The

Divider: A Conversation with Peter Baker

Sat, Oct 22, 2022 11:59AM 29:12

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

trump, people, book, white house, president, term, election, question, wrote, power, thought, kelly,
military, view, presidency, country, documents, administration, pushed, long

SPEAKERS

David Rothkopf, Peter Baker

D David Rothkopf 00:00

oh nine well 28 to three. This is deep state radio, coming to you direct from our super secret
studio in the third sub basement of the Ministry of snark in Washington DC, and from other
undisclosed locations across America and around the world. Hello, and welcome to another one
of those special episodes of our podcast where we take a deep dive into a book that we think
you really ought to get and read. By now, all of you, given what we talked about here, have
heard about many, perhaps some of you have gotten and started to read the divider Trump in
the White House 2017 to 2021, by Peter Baker, who's the chief White House correspondent of
The New York Times, and his wife, Susan Glasser, who is a staff writer at The New Yorker, but
we wanted to give you a bit of more insight into it. And we were fortunate to have Peter be able
to join us here today. How are you doing, Peter?

P Peter Baker 01:17

I'm good. Thank you for having me really appreciate it.

D David Rothkopf 01:19

Well, the book is a spectacular success, I have to say, as somebody who has also just written a
book about the Trump administration, which I mean, I suppose everybody you meet, can say
that. And having spent the past two years researching this thing, I read it, and on page after
page, there was a new revelation. It is, I think, 750 pages long, but it reads much shorter than
that. Because it is so compelling, and dramatic, and sometimes comic and sometimes
infuriating. It's just a tour de force. So let's begin by that. Let me begin with the compliment,
spectacular piece of work. But let me pose the first question. And I can only say I can't help but
do this in light of the work that I've been doing as well. You know, you talk about the divider,
the title, you know, talks a little bit about Trump's political strategy of dividing the country have
not have not been unifying force. But as somebody who's been interested in policy and
process, what struck me was the way he divided. The people who work for him and the
government of Franklin Roosevelt famously said that he didn't want his right hand to know
 what his left hand was doing. I don't think it was that conscious in Trump's part, he wanted
everybody to do what he said. But very quickly, in the administration, there became a division
between the people who were sort of inclined to say, Yes, sir. And the people who recognize
that there were some dysfunctional elements to this, and who felt that they had to sort of run a
parallel government. That's what my takeaway wasn't doing my research. I got it from your
book. Was that also your takeaway?

P Peter Baker 03:21

Yeah, no, I think that's about right. And first of all, let me thank you for having me on the
program today, and congratulations to you on your book, which I think comes out in a week and
a half or so. Is that right? Yeah. I can't wait to do it.

D David Rothkopf 03:36

Yes, yes, it does. As you know, the best day and writing a book is getting the contract and
finishing the book. Publication day is never the best.

P Peter Baker 03:49

It's just too nerve racking among other things, right? Yes. No, exactly. Right. Yeah. It's good to
have as every every writer has ever said. It's good having written rather than.

D David Rothkopf 04:00

Yeah, right, or having to write.

