So to begin with, let's go back to the election of Donald Trump. During the campaign he's the insurgent candidate. He's talking about the hostile takeover that he's about. Does the GOP, do the people around the GOP, the leadership in the GOP understand what kind of candidate Donald Trump is going to be? OK, I'm going to do something for you. I'm going to tell you a story that I've never told before. But you've got to let me tell my story first. Donald Trump hated me. He hated me from the beginning. We did a focus group the night of his first debate, and our participants—and it was on Fox News— our participants didn't like him. They thought he was rude; they thought he was overly aggressive. They liked the fact that he was willing to challenge the status quo; they liked his willingness to bring up political correctness. But they didn't like him as a person, and that was an interesting foreshadowing of who Trump became for his second election. But I don't have a great history with him because he was very critical of me, very critical of what I do and how I do it, because it was critical of him. And the truth is, he can't take criticism. And we should have seen this at the very beginning. So I had done these groups for Fox News. … We are three months into the campaign. This is September of 2015, and I had a meeting that has not been reported with Mitch McConnell, John Thune, John Cornyn, John Barrasso. John McCain was there. … It was a Senate meeting in John Thune's office, and I didn't know that all these people were coming. But I had said to Sen. Thune, “You need to hear me now. You need to hear what I've seen.” And he took it so seriously that he invited the entire Senate leadership, and virtually all of them came. And I still remember McConnell saying, “You got us here. What do we need to know?” And I still remember my saying to him, “Unless you do something now, Donald Trump is the next president, or at least— at least he's going to win the Republican nomination. This is not a fluke.” At this point he was leading, but still, this was before Iowa, before New Hampshire, before any votes have been cast, when the establishment still thought that there was no way that Donald Trump could actually win the nomination. And I told McConnell—and he'll acknowledge it. All the senators were there, and I showed them the dials. I showed them the research that I had done. I showed them the focus groups. I said, “This guy is going to win the nomination. You guys have got to do something.” And McConnell and I were not all that close. He really—he's someone who doesn't believe that much in communication, but he believed me; I know he did. And they looked at each other and said, “What do we need to do?” And the truth is, it was already too late. The Trump train, once it got on track, was underailable. You couldn't knock it from its course. That the Republican grassroots and a brand-new set of people who are not Republican— see, Trump didn't just win by winning the Republicans. He brought in the Independents who identified with the Republicans but did not feel part of the party. Donald Trump gave voice to people who had never had a voice before. Donald Trump spoke in the way they spoke, he thought in the way they thought, and they'd never had anyone like him running. And it's something that back then the establishment just did not understand. And to this day, to this day, I believe that the so-called Republican establishment, whatever is left of them, they don't understand the deep intensity of the Trump voter and how they voted for him against the establishment. They voted for him against the elite. They voted for him against Washington. You didn't vote for Donald Trump. I want to be clear about this. You did not vote for Donald Trump. You voted against the status quo that brought us to this situation that we were in. So how afraid of him and what he represented was Mitch McConnell? Up to that point, which is October of 2015, up to that point, they didn't take him seriously, because no Republican could ever have gotten the nomination saying what he had said or doing what he had done, or changing his position on issues, or taking positions that Republicans never take. It was an impossibility. But I know that when I sat down with them, I know they got it, and I know they took it seriously. But the fact is, it was already too late. They didn't know it at the time. I certainly didn't know it at the time. And hell hath no fury like a voter scorned, and the Trump voter was scorned to hell, and they were mad as hell, and nothing was going to derail them. So over the next few months, I even did focus groups not for the purposes of defeating Donald Trump, because I really did take no side in this. I wanted to explain it to them. 2016 was the beginning of my insistence on being accurate rather than being partisan. So you've known me for, I don't know, 10 years now, 15 years now— Something like that. —and you were correct to refer to me as a Republican pollster. Beginning with 2016, that is inaccurate. And you're probably going to label me that now, and I could—I could scream at you. But that is not what I was then, and it's not what I am now, and I have the record to prove it. So I'm hoping that this is my way to appeal to you guys that starting with this show and what we are starting with, I'm not a Republican anymore. I'm trying to tell the truth. And the truth back then was that the more you criticized Donald Trump, the stronger that he got. The more you showed him to be a hypocrite, the more they justified his changing of his mind. The more