Original subtitles

There's that period of a couple days where

it's junior, it's Alex Jones,

and there's a moment by the end of the week

where you've got Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz and Kevin McCarthy

coming out and amplifying some of the questions about the election.

Can you describe the moment when Trump comes out

and the choice that the Republican Party faced in that moment?

The only word that comes to mind is paralysis.

You have Republicans

who've been listening to Trump for the past year, seeding doubt

in the legitimacy of the elections,

sort of leading up to this moment.

None of them are really sure whether or not he's

going to follow through, whether he's going to actually pull the trigger

and, and claim to win an election that perhaps he did not win.

And of course, in hindsight, it's easy to, to to to call that naive

or pollyannaish and think, well, of course he was going to do this.

Why would he have spent a year laying the groundwork to try and subvert

democracy, only to then back away at the last minute?

That's not Trump's style,

but I think this was sort of part and parcel of the entire Trump experience

dating back 4 or 5 years, where so many Republicans

who had sort of come up in a traditional political ecosystem

and were not prepared for him to follow through on some of these teasers,

some of these threats, some of this, some of this rhetoric that they hoped was

just, you know, Trump blowing off steam and, well, why should we weigh in?

Because, you know, just humor the guy.

What's the worst that could happen? Well,

we found out what's the worst that can happen.

We found out that there is a downside to humoring him.

But in those 48 hours following the election,

and when Trump comes out in the white House

and says that he did win this election, and he starts

just dispensing with lie after lie and an unfounded rumors and conspiracy

theories, Republicans are paralyzed because they they're not

they're not sure what they're supposed to do about this.

Now, I could I could say what I think they should have done.

I think a lot of us could say what we think they should have done.

But Republicans, in that moment,

they know that based on the numbers that are adding up

in these battleground states, that Trump is going to lose.

And they also know that they've shared the same ballot with Trump and that

many of them have won their races, despite the fact that he's lost his.

And so you've got a lot of competing impulses in this moment.

You've got some Republicans who are saying, well, wait a second,

if I go along with this,

if I sort of, endorse this effort to delegitimize

the ballot box, what about my election?

Does that delegitimize my victory?

What kind of can of worms are we opening here?

But I think for many Republicans,

they simply default

to the same stance that they'd taken for the previous

four years, which was my base is on his side.

And who am I to stand between him and my base

and what makes this ironic, of course, is that

elections are purposely and brilliantly.

I mean, they are run locally in this country.

Elections are administered at the local level

and for so many of these Republican Congress members,

they know the people in their districts, the county clerks and the recorders,

the people who are charged with running these elections.

These are people that members of Congress have relationships with.

And, by the way, in safely Republican areas,

those elections are being run by Republican officials.

Most of them are Partizan elected officials.

And so these Republican members of Congress

in the 72 hours following election

day, when, when, when all of these, wild claims of rigged election

and a conspiracy to steal the ballot box are swirling,

you know that all of these Republican members of Congress,

the first calls they're making are back home to their elections officials,

Republican elections officials saying, hey, give me something to work with.

There's got to be something.

There's got to be some irregularity, something that's out of whack.

There's got to be something

that we can investigate, at least to throw this guy a bone.

And what they're being told time and time and time again is

not really sorry.

We got nothing for you.

And so that's the circumstance in that, in that initial period

right after the election where Trump is making these, these

unprecedented claims,

and Republicans across the party spectrum, across the across the parties,

many divides, they are sort of

in stunned, paralyzed silence for a time.

But they know that that silence

is not sustainable and that they have to choose either.

They can choose to stand up and say what they know to be true,

and what they're being told

by those elections officials, which is there's nothing to see here.

This election was run as freely and as fairly as any other election or

they can side with Trump and they can go along with him,

or at least they can enable him and continue to humor him

in the hopes of staying on the right side of their political base.

And obviously, the vast majority of Republicans chose the latter.

Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, how important was the moment

when they come out and they start asking questions about the election?

And how important was that, you know, why did they make the decision,

and how important was that to everything that would follow?

Well,

put yourself in the shoes of Ted Cruz for a minute.

It's been a very interesting,

four years for Ted Cruz,

and he has been on every conceivable

side of, of the Trump phenomenon.

And he knows what it's like to be sort of,

run out of the party on a rail to be booed off stage at the convention.

He knows what it's like to to be in the barrel,

to have all of the power

and the the ugliness of, of the Trump,

political apparatus come down on him.

And he also, by the way, still wants to be president.

Right.

Ted Cruz wakes up in the morning, looks in the mirror

and sees the president of the United States.

And so he knows in this moment

when all of these Republicans around him are sort of paralyzed,

not sure what they're supposed to do in response

to the president claiming that the election was stolen from him.

Cruz, who is nothing if not opportunistic, he sees this as an opening.

He sees this as an opportunity.

If if no Republican was willing to stand up

and lead the fight on Obamacare, he was going to do it

because there was a political opportunity there,

even if it meant shutting down the government,

even if it meant doing damage to the political system.

And as we know it, he was willing to to take that opening.

And this was no different.

And Cruz looks

around and he sees that there are really no Republicans

stepping forward to lead this fight on behalf of President Trump.

And he knows that, more importantly, he knows that this isn't

just about humoring Donald Trump at this point, because let's be clear.

Ted Cruz has argued cases in front of the US Supreme Court.

Ted Cruz is an Ivy League educated lawyer.

Ted Cruz is one of the smartest men in politics as far as understanding

the Constitution and understanding what it means and what it doesn't mean.

So. So Ted Cruz understands

that Donald Trump is not going to be the president come January 20th of 2021.

But Ted Cruz also understands that this is no longer about Donald Trump.

This is about Donald Trump's voters

and what they perceive to be

a Republican governing class that is still scared,

that is still weak, that is still feckless.

Donald Trump rose to power in the first place

because so many Republican voters viewed their elected officials,

their leaders, as cowardly and as spineless.

And so Ted Cruz surveys the landscape in the days

after the election, and he decides, you know what?

This is my opportunity

to go to war for these people,

the same way that Donald Trump was willing to go to war for these people.

And the fact that it was a war

fought on false pretenses, a fabricated and phony war

that was never going to lead anywhere, that made no difference to Ted Cruz.

Not in that moment.

He saw the opening and he took it.

Why is it important? Because Trump was pushing it.

But oh yeah. Yeah.

Right.

For a Graham or a Cruz right.

To come out and to say this. Right. Amplified.

Right. Right, right.

So so so you've had four years of the Republican Party

largely

marching in lockstep with this president, despite some of these sort of smaller,

fleeting moments of division, the party is largely unified around him.

But here's the ultimate test.

Right here is the president of the United States coming out, addressing the nation

and telling them that we live in a banana republic,

that our elections are no longer trustworthy, that this election

was stolen from him, that this is a crime of unprecedented proportion.

And in that moment, Republicans

have an opportunity unlike any other

to finally, despite everything that's taken place,

despite all their enabling of Trump, despite all of their subjugation

to Trump over all of these years, they have this opportunity now

to break from him and say, listen, this is a bridge too far.

This is un-American.

This is undemocratic.

This is Uncosted what you're about to try to do.

And we're going to have nothing to do with it.

And had the party broken from him decisively

and uniformly in that moment, I think there's a very good chance

that the entire narrative

shifts around this idea of a stolen election.

