Transcripts For CSPAN3 In Depth 20221226

2021. host: peter baker, susan glasser, you are in history. you are the third married couple to ever appear on "in-depth" in between five years. bernadine dorn and bill ayers and rosa milton friedman. and now glasser-baker. peter: an illustrious group. susan: we have no ideology to propound. host: you are somewhere in the middle of those two. susan glasser, what's the best part about working on a book and living with the person and raising a son? susan: your spouse can't get mad at you for spending too much time at work. host: what's the worst part about writing a book with that same person? susan: it's 24 hours. peter: we met in a newsroom, so we always worked together even from the beginning of our relationship. it's always been part -- we never separate them, so for us it is natural. host: and you have worked simultaneously in many locations. susan: we met first in the washington post newsroom in january of 1998. so we like to say we are the only good that came out of the monica linsky-bill clinton situation. but we have basically always worked together. we did a stint in moscow together as the co-bureau chief. when we came back to washington, we had different assignments. but whether we work at the same place or not, peter worked at the times and i worked at the new yorker, it's part of an ongoing conversation we feel so lucky. we had 70 people say how can you write a book together? but i would say the inverse. we are so lucky to have this partnership in real time and all the things we are interested in. host: your third book together, the divider, is almost accidental. is that a fair way of saying it? you are already in jerusalem in 2016. peter: we decided we wanted to be foreign correspondence while our son was young enough to get something out of it. we made the move in 2016. i was at the new york times and was going to be the bureau chief. but susan renovated our apartment and was going to join us later. that she was the editor and the election changed everything. it was the middle of the night in jerusalem and susan texted me and said trump is going to win and they don't want you to come back. she was right. host: what did you do with your apartment in jerusalem? susan: the new york times owns it, so we turned it over to our successor who got to enjoy it more than we did. host: you came to work at the new york times and you stayed at politico for a while? susan: doing a column, doing a podcast but it was supposed to be focused on international affairs. but i would say the point here, and we've been in that moment for the last five or six years is the united states is the biggest focal point of global disruption that there has been. if you care about foreign policy and i was the editor of foreign policy magazine, but the truth of the matter is this disruption, this internal crisis in the world's major superpower is the biggest question for anyone who cares about foreign policy. so anyway, we got to be foreign correspondence in our own country. we had to buy a whole new house. our house was rented out. even though we were only gone for a few weeks, it felt in some ways covering the trump presidency was covering a whole front world. host: when did you actually start working on the divider? was it in 2016? susan: not at all. writing a book is so hard. it is such an enormous lift. there had been a lot of great but incremental books about the trump presidency during the middle of it. i think our aspiration was to resist doing that and think about what can we do that might be lasting? that five years now -- five years from now, 10 years from now when your kids or grandkids say donald trump was president? what was that like? our goal, once we decided to embark on it, which we did not do until trump's first impeachment, we thought that is something that will last for history. we will do that. but that was immediately followed by the disruptions of 2020 and the election there. the concept changed to the full trump in the white house for years. host: it was almost a bookend to your book on bill clinton's impeachment. peter: my first book was on clinton's impeachment at the time and there were obviously echoes in the later impeachments. but it was so different under trump. it was more magnified and the -- it put the clinton impeachment in a different light in some ways. that you are thinking about an impeachment book. we did not start working on it until after was over. we get this a lot -- why did you not tell us these things before? we did not start working on this until he was out of office. susan: the germ of the idea, it was literally within 24 hours of the beginning of trump's first impeachment year, the ukraine scandal and the perfect phone call and we were going out to dinner one night in september of 2019 and we ran into lindsey graham, a key character in peter's first book. that's how lindsey graham came to national attention was as one of the republican house managers in bill clinton's senate trial two decades ago. we ran into lindsey graham, coming out of the palm restaurant, the famous washington steakhouse. he said peter, are you going to write a book about this next impeachment? it was a remarkable demonstration of what would prove to be one of the enduring themes of this book, which is republicans who privately disdain donald trump while publicly accommodating themselves to him or, even in lindsey graham's case, over-the-top, lavishing with praise and sycophancy. for all his public defenses of donald trump at that time, he turned to us and wanted to prove he was in on the joke and said he's a lying mother f-er, but he is so much fun to hang out with. that's something that stuck with us as we eventually embark on this project that became the divider. host: there is a quote from you about your james baker book that you said both peter and i came away reinforced with the idea individuals do matter and history is not inevitable. i want to talk about some of the individuals in the divider and let's begin with lindsey graham. what was his role during the trump administration? peter: there are so few characters as interesting as he is. he ran against trump and was very visceral saying he was the most unfit ever, he was a kook, he was an extremist in all these different ways. once trump gets in office, trump starts giving him access -- let's play golf, have you ever ridden on marine one, we will look at the view, fly on air force one with me. it really drew graham in and he love the access. he loved the ability he could call on his cell phone any other time the president of the united states. it's a fascinating story because it began to draw him away from his mentor, his partner, john mccain, with whom he had been so close. mccain despised trump, thought trump was dangerous and incompetent and terrible for the country and didn't understand why lindsey graham was pulling closer. lindsey graham would tell you first of all he is a lot of fun, he would tell people he could moderate trump, he could guide trump and help him be a better president, but he never convinced john mccain. even on his deathbed, john mccain in lindsey graham were fighting over this. john mccain was dying of brain cancer and there was this moment in arizona where lindsey graham had gone down to be with john in his last months of life. why do you have to do this? why do you play golf with him? why do you have to lie about why he's a good golfer? he said look, you forgive the vietnamese, why can't i forgive donald trump? there's this dramatic scene that plays out after mccain dies in which lindsey graham has no speaking role other than to read a quick line from scri it is one of the dramatics of stories. host: susan glasser, throughout "the divider" you talk about the players in washington. it's fair to say that you two are probably washington insiders. i don't mean to be unfair. susan: if longevity confers inside ernest. host: would donald trump have ever been accepted by the washington establishment? susan: it's one of the hoary truisms about washington -- this idea that there's this permanent establishment. there's a constant renewal in the sense every four years, every eight years, there's a new president, new administration, the clintons came to town as they were dismissed as outsiders and rubes from arkansas and fast forward a few years and they are the people establishment that needs to be overthrown. the reagan revolution begat a new generation of republican insiders and establishment that today, the republican establishment venerate's ronald reagan as their patron saints, where as he originally came to town as the ultimate insider who is going to shake things up. there is that notion but the difference is donald trump, he will never have conferred a new generation of insiders because he chose to pursue the maximally confrontational version of the presidency. it was almost chaos and disruption for its own sake. we see now the consequences of that. we are still dealing, two years after the presidency, with the damage that has brought and hundreds of court cases still proceeding related to the january 6 2021 insurrection act capital. a -- the former president running again for his office, seeking to be the first since over cleveland to return to the presidency, says the constitution is optional when it comes to elections and what he thinks he is owed from 2020. that is never going to be an establishment. that's not going to be a new establishment in washington, so it felt important for peter and i -- normally we write a book after the end of the presidency, it's for history. we are hoping for people to read this as a historical document, but in this case, it is literally a live-action crime scene, the subject of multiple investigation by the justice department and so is it -- so it is a present-day crisis in our democracy. host: peter baker, these are quotes from your book, but if only he would... -- it was a washington parlor game, he could if only he would. peter: there was this idea when we first came and that maybe he could break out of the mold by being somebody work across the aisle because he didn't have ideology, he didn't have a party really. he switched parties five or six times. he was the ultimate chameleon. he didn't have a core set of principles the way reagan did, bush did, clinton did, obama did. he was very pro-choice before he became pro-life. he was for banning assault rifles before he was pro-second amendment. he was pro-raising taxes on the rich before he was for cutting taxes. he changed his positions time and time again before he decided he didn't need them anymore. he did not have a wedded view of things. that fundament he misunderstands who he is and who he is is a disruptor, to use a kind word. there are less kind words to use, but his whole motives is to be a divider. he is about division. he has been his whole life. he's about throwing fuel on wherever there is a fire out there. if he can't find a fire, he will find one to start. host: could you see him leaving the republican party? peter: absolutely. you shouldn't rule it out. even if he were to not run -- he is running