you showed him as not knowing the issues, the more they liked his refreshing approach. The more you showed him as being extreme or inappropriate, the more they enjoyed what he had to say and appreciated his humor and his directness. Every attack was a boost. … OK, let's move to the 2018 elections, because I'm trying to get you in a couple of places in the history of some of the things that were already precut. OK. But don't forget the greatest moment of all, the moment that everyone— I was there, and I hope you know it; I hope you heard my voice. The single most significant moment of the campaign, the moment that Donald Trump actually won the nomination, was his lowest moment in the campaign. And that was the day that he criticized John McCain and said he wasn't a war hero. I'm the guy who asked him that question. And in that room, there were applause and there were boos when he said it. And I was shocked. And I looked around at the press facing me and the audience looking at me. I wasn't looking at Donald Trump, who made that comment. I was looking immediately for the reaction, and what I saw was astonishment from the press and nods of approval from the audience. It was inconceivable to me that a traditional Republican would ever allow an attack on a genuine war hero. Not only did those voters allow it, they were nodding their heads in approval. And that's the moment that I realized that if he is not beaten right now, he will get that nomination. Different kind of candidate, that's for damn sure. So 2018 election. And a different kind of voter. And a different kind of voter. The voters have changed. These are not the same Republican voters. These are not your parents' Republicans. They're much more agitated. They're much more willing to stand up and fight. They're much more willing to speak out and be heard. The Republicans of the 1950s, '60s and '70s were all jacket-and-tie, suit-and-tie Republicans, all properly raised, well-coiffed, suits that fit, and very quiet and respectful of the establishment. And it was the left were the protesters. The left were the outspoken people, the left who were the angry ones. By 2016, it was the exact opposite. The angry people were the Republicans. The outspoken people were the Republicans. And Donald Trump came about at just the right time to connect to the voters at the moment that they were the most outspoken and the most angry. So let's skip up to 2018. There was a backlash at that point, not the base of his vote, but others that had grown tired in some way of Trump. What happens in 2018? What's the message that it sends to Trump and to the GOP? I don't think it's the message you think I'm going to say. The message of 2018 was if you challenged Donald Trump in a Republican primary, he wins and you lose. In fact, the message of 2018 was the complete and total takeover or capitulation, because you had the Arizona senator [Jeff Flake], you had the Tennessee senator [Bob Corker], you had a few congressmen who were challenging him, taking him on, saying, “We don't behave that way.” And in race after race, the Republican that Donald Trump supported won and the Republican that Donald Trump opposed lost. That was a sign that the Republican Party was now lock, stock and barrel a Donald Trump party. But the general election, the Republican Party loses. The general election, the House goes Democrat. And Donald Trump never really understood. He thought—Donald Trump assumed that he could work a deal with anyone. He assumed that he could out-negotiate anyone, and he'd be able to intimidate Pelosi or cajole her or win her over in some way with charm or style or whatever. He did not understand, and never really did, the personas of the people in Washington, never really understood who they are and what they're about, because Trump had always operated in the business world, never operated in the political world, and never met people that you couldn't buy off, never met people that you couldn't charm them into submission. And he never understood that the moment that Nancy Pelosi became speaker was going to be the worst moment of his life. He thought he'd roll over her in a second, and she embarrassed him again and again. And boy, did that make him mad. He couldn't hide that anger. And so he shut down the government in spite. Now, I could argue, and I'd actually worked up language to be able to explain that this government shutdown was the— was the responsibility of the Democrats. Trump took credit for it. Pelosi's sitting there. They're arguing with each other, and Schumer leans over to her, I think he put his hand on her knees, basically saying to her, “Nancy, shut up. He just sowed the seeds of his own defeat. He just created the Republican Party disaster by what he said, and he did it out of hubris.” He wanted to say to her, “Only I have the power to shut the government down. Only I can do this.” And by saying it, he owned it. And by owning it, that was the end of the GOP. So let's skip up to the impeachment. How was McConnell able to hold the line? The Republican senators listened to the evidence, heard the tapes, and yet they were very supportive of the president. What was going on there, and why was McConnell so strong and able to do what he did? And how did the GOP see this compared to the way that the left did, the Democrats did? It's not that the Republicans were supportive of Donald Trump. That's a misread. It's that the Republicans were opposed to removing him. They were opposed to the claims that had been made against him. The Democrats never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. The