Sure, you would still have some of

the president's most fervent supporters go along with it,

but if you had the entire Republican elected class up and down the ballot,

people who had voted with the president 99% of the time and who wore

red caps to rallies in their district, if you had those people

who had credibility with their base,

if they had come out in unison and said, listen, I love this president.

I voted for this president.

I'd like him to be the president for four more years, as much as anybody.

But what he's saying here is not true.

And in fact, it's dangerous and un-American.

If Republicans had been willing to do that,

I think we would have

seen a very different outcome.

But instead, you had some of these

very opportunistic Republicans seize that moment to make sure

that if there was going to be a fight, that they would be the ones leading it.

Who was the Ted Cruz running in 2016 against Donald Trump?

How did he see himself?

How is he offering himself in a way that might be surprising?

If you're coming out of the story that we've just

heard about what happens in those days after the election.

So the irony of Ted Cruz and his campaign for president in 2016

is that he had properly diagnosed

the failures of the Republican Party in the eyes of the Republican base.

Ted Cruz saw a Republican establishment that was sort of fat

and complacent and lazy, and that was not responsive

to to some of the grievances, of the conservative base.

And so Cruz builds his presidential campaign for 2016

around this idea of being a fighter

and of sort of, going outside

the box and defying political convention and taking the fight

from the bottom up to a political class and the Republican Party

that had grown sort of hopelessly disconnected from, from its constituents.

What Cruz, of course, never could have banked on

is that somebody would out Cruz.

Cruz.

He never he never calculated, never took into his in his considerations.

He and his team at the outset of that campaign, never, never,

could have conceived of a scenario in which someone would sort of

flank him from the

populist right, somebody who could be, louder.

Somebody who could be sort of, more unconventional,

somebody who was even less tethered to sort of the rules of the game,

if you will.

So Cruz is a guy who,

you know, rides this sort of Tea Party momentum into Congress

in 2012, wins this Senate seat, having really come out of nowhere.

One of the things that you have

to understand with Ted Cruz is this is a guy who met his wife

working on the George W Bush campaign, worked in the Bush administration.

Wife was a VP at Goldman Sachs,

but Cruz himself was something of a true believer.

Cruz was far more comfortable in that sort of Tea Party world

than he ever was, perhaps in the George W Bush world.

This is a guy who, as a kid, memorized the Constitution and would go around

reciting it to people in sort of performances with a traveling troupe.

I mean, this is a guy who argued cases in front of the US Supreme Court

as solicitor general.

This is a guy who, in his blood,

claimed to be a hardcore core constitutionalist

and somebody who would always sort of adhere to the rule of law,

and who would quote

John Adams saying that this is a country not of men, but of laws.

So this is the Ted Cruz who comes to the US Senate in 2012,

and this is the Ted Cruz, who in record time makes enemies out of

just about every single Republican colleague of his on Capitol Hill.

This is this is a guy who not only is

he uninterested in making friends, as a general rule,

but this

is a guy who understands that making enemies in

the Republican Party is politically advantageous to him,

because he intuitively understands

already that this is all the way back in 2012.

He understands intuitively the disgust and the distrust,

the grievance that so many conservative voters,

feel, the animus they have towards the Republican ruling class.

And so Cruz wants to capitalize on that.

He doesn't just want to go to Washington and make speeches on the Senate floor,

and then go out to dinner with these guys and pretend to be pals.

Cruz actually calculates that

his path to power in the Republican Party

is by actively antagonizing

and alienating his Republican peers.

His Republican colleagues in the U.S.

Senate. And it works.

It works. It sets.

It sets Cruz up to run a campaign in 2016 that is not just

sort of anti-establishment in theme or in theory.

It's not some abstraction.

This is a guy whose colleagues have joked publicly about murdering him,

and it's

perhaps his greatest political asset.

So let's look to the moment after the Iowa caucuses is the

it takes a little while for the results to come in, but once they do,

and you write about in your book Trump's response,

his his call to Jeff Coffman.

Can you describe that moment, especially now that we're looking back

through the lens of 2020 and what we see him

do in Iowa, and what that might have been an early warning of who Trump was.

So knowing what we know now,

I think you would go back to February

1st of 2016

and you could view it as the beginning of the end.

It's February 1st of 2016, and Donald Trump

has just experienced the thing that

he cannot stand to experience.

He has lost.

And this is not just a matter of,

sort of defeat and statistics and vote share.

Trump has in running for president,

built his entire image around

the idea of being a winner.

And and the notion

not just of losing, but of losing in his very first contest

here, after months of brutal hand-to-hand political combat

between all of these Republicans seeking their party's nomination for president,

finally, we see voters casting ballots for the first time.

And so what we have in Iowa

is really the first test case

of whether this reality television star

turned presidential candidate who has said and done these outlandish things,

who has defied political conventions at every turn,

whether this is real, whether he can actually translate to the ballot box

the way that many Republicans refuse to believe that he could.

And in this first test case of whether Trump

was real as a political candidate, he loses.

He does the thing that he swears that he'll never do if he loses.

And it is something he cannot tolerate.

The final results are tallied in Iowa, and Ted Cruz is the winner.

And there's a little bit of hubbub, a little bit of controversy

surrounding the results because of, of some hard edged

tactics, let's say used by the Cruz campaign.

And Trump is furious.

Trump is humiliated.

Trump cannot stomach

the headlines

calling him a loser.

And so he rides to the Des Moines airport,

where his private plane is park, and he's seething on that car ride.

And he gets on his airplane

and they're about to take off from the Des Moines airport.

But they don't.

They sit on the runway for a few minutes so that Trump can make a phone call.

And he calls

Jeff Kaufmann, who is the chairman of the Iowa

Republican Party.

And Trump says to Kaufmann.

You know, Jeff, I think you need to disavow

the result of this election.

I think we both knew that that Cruz cheated.

And Kaufmann says.

Mr. Trump, I can't do that.

Well, well, there's just.

What do you mean, he cheated?

I we just had an election.

The votes have been counted.

Cruz won.

It's a long silence.

And Trump says,

I really think you need to disavow the result.

Think about it, will you?

Hangs up the phone.

Now, in the moment, Jeff Kaufmann

and some people who knew about that phone call,

they may have just chalk that up to

passions running high.

Trump being a sore loser.

But in the sweep

of history and everything we know now,

that episode was a bright

red blinking light.

Foreshadowing everything that was to come.

And just what a danger to democracy that this man posed.

What would have told Ted Cruz about Trump when he sees Trump

making public proclamations about rigged election?

You know that he had cheated and there was a rigged election.

It's Groundhog's Day, right?

It's with Bill Murray.

It's this whole thing is Groundhog's Day

because nobody took Trump

seriously when he ran for president.

Nobody took much of what Trump said seriously,

even when he became the front runner for the Republican nomination.

So around the time of the Iowa caucuses,

when Trump is just throwing everything against the wall,

and when he makes this call to Jeff Kaufman asking him to throw out

the results of this primary, this caucus in Iowa, because he lost,

I think everybody just sort of shrugs.

You have to understand that at this stage, nobody thinks

Trump is going to be in it for the long haul, much less thinks he's going to win.

I think there's there's a select group

of Republicans who are increasingly concerned

by the time the Iowa caucuses roll around, that this guy has real momentum,

that he has a base that is loud and growing louder by the day.

But there are very few people in the party who are seriously entertaining

the idea that Donald Trump will last the duration

of the primary season much less that he'll be the party's nominee.

Let's bring as it heats up between Trump and Cruz.

There's a lot that's been made about the attacks.

