Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics. Well, we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's best minds, and sharks are swimming down the streets of Fort Myers, Florida. What an excellent show we have today. First, we're gonna talk to Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and he's gonna talk to us about his concerns about authoritarianism on the rise in America and of course income inequality in America.
Then we'll talk to Susan Glazer and Peter Baker about their new book, The Divider Trump in the White House, and they're gonna talk about some of the more interesting things they found writing this book. But first we have the one and only Dhalia Lithwick, who's of course an editor at Slate and the author of her latest book, Lady Justice, Women, The Law and the Battle to Save America. Welcome to Best Politics, Dahlia. Thank you, Lolly, thank you for having me. We're so happy to have you. The
book is Lady Justice. We're gonna talk about other stuff too, but let's first talk about the book. So you sort of find the women who were the actual bulwark against Trump and his assault on democracy, right, Yeah, I mean
I think I tried to. And there were, you know, thousands and tens of thousands of women lawyers who were kind of holding up the sky for the four Trump years and the years that have followed, and I just wanted to tell the stories of a couple of them, both to say, holy cow, we sometimes don't take credit for the winds and all the ways in which Donald Trump was like trammeled in courts, but also to say we can keep doing this. It's hard, but these women
are all around us. They're doing it every day. There are a lot of different women in this story, but let's talk about Sally Yates because that is sort of one of the clearest moment of like the kind of a woman, you know, sort of doing what she could to try to stop Trump. Can you talk about that? So, Sally Yates was the acting Attorney General under Donald Trump
in the first days of his administration. I think she knew she was just going to be a holdover from the Obama administration and a placeholder Jeff Sessions was going to take the job. She thought it would be just long lunches and not much action, and then just days out of the gate, she gets just shellacked with the travel ban, which was not sent to her for vetting. Nobody knew about it. She read about it on her
phone like the rest of us. And she was supposed to be sending d o J lawyers into courtrooms to defend it. And she felt that it was rooted in religious animus towards Muslims, in violation of the Constitution. She felt that it violated due process protections of the Constitution. And she did the thing that not nearly enough people did, which is just say, oh, hell no, I'm not going to put the in perimeter of the Justice to partment
on a thing that I think is unlawful. Most of the people either got fired, like from the toilet, or they you know, wrote bestsellers saying that they were heroes, or they slunk off into the night. But I think for me, she is kind of a emblematic of what rule of law actually means, which is protecting not just the law, but the integrity of the Justice Department, even at immense personal cost. Yeah, that is a really good point. I just am curious, like what did happen to her
in the end, Like what does she do now? She in private practice? Yeah, she's at a firm, and she does a whole bunch of work on issues that matter to her, including mental health stuff and depression. But I think that she is another example of this phenomenon. I trace in the book Stacy Abrahams, who is the very last chapter in the book, you know, was asked if she wanted to be Biden's running mate. She refused, you know, asked if she was interested in a seat on the
Supreme Court. Wasn't interested, Just kind of wants to go back and do her job. And Stacy Abrahams is that. And I think Sally Ates is that. And a lot of these people, like given the opportunity to scale up and get super famous and beyond mugs and uh, you know, topebags just chose to stay in the trenches and keep working. Would you go for the mugs and the toe bags or would you stay in the trenches and keep working. I'm quite leary of the bugs and the toe bag.