right now, but let's say he were to pull out, he will constantly second-guess who the nominee is. if he were to lose the nominee, he could somehow undermine it in some way. republicans have bought into summit who doesn't believe what they believe. he said after 2020 when he went back to mar-a-lago following the january 6 -- january 6 attack on the cap bubble, he said maybe i will give up on the publican party and they had to push him not to. host: a lot of people were saying i stuck around because it was important i stuck around -- they didn't want trump to be trump. for chiefs of staff, reince priebus, john kelly, mark meadows and mick mulvaney. at what point did the chief of staff let go of managing the white house? [laughter] susan: let's just say these might be case studies and anyways how not to do it. reince priebus used to tell people donald trump likes to kinds of staffers -- he likes the staffers who used to work for him and the ones who will work for him. trump, for all of his obsession with personal loyalty, what he means is personally loyal -- personal loyalty to him. he doesn't feel any obligation going in the other direction. that's a very important point -- what the trajectory of those for chiefs of staff? in some ways, that's the spine of the story we are telling in "the divider." it's a story about those who surrounded donald trump as much as trump himself. trump, in the end, is a very unchanging, inflexible man in his 70's. without these others who were willing to work for him for whatever complicated sets of reasons, he would just be another old dude shouting at the television, watching fox news between golf games. what is striking is that as he went through the four years, trump was seeking not only loyalty, but a definition of staff who would do what he wanted without questioning him, who would join him in the project of knocking down the guardrails. think about january 6 and the difference between mark meadows, the former far right congressman from north carolina who was his fourth and final chief of staff versus john kelly, the retired four-star marine general who was a stack -- u.s. is second chief of staff. we can't say for sure if kelly had been chief of staff that january 6 would not have happened, but kelly would have thrown himself at the door of the oval office in order to stop people like mike flynn from getting in there and advocating martial law in a five hour long meeting with donald trump, which actually happened in december of 2000 when he went. meadows, in the words of one of the people we quote in the book was serving as essentially a matador in that time, just waving the crazies into the oval office and those who were burying conspiracy theories, lies and recklessness. i think it really does matter who surrounded donald trump, but it is important to note that there were many who did, in their own way resist trump at various points along the way. that doesn't mean they are heroes. that was literally a quote the white house official from the trump white house said to us -- there are no heroes in the story. that's an important point to make. host: there's a -- peter: there's a great story by john kelly when he's being forced out and he says to trump you don't want to yes-man and trump says yes, i do. i want a yes-man. he wasn't looking for some buddy to disagree with him, he wanted people to do what he wanted them to do and it took a while to find them. host: how many of those four talk to you? peter: we talked to as many people as possible and people we -- you might not want us to know we talked to them. susan: we tried to be as authoritative as possible. when you talk to several hundred people, which we did, all of them after trump left office and the second impeachment, what was striking to me was how much we were able to debrief people, many of whom had never spoken out publicly, much to the fury of trump's many critics in and out of the republican party. but it struck us as extremely important, almost taking a form of testimony, and after action report for someone who is a crisis to american democracy. host: did you pursue an interview with the president? susan: we did not need to. we interviewed donald trump twice for this book at mar-a-lago. interestingly, donald trump, he wanted to give as many interviews as possible. it wasn't just for us. he's so convinced in the power of his own persuasiveness that he will talk and talk more or less with many of the authors who came forward to write about him. although interview is a little bit of a misnomer and i don't want to mislead people. because it's not like an interview where you ask us questions and we do our best to answer them. donald trump is much more of a monologue than an interview. there was not really a noun and a verb and period. he said if you are going to write a history of a man and his time is office, it's valuable to see him and i was struck by the fact that even in private, there is no tv camera on at that moment in time, we are just talking to him -- it's almost like a live-action version of his twitter feed, slinging insults, we would mention one of his former advisers and he would just throw nasty nicknames at them. he would make up thingon the spot, he would contradict himself in the space of a short time -- let's just say he was not a reliable fact witness. host: what was your experience like at mar-a-lago? susan: on the one hand, trump is not the persona of his rallies. he's not yelling, he's not red in the face, he not attacking you frontally as the enemy of the people or the fake news. in fact, that always was a bit of a misconception people have. historically, trump, the man who is famous on the for firing people, as historians and biographers have document it, he was conflict averse in person and would often have other people do the firing at the trump organization. maybe that's why he liked to fire people by tweet when he was president, because he didn't have the desire or courage to look some buddy in the eye and say you are fired. he was personable to a certain extent. can i get you a diet coke? he struck me as a bizarro world combination of napoleon and -- napoleon elba raging about the reg election but also sort of a anklet all greater there in his club. welcoming the guests to dinner in the middle of our interview. host: peter baker, anything to add to that? trepidation is going into that? peter: no. you want to make sure you use time well. you want to crafter questions in advance. susan: that didn't work. peter: the challenges he's different from any other president. you're susan: asking direct questions. it doesn't matter what the questions. peter: i've interviewed five president and he so different from anybody else i've ever interviewed in which you go in, even in the white house, iron member going in with maggie haberman and mike schmidt and we were trying to zero in on this particular scandal of the moment. we were not going to let him dive into some other topic. except when he dove into the other topic, he made complete and total news on the other topic. do i stick with this or go there? you don't know what to do with him. you don't know how to control the conversations, so in some ways, you let it go because you want to experience it not as a fact witness, susan said, because you are not going to be able to trust what he says as a matter of specific detail. what you are looking for is mindset, to understand what he says, and to his credit on some level, he's the most transparent president we've ever had. not necessarily for his own in a fit because he tells us all the things you thinking, including all the things no politician would ever admit out loud. including i'm trying to use the government for my own political purposes. he would admit things no other politician would admit because he doesn't hide his own motivations and own self interest, which is the way he defines everything. host: which is great fodder for a reporter. peter: great fodder for a reporter, but not great for the republic. he's the one, i felt we knew what he was thinking at almost any given time. because of twitter, because of his offhand comments, because he never had any discipline about what he was saying, because he would say whatever came to his mind, obama didn't do that, bush 43 didn't do that -- those were disciplined people who wanted to stick to their message. in that sense, trump is a fascinating character to write about because you don't have to guess what he's thinking. he's going to tell you. host: even though you worked for the quote unquote failing new york times, he had more access -- more access to him to president obama or president bush? peter: or president biden. we have an interview president biden yet. by this point, trump had given us multiple or views. he has a love/hate message. i should point out we have the largest readership ever and's inscription base ever, we are not failing. but let's say for the sake of argument he doesn't like us. at the same time, as the paper his father read growing up and he read going up in new york to be accepted in the elite, which he really wanted to be, meant the new york times. so he would lash out at us, but he was desperately eager to get something good. i was in the oval office with him once with our publisher and he literally begs, please i just want one good story in my hometown paper. don't i deserve just one good story? it meant something to him that was different than other presidents who could write us off and say who cares. host: i know it's probably too easy, but a mafia don -- is at an easy comparison? susan: donald trump spent a lot of time around people like that. look at who his mentor was -- the most influential person in donald trump's life, aside from his father who was a very tough character, literally his father's favorite wordless killer. make of that what you would. aside from his father, the most influential person in his early career was roy cohen, the famous mccarthy investigator who later went on to be a lawyer for people like that in new york, who taught trump the ott -- the art of hardball dealmaking in new york city in the 1970's and 1980's. you see very much that spirit of never accommodate, never give in, the constant contention with the law, the use of lawsuits, whether he's under investigation or he himself is using the courts against his enemies or vying for time. it is a fascinating aspect of a man who has sown division and conflict throughout his entire very long career, decades in the public eye. the trump of the white house was, in many ways, unchanged from the donald trump of the 80's and 90's. the surprise in many ways was people were so surprised about it. the notion he would somehow ever become presidential easily disputed by the very big stack of excellent biographies of donald trump that had been written before he came into office. yet somehow people had this ability, again and again and again, to delude himself that he would be something other than what he was. host: had the president or has the president reacted to your book? peter: he hasn't, not publicly anyway. host: privately? peter: we haven't got a private