Become a sustaining member of
the Commonwealth Club for just ten dollar a month. Join today. Hello, everybody,
and welcome to today's virtual program at the Commonwealth Club of California.
My name is Scott Shafer on the senior editor of KQED Politics
and Government Desk. And I'm very excited to be moderating
today's program. I'm pleased to be joined by Robert Costa. He's one of the coauthors
of the new book Peril. The transition from President Donald Trump
to President Joe Biden, as we all know, is one of the most tumultuous periods
in recent American history. And Robert Costa and his coauthor, Bob
Woodward, have taken on the task of documenting the transition in a
never before seen way with material ranging
from secret orders of trust to transcripts of phone conversations
from the Trump and Biden White House. The 2020 campaign
and more peril is the story about changes A first inside look into Biden's
presidency and the unique challenges that face the new administration. We'll be discussing
a lot in the next hour. And, of course, we want to hear
your questions as well. If you're watching along with us, please put your questions
in the text chat on YouTube and we'll be getting to them
later in the program. Bob Costa, Robert Costa,
thank you so much for being here. It's great to be with you,
I mean, when I was writing this book with Bob Woodward, we would always refer
to each other by our surnames, Woodward Costa, because there are too many. Bob's involved with Bob and Bob. Well, I want to ask you about a mark,
and that would be Mark Milley. This book opens. It really does pack a punch
and you don't waste any time. But I think the first
very first page of the prolog, you tell the story about phone calls from the Joint Chiefs chairman to his counterpart in China, General. I think it's probably pronounced
generally generally a week before the election and then also right after the January six insurrection. And he was trying to reassure his counterpart
that everything's under control. This is normal. Democracy can be messy. But what was he thinking
really as he was on those phone calls? He obviously felt compelled
to make the call. Well, it's great to be with you and with
everyone here at the Commonwealth Club. I only wish we could be doing this in person
and hope to make it to San Francisco soon But this prolog of our Brooke, it's
something we never expected to find
and it's part of reporting and sometimes the joy of reporting,
but also how just reporting about a story like this can continually stun
you, surprise you. When we started out this book in December,
we never thought there'd be an insurrection. And then come January six,
we we watched it. Woodward and I watched it
just like everybody else. We were startled watching
this terrible event at the Capitol. And it seemed to be
a domestic political crisis. But while the story kept moving in
Washington, the luxury of doing a book is you have the luxury of time. And Woodward and I kept going back
to January six, back to what was really happening
behind the scenes. And what we found was that
this was not just a domestic political crisis
that almost like the Cuban missile crisis You had something unfolding behind
the scenes that was highly tense, fraught And this is on January eight, 2021, that the world was on alert
about the United States. What happened in the U.S.
doesn't happen in a vacuum. Our adversaries are watching
China, Iran, Russia. They're on high alert. Our national security
apparatus is activated because this is now a time of instability
in the United States. And the world wonders, is the U.S. going to have some kind of coup d'etat? And so, Milly, as the senior
military officer of the United States,
is constantly trying to avoid one thing. Our reporting shows his number one
priority is avoiding a great powers war. And what we also found in our reporting is that this call
that Meely had on January 8th with Genera Lee, the head of the play
very close with President Xi, is that this was preceded on October
30th, 2020, by a similar call. And Millie believes
miscommunication can be the seat of war. And it's very important sometimes this
has been misunderstood about our book. If you read our book, it's evident
we spell it out. Meely believe Trump did not want war, but that did not matter because the Chinese
may have believed you still may want it. So Miller knew Trump didn't want war,
but there was a concern that miscommunication at some level
could prompt the Chinese to act out. It was what Meely called privately
the quote, absolute darkest moment, a theoretical possibility. That's what he had to confront. That's why he spoke to the Chinese you times of transition
in the United States, whether it's through
an assassination like in 1963, you might even say the same thing
about 1974 in the midst of Watergate when Nixon was resigning. But even in a quote unquote, normal
transition, say, from Bush to Obama, those are times when the national security
apparatus are on high alert, because they know that if a country
or some kind of an entity wants to make mischief, it's a great time to do it
all iser like sort of, you know, on the capital and the ceremony
that's going to happen. How was this different? In other words, would someone like a General Milley
have called their counterpart? You know, in a more normal
sort of transition just to kind of check in,
or was this totally out of the ordinary? It was very much out of the ordinary, but there were echoes of things
that have happened before. As we note in our book in 1974, Secretary James Schlesinger,
the defense secretary, does kind of a call around
when Nixon is drinking heavily at the end in August of 74, about to be impeached
in the House and move on to a Senate tria is on the brink of all that and Nixon's
collapsing into his own presidency. Woodward and I talked about this a lot, that there are echoes of Nixon in his
experience with the Trump final days. And Woodward wrote the final days
with Carl Bernstein in 1976. And what you saw in
this period was a president once again collapsing into his own presidency,
which unraveled, which what seem to be unraveling and rattled
national security and military leaders. But the most important thing we found is that to your answer
your question directly, what was happenin post insurrection was not just a response
to the insurrection at the national security
and military levels. National Security Adviser Robert O'Brien,
Gina Haspel, for example, the CIA director, in addition to Meely,
are highly alarmed, especially Haspel and Emily O'Brien. Nuts? Not so much. O'Brien, still a Trump ally. Haspel is worried in November
of 2020 of a, quote, right wing coup, possibly on the horizon
during the transition period, she wonders if Trump's going to strike out at Iran
just to feed his ego. That scenes in our book,
you have Trump firing ESPA, the defense secretary, days
after the election in November. And you also have a very important moment
in November of 2020 where Donald Trump decides
to go outside of the usual channel and make a rapid withdrawal memorandum
for Afghanistan. Stunning military leaders
who say what is going on? O'Brien, go over the president, say,