And obviously he, you know, criticizes the looks of Cruz's wife.

But looking back over some of the other incidents

that are mentioned in the book, the, you know, accusation,

he wasn't legitimately able to be president, right.

Like a birther type accusation against Cruz, the accusations

of extramarital affairs, that his dad was involved

somehow in the JFK assassination, there seems to be this strong undercurrent

to of misinformation, of lies coming from, Trump.

Can you describe the nature of the attacks, how they worked?

I'm that we're coming from Trump onto Cruz during that spring of 2016.

Yeah.

So, so as as the primary field winners.

And it becomes evident that Ted Cruz is really the only Republican

standing between Donald Trump and the Republican nomination,

we enter a stage of sort of zero

sum combat between the two candidates in the two campaigns,

the likes of which we'd never, frankly, seen in modern American politics.

And what differentiated the two of them was very simply

the fact that Ted Cruz, despite all of his anti-establishment rhetoric,

despite his reputation for being kind of a knife fighter

and coloring a little bit outside the lines, Ted Cruz was still a

United States senator who had a rich political pedigree

and sort of understood that there was only so far outside the lines he could color.

Donald Trump had no lines.

There were no boundaries.

If Ted Cruz brought a knife to the fight,

Donald Trump brought a nuclear tipped bazooka.

There was just there was no comparison

as far as what they were willing to do, how far they were willing to go

in their escalating sort of attacks on one another.

So what you see in the spring of 2016, as the Field Winnow is

and you really have a mano a mano Cruz versus Trump contest,

you see Donald Trump

go scorched earth in ways that we'd never seen before.

And it's not just that he's

questioning whether Cruz is eligible to be president because, oh, well,

he was born in Canada, kind of a birther 2.0 routine.

It's not just that he is insinuating that Cruz's wife is ugly.

It's not just that he's floating theories about Cruz's

father having been complicit in the assassination of JFK.

Donald Trump has a sordid history

with some very shady characters.

One of them being Roger Stone.

He's also very close with people in the tabloid world, people who,

professionally, go digging for dirt and who professionally spread disinformation.

And Donald Trump does not hesitate to deploy those people on his behalf

to try to not only end Ted Cruz's

campaign for president, but to try and ruin Ted Cruz's life.

He's going to follow amplify Trump and, you know, lies about the election.

But at that moment, you know, the most famous piece of footage of Cruz

talking about Trump is saying he's a pathological liar,

practically every word that comes out of his mouth is a lie.

Can you describe what Ted Cruz diagnosed in Trump?

What that attack was that that he identified and articulated so early on?

So Cruz knows that the end is near.

His campaign is running out of steam quickly.

Trump has all the momentum.

Cruz had tried to stage kind of a last stand in Indiana,

and really rolled out

the red carpet for the governor of Indiana.

Mike pence, got his endorsement.

Traveled around the state,

spent all the money and resources and time that they possibly could

to try to steal another victory in Indiana to sustain their campaign.

But it was evident within about 48 hours of that Indiana primary.

It was evident that Trump was going to win, and he was probably going to win big,

and that Cruz's campaign was effectively finished at that point.

Trump didn't need to resort to dirty tricks.

Trump was winning.

It was over.

But he couldn't help himself.

And so Trump goes on Fox News

and starts speculating about Ted Cruz's

father being complicit in the assassination of JFK.

And Cruz had already begun preparing

mentally for the end of his campaign that night in Indiana.

But when he saw what Trump said on Fox News,

something snapped inside of Cruz.

I mean, that's the only way to think about it.

He had been pushed too far. Finally.

Cruz is smart enough to recognize that oftentimes in Republican politics,

the runner up for president in one race is then the nominee four years later.

And Cruz is a very young man.

He has a big future ahead of him.

He knows that the smarter move here

is to sort of, as graciously as possible, bow out of the race,

throw his support behind the nominee, play nice.

And if Trump loses in the fall the way that most Republicans

expected that he would, Cruz is set up perfectly.

He's in the catbird seat to be the nominee four years later.

So he knows his his

his brain is telling him, don't take the bait.

Just just let this thing fizzle out.

But his gut is saying,

I can't take it anymore.

I cannot exit this race without telling the world

what I really think about this guy.

And so he does.

Cruz calls a bunch of reporters together,

tells them to get their cameras on.

And then he unleashes.

He unleashes six months of pent up rage,

six months of pent up animus, and really,

six months of pent up

disorientation.

Cruz cannot, for the life of him, understand

how this man, who has spent his entire life is a Democrat,

who has you know, championed Planned Parenthood,

who has advocated for a single payer, government run health care system.

How is this man

outflanking me

as a conservative champion for the people?

He can't understand it.

And it's not as though

Cruz's, mystification over, over Trump's appeal is what drives this.

Cruz had watched

as this man

humiliated him, humiliated his wife,

humiliated his father, attacked his family

in the most brazen and and despicable way.

And he felt at that moment

that if he was going to lose,

he needed to get a few things off of his chest.

And he did.

Cruz at the convention.

Can you bring us inside there?

And first, that discussion that he has with his advisers, where he talks

about why he's not going to endorse Trump.

Fast forward into the summer of 2016 and,

you know, Trump is the nominee in waiting.

And the entirety of the Republican ruling class

is trying to come to terms with Donald Trump.

People who had held out, like speaker of the House Paul Ryan,

so many Republican elected officials who had been cool or lukewarm towards Trump.

They're trying to get to a place by the time of the Republican nominating

convention, where they can be comfortable publicly wrapping their arms

around this guy and endorsing him and projecting unity to the masses.

And one by one,

over a period of months, people are falling into line.

There's just one holdout, and it's Ted Cruz,

you see.

Time did not heal all wounds.

I talked to people close to Ted Cruz

in the days after he left the presidential race,

and they were concerned for him.

They were concerned for his health and for his mental state.

This was not just any political loss.

This was something that wounded him and haunted him

deeply.

And so here is Ted Cruz being invited to speak

at the coronation of the man who had devastated him

and humiliated his family and

and put them through hell.

And once again,

for Cruz, it's sort of a battle between the head and the heart.

The head is saying, just go through the motions.

Do what you need to do.

Pledge your support to this man.

Be a team player.

And in four

years, you will be on deck to be the Republican nominee.

Because that's the way this works.

And his heart is saying, I can't do it.

I cannot subjugate myself to this man.

I cannot

in good conscience

pledge my support

and bend the knee on national television in front of the world

to this man who attacked my wife and attacked my father.

I can't do it.

And so Cruz begins

to write his speech for the Republican convention.

And outside of Trump's acceptance speech,

Cruz knows that his address to the Republican convention

is going to be the single most watched, the single most important,

the single most suspenseful moment in Cleveland at this convention.

And as Cruz is writing the speech,

he suddenly finds himself

in the middle of a fierce

disagreement among his inner circle of advisers.

He's got 3 or 4 people over here who are telling

him, Ted, you have no choice.

You have to endorse Donald Trump.

You cannot go to Donald Trump's convention

and give a primetime keynote

address and not endorse the man for president.

Your future in the party will be finished.

And then he's got these

other voices over here, and they're saying, Ted,

not only did this man humiliate you and your family,

but this man is undemocratic.

This man is anti-constitutional.

This man is downright un-American.

The way that he talks about things.

And you want to be on the right side of history here.

This isn't just about 2016 or 2020.

In the long run, you will be proven right

by standing firm in your convictions

and your fidelity to the Constitution and to the principles that you believe in.