response either. host: you mentioned president trump had trouble firing people in person but one person he fired personally on a sunday night with kiersten nielsen. who was she. remind us who she was and how she tried to control her agency. susan: kiersten nielsen was the secretary of homeland security. she belongs in that fairly large category of people who achieved high office under trump who probably wouldn't have ever had those positions and any other administration. she worked closely alongside john kelly when he was the first homeland security secretary and then he began white house chief of staff and she went to the white house with him. there were months and months of looking for some money to go to the department of homeland security, people said no to them. it's probably the most hyper politicized role you can imagine in the trump administration because of trump's focus and almost relentless attention to the issue of illegal immigration. although it is a vast agency, cobbled together from dozens of other agencies all put together after 9/11, trump saw it only as an immigration agency. he wanted them to build his wall . he wanted them to fulfill what he saw as a key pledge to his applicable base that got him elected president in the first place. it was a constant friction point with kiersten nielsen. some of the strays are incredible. he was probably more abusive toward her that any other member of his cabinet. there were repeated examples of that, from her perspective and that of her advisors. just remarkable, the stories we are able to report in the book about the extent to which trump was constantly demanding they do things they were told by the lawyers were illegal. nielsen had the very difficult job of saying no again and again to a president who did not want to be told no. some of his ideas were unbelievable. they wanted to build a moat at the border and alligators and shoot at the legs of migrants. this constant barrage. she had an incredibly difficult time handling that. host: in your four years covering the trump white house, do you witness political adeptness? peter: [laughter] the biggest political challenge in the white house was managing their boss. some of them were more adept at it than others. some of them were confrontational with him. some of them found ways of steering him in the direction they wanted to steer him. but ultimately none of them succeeded because all of them fell out of favor at some point, even his own family members. one of the most interesting characters is jared kushner. he was expected to go along with ivanka and to moderating forces. they are democrats from new york, they will keep him from going too far. they discovered early on they didn't want him to do that. he would get mad if they were sent in to stop him from doing something he wanted to do. kushner learned to not do that which disappointed a lot of people who thought he had a responsibility to interact more. he came up with a formula for how he would deal with his own father-in-law -- a two to one ratio. every time have to give him bad news, i'm going to give him twice as much good news. two times good news to one time bad news. if he had a poll to deliver, they would allow five points to it. the biggest moment for kushner -- he was successful in a lot of ways. he gets his father-in-law to agree to criminal justice reform and helps hold together israel and its neighbors. he has some things he can point to that were important. but in the moment where it really came down to it, after the election of 2020, when his father-in-law was heading down the road to this massive lie to the american people about the election being stolen, jared kushner retreats. he takes himself out of it. if you are going to listen to rudy giuliani, i don't want any part of it. he heads off to the middle east. it leaves the void open for the mike flynn's and sidney powell's and rudy giuliani's. the people who most wanted jared kushner to play a part to fight on what was called team normal inside the white house, he chose not to. host: time is fleeing too quickly. we've already gone a half-hour with susan glasser and peter baker. this is book tv's "in-depth" program. we usually talk to one author and his or her body of work, we are talking to their body of work. we will begin taking your calls and just a little while. susan glasser is currently with the new yorker. peter baker is with the new york times. they have written three books together. their first was "kremlin rising -- letter putin's russia and the end of the revolution." in 2020 came the man who ran washington, the life and times of james a baker the third. and the divider -- trump in the white house came out earlier this year. peter baker has written four books on his own. the breach, inside the trial of william jefferson clinton, days of fire, bush and cheney in the white house, obama, the call history in 2017, and an impeachment compendium -- in american history along with john meacham and jeffrey ingle. that came out in 2018. peter baker was the bill clinton part of that book. we will put the numbers up on the screen. we want your participation. if you would like to talk with our authors today. you can also contact us via our social media sites. we will scroll through those as we go. jester member -- jester member @book tv. pardon me. i've got a touch of a runny nose. i apologize for that. we left off with jared kushner. and in a sense, the bureaucracy. i want to talk about somebody featured in your book and i don't know whether you want to publicly admit you talked to stephen miller of the trump white house or not. if that is an open source or not. he survived the bureaucracy. peter: he's one of the few people who were there -- who was there for all four years. most of the people except for family were not. host: why did he survive? peter: he's one of the ones that figured out how to manage trump without drawing his ire. he nudged and pushed and cajoled trump in taking ever harder positions on all sorts of issues, whether it be refugees, the cap on refugees, the public welfare provision, trying to limit the number of people coming in, whether it be limiting people, much less the ban on people coming in from several muslim countries. he played in trump already had and figure out how to maneuver around the bureaucracy. kiersten nielsen was angry because she discovered her own staff would be called to meetings by stephen miller without telling her. it was a constant struggle within the bureaucracy. trump said stephen, you are in charge of immigration. at which point, stephen miller tells another person i hope you understand this is my coronation. i'm going full napoleon, which is what he tried to do. host: did jeff sessions -- was it because of immigration that he failed in the trump white house? susan: there are three words here -- russia, russia, russia. the bottom line was it was a fascinating story about trump and what he was looking for in an advisor and subordinate, and it's only a very narrow definition of personal loyalty. jeff sessions come his first attorney general, was the first u.s. senator to endorse donald trump and the 2016 campaign. he was, in many respects, the archetype of the kind of republican who supported donald trump when the vast majority of the republican party did not. the other senators and representatives in congress did not support donald trump in 2016. jeff sessions did. none of that mattered when it came down to it because trump blamed jeff sessions for recusing himself from overseeing the investigation into russia's role in the 2016 campaign and thus triggering the molar investigation, which hung over a large portion of the trump presidency. the way he treated investigations, that stephen miller started as an advisor to jeff sessions, that is how he got into trump's orbit. he felt no compunction about abandoning his first boss and sticking with his second boss. but trump berated sessions openly. peter was mentioning in an interview he had with donald trump in december of 2017 when donald trump first essentially started publicly attacking his own attorney general, essentially daring him to quit, which sessions refused to do. in fact, it went all the way on, this spectacle of the president against his own attorney general -- that lasted all the way up until the 20 midterm election. the first thing he did as soon republicans were decisively rebuked in that election was to fire jeff sessions. host: was it bill barr strict to go and if the president started railing on him were having a topic he wanted to get off of by mentioning one of these hot button topics? susan: that is a great vignette in ill bars recent memoir in which he said he and mike pompeo, who is trump's second secretary of state, that they would distract donald trump by mentioning the russia investigation, the mueller investigation when they were worried about something. talk about waving a red flag at the bull, that was an easy way to get trump off a lecture that could last for a long time about how badly treated he wasn't all his grievances. but you mentioned bill barr. to me, he's a fascinating example of the argument that while donald trump broke with many people and many officials ultimately ended up breaking with donald trump, it's always a complicated story. bill barr got the job as trump's second attorney general after trump fire jeff sessions, in part because he wrote a memo saying the mueller investigation was not a legitimate use of the special counsel power and it was an overage. of course, that was exactly what donald trump wanted to hear and trump thought by appointing bill barr as attorney general, he would help him either fire mueller or contain the damage from the mueller investigation and many people believed that was exactly what bill barr did in the spring of 2008 -- sorry, spring of 2019 when the mueller report finally came out. bill barr's mischaracterization of the findings helped shape the public perception and donald trump, when he said there was no collusion, there is no collision, that barr was a key facilitator of cementing that i deal the public. yet even for bill barr, there is a moment trump went too far and that moment was what he did after the 2020 election and bar, and many respects was the most significant official to break with donald trump. on december 1, two thousand 20, bill barr came out publicly and said there is no basis to believe there's any widespread fraud that would be sufficient to overturn the election. that was a crucial moment and never since then, he's been a public critic of trump's when it comes to the election stuff. again, it's a complicated story. many of these former trump officials and advisers, mike pence is another example of that. on the one hand, they say he went too far after the election, but oh no, he got crazy later. when i worked for him, he wasn't this -- it's kind of a disingenuous thing to invent history so that at just the moment you happen to conveniently discover donald trump is a problem and everything else that came before, that was ok. host: in your book, you write "trump was not exonerated in the russia