The Spectacle of Trump at 80

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0:41Robert Siegel:So the crowd should look good. Yeah, well, I guess there'll be an exception for the president in that case. I think so.

0:53Robert Siegel:Hi, I'm Robert Siegel in conversation about politics with two very insightful observers of American politics and society. Our regular participant, author, and New York Times opinion contributor E.J. Dion. Great to be with you. Good to see you again. And Peter Wehner, who is a contributor to The Times and also The Atlantic, and who served as a speechwriter in three Republican administrations, Ronald Reagan's and the two Bushes. Thanks for joining us. Great to be with us. Great to see you. Great to have you, Pete. And we're going to start by taking note of the birthday that falls on this weekend, Donald Trump's 80th.

1:26Robert Siegel:We went more than two centuries without having an octogenarian in the White House. And now we've had two in a row. And I'd like to hear your thoughts about Trump at 80 and especially how that landmark is going to be observed. UFC will present a seven-fight card in a cage that's been hoisted onto the White House South Lawn. AJ, why don't you start things off? First of all, this birthday celebration is billed both as UFC Freedom 250 and UFC White House. It's been folded into the celebration of the country's 250th birthday.

2:00E.J. Dionne Jr.:Well, first, lest anyone out there think that all of us are ignorant about MMA, I want to point out that you, some years ago, did a 13-minute piece on NPR, quite fair and balanced, if I forgive me for using that term, that included a philosopher who does MMA. So let's get that out of the way.

2:22Robert Siegel:And it included a very young reporter, Tam Keith, out of San Francisco, who went and witnessed the fight for us.

2:28E.J. Dionne Jr.:Oh, that's fantastic. You know, a couple of things about this. First, I don't think it's a great idea for Donald Trump to be reminding everyone that he's 80 years old at this moment when he shows various signs of faltering or saying very odd things. Secondly, it is not at all surprising, but still astonishing that he has really tried to fold his own birthday into the country's birthday and suggest that somehow these are equivalent or equal events. I mean, perhaps that goes too far, but he's really merged the two. But there's there's a third thing here, which is and I know this thanks to a very good piece that Michael Shearer did in The Atlantic.

3:07E.J. Dionne Jr.:This has been a real fight over the control of the 250th. And believe it or not, there was bipartisan agreement on how we should celebrate it. There was a group called America 250. And then President Trump came in and essentially took it over, kind of knocked that aside. But there was a great quote in Michael Shearer's piece. This is straight out of It's a Wonderful Life, when Mr. Potter steals George Bailey's money and tries to drive him to the brink. And, you know, and with Trump, it is always playing to the base. MMA, these numbers are hard to find for sure, but as best I can tell, it appeals to 10 to 12 percent of us, overwhelmingly male.

3:51E.J. Dionne Jr.:And, you know, it's once again going to the base. And at a moment when we could talk about the Constitution and the Declaration, and while we do argue a lot and they're good arguments, I think about the meaning of the Constitution and the Declaration. We all honor them. But instead, we're just thrust into starting out with a sport that John McCain described, late John McCain described as human cockfighting.

4:20Robert Siegel:Pete, mixed martial arts, UFC, one can just say this is stuff that Donald Trump likes. Or is it a calculated appeal to this cult of masculinity? I'd say it's both. He clearly likes it. This is one of his longest standing cultural institutional affiliations. I mean, he was promoting MMA and UFC back in the early 2000s. I think when it was banned by various states, he allowed his Taj Mahal in Atlantic City to host them. So he's had an attachment to it and to Dana White, who's the president of it for a long time. I do think it's cultural signaling of a kind, a sort of populist gesture. year, I would say that the only sporting event that Donald Trump could go to these days and not get booed would be the UFC or MMA.

5:08Good reference, Pete. If you saw him in Madison Square Garden for the Knicks game earlier this week, it was just a cascade of boos, and that's happened. So I would say that apart from that, something is different. One is that previous presidents have hosted athletes all the time, Super Bowl winners and others. That's not unusual. The idea of not just hosting athletes, but making an event a centerpiece for the White House, bringing it into the executive space, that's different. Even in your introduction, I mean, I worked in the White House. You said that there's a cage hoisted on the south lawn of the White House.

5:45And it's like for people who work there in particular, you're thinking that didn't happen when I worked there or anybody else. The last thing I would say that makes this different is it's not a one-off for Donald Trump. This sport captures his ethic. There's a brutality and a cruelty and an effort to dominate people that has been a through line through Donald Trump's life. And so this UFC event is very consistent with who he's been and how he treats people.

6:18Robert Siegel:I would add here that according to the Washington Post, the military personnel who were selected to have tickets to this event, and I think at least half of the people watching it, a few thousand, will be military, they are required to meet current waist-to-height ratio and physical fitness standards. So the crowd should look good. Yeah, well, I guess there'll be an exception for the president in their case. I think so. So pretty soon the country is going to be celebrating the 250th anniversary of American independence, which brings back for me some memories of the 200th, the bicentennial. I wonder if you have strong memories of that, Peter.

