 I want to welcome you to an evening with Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, co-hosted by the LBJ Presidential Library and the Harry Ransom Center. My name is Steve Ennis and I'm director of the Ransom Center. This conversation is my friend and colleague Mark up to Grove, president and CEO of the LBJ Foundation. Over a distinguished journalistic career, Bob Woodward has been one of our closest observers and chroniclers of the American presidency. While Robert Costa, former moderator and managing editor of Washington Week and now a political reporter for the Washington Post, has had an intimate vantage point on our own evolving national political story. Their co-authored book, Peril, is an account of the recent presidential transition. As we know, the peaceful transfer of power has been one of the defining features of American democracy and a powerful statement to the world of the durability of our constitution. As Peril makes clear, it is precisely that that is now threatened. Bob Woodward's career has spanned two of the most perilous crises in American democracy, the 1972 Watergate break-in and its political aftermath and the four-year assault on democratic norms and institutions that remains the hallmark of the Trump presidency. Peril follows Bob Woodward's recent books Fear and Rage and all three are noteworthy for their extraordinary access to the Trump White House and in the case of Peril, the Trump and Biden campaigns and key figures in the Biden administration. All three are based on an extensive record of insider interviews and each book has made news with never before reported revelations on a story we thought we knew well. Perhaps the most important question raised by Peril was the one only we can answer. Have we just witnessed the end of the Trump presidency or are we witnessing some new and enduring force in American political life? It is in our hands to write that conclusion and Peril is a passionate wake-up call for all who care about the health of our democracy. Our moderator, Mark Uptegrove, is himself an accomplished journalist and historian and author most recently of The Last Republicans inside the extraordinary relationship between George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush published in 2017. And now please join me in welcoming Robert Costa, Bob Woodward, and Mark Uptegrove. Well, Bob Woodward and Robert Costa welcome and huge congratulations on the smash success of Peril. Thank you. It's good to have you both. I want to start with you, Bob. You have this is by my count your 20th book in almost 50 years. You've teamed up with some pretty famous co-authors. What made you team up with Robert Costa for this one? Well, and there's an interesting moment in 2016 where we encountered each other in the newsroom. And Robert said, you know, we should go interview this guy, Donald Trump, who's running for president. People are not taking him seriously enough. And so Robert Costa set it up. And we decided we would ask questions about the power of the presidency and what the president does and not look for traditionally for a news statement from Trump, but go into what the office is and something Mark, you spent your life studying. And so it was over 90 minutes with Trump. And he said lots of things, including real power is fear, which gave the title of the first book I did on Trump. And he also said that he brings outrage in people, which was the second book. And so Costa is the real expert on Trump and that introduction together. And so we decided on this project to really spend eight or nine months extracted from the daily news business so we could look at Trump and Biden in depth. Robert, what was your sense of Donald Trump in 2016? Did you think he had a shot at the Republican nomination, let alone the presidency? I did believe he had a shot and Woodward said to me at the time, if you believe that as a reporter, you need to ask those governing questions. So I'm so glad we had the opportunity to interview Trump together. And before that interview, Woodward and I set out a series of about 10 or 20 questions to really dig deep with someone who could be commander in chief, president of the United States. And what I saw in Trump in 2016 was this ability to use his celebrity, his comfort with marketing, with having a public life, his ability to find the pulse of the Republican base voter and really cobble that all together into an overwhelming political persona. But this is a persona that after four years in government, was a total outsider at the start. But at the end, much more comfortable, in fact, fully comfortable with power. When you think about this trilogy, I really think about how I always thought Trump could be president back then, but I never knew how he would be as president. And if you think about how Bob Woodward's first book on Trump fear begins, it's with AIDS stealing documents off of the president's desk. And in a sense, peril near the end has Trump putting documents in the hands of the vice president, the Eastman memo, to try to convince him to throw the election to the House of Representatives. It's quite a spectrum of a presidency. Let me come, we'll come back to that in a moment, Robert. Donald Trump surprised the world in many respects by winning the election of 2016. Obviously, he loses the election of 2020. What in your mind was