investigation, but he had one." one of -- peter: one of the things he is skilled at is shaping public perception and branding himself and selling things to the marketplace. what he sold was this idea that the investigation had somehow exonerated him, even though it hadn't. mueller specifically writes in their this does not exonerate him. he created, by sheer repetition, by distortion, he created this impression even among democrats that the mueller report didn't find anything wrong, when it fact it did. -- when in fact it did. he identified 10 cases where the there was obstruction of justice -- but part of the policy was we cannot and died a sitting president. it sold to his supporters and a lot of other people. host: was there overreach by the washington press when it came to russia in 2016? was there an eagerness to find a story that wasn't there? susan: i'm a big believer that there no such thing as a monolithic washington press. if you look at trump's attacks and those of his administration on the media, it is important to note they were purposeful, calculated, and served an important clinical purpose from the very beginning of his time in politics, even predating the presidency. the use of the terms "fake news" was an appropriation of those who pointed out in 2000 16 how much lies and misinformation and this information were being used by trump, by a network of russia-supported bots on social media that aimed to distort and misrepresent things. i think it's very important to make that point. there is no one monolithic washington media. when it comes to the russia story, what i am struck by, as peter pointed out, the incredible success trump has had shaping a narrative. peter and i have covered, and we will talk about kremlin rising, but we have covered the u.s.-russia relationship for more than two decades. i have to tell you, people might not understand this -- there has never been an example of any presidential campaign except for donald trump's 2016 presidential campaign in which there were repeated contacts with the ambassador from russia, in which there were repeated efforts to reach out, in which the campaign manager, chairman paul manafort, also had a long history of maintaining contact even during the campaign with officials, the fbi, the treasury department have said were working with russian intelligence. so let's be clear about that -- this is an exceptional situation we are talking about here. the weaponization, the hacking, stealing and weaponization of democratic emails done by russian intelligence in the course of the 2016 campaign was a dramatic and remarkable moment that the u.s. political apparatus was not really prepared to handle. the obama administration struggled with how to respond to that. but this is an exceptional thing and i think that often gets lost. host: i wrote a note to myself -- all roads lead back to russia and ukraine. peter: nancy pelosi once said that to donald trump in a meeting. susan: probably one of her most famous moments come when she stands up in the white house and says what is it with you, all roads lead back to putin? host: in "kremlin rising" -- the trends we saw in our times and russia have only accelerated. this book is a couple of years old and was up they did in 2007. is that still true today? peter: i think so. this book obviously takes place long before the war on georgia, the war on ukraine and interference in the election. but, you see the seeds of it. in our time in russia, we were there for four years, the beginning of putin's term. we saw his cckwn, his lamenting the collapse of the soviet union, you saw his desire to create or re-create russia as this great power on the stage to be respected and stand up as an alternate to the west. a lot of those themes are in this book that would be familiar to anybody looking back on today. host: are you fluent in russian? susan: less affluent than when we lived there. but we have tried to keep it up. it's remarkable how this time of the post-cold war is the time peter and i had been reporting largely in washington but russia was the story that never fully went away, as much as people wanted to believe we moved on to a different era in politics. for peter and i, having covered five american presidents dealing and struggling with and in many ways making the same mistakes again and again when it came to how to understand vladimir putin , it's remarkable how much even in the post-cold war era of american politics, russia has been a through line. the struggle to deal with vladimir putin. host: chechnya -- is there a direct connection between chechnya and ukraine and what's happening there? is that a fair connection? peter: in a way. putin comes to power in 1999 in chechnya. chechnya is a small republic within the washington -- within the russian state and putin uses that conflict to gain political power internally. and it is a brutal, vicious war against the separatists rebels. he doesn't just go against the separatist rebels, he goes against civilians. he pummels it with more firepower than we've seen since dresden. 100,000 people are killed. i visited chechnya repeatedly and it was a horrific wasteland because of the war putin waged on the civilian population, not just the separatists. fast-forward to ukraine and you see much the same. the use of indiscriminate power in order to achieve political goals. the differences the ukrainians have not surrendered and in fact have beaten back the russians in a way that chechens ultimately not. susan: and it is a horrible irony of this war and ukraine that the kremlin's hand-picked warlord of chechnya and his men have become some of the most feared and brutal fighters, fighting for russia in this war inside ukraine. it has come sort of full circle but peter's point is an important point if you want to understand putin again and again throughout his more than two decades in power, he has resorted to the use of military force to pursue otherwise unattainable political ambitions. that marks him as very different essay from the chinese, who have not had a war since 1979. they -- that's a long time of china's peaceful rise. now they have re-militarized and invested the lien's and billions and read -- in recent years, but they have not resorted to the use of force. whereas, for putin, it's an important part of his playbook. unfortunately for ukraine and for europe and the united states, they are not really examples of putin sitting down at the negotiating table and coming to a long-term resolution of any of these conflicts. host: there's so much or i want to talk about. vladimir putin's time in london graham, the -- in leningrad, the connection to orest johnson, how much can you draw -- peter: it is important to ember he is kgb. that something we often paper over. he wanted his child to join the kgb. it's like watching dlg men in the united states. he offered himself to the kgb without accepting him. and they said sorry, we -- you don't come to us, we come to you. eventually he became an officer in dresden. it is this moment, the collapse of the old soviet order happens and he's left there in this dank outpost in the middle of east germany and there are crowds of people outside the kgb office and he is there by himself with a lone gun, saying back off, don't dare come in here and they are burning the documents inside because they are afraid of being overrun. they call for help and the answer they get is moscow is silent. a searing moment for putin and it reverberates to this day. the idea that power had collapsed. that's what he's been trying to reverse for 20 years. host: have you ever met vladimir putin? susan: i have met vladimir putin. i did the first time i met vladimir putin was the first time putin held an interview for american correspondents based in moscow. it was right after the very famous first meeting between george w. bush and vladimir putin, at which they looked into each other's souls and saw somebody they could do business with. so it was a moment of perceived opening to the west and the united states. we were invited to the criminal library for a roundtable discussion. a small number of american correspondence and, interestingly, my first chance to ask vladimir putin to question, we went around the table and i was about two thirds of the way around the table and i was waiting and waiting for someone else to bring up the difficult subject of chechnya and human rights and nobody did so i thought the honor of the american correspondent class requires i do so. so when it came to me, i asked him about chechnya and it was fascinating. very revealing. up until this point, putin had been determined to project the image he was a young, technocratic leader unlike boris yeltsin who was perceived as old and stumbling and literally drunk at many times. so putin was very in control, spouting facts and figures from his briefing books, trying to prove he was not too young and inexperienced. and i asked him about chechnya and his entire visage changed. he became snappish and angry and he said what you want me to do? you want me to sit down and talk about the koran with these people? these are killers and i'm going to respond the way i need to. it was a really revealing interaction. that was the first time i met vladimir putin. host: did you ask him in russian or english? susan: in english. there were translators. putin, interestingly, was learning english at this time. one of the things come he doesn't often conduct conversations in english, but he knows enough english that it would be an advantage he would have in dealing with the many u.s. presidents that he dealt with because even though he had an official interpreter, he could probably understand much of what the presidents were saying even before there was the infinite -- the official interpretation. peter: he would correct that translators sometimes if he felt they thought it was wrong. it's an advantage because he gets to wait for the translation to happen while he inks of an answer. host: have you traveled there center time and would you go back today? peter: we have not been in the last seven or eight years. susan is now banned. host: you are banned? susan: on the saturday morning, they put out many lists of and american officials and commentators. they don't send you a letter or anything saying why you are on the list. my late father, i called him up and he said you should think of it as a badge of honor. and that's true in the sense that we have been very clear and have tried to be straightforward about the consequences of this horrible russian war of aggression against its neighbor. but at the same time, it's made me very sad for the russian people and i have to say, i very much look forward to going back to a free russia someday. host: before we go to calls, i want to bring up the name -- who is she? peter: she was a crusading russian journalist. one of the most remarkable people we met while you're there. she would go to chechnya and the surrounding republics all the time and reveal all the abuses by russian troops there. she is brave beyond measure in standing up to authority. of course, she paid a price. one day, she