did you sign this? And you're supposed to consult with people on major foreign policy,
military decisions. Trump ultimately shelved that plan,
but he signed the document. It was almost put into action. And that moment was very important
to understand January 8th, because you have millions others
realizing Trump's not listening to them and he's going outside on policy and major decisions on national security
without talking to them. And then you even go back a little further
in the summer of 2020. We call them full metal
jacket moments in the book, because that' how Meely characterized him privately
to staff with, if you remember the movie, the gunnery sergeant
just screaming at recruits. And Trump would be screaming
at military leaders over the George Floyd protest, wanted to bring
the 82nd Airborne into Washington, D.C.,
lethal combat troops. We document that in our book. And all this is to say
when Miller is talking to the Chinese, it's the culmination of extreme concern
that was building by the day from June of 2020 , in particular
through January of 2021. Well, and it wasn't just merely talking
to his Chinese counterpart. It was conversations
he was having with his fellow generals and members of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff asking them or reminding them almost of their loyalty
to the Constitution, not to an individual, but to the country
as a whole, the constitution , which, again, seems to me extraordinary. What can you tell us about General Milley
in terms of his character? I mean, was he somebody who evolved over
the course of the Trump administration? I mean, because he sort of seemed,
you know, a sort of an unsophisticated analysis might be, oh, he's a Democrat, but obviously it's
more complicated than that. But how do you see him as a
as a human being and a character over the course of these years? He's someone who's really emerged
now as a character on our national scene in a way he wasn't
when he was appointed, Robert, he was appointed by President Trump
to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs. President Trump liked his broad shoulders. This is a tough talking Princeton grad. So somewhat of a brainiac inside the military, but also really has
that look that Trump likes as someone who's covered
Trump for over a decade, the word President Trump loves
more than anything. Trump loves to say the word tough. And to him, Meely seem tough. And remember, he loved Mad Dog James
Mattis for defense secretary. So Miller comes in and initially
he's like a lot of people who are close to the president, the generals
who surrounded the president early on. They all kind of go along with him. They they humor him
in a way that we have a scene in the book where they're talking about naval warships
and how they're designed. And the president says to me,
you know, look at my hair. I really know how design works.
I know what looks good. And so you have kind of seemed like he was joking, though,
because he kind of fluffs his hair. He was joking. And that was what
we're trying to show at that scene is that initially million
Trump are getting along. It's not a perfect relationship, but the turning point, June 1st,
when Trump walks across Lafayette Square, because Billy realizes at that moment,
so does Secretary Esper. You may think you can handle this
situation, you can contain the president, you can try to nudge him
in a different direction. But they felt used at the military
and Meely prides himself on being a nonpartisan figure, somehow
is being painted with a political brush. He was coincidentally
in fatigues that day. And then he's seen in
front of all these cameras walking in fatigues, military style
with the president as he holds the Bible. And that was one of those
major moments in Miller's life based on our reporting
and everything post June 1st. You really see clearly on edge
that this situation has turned. He needs to be on high alert about this president,
his president's conduct, his own conduct. And he's seemingly really
trying to reaffirm week after week that this transition
is going to be smooth, that they're going to have a new
president, whether it's Trump or Biden. It's going to be a smooth process. And really it's really a turning point
in his life and career. And that informs
how he handles himself in the transition. I'm wondering, you know,
members of Congress, if they're on certain committees,
get confidential briefings. And you mentioned Gina Haspel,
the CIA director, saying we're heading toward a right wing coup. I mean, that's an extraordinary thing for a CIA director
of United States of America to say. And I'm wondering to what extent did
members of Congress, Republican, Democrat Get indications from inside the government that these concerns were very real. It was very real at the top ranks. Speaker Pelosi is a veteran
and she used to. She's been on the Intelligence Committee
and she's the one. And we have the transcript in the book
who calls Miller and says this situation better be contained. I mean, this book has so much in it. It's almost hard for Woodward
not to articulate the whole thing, becaus to your point about Haspel,
that Haspiel, quote, privately about a right wing coup,
it's gotten a little of attention. But just think about that. The nonpartisan CIA director,
along with the senior officer of the U.S. military, both believe the president
could be mounting a right wing coup or as we would detail
with our reported amily, he believe the president
was in serious mental decline. You may have seen General Milley testify
before Congress in recent weeks and kind of sideways
answered that question. He was under oath, so he was being
careful, obviously, to state the truth. And he said, I can't assess
anyone's mental health. And that was seemed to be
a nod toward our book in the transcript o between Billy and Pelosi. But in Congress, on the Republican side,
you have a lot of people who don't really want to deal
with the present reality. We see Leader McConnell
saying to Attorney General William Barr, hey, look, I got Georgia
Senate race is coming up in January. I don't need to be
ruffling this president. I don't like Trump. We show him mocking Trump in private, but he didn't want to be
dealing with Trump because he needed Trump's
political capital in Georgia. Kevin McCarthy, close to Trump, grows
increasingly frustrated, frustrated with Trump, but doesn't fight him.
In fact, he and House Republicans sign on So on the Republican side,
some concern privately. But now everything in life in politics
is about action. What are you doing? Little action. And you see Barr resigns himself. So some people just get out,
get out of town. And on the Democratic side, it's Pelosi. Speaker Pelosi from your area. She's the one with the national security experience,
along with the political power. And that scene is so important
that she's the one saying, tell me, make sure nuclear weapons
are under control. And it's it's it's prompted debate. Already, you see former Secretary Bill Perry wrote
a Wall Street Journal op ed about do we really have control
of nuclear weapons in this country? The Constitution says
the president's commander in chief, but we hope this book, it's already done.
