The Inaugural Episode

season here on Deep Background. This year on the show will be exploring the theme of power. Who has it, how do they get it, who doesn't have it? And why? How has power used? What is power in different realms? And how does power shape events. Over the course of the year, we'll be discussing many forms of power, well

beyond the strictly legal or political or constitution. To start off this new season, given the January sixth attack on Congress and Trump's second impeachment, We're going to talk today about how power functions in the presence. To discuss this, I'm joined by Professor Douglas Brinkley. He's a professor at Rice University, the official US presidential historian of the new York Historical Society, a contributor to CNN, and a best

selling author whose most recent book is American Moonshop. John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race. Doug, thank you so much for being here today. Let's begin with the capital storming on January sixth. There's no immediate precedent for an

event like this. My mind immediately went to the moment in the War of eighteen twelve when the capital was actually burned, but that was by a battle hardened force of British regulars who swept away the state militias who briefly tried to block them at Bladensburg, So it's a pretty different scenario. What did it call to your mind when you try to think about this bizarre event, an upsetting event in historical context. Well, no, I immediately did

what you did. I pulled back and thought, gosh, what's going on here? And I did think for a minute about the War of eighteen twelve, and I did recall when Washington was attacked during nine to eleven, and our Pentagogue was hit, and the Capitol had been a target, and I remember scares of anthrax and the like, with some people running out of building but they were kind

of frivolous comparisons. I mean here, the fact of the matter was a group of our fellows, citizens mob were going in and destroying the US capital on a hunt for the Speaker of the House and the Vice Press, with ostensibly the order to hang them or do something horrible to them. That was unprecedented, and that, to me is a day that will live in infamy. January sixth

is not to be forgotten. Likely, just like we have a nine to eleven museum in New York City, there will be a museum by the capital to talk about what happened in that day when the insurruction occurred, and so I thought it to be an extremely frightening day for our democracy. That's a fascinating idea of a museum or an exhibit even in a museum, to commemorate those events.

And it leads me to a question that I've been really puzzling over and I don't feel I have a good answer to it, and that is, will we achieve the kind of consensus on the meaning of those events over time that is usually the precondition for some kind of a public recognition in the form of a museum or a monument, because there is an impulse now to say, well, look, Donald Trump was the president, he spoke to this crowd before they stormed the capitol. He's been impeached under an

article of impeachment that accused him of inciting insurrection. Those are two major words, incitement and insurrection. They're both invoked there. And all of that is of course partisan in some powerful way. For us to get to a place where we say, you know, let's memorialize this would probably would be necessary to think of this as an outlying event that wasn't closely associated with one of the two major political parties. Oh, excellent point, and that's actually why I

mentioned it. I think that day will come, you know, I think the country will unite that this was a really rotten thing that occurred, the insurrection. But I don't think it's a date that's easily forgotten to select. In April twenty fifth, when the Oklahoma City was bombed. Well, in Oklahoma City, they have a beautiful museum there. They have the empty chairs of all the dead, and they explain that event of Timothy McVeigh and right wing extremism

quite well. It's a marvelously curated museum. That's an Oklahoma. This is in our nation's capital, where all the school kids come, where everybody goes to visit to study democracy. So this is going to be, I think, studied like Ford's Theater where where Lincoln was killed, as an anti site, a site where something went terribly wrong with our democracy. Your comparison to the Oklahoma City bombing is really an

important one. I was lucky enough to have on the program professor Kathleen Bellew from University of Chicago in the history department there, who works on the white supremacy movement, and she treats the McVeigh bombing in Oklahoma City as a central event in the history of that movement. And she's been saying recently that she sees the capital attack as itself a manifestation of what is essentially the same movement.