was walking home with her groceries and is shot down, assassinated in the of l later -- in the elevator of her apartment building. host: any doubt it was an official set -- official assassination? peter: no doubt about it. putin's reaction was classic that she says why would we kill her, she was of no importance. her killing is more important than anything she ever wrote. in other words, the west was using this as propaganda against him, blaming him. it was done on his birthday, putin's birthday. it was wrist -- received in russia as a birthday present by his security services or loyalists or whoever it was that actually pulled the trigger. there was no doubt it was connected to him. susan: i must say many of the people we wrote about in kremlin rising, the people who helped us to understand this big, complicated country, she's not the only one who is dead. boris mems and murdered in the shadow of the kremlin, many others killed, exiled, and then there are a large category of people we quote in the book who have become apologists for the putin regime. host: let's go to calls and begin and leo up in the bronx. leo, you are on with authors and journalists susan glasser and peter baker. caller: thank you for taking my call. my question is for both susan and peter. number one, i enjoy seeing you on msnbc because you're both very knowledgeable. i question is about china. as you know, this week, china has riots against the lockdown. it's not clear to me is why won't the chinese leadership purchase mrna vaccines from pfizer and moderna, which are more effective than the vaccines they produce? aren't they jeopardizing their political stability by not working with vaccines that are most effective? host: getting a little bit off the topics of the books they have written about? anything you want to address? susan: it's a very good question. we were just having the conversation last night exactly on the subject. china and its leadership under xi jinping have really locked itself into what appears to be a terrible corner three years into this pandemic. the zero covid policy, unfortunately, has come with a low percentage of the chinese population, especially the elderly, being vaccinated. it is hard to imagine them being able to liberalize the policy since that would risk large-scale hospitalizations and mass death. needing to vaccinate more of the population seems to be coming into conflict with a nationalistic view that they have. we are told that there are more than enough global supply of vaccine, you know, if china were to purchase. but it does not seem that that is happening. i should note it is not rioting taking place in china, but some examples of protests, peaceful protests, including the symbol of this movement is so poignant and powerful. people holding up blank sheets of paper, which tells you everything. host: peter baker, you are on msnbc regularly. you were on cnn for a long time. are you still cnn? susan: that's right. we are basically promoting the book but not on cnn. host: is the new york times staff going on strike? [laughter] is that an open question? peter: there seems to be -- there is conflict over the bargaining of our new contract. there has been a statement by our guild saying they would like to have a walkout on thursday if there is not progress. my hope is there is progress. host: as of today you are both employed. peter: yes. [laughter] susan: these are tough times for journalism. host: you have a quote talking about independent journalism. i have got it in my notes. you know what it was, that you are worried about the state of independent journalism. susan: absolutely. when you look at how vulnerable so many companies are, we are talking about hundreds of journalists this past week that have been laid off around the country as well as cnn and other news organizations. it is a time of great tribulation for independent news media. especially when you see the hyper polarization of the public space and the supercharged nature of our politics. it is something i worry deeply about, because to be a free people requires free press. host: why do you think we seem to be hyper anything today? [laughter] susan: that is the word. peter: good question. we have this conversation a lot. look, american history is full of moments where we tend to get more hyper about things and there are ebbs and flows. but it has accelerated in this moment by social media, by the incentive structure to express anger and conflict over compromise. one of the books we wrote is "the man who ran washington." he is such an example of a different era where compromise was valued. it was rewarded for you to sit down with the other party and come up with a deal. today if you tried to do that, you are punished. that is the difference between now and the past. susan: and i am glad you brought that up. the difference between the era we describe in "the man who ran washington," all the way to the end of the cold war, the media landscape is one of the biggest single differences. in the era of, you know, ford, carter, reagan, first bush, you were talking about an era of three national tv networks and the very beginning of cable news. you are talking about a few national newspapers like "the new york times," "the wall street journal," "time" magazine. but it also led to a politics where you were seeking to appeal to the broad middle of the country and your goal was 51%. we have moved into this different era where it is hard to persuade anybody to change their minds. you do not see large swings of public opinion. in the 1980's when jim baker was the white house chief of staff and treasury secretary, you would have half of the u.s. senate would be senators elected from states that when the other way in the presidential election. these days you are talking about a handful of senators at best who can defy the overarching identity of their state as either a blue state or red state. that is a massive structural shift and the shift in our media. we can debate whether the shift in the media led to the shift in politics or they are representations of the same phenomenon, but it is so different. host: and i promise we will get into the jim baker book. it is worth reading. i want to read one paragraph. "baker had long aspired to the state department, an ambition born of success so rapid it was easy to forget how quickly it had all happened. he was 58 years old and only 10 years earlier he had been between jobs, a houston lawyer, who lost the campaign for the only political office he ever tried to win. it was a mark of his convincing rise that baker's appointment as secretary of state now was not the least bit controversial." we got to get back to the calls. james in philadelphia, you are on with peter baker and susan glasser. caller: how are you doing? my question is for peter baker. in regards to bias at "the new york times." admitting the hunter biden story, not really reporting on that before the election. and how many people actually died january 6 by the hands of the government? ashli babbitt was not the only one who died. there were police officers who died. do you have reporters that go out to the middle of the country and to the small towns in america? america is dying. the middle class is dying. you claim to be elite. you are an elite class and that is a huge problem with the country today. you are a monolithic thought in washington. you think alike, you vote alike, and you vote for people and you do not report on the policies of biden and the democratic party right now that is killing the middle-class. host: james, we are going to leave it there. there is a lot on the table. peter baker, what would you like to address? peter: thank you for the call. i understand your point of view on this. i would say that we actually do do a lot of reporting from across the country. we are the only newspaper that has as extensive a national staff as we do. we have reporters in the midwest, the south, mountain states and so forth because we want to capture america outside the east coast. we are not a new york paper. we are a global paper and we do, very extensively, right about the concerns and the issues that have been animating opposition to president biden. we write about the policies that have caused concern among voters and his low approval ratings, including inflation and economic issues. in the end, people are always going to be satisfied or think we are biased? everybody is biased. it is not our goal. our goal is to be accurate, evenhanded, fair, open-minded. those are the goals for journalism. we get attacked and we get criticized from the right, understandably so at times, and criticized from the left, understandably at times. i appreciate the thoughts and i appreciate james for asking them. host: susan glasser, anything you want to add? susan: i think peter said it right. the goal here is to be open-minded, to be critical, to be fair, evenhanded, and curious. this is a moment that requires journalism, i think, to be humble. surprised by what we are surprised by and to constantly seek to reinvent ourselves into better. it is hard to do that in this polarized moment. what is hard for us as we have traveled around the country on this book tour -- all the way over the country -- and i am struck by how much people live inside news and information environments in which they are rarely exposed to information and ideas that challenge their thinking. that push them to consider facts they may not have pushed. or lead them to reject facts altogether and unfortunately, that is a huge challenge for people. peter and i have been journalists are entire careers. we are committed to the idea that facts do actually matter and it is very important to establish a commonality of facts and experience to then have a robust political debate about what to do about it. we are living in a world two years after an election in 2020 in which polls have consistently found as many as two thirds of republican voters believe the lies about the election of 2020. that the former president has told and that has taken the country to a different and very worrisome place. host: susan glasser, harvard grad. peter baker, oberlin grad. did i get that right? peter: not a grad but i did get o there. caller: really enjoying the show. peter, you have got some great gifts. i am african-american and i was a military police officer. i fought the russians from 1979 and 1994. my question for you is with january 6, there is paperwork where president trump wanted to send in 20,000 troops or 10,000 troops nancy pelosi denied him. mitch mcconnell denied him. the sergeant of arms and the d.c. mayor bower, and the secret service knew about it and the fbi norfolk office knew about it. you have those on the books? peter: there is no question there was the part of a number of people that failed to see the security threat. it is true there was reluctance on the part of a number of people in washington to have the military in the streets because of what happened in lafayette square the previous june. we have a scene in the book where president trump says i want troops on the street, but he wants them to protect his