New York Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker and New Yorker staff writer Susan Glasser join Heilemann for a discussion of their new book The Divider: Trump in The White 2017-2021, which aims to be the first soup-to-nuts account of the 45th president's tenure in the Oval Office. Baker and Glasser — both long-time, much-admired Washington reporters, spouses, and co-authors of previous books on Vladimir Putin's Russia and the life of James A. Baker III — discuss their thesis that Trump is the sole POTUS in history who never saw national unity as a goal, and in fact sought to profit politically from dividing the country; how Trump's 2017 inaugural address, with its invocation of "American carnage," augured the darkness (and strangeness) that would follow; Trump's disregard and disdain for democratic and institutional norms, from his politicization of the Justice Department and efforts to co-opt the military to his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election; how his foreign policy came closer than anyone knew to leading to armed (even nuclear) conflict and diplomatic chaos (including a U.S. exit from NATO) abroad; the transactional nature of Trump's relationship with his wife, Melania; and the mind-bending experience of interviewing Trump for the book and finding his mental stability as questionable as many of his top advisers did. They also assess the various investigations currently encircling Trump, along with the very real prospect that he could run for president in 2024 while under federal indictment ... and win.
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