Democrats always go too far in their criticisms, and they're doing exactly the same right now. The Democrats don't realize, if they would tone it back about 30%, they would hit America exactly where it is, and they'd be able to move some Republican senators. So in the end, their criticisms, the Democrats' criticisms were so harsh and so over the top that the Republicans were able to justify their support of Donald Trump because they opposed what the Democrats were saying. If this had been a referendum on Donald Trump, he would have lost. But instead, it became a referendum on the caricature that the Democrats had created around him. And at that time, they had not proved their case. At that time, what they said and how they said it was so extreme and so over the top that it allowed Republicans, in their own minds, to say, “I don't support this. I don't like the president, I don't like what he did, but I'm not going to support removal, because what the Democrats are claiming is just too extreme.” There's a message in here. There's a message for the Democrats that they've never heard, and they're still not hearing it, even now, which is, you've got a point; you're actually correct. But the way you deliver it is so extreme and so blatantly partisan and so ugly that you lose people who would support you otherwise. Look at that. Look at the face I make when I make that statement. That's not a face you want to follow. That's not a face you're going to agree with. They had no one telling them, “Chill out. Calm down. Be a little quieter.” You know, David Garth, the political consultant, once said to me, as a lesson, because he was telling me to shut up, he said, “You can run down this hill.” He said, “The old bull says to the young bull, 'You can run down this hill and screw a cow, or you can walk down this hill and screw them all.'” Democrats wanted to run. They wanted to make a statement. They should have wanted to make a difference. But Trump comes out of it feeling pretty invincible. The whole problem with Donald Trump—during this entire White House administration, the problem with Donald Trump is that he increasingly surrounded himself with people who told him what he wanted to hear rather than what he needed to know. So why was McConnell one of them? McConnell never kowtowed to Donald Trump. He said the minimum to get him and his Senate colleagues by. He never hugged him, and I mean that symbolically, not physically. He never hugged Donald Trump. He never embraced him. He tolerated him. … But back in impeachment, did McConnell understand the danger of the game he was playing, in that coming out of that impeachment, he was now really in ownership of the party? He was in the ownership of it before, but now there was nothing that was going to stop him. Did McConnell think that way, that he wondered about the fact of what they were doing because of how it empowered the president? Ask him. You're doing it to me again. He won't talk to us. Oh. I'm not surprised, you know. But that's Mitch McConnell. McConnell does not feel a requirement to explain his strategy. He does not feel a requirement to explain what he does to the American people. And that has allowed him to lead the Senate for so long and allowed him to get things through that nobody believed was possible. Mitch McConnell, in terms of impact, is probably more significant than any leader of the Senate of my lifetime, and it's because he does it differently than you and I, because frankly, he ignores you and I. He ignores the traditional trappings of politics and communication and 21st-century social media, and he does it the old-fashioned way: through relationships and through keeping quiet rather than speaking up. And the louder that Donald Trump was, the quieter that Mitch McConnell got. And McConnell's was the correct strategy, not Trump's. Well, it worked for Trump. It would have worked for McConnell in 2020. We—the Republicans won those seats in Georgia. They didn't get to 50 percent, but the Republicans got more votes in both of those races. And two months later they lost it because of Donald Trump's behavior. McConnell was right. Trump was wrong. … Trump immediately, on election night, disputes—not just on election night but months before, he was disputing the fact that this election would be fair, that there would be fraud. If he lost, there was fraud. On election night, he basically said it, that this is not going to stand. What was going on in the beginning of the fake claims there? I'm going to answer that, because I… We had done a significant amount of research in mid- and late September, both focus groups and polling, and what we realized is that Republicans were going to vote in person and Democrats were going to vote by mail. And I also knew the laws of the individual states, that so many of them count the in-person votes first and the absentee ballots or mail-in ballots after. So I realized, by the 1st of October, that the election, the way it's going to be reported is simply not going to be an accurate reflection of what's going to happen when all the votes are being counted. And we brought this news to the public. But the media at that point was so focused on making Donald Trump look bad that all they did was focus on his criticisms of mail-in ballots for the potential for fraud rather than focusing on what people like me were seeing, which is, don't trust the election night counts, because they won't be an accurate reflection of the electorate. And that's where we got into trouble. … But this is something that Donald Trump