supporters from what he thinks will be counter protesters against him. he is not worried about protecting congress. he is worried about protecting his supporters. that is from reporting from people in the room at the time. president trump trying to stop it, he did not. he encouraged it. he put out tweets encouraging people to come to washington. it will be wild, he said. when the people stormed into the capitol he did not act aggressively to stop it. that has been shown time and again. even people like mike pence and others who work for president trump would tell you they were incredibly disappointed he failed to act. senators who voted to convict him in the impeachment trial were reacting as much is anything to his failure to stop it once it began. i think the image of him sitting in the diner watching this unfold on tv has been very clear for the people that were there at the time saying he was not expressing concern about the people in danger. but he was encouraged his people were standing up for him so aggressively. he suggested that the protesters or the rioters chanting "hang mike pence" maybe had it right. host: if you cannot get to the phones, you can send a text message. that is 202-748-8903. that is for text messages only. please include your first name and city if you would. we will also scroll through our social media sites if you want to participate. the next call is gerald in los angeles. go ahead with your question or comment. caller: it is fitzgerald and this is for peter and susan. gina's journalistic mind. huge fan. -- genius journalistic minds. huge fan. how have you seen journalism change during the time a donald trump? susan: thank you for the kind words and for listening and reading. by the way, one of the positive aspects for us as journalists that is maybe not fully understood is this has been, in some respects, a return to first principles for us. if there was ever a moment it was clear, the urgency and importance of journalism, it is when our political institutions are being tested like this. i think the obama era in washington was kind of a technocratic era. it was a sense of, you know, let's focus on how to, you know, nudge people toward the right policies. let's talk about the nuances of health care reform and things like that. in the trump era, we quickly came to first principles,. basic debates about the role of media, the constitution, the limits of presidential power by a president seemed to see no limits. for us as reporters i think it has been an important and invigorating time when you see the urgency and the necessity of our jobs. i do not know. obviously, we would prefer not to be in a moment in time when journalists are being called the enemies of the people. when they literally are being required to take security details to cover rallies by the president of the united states because he is pointing and whipping up his crowds into a frenzy at the reporters. peter and i lived in russia in the former soviet union. to call someone an enemy of the people is a very resonant and historically horrifying phrase. that phrase was used to condemn millions to the gulags. donald trump maybe not have known that the second for the fifth or the hundredth time, but he was told again and again, and he chose to use this to weaponizes platform against a category of people. peter: i told you about the time i was in the oval office with our publisher. he says to president trump, you have to understand, your rhetoric is putting journalist's lives at stake. not necessarily in america, but around the world. it would be empowering autocrats to use authority against journalists like anil pull anna politkovskaya. but the language of the enemies of the people and fake news is so inflammatory that it was a danger to president trump. he said, you think so? that is interesting. and it made no difference whatsoever. susan: that is another really striking way in which the trump presidency was such an outlier from any other presidency. democrat or republican really. there have been other presidents who might have worked with autocratic leaders, especially in the cold war, but we have never had a modern president of the united states who cheered for the world's dictators, strong men and bad guys. this was something that, of course it is a major theme in "the divide," but we are trying to see -- this is not only demonizing and attacking the press on the home another level, but this admiration for the autocrats of the world who did not have to deal with the independent media. he celebrated people like kim jong-un, the philippines,cc in egypt, erdogan in turkey. and tormented america's allies. it is such a remarkable period. it is hard to process this actually happened. host: next call for susan glasser and peter baker comes from iris in michigan. you are on book tv. good afternoon. caller: good afternoon. how are you doing, peter? i have not talked to you in a while. i am interested in whether they have ever spoken to people that have raised money for charities and with that have happened without the program of donald trump? i am stepping in as an instructor on how to raise money. the other thing is, what brought them to russia and why are there so many other companies with vaccines that we have known about? they have been around for a long time, and yet, our president will not touch them with a 10 foot pole. host: thank you for calling. if you would address the russia question. why did you go to russia? peter: why did we go to russia? [laughter] susan: because they asked. host: were you assigned? peter: they asked. it is about books for me. when i was a young teenager, i remember reading two books about russia. one called "the russians" and one called "russia." the came out around the same time and they were remarkable books by correspondents in moscow about this important country they were covered. i was so inspired i said, i want to be the moscow correspondent for "the washington post." one day i was asked and i said, this is something i always wanted to do. that was a great gift, to see another culture from the inside. susan: when i was growing up in the 1980's i was always fascinated by russia. i took russian in high school. this was right in the middle of the 1980's at a moment when gorbachev had just come to power. i vividly recall my senior year in high school. we were having our russian class one day outside school in mcdonald's and some people overheard us and they mistook us for exchange students. they came over to give us their condolences for the chernobyl nuclear accident which was, at the time, occurring. there was a sense of, can we end the cold war? look at the horrors. inside russia, and for gorbachev, that chernobyl incident was a real crisis. a moment at which gorbachev may have realized, you know, part of the unsustainability of the soviet system, the consequences of logging on a massive scale to their people -- lying on a massive scale to the people. it turned out peter and i, who were just getting engaged and just about to get married, it was not something we talked about. but when it came up as an opportunity we realized it was something both of us had been interested in since a young age. host: did you let on you are not russian? [laughter] susan: i cannot speak to what we might have said in that long-ago encounter in a mcdonald's. [laughter] host: a fun note in "kremlin rising" is that your son waited 10 minutes until after you submitted the manuscript for you to go into labor. susan: it is funny. this was back in 2005. we had just returned from our time as correspondents in moscow. we were racing against the clock. when you are nine months pregnant, you write a lot faster. [laughter] we thought we had three weeks left and one day we went out to dinner and, you know, i felt a strange sensation. i said, peter, there is something happening. we actually pulled an all-nighter to get the last couple of chapters done. the next morning peter said, good news. i.e. mailed the last chapters and i said, i am in labor. -- i emailed the last chapters and i said, i am in labor. host: do you write on the same computer? peter: we have different computers. i do not mind transferring back and forth. host: split up chapters? susan: with both books we had an outline and we split the chapters 50 to do a first draft. and then we edited and wrote through it. host: former editor of politico. does she edit more than you do? peter: yes. [laughter] but that is a good thing. host: carolyn sends in a text, could you comment on gorbachev's legacy? peter: gorbachev is one of the most consequential men of our era. what is sad is he is not recognized as such in russia. in the west, we see him as somebody that, whether he intended to or not, freed tens if not hundreds of millions of people. he gave an opportunity to his country to become freer and more prosperous. when we were there, he was the first person we interviewed when we went as correspondents. he also likes susan. he was remarkably impressive. to us, seeing a hero and as a villain, they saw him as somebody they loathed. he was a person of great controversy. you saw putin refused to go to his funeral when he passed away. host: what did jim baker think of mikael gorbachev? susan: jim baker and his lifelong friend george h. w. bush, their great accomplishment, in many respects, was midwifing the end of the cold war. in many respects, they forged a unique partnership with mikael gorbachev and his foreign minister. it was a partnership that meant the difference between stability and a world not in crisis. when you see how hostile and adversarial relations had become of vladimir putin and russia have become you realize how differently it could have turned out. i think baker met many times with gorbachev and he would say that is the defining moment for both of them. host: why james baker? why did you choose to write 600 pages about james baker? peter: it is a very fast read. [laughter] host: i do not endorse books and i recommend it. peter: nobody had done a biography which was fascinating. most secretaries of state, it seems like somebody writes a biography. here you had, in some ways, the most consequential secretary of state of our time. if dean astin was president at the beginning, he was president at the end. helped reunite germany. helped assemble the coalition that fought the goal for and created a new world order. on top of that had his hand on every political thing that happened in a quarter-century. helped run gerald ford's campaign in 1976 and george h. w. bush's. he has hands in a most everything. in some ways, his story was a story of washington. in terms of how it was then and how it is now. host: the subtitle is "the man who ran washington." i think about mark hanneman. [laughter] peter: you are a great student of history. susan: the interesting thing is baker, who achieved power in washington because he was so skilled as a mark hannah-like fixture, somebody who could get things done. a behind the scenes player. but oh, he loathed that he would be remembered. once he was featured as a handler, the fixer, he hated that. it was his cousin that coined the