So it's not our hope, really. But it's interesting how the books prompt a debate about does
the presidency have too much power? Should a president
be able to directly order a nuclear strike
without consultation at the moment? We we Cemile, in January. Behind the scenes,
trying to make sure procedures are followed in our reporting shows
and working within the duties of his job, not breaking the law,
not breaking protocol, but he's making sure
that procedures are followed. Yet there's no real law
that states that Trump has to call someone before firing off a missile
if he ever wants to do it. Well, I want to ask you about that
point about he didn't break any laws, because in the reporting
on his conversation with his Chinese counterpart, General Lee, he says and I, I don't think
I misinterpreted, but he he did reassure him that everything was
under control and even told him he would. I think he reported that
he would let him know if something was coming like some sort. That seems to me beyond. I mean, you know,
we would never do that with the Japanese in World War Two or, you know, obviously
that was in the middle of a war. You know, he's trying
to maintain calm and peace. But I mean, that's strikes
me as being a little over the line in terms of what a chairman of the Joint
Chiefs should be doing. I understand that point, but respectfully,
I would urge everyone to read. That full chapter that that quote about Meely warning
the Chinese of an attack comes on page 129 of peril,
and that quote was immediately seized upon by some Republicans
who called it treason. President Trump called it
treasonous, is somehow warning the Chines about an attack, and they framed it as a subversive act
that he was somehow secretly tipping off. The U.S. is major global adversary. That's not what he was doing. Our book shows, if you read the next
three paragraphs in that scene, you see the full context. And like everything in life,
we as a reporter, you always watch
the full context is understood. And but I can't control what what
people cherry pick out of a book. But what you see, if you step back and read that chapter is
that Millie has a five year relationship with General Lee
and that military to military calls. They call it they're called mil to mil. And the national security
community are frequent. Meely kept this relationship up for years
because military leaders want to make sure that let's say there was an exercise in the South China
Sea that somehow got hot and a U.S. plane started to get close
to a Chinese ship. They want to have a back channel. And this used to happen between the U.S. and the Soviets, the back channel, to calm things down
before people start pulling triggers. So this channel is kept open
during the Cold War and it's kept open
now between the U.S. and China. And what Mili says to Lee is, look,
I know there are reports in Asia that Trump's hard on China and he wants to
maybe have a wag the dog war. That's what the Chinese fear based on U.S. intelligence. U.S.
have good intelligence in China. We don't get into it in the book
about exactly what it is. But the US knew the Chinese
was worried in October that Trump was somehow going to fire
a missile to win reelection. Hmm. And what Miller says to Lee is generally,
you know, throughout history, there's always been communication
before and escalation in warfare. Any kind of military kinetic action. You're going to see
a buildup in our ships. You're going to see action militarily
before a strike. We're going to have back channels open. Know that. I, of course, will talk to you. You'll see buildup. If there's going to be
action, you'll know. And that just like
you have throughout history. And it was all about calming things down. And then you see General Lee said, amily
I take you at your word. So it's not like Millie was going outside
to somehow tip the Chinese off. He was trying to avoid a great powers war. Now, people can be critical of military
to military calls without involving the commander in chief. And that's a fair point to raise. People in Congress on both sides
have raised that to me in recent weeks. But that's something for them to decide,
whether that's right or wrong. But it was not something
unusual for me to do. What was unusual was the context. Military to military calls can be routine,
but the moment was extraordinary, trying to wave off a wag
the dog presumption on the other side. You know, it strikes me
that your book could be sort of a Rorschach
political Rorschach test. You know, you may look your read peril
and you think, wow, people like Meely really stood up. Gina Haspel, Bob. Bill Barr. Well,
we're not trying to say they stood up. OK, well, we will. Let me just finish. So but you could also look at that
and say, is there are people on the right Q and on and others
who always talk about the deep state. And it's really these figures
that are inside, deep inside the government
that are running things, and they're subverting the will
in this case of the president. I mean, you could read your book and think, well, yeah,
that's kind of what happened. Thank God. That's what happened. But, you know, what's your response
to that take on the book? Well, I mean, there is a national security
and military leadership in this country,
and it's not necessarily a deep state. It's the state. It's there. Many of these people
are sometimes public facing. But you are right. I don't think about you're
right in the sense that there are secret things that happen in government. And Bob Woodward would often tell me
the one thing we're always trying to do is report on secret government,
because there's so much now . And it's a legitimate complaint. I don't I don't call it the deep state, because that's
not how I see it as a reporter. But there are there's so much that happens
now in our government that's done on a classified basis
or a top secret basis. That's not out of it's
out of the public eye. And it's our job as reporters
to try to bring as much of that out. And I think people rightfully. In good faith, if they're not making
some kind of deep state conspiratorial claim, people
rightly complain they don't know enough about what's going on.
And you saw this in some of the M.E. testimony. Congress members of Congress
are saying we want to know if the Chinese think
they're going to attack. We're going to attack them. We want to be
we want to know more. So there is a lot happening
sometimes outside of congressional knowledge, and that's something for lawmakers and people in power
to consider how to address. But we're just trying to just dig in
because there is too much going on that secret throughout any administration. And we want to shine a light on it. So much of this subtext for this,
I think, is the psychology, the mental state or mental health
of the president of the United States. And at one point in the book, somebody warned that
the one thing you'd never want to do is humiliate Donald Trump in person
or in public because he will seek revenge You hear, as you said, Nancy Pelosi
talking to General Milley, that he's unhinged, that he's unstable, and he seems to have used the word strong,
talking about Mad Dog Mattis. But he seems to have
this fear of looking weak and the possibility of losing is something
that just sends him over the edge. What do you make of that
and how that played into all this during the Trump presidency? I'm not a psychiatrist,
but many people around the president have tried to use psychiatry
to understand him. It was really intriguing for us to learn,
as we reported out this book, that former House Speaker Paul Ryan literally studied
psychiatric manuals and articles in late 2016, early 2017
on narcissistic personality disorder to try to understand the sitting
president of the United States. I don't know if that's ever
happened in history. The speaker of the House turning
to psychiatry to understand the president And that's the kind of moment
this country was in for four years, a total outsider president
who had a very vexing, perplexing personality not only
for voters, but for the people around him who had to deal with him as he pursued
his own agenda where they encountered it. And you see at the end this real belief
that he can't accept defeat. And there's a debate
among some of our sources about how much of this is psychiatric. How much of this is a choice. For example, the days after the November
2020 election, we have seen Kellyanne Conway talking to Trump and he says,
how did we lose? How did we lose to Joe Biden? And what's so important about that
is he's saying privately he lost, but it's only a few days later
that Giuliani starts to say it was stolen That's the new refrain.