understood, right? I mean, he understands that what he's selling is not true. I don't know that. That—I'm very critical of him in so many ways. I do not know if he understood that what he was saying was simply inaccurate at midnight on election night, because at midnight, the betting sites moved, shifted from Biden winning to Trump winning. At midnight, the assumption was that Trump was somehow going to skate through with enough states and enough electoral votes that he was going to win. And they felt this way for about maybe two, three hours. And then it shifted back. … So Election Day, everything changes. And in your question and your answer, also go into the fact that this is something that Trump runs with from then until now. We had seen what was going to happen on election night. We knew it. We knew that the first votes in the first few hours would be very overwhelmingly pro-Trump, the people who voted on Election Day. And then, as they start to count the absentee ballots, it was going to reverse, because they were overwhelmingly Joe Biden. And in fact, that's exactly what happened. At midnight, Donald Trump was leading. At midnight, they started to have to accept the fact that Donald Trump might well win reelection. He was ahead in the key states, and they had counted 50%, 60% of the vote. But then the absentee ballots started to come in. And at this point, Trump had thought that he'd won the election, and he never changed from that point. Donald Trump, to this day, is still in the mindset of Donald Trump on election night at midnight, when he was projected to have won those states with enough electoral votes to have somehow squeaked by Joe Biden, even though at that point Joe Biden was getting more of the popular vote. And his frame for the election has never changed since then. He is still at that moment. In his life right now, he is still living that moment at midnight, on election night, when he was in the lead. And the effect on his base is? Every Trump voter saw what Trump had been telling them, which is that if every vote is counted— and they assume that that's every vote on Election Day— when every vote is counted, every legal vote, every legitimate vote, Donald Trump will win. So as the votes continue to come in the next day, and in states like Pennsylvania, which took two days to flip back to Joe Biden, and Georgia to flip back, and Wisconsin to flip back, and Arizona to end up in the Biden camp, state after state that was so close are now supporting Joe Biden. And the Trump voters rejected that because of what Trump said to them on election night: “We're going to win. Unless they steal it from us, we're going to win.” And how the Trump voters saw that, and as every day, every hour, and more and more Biden votes came in, more absentee ballots came in, more early votes came in—these were legitimate votes—they saw this as a steal. And that's why the phrase “Stop the steal” came into play. It was Donald Trump's language that was adopted and endorsed by his own voters. And McConnell and the GOP leadership, what did they say? I'm talking to dozens of House members and at least a dozen senators from both parties, and they understood what was happening. They understood the dynamic of a different count on Election Day versus the day after and the day after that. But they also kept hearing stories of voter fraud. They kept hearing stories of votes appearing out of nowhere, votes that are accepted without being signed properly. All the stories that Rudy Giuliani started to promote, all the stories that Trump's legal team started to promote, they were hearing these things, so they were wondering. I don't know how to take it beyond that. They don't see the danger of doing this week after week after week after all of the legal suits and after all of the statements by Republicans in the White House and in Georgia and in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania? They don't see the danger? No one saw the danger. … I didn't predict this. I did not predict what would happen in the House and the Senate. I did not predict a violent takeover of the Capitol. I did not predict an attempted overthrow of the system. I saw the anger. I saw the sense of betrayal. I saw the divisions, absolutely. But nobody predicted what would happen on the 6th of January. That was beyond any, any ability to see that this country would come apart. We had been saying that we are divided. We had been communicating this for 20 years now. We've been saying that everyone's angry for 10 years now. We've been saying that we could someday get to a point where our democracy would be destroyed. But they were just words. No one could see Jan. 6. And I'd like to be able to say to you that, because of my focus groups and because of my polling, because I know these people—I've lived with them for the last five years— that I could have said that they could get so angry that they would take down the Capitol. I took a photograph literally minutes before they started to tear down the barriers and they pushed their way in. And that photograph is a woman with a sign, and "Trump voters don't riot. Liberals do." She's holding up that sign on Pennsylvania Avenue. It was three minutes after I took that photograph that I got texted, “Get out. Don't go up to the Capitol. Get away from there. Go home, because it's gotten violent.” Even the Trump voters who were there could not have imagined what happened on Jan. 6. It was beyond anyone's capability. All the ingredients were there, and Trump had certainly stirred them up with his language, as had Don Jr. even more