And I think to the extent that we do come to see it that way, you're going to be proven right that we can peripheralize the events of that day. The question that I have is what about the denial of the legitimacy of the twenty twenty election results that

was closely associated with the attack. That goes way beyond the people who attacked the Capitol Right now, these numbers will change, but right now close to seventy percent of Republicans are telling posters that they believe that the twenty twenty election was illegitimate, and that too is going to have to be assimilated into the historical record in some way. In fact, that's a dispute about the very facts of

the historical record. You know, who won the election. How do you anticipate that structure I would call it a structure of denial will work itself out over time. Well, it is a structure of denial, and that's a perfect way to put it. Noah, I worry about it. I have a feeling that there will be a lot of those people that will admit that the January sixth insurrection was, you know, shouldn't have happened. That it was a cantful

of real zealots that were responsible. It didn't represent the Trump movement or the seventy million plus people that voted for Trump. But when you had that high a number, who thinks the election of twenty twenty was rigged? That really is a reprogramming or re education process. I don't know where to begin on that. All I can tell you is that twenty twenty was a model of how a free and fair election should be run. We ran

a great election in twenty twenty. And why it disturbs me is I see that as one of our great exports. The American brand is all about we know how to do free and fair elections. It's why Jimmy Carter's ex president could go to Nicaragua or go to Panama and say I'm a former American president and I'll be judged whether you did a free or fair one here. We've

made that our signature service for democracy in America. So the challenge that we don't know how to count votes is really a direct and central attack at the nervous

system of what makes our democratic body politique work. And I hope more and more people will start dropping off of that stance and recognizing they were hoodwinked by talk radio, internet, post by hate sites, or just by a refusal to accept that their team had lost that maybe over time people will come to their senses, but there's always going to be a twenty percent of the American public that will always think that this was a fixed and rigged election.

And that's that twenty percent that Donald Trump will carry around in his hip pocket even as ex president. Well, speaking of Trump and carrying that twenty percent around and its structure of denial. Trump's decision that he will not attend the inauguration, I think, really underscores that he's trying to say, not just I don't like Joe Biden, but I don't think Joe Biden is genuinely the president of

the United States. I was trying to explain to my kids why I thought it was such a big deal for the president not to attend an inauguration, And I tried to explain it hadn't happened since Andrew Johnson and that it was a central symbol of transition. And they looked at me. You know, they're fourteen and fifteen. They look at me blankly a lot as if you know, Dad,

we don't know what you're talking about. And they just said to me, Dad, why would you ever have expected Donald Trump, under any circumstances to attend the inauguration of his success Right? That was a fair point that they made. How do you think about that decision? Is it something that will ultimately contribute to the delegitimation of the transition? You know, I have a fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen year old. I have three in high school right now, and they

would all say the exact same thing to me. They're kind of on to the fact growing up. I think in the age of Trump that you're never going to have a sense of reconciliation. They grew up with neo Civil War and they haven't experienced a healing moment that we keep talking about. It's a tragedy at least. I first thought it was that Trump wasn't coming to the Biden inauguration because if he would have shook Biden's hand, it would have symbolically been omitted as difficult as it

was for him that Biden and won. But after January sixth, I say good riddance. I think Trump at the inaugural would have been a distraction by not very forgiving of Trump for January sixth, when you have five people that are killed, and that you run a reign of terror through our capital against our representatives and people having to either catch COVID, have terror trauma, nightmare attacks, hiding in closets and corners. You know. So I've been asked a lot,

as you can imagine. Noah from the press to talk about why did John Adams not show? While for John Quincy Adams or Andrew Johnson, the fact of the matter was after the Civil War, when Andrew Johnson refused to go to Grant's inaugural, He spent the inaugural in the White House, claiming he was doing paperwork, desk work, and so he was in Washington. He just refused to go. It stuck a bone in the throat of the nation, and we decided really collectively after that to make sure

that the president's there for the transition. I found that moment of the transition sort of the crown jewel of our democratic process. It's the coronation, which legitimizes all of the mud slinging and debating and belittling and all the ugly side of American politics. He suddenly get the reward of the great hug, the great moment of friendship that emerges out of two adversaries. We see this in every sports game, right A team loses and then the coaches

go hug each other, players talk to each other. We teach our young people to be good losers as well as winners. But Trump's refusal just sets him apart as a very small man, as somebody who's not well liked, doesn't really have any personal friends, a loner in his

own way. And you probably not being on the inaugural stage was a good thing at the end, because I would have been looking for the blood on his hands if he was standing there, I would have been feeling, how dare you have the gall to even be here today? I got that angry at Trump over January sixth, Doug. One of the themes that I'm going to try to explore in this new year is power and how it's created,