I had an RBG advent candle, uh that someone had given to me that that I in facted um Burn when she died. But I think that the kind of mugs and the toe bags and the candles and the whole Robert Mueller is gonna save us. Now, Adam Schiff is gonna save us. Oh wait, Mark Garland is gonna save us. Is just a way of not like digging in and doing the work. I mean, I like mugs. I think they're good for coffee, But I just think democracy is not super well served by the top bag
industrial row complex. Yeah. I think that's the last three five seven years have taught us anything. Right In this book, you grapple with your own I want to say kind of revelations about me too. Will you talk to us a little bit about that? Is that okay to ask you about it? Yeah? No, I wrote about it. I'm only sort of orthogonally talking about me too. I'm certainly in the chapter about it talking about a federal judge, Alex Kazynski, who was the chief judge of the Ninth
Circuit Court of Appeals. He was a famous feeder judge. If you clerk for him, he had a really good chance of going on to clerk at the Supreme Court. Brett Kavanaugh was one of his clerks. And I just talked about the fact that you know, it was an open secret in the federal judiciary and law schools around the country. Everybody knew that he showed porn to his clerks, that he spoke inappropriately to female clerks, that he had this very hyper sexualized way of talking to women, and
nobody did anything. For years and years. There was just this kind of culture of you know, oh, boys will be boys. And in seventeen, one of his former clerk's, Heidi Bond, came forward and finally on the record, said what had happened to her. Another woman who clerked for a different judge on the Ninth Circuit, Emily Murphy, came forward. Eventually Leah Lipman, a bunch of other women came forward. And I had to grapple with the fact that I
had known all this. I'd known because as a clerk, I knew it on the Ninth Circuit, but I've known as a reporter and as somebody who sat next to him on panels. And I ended up writing a piece at the time putting my name on the list of women who were willing to put their names forward, but with just deep sadness about the fact that we keep these secrets and that years later people will still say to me, oh, everybody knew about him, and my responses will put why did it require a handful of women
to do something? And so it looks like it's a meat to chapter. And at the time, I think it was perceived as a me too, and it was much more just me thinking through power structures in which we all become complicit and hope somebody else does the work to fix it. Right. No, it's true. I just relate to that so much. I mean, I think some of it too, as we were of a generation where we were, or at least I feel it was not clear to me that we had that kind of power. I think
that's right. And at the same time, somewhere in my piece that I wrote, when I finally kind of put my name in as somebody who could attest to this behavior, I said, how is it possible that I'm, you know, almost fifty, I'm at the peak of my career, I get invited to brief Supreme Court justices and I still
didn't think I had the power like who does. And there's a lot in the book about the failures of me too and how we need to have actual processes, not just for the Alex Kazynski's, but for the Brett Kavanaughs and everyone else. But I think that there is a piece of it that asking Christine Blasi Ford to all the work of coming forward, asking Anita Hill to do all the work, and then failing to support them because power structures won't change, is such a betrayal of
what they tried to do. Oh yeah, I mean such a betrayal. And I think about that all the time. I can't talk about it, but I think there's more coming in the world of brick avanag that will that I think will bear out some interesting stuff. I think what you're saying is so important. Now talk to me about We are coming up on another fucking Supreme Court session. Yeah, it's gonna be I think. I think that is the correct descriptor. I think that you've nailed it. I mean,
one of the things that went wrong. I feel like you and I talked about this in the summer, but Dobbs kind of took all the attention last term. It's not that Dobbs was inconsequential overturning Rope, but as a consequence, I think we missed that. Oh, they massively expanded gun rights. Oh, they massively shrank the wall between church and state. Oh, they tried to kneecap the e p A like it was such a bad terror. They were all terrible, and I think that all of the stuff they didn't manage
to get to laster. They're doing this term and so affirmative action is on the docket in higher education, this voting rights case out of Alabama, the existential voting case, that is this independent state legislature doctrine that would give state legislatures complete and total, unchecked plenary power to decide election procedures. So all of this is, you know, there's a follow on to the Cake Baker case um of somebody different, a web designer refusing services to same sex marriages.
So it's almost nothing that isn't on the table, and they have not by any means finished the docket. They're gonna take a run at the Indian Child Welfare Act, so there's very little, and the Clean Water Act. How much do you want to cry? It's terrible, And we've got this kind of six three supermajority juggernaut that I once believed, in error with approval rating might be a
little reluctant to hit the gas and go. And I was wrong, and I will continue to be wrong because I don't think they care at all about approval ratings or what the rest of us say or think about them. No, I mean they're out of control. I'll be curious to see. And I think curious is not the right phrase because the stakes are so high. So I don't want to make it sound like I'm horse race journalism journalism ming
here because I'm not. And I understand that people's lives and livelihoods and and all of their rights are on the table here for the Supreme Court to funk with. But I will be interested to see if Republicans get hurt in the mid terms by Dobbs, if then Roberts is able to take more control of the Court or not. You know, those guys know they have a lifetime appointment. So yeah, And I think the misapprehension we all have is that that John Roberts has some power to take.
I mean, I think he's on the losing end. He's right on these five fours when there are big questions about the legitimacy of the court. Hillside with the liberals, but then he's lost. And I think that this five justice block, you know, with occasional defections from Amy Coney, Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh is completely unbothered by the things that worry John Roberts, these legitimacy questions, public opinion questions.