You should not be willing to compromise those things

in the interest of immediate political gratification.

And so Cruz finds

himself at the eye of this storm.

Everyone around him, the people who have guided his political career to date,

they view this as an inflection point, as a watershed

in his young political career.

Remember, this man had only been in the U.S.

Senate for four years,

and here he was, the runner up to the nomination for the presidency.

The future was unlimited for Ted Cruz.

Unless he screwed this up, and everybody around him

had a different idea of how he could screw it up and what he needed to do.

So ultimately,

the day before the convention, Cruz

has finished his speech and he's talking with his advisors, and he tells them

his decision that he's not going to endorse Donald Trump in his speech.

And they ask him why.

And Cruz just looks at them

and shrugs and says,

history isn't kind to the man

who holds Mussolini's jacket.

And that's that.

His decisions made.

How is that speech and the reaction in the day after?

How is that a turning point for Cruz when Cruz

makes the determination not to endorse Trump?

He has severely underestimated

the blowback.

He understands that there will be some people

who aren't happy with him.

And he knows that he might catch some some grief for it.

But he believes that he's taking a principled stand. He believes that

the people who have supported him to date

have supported him, because he isn't just

another go along to get along politician.

And so Cruz walks onto that stage in Cleveland with real confidence

that even though he is defying

the party's new standard bearer, that

he will still have the support of lots of folks in the party

who appreciate

the ways in which he has campaigned and he has conducted himself in office.

And he doesn't think that this is going to hurt his career in any real way.

Cruz underestimated two things.

He underestimated the ferocity

of the backlash from sort of the party's grassroots.

He also underestimated the extent to which Trump

still viewed himself as in competition with Cruz.

In other words, Cruz thought that their rivalry was over.

I lost you one. To the victor.

Go the spoils. Now leave me alone.

When Trump and his

team learned in advance

that Cruz would not be endorsing him at the convention,

they decided to turn the convention into a

wrestling spectacle.

Trump's team got down to the convention floor.

They began spreading the word to delegates ahead of Cruz's speech

that Cruz is betraying the nominee.

He will not support Trump.

Therefore, we should not support him.

And by the time Cruz gets to the stage to give his speech,

the ground has been ceded.

And when Cruz gets to the pivotal moment

at the end of his speech, where he talks about this November

and the stakes and what you need to do as Republican voters,

he says, vote your conscience

up and down the ballot.

And I can tell you,

I had moved from the convention floor

with my press credentials up to the first level

and then up to the second level,

and by the time Cruz was finishing his speech, I snaked my way

all the way up to the third level in the quick and loans arena,

so I could have a bird's eye view of what was happening below me

and the boos that started

at the ground level on the convention floor.

They cascaded and cascaded and cascaded.

And I have been at some of the loudest sporting events

in the craziest venues in the United States of America.

I have never heard boos

as thunderous as the ones raining

down on Ted Cruz on that stage.

And in that moment, Cruz

came to realize something that would guide the rest of his political career.

When in doubt,

side with Donald Trump.

And from that moment, the calculation that he would make to endorse him, to

who would he become?

Is that a result of what happened there?

Look, I don't think it's any exaggeration to say

that the trajectory of Ted Cruz's career

was changed,

permanently changed,

by being booed off of that stage

in primetime, delivering that keynote speech

to his party's convention

that night.

Immediately following the speech, Ted Cruz went into a bunker

with his team, his closest advisers.

And I can tell you from talking to two of the people who were in the room

with him in those moments that there was

a real belief that his political career might be finished.

Mike Pence, why does he agree to be the vice president?

And what is the nature of that deal?

And what is he offering to Trump, and what does he get in return?

You know,

it's really important to understand that

at the beginning of 2016,

Mike pence, the governor of Indiana,

is in deep trouble politically.

He's made a couple of major missteps

in Indiana.

His party has turned on him

in some significant sense.

The business community is furious with him.

His,

his own closest advisers and confidants are deeply concerned

about his ability to win reelection that fall.

And the polling bears it out.

Pence is in real trouble.

It's not clear that he'll be able to win a second term as governor.

And against that backdrop

of his own political misfortune,

pence is feeling

torn over whether to endorse somebody

in a presidential contest that's coming to his own backyard.

Remember, the Trump versus Cruz blood fest

is really climaxing in Indiana.

And pence, who thinks of himself

as a constitutional conservative,

is very much aligned

ideologically and otherwise with Ted Cruz.

But pence, who's a very savvy political player

who has his ear to the ground, he can see the appeal

that Donald Trump has to voters in Indiana and elsewhere.

And so pence is very careful

in ultimately choosing to endorse Ted Cruz,

but do it in the least objectionable way in the eyes of Donald Trump.

He goes out of his way.

While endorsing Ted Cruz, he actually says nicer things about Donald Trump.

It almost comes off as an endorsement of Donald Trump.

And so by the time Trump

is convinced to entertain the idea

of adding Mike pence to the ticket, Donald Trump's first reaction

when Pence's name is floated to him is Trump says

he says nice things about me.

Right. Which is so unusual for Trump.

Normally, if somebody at that point had endorsed one of Trump's,

rivals, one of his opponents, the first thing Trump would say

is, oh, he's, you know, no, he's a he's a traitor.

He's a backstabber. He's an S.O.B.

he didn't endorse me.

Why would I want anything to do with him?

But with pence at first mention, Trump says,

he says nice things about me,

which is a testament

to pence and his political savvy and understanding that

even though he could not stomach at that time

sort of betraying his own principles and endorsing a man

for office who he thought was fundamentally unfit for office.

Which pence said to his friends and his allies

at the time that he he worried about Trump.

But he also was not willing,

given his own political circumstances.

He was not willing to poke the bear.

He wasn't willing to antagonize Trump and invite attacks on himself when he

when he knew that his own position was so fragile.

What is he offering to Trump politically?

This is a masterclass in political transactional ism.

Donald Trump

sees that Mike pence needs him.

Donald Trump sees that Mike pence is in trouble in Indiana,

and that he can throw pence the ultimate lifeline,

pull him out of this

terrible political circumstance that he's in in Indiana,

put him on the national ticket and put him on the fast track to becoming

president of the United States, which, you know, Mike

pence is a guy who

for decades

viewed himself as a future president of the United States.

He had never, never been coy about it.

And so here is Donald Trump with the ability to offer

Mike pence a lifeline unlike any other.

And that's what he can offer.

Pence.

Well, what can pence offer Trump?

The single biggest bloc

of resistance to Trump and to his candidacy

comes from evangelical Christians and from social conservatives,

who view Trump as a wolf in sheep's clothing,

who view him as a charlatan who view him as a con artist.

They're worried that there is going to be a bait and switch, that this guy

who spent his entire life advocating policies and political positions

that run directly counter to the conservative movement

and to the church, the evangelical church in America, that this guy

is going to take their votes and then get into office and betray them.

So what could Donald

Trump possibly do to signal to them

that he won't betray them, and that he means what he says?

There were two things that shored up

Donald Trump's standing in the conservative movement

and allowed him to become president of the United States.

One was releasing a list of Supreme Court nominees and promising

that he would choose one of these conservatives for the High Court.

And the other was adding Mike pence to the ticket.

Those two things done in unison

in the late spring early summer of 2016,

gave Donald Trump a fighting chance to become the president.

So let's skip ahead to Trump coming into office.