and how it weakens and how it grows. And I'm wondering whether you think when you wear your historian of the presidency had not just a starting of particular presidents,

but of the presidency as an institution. Whether Trump is emerging from his presidency having strengthened the presidency as an institution, partly through his ability to be a populist and gain not the whole communities, but a substantial part of the community's support for his conduct, or whether he's weakened the presidency by especially the way he's leaving it, with the association with the attack of January six with the sore losrism, because I think a reasonable case could probably be made

in either direction. And I really wonder how you think about it, And obviously we won't know for a long time, but it's an interesting question to ask in real time. It's a very interesting one, and I am of two minds on it. You know, I've always been a promoter of strong executive power because I write books like on Theodore Rooseville. So when tr said to himself, if Lincoln can use executive power to emancipate the slaves in the Civil War, I certainly can use the executive power in

a vigorous way. And these incredible moments like when Theodore Roosevelt stands on the lip of the Grand Canyon and says, do not touch it. God has made it. You will only marit. Leave the Grand Canyon alone and send it. Wants to mine it for zinc, abstus and copper, and Roosevelt uses executive power to declare it as a national monument, which was really meant for sort of dinosaur bones or antiquities pottery, like a five acre sites. He declares six

hundred thousand acres and today it's a million. So you share executive power. We wouldn't half the Grand Canyon without Theodore Roosevelt. And I can go through each president when they have moments of executive power that are usually quite admirable. I mean, Jimmy Carter are using executive power to pardon Vietnam veterans, so called draft dodgers, to try to heal the country, you know, as an executive power in a sense of a pardon. That probably was the correct thing

to do. But I worry about executive power overreach. Like look how many executive much executive power Barack Obama used once plumbaxed after the Affordable Care Act, and then all we saw as Trump sent four years undoing the executive achievements of Obama. Now Biden is coming in. The first thing he's doing is undoing Trump's executive decrees. So we're kind of going to go back and forth to eat up a lot of clock. In that way. I have

learned to appreciate Lyndon Johnson a little more. When Johnson had opportunities for executive power on a lot of things, he insisted to go through the Senate in Congress. But it's easy to say that I'm going to build a legislative record when you have an overwhelming percentage of the party with you. Biden's operating on a fifty fifty basis in the Senate, meaning it's just going to be really

hard on any vote for him. But so, I really am not one of those people that have tried to reign in presidential power up until Trump, and now I see the real dangers of somebody who ignores or civic morays, our sense of decency, who treats the legislative branch as a whipping post, who abuses the judicial apartment. I think now maybe the time right we have to figure out

how to curtail presidential power. For example, how do we curtail this pardon power that has gone crazy Now has nothing to do with justifying a judicial situation that had gone badly. It's now just pardoning cronies and would be personal friends that turned cons or criminals. And it's very unseemly to be doing that at the end. And so I think we might have to look at the twenty fifth Amendment ANEW. When people called for the twenty fifth Amendment to get rid of Trump, people said, well, it

doesn't apply, not really doable. Well, why the reason I got when they said you can't use the twenty fifth. It wasn't meant for that. It was done after John F. Kennedy's death. And if it was just somebody was incapacitated, well, in nineteen sixty seven when we passed the twenty fifth Amendment, mental illness wasn't treated seriously. If you want to look at books about what it was like to be treated

for mental illness in Georgia and Alabama, it is horrific. Now, I think we all agree that Trump has some sort of a narcissistic disorder malignant self love. We're all not supposed to say so because we're not psychiatrist. But I believe we had a very sick man operating in the White House for the past couple of years, and his behavior since the election warranted the twenty fifth Amendment to

be put into action. I would think somebody having losing their sense of mind and inability to think rationally would be a reason to evoke the twenty fifth. I just want to push back gently on the twenty fifth Amendment. There and here, I think I'm wearing my constitutionalist hat. You know, the language of the amendment is unable to discharge the duties of the office, right. It doesn't say anything about diagnosis of mental disease or defect, which I

agree it has evolved tremendously since then. But unable is as constitutional language goes pretty clear. And I don't think that Donald Trump was unable to discharge the duties of his office. He was unable to discharge them in a way that I found satisfactory or that was morally acceptable. So entirely apart from our attempts to make sense of his psychological state, which as you say, is a challenging thing to do from the outside, but you know, reasonable

judgments could certainly be made. I don't think the twenty fifth Amendment says that if the president has a narcissistic personality disorder, that that authorizes the removal of that president. And I actually think that's a good thing, because presidents should be removed if they've committed high crimes and misdemeanors.

