Washington Week with The Atlantic | Season 2023 | Washington Week with The Atlantic full episode, 12

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Tonight, on a special Last of the Year Edition of Washington Week, weúll take Donald Trump both seriously and literally, and discuss what a second Trump term could look like.

Heús already told us what heús planning for January 20th, of course.

DONALD TRUMP, Former U.S. President: I said I want to be a dictator for one day.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Weúll talk about the presumptive GOP frontrunnersú plans and dreams, and what they can mean for America and the world, next.

Good evening and welcome to a very special episode of Washington Week with The Atlantic.

And I really mean with The Atlantic, as you will soon see.

Tonight, for our last show of the year, weúre going to talk about Donald Trump, his record, his campaign, and the promises heús made.

We just published a special issue of The Atlantic devoted to answering the question, what will happen if Trump wins?

In this issue, 24 of our writers look at Trumpús record in domestic and foreign policy, the economy and national security.

And we have a number of those writers with us tonight.

McKay Coppins, who, in addition, to being a staff writer, is the author of Romney, A Reckoning, Franklin Foer, whose last book is The Last Politician, Inside Joe Bidenús White House and the Struggle for Americaús Future, Clint Smith, author of How the Word is Past, and also a staff writer, and Adrienne LaFrance, our esteemed executive editor, esteemed.

I put that in there special.

ADRIENNE LAFRANCE, Executive Editor, The Atlantic: Thank you.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Youúre welcome.

Welcome, Atlantic team.

Yes, itús an Atlantic takeover.

What do you, what do you -- FRANKLIN FOER, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: Thank you, boss.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: We finally -- weúve launched a coup.

And here we are.

So, yes, we have this issue.

I hope you at home have a copy of this.

You can buy it, find it online, do whatever you want.

Itús a free country, we think.

And we decided a while ago that we thought, as Trump became -- it became clear that Trump was going to become the nominee.

And I think weúre all sort of there, that thereús not a lot in the way right now.

Thereús the Colorado business, but weúll put that aside for the moment.

We decided that we really should examine what we - - everything we know about Trump and everything -- based on what we know from the first term, how the second term could go.

Adrienne, let me just start with you, just to give like the -- why donút you give us the overarching core argument of the reason for the issue.

ADRIENNE LAFRANCE: Right.

So, I think the first two things I would say are what you alluded to, which is this -- you know, conveying to people that this really could happen.

He really could be president again.

Heús the presumptive nominee.

And then really deeply exploring through reporting, through an examination of the near, you know, recent historic record what the next term could be like, and helping people understand that, you know, itús, it may be and likely will be different.

And the ways in which theyúre different really lay out the stakes for what that is.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Is different a euphemism for worse?

ADRIENNE LAFRANCE: I think it is, yes.

I mean, worse if you donút like authoritarianism.

So, I mean, not quite seriously, is when you read this package, youúre left with the really clear sense of, oh, this is what it will be like or could be like to experience the realization of authoritarianism in America.

And that that is not something that is just hypothetical, but itús a real danger.

I mean, your editorús note in the issue is called a warning, and it really is a warning.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Just stay on this for one more second because I want to have clarity on this.

This is not about conservative policies or Republican -- what we think of as traditional Republican policies on taxes, social welfare issues.

ADRIENNE LAFRANCE: Exactly.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: What is the split here?

As you were involved in this, how did you think about it this way?

ADRIENNE LAFRANCE: No, this is really important.

Iúm glad you asked that.

Itús not about right versus left.

It is absolutely not an issue about why people should support Democrats or Biden.

Itús about what America looks like if it is a democracy or if it is under authoritarian rule.

And the notion being that we want to remain free and that Trump becoming president again would make that very, very difficult.

And so itús not about right versus left.

Itús not about policy, even really at all.

Itús about the rise of authoritarianism in America.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

McKay, let me go to you.

