 Welcome, everybody. And welcome, Susan and Peter. We will make sure to make this more fun than a White House Christmas party. It's a high bar, but we'll do our very best. And congratulations on this smashed bestseller, the divider which, to my mind, is the definitive chronicling of the Trump administration, a true first draft of history. And let me quote you from the book. There was a passage in there that really struck me as capturing the essence of the Trump years. You write in the first few pages of the book. With Trump, there was always an us and always a them. But when he improbably won election as president of the United States in 2016, this became America's reality too. Over the next four years, Trump identified vulnerabilities in Washington and in those who had served there. He weaponized his prolific lies for his political benefit and buoyed any who opposed him, setting up his administration as an endless series of loyalty tests. He hijacked a Republican party that was riven and ailing, a party that has now lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections and turned it into a cult of personality so dedicated to him that instead of producing a policy platform at its last convention, it simply issued a resolution saying it was for Trump. You were there during those four years. You were on the front lines. And I wonder, there was sort of a drip, drip of chaos that ensued. But as you were putting it all together and encapsulating in this again definitive book, what most struck you or surprised you? Putting it all together, assembling this story. Well, you know the one about the frog being boiled? We're sort of like the boiled frogs at this point. Mark, thank you so much to you and to everyone here for sharing some of their busy holiday time with us. We're happy to miss the White House Christmas party, although there are no cookies here. Maybe there should be some cookies. Somebody bring this one with some cookies. No, no, no, no. No, seriously, it was an honor to have the opportunity to write something like this down. For Peter and I as journalists, we covered a lot of stories. They think you mentioned that very generous introduction. We covered the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq. We covered the rise of Vladimir Putin in Russia. We never thought we would be writing stories like this about our own capital, about Washington, DC. And in fact, to the question of what surprises you, there's only one thing in this book that we wrote in any other book. And our first book was called Kremlin Rising, it was about Vladimir Putin's Russia. And we were there about 10 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. And there were already big questions about Russian democracy. And we were at an event with Gregor Yavlinsky, very well known Russian reformer. He was asked, well, what about the state of Russian democracy? And he told this anecdote that stuck with us at the time. And we put that in our first book. It's an old one that will be familiar to anyone who lived in Russia in those years. It's one about an ambulance driver who picks up a guy and after a while they're driving through the city. The guy says, hey, wait a minute, where are we going? And the ambulance driver says, well, we're going to the morgue. The guy says, well, what do you mean? I'm not dead. And the ambulance driver says, yeah, well, we're not there yet. So that was kind of a sad, morbid joke about Russian democracy 20 years ago. Now you couldn't even tell that joke about Russia and somehow it seemed kind of sadly relevant to the Washington that we've been covering. So that's the only thing that appears in two of our books. Peter, how about you? You've covered every administration since Clinton and written books about the Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama, and now Trump administrations. As you put this story together, page after page, did anything strike you about this period? Well, there's kind of come a cliche in Washington in the Trump era to say that there is nothing surprising but everything is shocking, right? In other words, that he still has the capacity to shock us even if we should not be surprised anymore. Just the other day, what did he say? He said that certain rules in the Constitution should be terminated so that he could be returned to office right away rather than run for reelection or something like that. And that was shocking but not surprising. And I think that what we discovered in writing this book was how many times we were shocked by things we thought we knew, but in fact, there was a whole lot more to it than we knew or things we didn't know that we could find out in the time after he left office. A handful of examples come to mind, you know, when he talks to his chief of staff, John Kelly, he says, you effing generals, how come you can't be loyal to me like the German generals were? Well, what German generals do you mean, John Kelly says? You know, Hitler's generals in World War II. And he says, well, sir, you know, they did try to kill him three times. No, they were very loyal. So is that surprising or shocking, right? It's shocking that he would want Hitler's generals to be his vision of who worked for him, but it's not surprising anymore. And I think that the broad theme that we came away from was that January 6th itself, while shocking, wasn't surprising or at least shouldn't have been surprising because when you go back, we're the first book that goes for four years and tries to tell us the tale from the beginning to the end of his presidency. And when you go back and research it as we did, we saw how it all came together. That this wasn't a one-off, it wasn't an aberration, it was a four-year war on democratic norms and institutions as Susan talked about with the joke involving the Russians. That was what was happening. So January 6th, if you think about it and you pay attention to it, especially if you go back and look at it in hindsight, was the inevitable outcome in some ways of what was going on? Let's go back to 2016. Was Trump's nativism, his xenophobia, did he adapt his message for the electorate at that time? Or is this something that he was sounding for years and years and years and the electorate caught up? I mean, there's really two kinds of politicians. There's the Ronald Reagan, who in 1964 sounded the same message that he did in 1980, but the American voters caught up to that message. And then there's the Bill Clinton, more amorphous, somebody who adapted to the electorate in 1992 and changed his own stances on things in order to become a viable candidate. Where does Trump fall into that spectrum? Well, you know what's interesting is that if you wanna get a shock and you wanna know what Donald Trump thinks about a lot of world issues, you don't need to listen to what he said in 2016 or 2018. You can actually read an interview that he did with Playboy Magazine. Yes, Playboy Magazine. In 19, it came out in early 1991, so it was early 1990, basically at the very end of the Cold War. And this Playboy interview, even Angela Merkel was reading this as a guide to what Donald Trump thought. He wasn't in politics for decades to come. He was just a sort of brash publicity hungry, soon to be multiple bankrupt, New York City property developer. But he even then fancied himself to be a kind of world historical figure. He had, our previous book pointed out, he had volunteered himself to George H.W. Bush to serve as his vice president. An offer that was kindly declined by Bush. He had volunteered actually to be Ronald Reagan's arms control negotiator because as everyone here knows by now, Donald Trump is the greatest negotiator in the history of the world. But beyond the personality quirks that didn't change, what really is amazing is a lot of those, I wouldn't call them fully formed policy views, but certainly his kind of worldview and his instincts remarkably similar, even though the