In my view, this president did, and there were in fact two attempts to remove him, or one and a half if you count the last impeachment, which won't be tried if it is tried, until after he's out of office. But that's a political process that's kind of overt and the twenty fifth Amendment to the extent that the president resisted, it just sort of seems like a not as good

version of impeachment. Right, you would still need two thirds of the House and two thirds of the Senate in order to remove a president who insisted that he was capable of discharging the duties of the office. So to me, I mean, I think that impeachment isn't doing what it should do because of some lack of virtue on the part of the Senate. But I wouldn't use the twenty fifth Amendment as a stopgap to replace it. So I wonder what that approach makes you think. I agree with

what you said about the twenty fifth. I just think we were caught in a two week period here where what if Trump started ordering federal troops to put down protesters or use a nuclear weapon on Iran? What was

their way to curtail him? These would have been highly irrational acts caused by his inability to admit that he lost due to his narcissistic disorder, and we would have no recourse because you wouldn't be able to get two thirds of the Senate, and you can't do it in time because there's only a couple of weeks left and twenty fifth doesn't allow for it. So what you're saying

is you're just suck that last week or two. And I'm thinking that we need to find a way never to be held hostage by an American president in the last days of office, and we may need to think more seriously of what is mental disorders at least have a talk about what's new in science since nineteen sixty seven.

You know, if you have somebody is truly a sociopath in the White House and the idea you can't remove them with the twenty fifth and your only recourses impeachment, Well, how do you do impeachment when you only have two weeks left when that sociopath starts acting out. What I'm most concerned is this limbo period we've been in right now where our country is sort of held hostage to

his mental whims and fancies, and that to me was dangerous. Yeah, that's an important comment on just the nature of the tremendous power of the presidency, especially in the nuclear era,

where the president can just do tremendous damage. And what you're saying, if I understand you correctly, is we don't really have a good mechanism constitutionally for how to fix that, and now we need to focus on that, and maybe we need to think about amending the twenty fifth or adding something that would enable us to act those circumstances that we might look into that We'll be right back.

So let's turn out to this part in question. Nobody in the Guilder presidentialist Darian says thought more about this than you, because you thought about Ford and you thought about Carter. So you and you also edited extensively the Nixon tapes, so you've got a deep understanding of the run up to Watergate, it's aftermath, and then the reconciliation processes that did or didn't take place in the years

that followed. And I guess I'm wondering if you would reflect on your deep knowledge of that period to think about what should Joe Biden do with respect to the hard question that he faces, which is, on the one hand, there's an argument for reconciliation and moving on, and on the other hand, there's an argument for historical accountability. And obviously the reconciliation prevailed in the middle set in these but there are lots of voices saying that this time

accountability should prevail. Well, you're right, and you know there's a consensus, as you know, that Gerald Ford did the right thing with Nixon, and that was not the consensus at the time. Ford paid dearly for the partnering of Richard Nixon, and in fact it may have cost him the election in nineteen seventy six or certainly contributed to his loss. But later decades later, most people said Ford

did the right thing. Ted Kennedy awarded Gerald Ford the Profiles and Courage Award, with Kennedy Senator Kennedy then saying I was wrong. I was so angry at you, but in retrospect, you were right. President Ford and Biden situation is going to be different. If I were giving advice to Joe Biden, I would let Nancy Pelosi work with