so, and my old friend Rudy Giuliani. But to actually break down the doors and break the windows and go inside and assert control of the United States Senate, no, that was impossible. … So Georgia. The quandary that McConnell was in, the fear of the party losing the state, was palpable. You must have seen it. But Trump was just not on message, I mean, as much as they probably tried to keep him on message— No, no, no. It's not that Trump is not on message. It's that Trump was off message. He was wrong message. His communication was encouraging Georgians to stay at home. If Donald Trump had been silent from, let's say, Christmas onward, just Christmas onward, after they had done their review, after the Electoral College had initially met to cast their votes, if he had just stayed silent, Republicans would have won both seats, absolutely. It's not being off message. He was actually destroying the hopes and dreams of Republicans in Georgia, of a Republican United States Senate. I cannot emphasize how much what he said and how he said it destroyed the GOP candidates in Georgia. I was there. I went to the Biden rally. I went to the Trump rally. I heard what both of them said. Everything that Joe Biden said in the last 14 days was designed to increase Democratic turnout. Everything that Donald Trump said in the last 14 days was designed to destroy Republican turnout. Donald Trump could have won Georgia easily if he had just taken his golf game from Mar-a-Lago and taken it up to Augusta. If he had played and did a rally at Augusta, just did one rally—and I say this to every Republican who's watching, who thinks that Donald Trump is your hero—Donald Trump, if he had gotten his ass, his fat ass out of Florida and had done a single rally in Augusta, which is an overt, overwhelmingly deep red, Republican, conservative community that voted for him by 70-30, if he hadn't been a lazy ass and had actually gone up and done a single rally instead of playing golf in Florida, they would have won both of those seats. I don't want anyone to misconstrue it. I actually believe, and I cannot prove it, but based on his behavior, I believe that Donald Trump wanted to lose Georgia— Why? —that it was inconceivable to him that he couldn't win a state and other Republicans could, and so he wanted those Republicans to lose. I remind you that Republicans got more than 50% of the vote in the original election in one of those Senate races, and David Perdue came within just a hair of 50% and beat his Democratic opponent by 2%. That the Republicans ran ahead of him, and that bothered him so much, that deep down he wanted them to lose. He did everything he could, and that's exactly what happened. And Mitch McConnell could not stop it. How angry must have Mitch McConnell been? You're asking the wrong guy. I'm telling you about the voters now. I can only tell you about the voters. I don't know how angry Mitch McConnell was. I hear stories of him losing his temper, which McConnell doesn't do. I can tell you how mad the voters were down in Georgia. They thought the election was stolen from them because Donald Trump told them that. And they thought, why should I bother and vote? Why should I stand in line? If they're going to steal Trump's election, they're going to steal this election, and I'm not going to help them do it. And so thousands of Republican voters who had voted in the first election did not vote in the second election. And for the first time in Georgia history, the Democrats turned out more voters than the Republicans in a runoff. This had never happened before. And the reason why, and the reason why is what Donald Trump said and what Donald Trump did. He's responsible for the Republicans losing. And the Republican electoral leadership down in Georgia was so friggin' pissed because they couldn't get their message through that we're not cheating; we're Republicans; we voted for you, and yet what you're doing—when [Georgia election official Gabriel] Sterling makes that speech, where he comes out and says, “People are going to die; this is dangerous; these conspiracies which are false are going to create violence in the streets,” why did they not listen? Why did the base not understand what was going on? Donald Trump demonized the Republican leadership of Georgia because he thought he could intimidate them into finding votes that did not exist. That's what it always was with Donald Trump. It was intimidation. If he didn't like what you said, he would try to bully you into changing your point of view. And I saw that myself. I had the opportunity to ride on Air Force One. I was suggesting to him a different language for immigration that might actually get his wall built, and he brought every one of his advisers into the conference room of Air Force One to laugh at me and to ridicule me, because I suggested you call it a barrier rather than a wall. A barrier Americans support; a wall they don't, because a wall, they had seen a wall as being Donald Trump's wall. A barrier is about security. Barrier is about safety. A barrier is no longer political. So he starts making fun of me. “What are my people going to cheer? What's going to be their— what they say in the rallies, 'Build the barrier'?” I'm like, “No, this is not your rallying cry. This is what you say about legislation.” And he brought person after person after person to ridicule me. And you know what? That's the last time I saw him, because I realized, this is just a waste of time. So his speech on Jan. 6, what is he doing? How does he—how does his crowd react to that? And do you think he's responsible