He comes to that joint address

and everybody says like, is he going to be presidential?

But it would be useful just to know when you were talking to Republicans,

to Republican members of Congress.

Who do they see in that president?

You know, did they see this guy as a threat

to us, this guy that he's coming into watching?

He's going to take everything over.

Or do they see somebody they could work with at that point?

Who did they see?

Who did they think that Donald Trump is?

Yeah.

So Trump really represents a

a lump of clay to

many Republicans early in his presidency

that can be formed and shaped by them.

There is some uncertainty over

where his real ideological convictions lie

or whether even he has ideological convictions.

But I think, you know, much of the

rationale that Republicans used in late 2016

for rallying around Donald Trump was this idea

that he was going to be an executive in the business sense,

that he was not going to meddle in the details, that he didn't have

a terribly specific agenda, that he was going to contract out

much of the policy making to them.

And so even for some of the Republicans

who had been very, very reluctant to support Trump

or who had even been outspoken in objecting to Trump during his campaign,

they were

excited, many of them at the opportunity.

Now, with not only a Republican president, but with Republican majorities

in the House and Senate to shape a policy agenda,

with unchecked

majorities in Washington for the first time in a very long time.

And so it certainly seemed as though

that despite Trump

being this sort of cartoonish, volatile,

unpresidential character throughout the campaign

and on Inauguration Day

and stepping into the House

chamber for the first time to give this joint address to Congress,

despite all of these reservations about Trump, the man,

there was this sort of quiet,

somewhat unexplainable excitement about Trump, the president.

And I think the only real explanation for it is

the idea among

many Republicans that they could control him.

And so, even despite their reservations about him,

they didn't disappear overnight.

Many of them still viewed him as sort of a clown, as a buffoon,

as somebody who was not to be taken terribly seriously.

But. If they viewed him as an idiot,

they viewed him as a useful idiot.

At that point.

Mark Sanford, who is he?

And does he represent the approach of the majority

of the Republicans in the caucus in those early months?

One of the truly fascinating characters who emerges

in the early stages of the Trump presidency is Mark Sanford.

Now, Mark Sanford, at this point is a congressman from South Carolina.

Mark Sanford previously had been the governor of South Carolina, and at one

time in his political career had been the odds

on favorite to be the Republican nominee for president.

In fact, early in the 2012 presidential cycle,

Mark Sanford was riding high.

He had the highest favorability ratings of any governor in the party.

He had the money flowing in.

The world was at his feet, and everybody believed

that Mark Sanford was going to be the guy to challenge Barack Obama in 2012.

And then his political career self-destructed.

He was caught having an affair with a woman in Argentina,

well, infamously claiming to be hiking the Appalachian Trail

and Mark Sanford

later told me that,

perhaps subconsciously, he'd gotten

caught on purpose having that affair because he didn't want to be president.

He was looking for a way to blow up his career

so that he wouldn't have to try to live up to these expectations of everyone else.

And so his career implodes.

He leaves the governor's office in shame

and under a cloud of scandal.

And then, somewhat miraculously, a few years later,

he resurrects himself politically and he runs for Congress, and he wins.

And Sanford, in some way

is the unlikeliest character to be,

calling out Trump for his falsehoods, for his deceptions, for his lies,

because he was defined in his political career

by this humiliation stemming

from the extramarital affair and his lies to cover it up.

And yet, somewhat ironically, Sanford.

He uses that that history

as sort of a super power to insulate himself,

to say, listen, I know lies when I see them.

I know deception when I see them.

Take it from a guy who practiced it right.

And I've done everything I can to repent.

And if I've taken a pledge now, moving forward,

it's that I'm never going to stand for anything like this again.

I'm going to hold myself accountable,

and I'm gonna hold everybody else accountable.

And this guy is a liar.

It was only a few weeks into Trump's presidency

when Sanford invited me into his office, and we sat down to talk about Donald Trump

and up until that point, there had really not been a single Republican

who was willing to sound off on Trump and say publicly what they had

all been saying privately.

And Sanford

just decided to let it rip.

He sort of lit Washington on fire,

telling me how this man was

just a serial liar and how he was manifestly unfit

for this, for this office, and how he was defying the very things

like reason and sort of, compromise

and nuance, the very things that make a constitutional republic work.

And Sanford

said to me at the end of that interview, I said,

do you realize how this is going to come off?

You realize what this is going to do to you?

And Sanford just kind of smiled and he said,

yeah, I'm a dead man walking.

Turns out he was right.

That term in Congress was his last,

and Donald Trump made a special project

out of making sure that Mark Sanford paid a price for his disloyalty.

And, that was the last time Mark Sanford.

By the end of that year, I want to ask you about whether the Republican Party is

and we have used before that tech ceremony where everybody praises him.

I mean, earlier in that year, they've issued statements about Charlottesville,

and a lot of them have moved on, except for some people like flake.

And by the time you get to that moment in December, I think

December 20th, when they're praising him, where's the Republican Party?

But also, are they enabling Trump, especially in the wake of Charlottesville

with that praise?

What is inside that moment and what does it reveal?

It's becoming clear as the first year of Trump's presidency is winding down.

Just how transactional

many of the other Republicans are.

In other words, it's not just him.

You have a lot of Republican leaders,

a lot of rank and file Republicans in Congress who view Trump's

missteps as an opportunity.

And you look at Charlottesville, for example, and the outrage

and the indignation

that so many Republicans felt,

but some of them were willing to use that as sort of a bargaining chip.

Tim Scott, the the only black Republican in the US Senate,

he marched into the Oval Office and gave Trump

a sort of blistering lecture on race relations in America

and the horrible history that had led to the events in Charlottesville.

And Donald Trump said to him,

what can I do to make it better?

And Tim Scott,

without hesitation said,

you can support my provisions in this tax reform bill.

And that episode was, I think, sort of, broadly

representative of how many Republicans approached their relationship with Trump.

They understood how important loyalty was to him

and how he would reward loyalty.

So rather than going to the mattresses with him, rather than calling him out

at every opportunity, rather than highlighting his offenses

or his inconsistencies, they would use them

as bargaining chips.

And oftentimes they could cash in those bargaining chips

for everything from a ride on Air Force

One to a policy

being passed that they could go home and talk to their constituents.

And so Trump, in many ways,

when he was dispensed seeing with his daily hyperbole

and his bad behavior and his lies and his outlandish rhetoric,

he was almost like a central bank of political leverage, handing out

favors that could be later cashed in on the condition of unflinching,

unconditional loyalty from the Republicans around him.

And that really, I think, came to define the party's relationship to Trump.

The graver, the misstep,

the uglier the circumstance, the more leverage

they then had to take to him and get what they wanted from him.

What are you we've been trying to understand is the first impeachment,

because not the details of the phone call or any of that,

but the fact that there are people like Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger,

basically everybody

in the Republican caucus, except for Mitt Romney in the Senate who opposes it.

And the question is why?

And is it a result of polarization?

Is it a result of the Democrats talking about impeachment

and Russiagate and the dossier for two years?

What's the political moment that would lead even to a Liz Cheney,

who's going to be critical, going to break with the president, to not defend him,

go on the attack against the Democrats

for launching the impeachment.

You're going to get tired of hearing me use the word binary.

But the first impeachment

of Donald Trump is an exercise in binary politics.

You have plenty of Republicans who understand full

well that what the president had done was

deeply irresponsible, hugely problematic,

and if it were

committed by a president

with a D next to his name, absolutely impeachable.