In addition, to spending all this time recently with, I guess you would call Mitt Romney, Donald Trumpús most prominent Republican critic, certainly, heús gone as far out there as anyone except Liz Cheney.

And theyúre probably a duopoly or something.

Youúve also known Donald Trump, probably the longest of anyone, at this table.

How has he changed?

Tell us first how you met him, and, second, how heús changed.

MCKAY COPPINS, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: So, I profiled him in early 2014, actually, when he was still talking about running for governor of New York.

And the idea of the presidency was sort of, you know, it was like a P.R.

stunt.

He was always talking about running.

And I accidentally, after a series of kind of travel mishaps, ended up spending a couple days with him at Mar-a-Lago.

And the piece that I wrote back then, almost ten years ago now, sort of, I think it holds up in a lot of ways, except with the notable exception that I predicted very confidently, he would never run for president.

But the portrait -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: But we admire the confidence.

MCKAY COPPINS: I bring that same confidence to work every day at The Atlantic.

No.

But, I mean, look, you know, the portrait, I think, holds up in that back then, a decade ago, the thing that came through is he was incredibly - - and this was surprising me at the time, incredibly needy, was constantly in search of validation.

He was desperate for respect from, at the time, kind of elite political circles that saw him as a joke.

And I think that his kind of sense of personal grievance and, frankly, need for revenge against the elites who were constantly holding him in disdain, ridiculing him, making fun of him has powered everything that came after that.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: So, even back then, he needed your respect?

MCKAY COPPINS: I was like a, I was a 25-year-old Buzzfeed writer, and he was desperate for my validation and approval.

He was constantly asking me questions like, you know, isnút this plane pretty impressive?

What do you think of Mar-a-Lago?

You know, I would be a pretty good candidate, donút you?

It was like fishing for compliments, which surprised me because at the time, I knew him primarily as the celebrity Apprentice host and the guy he plays on T.V.

is this very confident guy.

I think weúve all seen that, you know, that kind of very needy ego in the ten years since, but at the time, the insecurity is a problem.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: And the insecurity -- I want to stay with you for a minute, because the insecurity is interesting because it forces him or creates in him a need to surround himself with yes men and yes women.

I want to read something from your article in this issue, which has to do with the type of person he would hire should he become president again.

One job that Trump will be especially focused on getting right is attorney general.

He believes that both of the men who held this position during his term, Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr, were guilty of grievous betrayal.

Trump has pledged to use the Justice Department to visit revenge on his persecutors if he returns to the White House.

So, going to that a little bit, what would be the difference from your analysis between the first term that we experienced and a theoretical second term?

MCKAY COPPINS: So, I think that that insecurity that we were alluding to led in the first term to Trump being sort of giddy about all these important credentialed Republicans who were willing to work for him in his first administration.

William Barr was a serious guy.

He had a long history in a Republican legal world.

And the fact that he and people like Gary Cohn or John Kelly or James Mattis were willing to join his administration was a source of enormous pride.

So, he let all these people, in addition to the Steve Bannons and Stephen Millers, right?

What Iúve been told talking to people in Trumpús orbit is that that would not happen in a second term.

He would prize obedience above credentials and above everything else.

So, with the attorney general, for example, the names that I hear are Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Mike Lee from the Senate.

Another one was Jeffrey Clark, the former assistant attorney general whoús now indicted in the Georgia racketeering case.

So, these are people who Trump believes would do exactly what he tells them to do rather than seeking to sort of thread the needle between Trumpús orders and precedent or norms.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

So, no more grownups, and the so-called grownups would not be there.

It would be just the hardcore.

MCKAY COPPINS: Both because he doesnút want any more so-called adults in the room and also because, frankly, a lot of those adults in the room didnút fare very well in the first term.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

We have an extraordinary collection of quotes from people who worked for him directly and who say that heús completely unqualified to be president.

Itús not Democrats who are quoting.

Itús Republicans.