the turning point? What was there an inflection point throughout the election cycle in 2020, where it looked like Donald Trump was just going to be on the losing end of the 2020 election? You know, we we chart that. And one of the things you learn in doing these books, Mark, you know, is chronology is so important. And one event leads to another to another. And what we found is that General Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs concluded that Trump was in mental decline. We showed the scenes where Trump is screaming in the Oval Office, just enraged of losing his bearings, going off the rails. And he created the environment for the national security crisis that we discovered, namely, and this this was the big shot for Robert and myself, I believe that what Trump had done set the stage that there was such alarm, particularly in the days before the 2020 election, when General Milley got intelligent showing that the Chinese thought we were going to attack the Chinese and everyone went on military alert. This was a secret national security crisis that really very few people knew about. And that what Milley did, which he's confirmed now in sworn testimony in the last couple of weeks, normally takes months or years for something to be confirmed that he called the head of the Chinese military generally, and use the five year back channel relationship that they had to say, we are not going to attack you. This is not the way it works. There would be a buildup. There would be tension. I would even be calling you at this point, we are not in this arena at all. We are not going to attack you. This is not one of those buildup moments. And generally, astonishingly said, okay, I'm going to take you at your word. And this crisis abated, but it only abated after the absolute shock that Milley felt and looking at this intelligence, as we know, that miscommunication is the seed of war. War is often something that occurs not planned necessarily by people. He worried that the Chinese would make a first move of advantage. Pearl Harbor attack us if they really thought we were going to attack them. And so that leads to the second moment, two days after the insurrection at the Capitol. Robert, I want to go back to the campaign and ask you, do you think there was a turning point in the 2020 campaign? One point where Donald Trump looked like he was not going to come out the victor in the election. You've been intensively on the campaign beat, but did you say to yourself, at one point, you know what, I don't think he has it this time. I would build upon Bob Woodward's point that the crisis moment around George Floyd's murder and Trump's reaction to that was certainly a turning point where as a reporter, I would pinpoint the beginning of the unraveling of a presidency and his lashing out at military advisors and officials. But in addition to that turning point of Trump's conduct, I would add another significant turning point after spending nine or 10 months reporting back on the campaign, a campaign I had heavily covered, but digging even deeper, I would pinpoint April of 2020. And that is when Joe Biden, at a later stage in his political career, finally becomes the effective Democratic presidential nominee. And at that moment, instead of having to prepare for a long battle against the progressive wing of his party all the way up into the convention, he instead consolidates the support of Sanders, who works closely with him, has a friendly relationship with Biden, and the support of Senator Elizabeth Warren, another progressive star. And we have a scene in our book that shows Biden's human personal touch is able to cement the bond with Warren when her brother dies. He has a phone call with Senator Warren about sibling relationships. And in that discussion of sibling relationships, you can, in a sense, read the political undertones of how Biden wants to build a bond, a sibling like bond politically with Warren, with the progressives. And you see Biden be able to activate the whole Democratic Party on a mission to defeat Trump rather than getting mired in debates over Medicare for all, or whether he's progressive enough. And the reason I would add that is Biden has brought together his party by April, early May, 2020. And so then when Woodward's point of the unraveling around George Floyd begins, Biden sources have told us for the book that that was a moment where Biden really saw that the choice was more apparent than ever, that the party was together. Now it was time to remind the country of the stakes for democracy and of having Trump for another term. So the election occurs on November 3, Tuesday, November 3 on Wednesday, November 4, Joe Biden is declared the victor. And Trump makes a statement and calls it a total fraud on the American public. But then hours later, he privately asks Kellyanne Conway, as stated in your book, how the hell did we lose the vote to Joe Biden? So Bob, when did things turn for Biden up? Privately, he seems willing to concede that he lost the election legitimately. And yet there's this public front that the election has been stolen for him. When did... Well, very quickly, when he... In this period from the election up for the next 10 days of November is one of the periods we concentrated on. And you see that Trump starts this whole line of, oh, the election was stolen. Now he's