P Peter Baker 04:02

I think you're right about that. I think you're right. What was striking about the Trump White
House was how tribal it was. And it wasn't just, I mean, look, every White House and you've
chronicled this in your other books, too, obviously, and the NSC and others, plenty of
administration's that had cleavages. I mean, to think back to the, you know, Reagan era, of
course, you had, you know, Jim Baker and Ed Meese is a Copic in an area I'm familiar with from
our book on Jim Baker, but none of them comes close. I don't think to what was happening in
the Trump administration, that the differences were more pronounced. They were more, they're
bitter, more bitter. And they're more fundamental, I think, to your point about people who
believe they were actually trying to save the country, from the president himself, in some cases
on the one hand, and now on the other hand, to audiologists who believe that that Trump is the
second coming of Andrew Jackson or go whoever else they thought he was and therefore not
only could not be questioned should not be questioned, that was in fact, what Stephen Miller
said one of the early TV appearances his his decisions shall not be questioned, as Even Miller
said that of course, it also was personality was also ambition. It was also, you know, quest for
power. And it was, you know, a toxic mix of all of these things in which sometimes Alliance has
shifted and changed depending on the day in which people could, you know, go after each
 other are trying to save themselves literally from the very start. People were being interviewed
for jobs in that White House and interview or like Reince Priebus representing the RNC
establishment crowd, or Steve Bannon representing the Breitbart crowd, or the Jared Kushner
representing the family, you know, quasi Democrats or what have you, you know, they wouldn't
be interviewed. And they would be asked, okay, I need you to come here and be loyal to me,
not to the president, not to the country, but loyal to me, because I'm already in a knife fight
with X, Y, and Z. And so there was never a moment where in that people in that White House
felt like they were pedaling in the same direction. They were always fighting with each other,
and took great consequences. You point out, I mean, the notion that the present itself, at least
in the view of a lot of people work for him was a clear and present danger to the country raises
all kinds of questions about what the duty of the people who work for him really is.

D David Rothkopf 06:14

It's true, and there was no figure that emerged. I didn't find it in your book, I didn't haven't
found it and looking at it, who was kind of that James Baker figure who was ultimately able to
triumph over the chaos or impose order on right, because Trump was constantly disrupting his
own government.

P Peter Baker 06:37

He didn't want order. He didn't want there to be a system or a structure. You hated the idea of
it. You know, he asked one, he says, Who do you report to? He says, Well, I think I report to
Vice Premier says no, you report to me. You know, there was he didn't even know what his
legislative affairs director did. When John Kelly took over as a second Chief of Staff, a retired
Four Star Marine General who thought he could make it a little bit more like the military that he
had experienced. He discovered that the President knighted states was kind of disobeying the
rules that Kelly had put in place and going around his back, Kelly would be trying to monitor his
phone call. So the President had another aide go out to the Apple store and buy him a new
phone that Kelly wouldn't know about. I mean, they literally, he was constitutionally incapable
of discipline and structure. And you know, from his point of view, that's what it worked over the
years. So why should he why should he make himself out to be something he wasn't, but it was
the most extreme version of what Rob Porter called the Adhocracy. Rob Porter, of course, was
his staff Secretary and his father, Roger Porter, and worked for other Republican presidents,
including George HW Bush, as his domestic policy adviser, and was a Harvard professor at
Harvard wrote a book about the adequacy of a White House, meaning the lack of structure at
bad times when a president is sort of making up decisions on the fly and the consequences that
that has, well, there's never been a more Adhocracy White House

D David Rothkopf 07:56

than the Trump White House. And that was apparent from the very beginning, right? I mean,
you know, he's came in, but he blew up his own transition process. And from the very earliest
days, people I spoke to were kind of like, this was not like anything I've ever seen before people
had been in the government. So this was not like anything I've ever seen before. And it only
metastasized from there. Did you find now to in 2020, to any resilient fans of it? Because it
seemed you know, in most, most of the time you do these things, and there are different
 factions who want to influence the way the story is told. But you know, there's some loyalty, it
seems to me that the group that exists around Trump, who were in the administration, who
were loyal to him at the end, was pretty small.