And you know, I think that Sam Alito flying out to Rome after Dobbs to spike the football is a pretty good and not to mention Clarence Thomas his wife, who is you know, apparently immune. I just don't think that even tiny adjustments to their conduct that they could make so as not to look like they're out of control, they don't make them, right. I mean, it'll be interesting
to see. I mean, I think that if Democrats hold that, you know how Senate and the presidency, then Biden is going to have to do something about this court and he is going to hate it. I mean, it's interesting because he convened his Blue Panel Court Reform Commission, and they met and they studied, and they produced an enormous and I think worthy piece of research about what could be done, and Biden still won't talk about court expansion,
and nothing has been done with the recommendations. As best as I understand, I think it was just kind of an exercise in kicking the can down the road. But I don't think it was a meaningful exercise in now we are you know, there's some momentum in some public will to do something. Now we're going to seriously and meticulously have a conversation about what can be done. And it doesn't have to be adding seats. There's a whole bunch of you you could do, term limits, you can do.
You know, there there are very smart people who are making arguments about stripping the Court of the ability to for instance, you know, change voting rules. There are things that can be done up to and including I think some of the strongest material in the Commission report is about ethics reforms and transparency and not like doing crap on the shadow docket at midnight and not failing to explain.
So this is all stuff that we should be seriously talking about, and we should have been talking about it ten years ago. But I really do hope that for people who feel as though, oh my god, we're just screwed, you know, we live in servitude to the six to three court for all time, can understand that there are really smart proposals out there that we're not talking about
very much. Yeah, I hope that that is really number one on the agenda if Democrats can keep the branches though, you know, we'll say, I'm just curious what other sort of you know. I always ask people in this because I actually am really interested in this. As someone who has written books before. I was feel like, when you write a book, you have this, you kind of learn from it. I mean, what did you learn from writing
this book? I think that when I started this book was seventeen and I just wanted to create kind of a historical record, right to say this happened. It was terrible. These amazing women fought back in one and I think in a sense, I thought I was just recording history, you know, putting down markers about some big legal fights that shouldn't have been one but were one. And then I think Dobbs happened, and I realized I wasn't just writing history. I was writing what I hope is a
blueprint for going forward. And you know, each of the women that I profile, first of all, was not super confident she was doing the right thing, but didn't have a lot of time to workshop. It just leapt in some of them. I mean Robbie Kaplan and Karen Dunn who fought the Nazis and white supremacists who invaded Charlottesville. It took them four years to get their case to trial, but they won and they got a twenty six million
dollar judgment, and it was hard work. They dusted off the KKK Act, you know, which now as being used against January six insurrectionists. So I think that what I thought I was writing was history, and what I hope I am writing is some version of the playbook, which is we have power. Democracy is not without these amazing levers and that you know, the last three chapters are all about vote suppression and gerrymandering and all the things that we would need to fix to have a meaningful
representative democracy. But they're all fixable. And I think what I was hoping is that folks would read it and say, it just is a choice to feel like you are powerless and that you've lost. It is also a choice to do what all these women did in the face of awful, awful you know, family separation policies and the Muslim ban, and they just were like, no, I went to law school, I'm super smart, I have a blue book,
I have a pen, I'm going to court. And so I think I want this to be a book that kind of bolsters us in this moment of feeling really fragile and helps us look around at those women in Kansas and the women in Michigan who got abortion, you know, onto a ballot initiative. It's everywhere, and I want us to feel that before we make claims about being powerless under the law, we can realize it also could be an instrument for tremendous focus and power, and that we
really have to pick it up and use it that way. So, I mean, I think that's really important. I have to say, as like the daughter of a feminist, it's fucking to say this sentence. Just every time, it just I die a little bit. So we're in post row America. There's no world we never get row back, right, there's never there's no way to unfunck this right, not unless we do some of that serious structural court reform stuff we
talked about. But I think again, you know, in Michigan and California, in New York, I think we are seeing efforts to shore up reproductive freedom. And I guess I would also say, as long as we don't care about state houses and Jerrymander red states, and you know the fact that Alabama is on the docket this year for Jerrymander, all of these red states. Again, the stuff is fixable. It's just like structural democracy work. It's eye crossing, lee boring.