actually, he started that on election night. And it's amazing what I mean, I just want to read, it's a little specific, but on specifics, you know, as a historian things turn, this is Gina Haspel, who's the CIA director. And on November 10th, so this is a week after the election, Trump has fired the Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper, somebody very well respected in the national security community. So Trump can install somebody who's going to do his bidding as Secretary of Defense. And what Haspel says is yesterday, the firing of Esper was appalling. We are on the way to a right-wing coup. The whole thing is insanity. He, Trump, is acting like a six-year-old with a tantrum. Now this Haspel, who her comments and remarks, this is really the first time they're made public in detail. Somebody who worked as a case officer in the CIA, senior official for 35 years, spent her life assessing instability in countries abroad, and for her to make that assessment of Trump. When we first heard it, Kosta and I were stunned. Here is somebody saying, not in some equivocating way, saying, this is a six-year-old with a tantrum. And we can't run that way. And then a couple of days later, after they have the National Security Council meeting about maybe attacking or what they're going to do with Iran, and some of this appeals to Trump. And again, Haspel says, what are we going to do? Are we going to lash out at a country like Iran because of the president's ego? So Trump has done these things and laid the foundation for doubt and assessments of his mental stability. And as we report extensively, so many Republican leaders who seem in public to be behind him in private really disdain and ridicule Trump. Robert, so there's this behind-the-scenes effort to show the American public that the election has been made. Take us through that, if you would. What does that look like in the White House? The White House essentially becomes a war room around a strategy to take back the election. Talk about what that looks like on a day-to-day basis after the election is held. It begins in a haphazard manner. Rudy Giuliani takes control of the Trump legal team in the days after the election, effectively elbowing out people like Matt Morgan, who were the campaign's general counsels and lawyers. He wants to be in command, Trump's lawyer. And so he starts to pursue litigation, working with various Trump allies in different states. But they keep failing court after court, state after state. The Trump legal strategy led by Giuliani is an abysmal failure and the president begins to get frustrated. And so by December, now the U.S. attorneys, Bill Barr, have not provided Trump with the ammunition he wants legally or politically. Sidney Powell and her voting machine conspiracy theory hasn't played out in an effective way for Trump. He's lost in the courts. So it becomes less than about what you can do to make the case that the election was rigged, but how to find votes. And that's when the president begins to call people like the Georgia Secretary of State wanting votes, wanting to find votes. And most importantly, after the legal strategy fails in December. In late December, the pivot happens from the court fight to the January 6th focus and to make Vice President Pence's role an area of concentration, but also the idea of having alternate slates of electors. But because they don't think about this in a serious way, even organizationally, until late December, it's very rapid and not entirely organized. So when John Eastman, this conservative lawyer and others start to think about having alternate slates, they're not happening actively in the States. They're only, in a sense, social media campaigns. So the big picture is based on our reporting, we see this evolving strategy that has flecks, if not streaks of desperation to it at every turn, trying to give the president a sense that he can hold on to power, even though it's clear to so many around him, that's not possible. So, Bob, Mike Pence becomes the center unwittingly of this whole drama that the entire Trump presidency, that the continuity of the Trump presidency is contingent on Mike Pence towing the line on resisting certifying the election on January 6th, characterize Mike Pence in this whole drama. Well, there's extensive reporting in the book, and you can see the road he walked, and it actually was not in his straight line. He wanted to accommodate Trump at many points. He was looking for a way out. And see, one of the surprising findings was that Pence talked to Dan Quayle, the former vice president under Bush senior, Quayle and Pence being both vice presidents in their time from Indiana. And Quayle literally read the Constitution and the law to Pence and said, you have no legal out your function as president of the Senate is to go up and count the votes. And you have no choice. But Pence is up and down on this. And the role of Pence's lawyers and advisors on this is you see the kind of way Pence worked himself into a corner, because there were so many people saying, you can't do this, except Trump was saying, oh, no, wouldn't it be cool if you had this power? You could just get up there and decide we're going to send the election to the House of Representatives, the possibility, maybe even the likelihood that more states could vote for Trump rather than Biden, and that