MCKAY COPPINS: Very small number of his -- I think itús 44 cabinet officials from the first term have endorsed his re-election.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

MCKAY COOPINS: I think that tells you a lot about what they think of him.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Frank, I want to turn to you and your piece, which has to do with the issue of corruption.

I want to just read a quick quote from that.

If the first Trump presidency was, for the most part, an improvised exercise in petty corruption, a second would likely consist of systematic abuse of the government.

Thereús a term to describe this sort of regime that might emerge on the other side, a mafia state.

Thatús a heavy accusation.

What do you think this mafia state would look like?

FRANKLIN FOER: Itús a term that comes from Hungary and Viktor Orban transformed the Hungarian government.

I think when you talk about the ways that this time will be different, thereús a quote that always rings in my head from The New York Times Columnist Paul Krugman.

He described the first Trump administration as malevolence tempered by incompetence.

And so there was a lot of stuff that was happening that was trial and error in that first term where he was testing the limits.

A lot of them were the limits of what his fellow Republicans would be willing to tolerate.

He didnút know if this type of petty corruption he was engaged in would just get a free pass or if it would be something that would earn the reprimand.

And so he tested the limits.

And he found out basically that there were no limits.

And so headed into this second term, you have people who thought much more deliberately about how to structure what they call the administrative state.

And one of the things that comes up in a lot of these articles in this issue is that thereús this goal of implementing something called Schedule F, which is that you would purge not just -- youúre not just talking about the cabinet appointees or the political appointees, but the civil service, the bureaucrats who populate what Trump disparages and referred to as the deep state.

And so if you take these experts, you take these people who have been committed to lifelong careers in government and you replace them with essentially the hacks whoúve passed some sort of Trump loyalty test, theyúre going to be committed to this larger project of corruption.

Theyúre not beholden to any of these other ideals.

Theyúre beholden to a leader.

And also just the nature of the people who would be attracted to those types of jobs are people who are going to want to line their own pocket, just given their ideals.

And so you start to have this state that is systematically corrupt, not just corrupt in places.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

But our David Frum, our staff writer, has written on this issue and said that in the first iteration, the first go-around, the petty corruption, the greed, actually tempered the kind of authoritarian effectiveness, if you will.

You think something is going to be different there, the revenge is going to -- revenge and power are going to be more salient than the desire just to build more hotels or whatever it is that motivates -- FRANKLIN FOER: I donút see these things as being fundamentally philosophically inconsistent, that youúll have at the highest level revenge being exacted against political opponents, and then kind of in a more systematic way, more petty sort of way.

It wonút just be that youúll have people trying to influence policy, buying rooms at the Trump hotels, youúre going to have people who are going to be distributing government contracts to their friends.

Youúre going to have the ways in which what Hungary suggests is that youúll have very systematic parts of the economy be handed over in very subtle sort of ways to people who are loyalists.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

I want to come back to both these subjects.

I want to turn to Clint for a second.

And, by the way, I want to acknowledge that December was beard month at The Atlantic.

Itús the little part of my authoritarian reign, mandatory beard.

ADRIENNE LAFRANCE: Iúm rebelling.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.

And Adrienne was exempt because of her high status and -- FRANKLIN FOER: Maybe youúll give us bonuses and allow us to cover the razors.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes, yes, thatús right.

If I only paid you more, youúd have razors.

Clint, I want to talk about -- Clint, your piece is a kind of a profound piece.

Itús a meditation on sort of the nature of the entire MAGA project, Make America Great Again, with the emphasis on the, again, the most important word in that formula.

I want to read something that you wrote in this issue.

The most patriotic education is one that demands that we sit with the totality and complexity and moral inconsistencies of the American project.

Trumpism seeks to censor attempts to tell this sort of story.

Trump says that he will double down on this effort if re-elected.

History has taught us that we should believe him.

Then you went on to write, his most enduring slogan, Make America Great Again, is an unsubtle pledge to restore just such an order.