for the siege? Donald Trump understood the impact that he had on his voters, but I don't think he ever understood how they saw in him their hopes and their dreams. We would do anything for our parents because they would do anything for us. Many of us would die to protect our families. And what he didn't understand on that day is that they heard in him that the cause is now and that the consequences may be great, but today is the day you stand up for the cause. And remember, they had heard the comments of others before him that had been even more overt, even more extreme, and he just confirmed what they had heard. And my whole career has been on a simple phrase: It's not what you say; it's what people hear. And they heard from him—he may not have said, “Man the barricades; storm the Capitol,” but that's what they heard. And he should have known better. After five years in politics, he should have known better. You can't pull out his words and say, “These are the words that tell you to break into the Capitol.” He never said that. Let's be accurate. But they understood what he meant, and he should have known better by what he said. What was it like to be in that crowd? So I only joined it at Seventh and Pennsylvania. You know, if I get COVID, I die. I've got a preexisting condition, and it kills me, so I have to be careful. So I got into the crowd at Seventh and Pennsylvania, and I walked from there up to the Capitol, and two things I saw, and if you want the video, I'd be happy to share it with you. But I saw, for the first time, I saw the police as an enemy, not as a protector. For the first time, I saw how the crowds were reacting to the cops, and it was ugly. And I remind you that moments before that, I saw the scene with the woman who says, “Unlike liberals, we don't riot.” And the cop cars were screamed at, and the cops were yelled at. And instead of celebrating them, which is what had happened in the very first rally, because I went to the first rally after the election, and in that rally, a cop comes, a car comes, and they applaud them; they're giving them standing ovations. We're now two months later, and it's not that at all. It's exactly the opposite. So that's how I knew that the mood had changed. And second, all you had to do was look at the signs; look at the flags; look at the things that people were carrying and what they were shouting. There was a lot more guttural language, a lot more four-letter words, a lot more anger. He should have seen that from the podium. He should have heard that over the last 48 hours online. You cannot claim to be the voice of the people and then not know what the people are saying to you. You cannot claim to listen and to be their voice if you don't know that that mood had changed, had gotten ugly. And so is he responsible? Not his words, but his deeds. And I ask people, and I'm going to ask you a favor to include this. And this is not really beautiful rhetoric, but I'm going to ask you to, because this really matters to me. I'm trying to be precise, and I'm trying to be accurate, because the public has the right to know. The words of Donald Trump did not cause that riot on Capitol Hill. But that event itself, and what happened before, and the tone and the demeanor created the conditions for that riot to take place. And it was a riot. If we are to learn anything from what happened, we have to be precise. We have to be accurate. We have to put aside politics and our own biases and hear people for what they think, what they feel and how they act, and then report that exactly as it happens. You could not have known, even 24 hours before, that a riot would take place. But you should have known that the conditions had changed, the mood had changed, the level of anger had changed. And the people themselves were thinking differently. And that was never taken into account. It was never anticipated. And frankly, Donald Trump should have known better. In the Capitol, McConnell's speech. He breaks from Trump in a way he had never broken before. Why now? What was going on with McConnell's speech? The words he said, the Senate, higher calling, "has a higher calling [than] an endless spiral of partisan vengeance," has been stuff you've been saying, we've talked about over the years. Take me to that moment. What did you see? The moment that the first door was breached and the first window was broken, the people inside realized that this was not a protest; this was a riot. And while I'm not prepared to use language like "coup" or "sedition" or "traitor"— I think that words like that actually cause situations like this. When you use language like that to label your opponents, you're creating the environment of this chaos. But they could see that this was not a common situation, that this had never happened before, and they had to speak in a way that they had never spoken before. And that's what I said to the members that I spoke to that night. I was in the Capitol. I was in the Capitol for about four hours when they had reopened it, and every member who I spoke to on both sides of the aisle, I said to them, “Do not speak as though we are as we were five hours ago, because we are not. In fact, we may never be.” This was a serious turning point in our democracy, and we need to pay attention. We need to pay much more care to what we say and how we say it. And that night, McConnell realized that things were not the same. And those people who realized it with him are now regarded, by many, as heroes. And the people who continue to pursue this pipe dream, this chaotic effort, are being punished