that would install Trump. And this was something that the drama of that, I mean, Costa and I, it's almost its own book, because if you see that if Pence had taken the the route of, oh, I'm just, you know, I'm going to say I'm confused. I don't know what to do and walk away could have constituted and triggered a real constitutional crisis. Pence did do the right thing. But it's it's it's quite a story. Someday somebody's going to take all this information and do a very powerful Broadway dramatic play, just called Pence. And being in this situation, and you you see it is a window into his character and his soul. And of course, whenever you can do that is reporters. That that's what you're going for, the reality. I want to go back, Bob, I totally agree with what you said about January 6th. January 6th is the is the climax of this book, and it is riveting throughout. I commend it to our audience. But Robert, take us to the White House and tell us what's happening at the White House and in the mind of Donald Trump on the morning of January 6th. When we began this project, we were like everyone else who watched the events on January 6th, deeply troubled and unsettled as citizens to see our capital as Americans stormed and attacked. And the initial reporting, good reporting on Donald Trump's day was that he was passively watching television in the dining room next to the Oval Office, that he was somehow an observer of events. But as we went back and did the reporting for peril, it became apparent that Trump was anything but a passive observer. He was aggressive. And it's not the day itself that actually reveals the story of the insurrection, but the days before, in particular the night before. And on two days before, in fact, January 4th, he's in the Oval Office pressuring Pence with John Eastman, the conservative lawyer alongside him, who wrote this two page memo, which many are calling a roadmap to a coup and said to Mike Pence, listen to John, listen to John, follow through with this plan. Pence resisted. And so the pressure campaign mounted in a way that history, I predict will long look back on January 5th. This is such a critical day for American democracy because you had senators like Mike Lee of Utah being pressured to buy into the Eastman plan. You had state lawmakers hurrying about trying to maybe think about alternate slates of electors, the Department of Justice under pressure. We'll hear more about the Department of Justice in the coming days. His testimony is revealed on the January 6th committee. And you had Trump himself talking to Giuliani and Bannon late into the evening, talking to Pence in the Oval Office. This was the ultimate use of power to keep power for Donald Trump. He went to every lane he could. In fact, he even issued a statement in Mike Pence's name near midnight on January 5th, trying to say to the world that Mike Pence is with me. And so on the morning of January 6th, he makes one final call, talks to Pence, and then Pence says no again, issues his letter and goes to the Capitol where protesters soon call on him to be hung. That was Trump on January 6th, watching events that he had put into motion, not just watching some kind of sporadic insurrection. Let me quote one of the things I think was most interesting in this book, Bob. It is a conversation that Trump has with Hope Hicks. There are many inside the Trump camp who try to reason with Trump and try to get him off this whole notion that the election was rigged. Hope Hicks, who had been his communications director and then left for a job at Fox News, comes back to the White House in its waning days. And she is among the many, this chorus of voices who asks Trump to step it down. And one of the things she says is, you have to think about your legacy. And you quote him as saying in response, it's not who I am to give up. It's not in me to do that. I don't care about my legacy. My legacy doesn't matter. If I lose, that will be my legacy. My people expect me to fight, and if I don't, I'll lose it. So I would ask you, Bob, because you've interviewed him so often, and I think you've gotten to know him over the years, what does Donald Trump want? Well, Donald Trump wants vindication, wants power, again, presidential power. But so much of this when you dissect it, and I guess a long project like this is a bit of a dissection, pulling the parts and kind of saying, well, wait, what's going on here? And as Costa says, we'll leave the soul of Pence to the church, and let's leave the psychiatry on Trump to others. And people, I just think this is one of the problems that people who examine Trump get so angry at him. And anger is not a useful tool for a reporter or a historian like yourself. You have to detach yourself as much as you can, certainly emotionally, and say, okay, what really happened here? I want to go back to another, but talk about Ronald Reagan again, Robert, and he was called the Teflon president. But in the end, things did stick to Ronald Reagan, or Ron Contra as an example, or something that stuck to Ronald Reagan. Donald Trump seems to have done what he did in his presidency with relative impunity to, you know, he was not impeached, or he was impeached twice, but he was never convicted by the Senate in either case. So why does Donald Trump, why does nothing stick to Donald Trump? Why does he seem to get away with