But I think that putting all of our eggs in the i'man at Ruth Bader games were exchanged in a retired basket is like, not democracy work. It's just grumpiness. So I'm just for like, you know what, if you care about your you know, state houses in Michigan, now, that's a good time to vote like it. I think that that's how we get unfucked. And it's not glamorous,
and there's no toepag. Well maybe there's a toag. I think we should we should brand the that's how we get unfucked toepag and then you and I can retire with millions in a beach house. Okay, yes, because because honestly, there's no better way to make money then through toad bags. That in podcasting, I think are the two sees the cornerstones. Please come back and join us soon. It's always a joy. Thank you for having me. Bernie Sanders is the senior
Senator from Vermont. Welcome to Fast Politics. Senator Bernie Sanders. Great to be with you. I'm so excited to have you here. The first thing we have this midterm less than six weeks away, Republican Party seems to go have gone full on authoritarian. Can you talk to me about the anxiety that the rest of us have. Well, the anxiety is justified. I think you know, what we are debating right now in this country is not healthcare, education,
or even climate change. What we're talking about, in the deeper sense is whether or not the United States remains the democracy and whether we continue having free and fair and open elections. And clearly our republic in colleagues are looking to countries like Hungary and other authoritarian societies to try to undermine the very foundations of American democracy. So if the question is should we be concerned, the answer is absolutely we should be. So this Electoral count Act
is in the Senate right now. It has some Republican support. Can you talk about that auto, Well, yeah, Look, I think the goal here is to prevent another January sixth, where you have you know, this this process by which the Senate has to confirm the election results state by state, and this hopes to address that. But why would say MAULDI.
What is a deeper question right now is for us to ask a very simple question that is not asked often enough, and that is, how does it happen that millions of working class people used to support Democratic candidates back in f DRS time, Harry Truman's time, JF Case time, are now voting Republican And how does that occur at a time when you have Republican party which is pretty open say hey, we want to cut Medicare and Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. We want to throw millions
of people off of the health insurance. I haven't want to give huge tax breaks to the rich. We don't even recognize in some cases the reality of climate tention. How does it happen that you're seeing a significant number of white working class Americans supporting Republicans, more and more Latinos supporting Republicans, and a growing number of flax supporting Republicans.
And I think that takes us to an area which again does not get the discussion that it needs, and that is who is speaking up for the needs of a declining middle class, who is speaking off for a struggling working class, who is speaking off with people in our society who has the guts to take on a Bigner class which is doing phenomenally well, which is bouring hundreds of millions of dollars intellecttions, where we are seeing an unprecedented level of concentration of ownership, where you've got
three world ree firms that the major stockholders, and hundreds and hundreds of American companies. So you're looking at an economy now, in a society in which the people on top of doing phenomenally well, ordinary people are falling further behind. And they look at Washington, d C. And no one is talking about their needs, not knowing, but you know, relatively few people. And when you have that kind of
situation and you know, I'm second top of politics. Give me somebody who's gonna get something done, a strong and I don't care about the courts, I don't care about the law, I don't care about rules, I don't care about democracy. I want something money. And I think at the end of the day, if we're gonna save American democracy, you're gonna need to have a government responding to the needs of working people who today significant degree field ignoyed.
One of the things you did really well with their presidential runs. Is that you were able to energize working people. How do Democrats win those voters? Well, you don't what They're gonna have to have the guts to tell the truth. That's the thought. And if you're going around thinking, what are the economy is doing really good and we have accomplished this and we have accompanied you know what, Molly,
nobody believes that. What they see is they can't afford childcare, they can't afford healthcare, they can't afford to the college, they can't afford housing. Their jobs. You know, maybe they're making twelve fifteen dollars an hour. You can't live on that if you're old. You know that half of the people sixty five or older in this country are trying to get buying twenty dollars a year. Can't do that. So you gotta be honest and say, look, this is
what is going on. We are the richest country in the history of the world, but it is not acceptable. You've got the three people are more wealth than the bottom half of American society. Yes, the Democratic body is prepared to take on the billionaire class and create an economy me that works for all. Now that sounds like simple rhetoric. It is not. What that means is think about what America would be like, Molly, if you had a healthcare system to guarantee healthcare to all people, that
did what virtually every other major country does. When you go to a doctor, when you go to the hospital, you know what your bill is? In Canada right now, you spent two months in the hospital. You come out, do you know what your bill is? You know? Zero? It's zero, not a nickel. All right. Half of the bankruptcies in this country are associated with healthcare. You have forty five million people, and I know if the president is trying to deal with dealing with student that kids
can't afford to go to college. So, in other words, to answer your question, the Democratic Party has got to make a fundamental decision. Which side are they on? You really can't collect a lot of money from the wealthy and the powerful and super pecks, and let's say, on on the side of working class people. We haven't been able to raise the money minimum, which we haven't been able to reform at dysfunctional healthcare system. We haven't done zip on childcare, pre K pretty elderly, all right, So
we in this country have the potential. This is not an exaggeration. You know, we have the potential to create a decent life for all people. But over the last fifty years, real wages for the arborage of American work are actually lower inflation accounted wages than they worked fifty years. So you wonder why people are angry where they're given up on government. I think it's not us a lot to do with it. You have done a lot though,
especially right now. I mean, I think you've seen that that there really is a sort of ground swell towards that Democrats need to address these issues because Republicans have completely just it's not even clear what they're doing. But
I'm wondering why Democrats are better at messaging this. Well, it's a question of you know, then you're dealing with the media out there, and you know, you've got a media which is owned by I think something like the media owned by eight large media conglomerates, and you know what, these media enomerates are not particularly interested in talking about lowering the cost of prescription drugs. They get billions of dollars and TV ads from you know, the pharmaceutical industry, etcetera. Etcetera.