That's what we're going with. And you see Trump quickly changed to it
was stolen and he's never gone back since So this lack, this inability
to concede, maybe in part and I'm not a psychiatrist in part, driven
by some other deeper character trait. But we do see him also making a decision
to preserve his political base. I mean, one of the scenes in the book
that stays with me is he's talking with Hope Hicks, Trump,
and she say to him, Mr. President, why don't you just go down
to Palm Beach, be the king of the GOP? You can run it all. And he said, hope
I can't buy. Voters demand a fight. I gotta fight. That's what I'm all about. That's what people know
before I got to fight. And no one can really
convince him otherwise. It's like it's all showbiz. I want to ask you about the attorney general, Bill Barr. I think you sort of corrected me
when you said earlier you started to say, well,
I wouldn't say stood up to him. He was, of course,
after taking over for Jeff Sessions, helped to try to put an early spin
on the Mueller report and make it incorrectly seem
that the president had been exonerated. And yet at that, you know, toward the end,
he was the one saying, you screwed this up,
you know, you left it up. You you know, you end and refusing to buy
into this fraud theory about the election, telling him again
and again there is no fraud. Mr. President, if there were,
we'd investigate it. So sort of the same question
I put to you earlier about General Milley Did did Barr evolve in his view,
because he could not have been surprised at what kind of personality Donald Trump
was seeing, how he treated Jeff Sessions? It's a great question. And what we're trying to do is not say
anyone was a hero or a villain. We want you just to learn more
about what these people did with Barr. Here's the real story. Based on spending the last nine, 10 months
looking at this bar from day one, as attorney general wanted to do everything he could
to help President Trump politically. And that's already a controversial
position to take as attorney general. You're supposed to be the law enforcement
officer of the country. You're a Republican appointee
if it's a Republican president, but seen as somewhat of a nonpartisan role
or should be, though, of course, that's been muddied over history. Sometimes attorney generals are very close
to the president politically. And the scene in April of 2020 in the book
is Barr walks in to see Trump and says voters think you're an expletive expletive and you think you're an expletive genius. And so he's a political
strategist, a counselor. And after the election, Barr doesn't immediately
just say it's time to wrap this up. He has people look at whether
there was fraud. He has U.S. attorneys
kind of looking into it for a little bit. And so he's trying to show
the president he's willing to to listen to him, even though there was no
evidence of fraud. Barr was willing to listen to a point. And then when the U.S. attorneys and others came back
and said these voting machines are fine. This conspiracy about from Sydney Power,
the lawyer that these voting machines were rigged by communists. It's insane. And Barr starts
to get frustrated because he feels, based on our reporting,
that he's done a lot for Trump. He's with Trump politically,
but he can only go so far. And so he stops speaking
to Trump for many weeks. And eventually they have a showdown
in December in the West Wing. And it becomes clear that it's over for
Barr and he decides to quit. But the president pushed him, pushed him. He said there's one conversation
to the book that I reread today that was looking at my notes
from our reporting and Trump saying to Barr, you know, Bill,
you're not doing enough over there. You better be doing a little bit more. I mean, there was pressure on
the attorney general to look into stuff. And there's a new report out today from Congress, which I think is
well worth reading. It adds new context to not only on Barr,
but then the acting attorney general to really try to pursue
where to find votes, where fraud instances could be spurred. And the big picture here,
if you step back, is that this is not just the president putting his thumb
on the Department of Justice, but almost like with Watergate.
Woodward and I have talked about this. This is a sprawling effort. These are there are multiple
pressure points here. And it was hard for us at first to understand this as reporters,
but ultimately start to see the web of pressure points
that lead to an insurrection, that lead to an attempt
to delegitimize by its victory. In part, it's from DOJ on DOJ,
its own Vice President Pence. It's on lawmakers on Capitol Hill,
all trying to get to that moment where Biden's victory is thrown out
and the election goes to the House and getting the DOJ to say
this election had fraud. That was the Trump push on that front to try to make it seem
illegitimate by the. Time January came around. I'm sure you've had many conversations
with Bob Woodward about comparisons with between this and Watergate
and Nixon's final months. I mean, one thing that was famous was the the walk up to the White House
from Howard Baker and some of the old bulls in the Senate
and in the House to say, look, you haven't been impeached yet,
but if you stick around much longer, you're going to be because the votes
are there and Nixon left. And, you know, in a way, Nixon
is a complicated character, of course. But he also he did have a
I think a even though some would say tried to shred the Constitution. I do think he had more of a respect
for the Constitution than Donald Trump did,
because it seems like Trump would have stopped at nothing,
really , to just overturn the results of the election as as I think Dick Durbin
said today, to shred the Constitution. I mean, is that your take? So what Woodward told me this one story
as we were reporting this out. That, to your point,
when Nixon is on the ropes in August of 74, Barry Goldwater as well
goes to see Nixon, and he says, Mr. President, you're going
to get impeached in the House. And when it comes to the Senate,
you have five votes, five votes. And Mr. President,
I'm not one of them. You know it. Nixon says he resigned almost a day after day or two after that, I think a day
after he announces his resignation. Because when Barry when you've lost
Goldwater, the conservative icon from 64, you've lost the GOP. And so Nixon go. And Nancy Pelosi references this
in our conversation with Billy. In our transcript. She says the Republicans at least went to
Nixon, but no one's going to trump. And that was part of the problem
at the end of the Trump presidency. The president was talking to people
like Giuliani and Steve Bannon and his social media director, Dan Savino,
more than McCarthy and McConnell and others who may have nudged him
in a different direction. Well, I think one difference, too,
was back in the 70s, in the mid 70s, Nixon's approval rating was probably down into the high 20s,
I would guess, by the time he left. Trump's really didn't change very much. I mean, it goes back to what he said in
twenty 2016 is I can shoot somebody in the middle of 5th Avenue and, you know,
my supporters wouldn't care at all. I mean, and there's a poll out
this week that shows even more approval for Trump from Trump
than he had when he left office. What accounts for that? I mean, you know, even educated, college
educated Republicans, I mean, slight majority, 51 percent in a Pew poll say
Joe Biden was not legitimately elected. What what happened? Well, I've covered Trump for 10 years. I first started to cover him
when he was doing the racist birther movement