7:00Yeah, I mean, I was a relatively young kid at the time, but that's probably true of all of us. My memory of it was the ships in the harbor. The tall ships. And I had that memory of, you know, Watergate, Nixon having resigned two years before. And there was a palpable sense of unity in the country and a celebration. And I think that that, to me, kind of flipped the switch of when we got out of that sort of Watergate era and began to look into something and enter into something better. E.J.?

7:36E.J. Dionne Jr.:I have a very similar memory to Pete's in a political sense that you looked back at Watergate and you looked back at the country rising up against corruption and actually getting a president to resign. And you felt that whatever flaws we have had, and certainly we have had flaws as a country, we set up a set of institutions that when they work and when people are willing to make them work, can protect our democracy and our freedom. So I thought it was entirely significant that we were celebrating this 200th after Watergate.

8:16Robert Siegel:I actually have a very strong, truly New York memory of the bicentennial, which was everybody was very excited about the coming of the tall ships. And a couple of weeks before July 4th, we were at a party, met a couple. He was a psychiatrist. That's the only thing I remember about him. When he heard where our apartment was, he offered to cater our watch party if he could just come and take pictures out the window. And so we had a wonderful gathering and watched the tall ships, which had no connection before that to July 4th that I knew of and none that I've heard of since, but it was a wonderful day.

8:59Robert Siegel:And yes, as you said, Pete, in those days, the political mood was pretty united. And the mood this time, I mean, is the 250th going to get the kind of broad buy-in from people or has it become politicized? Oh, I think it's become politicized. I mean, that's in large measure because Trump has put his imprimatur on it in a way that was bound to make it politicized. And, you know, most, I mean, all presidents are partisan, but prior to Trump, most presidents picked moments. Sometimes they were moments of national tragedy. Sometimes they were anniversaries. And they used those moments to try and unify the country.

9:45And in this case, Donald Trump, because of his own peculiar sociopathy and psychology, uses everything to divide us. And that includes the celebration. And so, you know, a lot of the country is just checking out. And that's a shame.

10:01E.J. Dionne Jr.:You know, it's interesting because when you think of the year 1976, that is very close to a period when our country was deeply divided. We think of the year 1968 when we had the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. The Vietnam War tore us apart. We were in the midst of a vast cultural change. And so that division in the country could easily have played out in 1976. And there were interesting arguments that year. I mean, we shouldn't sanitize the past and say we were completely united. But the incentives in politics were radically different at that moment. And in particular, as Pete suggested, the incentives for Gerald Ford, who felt that the right thing to do and the politically smart thing to do both was to bring the country together.

11:00E.J. Dionne Jr.:And he had a campaign song that was very effective that began with the words, I'm feeling good about America. And his desire in that bicentennial was to make people feel good about America. That's not the leadership we have at the moment.

11:17Robert Siegel:It's really a reminder that the presidency is it's a double job. It's head of government and it's head of state. And Gerald Ford knew that gear that was head of state and nonpartisan. Years later, I remember Bill Clinton speaking in Oklahoma City after the bombing there. And he was in terrible political shape, as I recall, at that time. But as a head of state, he was masterful. That nonpartisan national gear has just not – it doesn't exist in the current president. Yeah, and that hurts a country because – you know, George Will wrote a book back in the early 1980s called Statecraft to Soulcraft.

11:59And it was the notion that statecraft, including the words of presidents, shaped the souls, if you will, of a country. And how cultures are shaped and formed is a very, very complicated thing. But one of them is what the leadership of a country either honors or dishonors, what they value, what they celebrate, or on the other hand, what they tear down. And in the end, and the founders understood this, if we go back to the real founding of the country, it wasn't just the structures of government. It was the values, the beliefs, the virtues of the citizenry. And that is shaped by a lot of things.

12:39And part of what it's shaped by are the words that we use and the way that we treat each other.

12:44E.J. Dionne Jr.:You know, the philosopher Nancy Rosenblum wrote a really interesting book called On the Side of the Angels, where she argued that in a democracy, partisanship is patriotic, but it has to be partisanship rightly understood. Partisanship is about having very strong views on where the country should move. But it also accepts that in a free and democratic society, people will disagree on this. And you accept by your very partisanship that disagreement is legitimate, that it can be fought out in ways that are peaceful and respectful. And you have a sense that if we lose now, we can win later. There are no final victories or defeats.

13:26E.J. Dionne Jr.:And what we're seeing now is not as worse than partisanship. I think we ascribe it too much to partisanship. This is a politics of friend and enemy, the philosopher Carl Schmitt's kind of view of politics. And a politics where we divide ourselves not as citizens who disagree, but as friend and enemy is just a very dangerous politics. politics. And I just want to add one thing to that, EJ, which is, and it alludes to something you had said earlier, you know, sometimes viruses create their own antibodies. And I think in the life of an individual, just like in the life of a country, you begin to take for granted certain virtues, certain qualities.