P Peter Baker 08:52

Very small. I mean, think of how many people who cycled in and out of that White House, we've
never seen anything like it, the turnover was constant. It was it was, and it was corrosive.
Because, you know, nobody thought that they had a lease on life for longer than a few months.
Even Steve Bannon told people at the very beginning, I don't think I'll make it past August,
which is exactly by the way, the month that he got pushed out. And you know, I mean, Reagan
had, I think, six national security advisors over eight years, Trump had for over four and he had
four White House chiefs of staff. We had like six or seven communications directors with
depending on whether you count the guy who never really took the job but was pushed out
before we even started it because it turns out he had had fathered a child out of wedlock or
whatever. I mean, there was constant churn. And nobody loyalty was a one way street to
Trump. It was the most important quality as far as he was concerned. But he never returned it
to the people who work for him and he never He was constantly berating people who work from
constant is pointing they never from his point of view, did what he wanted them to do. Even the
ones who were the most loyal. Rights previous told people he was the first Chief of Staff. He
told people that Trump likes two kinds of people who work for him ones who used to work for
him, and the ones who are going to work for him. And you only achieved, you know, wisdom in
his eyes after he fired you or you quit. And then suddenly he kind of missed you and realize
maybe you weren't so bad. And he would call up farmers and say, Well, what should I be doing
while he was undercutting and backstabbing that people currently working for him. And you're
right that people at the end, you know, there were some true believers who really stuck with
him through the whole things even not being a good example of that. But otherwise, you know,
the people who were most troubled that we discovered and doing this book, 300 interviews
after he left office, the people who were most troubled, were the people who've been in the
room, the people who work for him, these weren't Democrats, these weren't liberals, these,
these were Republicans or Trump appointees, who were telling us all the things that they found
very disturbing about what they

D David Rothkopf 10:47

experienced. One of the things that you do best in the book is talk about the relationship with
the Pentagon, the generals, and in an interesting way, this is the group that Trump rubbed
most in the wrong way, right? These these are people who came from structure came from
hierarchy sought order. It's not to say they're a monolithic group, there are certainly some
people in the Pentagon who are supportive of Trump. But when you look at Kelly, or you look at
Mattis, or you look at McMaster sooner or later, they didn't just find, you know, difficult they
found it intolerable. And what's more, Trump showed remarkable contempt for them from that
meeting in the tank, which was sort of halfway through the first year onward. And yet, that
didn't, you know, Mattis was kind of quiet about speaking out. And I was just wondering what
your view of that I mean, people spoke to you finally, people spoke out finally, but a big
question in an administration like this is shouldn't I've done it sooner?

P Peter Baker 11:56

P Peter Baker 11:56
It is a big question. And it is a recurring theme in our book and I think others as well. You're
right about the relationship with the gentleman so fascinating, right? He was initially enamored
of the my generals, he likes to call them they love that they came from Central Casting look at
Mad Dog Mattis. Of course. Anybody who knows Jim Mattis knows he didn't like the nickname
Mad Dog because that suggested he was somehow nuts. And that's not something he
considered to be his calling card. He liked chaos, which was his call sign as a as a Marine,
actually, I think but he termed it as, you know, as I that's what I deliver to the enemy, I deliver
chaos to the enemy, not that he himself was a believer in chaos the way Trump was. But Trump
ultimately soured on the military guys, because, in fact, they don't match up to his image of,
you know, doing whatever he wanted, that they in fact, did have, you know, a credo that they
did have a set of principles that were at odds with his view of what how the military was
supposed to be. These guys were offended by Trump, not just because he was undisciplined.
Although that was certainly a big part of it. They were offended because he didn't seem to
subscribe to the very tenets of an apolitical military and a civilian led government that you
know, has under has undergirded our system for so long. This letter that we obtained that
General Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, wrote, resigning, but never actually submitted
is an extraordinary document. We've never seen anything like cover five presidents, I can't
think of any parallel. Maybe going back to, you know, George McClellan and civil war or
something in which a general so directly takes on the commander in chief again, he didn't send
it but the just the words he used it reflected not just his own views, I think but those were the
established officer corps, in which he said to the president, United States, you are doing great
and irreparable harm to the country. He said, You are ruining the international order. He said,
You do not subscribe to the values that we as Americans fought for in World War Two. That's
extraordinary. Right? That's not just I disagree with this decision, or I think you're kind of you
know, you should have done this or that. That's that's an indictment the likes of which we
haven't seen from the military of a civilian leader in our lifetime. I don't think but he didn't
submit it. Why didn't he submit it? Why didn't they all speak out? In his case, he thought, well, I
can do more good from the inside to protect the military, especially in these last months when
he foresaw the possibility that after the election, the president knighted states might not want
to give up power and might try to use the military to do so. And he was pressured in that
regard. There was this of course five hour meeting in the Oval Office and the residents and the
residents of the White House were Trump was actively considering martial law after the after
the election, which I think Mark Milley would have resisted had come to that. So you can argue
and I think people do argue, you know, should they have spoken out? Should they have
resigned? Why should they stay? Each of them had their own line that they drew each of them
struggle with this moral question of when are you actually enabling something that you
disagree with that you find reckless and when are you you know, obligated to stay in or To stop
things from being worse. And that's, that's a through line that ran throughout this presidency.