world changed so much. He lamented that Mikhail Gorbachev was not a strong enough leader. He actually praised the Chinese crackdown on Tiananmen Square. So even then he had this affinity for autocrats and authoritarians. He was very much a protectionist even then. At the time, of course, the issue was trade with Japan rather than China. And in fact, in the reporting for the divider, his worldview was so set in the 1980s, some of his White House officials told us that in early months in the White House, he would often say Japan when he meant to be talking about China because that was his frame of reference. So you can read this early interview with Playboy Magazine as if it was like a rosetta stone to Donald Trump, but I would put one asker's there because I do think that as a communicator and as a politician, Donald Trump is always workshopping lines that he thinks will work better. And there are many examples of that there. He would start talking about things on the campaign trail in 2015 and 2016 and drop them basically if people didn't really respond to them. So he definitely had a sort of feedback loop with what he wanted to talk about and said he doesn't really care about policy very much in who's a lot more willing than many politicians just to say what he thinks people want him to say. Peter, you write in the book that a senior national security official who regularly observed Trump in the Oval Office compared him to a velocirator in the movie Jurassic Park that proved capable of learning while hunting their prey, making them ultimately more dangerous. Trump in characteristic, immodest form called himself a stable genius. How would you describe Donald Trump's native intelligence? By the way, that's very stable genius. Very stable genius, yeah. Very stable genius. Very stable genius. Yeah, that's a good question. He would probably be offended by the velociraptor comparison. He would be a T-Rex, I think, in his mind. But the velociraptor, what the official meant was that in this movie, for those who've forgotten it, there's a scene where the kids are running from the killer dinosaur and they go into the industrial kitchen and they close the door and they think they're safe, right? But then the velociraptor has learned to turn the handle of the industrial kitchen, which is a sign of learning how to do things that otherwise were not within the animal's natural instincts. And that's what this official meant about Trump. He's not gonna learn about policy details about healthcare. He probably couldn't tell you more about healthcare reform today than he could have six years ago. But he has figured out how to manage the levers of power. And that is to get rid of the John Kelly's, who were not like Hitler's generals, and to get people in there who would be more deferential to him, who were more willing to go along with the things he wanted, who if it were not Mike Pence might have gone along with him even on January 6th, had he had a different vice president, right? And so I think he's not a policy wonk, okay, in terms of intelligence. He's not gonna be a master of details. I think he has trouble processing certain information. I remember being with him in an interview in the Oval once where he just clearly didn't understand what we were talking about. But he has a cunning about him that is hard to match in modern politics. The cunning of understanding an opponent's weakness, the cunning of understanding even the weaknesses or vulnerabilities that Susan always liked to say are the people who actually wanna work for him. He understands their weaknesses and vulnerabilities and how to take advantage of them in order to get them to do what he wants them to do. So it's not an IQ as much as an EQ of sorts, I suppose, but that has, you know, that made him successful in a way that no other non-politician ever has been, right? He's the only president who's ever served in our entire country who'd never spent a day in public life in either government or the military. And yet he managed to use this cunning, this instinct he has for, you know, bombastic populism for weaknesses of his enemies to parlay it into the Oval Office. And he did it in part, as you say, because we were a divided country and he is a master divider who came along at the moment where he fit the times. Susan, there seems to be this supreme confidence that he has that somebody will come over to his side, no matter who he's talking to. Where does that come from? You know, Donald Trump is definitely a believer in what you might call the New York City tabloid school of publicity, which is to say that all publicity is good publicity, you know, as long as they spell your name, right? He actually had his own kind of caveat to that. He was once overheard by his then campaign manager, Brad Parscale, is telling someone actually that all publicity is good publicity as long as they don't call you a pedophile. So that was Donald Trump's rule. And, you know, it applied not just to public interactions, not just to, you know, on camera interviews, but to really any interaction. I mean, I was astonished in some ways, and yet not really surprised that he wanted to speak with us, not once, but twice for this book. You know, Peter was working with his advisor to schedule this, and I kept saying, well, you know, are you sure he's really gonna do this interview because he know I'm coming? But the truth is that Trump is supremely self-confident in any interaction, as you said. And, you know, it's the kind of self-confidence that perhaps comes from really not listening and from really affecting an idea that you don't care about all of the, you know, sort of indignation and the name calling because he's going to always outdo you in the name calling. You might write a tough story about him, but maybe he will get across the points that he wants, and I think that's the thing. Trump as a communicator, you have to say that it is a very reckless way of conducting the public business, but I'm amazed at his ability to shape the conversation even by those who are fiercely critical of them. Trump does things that, you know, no other public official has ever done in his willingness to say, get out of one scandal by just introducing another very scandalous thing. You know, he is shown again and again and again that he sets the terms around which we're talking about him. Donald Trump first started calling the 2020 election rigged in May of 2020. You know, so an incredible act of clairvoyance on his part, clearly, to have anticipated this. But the point is that he spent months talking and therefore willing into being a rigged election that was not and messaging to millions of his followers around the country. He took mail-in voting, which had historically been a Republican political advantage in many states, not in all states, but in many states it was, you know, a sort of a built-in guarantee of a certain number of early votes that the party counted on. He destroyed the credibility and legitimacy of an important part of our electoral system with his words. So, you know, his self-confidence comes from realizing that even when people disagree with you, they're still buying in to your framework, I think. And in terms of disagreeing with you, he called the media infamously the enemy of the people. When Leslie Stahl asked him during a 60-minutes interview why he did this, you write in the book, he replied, you know why I do it. I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so that when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe it. What was it like to be a member of the press corps during the Trump years relative to your experiences in other administrations? Yeah, I mean, look, you know, every president hates us. I mean, Mark, you've interviewed multiple presidents, you've written books on JFK, LBJ, the Bushes. I mean, you know that it's built in, it's baked in. And that's fine, that's okay, it's part of the