in 2011 and 2012. And long story short, I've been to too many Trump
events, hundreds of Trump events, rallies I was there at his first Arizona
immigration rally when he first got the roar about the war. I could go on for hours about Trump
stories, but in brief, do not discount. This is all based on reporting
and seen it up close. The power of grievance
about the global economy. So much changed in my coverage
of American politics in terms of talks with voters after 08
when the recession starts. I start to see a rise of progressive
voices on the left who say the elites and the establishment are out of touch
and the Occupy Wall Street movement. Then you have Bernie Sanders,
his candidacy in 2015, 2016, and then on the right, in reaction
to kind of the global recession, you see the rise of populism
and nationalism. Steve Bannon, Breitbart,
the immigration fight in 2013. This is a roundabout way of answering
your question is how does this happen? Donald Trump, in part, is a personality
that has many followers. But he the predicate for Trump's candidacy
was laid by the Tea Party movement, the immigration fight, a 2013
the birther ism episode in 2011 and 2012. This Republican exhaustion in the core Republican base about the war in Iraq
and Afghanistan, the Bush presidency. All this allows the Republican voter
to drift towards someone like Trump. And so many working class white voters
who I covered who would never vote for Mitt Romney found the siren
call of Trump's serially anti immigration message and his powerful,
powerful, anti-establishment, incendiary rhetoric on all these different
fronts, really appealing. And that appeal remains. And you see outsiders, whether it's
Senator Sanders or Representative Ocasio Cortez or media personalities
on the right, like Tucker Carlson, someone like even like Steve Bannon, power is now much more fluid
in American politics. And Trump caught people by surprise. But if you go into Republican events,
it wasn't really that much of a surprise. That's why in March of 2016,
the whole reason this book happened, it's Bob Woodward. And I got to be friendly in 2014, 2015,
when I was starting at The Post. And I said to him,
I think this guy Trump could win. And he said, if you think that. You better be asking
him governing questions because he could be president, and I said, well, I take it seriously
that he said, I take it seriously. I said, well, let's intervene together. So we interviewed him for 90 minutes
about governing issues, and he laid out a lot in that interview
in March 31st, 2016. It was our first Cobet allied together. He said, for example, real power is fear. That title of Woodward's
book comes directly from that interview. Trump told us to our face.
Real power is fear. He told us, rage. I bring it all out. I always have. I begin the second Woodward book. He also told us he wanted to give everyone in his inner circle
nondisclosure agreements, even though they were
government employees. People laugh, but it showed you
kind of a culture of secrecy around Trump And Woodward and I have stayed close
ever since then, trying to take Trump and these political movements seriously,
because as we saw in January, this is very serious business. Democracies is no joke and it can be
tested and you have to track it all. Well, and, you know, we've seen here in California just very recently
with the recall election where before the election, Larry Elder,
who was the leading replacement candidate who ended up getting almost half of the votes of people
who did vote for a replacement can beat a lot of people just didn't vote
at all in that part of the ballot. But this was part of the playbook. And Trump amplified what he was saying about and Larry
Elder was in first place. Right. If the recall had happened,
he would have likely won. Oh, absolutely. I mean, there was no one even close. I mean, and he he ended up
with 48 percent of the vote. I think the number two was got 10 percent,
and that was a Democrat. So it I mean, it really wasn't close. But Larry Elder, although he changed his tune on election
night because the margin was so great, it seemed ready to to play that card, you know, to challenge the the results. And Trump would have been
very happy to chime in. And we're seeing that with audits,
you know, in Arizona and election officials being in some of their power
being taken away in Georgia. So, you know, when you look at that
landscape of the different pillars of democracy
being kind of knocked out or weakened. What do you see? Well,
I think it goes even deeper than that. And we report on this
in the end of the book. And I think this is really
the thing to watch. It's not just about the audits right now. It's not just about challenging
current officials. What you're seeing on the right is a real push. To get elected to election positions on the municipal level, county, state. Set to be even secretary
of state of various states. There is a major push right now. To get Trump allies installed or reelected
in election positions to decide how elections are processed,
how how things are run. And this is because Republicans
in 2022 and 2024, many of them across the country,
who are listening to Bannon's podcast, who are going to President
Trump's rallies. They want more of a hand
in how this all goes down. And think about this. And this is why we end the book
with the phrase peril remains. And in 2021, someone named John Eastman
from California wrote us a two page, six point memo spelling out how what many
are calling a blueprint for a coup. What was the coup attempt
in the eyes of critics of this memo? It was to throw out
electors, to have alternate electors in states
be recognized and then have them count in Congress instead of the votes
that were originally the slates. This doesn't happen because Pence and ultimately concludes that. There and Mike Lee, we show in the book,
does his own reporting. There are no alternate slate of electors. But suppose come 2024. It's different. State
legislatures, different election boards and alternate slate of electors
are ready to go. And there's a system of then maybe starting to recognize alternate slates
all of a sudden. Well, yeah. And in fact, there was a story
I think just yesterday, I think, in the Atlantic
about how Kamala Harris as vice president
could be the last, you know, thing preventing a real steal of the election
in twenty, twenty four, twenty five when they when it goes to the Congress,
as it did earlier this year. I don't know if you've analyzed
that sort of theory, but, you know, is the rule is her role
potentially, you know, not ceremonial, not administer? No, the Constitution is very clear. I mean, I'm not a constitutional scholar,
but you you talk to constitutional scholars and experts and senators
who are familiar with this. The job of the vice
president is to count the votes. It's it's a counting role. I wouldn't use the word
ceremonial necessarily, but your role is to process the count, to be up there. In a ceremonial in the sense
that you're given integrity to the proces by being the vice president, the
president, the Senate and overseeing it. And. Pence is talking to his lawyers during the transition, saying,
is there anything else we could do? Could we recognize? He asked the parliamentarian
on January 3rd, is there a way we could maybe recognize
some of these other things going on? No, the parliamentarian says
count the votes. And this conversation
that really is interesting for history's former vice
president, Dan Quayle of all people. And political winter in Arizona. Shane. Mike, all you can do is count the votes, Republican
to Republican, Hoosier to Hoosier, conservative to conservative.