It's not only messaging, it's standing up and doing the right thing. In my view, if we had been able to pass Build Back Better, which would have been a transformative piece of legislation dealing with everything from childcare to the needs of senior citizens, what you would have seen is millions of people said, Hey, guess what I didn't
know This government can actually do something for me. Now I'm an old person, I can go to the dentist and medicare covers that I'm a working person, and my god, I don't have to pay more than seven percent of my income on childcare. I'm a college student. I get free tuition at community college. I'm a senior citizen, and I can now stay at home, not be forced into a nursing home because we're dealing with home healthcare for
I'm a young person, and find me. The government has got to create, you know, millions of jobs transforming our energy system away from fossil fuel. So what I am saying is these are really difficult and crazy times for this country in the world. I mean, if you're dealing with a never ending pandemic, you're dealing with you know, the Ukraine, with dealing with climate and people are very exacerbated and nervous, and they depressed in many ways. But what we need right now is a government that is
clear about which side is on. And if you do that, I think there's a chance, a chance that we can get people involved in the political process, whether they're black or the white, or Latino or whatever they may be, and say, you know what government can work for me. I don't need, you know, to the way with democracy. When you saw this CBO report that one the richest one present now owns a third of the wealth in the US, you said it was scene. Talk to me
about that a little more. I mean, I also think it's completely just beyond the well, you know, here's a funny thing. And you know, I look at the world a little bit different than many of my colleagues. If somebody walks into a store this afternoon today and shoot somebody, everybody says this is terrible. You say it's terble. I
say it's terrible and terrible people around shooting people. And yet you have in an economic system in which, for example, you've got drug companies raising their prices so high the thousands of people die every other very conscious of that influence. Influence is one example, but there are many other examples. People die in this country because I can't afford prescription drugs while the drug companies make tens of billions of dollars in profit for you in terms of income and wealth.
You know, yes, it is immoral and wrong for somebody to shoot somebody. Everybody agrees with it. Is it immoral or wrong that we have a system in which three people one to three literally own more wealth than the bottom half, with the top one percent now owns more wealth in the bottom holds one third of the wealth of America? Is that morally wrong? And the answer is yeah,
it is. I just looked to somebody active in California, forty thousand people as we speak, homeless in the city of Los Angeles, forty thousand people, and you've got the one percent owning, uh, you know, a third of the wealth of this country. That is immoral and that is wrong, and we've got to be clear about it. It is wrong. That's sixty thousand people every year die because they don't go to a doctor because they don't have health insurance,
so they're under insured. That's morally unacceptable. But we don't talk about it in those terms, while the insurance companies make zillions of dollars every year in profit. So what I'm saying is you've got to talk truth to the American people. Not everybody's gonna agree with you. Some people say, well, that's the free emperprise system, that's capitalism. Isn't that great that? You know? Elon Musk is worth, you know, eighteen trillion dollars wherever he's worth. He's going off to in his
spaceship in someplace. Fine, but got government subsidies, Ah, no kidding, And so do all of them. And they use some cases. You have billionaires not paying a nickel in federal taxes, you know, and they got lobbyist level capital hill youre trying to protect their interests. But you've got to be honest with the American people and say, look, the political
system is clearly corrupt because billionaires. You know, recently, some Republican guy you announced he is giving the Republicans one point six billion dollars, yes, for the Judicial Action League or something, and that money is going to be spent all over the place. So you know, you have billionaires buying elections, billionaires becoming much ritual working people, pull up behind.