Schumer on what's going to happen with impeachment. If I were by night stay out of it for one hundred days, I would try to craft one hundred days where impeachment doesn't infect the Biden administration, because I do believe he is inheriting such a difficult situation. With four hundred and fifty thousand COVID deaths number rising. I'm not convinced we have a logistical strategy for getting shots and arms two

shots and arms across the country this spring. So I think he has one hundred days to work with Mitch McConnell, try to work with Republicans on a COVID nineteen economic stimulus relief bill, and a kind of martial plan on

getting the COVID vaccines out. After that one hundred days, I would hope that we might be able to have a Congressional Commission report presented to President Biden, which will have gaps in it, obviously, but might be able to point out how culpable is Trump for what happened on January sixth, And I think Buying at that point's going to have to decide whether the evidence is so egregious that he has to let Schumer move forward in the Senate, or if not, Biden may need to try to now

get control over his own Democratic Party and say, let's cool our jets. What if we do a Senate censor. What if we write a you know, I write a presidential report, you know, and we do a media outreach saying how guilty Trump was. But I'm not going to take him through the trial. So I'm indifferent on the trial now. I would want to see more evidence because I do think it would cripple Biden if he goes too soon in a Senate trial, and again it might

tear our country to smithereens. But without question, I would not touch that trial for one hundred days if you can boot it down the line for a little bit, let emotions settle and start looking at the empirical facts

of what occurred. In a sense, it sounds like you're saying that moving too quickly to a trial would sort of drain power out of the Biden presidency, and especially if Trump, as seems to me very likely, were to be acquitted by the Senate, that actually may reinvigorate Trump's own power as a potential candidate four years later, or at least in the meantime as the most powerful figure

in the Republican Party. It. I mean, that's the sort of like serious self harm story from the standpoint of the Democrats, if indeed they push forward too quickly, am I reading? You're right? I agree with that completely. You said it perfectly. I think we have to be cautious of that. It's a big moment now that Biden's inheriting a major problem with COVID in the economy, and he's got to keep focused to not let Donald Trump be

jumping around in his head. The one thing we don't want to do is turn Trump into a martyr, you know, immediately make him a folk hero that he beat the rap yet again, and he'll probably does have a self pardon. You know, I've been convinced by John Deane, colleague of Mina, on CNN, who says that without a doubt Trump will sign a personal pardon with his own private lawyer and put it in a safe without announcing it to the public.

You can assume, Noah, that when you see Trump leave for Florida, he has already signed and has notarized a self pardon that he can pull out at any moment and try to actualize when that gets pulled out. If it gets pulled out, then that's going to eventually become a Supreme Court case whether a president has the right to self pardon or not. And it gets back to my original complaint. I think we need to do some clean up work on the twenty fifth Amendment on impeachments,

on pardoning. It seems to me that the fact that we as a society don't know whether a president consult partner not because nobody's ever done that before, and we've got to wait and see till it goes to the Supreme Court tells me that we might need to try to figure out how to not have this happen again.

I've been saying since the beginning of the Trump presidency, this is a stress test for our constitutional democracy, and now we can read the read out of the stress test and we see where our weaknesses are, and you've highlighted some important ones. Before I let you go, there's a question I've been dying to ask you. You are the very model of the sober, thoughtful historian, and you work on topics of great seriousness, presidential power, environmental protection.

But you also have a side which features your friendship with the late gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, and I read that you're actually the literary executor of his estate, which is an amazing responsibility. You've worked on the great documentary with Johnny Depp about him. What's the backstory here? How did you get to know Hunter S. Thompson And

what was the cement in your friendship. My mom and dad were high school teachers and we had a twenty four foot Coachman trailer, and so we traveled around the summer and we would do road trips. So I became a great lover of that kind of family vacation meets Jack carrollas on the road. So when I was a young professor in nineteen ninety two, I got a bus called the Magic Bus, and college students would live on the bus and we'd go for a semester all over

America thirty five thousand miles. We'd even go up to Alaska, visiting presidential libraries, homes of people like Martin Luther King or Helen Keller, Willi Kather, john Steinbeck on and on. It was an all purpose American studies road trip. And I would have the students read classic books, and when I had them read Fear and Loving in Las Vegas. We visited Hunter Wis Thompson in Colorado. We met Arthur Miller in Connecticut, and Tony Morrise in New York, and

Ken Kesey and ore again. So they're about fifty writers that were part of my program. Dick Goodwin, who died recently, Doris Kerr and Goodwin's husband was great friends with Hunter, and Dick Goodwin and Arthur Slussingshire both liked Hunter and knew him and said, well, if you're doing that book, why don't you go visit Hunter in Colorado. So I pulled my bus in and he actually was kind of a mensch, except Hunter would shoot all of the books.