D David Rothkopf 15:07

I think you're probably right. It hasn't happened in our lifetime. I think it happened just before,
though. Because I think MacArthur and Trump Arthur perhaps. Yeah. Kind of a similar.

P Peter Baker 15:17

Yeah. The letter E the letter he sent that was, you know, posted while he was in Korea and that
speech he later gifts to Congress are pretty direct challenges of a sitting president.
 speech he later gifts to Congress are pretty direct challenges of a sitting president.

D David Rothkopf 15:26

Yeah, pretty, pretty, pretty direct. And what he said behind the scenes was apparently,
somewhat worse. But, you know, one of the things that struck me more from doing a book
about it, which is kind of contrary to the popular narrative, was that people kept coming in who
thought they could fix it, and who tried to fix it. And, and honestly, I found something kind of
encouraging in that. I mean, there's a lot you can question about different people in the
administration, I've cabinet officials, sub cabinet officials, some of them were driven by, you
know, ambition, you know, some of them had sort of wobbly principles, you know, and you can
say that the vast majority of the people I spoke to went in saying, I thought I could do more
good being in that out. And they tried, and they came up with ways to do that. And and, you
know, it says something about our country that they kept trying. No, I agree with that.

P Peter Baker 16:34

Yeah, I agree with I mean, obviously, you're right, that there's it's a mix, right, and everybody
has a different point on that spectrum between, you know, personal ambition, and public
service, right. And some of them were, you know, that blend may have been more a little of
this or that. But you're right, I think, broadly speaking, a lot of them really believed that they
were, you know, that they had a duty to the country to keep things from spinning out of
control. And that if they left, they would be replaced by somebody who would be worse from
their point of view, who would be much more willing to accommodate some of the more
reckless or unethical or inappropriate or even illegal ideas that Trump kept pushing. Kiersten
Nielsen comes to mind, Secretary of Homeland Security, she became unwittingly the face of
family separation, because she, she had resisted it, but then got pushed into signing it against
her own judgment, and then became the person put out front of the White House briefing room
to defend it. And she will always go down in history that way, and only be remembered that
way. But at the same time, she felt like she was stopping a whole lot of things from happening.
That would have been worse. In fact, Trump would call her at six in the morning saying, Do this,
do that. And she would say, well, we don't have the power that we don't have the authority,
though. It's not illegal to do that. And he would just keep pushing, you would never give up
your call again at 11 o'clock at night. How come you haven't done that yet? He said these
things so many times, or he that she joked with her staff, that if she ever wrote a memo be
called Honey, just do it. Right? And but she felt like she was resisting some of these worse
ideas. And if she left, the next person would come along and would be more accommodating.
And she wasn't wrong about that. And she paid a price. And she made a moral compromise in
her own view, I think. And I think that's a classic case study of how, you know, Trump put his
own people in these positions, these sort of no wind positions. And everybody in some ways
was compromising and trying to find, figure out how far they could go and live with themselves
and still accomplish something to interview protect the country or protecting the rule of law or
what have you.

D David Rothkopf 18:40

Yeah, absolutely. Right. And she's a great example. I also talked to her a lot. Yeah, there are
others like that. But, you know, one of the things that talking to her revealed was, you know,
there were certain issues, that Trump was so neuralgic about, that they couldn't even talk to
 there were certain issues, that Trump was so neuralgic about, that they couldn't even talk to
them. And, you know, she and some others in the administration said, you know, we need to
deal with election security, but he didn't want anything to do with it. So they set up a kind of a
parallel process that cut out the wire, just and you know, Chris Krebs and the other day actually
played a big role in why 2020 was one of the most honest, clean elections that we'd ever seen.
But this is also something kind of extraordinary, right, that there were processes in this
administration that were designed Russia policy very often to bypass the President of the
United States, because they just thought he was too much of a wildcard.