And then you've got this technological revolution that we're in the middle of right now, and it's going to displace a lot of people. Does anyone care that somebody's gonna be replaced by a role but what happens does that work makes those decisions. So my point is that in this country, the truth is, Yes, you can provide a decent standard of living to old people. Yes we can have healthcare is a human right, not a privilege. Yes
you can make public cologist and university's tuition free. Yes you can have a much much fairer level of income and wealth distribution than we currently have. So you know, that's kind of where I'm coming from. Tell the truth to the American people about what's going on. Have the guts to stand up that the big money interests who today have enormous power, and the Democrats are gonna have
to make that choice. And I think if you don't stand up with working people, they will see right through you, and uh, we've got to decide which side we're on. And if we do that, I think we develop good policy and it's good politics as well. This Global minimum corporate tax, which is now nowhere that seemed to me like a moment where we could really see corporations paying
their fair share. Fuck, you got this scandal of situation that American corporations and corporations that every major country on Earth are parking their money in the Cayman Islands and Muta and in all the tax countries which allow them to do that. So all over the world, governments are searching for money to deal with the needs of working people, poor people, and you have these billionaires of talking that
money in tax havens all over the world. And this is an issue that governments around the world are going to have to deal with. Absolutely. Thank you so much, Senator Sanders. I hope you'll come back all right, my pleasure, Molly, take care, keep up the good work. Susan Glasser and Peter Baker are the authors of The Divider. Trump in the White House. Welcome to Fast Politics. Susan Glasser and Peter Baker. Thanks for having us. It's great to be
with you. Milly. Let's first talk about the book and then we can talk about how the world is ending. The book is called The Divider. Blame to us a little bit about how you decided to write this book. Well, you know, the truth is is that everybody in some ways wants to move on, of course, from the Trump thing. But you know, Trump is not just history. He's our
present as well as apparently possibly our future. And I think Peter and I felt like it was really important to establish as much of the historical record as possible Trump in the White House. You know, every presidency has a book like this, right, a sort of a definitive first draft account of the administration. Luke Canan great journalists, did that for the Ronald Reagan presidency. Our colleague John Harris did that after the two terms of Bill Clinton.
And you know, in this case it seemed even more urgent. Right. We really felt that all of the catastrophic ending of the Trump presidency January six and like, had obscured that there was this four year history of building up to it. And we felt that if you really wanted to understand January six, you had to go back to January seventeen and all the days in between. Talk to me about some of the more shocking stuff that you you sort of knew but that you were I mean, the COVID
stuff is really interesting. Do you want to talk about that a little bit? You know, One thing is really interesting was, even though we spent four years covering this White House, I was a beat reporter, Susan as a colonist, we really want to go back and find out what we didn't know at the time. So this is three hundred interviews we did after he left office, and one of the things we discovered there was a whole lot more information about stories that we thought we knew, as
well as stories that we didn't know. I mean there from the from the serious to the sublime. I mean, just this small example right is is the Green Landing. Remember when Trump talked about I was gonna buy again. Everybody sort of assume as kind of a one off, you know, random thought, But in terms, this has been going on for a couple of years by that point, because his friend Ron Louder, the billionaire from New York,
planted this idea his head. It went so far that they even came up with an options memo for how to do it, maybe even the least back option or
something like that. So there are things that we didn't know about, stories that we thought we knew in the story we had no idea about, you know, like how his own staff was so disturbed by him, that John Kelly, his second chief of staff, bought a book talk about how Trump's mental health was so unstable in order to try to understand the commander in chief he was serving,
which is a pretty amazing thing. And then this lastly, list this letter that Mark Milly, the general who was a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote to resign at one point when he was so bothered by Trump, so disturbed by Trump that he said that you're doing great and irreparable harm to our country that's never been out before. So that's the value in going back and doing a book like this. In our view, Can we
talk about the Avanka and Jared's story. Those two are the quintessential Trump characters, right, Uh, the grifters who present themselves at all times as sort of this, the children who passes the grown ups in the room, right, but at the same time somehow managed to absent themselves when Trump creates the biggest crisis you know, of his presidency
in our lifetime of democratic legitimacy. Right. You know, there's just this incredible scene two days after the election when Jared Kushner wakes up and says, you have Anka, Hey, honey, we're gonna move to Florida. You know, we're done, We're out here. Never mind the whole election challenge thing. And they know full well, of course that there was no
rigged election, that there was no massive voter fraud. But instead of doing what they claimed all along to be doing, which is, you know, being responsible at least semi responsible actress in the room with Trump, they just throw up their hands and say, well, you know, if you want to pick Rudy, that's fine. And it's just an incredible moment of the callousness. There's this. You know, some of the reporting I thought Molly in this book really underscored
how how how the method worked. And and Jared Kushner used to brag to others, Uh, well, I know how to manage my father in law. And he even had a ratio that he talked about, uh, two to one, two to one good news for any little tiny bit of bad news that you had to give the boss. Uh. He would put five points on any pole that he told me about. Meanwhile, you know, Trump hands and responsibilities
for such a wide ranging thing. They talk about him in Jared and the White House is the Secretary of everything, you know, and yet of course he had a background and nothing. Uh, And it's just it's it's extraordinary that these two were allowed to play the role they were. Donald Trump seriously considered putting Ivanka on the ticket. We just thought that was a joke, but he hed said
it again and again to his advisors. In twenties. Sixteen later, he seriously thought about naming Ivanka ambassador to the U n or President of the World Brank World. This is unbelievable. I shouldn't laugh everything, by the way, I keep saying, I shouldn't laugh because people tell me horrible stuff. But wow, Ivanka Trump president of the World Bank. That is something Trump sometimes would undercut, Jarrett, Can you talk about that.