And yet, coming off of several years

of sort of relentless

Democratic attacks on Trump

and this sort of much ballyhooed

investigation into collusion,

alleged collusion between the president and

and Russia during the 2016 campaign.

There was a sense among many Republicans

that even though they did view

Trump's actions and his and his conversations, his phone call

with the Ukrainian president as completely inappropriate

and an abuse of power and,

very arguably as impeachable,

that if they were to take this vote now for impeachment,

after everything that the Democrats had done and everything they had put Trump

through during the first couple of years of his presidency, that they would

they would themselves be seen as effectively

no better than the Democrats, that there could be no greater betrayal

than for Republicans to have defended Donald Trump

against these allegations of having colluded with the Russians in 2016,

only to then turn around after that investigation and impeach him

for something that was,

in their view,

probably more egregious, but far less publicized.

And do the Democrats have responsibility for,

you know, the Republicans say it's Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Is there something on the left that's real that they're reacting to?

Oh, yeah.

I mean, listen, the former speaker of the House, John Boehner,

he had this expression that in politics, when somebody is committing

suicide, don't shoot them.

And Donald Trump,

throughout the first several years of his

presidency, was politically

making what seemed like

daily attempts at suicide.

And Democrats

could not stop shooting him in the process.

And oftentimes,

the only thing that sort of saved Trump and restored Republican Party

unity was Democrats overplaying their hand

and stretching too far in their in their attempts

to to convince the American public of what the American public,

in many cases, already knew,

which is that this man is dishonest, that this man is abusing his power.

But it got to a place where many voters

who had been reluctant to support Trump in 2016

because of this sort of relentless day in and day out onslaught against Trump,

many voters sort of got to a place, strangely enough,

where they came to view an attack on Trump as an attack on them.

And it's very unique in our politics.

It's not something that we have a lot of precedent for,

and it's sort of a psychological dynamic that I'm

probably not, equipped to, to properly diagnose.

But there's certainly something to say for the fact that

when you would talk to two Republicans,

moderate Republicans, Trump wary

Republicans during that first impeachment proceeding,

there were people who would tell you

candidly that

what he'd done was absolutely an abuse of power,

and that they were probably inclined to impeach.

But there was almost no way for a moderate

Republican to break ranks at that point

without sort of being viewed as a as a Trojan horse,

that they'd been manipulated by the Democratic Party

and that they had effectively switched sides.

In other words, there was no there was no objective

analysis of that first impeachment vote.

Given the context of the times, the amount of polarization on Capitol Hill

and in Washington and, frankly, across the country

stemming from the Mueller investigation and from this two year long

dispute over allegations about colluding with the Russians, that

for Republicans to then turn at the end of that and suddenly

impeach the president for something completely separate, it would have

smelled like the deep

state to any Republican voter out there.

And, and the last thing any of these Republican lawmakers

on Capitol Hill were willing to do was to feed into this sense,

feed into this narrative

of a, sort of, well coordinated,

very shadowy attempt to undermine Trump from within.

And I think that, more than anything, shaped the approach

that most of those Republicans took to ultimately exonerating the president.

He was acquitted.

And from the people we've spoken to so far,

they say the president feels emboldened after that.

And one of the things he's as he's heading into 2020,

you know, with problems from Covid and Black Lives Matter and he's ramping up

talk about Antifa, about the radical left,

about an existential US versus Ben sort of conflict.

Can you describe what you're seeing and what you're hearing is you're talking

to voters.

And that run up to the 2020 election.

How were they taking that talk, and was it changing things on the ground?

Yeah.

So I mean, two separate things.

First, you know, you have to get inside Donald Trump's head for a minute here

and and think about how for the previous four years,

he had time and time and time again

crossed lines that people told him he couldn't cross.

He had

he had systematically destroyed

all of the conventions,

all of the rules, all of the boundaries

that govern our politics and our government.

Trump view them as, as, expendable.

And there was no price to be paid.

In other words, every time Trump would cross a line,

the line would move, and then he would cross it again.

And so by the time

he is claiming to be exonerated by the Mueller report,

and then he is acquitted in his impeachment trial,

and he has gotten away with basically doing and saying

whatever he wants for the first three years of his presidency.

He views himself as invincible.

And understandably so.

This is a president whose own party refuses to hold him accountable.

And frankly, this is a president

who has politically benefited from many of the attacks

launched on him by the opposition party for one reason or another.

And it creates this environment

in which not only does Trump feel invincible,

but from the ground up,

any of the potency

that may traditionally be attached

to some of the political attacks coming his way just isn't there anymore.

As he's ramping up apocalyptic rhetoric and talking about Antifa,

what are you seeing as far as talk of Civil War and guns

and belief about whether the other side is a cabal of pedophiles or not?

I mean, and when you especially when you look back

from January 6th and the people who are going to show up there,

were you seeing hints of that on the campaign

trail or, you know, as you're talking to voters?

Look, as a personal note,

I moved out of DC

during Trump's presidency, move home to Michigan,

and really decided that I wanted to cover

the 2020 campaign in a different way than I'd covered previous campaigns.

I wanted to spend a lot less time with the candidates and with their staffs,

and a lot more time with voters.

And so that's what I did in 2020.

I traveled the country, much of it driving small towns, big cities,

super conservative white voters, in rural areas, super progressive

black voters in urban areas and everything in between. And.

Suffice it to say that

by the time we got to Election Day, I was scared about

where all of this was headed.

I don't pretend that

every other reporter or political observer

or politician shared my same set of experiences,

but I would say that anybody who was surprised by January 6th,

anybody who didn't see January 6th coming, they didn't want to see it coming.

They chose not to see it coming because there were only so many times

when I could be in mid-conversation with voters somewhere in this country,

when unsolicited, they would start talking about secession

or talk about arming up

or talking about civil war.

You could only hear that so many times

before you started to take it seriously.

And long before Donald Trump

claimed that the election had been stolen from him, and long before

he and other Republicans urged people to sort of take their country back

and not let this stand, that Tinder was already being sparked.

And the fact that we made it

all the way until January 6th without

serious civic unrest and without, lethal

violence is in of itself sort of a minor miracle from my perspective.

But certainly by the time we get to January 6th,

you have the ideal conditions

in place for violence

at a scale that most folks

weren't prepared to to witness,

because that's where I want to go, is it's in that period now, back

after the election, because we started talking about it at the beginning.

And the first question I want to ask you is because you write about it

in your piece.

You know, the people were interested in Graham McCarthy, Cruz,

and we don't have to do them all separately.

But but my question is they're going out

and they're at the very least they're casting doubt on the election.

They may be even stronger.

They may be feeding a belief that the election was rigged.

Do any of them believe what they're saying?

No. Do you think Republicans believe?

Do Republicans believe leadership?

I'm talking about.

I'm talking about Brian McCarthy. Cruz.

Those are the leaders of the party who are going out and amplifying this

or adding questions.

Do they believe what they're saying?

No. You might be sitting at home

during this period watching cable news,

and you might see one of these prominent Republicans

come on the air and deliver

a fire and brimstone

speech about how America's

self-government is under attack

and how this is an existential crisis.

And if we don't do something to stop this, that our sovereignty

as a nation is in jeopardy.

And you might ask yourself, wow,

do they really believe this?

And the answer in almost

every single case is no,

they don't believe it.

So why are they willing to say it?

Why are they willing to rip away

at the fabric of American democracy

if they don't believe in what they're saying?