system. It's an adversarial system. We're not supposed to be their friends. What Trump did, of course, was take it to a different level, right? When you say again and again words like fake news and you use phrases like enemies of the people, what you're doing is not saying, I think this story is not fair, or I think the supporter is not fair. What you're saying is, I don't believe in the very concept of a free press. And he's undermining the very nature of our system, really. And it has worked. Our credibility due to our own work has always been somewhat suspect in polls. It's gone down substantially since then. I think we're just barely above Congress, which is a little like the toad being above the frog. But he wanted to do exactly what you just said, he told Leslie Stahl, to discredit anybody, any source of information, other than himself. I was struck the other day just Friday that Vladimir Putin said the same thing to a reporter there. He says, don't trust anybody. The only person you can trust is me. That would distill Donald Trump's approach toward the media as well. Don't trust anybody, only trust me. And it was a corrosive thing. I mean, obviously on the one hand, he was the most transparent president I've ever covered. He talked to us more than any other president. He gave us more interviews. He gave us more sound bites, more press conferences, more pool sprays. And, you know, whereas Biden, for instance, doesn't do that much at all by comparison. And yet, as enamored as he is of attention, as hungry as he is, as Susan said, for publicity, this broader notion that anything is fake, unless I tell you otherwise, is corrosive to the system. So did it make you, did this kind of scrutiny that he puts you under, this kind of vilification, did it make you change your behavior in any way as a reporter? How did you change as a consequence of that kind of treatment by the president of the United States? Well, I mean, I think, you know, there's the positive side of this in some respects is that the Trump years are really a moment of return to first principles for journalists in a way that is probably healthy and good if there were ever a reason to suit up and to, you know, understand the value of independent, critical-minded, honest reporting and the urgency around doing so. You know, this is literally, this is why we become journalists in many respects. It's not to have access to the halls of power. It's not to be popular, certainly. All presidents are unhappy in some way about their coverage. It's a question of their ability to suppress their disagreement with it, you know. But Donald Trump, you know, I think, was really about a crisis in American democracy in a way that I think, you know, gave journalism, you know, a sense of mission. And I think that's really important, understanding the value that we must continue to place on independent, fact-driven reporting. You know, we're all products, all three of us, right? We grew up at a time when, you know, there was much more of a single kind of national public space, right? You know, there were three television networks. There were, you know, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine and Newsweek. There was a sense that we could, you know, agree at least on a basic level about the facts, even if the country disagreed and vigorously so over what to do about them. It's not like the 1980s was a period of, you know, kumbaya, but I think that, you know, looking at a moment where you have the weaponization of facts and information by president of the United States in that way, to me it was really an important moment as a journalist to understand, you know, that what we're doing really matters. Well, that is a story, by the way. I meant to, I should have added this. I remember being in the Oval with Trump one time with my publisher, A.G. Solesberger from the New York Times. And A.G. sat through the interview, let us ask our questions, Trump gave his answers, but he just wanted to say one thing at the end and he says to the president, he says, listen, I just want you to understand that when you say things like enemies of the people and fake news, there's real consequence there. It puts people in danger. Not just much in this country, but around the world. Journalists around the world, because less principled leaders will use this as a way to jail journalists, to intimidate journalists, to do violence against journalists. And there's examples of that as we saw repeatedly over the years in some places around the world. And he brought this directly to Trump and I was really glad he did, that he said this directly to him. There's consequences. He did it politely, we did it firmly and he said this is something you should really think about before you do it because there's consequences. And Trump says, really, you think so, huh, I hadn't thought of that. That's really interesting. And then a week later, he was doing it all over again. Couldn't, didn't matter a thing to him. Did journalism get better as a result of the Trump administration? You know, I think we talk often in a very broad brushway about journalism. Obviously we hear all the time, you know, about the media's this, the media that, you know, like any profession, there's bad actors, there's, you know, there's excellence both commingled. But in my view, there is a little bit of a misunderstanding about Trump. You often hear, of course, Trump's complaints to the conservative media, but there's also a liberal critique as well of the coverage. How many times over the last few years we would hear people say, well, somehow the New York Times because of the Hillary Clinton email coverage, you know, gave us Donald Trump. My take is a little bit different, which is to say that, you know, probably no one ever had as much, you know, hard-hitting, you know, rigorous independent journalism committed about them before entering public life as Donald Trump. You know, there was a stack of five excellent, deeply reported biographies about Donald Trump even before he announced his campaign. I brought that group together, actually, when I was editor of Politico Magazine in the spring of 2016. They never met each other, these biographers, going all the way back to the very legendary Wayne Barrett who was the investigative reporter for The Village Voice. You could read Wayne Barrett's 1979 profile of Donald Trump and learn an awful lot about the guy who was gonna go on to become president. We had this crazy lunch in the basement of Trump Tower at the Trump Grill, and we compared notes. You know, I sort of tongue-in-cheek called them the Trumpologists, not really anticipating, you know, that there would be, I guess, Trumpologists for decades to come. But I say this to say that if you wanted to know what kind of man was Donald Trump, what kind of president would he be, you knew what you needed to know. At thanks to a lot of hard work by a lot of dedicated investigative reporters and authors and journalists and scholars. And, you know, certainly we've learned more since then, but what's remarkable is that, you know, this, I would call it almost this sort of presumed compact, you know, between journalists and their readers. Somehow that has broken down as our political system, you know, has entered, I think, a crisis in recent years. And, you know, when I was coming up in journalism, we had the saying, you know, that sunlight is the best disinfectant. You know, there was this notion, right, that it was our job as journalists to sort of pick up the rock and show you all the creepy, crawly things underneath. And then the voters, it was up to them to figure out what to do about it. And this link between journalism and accountability, I think, is where we are having a crisis. I think that's true. I would add to that, I think, I mean, it has been a test, right, of all the different values and structures that we had coming up. We believe in neutrality, we believe in