: presidential report, you know, and we do a media outreach
Speaker 1: saying how guilty Trump was. But I'm not going to
Speaker 1: take him through the trial. So I'm indifferent on the
Speaker 1: trial now. I would want to see more evidence because
Speaker 1: I do think it would cripple Biden if he goes
Speaker 1: too soon in a Senate trial, and again it might
Speaker 1: tear our country to smithereens. But without question, I would
Speaker 1: not touch that trial for one hundred days if you
Speaker 1: can boot it down the line for a little bit,
Speaker 1: let emotions settle and start looking at the empirical facts
Speaker 1: of what occurred. In a sense, it sounds like you're
Speaker 1: saying that moving too quickly to a trial would sort
Speaker 1: of drain power out of the Biden presidency, and especially
Speaker 1: if Trump, as seems to me very likely, were to
Speaker 1: be acquitted by the Senate, that actually may reinvigorate Trump's
Speaker 1: own power as a potential candidate four years later, or
Speaker 1: at least in the meantime as the most powerful figure
Speaker 1: in the Republican Party. It. I mean, that's the sort
Speaker 1: of like serious self harm story from the standpoint of
Speaker 1: the Democrats, if indeed they push forward too quickly, am
Speaker 1: I reading? You're right? I agree with that completely. You
Speaker 1: said it perfectly. I think we have to be cautious
Speaker 1: of that. It's a big moment now that Biden's inheriting
Speaker 1: a major problem with COVID in the economy, and he's
Speaker 1: got to keep focused to not let Donald Trump be
Speaker 1: jumping around in his head. The one thing we don't
Speaker 1: want to do is turn Trump into a martyr, you know,
Speaker 1: immediately make him a folk hero that he beat the
Speaker 1: rap yet again, and he'll probably does have a self pardon.
Speaker 1: You know, I've been convinced by John Deane, colleague of Mina,
Speaker 1: on CNN, who says that without a doubt Trump will
Speaker 1: sign a personal pardon with his own private lawyer and
Speaker 1: put it in a safe without announcing it to the public.
Speaker 1: You can assume, Noah, that when you see Trump leave
Speaker 1: for Florida, he has already signed and has notarized a
Speaker 1: self pardon that he can pull out at any moment
Speaker 1: and try to actualize when that gets pulled out. If
Speaker 1: it gets pulled out, then that's going to eventually become
Speaker 1: a Supreme Court case whether a president has the right
Speaker 1: to self pardon or not. And it gets back to
Speaker 1: my original complaint. I think we need to do some
Speaker 1: clean up work on the twenty fifth Amendment on impeachments,
Speaker 1: on pardoning. It seems to me that the fact that
Speaker 1: we as a society don't know whether a president consult
Speaker 1: partner not because nobody's ever done that before, and we've
Speaker 1: got to wait and see till it goes to the
Speaker 1: Supreme Court tells me that we might need to try
Speaker 1: to figure out how to not have this happen again.
Speaker 1: I've been saying since the beginning of the Trump presidency,
Speaker 1: this is a stress test for our constitutional democracy, and
Speaker 1: now we can read the read out of the stress
Speaker 1: test and we see where our weaknesses are, and you've
Speaker 1: highlighted some important ones. Before I let you go, there's
Speaker 1: a question I've been dying to ask you. You are
Speaker 1: the very model of the sober, thoughtful historian, and you
Speaker 1: work on topics of great seriousness, presidential power, environmental protection.
Speaker 1: But you also have a side which features your friendship
Speaker 1: with the late gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, and I
Speaker 1: read that you're actually the literary executor of his estate,
Speaker 1: which is an amazing responsibility. You've worked on the great
Speaker 1: documentary with Johnny Depp about him. What's the backstory here?