Power.

Influence.

More power.

It might sound reductive

if you've never been involved

with politics, or if you've never had this sort

of proximity to power

that these people have.

But it is addictive.

It is consuming,

and it is corrupting.

And what we saw in the aftermath of this election,

and the decisions made by these Republicans was no different

in kind

than what they'd been doing for the previous four years.

It was different in degree,

but it was fundamentally the same calculation.

Either you're with him or you're with them.

And if you hope to have a career

in the Republican Party, you better be with him.

It's that simple.

You're talking to people during this period and they're saying, well,

you're hysterical about your concerns when you're talking to people.

What are they saying to you privately about about this,

about what they believe, about about why they're doing it?

Here's the thing.

The beauty of American elections

is that they are run locally.

Any Republican member of Congress

who you saw on Fox News railing

against the legitimacy of our elections, calling them crooked.

I can guarantee you that that Republican member of Congress,

he or she knows back home

in their district or in their state.

The people responsible for administering the elections,

they know the township clerks or the county

recorders, the people who are in the position locally

to run the elections and count the votes and report the results.

And guess what?

In most of these Republican jurisdictions, the people in charge

with counting the votes are Republicans.

The reason that we know that they were lying

to us about the election being stolen is that we know that they are in contact

with those Republican elections officials in their own backyards.

As of November 4th.

And they're telling them, please,

you got to tell me that something's wrong.

You got to tell me that there's some irregularity.

You got to tell me that you caught somebody doing something.

You gotta throw me a bone so that I can throw him a bone.

There was nothing.

Nothing.

Mitch McConnell, silent these six weeks after the election

where a lot of people are saying, indulge him.

He's going to get over it.

What was the consequence of the silence?

What was actually happening during those weeks between on the election

and between December 15th, from McConnell going all the way up to January 6th?

Was the country changing?

What were the what moments were happening in that vacuum?

Yeah. So.

Put yourself in Mitch

McConnell shoes for a minute.

You've spent the last four years

issuing no comments

on a president who is driving you crazy,

who is hurting your party's reputation,

who is oftentimes undermining your legislative efforts?

Who is

unwittingly sabotaging

much of your agenda

in Congress and across the country with his behavior and with his rhetoric,

and you're sort of to the point

where you just wish he'd go away,

even if that means that you have to deal with a Democratic president

for the next four years.

Well, you just got done dealing one with one for eight years,

so that's not the end of the world.

If you're Mitch McConnell

and you're you've, you've you've been around the block a few times.

You've seen what the numbers look like and what they portend.

You're Mitch McConnell in the days after this election.

And you're looking at the numbers and you're talking with your advisors,

who are some of the smartest political minds in the country.

And you can see that Trump lost and that he's not coming back from this.

You don't really want to go spit on his grave, do you?

He's buried.

And the last

thing you want to do is be seen as dancing on his grave.

At this point.

So you're telling yourself,

why should I go out of my way

to antagonize him?

Or even more so, to antagonize his voters?

When, a couple of months from now, I'll be free of this guy.

I won't have to worry about him anymore.

Or at least I won't have to work with him anymore.

So for McConnell and for a lot of Republicans

during this period, there's just this sense of.

Let him vent.

Let him say what he wants to say.

Let him get it off his chest.

You know, it's not going to change anything.

So why bother?

Why bother correcting him?

Why bother confronting the lies?

You know, ultimately, he's not going to be president.

Come January 20th.

So what harm does it do just to humor him a little bit?

It turns

out there's a lot of harm in humoring him.

Let me just ask you one question about the house where Kevin McCarthy

and Liz Cheney are.

We're now on January 1st.

We're in the run up to January 6th.

So a lot of the things you're talking about are have happened now.

And there's a lot between the two of them.

And McCarthy and the majority of the House Republicans

are going to vote to not certify at least some of the states.

How important a moment is that, how important a choice is it

that they're facing?

So put yourself in the shoes of a Republican member of Congress

for the previous 4 or 5 years.

You have come to these forks in the road.

Time and time again where you have a decision to make,

whether it's on the weekend of Access Hollywood,

you're going to stand with Trump or you're going to break away.

Whether it is, after Charlottesville,

whether it's after Helsinki, whether it's the impeachment vote,

you have had to make a decision

whether you are with this guy or whether you're not.

And time and time again, the people who have decided

that they're not with him have paid a consequence for it.

Some cases with their careers.

Now, fast forward to the aftermath of the 2020 election.

And bear in mind the fact that almost all of these Republican officeholders

understood that, no, the election had not been stolen.

No, Donald Trump had not been cheated out of a second term, and that no,

Donald Trump was not going to be president come January 20th.

With all of that in mind.

If you're one of these Republican officeholders,

there's a little voice in your head that's saying,

you know.

This is the last fork in the road.

This is the last

time that you'll ever have to worry about

making one of these decisions that could potentially end

your career.

Yes, you know that the election was stolen.

And yes, you know that it is a rotten and corrupted

and blatantly anti-democratic thing that you're about

to do to take this vote to decertify the election results.

But once you take it, you're in the clear.

It's like being in the mob, that one last favor,

and then you'll be released from this life.

And that's how many of them interpreted it.

There was a freshman member of Congress.

Brand new third day on the job when the Capitol was invaded.

As they were beginning the arguments over

whether or not to certify the election results.

And this freshman member of Congress, Peter Meyer from Michigan,

he told me on the

record that a senior member of the Republican House delegation

came to him and said,

listen, I don't believe the election was stolen.

I don't believe in any of this, but

I'm going to vote to decertify.

And Meyer asked him why?

Why would you vote that way?

And this member of Congress said to him,

it's the last thing

Donald Trump will ever ask you to do.

So let's go to January 6th.

And there's something you write about

that you've written about, which is those people who were there

and you described them as having been coming into coming there,

and not just by Trump. What's the responsibility?

What were the choices that were made that led to this attack

on the Capitol and on to the peaceful transfer of power?

And what's the responsibility for the choices that individual politicians,

congressmen, senators have made that led to that?

The tragedy of it is that so many of these people

have just been lied to nonstop.

They've been lied to by their elected officials.

They've been lied to by their favorite media

personalities.

They have been lied to and manipulated.

And some of them were willing to die for those lies.

And this was not a foregone conclusion.

It didn't have to be this way.

Time and time and time again,

elected officials in the Republican Party

who knew?

That Trump was lying to them.

Who knew that Fox News was lying to them?

They chose to go along with those lies, either to parrot them

or to enable them to stand by and say nothing at all,

because they knew that objecting.

That crying foul that's stepping out of line

and telling their constituents, no, this isn't true.

No, you're being lied to.

Don't believe it.

That would be the end of their careers.

And you know, you're supposed to be detached

and objective as a journalist covering all of this, right?

But it pisses me off.

I've watched it happen to friends.

I've watched it happen to family.

I've watched it happen to my community.

I've seen how this has changed

the fabric of American life.

Perhaps for good.

And it was avoidable.

It was avoidable.

It's not a Partizan thing.

It's not an ideological thing.

People who voted with Trump nine times out of ten,

and who have conservative values and conservative ideas,

they still could have done the right thing by their constituents.

They could have told them

when the moment in history called,

they could have stood up and said, listen, I'm for the guy.

I voted for him.

I supported his agenda. But I am not for this.

I will not abide what he is doing right now because it's dangerous.

It's undemocratic. It's un-American.