P Peter Baker 19:38

Exactly. You could get some of what people said again, and again, I'm sure they said this to
you, too. You could get stuff done. As long as you didn't involve him. You know, that things. In
fact, were possible to get done. Sometimes these people with their own personal agendas, but
a lot of times these are people who thought they were carrying out the best policy for the
country. And I think there are a lot of examples of that, but they were afraid they were afraid
had this President and what he would do if he did get involved with something. And that's why
he had the intelligence agencies were nervous about ever sharing with him, particularly secret
information, particularly sources and methods where he could, in their view indiscreetly just
sort of mentioned it to a passing Russian foreign official, right, or put it on on Twitter or
something like that. And they will be they will be putting people in jeopardy. So they, in fact,
stopped telling him certain things that they worried he would expose to the public, not things
that he needed that was present in their view, but they wouldn't tell him where they got certain
information from the way they might have told him George W. Bush or Barack Obama because
they didn't think that George W. Bush and Barack Obama are gonna spill the secrets.

D David Rothkopf 20:42

With a sweet, we don't know that he didn't. You know, today's today's news story, as we're
having this conversation is, among the documents that were stolen, taken illegally from the
White House were top secret documents pertaining to Iranian missile programs. And China. And
you know, you got to ask yourself, the he didn't do this accidentally. That thought went into it,
he was totally shouldn't do it risk went into it. He did it purposefully. Why those documents?
You know, so that that mean that these issues loom still today?

P Peter Baker 21:17

They do? And I think actually, on this case, you're exactly right to point that out. The one thing
we have not discussed in a significant enough way on this on this documents case is what was
he thinking? What was he doing? What did he want them for? Right? Well, we get distracted on
this idea of whether you can declassify information by mental telepathy and whether or not you
know, the FBI should execute a search warrant or not. And those are distractions, in some ways
from the central question was, what was he doing with them? What did he want them for? He
hasn't given us an explanation

D David Rothkopf 21:47

why these documents why these documents why Iranian missiles are my China this, you know,
 why these documents why these documents why Iranian missiles are my China this, you know,
and perhaps we will never know, one of the things that I was struck with that reading your
book, and I've read so many presidential biographies and histories is that almost always, not
almost always, always, except in this case. There is growth in the presidency, there is this big
learning curve. And we've seen it, you know, Brock, Obama had very little experience. He's the
fumbled, he got better. George W. Bush, first term, you know, foreign national security policy
was a mess. Second term got better, you know, they sort of got things underway, you know,
PEPFAR and so forth. Clinton was a mess, the first couple of years learns how to be president on
the job. You've lived through this now through five different presidents. But one of the most
striking things about reading your book, as well as living through the period, there is absolutely
no sign no evidence of any sort that Donald Trump grew or changed in any way, or did I miss it?