balance, we believe in fairness, we believe in truth. How do you reconcile all these values in a time when we are being called fake news all the time, right? Do you respond in a way that makes you look like at the opposition, which is what he wants, okay? And what some of, frankly, his critics want. His critics are mad at us because we're not more of the opposition and he wants us to make us the opposition, right? I mean, I like what Marty Barron, who was the editor-chief of the Washington Post said, we're not at war, we're at work, okay? So that means our job is not to be his opposition. Our job is not to be his opponent, not to be his, you know, his skull or his lecture. Our job is to report the truth, as Susan said, to go back to first principles. Now, that doesn't mean that it's not, we shouldn't rethink some of our ways we do that, right? Good example, the L word, constant issue in my newsroom for four years. Do we use the L word? Do we say Trump is lying, right? And if so, when do we say that? It's a hard one. It's not as easy as people like to think. You should say it all the time. You should say everything he says is a lie. Okay, I get it. I understand that. First of all, if you use the word all the time, it loses value and it becomes looking like you're screechy rather than you're reporting. But secondly, we've always been reluctant historically because we don't like to presume that we know what somebody's thinking. We say somebody said something wrong, that what they say is false, what they say is not true, but do we know for a fact that they know it's not true? When they say it, that's, in theory, what a lie is. So we were pretty conservative about that. Our editor, Dean Bouquet, did not want to use it all the time, but we did use it. We did use it. We use it on the front page about the birth of a lie because the theory is that it had been disproven in so many different times that if he continues to say it, he knows or at least has reason to know it's a lie. We say it about the election 2020 stuff where he says that the election was stolen. We all know that's not true. There's zero evidence of that. We've decided that it's certainly appropriate to use the L word for that. But more importantly, I think, was just fact-based reporting and our friends at the post actually tabulated how many false and misleading statements, some of them you could call lies, that Trump made over four years was 30,000 statements that were false or misleading. That is a power unto itself. You don't need to sit there and be a columnist or an opinion journalist and say, shame on you, the fact of that says it for itself in my view. Well, except that that's also an example where the accountability has broken down. And what are the consequences of having a president of the United States who lies as he breathes? And 30,000 lies is the kind of record, whether you call them falsehoods, misstatements, untruths, that's an extraordinary record. And one of the big takeaways, clearly, is that when you have a rogue president, the tools to constrain that president are mostly not in laws and institutions, they're in individuals. And Congress has very, very limited power. Basically, it has in case of emergency, break glass and Congress broke the glass twice in the course of the Trump presidency with not one but two impeachments. And it wasn't able in a polarized system, if anything, what we learned as a result of the Trump presidency is that the mechanism for accountability for a president envisioned by the Constitution is for all intents and purposes, non-functional in a divided polarized country, such as we are, it's impossible to envision any president really being able to be convicted in a Senate that you don't just need 51 votes to convict, right? And it's really almost inconceivable to see impeachment any more going forward as a meaningful tool of constraining a president given that polarized political reality. And you both identified, I think, a major challenge of the Trump presidency as members of the press. Our greatest presidents are really almost characterized by their honesty. George Washington, I cut down the cherry tree. Honest Abe, right? But you have this president that lies 30,000, what, I'm sorry, 30,000 times? Yeah, 30,000. Which is astounding and is shaking the core of our democracy, right? Testing our norms. And there are only so many exclamation points you can put in front of a story. How do you continue, it must have been an enormous challenge, how did you continue to emphasize how pressing these matters were, how they weren't normal. How they were a test to our democracy. They were challenging our system. And not become the wallpaper that everyone sees but no longer knows. How do you do that? The boiled frog problem is a really big problem, I think, for all of us in the course of four years of it. In many ways, by the way, Mark, that's actually why we wrote the book. Because we felt that it was really important that in this sort of almost manufactured chaos of the Trump presidency it was extremely important not only to record what had happened but that a lot of things that I think the historical record will show are extremely significant, almost got lost in the daily kind of circus. And I would say that was another takeaway for us in going back after the presidency and doing the book was that in some ways the public theatrics of the Trump show tended to sort of make us overlook at times the very seriousness with which he challenged the institutions. The politicization, his efforts to weaponize the Justice Department on his own behalf, to use and weaponize the independent nonpartisan US military as a prop in his political games. Those things began essentially on day one of the presidency from January of 2017 and were fundamental to Trump's approach to the office. And yet, understandably, we were very caught up in the drama of the revolving door of the White House. We were caught up in the remarkable fusion of man and Twitter feed, things like that. And those are important aspects of the presidency too historically but I think that really is a big reason why we wanted to go back and really document that it wasn't just a show, kind of all sound and fury and signifying nothing but it was much more serious than that. Peter, you write of Fox News that they were blessed by Rupert Murdoch, right wing TV became Trump TV. Talk about the symbiotic relationship between Donald Trump and Fox News. Yeah, it's remarkable. I mean, I know that other presidents or other politicians will say that there are some news organizations that were supportive or not supportive of this president or that president. There's never been anything like this since the earlier days in the presidency when we had a much more overtly partisan press. Now, in the 19th century, you saw this a lot. There were Republican papers and Democratic papers and so forth but in the modern era, this is a pretty unusual thing. To the point where I remember being in Camp Jardot, Missouri with Trump on the eve of the 2018 midterm elections and he's on stage and suddenly calls up Sean Hannity. Hey, Sean, come on up here. And then he calls up Judge Neane. Hey, Judge Neane, come up here. And he's just naming all the different anchors on Fox. We like Lou and we like Tucker. We like, oh, don't we really like Steve and so forth? In fact, our friend and colleague, Jane Mayer, reported that he literally gave ratings to the different Fox anchors. I think Steve Ducey was a 12 out of a scale of one to 10. And so forth. And I think that there had rarely have ever been that kind of symbiotic thing. What's interesting, you talk to people who are Fox veterans today, what they will tell you is they think that might not have happened under Roger Ailes, that the difference was that Fox used to be the umpire, if you will, of Republican politics, that you had to go to Fox to suck up to them if you were gonna get support among