Trump rode that pledge to power in 2016.

Now running for a second term, he has promised yet more to impose his harmful, erroneous historical claims on school curricula and to instill a culture of fear in classrooms across the country that dare to deviate from his preferred historical narrative.

Now, our colleague, Yoni Appelbaum, has written in the recent past about this unsupervised or unregulated experiment that weúre all undergoing, the movement of a large-sized democracy from one group domination to a more multicultural kind of environment.

And, obviously, itús been your view, and youúve expressed this, that Make America Great Again is a reaction to this kind of change.

Talk about what you see as the core of the Trump project, and if you think that, from the issues that concern you the most, if heús going to be more effective, if he becomes president again.

CLINT SMITH, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: Yes.

I think Trump is somebody who fundamentally rejects the idea that we should hold complexity, hold fullness, hold multi-dimensionality together, right?

And when it comes to American history, when it comes to American education, we recognize I think here at The Atlantic that America is a place that has provided unparalleled opportunities for millions of people across generations in ways that their own ancestors could have never imagined.

And it has also done so at the direct expense of millions and millions of other people who have been inter-generationally subjugated and oppressed.

And you have to hold both of those realities when you consider the totality and the history of the American project.

But Trump and the sort of MAGA movement rejects the idea that we should even name or acknowledge or incorporate analysis of the things that include violence, include oppression, include parts of the American story that donút fully align with a very specific notion of America as being a singular beacon on a hill that is upon whom no aspersion should be cast.

And that goes to the way that we talk about the founders, right?

And so much of the way that Trump spoke about history was animated by a rejection of a lot of what weúve been wrestling with here at The Atlantic and then perhaps most notably The New York Timesú 1619 Project.

And he rejected that premise so much that we should wrestle with the complexity of the founding and the founders that in the way that the sort of 1619 Project and a lot of our pieces illustrate that he created the 1776 Commission toward the end of his presidency, specifically with the intention to suggest that teachers should only be teaching a patriotic education.

And what patriotic means to him is that you only focus on the sort of dominant narrative that has been central to the way that weúve told the story of American history for many years.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

Thereús an argument, of course, that the dominant narrative or the dominant direction is from the founding document.

So, weúre pursuing -- weúre trying to build a more perfect union.

The clear implication of seeking a more perfect union as the union is imperfect.

And so the interesting thing, like so I can live with that, and we obviously at The Atlantic believe that the American project is worthwhile and democracy is worthwhile, and that the story of America is a story of getting better.

But what is it about the age weúre in that created such a kind of brittleness that doesnút allow for people to say, yes, we did good things and we did bad things, and we have to talk about all of them, including in school?

CLINT SMITH: Yes.

I think part of it is, itús a range of factors, but I think a big part of it is that over the last ten years with the Black Lives Matter movement, when we think specifically about the history of race and racism in this country.

It is made clear for millions of people across this country that we have to analyze our understanding and make sense of American history in a way that is much more sophisticated, much more complex than we previously have, and that our previous conceptions of what was or was not racist or what was or was not oppressive have expanded necessarily, and thereús a sort of structural analysis, thereús a systemic analysis.

And what that means is that now you have many more people who are telling a fuller, more honest, more complex story of America.

You know, Yoni talked about how weúre trying to incorporate a range of different stories, a range of different communities.

And I think when you begin to include those stories that complicate some of the previous narratives that have existed in America.

For example, Thomas Jefferson, I write a lot in my book about, going to Monticello, and one of the things that docents and public historians at Monticello struggle with is that there are so many people who show up to Monticello who donút want to accept even the very fact that Thomas Jefferson owned enslaved people, right?

When we know that Thomas Jefferson owned 600 enslaved people, donút want to accept that Thomas Jefferson was somebody who enslaved his own children, which we know that he did.

But part of that is because Jefferson represents as a sort of personification of a story of America that told them that America is all good and that we shouldnút wrestle with the things that arenút good about America or about Jefferson or our founding.