nickname he liked better. he was on the cover of "time" magazine as "the velvet hammer." that spoke to him as both a diplomat but one who was brutally effective when need be. willing to bring down the hammer. you know, baker wanted to escape the reputation and the great success, in some ways, that he had as a powerbroker behind the scenes, as a fixer. and to become a principal in washington. a statesman in his own statesman his own right. that tension is part of the interesting story of this remarkable, decade-long rise to the heights of washington power. a very unlikely story. that is the other thing peter and i really enjoyed as being able to do a work we started out interested in the story that tells us about washington but we became interested in the story it told us about jim baker, who is this unlikely figure who spent 40 years essentially in his native houston, never anything and that ground that would indicate he would be a global figure. in fact, barbara bush used to joke that he didn't even vote, it was the be getting of hunting season and he preferred to be out hunting. so he's the greatest midcareer change ever. host: how many hours did you spend with jim baker? he is what 87, 88? peter: 92. he will be 93 next year. he is out hunting. he was post to go hunting with a friend or a couple of friends. he is an remarkable shape for 92. we should all be so lucky. we spent about seven years on this book, maybe 70 hours doing interviews. we went to his ranch with him and his wife in wyoming. they are incredibly gracious to have us there. we tried to get the major touchstones of his life and interviewed multiple presidents, vice president and secretaries of state about him. we also interviewed all eight of his children, which is interesting. and we interviewed his nanny, who at the time was still alive. we were very lucky to be able to dive so deeply into his life and his personal life was fascinating. his first wife dies of cancer tragically and is left with four boys and it is devastating for him. he ends up marrying one of her best friends who had kids of her own and they end up having eight between them. it's that story of tragedy and heartbreak which i don't think had ever been told and quite as visceral away. host: for those of us old enough to have arrived in washington in the 1980's, we remember ed meese and jim baker. susan: it's almost unthinkable today, by the way -- jim baker, one of the reasons he gets into politics in his 40's is this tragic death of his wife and looking for something new to do. the other reason is his very best friend in houston, his tennis partner at the houston country club is george herbert walker bush. bush sees this as a way to help his friend move on from this terrible tragedy, so bush and aker enter national politics together. baker runs bush's 1980 primary campaign against ronald reagan and, amazingly enough, although they are tough on the campaign trail about reagan, they somehow end up with bush on the national ticket as a vice president and reagan invites jim baker who has run two national campaigns against him to be his white house chief of staff. it speaks a lot to the reputation he had acquired in a very short time as someone who was highly competent and skilled and to this day, baker is considered the gold standard for a white house chief of staff. many democrats as well as republicans over the years have consulted him and that role. it was a democrat, tom donlon, the former national security advisor to barack obama who said jim baker is the most important unelected official of washington since the end of world war ii. host: i remember tallahassee in 2000, sitting in that conference room and there's jim baker on george w. bush's recount team. but you began your book, the man who ran washington with donald trump and then end it with donald trump. peter: can't quite get away from him. we did not start this book when trump was on the stage. we started when obama was president. but what happened during writing the book is trump does arrive and our conversations cap turning back to trump. we would talk to baker about this because he's a political guy even if he doesn't like to admit it. it would constantly come up and he would be disdainful of trump. he would use words like crazy and nuts and he voted for him in 2016 and again in 2020. you are the picture of the establishment modern republican party that believes in free trade, that believes in alliances and compromise when it is necessary to get things done. how could you vote for this guy when your own friend, george h w bush and george w. bush didn't vote for him. it was a constant source of conversation which he never fully gave an answer that we ever understood. his answer is i am a republican, he's the leader of my party, i don't want democrats in there. i always thought it was part of his nature. his nature is to not be on the ouide throwing rocks but to be on the inside. because even though he doesn't need any power or influence, on the inside, you have a chance to have something. susan: it's the conundrum of the modern republican party. in many ways, we realized if the subject of your biography is telling you again and again the same answer, you have to listen to him. what was he telling us? certainly helping us to understand how it is possible donald trump could have become the candidate of the republican party twice. many people were like jim baker. they didn't necessarily agree with donald trump on many issues. they saw his character, certainly in baker's case, quite clearly. yet the demand of partisanship in our dysfunctional time were such that they were willing to override even what they claimed to be were very principled objections to donald trump. if you want to understand how it is even possible trump having done the things he is done could still be report -- supported by so many millions of americans today, i think this baker story is important and eliminating, an example of why that republican tribal affiliation seems to have overwhelmed all other columns and objections when it comes to jim baker. host: let's go back to calls. paul is in new york. you are on with peter baker and susan glasser. caller: congratulations on your esteemed careers. really quickly, i grew up in new york city. trump was a very visible part of the media landscape since i was a kid. what i would say and i think was missed a lot is there is a big class divide that for some reason, trump was very effective at getting support for or, excuse me, exploiting. this is lost on the media because it's perceived to be so elitist as the guy from philadelphia was saying. you have to go to the midwest to see this -- you can be in different parts of new york -- you don't have to go to the midwest to see this. a large portion of the media, it's very low in terms of its approval rating. it's lower than trump's in some cases. i think it's important to look at it in that context. for instance, the new york time, a local paper in new york and this was in the new york section, it doesn't cover street crime. they don't really cover any violent street crime almost ever. the -- they don't cover it. host: could you put a period on what you're trying to say? caller: if there's such a huge divide between people who are highly educated and driving the media conversation versus the vast majority of americans, doesn't that lead to a better chance of trump coming about as opposed to saying he's a master liar and all this other stuff, you have an unstable situation in which the media is perceived to be so elitist, attacking the media is popular. susan: he is a master of outer borough grievance. no question donald trump perpetually -- that was always his persona. i'm the guy from queens trying to barrel my way into the inner sanctum, whether that was the inner sanctum of the new york times or washington and the deep state, he has made that a foundation of his career. but he was also made by the media and i think he was particularly made by the new york media and that is an important story. we tell it in the book and that has been told many times before. without the new york post, donald trump probably never would have been president. it predates all the free airtime on fox. many years before that, donald trump at one point was reputed to have been on more covers consecutively than anyone else and to this day, we can see it -- he's a believer in as long as they spell your name right school of good publicity. there is an extraordinary moment we report in "the divider" where his campaign manager donald trump telling somebody not only is all publicity good publicity, but according to trump, as long as they don't accuse you of being a pedophile, it's good blissfully. i think he's a creature of new york, the outer borough versus and had intentions. the new york post and the tabloid mentality which infuses and suffuses his public appearance. but it is calculated. the attacks on the news media were calculated not only because they read the polls and saw media as an institution was looked down upon, but as a specific strategy to drive down the approval ratings in the media. in fact, lesley stahl once asked donald trump during the 2016 campaign, she said why do you do this? why do you demagogue about the media? saying the quiet part out loud, donald trump says to lesley stahl so that when you write something bad about me no one will believe it. host: this goes back to an earlier caller asking about the other players -- was it a mistake the mainstream media did not cover that story or is it a nonstory? peter: it's a story but it is one we should cover with facts and investigation, not political hot air. the trick is trying to get past the disinformation that was being put out there and find out what is there because there is something there. there is a prosecution currently looking at something worth at least investigating. we don't know what that investigation will produce or whether it will produce any charges or not. there's probably a disinclination to believe rudy giuliana -- rudy giuliani after all the things he have said that she has said that is not worth believing. but that doesn't mean it's not something worth looking at. that's the balance the times is trying to take -- look at what is there and not the politics of it. the second part, let's just say there is something regarding the president's son. what does it mean about the president? all residents have relatives that ended doing things that look bad in the public light, including president trump. the question is do we have anything of concern regarding the president himself and that has been much more tenuous strain there. that's when that has been important to us. ukraine as an example, there's no evidence the president did anything -- getting rid of the prosecutor which has been harped on by his critics, it was the policy of president obama and the entire western allies. it had nothing to do with hunter biden, yet it has been linked to that as if joe biden did something -- there's no evidence of that. we have to look at what's real and what's not real. host: every author we have on, we ask what they are