Speaker 1: How did you get to know Hunter S. Thompson And
Speaker 1: what was the cement in your friendship. My mom and
Speaker 1: dad were high school teachers and we had a twenty
Speaker 1: four foot Coachman trailer, and so we traveled around the
Speaker 1: summer and we would do road trips. So I became
Speaker 1: a great lover of that kind of family vacation meets
Speaker 1: Jack carrollas on the road. So when I was a
Speaker 1: young professor in nineteen ninety two, I got a bus
Speaker 1: called the Magic Bus, and college students would live on
Speaker 1: the bus and we'd go for a semester all over
Speaker 1: America thirty five thousand miles. We'd even go up to Alaska,
Speaker 1: visiting presidential libraries, homes of people like Martin Luther King
Speaker 1: or Helen Keller, Willi Kather, john Steinbeck on and on.
Speaker 1: It was an all purpose American studies road trip. And
Speaker 1: I would have the students read classic books, and when
Speaker 1: I had them read Fear and Loving in Las Vegas.
Speaker 1: We visited Hunter Wis Thompson in Colorado. We met Arthur
Speaker 1: Miller in Connecticut, and Tony Morrise in New York, and
Speaker 1: Ken Kesey and ore again. So they're about fifty writers
Speaker 1: that were part of my program. Dick Goodwin, who died recently,
Speaker 1: Doris Kerr and Goodwin's husband was great friends with Hunter,
Speaker 1: and Dick Goodwin and Arthur Slussingshire both liked Hunter and
Speaker 1: knew him and said, well, if you're doing that book,
Speaker 1: why don't you go visit Hunter in Colorado. So I
Speaker 1: pulled my bus in and he actually was kind of
Speaker 1: a mensch, except Hunter would shoot all of the books.
Speaker 1: All the other authors would autograph them. Hunter we make
Speaker 1: them put it against a tree and shoot him. So
Speaker 1: suddenly their book had a big bullet hole in him. Well,
Speaker 1: some of the students thought that was idiotic, but there
Speaker 1: were about half of the students that, oh my god,
Speaker 1: it's so cruel. Hunter shot my book, you know. And
Speaker 1: we became quite friendly. And he then asked me whether
Speaker 1: I had helped him edit down some of his books,
Speaker 1: and he trusted me enough to go in his basement,
Speaker 1: and I found a goal mine of great writing and
Speaker 1: brought out The Proud Highway, his first volume of collected
Speaker 1: letters that I edited, Fear and Loathing in America, and
Speaker 1: then a third one called a Mutineer I have queued
Speaker 1: up right now to eventually bring out too. A Hunter
Speaker 1: was a great satirist, a great natural, almost athletic writer
Speaker 1: in his prime and had a prophetic sense, a bit
Speaker 1: of a seer about some things. And so we became friends.
Speaker 1: And while he drank and drugged a lot, he was
Speaker 1: able to give a lot of good advice to me
Speaker 1: in my personal life, which is kind of odd. But
Speaker 1: he was unable to deal with his own personal life,
Speaker 1: but he was smart enough to be able to give
Speaker 1: good advice for somebody coming up the ladder. So while
Speaker 1: I did my work in history, I learned a lot
Speaker 1: about journalism from Hunter. That's completely fascinating and I hugely
Speaker 1: appreciate that account. And I just want to thank you
Speaker 1: very very much for your amazing work, for your time,
Speaker 1: and for sharing your perspective with us this week. Thank
Speaker 1: you for your amazing work everything you do. You have
Speaker 1: a brilliant legal mind in your amazing asset to our country.