All the other authors would autograph them. Hunter we make them put it against a tree and shoot him. So suddenly their book had a big bullet hole in him. Well, some of the students thought that was idiotic, but there were about half of the students that, oh my god, it's so cruel. Hunter shot my book, you know. And

we became quite friendly. And he then asked me whether I had helped him edit down some of his books, and he trusted me enough to go in his basement, and I found a goal mine of great writing and brought out The Proud Highway, his first volume of collected letters that I edited, Fear and Loathing in America, and then a third one called a Mutineer I have queued

up right now to eventually bring out too. A Hunter was a great satirist, a great natural, almost athletic writer in his prime and had a prophetic sense, a bit of a seer about some things. And so we became friends. And while he drank and drugged a lot, he was able to give a lot of good advice to me in my personal life, which is kind of odd. But he was unable to deal with his own personal life, but he was smart enough to be able to give

good advice for somebody coming up the ladder. So while I did my work in history, I learned a lot about journalism from Hunter. That's completely fascinating and I hugely appreciate that account. And I just want to thank you very very much for your amazing work, for your time, and for sharing your perspective with us this week. Thank you for your amazing work everything you do. You have a brilliant legal mind in your amazing asset to our country.

So and I saw you wanted me to do this, I felt honored you wanted me to be on your podcast to thank you. After talking to Professor Brinkley, I

came away with two central ideas. The first is that Donald Trump's conduct as president culminating in the attack on the Capitol, which he encouraged, and according to the article of impeachment incited is an extraordinary outlier in US history, so much so that Pressor Brinkley thinks we actually need to take a closer look at the mechanisms of constitutional power that we have to constrain a president who seems

to be going off the rails. The second point from our conversation is more nuanced, and it's about how history is likely to view this moment. Looking at President Nixon's resignation and how the Republican Party and the Democratic Party

ultimately worked together to create a new story. Professor Brinkley made the point that over time, we Americans tend to create common historical narratives that function to bring us closer together, even if they sometimes involve papering over some of the most shocking aspects of the past, including shocking aspects of

presidential conduct. What that would mean for understanding the attack on Congress in historical terms would be that the attack would be somehow peripheralized, by which I mean it would be treated by history as the action of a small number of white supremacists and conspiracy theorists, rather than as a manifestation of a national political movement that to a certain degree came to take over the Republican Party, and that denied the legitimacy of the results of the twenty

twenty presidential election. In order for a narrative like that to emerge, a narrative that treated the capital attack as far from the mainstream of American politics, there would have to be a gradual process in which the Republican Party came to accept the twenty twenty transition of power as legitimate.

For that to happen, the Republican Party would have to de emphasize Donald Trump, and then and only then would a new story be able to be told about the attack on the Capitol, perhaps not completely accurate, but designed to reestablish a national consensus. If that happens, and I emphasize that that's only an if, it would show the capacity of a US political system to retell, reframe, and reshape historical narratives in order to generate outcomes of reconciliation.

If that happened, then the historical process would have operated in a way really reminiscent of the aftermath of Richard Nixon's presidency, in which ultimately the pardon if Nixon and the public decision to quote move on enable the Republican Party to avoid any serious long term costs for having elected a president who abused the power of the office and ultimately had to resign. These are all predictions made against the backdrop of historical experience. They're falsifiable. They might

turn out not to be true. We will find out in the future, the near future, what's right and what's not. But as always, we can benefit from a deep encounter with historical background material to help us make an educated guess at what might happen next. Meanwhile, we have not

forgotten the COVID nineteen pandemic. We are hard at work to bring you episodes exploring the latest developments, including a conversation in the very near future about what new variants of the virus mean for the configuration of health and power in the world. Until the next time I speak to you, be careful, be safe, and be well. Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Mo laboord our engineer is Martin Gonzalez, and our

shore runner is Sophie Crane mckibbon. Editorial support from noahm Osband. Theme music by Luis Skara at Pushkin. Thanks to Mia Lobell, Julia Barton, Lydia, Jean Coott, Heather Faine, Carl mcniori, Maggie Taylor, Eric Xander, and Jacob Weisberg. You can find me on Twitter at Noah rfeld. I also write a column for Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at Bloomberg dot com

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