in the public square. Half the people in the Republican House's caucus continued to vote to deny those ballots. But that's not correct. What they actually voted for — How will history view them? History has a way of working it out over decades. ... That's not what the vote was, by the way. The vote wasn't to throw them out. The vote was to reconsider them. This is—this is my point. In fact, my point is this. How you define what happened and what that vote was determines whether or not these people are justified or ignorant. It determines how you view them. This was not an issue of throwing out the Electoral College. This was an issue of reexamining— Right. For 10 days they were going to study it, and they were going to kick it back to the states. But the thing was that they had just seen the violence they had seen; that the fact that this debate that was going on had angered people so much that they did what they did. Did they not see that, as you were trying to tell people, that this was a different time? No. The fact is, they saw this as, do we change our votes because a few thousand people are angry at us? Do we change—if we felt this way before the protest, why would we not vote this way after the protest? This was to them a vote of principle. And I know this for a fact. They thought, if the principle was good enough to stand up and say, “This election needs to be challenged”— not throw the votes out, not ignore the people who voted for Joe Biden— but if the process by which the election was waged was problematic before the protest, then it's problematic after the protest. They thought that they were doing the work of their citizens by sticking to that. What they did not realize, at that moment, is that everything that we know had changed. What they didn't realize at that moment is that the American people no longer felt that way. But, you know, I think I sent you the polling data. I know. It's amazing, amazing. OK. So you know that what I'm telling you is the truth. You know how Trump people feel about this. They still—that's the issue. You're trying to hold Republicans responsible for attempting to do what their own voters wanted them to do. This is a fact. Trump people believe, to this day, that the election was rigged. They believe, to this day, that the election was stolen. They believe, to this day, that Donald Trump was duly elected president of the United States. They believe that. They are wrong, but they believe it. And you need to understand that to understand the actions of the senators and congressmen who voted to challenge the results. But do these representatives believe it? Yes. Many of them still do. Many of them do. … Why [are you] not surprised that McConnell would support impeachment? Mitch McConnell is a historian, and he loves the country deeply. I took him to my house in L.A., and it took him almost an hour to make it through because he wanted to read every historic document that I've collected. He loves the institution. I know that he's not a particularly popular individual, but he is a defender of the institution of the Senate; he's a defender of the role of Congress, and he takes this very seriously. And I know that he has had an issue, for the entire four years, with Trump's behavior. Why would he do it now is that he feels that the Senate itself is in jeopardy, and he feels that the integrity and credibility of the institution matters more than anything else, including the wishes of the Republican leader. And so it does not surprise me that McConnell, on the 6th and since then, has spoken up against Donald Trump. I know that people criticize him for not doing it sooner. People should be grateful that he's done it now. … So the Pence situation, just define what the hell was going on, and what it says about the dynamics of the situation, that Pence is being rushed out to a safe place, and there are people in the Capitol building that are screaming that they want to kill him, that they want to hang the vice president, the guy who for four years was the biggest supporter of the president out of everyone. I can only give you the answer, which is not that answer. But I'm going to explain his relationship. Fine. After the election but before the inauguration, I had a chance to spend some time with the vice president, and I asked him directly, knowing how religious he is, knowing how he's a man of faith and a man of the Book, I wanted to know how he could support the words and the actions of the president, how he justified it, because I'm not as religious or as a person of faith as he is, and I had trouble. And he said to me that God had a reason for this, that he just believed that these things were happening for a reason, and he was willing to accept that he was put in that position for a reason. And so even as Trump would disrespect him, even as Trump wouldn't—wouldn't stand up for him, Pence would remain loyal, would always remain loyal. And he remains loyal to this—to this day, because he believes that that's what he was put on earth to do. And I appreciate someone of faith having that much confidence, because I sure would not have. … OK. Let's do the big-picture story at the end here. So what's going on in the GOP at this point? It seems to be that there's basically a civil war that is taking place, that there is a split in the voter base and in the leadership and in the House and in the Senate. What's going on? And can McConnell regain control, or is this—or will Trump continue to have control over the party even after he leaves? Give us the overview that you have of the party at this