That's sort of hilarious. Yeah, I know he did even and and he would just say barbed things about him and meetings in the wide houses and well, I just Jared, he only cares about his liberal friends, that kind of thing. So he really he had in his mind, Jared, you know, was very useful and I'm sure you know, as a
member of family, they have some affection there. But he was also quite jaundice about his son in law, and there was a sort of constant refrain with his aids about wishing that they had stayed in New York or would go back to New York, and you know, some people try to spend that and saying, well, he was just concerned about them because they were being beat up by the system in Washington and the media and the Democrats, and how terrible it was for them. It wasn't that what.
He just didn't want them there. He thought that they were causing issues for him. Every time he saw them on television, like Jared coming out after being for testifying, he just thought to himself, this is not, you know, what he wanted. And the aide took that to be, you know, kind of a sign that they should try to encourage Jared and Ivanka to leave, which of course only got them in hot water because Trump would ever actually tell that to them himself direct. And the John
McCain stuff continues to really haunt Trump. Can you talk about that. Yeah, he really did have an obsession with McCain, And of course you go back to the sixteen campaign, and for many Republicans that was an initial gut punch when he savaged McCain, you know, and essentially said, you know, prisoners of war don't deserve respect because it's somehow they
were taking a prisoner. And yet, nonetheless, of course, Republicans continued to support Trump, and that really was the story of McCain's final year of life and in office, that he became an increasingly marginalized opponent of Trump at his own party. And yet Trump was driven crazy by McCain's resistance, and when he died, of course, he refused to have the flags lowered, to have staff as would be customary in a situation like that. That was reported at the time.
Trump and his people denied it, but our reporting for the book says that it was absolutely correct, and in fact, John Kelly, the chief of staff at the time, had to repeatedly go to Trump, uh and they had one chatting match in which John Kelly basically said to Trump, you know, if you don't do this, people will come to your grave and piss on it. And I mean, you know, can you imagine what what a toxic, horrible place that White House was to be? And I think
it could come back. Yeah, I mean, look, let's be real. That is an amazing fact after January six. But it is nonetheless true that Trump has retained the support of a majority of the Republican Party. There are millions of people who continue to adhere to his lies about the election. In fact, he's made support for those lies a litmus test for the candidates he's endorsing this year, in a year that looks to be a Republican year in terms of the overall results. And so, uh, it may be
an even more trumpefied party that emerges over time. It does certainly seem like that, right, yeah, I mean, look, you know, he has had every possible scandal and and and embarrassment and investigation and accusation and allegation any politician could ever have times ten or whatever rights on steroids, and yet he keeps surviving that Republicans have not broken
with him. If they're not going to break with him as a party after January six, it's hard to imagine what we'll finally do that they perceive him to be the power in their party in as long as they do, they're correct about that as a self fulfilling thing. There is, however, you know, the corrosion theory that over time people get tired of it, get tired of the you know, all of the hubbub that comes with him, all the investigations
and so forth. There is a pole NBC does asking Republicans do they consider themselves more to be a supporter of Donald Trump or more support of the Republican Party, And the latest one said Trump, which is a large number, but the lowest since they started asking that question twenty nineteen. So it's the only you see what happens in the
months to come. Susan, You've worked at political You've worked at so many nonpartisans, straight down the middle, non opinion places, and I know you're a columnist now, so you are more on the opinion side. But I think, right, well, yeah, although what I'm trying to do is really more rooted in in analysis, and you know, I don't see myself as a kind of ideological war warrior in the way that a lot of opinion columns are great, but it's
just not my role. I feel like that's the thing about writing a history about Trump, Molly, you know, is that this is not about ideology. It's not it's not about what kind of healthcare you know, should we you know, details of legislation, trying to understand the ways in which this presidency, uh and the threat that it poses to American democracy is different than than any other presidency, not