conservatives, that you came to them and they generated, they decided, and there used to be an attitude one Fox person told me of F us, F you. There was kind of this, we are brash and we are in charge and don't you dare, Republicans, dare to defy us in some way. And Trump turned that around. They felt the need to take the lead from him. That he intimidated or bullied or coerced or pressured them into following his lead in effect. They helped make him as a figure by giving these weekly appearances before becoming president on Fox and Friends in the morning where he talked about Barack Obama's birth certificate and all that. And they allowed him to come on at any point he wanted. He did very few interviews with other networks compared to what he did with Fox. All of the three or four networks combined he didn't do enough interviews compared to what he gave to Fox as a soul. What's really interesting is how it broke apart at the end. One of the biggest, most important moments of the Trump's defeat comes when Fox calls Arizona on election nighter and says that Biden is won an election there. And the pressure was enormous, enormous because suddenly they're calling Rupert, they're calling the Fox journalists and managers. And there are journalists of Fox who cared very deeply about the integrity of their report and their polls and refused to back down and said, no, this is what our research shows. Sorry, you may not like it, maybe we don't like it, but that's what's gonna happen here in Arizona. And they were right by the way. And they got fired as a result by Fox because in the end, Fox couldn't dare to offend not just Trump, but Trump's base because Trump's base was their viewership. But it was also Susan really good business as you point out in the book. The ratings spike in 2017, Fox News is suddenly getting a greater audience and CNN and MSNBC combined. The next year, their viewership at least in the evening increases by over a million. So why would Fox change its strategy? Why if money is coming in and you have Rupert Murdoch at the helm, businessman Rupert Murdoch, why change? Well, you know, what's interesting is that both the Fox executives and Trump are chasing the same audience, as Peter said. And, you know, I think they both fear seem to drive them on. I was fascinated by the extent to which by 2020 as Trump is worried about winning reelection, he understands clearly that, you know, he has a real race on his hands that the pandemic has changed everything. By the summer of 2020, it's, you know, he's chasing after Tucker Carlson as much as Tucker Carlson is chasing after him. And there's this sort of really remarkable moment in our book, you know, when Tucker Carlson goes on television and is basically, you know, ranting at Trump that he's not doing enough to stop the riots around the country and, you know, the country is descending into mayhem and chaos. And, you know, Trump is absolutely desperate to please the Fox audience of one. You know, there was a lot of talk in Washington. It became like almost a cliche to talk about the audience of one, right? That members of Congress, they knew that Donald Trump was watching television and specifically Fox so much that from the very beginning of his presidency, they would go on Fox in order to get a message to the White House. Lindsey Graham told us that it was actually more useful for him sometimes to go on Sean Hannity to talk to Trump than it was to just call him up directly. He cared so much about what was on television. Jim Jordan, you know, who of course would become one of his main allies and defenders on Capitol Hill. He writes a scene in his book about how he discovered this phenomenon very early on in the Trump presidency, how much Trump paid attention and he said to his staffer, hey, listen, book me on Fox any time I need to talk to the White House. And so you have this kind of unique thing, like who's really, you know, directing the base is Trump leading or is he following? And I think his insecurity really came out when Peter and I went to Mar-a-Lago to meet with him for the book. And, you know, Trump had obviously overseen the development of the COVID vaccine by many accounts, right? This is a great scientific breakthrough that took place on his watch faster than any vaccine ever had been done before. You know, normally Donald Trump would be crowing about this as if he personally had been in the lab, you know, inventing the vaccine. And yet he's scared of his base. And we had this fascinating kind of interplay over the course of our two interviews. The first one was in the spring of 2020, not that long after he left office. And Trump volunteer Swiss, he says, well, I'm, you know, bedassed by the White House and people to do a public service announcement about the vaccine, and I'm considering doing it because, you know, my people are more reluctant to do it. So, you know, I might do it. So flash forward, it was November of 2021, our second interview, and we're just sort of chit chatting. That was in, by the way, the famous office that you've now seen the classified documents on the floor. And we said, oh, Mr. President, you know, like what about that public service announcement? You haven't done it, how come? And he just looked at us, he said, I don't know what you're talking about. What public service announcement? We said, well, you know, the one that you said that the Biden White House is interested in you doing, no, no, I don't know anything about that. No one ever asked me, where'd you hear that? Well, we said, we heard it from you. You, no, I don't know anything about that. And of course, what had happened in the intervening few months was that Donald Trump had mentioned the vaccine and he'd actually been booed by his own followers at a rally in Alabama. And I think, you know, it illustrates that, you know, the push-pull between Trump and the base. Peter and Susan worked in the Washington Post's Moscow Bureau for several years, hence their book, Moscow Rising. I wanna ask you both, what explains the fealty that Donald Trump clearly has toward Vladimir Putin? How do you explain that? Yeah, it's a great question. And it is one of the mysteries that will, I think, continue to animate historians for years to come. Well, you're gonna hear a lot of books are gonna be written about this in years to come. We don't solve the mystery, I don't think. But we, you know, there's this remarkable moment during the Helsinki Summit when he's standing next to Putin and he basically says, I agree with Putin over his intelligence agencies about the 2016 election interference. And back in Washington, one of the people watching, Susan was in Helsinki, one of the people watching, and watching it was Dan Coates. It was Trump's appointed National Intelligence Director or a public and Senator former, former Chief of Staff Dan Quayle, no liberal there. And he's watching this thinking, maybe Putin really does have something on Trump. Maybe the President, I think about that, the President of the United States may actually be compromised by Russia says his own National Intelligence Director because otherwise he could not explain it. It did not make any sense otherwise. This is the person who had accessed all the secrets that our government has and that's what his suspicion was. And we asked a lot of people and you've got a couple different basically baskets of answer. One is, look, he just likes strongmen. He likes autocrats, he likes, you know, his dad's famous phrase was, you know, his biggest praise is you're a killer. You gotta be a killer. So in Putin, he had it literally. And the idea is he loves strong leaders and autocrats. I was on Air Force One with him once, coming back from a summit meeting where he had met with Xi Jinping and he was just waxing like enviously about how Xi Jinping didn't have to worry about a Congress or courts or anything like that to get stuff done. He could just go ahead and do it. If he wanted to put something on trial for fentanyl distribution, he could put them on trial today and have them executed by tomorrow. Now that's how things should work in effect is what Trump was saying. So in that sense, Putin is the ultimate manifestation of that affection. The other theory is one advanced by people like Michael Cohen, who was his longtime fixer who broke with him, was imprisoned on corruption charges. And Michael Cohen says it's all about the money. It's just about money. He wanted for 35 years to build a tower in Moscow. 