All you can do is count the votes. Does it matter what kind of pressure
you're under? Doesn't matter. Allegations of this
or that happen in various states. Count the votes in and we don't try to say
Pence is a again, a hero or a villain. We're trying to show what he did. But imagine if he
had not decided to count the votes. If the vice president walks away
from the lectern on the day of congressional certification, you are. At least moving closer to a possible
constitutional crisis, because even if the votes ultimately are counted
by the president pro tempore the Senate. You lose the legitimacy
of a transfer of power. And that's what you see now and in further
reported and in our book, so much of what was going on with the Eastman memo
was about delaying the certification. So somehow alternate slate of electors. And that's why that Kamala Harris
piece in the Atlantic is an important one Unless the Electoral Count Act
is addressed by Congress and in these kind of issues
are kind of solved in a way, who knows if a vice president would maybe make
a different decision next time around? Well, and there is a lot of ambiguity
in the law around the Electoral College. And it seems to me that a lot of the discontent in our country comes in part
through the Electoral College. You know, Joe Biden in a popular vote,
it wasn't even close. You know, I was at six million votes
or something like that difference. He won by five million
in California alone. And yet there doesn't seem to be the will
or the mechanism to change that unless
unless I'm missing something. I mean, there's not the will yet,
it seems, or I'm tracking how this is all going to play out. But the uncertainty and in vagueness
of a lot of these things, it was a cloud over the transition
and it hasn't gone away. I want to ask you a question about pants, because you said he's
neither a hero nor a villain. Well, it's for others to decide. Some people think he's very much
a villain. Yeah. And some people think he's
he did the right thing. But what is your take, though, on him? Not not the hero
villain part of it, but just. Well, I can tell you about him
on a human level. I mean, I covered him for
I started covering Mike Pence in 2010
and he was a back bench congressman. I started covering Capitol Hill. And there's a place off
to the second floor of the Capitol. The House chamber
called the speaker's lobby, and ambitious politicians will sometimes wander into there
to give quotes to reporters. And Pence was so low key,
he would wander into the speaker's lobby and not a few reporters,
if any, would ever approach him, because he was just
Mike Pence from Indiana. I mean, he wasn't the guy you would put
in the third paragraph of the story, and his quotes were kind of anodyne. One time Pence and I were talking
and he would say, Bob, you know, I used to be a talk
radio host in Indiana. I said, oh, really, Congressman Pence?
So that was that's great. What was it like? He said, you know what?
They used to call me. I said, no. What do they call you? They used to call
me Rush Limbaugh on decaf. And I just said,
oh, well, that kind of fits. And he was this conservative
Rush Limbaugh type Republican, but he didn't have the personality
of Rush Limbaugh at all. And he becomes governor is off the radar. Trump picks him in 2016. He may have even lost
that gubernatorial race in 2016. And long story short is that this is a guy
I covered for a long time, a politician who is so ambitious
but so contained. And he saw Trump as the path
to being president for himself. And that's why when people ask me, oh,
why did Pence entertain this for so long? Because he sees himself
as a future president. And this is not he's not looking for
some kind of West Wing moment to break with Trump. He wants to be with Trump. Well, and there was
maybe if you just answered it with that last comment there,
but there were calls for him to invoke the 25th Amendment to, you know, get the Cabinet together
and declare basically that Trump is unfit to hold this office and
have the nuclear codes and all the rest. And he really never gave that
any serious consideration. Did he know it History will judge how this all after the insurrection. Speaker Pelosi talks to Chuck Schumer
and she says, we got to call Pence. We got to deal with this 25th Amendment,
get him to invoke the 25th Amendment. And Pelosi's view, based on our reporting, was this is the time there's
been an insurrection at the Capitol. If this is not the moment
for a 25th Amendment, right out of the dictionary definition
of when that moment is, this is it. So they call Pence together and Pence doesn't pick up. And Pence puts the call on hold at his office
and Pence talks to his lawyers and his top aides, and he says, well,
what do you think about this? And Pence doesn't want to do the 25th
Amendment based on what we found out behind the scenes. But he's trying to figure out
how to handle it. And his lawyer, Greg
Jacobs, says to Pence, look, you don't need to do
the 25th Amendment, because our view as conservative lawyers
working for you is that the 25th Amendmen should only be used if the president's
mentally or physically incapacitated. And we don't have that threshold
in any direct way. So we don't need to do it. So Pelosi, as these talks are going on
and Pence decided Pelosi and Schumer looking at each other over in their office
going, what is going on? He's 20 minutes.