reading and what some of their favorite oaks are. peter baker, this is what he ld us -- carlnstein and bob woodward, all the presidents men. david halberstam's the best and the brightest. edwin morris, his series on feudal rooseve what it takes, the wiseman, and hedrick smith, the power game -- obviously a theme with the books you have lusted. but he did add this -- you have lifted. but he did add this. any and everything by doris kearns did win, michael best loss, jon meacham, doug brinkley, robert dowell, ronald white, david mccullough, david remnick, michael dobbs, robert massey, lynn nelson, rick atkinson and anne applebaum. i'm sure i'm forgetting some remarkable books. so as they say in congress, i reserve the right to advise and extend my remarks. susan glasser' response -- louisa may alcott, little women. what is it about that book -- and it is women who really like that book? susan: i wasn't sure if you're asking about nonfiction or fiction. obviously peter has chosen to answer your question by not answering your question, listing every single author that he likes. [laughter] there's no question that for every bookish young woman for a century, they have delighted in this story of joe marge and her sisters. i love that book so much that i would read it again and again as a child. in fact, in the book, they talk about reading again and again a book. that's what i was doing with little women. i would finish it and start all over again. host: other books susan glasser gave us -- zora neale hurston, their eyes were watching god, a brhthining lie. secondhand time,n ground, rebecca west -- black lamb and gray falcon. and the art of eating. susan: to anybody who knows about food writing, she sort of defined it for a whole generation of americans and as escapism goes, i highly recommend it. host: and you are currently reading bill cohen power failure , after lives? susan: that is the nobel prize winner in literature. it is great. host: peter baker is reading john meacham, and there was light about abraham lincoln and getting ready to read the ted kennedy out of you. caller: hello. i grew up in the middle east and to be skeptical about state run tv, so i listened to different news outlets. the news media here i think cover what they want and don't cover what they want. i think msnbc covers certain stories. murdoch and his fox make up stories and that's a problem. i think division never recovered after the civil war. reagan prayed on that. reagan talked about ethically dividing people. he attacked the federal government, i think trump didn't care. he came down the stairs and said mexicans are drug dealers and rapists and all that stuff. the gop always went after obama. i can't believe people -- i expected -- i respected all my life james baker, but when he came on msnbc and said i support him because he's a republican. but how could you support someone who is a racist and who divides people and the gop always lives on divided people. that does not make sense to me. host: any comment for mike? susan: we got that a lot. i have to say many people admire jim baker a lot and were surprised, including many republicans we spoke with who were surprised he chose to support donald trump twice. i should point out he did speak out against trump's claims about the 2020 elections and had a view -- make of it what you will -- but he certainly has a view he shared with us many times that he found much of trump's policy agenda, especially his efforts to change american foreign policy, he profoundly disagreed with that. he was very uncomfortable with trumps personal behavior and character and yet, there's this paradox and it's not just about jim baker, it's about millions of republicans who share those quorums and overcame them and voted for him because he was a republican nominee anyway. peter: a lot of americans are like i don't like the politicians, so i'm going to vote for anyone who will do what i like -- i don't approve of trump as a person but the policies are more important than the personality. that's the argument some of them make. it's if you are an antiabortion voter, somebody to whom that is important, he accomplished what you would have wanted him to do and no other republican president had done, which is putting three people on the supreme court who helped overturn roe v. wade. so your policy goal was achieved. the view of a lot of people as i can live with a lot of stuff because the policy is more important. it's hard to make that argument after january 6 when you're talking about the actual threat to democracy, but for a lot of people, they are saying he's a buffoon or he is bombastic or embarrassing, but as long as i get my policies, why not support him? susan: baker never went to the level of disingenuous and -- it's interesting, just the other day over the last few days, there has been an enormous debate about donald trump's dinner at mar-a-lago with a known white's premises to just days after that dinner explicitly said how much he admired adolf hitler and rather than disavowing that person, trump has continued to double down on it. it's fascinating to see mike pence who is out there selling this memoir that is arguably this book of contortions where on the one hand, he's rejecting trumps view of the 2020 election trump literally called forth a mob saying hang mike pence, hank mike pence. pence has tried and not all leg successfully to thread the needle saying i'm against what trump did with the election -- and he said this the other day -- i condemn him, he should not have had that dinner at mar-a-lago, however, i don't believe trump is a racist or anti-semite or i would not have been his vice president. that's a fascinating level of disingenuousness. donald trump is absolutely the same man today he was in 2016 when he selected mike pence to be his vice president. the divider and many other accounts are filled with extraordinary examples. we asked a former national security official about these terrible incidents reported about trump saying racist things -- the famous remark about shithole countries was not an outlier. they said trump would say things like that again and again and again about 70 different countries and semi-kinds of people. jim baker never went to that level of justifying, contorting himself to say the man is not a problem. you have these different gradations, mike pence trying to get us to believe something that's impossible to believe about who trump is. but they all more or less did support him, the vast majority of republicans. host: you begin with donald trump and end it with donald trump, with the memo jim baker sent. peter: in 2016, trump invites him to meet with him. baker does not want to be perceived as endorsing him because of all the reasons susan has talked about. he doesn't particularly like the guy. his solution, i would vote for him but not endorse he did not want to give a public embrace of this person he found so loathsome. when trump asked him to come in, he says i've advised other candidates. he brings a two-page memo of what he thinks trump needs to do to be a successful candidate and president. all things we know trump is not going to do, reach out to women and people of color, to believe in free trade, to do all of these things that are an anathema to who trump is. baker knew of trump didn't do them, there's no way to argue -- his requirements for an endorsement, which he would never meet. host: louis in new york, please go ahead. caller: thank you for taking my call. i always enjoy reading what peter and susan have in the new york times and new yorker. i want to push back a little bit since you have written so extensively about both jim baker and donald trump. i would suggest going back to jim baker and his times in the reagan administration that you can draw an almost straight line between the willie horton tactics of george h w bush and donald trump's attacks on barack obama not being born in the united states. that's deeply embedded in the republican party. despite that handwaving people like jim baker make, that's the reality. it's not going away anytime soon. i will take your comments off air. susan: i want to thank you for that comment because i think it's an important one that's other explanation for why the jim baker's of the world supported donald trump ny some of them, we will see how many, are breaking with trump. that goes to winning at all costs. the 1980 eight campaign, when george h w bush was running for president, he was losing. he was down by 17 points after the democratic convention to michael dukakis and the governor of michael -- governor of massachusetts. that's when baker came into the campaign. he realized they were going to have to hit dukakis and hit him hard, go negative and baker, it wasn't his idea, the willie horton ads. the most famous one was run by an outside group ostensibly not connected to the official campaign but acre did not act quickly or decisively to stop that line of attack. he did tell us -- we asked about willie horton. he allowed if he was going to regret anything it might be that but jim baker is not a man who does regrets. i think the through line there is winning. it is why someone like mitch mcconnell, who has always had a very pronounced and obvious personal distaste for donald trump, nonetheless accommodated himself. it's one of the reasons trump became president and why he was able to get many things like the transformation of the supreme court done while he was president. it is about winning and that's where you see many republicans right now seeking to break with trump after the results of the 2022 midterm elections. this idea that he might be a loser for the party in addition to having been a two time loser in the national popular vote. we will see. it is a party that believes in hardball politics. host: where can people read you and what are you covering these days? peter: read at nytimes.com. and i cover the biden white house. from time to time i still write about trump because he is still out there. we had a story just the other day about how much he is seemed to be increasingly embracing extremism but this dinner with kanye west and nick frente!'s come with the video he sent this week to the families of the january 6 stormers -- and the tweet he just put out yesterday -- not a tweet, a truth social calling for the termination of the constitution in order to overturn the election and put him back in power. he has always flirted with the fringes and extremism in the past but he seemed to be embracing it as almost the core of his current candidacy. host: where can people read you? susan: i write a weekly letter from washington for the new yorker. you can see it on its website. it generally comes out late her savings, friday mornings. i'm also doing a new podcast with my colleagues in the washington bureau of the new yorker called the political scene and that comes out every friday. we look forward to all of your ideas about all that work. peter: free books together by susan glasser and peter baker -- kremlin rising, the man who ran washington and, most recently, the

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