35 years and who's in charge in Moscow but Putin. And it really is as simple as that. The Russians gave them money when the American banks cut them off. The Russians bought their condos in Miami at inflated prices. His own sons said we got our money from Russia. And it really, according to Michael Cohen, is as simple as that. So it could be all of these things. And maybe we'll learn a lot more from these tax returns which have finally been obtained by Congress. Susan, you mentioned that Trump started seeding the notion that the election was going to be rigged, the 2020 election in May of 2020, well before the election happened. But you also pointed out in the book that this is a familiar tactic for Donald Trump. When the apprentice was up for an Emmy award and lost to the Great Race in 2004, he said that the system was rigged. And in subsequent years when he didn't win it, he said the same thing. When the Iowa caucus, when he lost it to Ted Cruz in 2016, he said the system was rigged. In 2016 when he actually won, it was a surprise to him too because he said if he didn't win, the election would have been rigged, right? So even when he won the election of 2016, he told Nancy Pelosi he actually won the popular vote too and created a commission to look into the charges and it dissolved after year, very quietly, after producing no evidence that it was rigged. So it was no great surprise that he was gonna call the election rigged in 2020. And yet, two-thirds of Republican voters still believe that the election of 2020 was rigged. How do you explain that? Well, you know- I know the hard questions go to her. Look, it is one of the enduring mysteries of partisan politics at this moment in time that so many millions of Americans would be willing to essentially choose tribal loyalty and political affiliation over facts in front of their very eyes. And I think that's why we're talking about it two years after the fact, right? It's already been two years since the election of 2020 and yet it is very much a present part of our politics as opposed to something in the past or in the rear view mirror. And that was the thing I think where official Washington and in particular kind of what remained of the establishment Republicans continually misread Donald Trump. And that's a big part of the story that we're telling in the divider is how they misread him in ways that had enormous consequences because they're probably the most famous background quote of all time was an unnamed Republican who told the Washington Post not that long after the 2020 election. Well, what's the downside of humoring Trump for just a few more days? I mean, he's lost, he knows he lost, he's gonna leave office. So what's the downside? And I think we know now what the downside was, right? We know what the downside was, but again and again and again, I think that Trump was underestimated or people refused to believe the evidence that was right in front of him because he acted like such a buffoon. They thought that he wasn't willing to go through with the threats, but in fact, he told us exactly what he was going to do. When the president of the United States says again and again and again before the election even that I will not accept any result of the election except my winning, then the problem on some level is the millions of people who are gonna follow him wherever he goes, but it's also the millions of people who refused to take him seriously, who refused to believe that Donald Trump was not gonna concede that he was going to keep going on. And for me, that moment really hit home and I think it comes across in the book. December 14th, even Attorney General Bill Barr has broken with Donald Trump by this moment, right? He comes out publicly on December 1st of 2020 and he says, there is no evidence of widespread fraud sufficient to overturn this election. And of course, Trump is furious with him, but even Bill Barr thinks it's over on December 14th because that's the date when the Electoral College has to meet when all 50 states have to certify their elections. That's it, right? You're over. January 6th, that's simply the ceremonial, you know, reconvening of Congress to count the ballots. That's it, right? And Barr says, okay, well, I can leave. My work here is done. The next day, Mitch McConnell, again, he's broken with Donald Trump by this point. He publicly congratulates Joe Biden. They were wrong. They, these guys who had been the big enablers of Donald Trump for four years, they underestimated him even then at this moment of crisis that he was gonna keep on going. And so I think, you know, let's focus on how we got into the situation where we got, right? The people surrounding Donald Trump still didn't really fundamentally understand who they were dealing with. And that there were also many who were enabling him. One of the things you took, you used the phrase hitting close to home. And there was one revelation in this book that really hit close to home if you live in Texas. And that was that Rick Perry was among the many who, before the votes were counted, started devising a strategy to overturn the results. He was with a number of folks, Donald Trump Jr., Ginny Thomas, we now know, others. That's unprecedented, yeah. We didn't have people talking openly at either party before this election about how they were going to actively overturn it before the votes were counted. Peter, what has changed? Well, what's changed is that we've discovered that the norms that we thought were inviolable were basically just advisory. You know what I mean? The things that, you know, somebody who's covered multiple presidents and you know this from your research and we have some of our friends in the audience who've covered many presidents, the things that we used to think were unthinkable turned out to be not unthinkable. They're not against the law even in some cases that you could do things that we would say, oh, you never could do that. And there's no, as Susan says, there doesn't seem to be any accountability at least at the moment for doing it. So you can do things like come up with fake electors and say, let's just go ahead and send those in and ask the vice president of the United States to accept fake electors overturning the clear and audited, you know, recounted will of the voters. Never would have considered doing anything like that. Al Gore did not consider doing that and he had a very close election. He was the vice president at that time. He got up there and batted down fellow Democrats who wanted to challenge some of the electors sent in in the 2000 election. He knew it was over, would never have thought to do that. Dan Quayle presided over his ticket's loss in 1992. Again and again, Richard Nixon in 1961, you know, and he had a much greater case for arguing that there was fraud there potentially than Donald Trump did, that's for sure. And every time in our history, there has never been a sitting president. Never been, we've had a lot of elections where people said, well, that was unfair. You know, they rigged the system in that sense or this sense, the rule should have been this or that. But you've never had a sitting president try to hold onto power despite the obvious, clear, fair and free election that defeated him. Never, nothing like that. And it's just, I know we've kind of gotten used to everything. Right, we've kind of like forgotten