Pence doesn't take the call. He's there sitting on hold. And ultimately, Pence
never takes the call. He never talks to Pelosi and Schumer. Instead, Pence's
staff gets back to them and says he's just not going to take the call and he's
not going to invoke the 25th Amendment. And that leads Pelosi and Schumer
to go, well, it's time to do another impeachment, because this is
if this guy's not going to act. We got to do something. Going to take some audience questions.
One question here. How much responsibility does Mitch McConnell have in
how Trump's presidency played out? Well, there's McConnell's favorite joke
about Trump is to say, do you remember when Secretary of State
Rex Tillerson denied calling President Trump a moron and Republicans
in the cloakroom will go, no? Why? Why was he able to deny it? Because he called Trump and effing moron. And this always leads to big
laughs inside the cloakroom, which I think is true, isn't it?
I think that's actually true. Oh, it is true. It is true. That is why Tillerson did it
based on what we know. So you see McConnell. And one hand can't stand the president,
but he gets a tax cut. He gets his number one goal for his legacy
is to overhaul the federal judiciary. Trump and the first White House counsel,
Don McGahn, just keep sending up nominations for federal judicial positions by the week. They get to a point,
all these Supreme Court Justices Gorsuch, then Kavanaugh,
then Amy, Coney Barrett. So for McConnell,
there's a lot of benefits to Donald Trump even though there are headaches that McConnell calls him
privately Maalox moments. And so this is the story of
McConnell is a lot like the story of so many Republicans. It's transactional. And McConnell is always
someone who just kind of a cold figure in saying
this is the reality I live in. And he doesn't want to go to public war
with the president. And I think a moment that, again, history will judge, not me,
but history will judge. The days after the door, the Senate trial,
after Trump leaves office, McConnell clearly is emotional
about the insurrection, but yet does not vote to convict Trump. And his argument
is that Trump's out of office, but. Now, Trump might
come back, and if Trump had been convicte in a Senate trial, that would be very,
very difficult constitutionally. Yeah. You know, on the other hand, Paul Ryan, who had been speaker
after reading all about narcissism, had to chose not to run for reelection,
which surprised a lot of people. I mean, he's young, up and coming,
had been a vice presidential candidate from a purple state and all that. What do you make of that decision? Did you have a chance to talk with him? I mean, you know, did
he just see what was coming and decide that he did not want
to be in charge of that caucus? Well, our book was written on deep
background, and we're were not trying to be super secretive,
mysterious about this. It's a way of protecting the reporting
so you can get a composite picture out as many sources as possible.
We did over 200 interviews. And so we just don't discuss
who we talked to. But we talked to as many people
as we could who were in the room for these decisions,
many of the key players, to try to just over nine or 10 months nail
the truth of what happened. And with the Ryan story,
you see someone who was a lot like McConnell, different generation,
but wants to get a tax cut, but comes in. He doesn't actually
get what he really wants, which is entitlement reform, changes
to Social Security and Medicare, because the president doesn't have
the political will to do it. And Ryan has kind of a breaking point
with Trump around Charlottesville. But like so many around Trump, he just can't ultimately connect
with Trump, understand Trump. And so he decides to leave Congress
to not run for reelection. And McConnell says to him, after Ryan
makes this announcement, I can't believe you're leaving
the playing field. And McConnell, by saying that our view
is as reporters, as he sees saying to Rya and you talk to people around McConnell
and Ryan, he's saying to ride look. Of course, this guy is we don't like him,
but we got to stay here. And that's going to be something that
really is a kind of a theme of this book. So many people believed
in the Republican Party that they could make this work,
that we can get what we want. He's going to be a little odd. He's going to be crazy
at times in their eyes. But we're going to get through this
and get some policy gains. And we're not going to paint the party
as Trump is for the rest of our lives. And then, you know, then they watch
what happens, though, an insurrection. Yeah, exactly. You know, and just just
before the insurrection coming back to Bill Barr, I mean, he did choose
to leave toward the term the end. You know, he could have stuck around
to sort of prevent some of the craziness that Trump tried, as we heard today
in this most recent report, to pull off. You know, what do you make
of his giving up so close to the end
when he really could have been like, you know, General Milley,
somebody who made a difference? Paul Ryan, you cut
out for a second. Oh, I'm sorry. No, no, no. I'm talking about Bill. Ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba. He writes this sugary sweet goodbye letter
to President Trump in December of 2020, and he sees how so many other Cabinet
members have a terrible exit and he wants to just get out
with his head down. He also knows the president
just doesn't listen to him anymore. But you do wonder. Stay with me for one second, OK? We don't have a choice. Maybe he's got an Amazon package. Who knows? Somebody just knocked
on my door a moment ago as well. I think it was Amazon. I apologize, I'm in a hotel room because this room service guy
that he's got to lost, I just got to look It wasn't room service. Yeah, I got to Los Angeles because I'm
doing the I wish I was in San Francisco. I'm doing the Bill
Maher show tomorrow night. And anyway, the lovely staff here,
they're just trying to be nice. No worries. No worries. So you want to have them
keep ringing the bell? Yeah. Yeah, no worries were.
So I just want to get to another question from the audience here. Given one of our two
major political parties does not seem concerned
with holding insurrections to account. How do we avert a slide into darker
forms of government? I mean, you can't look away
from what's happening in this country, and that's not political advice,
that's just a reporter's assessment, because I've spent nine
or 10 months with Bob Woodward looking at what happened in this country. And I think The New York Times editorial
board nailed it this past Sunday. They referenced our book in their Sunday
editorial full page editorial on the side and they said what happened on January six was far darker
than we previously understood, that this was not just some kind of random day
where a rally spiraled out of control. This was an insurrection
that was bloodless in the days prior,
but intense, coordinated, sprawling. And this was an insurrection that had
a president driving it in that president apologize. I would try to fill the time,
but you're not here to hear me talk. I really apologize. This is this is anyway,
that we're so used to it to get back to this bleak topic, our democracy is very much
being tested to this day. President Trump, people don't people come up to me
and they say, I'm done with Trump. I don't want to talk about him anymore. I don't want to watch him anymore. And I just tell them,
you may want to avoid it, but you should go to C-SPAN, dawg,
or YouTube and go watch one of his his 90 minute rallies from this summer. And what do you hear in those rallies?