Speaker 1: So and I saw you wanted me to do this,
Speaker 1: I felt honored you wanted me to be on your
Speaker 1: podcast to thank you. After talking to Professor Brinkley, I
Speaker 1: came away with two central ideas. The first is that
Speaker 1: Donald Trump's conduct as president culminating in the attack on
Speaker 1: the Capitol, which he encouraged, and according to the article
Speaker 1: of impeachment incited is an extraordinary outlier in US history,
Speaker 1: so much so that Pressor Brinkley thinks we actually need
Speaker 1: to take a closer look at the mechanisms of constitutional
Speaker 1: power that we have to constrain a president who seems
Speaker 1: to be going off the rails. The second point from
Speaker 1: our conversation is more nuanced, and it's about how history
Speaker 1: is likely to view this moment. Looking at President Nixon's
Speaker 1: resignation and how the Republican Party and the Democratic Party
Speaker 1: ultimately worked together to create a new story. Professor Brinkley
Speaker 1: made the point that over time, we Americans tend to
Speaker 1: create common historical narratives that function to bring us closer together,
Speaker 1: even if they sometimes involve papering over some of the
Speaker 1: most shocking aspects of the past, including shocking aspects of
Speaker 1: presidential conduct. What that would mean for understanding the attack
Speaker 1: on Congress in historical terms would be that the attack
Speaker 1: would be somehow peripheralized, by which I mean it would
Speaker 1: be treated by history as the action of a small
Speaker 1: number of white supremacists and conspiracy theorists, rather than as
Speaker 1: a manifestation of a national political movement that to a
Speaker 1: certain degree came to take over the Republican Party, and
Speaker 1: that denied the legitimacy of the results of the twenty
Speaker 1: twenty presidential election. In order for a narrative like that
Speaker 1: to emerge, a narrative that treated the capital attack as
Speaker 1: far from the mainstream of American politics, there would have
Speaker 1: to be a gradual process in which the Republican Party
Speaker 1: came to accept the twenty twenty transition of power as legitimate.
Speaker 1: For that to happen, the Republican Party would have to
Speaker 1: de emphasize Donald Trump, and then and only then would
Speaker 1: a new story be able to be told about the
Speaker 1: attack on the Capitol, perhaps not completely accurate, but designed
Speaker 1: to reestablish a national consensus. If that happens, and I
Speaker 1: emphasize that that's only an if, it would show the
Speaker 1: capacity of a US political system to retell, reframe, and
Speaker 1: reshape historical narratives in order to generate outcomes of reconciliation.
Speaker 1: If that happened, then the historical process would have operated
Speaker 1: in a way really reminiscent of the aftermath of Richard
Speaker 1: Nixon's presidency, in which ultimately the pardon if Nixon and
Speaker 1: the public decision to quote move on enable the Republican
Speaker 1: Party to avoid any serious long term costs for having
Speaker 1: elected a president who abused the power of the office
Speaker 1: and ultimately had to resign. These are all predictions made
Speaker 1: against the backdrop of historical experience. They're falsifiable. They might
Speaker 1: turn out not to be true. We will find out
Speaker 1: in the future, the near future, what's right and what's not.
Speaker 1: But as always, we can benefit from a deep encounter
Speaker 1: with historical background material to help us make an educated
Speaker 1: guess at what might happen next. Meanwhile, we have not
Speaker 1: forgotten the COVID nineteen pandemic. We are hard at work
Speaker 1: to bring you episodes exploring the latest developments, including a
Speaker 1: conversation in the very near future about what new variants
Speaker 1: of the virus mean for the configuration of health and
Speaker 1: power in the world. Until the next time I speak
Speaker 1: to you, be careful, be safe, and be well. Deep
Speaker 1: Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer
Speaker 1: is Mo laboord our engineer is Martin Gonzalez, and our
Speaker 1: shore runner is Sophie Crane mckibbon. Editorial support from noahm Osband.
Speaker 1: Theme music by Luis Skara at Pushkin. Thanks to Mia Lobell,
Speaker 1: Julia Barton, Lydia, Jean Coott, Heather Faine, Carl mcniori, Maggie Taylor,
Speaker 1: Eric Xander, and Jacob Weisberg. You can find me on
Speaker 1: Twitter at Noah rfeld. I also write a column for
Speaker 1: Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at Bloomberg dot com
Speaker 1: slash Feldman. To discover Bloomberg's original slate of podcasts, go
Speaker 1: to Bloomberg dot com slash podcasts, and if you liked
Speaker 1: what you heard today, please write a review or tell
Speaker 1: a friend. This is deep back.