And so Trump would have us not talk about those things even though those things are essential to understanding the landscape of contemporary inequality today.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

Adrienne, I want to ask you a journalism question.

And the journalism question is one that weúve struggled with on this show in The Atlantic, all across the media, which is, thereús a portion of the country, thereús a large portion of the country, that we believe isnút completely tethered to reality and fact-based discourse.

Obviously, the leader of that group, Donald Trump, is someone who lies freely and often and ostentatiously.

But I donút want to act as if the, quote/unquote, mainstream media is anything close to perfect.

Itús an imperfect union, itús an imperfect media.

How did we get to the place where all of this amazing reporting over the last eight years by The Atlantic, by everyone from The New York Times and the Washington Post, to the networks, CNN, et cetera, how did it come to pass that this reporting, unrefuted reporting, didnút affect the way millions and millions of people see him, and what does it say about us and what does it say about those people who feel left behind by whatever is going on in this country?

ADRIENNE LAFRANCE: I think there are a bunch of ways you can answer that question.

And I would start with -- I mean, you think about sort of the unshakable base that he has.

And so there is some degree to which, and I think is probably related to why people like him in the first place.

But whatever it is, whether itús his charisma, whether itús his, you know, tapping into certain grievances, legitimate or not, his bombast, whatever it is that makes people drawn to him, is solid for that base.

And so that is just like -- you know, thatús one piece of it.

I think the other pieces, in terms of like the journalism part of it, you know, this goes into the decline of faith in institutions generally, which is its own large story.

I mean, journalism as an institution is certainly one of the places where weúve seen declining trust in America and around the world to some extent.

And then, of course, you know, looking at the informational environment, I think the way that people come to different news stories, or itús just with the social web in particular, itús chaos, right?

And so people donút know what to trust.

And, you know, they have their tribes and their places where they can get snap reactions that validate their opinions.

And so weúre just simply not in an environment, you know, informationally or culturally, where weúre making it easy for people to believe truth, despite our best efforts as journalists.

And so itús just -- I mean, I would say itús just a really chaotic time.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

We only have a couple of minutes left, but I want to ask you all a pretty basic question.

We see that he has an obvious path to the nomination.

Do you think that he has an obvious path to the presidency?

CLINT SMITH: Yes, he absolutely does.

But thereús also a lot of factors, as people have noted, that we just donút know whatús going to happen with the trials and the different court cases.

And, obviously, Colorado is an example of some of the things that weúre going to be thinking about and talking about.

So, yes, but with an asterisk.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Youúre an obvious expert on what heús going to do.

MCKAY COPPINS: Well, I mean, yes, let me confidently predict the outcome of the election.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Bring your confidence.

MCKAY COPPINS: No, look, I mean, I think that in the nature of our country now is that itús hyperpolarized and any presidential election is at least reasonably close.

I also think that, you know, 2020 was not a landslide victory for Joe Biden by any stretch.

It was also taking place in an uncommonly tumultuous year in American democracy between the George Floyd protests, the pandemic, the bungled response from the Trump administration.

I think that this is now not just about Trump, itús about Biden, and I think itús a jump ball.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Frank, 20 seconds.

If Donald Trump loses, does he march on the White House anyway to try to take it back?

FRANKLIN FOER: Thatús what the pattern of his past behavior seems to suggest, that for all the character flaws that McKay diagnosed, itús the very reason why he is incapable of accepting defeat.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Well, unfortunately, we need to leave it there for now.

I guess weúll have to wait until next year to find out what happens.

I want to thank my Atlantic colleagues, our threes staff writers here and Adrienne LaFrance, our executive editor, for sharing your insight and reporting.

And for much more on what a second Trump term could look like, be sure to check out theatlantic.com.

Iúm Jeffrey Goldberg.

Goodnight and Happy New Year from Washington.

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