point. Mitch McConnell, by what he has said and done over the last few weeks, has earned the right to continue as Senate Republican leader. Kevin McCarthy has had equal difficulty, equal challenges, perhaps a conference that's even more difficult to manage and a challenge that's more difficult to manage, because he has attempted— whereas McConnell wrote himself out of Trump's life, McCarthy attempted to change Donald Trump from the inside, and he's been surprisingly effective in being able to do so, but he's been punished for it, why he didn't break earlier. I mean, that's the question everyone asks: Why didn't they break earlier? And the answer is in the polling. The answer is in the focus groups: that Trump people would not let them break; that the people who voted for him, the reason why they're in office, the reason why McCarthy gained so many seats and why he's a hair's breadth away from becoming speaker himself is because people who voted didn't want Kevin to, in their perception, to abandon Donald Trump. And as you can see from the polling today, the people who have changed the least are the Trump voters themselves. Fifty percent, half of all Trump voters want him to continue to contest this election, 50%. Fifty percent want Donald Trump to run for president in 2024. A good number of people want Trump to leave the Republican Party and start a new party; that 70 percent, even more, believe that Trump won this election and believe the election was stolen even after we've seen what we've seen. And I know that that's hard to believe, and I realize that the rest of the country has moved on, but that's the challenge that the GOP faces right now, that you now have a majority of Republicans who will never, ever trust an American election again. And I frankly don't care what that means to the Republican Party. I care what that means to America. I care what that means to our future. I know the damage that was done to democracy when Democrats had the same opinion over the 2000 election, between Bush and Gore. I know what happened in 2016 when Democrats believed that they got more votes so they should be in charge. I've been here before, but never to this degree, never this intensity, never this passion, never this huge rejection of the country and a willingness to write our future off. And we are in so much trouble. I don't know if we'll ever come back again. We will survive this because we survive anything, but I don't know if this willingness to believe that our electoral system is beyond reproach, I don't think we'll ever get that back again. You know, I never felt this same way about life when I realized that there was no Santa Claus. It's the same way that I feel about my country. I'm sorry. So lastly, I mean, what does it do to Biden? I mean, what does it do to the ability of Biden to come into a split America like it is, to a damaged country where people don't even believe in the elections? How does it complicate his ability to govern over the next four years? This is the—this is why—this is my complaint with the Democrats. You've proven your case. You don't need to do this. You've proven the case that Donald Trump isn't capable of running this country, has lost the support of the people and has behaved so badly that he doesn't deserve another chance. He proved it. He's done. Why do you have to kill him again? Isn't it time that we start looking towards the future? Isn't it time that we repair the breach and let Joe Biden be his own man and bring the words that he— that I believe he can unite the country? Isn't it time to give the Problem Solvers Caucus, who actually figured out how to get help to the American people during this horrible division, this partisanship—the Problem Solvers Caucus stepped in and said, “You're both wrong.” Let's let the next generation fix what the previous generation caused. Let's move on. Let's focus on the future, not put another wound into the past. I've learned one thing from politics and polling. We never succeed when we feel ourselves as victims. We only succeed when we feel ourselves as doers and repairers. We refocus on building something rather than tearing it down. Trump tore down everything there was. There's nothing more to gain from this. There's nothing more to do from this. We are done with this. If we want to focus on the future, then do it. I think the Democrats' are engaged—are foolish. I understand their anger. I understand their frustration. I understand their desire to get even. But revenge has never been a value that has served people well. We need reconciliation, not revenge.
"Nobody could predict" fucking idiot
Pretty sure this man is not to be trusted
This turd is responsible for much of the decline of American political discourse over the past 20 years.
Screw PBS for legitimizing this Dollartree Goebbels with his shit take and CYA anecdotes.
I don't want to listen to an hour of this dude, so if someone feels like summarizing any super-important bits it would be appreciated. Or not. I'm sure I can live without knowing.
Fuck this guy for saying the next generation has to solve what his generation caused AND we don't get to see Donald Trump in a suit that matches his face for once. We will fix it after we've made shitheads like him irrelevant.
He looks like a fusion between Will Riker and McLovin hahahah
I started watching this yesterday, but got too pissed off.
Will try and finish today.
FUCK YOU, FRANK!
Frank Luntz is one of the worst. I remember him when he was doing awful things for the Reagan Administration. Please don't let him try and rehabilitate himself now.