P Peter Baker 23:01

No. I think you're right. He did not adapt to the office, he tried to force the office to adapt to
him. Right. And I think you know, you're absolutely right. So the five presidents cover three or
two terms, and all three of them, I would say were better presidents and their second term, it's
just natural, that they will be better. I didn't mean they didn't have mistakes, or make pretty
big screw ups at times, or have scandals they did sometimes second terms are worse than first
terms. But they were clearly more adept at the office, they understood how it work, they
understood the choices word how to make them how to present them to the public, they
understood the limits on their power, right. One thing every president ever talked to said is how
much they were surprised at how little power they actually do have we have created this
mythology of the presidency partly because the media, and I'm part of it, covers it so intensely
as if the President was in and of himself a king, or eventually a queen, but in fact, our limits on
power. And that was one thing that Trump never accepted. That's when they discovered greatly
bothered him that he didn't have the absolute article to power that he kept claiming he had.
And the one thing I would say where he did learn was how to bypass the rules and the
traditions the norms that we have all thought were governing the presidency. So we have a
national security official who spent a lot of time with him. We quoted in the book, comparing
him to the Velociraptor from Jurassic Park, the velociraptors chasing the kids into the industrial
kitchen, they managed to shut the door they think they're okay except that it turns out the
velociraptors learn how to turn the handle right and learn how to get in. So this is the
comparison is to suggest that in a second term, Trump would understand how to you to bypass
the things that stopped him in the first term, how to get out of NATO how to pull troops back
from South Korea, how to close the border things that were he was told he couldn't do. You
know, he would find people who were willing to help him do them in the second term, even if
they were not legal. And that's the one thing where I think he did change or evolve over the
four years as he learned how to manipulate the levers of power a little bit more. So you had at
the end of Mark Meadows, not at John Kelly, who would allow all these crazy fringe characters
into the Oval Office telling the President knighted states he really won when he didn't, was
never would have happened, at least a John Kelly had anything to say about if he were still
there. So a second term Trump, if there is one, he wouldn't have learned about health care
policy or, you know, national security policy or anything like that. But he wouldn't, he will have
learned how to surround himself with people who will enable him rather than frustrate him.

D David Rothkopf 25:34

You know, as I listen to you say this, I have several reactions. One is, this is a post traumatic
 stress therapy session. I'm not sure whether it's the stress that came from living through the
period or from writing about it. Secondly, you know, you've come to the same conclusion that I
did, and which maybe that shouldn't be a good thing in a book, or maybe it actually confirms
that we're both writing about the same thing. But essentially, there's a cautionary tale here.
This guy wants to be back. And if there was anything that he learned, it was, how do I get rid of
the guardrails? How do we do it in the Senate? How do we do it with the officials that are
around us? You know, I'll go and I'll put in the cash Patel's, or the others who is or the IGs that I
think will be loyal to me. And there are a lot of people I spoke to and doing this including
cabinet secretary level people sub cabinet, who said, the thing that worried the most as they
got close to the action closest to the election is that Trump would be reelected, because he
would be unstoppable in the, you know, he it would be harder to counterbalance it. And, you
know, we're a couple of weeks away from an election. If the GOP gets control of this house in
the Senate, you know, some of the things that he wanted are going to start getting teed up.
And and and I find that a kind of ominous without taking political sides. Do you share the
concern that the system may not be up to another bout with this?

P Peter Baker 27:13

Well, I definitely think that there would be in a second term less constraints on him, right. Is
impeachment going to be a check on him? No, he survived to why would he consider that to be
something to worry about? Would he have to worry about running for another term as long as
he didn't overturn this 22nd amendment? He wouldn't he wouldn't be free of that. That
consideration. He will have learned and we won't watch what he did in this final months of his
presidency, he got rid of people like Mark Esper and replaced him. After the election at the
Pentagon with a with a defense secretary he thought would be more compliant. He got retried
to put cash Mattel in positions of extraordinary power. Get rid of Gina Haspel as the CIA director
and maybe even find a way to put cash Mattel in there or at the FBI or what have you. He tried
to get Jeff Clark as the Attorney General instead of Bill Barr Jeff Rosen. And you can certainly
say that Bill Barr was accommodating Trump for much of what he wanted to do for much of the
time, but when it came, push came to shove at the very end, he says no, this notion of a stolen
election is BS and you can't use me and the Justice Department to justify it. Jeff Clark would
have so I think that you're right that a second term, he will be more adept at surrounding
himself by people who will not tell him no, and will not try to say you cannot do this. This is
illegal or unethical and appropriate.

D David Rothkopf 28:33

I think there's a great book, the diviner, Trump in the White House 2017 to 2021. But I pray to
God you never get the chance to write a sequel. I think, you know, let's turn the page let's face
the new challenges, but the reporting in it is absolutely spectacular. And credit to Susan to his
not here. It's it's just a remarkable achievement. And so congratulations. Thanks for sharing the
time with us. I strongly encourage everybody who's listening to go out and buy the book and
hope to talk again sometime real soon.