just how extraordinary that is. That's what happens in places that Susan and I covered overseas. It's never happened in the United States. As we look back at the Trump legacy, when the eyes of history are cast upon Donald Trump, Susan, is there anything that you think will be a positive reflection of his time in office? I don't ask that. I'm so glad you got that question. You know, I have to tell you Mark, you know, I've avoided it for a while. Peter and I, the book came out in September, we consider this to be the most difficult question that we receive in the course of the book tour. You know, usually you get to know a subject of your book, you know, better and you find things you didn't know about them as a person or, you know, Hillary Clinton was asked this question in one of the 2016 debates and she gave at the time, which would be sort of the conventional wisdom of what do you do? You say something nice about the man and his family. Well, he's a good father. Our book contains a fair number of examples that suggest that he's not the best father. So I can't really give you that as the answer in good conscience when his son, Don Jr. was born and his first wife, Ivana, wanted to name him Don Jr. Donald Trump said, well, are you sure? You know, I don't really want to give my name to somebody who could turn out to be a loser. You know, and there it went. So I'm not going to tell you that he's a better father than we thought, because I don't think that's true. You know, the view in Washington was that the country could survive four years of Trump, but not eight, given what a close call, the country underwent in January of 2020 and I do think sorry, 2021, you know, that's what the history book is going to remember. Barack Obama talked about leaders only aspiring to their own paragraph in history. I think we know what Donald Trump's paragraph in history is going to be, and it's not going to be a flattering one. What would you, if you were to encapsulate that, as you did so brilliantly in the book, the cast of the administration, the divisions in the administration, Peter, let me put it another way. Claire Booth, Luce, used to famously lecture presidents. She said, you will be remembered in one sentence. What will be your sentence? Wow, he doesn't even get a whole paragraph, just a sentence. Just, as you would illustrate, she would say, Lincoln, he freed the slaves. What might Donald Trump's sentence, or two, or three, be in history? You know, it's funny you ask. No, Peter's writing his obit. Yeah. Oh, really? Wow. At the New York Times, it should be clear. We write advanced obituaries on famous figures. We have them of all presidents, obviously, and vice presidents, and many others as well. We actually have, I think, thousands, if not, I could be wrong with a number. We have a huge number of advanced obits that are sitting in the system ready to defer their use. And obviously, it's important to have them for people like presidents. And I have written almost all of the living presidents' obits. So I've had that thought a lot. Like, what do you say? How do you come up with the one sentence? Because that's all you get in a lead that sums it up. And I'm rewriting the Trump one now, because it's a little dated. And I think it's what we just said. I think it's that you have this disruptive force who came and upended American politics. And at the end of the day, refused to accept that he had lost and tried to hold on to power through violence and lies. And that's a harsh judgment. I would say, now, to Susan's point, if you did he do anything that people would think are good. If you were a conservative, yes, he did. He had a lot of policy things if you're a conservative that you would agree with, right? Tax cuts, regulation cuts, more money for the military, Abraham Accord, you can name some things. Criminal justice reform, by the way, was a bipartisan bill. If you are anti-abortion, then you obviously appreciate the three justices he put on the Supreme Court that led to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. But I think that the first sentence is about your fidelity to the Constitution. You are, as a president, sworn to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. He's just told us in the last month alone he thinks the Constitution should be terminated when it comes to him holding on to power. How is that not the most important and the most singular thing that this president has done compared to the other 46 people who have had that office? Susan, let me deviate from Trump for a moment, probably happily for you, since you've lived this story for so long. But let me go back to Moscow and ask you about Vladimir Putin. What motivates Vladimir Putin? What does Vladimir Putin want right now? Vladimir Putin sees himself as a modern day czar, a reincarnation of Russia's imperial ambitions. And even as a young, not so former KGB agent, deputy mayor of St. Petersburg in the 1990s, the one picture that he hung on his wall even back then was that of Peter the Great. And he sees himself, as he said the other day, he said, well, we have acquired more territory. Russia is gaining. He sees himself in the line of Russia's leaders who even at great cost in lives and treasure managed to aggrandize and to make Russia an empire again. I think this was the sort of signature moment for Vladimir Putin was the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. And from the first day that he was president, he didn't have the means at that time at his disposal. He came in to power not that long after Russia had defaulted on its debt, was in an enormous financial crisis, was at war inside the country to prevent Chechnya from breaking away, was a dead or nation, was on its knees. And yet even from the very beginning of his very unlikely time in the Kremlin, Putin really saw himself as the restorer and the Resurrector of Russia's imperial power, not just within its own borders, but in its world and in the world at large. And I do think that he has a different tolerance both for risk and certainly invading Ukraine was an incredibly risky thing to do. But where we see foolhardiness and waste and tragedy and the horror of this invasion, I think Putin's willingness to keep going on and on for a long time is something that shouldn't be underestimated. He wants to go down in history and thinks that 100 or 200 years from now nobody's gonna care how many Ukrainians or even how many Russians die in the effort. What they're gonna remember is the glory of a greater Russia. In the same way that St. Petersburg, the city that he was born in, do you remember the bodies of those thousands and thousands who died to make the city or do you remember Peter the Great's city? Peter, what happens in Ukraine in the days and weeks and months ahead? Well, we should be humble and making predictions given that we've gotten it wrong every other time, right? I mean, the one thing that's been right was the Biden administration put out intelligence before the war began to say he is gathering to invade and they repeatedly called him on various schemes and false flag operations to expose them before they happened so that they could not create a false predicate and say, well, we had no choice but to go in. I think that was a very effective thing, by the way. It forced Putin to basically own what he's done, which is that it is an invasion of conquest, as Susan said, it's not in reaction to some sort of provocation by the Ukrainians that they faked. Having said that, every other prediction that has been made this year about that has been wrong. The American intelligence agencies in the military thought he would be very successful and at least conquering the country in a military sense, not that there wouldn't be a continuing guerrilla war against occupation, but they were gonna take Kiev within seven to 10 days, they were gonna be able to topple the government, they were gonna be able to