Every one of them had that opportunity, and almost none of them took it.

They took the cowardly way out.

And then when the people came

for the people's house.

And when the shots fired

and the attackers scaled the walls.

And the mob started beating the policemen.

What did all these people do inside of Congress?

All these people who had fomented this, all these people who had enabled the lies,

all these people who had invited this violence, what did they do?

They ran.

They went looking for cover.

They weren't celebrating.

They weren't joining the mob.

They ran from the mob and they cowered.

That's all you need to know about them.

Sorry, I shouldn't get so pissed off, but I am pissed off.

Let me ask you about the day after or the days after, because you have.

Lindsey Graham makes a famous speech.

McConnell is floating that he might be willing to impeach.

And eventually McCarthy's going to say, you know, he said certain things

privately, but even publicly, he says that the president was responsible for this.

I mean, why is it over on January 6th,

that the story that you're telling, or was there a moment of choice

for the Republican Party in those days, after

about how they were going to understand January 6th,

how they were going to understand their trouble?

What was the I mean, was there was that really a moment where things

could have been different, where it felt like things were going to change?

Yeah.

You know, if this is the mob, then in the immediate aftermath of January 6th,

it was the moment of just when you think you're out, they pull you back in, right?

Because you thought that, well, if I cast this vote

to decertify the election, then, you know, I'm done.

That's that's my last.

That's my last errand for Donald Trump.

I'll never be called on again.

But then, in the aftermath of January 6th,

there's another fork in the road.

Do you condemn

this sort of extremism, this sort of violence?

Do you condemn the president for his role

in inviting this attack?

And are you willing to impeach him for it?

So suddenly, all these poor saps who thought to themselves

that casting a vote to decertify the election

would be their last act

in servitude to Donald Trump, and that they'd finally be free of him

and sort of released from this four year term of constant and

and sort of, self-perpetuating subjugation to Donald Trump.

Suddenly the beauty of their story is that it's not over,

that it wasn't the last favor they'd ever has to have to do for Donald Trump.

Now, there's another favor.

And it's not just

a matter of appeasing Trump.

It's never been that.

Once again, it's about appeasing his base.

It's about appeasing the people who stormed the Capitol on January 6th.

And more importantly,

it's about appeasing the millions more who are sympathetic to it.

Are you willing to come out

publicly on the record

and say that these people were violent,

domestic terrorists

who just shamed

the institution of the United States Congress?

And are you willing to say that this president,

this outgoing president who was legitimately defeated,

that he has brought shame to his office

and that he absolutely committed impeachable offenses

by inciting this violence, not to mention committed impeachable offenses

by calling the Secretary of State of Georgia and asking him to find votes

and a dozen other things that he did

in the aftermath of the election that are clearly impeachable.

Are you willing, now that you've seen this violence up close and all that

your behavior and your enabling half

rot for this country, are you now willing to come out

and say what needs to be said?

And for most of them, the answer was

shocker. No.

I know you're surprised.

Spoiler alert even January 6th

was not sufficient to change,

at least publicly, what these people were willing to say

about Trump, about the party, about extremism,

about all of it, about the election being stolen.

And in many ways,

You might think that having that sort of brush

with political violence would be the wake up call.

Some of these folks would need to say, okay, this has gone too far.

And you know what?

I had a role in it, and I can't have a role in it any further.

I need to I need to say some things, and I need to repent

here, and I need to try and make this right.

But if anything,

their proximity to that political violence,

it caused them even further.

It made them all the less likely

to step out and and

and to condemn Trump, condemn the people involved.

With January 6th, condemn the

campaign to delegitimize the election.

You know, I had a member of Congress

say to me.

These people were willing to come after us

inside the United States Capitol building.

What are they going to do to me when I'm at home

with my wife and kids?

So if January 6th was political terrorism.

I think you have to say that it worked.

Seems like a real turning point in the party comes with how

they see Liz Cheney in this period.

You know, at

first in February, McCarthy seems to think he can still maintain the big tent

and that Cheney can be part of it.

But by the end of the spring, it seems like because of this,

how do you understand January 6th, how you understand the 2020 election?

She's going to be voted out of out of her leadership position.

The fate of Liz Cheney.

What does it say about the Republican Party,

Liz Cheney

committed the cardinal sin of the Trump era,

which was to say publicly

what she said privately

and what she said privately

in the aftermath of January 6th was what hundreds and hundreds

of Republican lawmakers said privately

at that time, which was that

this can never happen again.

This was an abhorrent attack on American democracy

and that the president was directly responsible.

And we must not only,

to to purge Donald Trump from the party, purge his influence from the party,

but the need to investigate

and expose.

All of the bad actors

who had been involved in the run up to January 6th

and make clear to the American public that there are consequences

for this sort of demagoguing, that there are deadly implications

for this sort of deception and these lies and this campaign

of mass disinformation that had taken hold.

And Cheney interpreted the events of January 6th

as a clarion call that that she now

had a mandate that she had a mission

to ensure that the people involved were held accountable.

Number one, and that, number two, the American public could see this

for what it was to make sure that it never happened again.

And Liz Cheney could be excused for believing

in the early days of those efforts, that she would have a groundswell of support,

that there would be a small army of Republicans

who had, up until that point, been loyal to Trump,

but who now faced with a choice between

defending Trump and defending democracy,

would choose the latter.

But she was mistaken.

And I think to this day,

she is still

shocked at just how mistaken she was

and has the Republican Party, as a result of that, become a party

that believes the election was stolen, that believes future elections

will be still, and that believes January 6th is legitimate political discourse?

Is that what the result of that means?

And if that's true, then what are the consequences of that?

Well, I think you know,

think about it this way.

Before the 2020 election.

Gallup did a survey that showed that

between 2018 and 2020, in a space of two years,

there had been a 35 percentage

point decline among Republicans

who believed that our elections were accurate and fair,

and that the ballots counted reflected the will of the voters 35 point decline.

So by the fall of 2020,

before the election, before the Stop the Steal crusade, before January 6th

and the aftermath, well before all of that,

you had fewer than 50% of self-identifying Republicans

tell Gallup that they believed our elections were legitimate.

That trend line had been driving sharply down during the Trump presidency

before things truly went off the rails,

and there was every opportunity

to slow that trajectory and even maybe bend it in the opposite direction.

But time after time after time, Republican

leaders, Republican officials, they went along with it.

They went along with Trump.

They didn't speak up. They turned a blind eye.

They enabled his assault on the legitimacy of our systems.

So for all the damage that had already been done

by the time January 6th comes around

and all of these people

can see with their own eyes the consequences,

there was still an opportunity.

Then to really have this Road to Damascus conversion moment

where you say, okay, I see now how dangerous this is

and we've got to do something about it.

We can't go along with this anymore, right?

It's not a Partizan thing.

This is an American thing.

We have to restore faith in our democracy.

But the number of people

who said that and who followed through

was almost nonexistent.

I mean, it's it's it's unfathomable.

Looking back on it.

And as cynical and as jaded as we can be,

having watched Republicans make these decisions time and time

and time again up until January 6th, even knowing all of that,

it is still unfathomable that so few of them

reacted to January 6th publicly,

the way that almost all of them did privately.

And as a result.

You can now see

in poll after poll, a whole body of research

and evidence shows that

voters faith in our democratic system

of elections is

significantly diminished, diminishing

further

by the day.

Practically,

the erosion of confidence in our elections

is an existential crisis for the United States of America.

There's no other way to say it.