this and retain his popularity with a very zealous core of supporters? When you read Woodward and Bernstein's reporting and about Nixon in crisis, his support in the Republican Party diminished by the end just a handful of votes on the Republican side for that possible Senate trial in 1974, and that lack of Republican support amid crisis is part of why Nixon decides to resign. In 2021, this year, Trump in crisis actually solidifies Trump's core support within both the hierarchy and the core base of the Republican Party. Now this isn't universal, people like Leader McConnell, the minority leader in the Senate, and Kevin McCarthy have varying levels of concern. McConnell is especially unhappy with the events of January 6 and believes Trump politically is a fading brand and off the track thoroughbred, he says privately, to others in our book. But what you see is by the summer of this year, Trump is being briefed in Mar-a-Lago at his New Jersey golf club about his polling, that his voters are with him more than ever, that he has immense political capital within the Republican Party. So you see the reality is, Trump carries on and has the support despite not only despite what's happening, but sometimes because of it, his anti-establishment political positioning, populism and nationalism, incendiary rhetoric, celebrity, all has given him this unique standing in a Republican Party that found itself in political winter during the Obama presidency and saw Trump, even with all of his political and personal flaws in their view, was a savior of sorts to a party that was growing old and sclerotic in both its ideas and its demographics. Bob, I mentioned earlier, you've been making news around presidents for almost a half a century. You brought down a president. It is a stunning career. As I mentioned, this is your 20th book. What keeps you going? Well, it's a great job, as you know. And I mean, just think of it, you get to wake up in the morning and say, what's going on? What don't we know? Who can I meet with? How can I get somebody's diary? How can I get documents and so forth? And so I think it's the most interesting job in America, quite frankly. I think this issue of why Trump is going to be debated in history for decades, if not 100 years. And I, in one of my interviews with him last year, and I need to emphasize for our book, Costa and I, we were not able to interview Trump. He declined, but for my second book, Rage, I interviewed Trump 18 times for 10 hours, one of the most extraordinary experiences. And at one point, I'm in the Oval Office talking to Trump about history and something he is not really tuned into. But we're discussing about how he won, why he won. And I said, you know, the old order in the Republican Party was losing ground, was fading, was dying. And I believe the old order in the Democratic Party, the other party, was also dying. And he came along and I just, there's that old, that grandfather clock in the Oval Office. And I pointed and said, you seized history's clock because you had two dying old political parties. And he just jumped and said, yes, I will, I will again, referring to, he thought he was going to win in 2020. And I think there's a lot to that. And it requires lots of examination, just not of people in the Republican Party, but in the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party, and we see evidence of this today, what's going on in the divisions within the party that President Biden, at least so far, does not seem to be able to bring together and come up with some of this legislation, which they also all ardently want in some form, but very different form. So you've got a political system that was disintegrating, and Trump filled it, and he filled it with emotionalism, as Robert was saying, as a candidate, he created this sense of, you know, I'm going to fix things. I've got ideas. I am going to, even though I'm wealthy and part of the elite, I am going to help you. And we, as we see this now, I think an important element of the polling shows that a lot of people who don't have college degrees support Trump. And a lot of people who do have college degrees are against Trump, but there are more people in this country who don't have college degrees. And it's not just a matter of education. It's a matter of somebody was telling me this morning, in fact, somebody I know very well, who's very well educated, not only is for Trump all the way, but believe it or not, is convinced that the COVID-19 pandemic is a fraud, is a hoax. And my head was spinning. How can somebody, but they think this and we've got to figure out what's going on and present information in a neutral way and not get angry. Robert, Bob mentioned earlier that you saw Donald Trump's great potential in 2016. You really saw him as a viable candidate at that time. And while you might not be clairvoyant, I wonder if you, if you had your crystal ball, do you think that Donald Trump will win the nomination of his party in 2024? I have two words that sit above my desk right here. And when I was working on peril with Woodward, I would stare at these two words as we typed out our transcripts and our stories that became chapters. And those two words are assume nothing, assume nothing. And it's really my guiding principle as a reporter. And when people give me credit for taking Trump seriously in 2014, 2015, I