seize this country and that has been wrong. And so I think we ought to be humble about that. I remember a few months ago I asked a White House official, what's going on, what do you think? He said, well, the Ukrainians think they can take back territory by the end of the year, but we're not really sure that they can. We're kind of discouraging them. Well, in fact, the Ukrainians have done exactly that. They've taken back Khursan, they've taken back a lot of territory. So I think we ought to be humble about suggesting we know what's going to happen. Having said that, the winner will probably be a little bit more static because it's harder to wage war in that part of the world with a great deal of movement. They're gonna dig in, Russia's dug in a lot of trenches. The question is like, there's not a negotiated peace that comes until after one side and the other have decided that they've lost. In other words, Putin is not going to negotiate his way out until he's decided that staying is more costly than leaving, right? And that could take years. That could really take, think about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. It took 10 years for them to realize that staying was costlier than leaving and then they could finally leave and say, look, it's worse, just eat it and get out. Right now he would not do that because it would be an admission of defeat. But every single thing he wanted to do with this invasion has turned out not to be the case. He did not topple it. He did not drive Ukrainians away. They thought that 50% of Ukrainians would be on their side. They were wrong. They thought that they would drive a wedge between the United States and Europe. They were wrong. They thought that they would drive a wedge in NATO. They were wrong. NATO is larger today. There's a larger border between Russia and NATO today because of Finland and Sweden, which didn't have a border, but Finland and Sweden joining. So every calculation he has made has been wrong so far. And I think that therefore he ought to be humble as well about his predictions going forward. And I think we can give Biden due credit for revitalizing a very weakened NATO to rise up against the invasion. Donald Trump wanted to pull out of NATO. That's one of the things in our book. He was much more serious about that than people realize. And Biden has, in fact, kept the alliance, put it back together really. And I think that's an important thing. Even Europeans would say so. If you look at the larger Biden record since he took office as the chronicler of now four presidents, five presidents, excuse me. What is your evaluation of Joseph Biden right now? Well, I think it's too soon to say. Every evaluation at the two-year mark has been wrong. Reagan would have been seen as a failure after two years, which, because he had a bad midterm, right? Clinton, obviously, was a failure at two years because he had a bad midterm. Obama, same. It's way too soon. I do think that there is a little irrational exuberance among Democrats who think that because they avoided the red wave, suddenly everything's okay again. It's not. Biden's numbers are the same as they were before. He's still in the low 40s. He's not suddenly become a popular president. Then my colleague, Nate Cohen, had a really important story in today's paper showing that voters voting for the House races, 51% voted Republican, 48% voted Democrat. The Republicans won the House races. What's interesting is, had the Republicans who voted for their House candidates in those swing states voted for their Senate candidates, the Republicans would be in charge of the Senate right now, which suggests coming back to our original topic, which is that Trump endorsed candidates, cost them the Senate. They would have won in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and so forth had that Republicans simply stuck with their party, but they didn't want to. So that suggests that we're still a very evenly divided country to me right now, and that President Biden has had a lot of successes that he can claim, particularly legislative successes, keeping the alliance together on Ukraine, but he still faces a very divided country in his hopes of unifying us and getting us past this era have obviously not happened yet. Susan, we don't know the first line of Peter's obituary for Donald Trump yet, although you may know it. We New York Times readers don't know that yet, but I think without question, one of the first lines of Joe Biden's obituary will be the fact that he defeated Donald Trump the presidency in 2020. Donald Trump has announced his candidacy for the presidency in 2024. Joe Biden has yet to do that. Will Joe Biden run for the presidency? Well, Donald Trump has proven to be a uniter of one thing, and that is Democrats who can't necessarily agree on a lot of things, but they did agree and came together around a Biden candidacy in 2020 that was really premised on the idea that Trump represented some fundamental threat to the country, something more along the lines of an existential challenge outside of the normal debates of policy. And I believe that Joe Biden thinks today that regardless of his age, he is the best equipped candidate to defeat Donald Trump once again in his party. So to the extent that Trump remains the front runner, albeit a beaten up front runner for the Republican nomination, I think that makes Biden more likely to get in. It appears that the unexpected success in beating back a red wave in November has also heartened and emboldened the White House. There's all sorts of tea leaf reading these days in Washington. Peter's colleague reported the other day a story from the recent state dinner for French president Emmanuel Macron in which Jill Biden suggested to the French leader that Biden was really seriously considering running again. Macron then gave a toast to his reelection bid. Look, Joe Biden's already the oldest president in American history. If he runs for a second term in office, by the end of that term, he would be 86 years old. And that is going to be a very significant issue if he runs again. Now, of course, if he runs against Trump, Trump isn't much younger than Biden. And the man who brought us person, woman, man, camera, TV is not necessarily in the strongest position to be running and criticizing his opponent's age. Look, we live in this very polarized moment. Politics is more team sport than ever before. Peter pointed out that essentially it's a kind of a 50-50 election result once again in 2022. And we're seeing these huge swings in control of our institutions based on relatively small swings in our electorate. And so that can make a difference, but the truth is that politics is a choice. It's not in this whole big country, can we come up with somebody better than two octogenarians? You know, you'd like to think so. You would like to think so. But I think today, as we're talking, it is very likely and very possible that we could have a 2024 election that is a repeat of the 2020 election. Whatever happens, we hope you come back. Ladies and gentlemen, we marked a milestone yesterday. 50 years ago yesterday, Linda Johnson stood upon this stage and made his very last public speech. It was at a civil rights symposium that he had convened and he spoke about racial equity. And at the climax of that speech, he invoked the same words that he used in his rhetorical height when he was making a plea for voting rights in 1965. He said, we shall overcome. And as Peter and Susan's book made clear, we overcame the perils, the challenges to our democracy posed by Donald Trump. But it was largely thanks to the Fourth Estate, largely thanks to reporters like Peter and Susan holding our president to account. So I wanna thank Peter and Susan, not only for being here today, but for helping us during a very perilous time. Thank you so much for being here today. Thank you very much. Thank you. That was great. Thank you so much.