A war like cadence. I study Churchill at Cambridge and Trump's
stealing Churchill's rhetoric. We'll never surrender. We will never give
in. We will never give up. This election was stolen. And Brad Paskowitz,
former campaign manager, said this summer privately to others,
he had an army, an army for Trump. He wants it back. And if he runs again,
it will be for vengeance. That's what I hope. If that's
the right word, like what? What are you looking for
in this investigation that Liz Cheney and you know, is being done in the house? It's sort of it has a patina
of bipartisanship with her on it. And one other Republican, they're looking into whether the Capitol
Police were involved in the planning of the insurrection, which would explain
why so little was done to stop it. And perhaps, you know,
a lot of military people as well. I mean, there are a lot of deep,
troubling questions that that could be answered
by this investigation. But what what are your expectations? Well, in the days after
our book was published on September 21st, we saw that the House Select Committee
on January six issued four subpoenas to Cash Batel, the national security
adviser, acting chief, acting secretary of defense,
his chief of staff during the transition, a controversial figure
because he used to work for the Californi congressman, Devin Nunes. Mark Meadows, the chief of staff to trump Steve Barrett dance Gavino
for subpoenas are issued. Two of those subpoenas
reference our book Peril, cited as the main source
for why subpoenas are issued. And Woodward and I
looked at each other and said, wow. I mean, these scenes of Trump
talking to Bannon, talking to Savino stand out, and they drew
the attention of the committee. Why do they draw the attention
of the committee? I haven't spoken to the committee
at length about this or any sources, but this is not just about the organizers
at the ground level. Marty Baron, the former
editor of The Post, used to always tell me, go to the top, focus on the person at the top
and who was the top Trump. Trump's fingerprints
are not only the Pence conversations, but conversations
with people on the outside. I mean, we didn't know
until this book was published. We had to confirm all this
all the way to the end. Steve Bannon is talking to Trump
and saying you have to kill the Biden presidency in the crib, focus
on January six and then on January 5th. Trump's talking with aides like Corvino
saying what can we do at this 11th hour to pressure lawmakers? So what the committee wants
to really find out is what was going on. And our book report for the first time that Johnny Spence
in the Oval Office on January 4th, The New York Times just did
a good follow up story with new reporting But our book shows that details
the Johnny Spin and Trump are pressuring Pence to his face two days before the insurrection, saying, listen to
John read the memo listed to John. You could do this, Mike, you could do it. And so the committee is really trying
to, based on my reporter's view of this. Paint a picture of
not just the ground operation, which is a very important component. How does this rally become
an intense insurrection, but also inside the West Wing,
inside the Oval Office, beyond the president
just passively watching TV on January six We all know that story. It's in our book. We've all read articles about it. But the story is not always
the day. It's the prior. It's the planning while we reach the point where we have,
unfortunately, just one more question or time for one more question, Robert,
but it's going to we're going to switch parties here. The question is, did
Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema enjoy being in the position
they're in right now? What have you observed
from the last 10 months? And maybe a little hard to say whether
enjoying it or not, but they certainly ar getting a lot of attention. And there's a lot of pressure
on both of them, especially her. There is a lot of pressure in our book. So much of it's about President Biden. And I would urge you,
if you're interested in reading about thi current administration and mansion in cinema
and the dynamics of the Democratic Party not being too much of a salesman ,
but this book is a lot about Biden. And some of the scenes are so vivid with
Biden and Manchin cursing at each other. I've been having tough conversations. The most interesting thing is that Biden is confronting Manchin
in cinema right now. Think about that. Biden for decades is in the Senate. As Amtrak writing centrist
Joe Biden from Delaware, the guy who passes the crime bill, the kind of moderate who goes
with the Obama on the 2008 ticket, he was the more moderate establishment Democrat, the working class
roots from Skrine. But when he came into the presidency,
we have the scene in our book, February 1st, 2020. What he looks up at the wall, FDR,
and says these are the kind of times we're in a global pandemic,
economy in crisis. He has chosen to be a progressive, transformational president
when it comes to his spending packages, one point nine trillion dollars
in March of 2021, a historic piece of legislation
in terms of its size and scope. He gets it through. How does he get it through in March? We detail it all by pressuring Manchin. How does he try to get the spending bill? Now he's pressuring
Manchin in cinema to come along. This is a different Biden, a Biden. He's made a choice
to have a progressive legacy. I remember when I first started
covering Biden, he was vice president. I used to stand outside Mitch McConnell's
office in the Capitol during the Obama years, and Biden would often come
to cut deals with McConnell. That's not been the Biden presidency M.O. He's not the deal cutter
with Mitch McConnell. I mean, they're doing a little bit
of a piecemeal now on the debt ceiling, but that's kind of after the huge
standoff over spending. Yeah, well, and of course, next year's
elections may determine whether Joe Manchin has less power,
more power, the same amount of power. There's a lot riding on that. Well,
I want to thank you. The book is terrific. I read a lot about it, probably,
but I really encourage you to read it. I it does, as Robert pointed out,
have a lot about the Biden administration as well. But I want to thank you, Robert, for
joining us today for discussing this book And we'd also like to, as always, thank our audience
for watching and participating. And if you'd like to watch more programs
or support the Commonwealth Club efforts in making virtual programing, please visit
Commonwealth Club dot org slash online. I'm Scott Shafer. Thanks so much. Stay
well. Stay healthy. Bye bye.