say that's valid. I did as a reporter, but not just him. I was covering at the same time in a very serious way, Senator Bernie Sanders or Vermont. And one of the rare people covering his campaign, especially in the first year of his flirtation with Iran, and ultimately he decides to run with him in a small diner in Des Moines, Iowa, when he makes a first trip out there with almost no media attention. And I assumed he could be the Democratic nominee. I thought he could be the nominee. I thought the Trump could be the nominee. And I assume nothing about whether they were serious or not too often in the media, we try to put labels on people immediately in politics. And the reason I thought Trump was viable, Bernie was viable, and I believe they could both be viable. Again, Bernie Sanders probably won't run in 2024. Trump could easily win the nomination in presidency again. But so could anyone else who's not just from the political sphere, but the media sphere. And this all comes back to why I have assumed nothing on my computer screen, which is because long story short, a formative experience for me as a reporter is when I was starting out, I covered the Tea Party movement in 2009. And this was a year after the economic catastrophe, the collapse of the economy, the recession in 08, 0708, and especially at the end of 08. And what I began to detect anecdotally in my reporting in 2009, was an unraveling of what I would call the American consensus in both parties that people on the left were moving toward this Occupy Wall Street movement, very anti-establishment populist. And on the right, they were very anti-establishment and populist, but moving more toward an anti-immigration position, hardline on that front, and nationalistic when it comes to policy and non-interventionist on foreign policy. And I saw the rise of Occupy Wall Street, the rise of Ron Paul, and our politics in this country are churning. The traditional things that have moored us together politically, you think back to the 96th election that Bob Woodward covered so well in his book, The Choice, much more of a traditional election, soccer moms being courted by Clinton and Dole. Now we have bigger stakes recovering, democracy, not just red versus blue. And so when I look ahead to 2024 to answer your question, it's not so much about answering which candidate is going to emerge, but keep an eye out for the outsider always, and also be ready to assume nothing about where this could all go, and keep attention on the democratic issues, small D democratic issues that are at play. Bob, I'll give you the last word. I talked about that very revealing scene in the book where Hope Hicks has the conversation with Donald Trump about his legacy. And Donald Trump talks about his legacy being the fighter who's going to not accept defeat. But if you had to write Donald Trump's story now and about his life and his impact, what would you say Donald Trump's legacy is? Well, the clear legacy is his four years as president. And as we explained in the book, he precipitated a national security crisis, the likes of which perhaps we never saw in this country. And he is running on this unsupported claim that the election of 2000 was stolen. So we don't know. And see, this is the virtue of, as Robert has said when we were doing one interview, he said, when you're doing contemporary reporting, there's such a temptation to try to predict and look forward. And what we decided on this book is we were just going to look back. What really happened and more like what you would do as a historian and dig into it and talk to people and not get into the prediction game. And unlike Robert, I mean, whenever I've made a prediction, I've almost always been wrong. So I'm not so sure. I mean, I don't have that skill. And I also don't have the more I think about it and get immersed in this. I'm not inclined to because there's always the surprise candidate. There's always the surprise event. This year, 2021, so much of our politics and our national security status in the world, all of the economic issues that exist in the world in the country are so defined by those events. 9-11, 2001, the terrorist attack that killed 3,000 people really set us on a course. And I was working on a book on George W. Bush's tax cut at the time and immediately realized the tax cut is not much of a story compared to how he deals with 9-11. And no one really, there are people who say they kind of saw it coming and there was evidence, but that was a jolt to the country. And so are there future jolts out there? I certainly would not discount them and almost to be quite direct, we'll expect them. There are things that are going to happen that none of the crystal balls get at. The very riveting book is Harold. And my guests have been Robert Costa and the legendary Bob Woodley. Robert, Bob, thanks so much for being with us. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for joining us. Signed book-plated copies of peril are available for sale at lbjstore.com. A special thanks to our co-host this evening, the Harry Ransom Center, and our programming sponsor, the Moody Foundation. These programs are also made possible by contributions from our members. If you aren't already part of the lbj library family, you can support programs like this by joining us at lbjfriends.org. I'm Mark up to Grove. See you next time.