just of our lifetime. There has been in the history of the United States, never a president until Donald Trump who challenged the legitimate results of an elector, who refused to accept the outcome of a democratic, small d election. That's the basic social contract embedded in our constitution. And there's only one president in American history who has refused
to accept that. And that is why I wanted to ask that question in that way, because I feel like I really trust you as a person who is not your problem with Trump is really this like anti democracy and it's a very important I mean, I think it's historically very much a paradigm shift that is so important to talk about, and so I just find it very meaningful, if that makes any sense. But what I wanted to ask you with this sort of do you see a
kind of shift in the Republican Party against democracy? Yeah? I think that is one of the most striking aspects of the story that we've all been, you know, watching unfold the last few years, is is essentially the radicalization and the as Jared Kushner put it, hostile takeover. Quote unquote of the Republican Party and essentially turning it into
a cult of personality. The data point that always sticks with me here is the Republican National Convention for the first time, almost certainly since the Republican Party was actually created in the nineteenth century, the convention did not have a policy platform, It did not have all those meetings and amendments in the lake. It declined to produce a Republican policy platform, and it simply passed resolution saying that the Republican Party was in favor of whatever Donald Trump
was in favor of. That's right, extraordinary moment in the annals of American democracy, it seems to me. And there's been no indication in the subsequent two years of any break in in that shift. And so, you know, again, just just to your bigger point, the book The Divider is a narrative history of Trump in the White House. I felt that it was a very important act of taking testimony for history's sake. It is not a polemic. There are plenty of people who have done, you know,
great writing and thinking along those lines. But that the goal that Peter and I said for ourselves, it's really much more that of historians and you know, journalists writing a first draft of history. We conducted more than three hundred original interviews for this after Trump left office, in addition to trying to synthesize and understand the history as it had already been public. And to me, that's what we were doing is an act of recording this for
for history's sake. I just think it's so important, and I just sai very much in awe of both of your writing and reporting, and and it's just a pleasure to have you both on this podcasts are a pleasure to be with you as you start off this new venture. We're so excited. Yeah, congre, thank you well. I hopefully we'll have you guys back on to talk about everything that's happening. I Molly, John Fast, Jesse Cannon, So tell me what's today's moment of Today's moment of fuckery involves
a Republican in Texas. Maybe we should just make every moment of fuckery to involve a Republican in Texas because they're certainly Molly, you have to let Louie go. I know he's in your heart forever, but like he's gonna be gone. Suit, I feel like it might be good to start bntally preparing yourself for him not being everywhere all the time. I'm telling you, I don't even think Louie Gomert is the worst Republican in Texas. No. What's even a shocking thing to me sometimes is that there
even do keep down some of their worst. Like Alan West was the worst congressman of his era. When you see him every time he's in the New is it is so insane what he says. But they had the sense to not vote for him this time around. It's amazing stuff. Good job Texas. So Ken Paxton is the long under indictment Attorney General of the state of Texas, and he has been under in diamond for seven years for securities fraud. You know, I feel like Republicans in
Texas are just built different than the rest of them. Oh, I like that. I like that. That's the one way of putting it. They're just tougher, crazier, louder. What we just found out was that Paxton was served as subpoena. He got in his truck the wife was driving. By the way, I feel for these wives. I mean, I know they did this to themselves, but also, like you know, you still don't want to be like, get in the car, honey, you were driving for driving away? Do you really feel
for them though? I don't know. I mean, I just think it's whatever anyway. So the lawyers for the eight argued they didn't know the attorney general would be served at home. Emails from opposing counsel show they tried repeatedly to serve him through his attorneys, and I guess the attorneys also got in their wives cars and drove away. And for that, I think it's fair to say that Texas Attorney General Kent Paxton, his wife, State Senator Angela Paxton, and his lawyers in the state of Texas all our
our moment of Corea bounds. That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to hear the best minds and politics makes sense of all this chaos. If you enjoyed what you've heard, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. And again, thanks for listening.