14:07And then when they're stripped away from you, you realize why they mattered after all. And I do think that this sort of stripping of the public square, the immorality, the depravity, the cruelty, the antipathy, all of those things, that takes a toll. And I would say this year, more than at any moment in the last 10 years, I'm beginning to see something else. I think despondency is giving way to people who are energized, and it's focusing itself on the repair. I'm hopeful. I wouldn't predict it. Life is complicated, but I'm hopeful that we're seeing these sort of civic antibodies kick in and that we're going to go into a better time, having gone through a really hard time.

14:49E.J. Dionne Jr.:I so agree with that. And I've thought for the last decade, or really since the gentleman came down that escalator, that this entire period has been brought to you by the philosopher-folk singer Joni Mitchell, you don't know what you got till it's gone.

15:05Robert Siegel:Both of you have written recently about politics and values and faith. Pete, you've written about the strong connection between Donald Trump and white evangelical voters, how that connection fits into American Christianity. How unusual, first of all, is his success with white evangelical voters? Well, on one level, it is unusual. And the reason it's unusual is why people are kind of shocked, particularly people in the Christian faith. And the reason is kind of obvious. They'd say, look, for most of my life, conservative evangelicals considered character, honor, integrity to be crucial to leadership, especially political leadership.

15:44You both will remember the late 1990s when Bill Clinton was caught up in a scandal with Monica Lewinsky. And it was conservative evangelicals that every other day were taking a figure of two by four upside his head. and criticizing him on moral grounds. The SBC passed a resolution on the importance of moral character. Southern Baptist. Southern Baptist, yeah, Southern Baptist Convention. And so now you fast forward Donald Trump, who in many ways makes Bill Clinton look like a Boy Scout. He's easily the most corrupt person, president in American history, and one of the most corrupt political figures in American history.

16:17And now they have aligned themselves with him, and they very rarely criticize him. So there, there's a brazen hypocrisy. What I do think that some people miss and why it's not unusual is that Trump didn't fundamentally change the sensibilities of many evangelicals. He personified them. He embodied them. And if you were familiar with the evangelical subculture that existed, there was a real effort to push this narrative, a kind of warrior mentality. And he tapped into the resentments of a lot of white evangelicals, and their feeling was that he is going to do to our enemies what I want him to do.

16:56He's going to hurt them. He's going to make them bleed. It's an ugly sentiment, but it was very, very evident that it existed.

17:04Robert Siegel:And you've offered, as a response to that phenomenon, a turn to Christian humanism, a tradition that joins the pursuit of human reason and the classics with tradition and faith. Yeah, I did. I did an essay in The Atlantic on Christian humanism because I wanted to think about what might be a pathway out for what I think is a kind of wreckage that American Christians have created. And I would say EJ would know it very well as a Catholic because I think it mirrors a lot of Catholic thought, social thought. This pope's most recent encyclical mentions Christian humanism. So essentially, it's the notion that everyone bears the image of God, and so they therefore have inherent dignity and equal worth.

17:56So that's one. One other thing that Christian humanism does, which I think is relevant to this moment, is it's very wary about the fusion of the Christian faith and political power. It's not a separatist view. It doesn't say that Christians shouldn't have anything to say about the public life, but it's very wary about what happens when Christians get wed. And the last thing I'll say is there's a temperamental aspect to Christian humanism that contrasts with a lot of what you see in American Christianity. Ironic, calm, curious, non-anxious. I'd say Christian humanists generally are more comfortable with shades of gray.

18:30And I think when they see the world, their impulse isn't to judge the world. I think it's to try and enchant the world.

18:37Robert Siegel:E.J., you've written recently about what you call the new values voters. Are they Pete's Christian humanists?

18:44E.J. Dionne Jr.:You know, I was listening to Pete talk, and I think the calm way in which he spoke about this embodied the very point he was trying to make about Christian humanists. What I wrote about is the idea that we often get used to something being true and assuming it's always been true. Things have been always like this. That's a normal human reaction. If you look at American history, we've gone through cycles where at times we did argue mostly about personal behavior, personal morality, prohibition, abortion, trans stuff now. But at other times, we have linked a moral critique to the larger society, to political corruption, to corruption and unfairness in the economy.

19:30E.J. Dionne Jr.:And my piece argued that we are going through a transition. You know, the obvious person representing that is James Tallarico, the Democrat running in Texas. But there are a whole lot of people talking about this. And again, Pope Leo reflects this. A lot of people in politics reflect this right now. Andy Beshear, the governor of Kentucky, is going to write a book inspired by the parable of the Good Samaritan. There's something going on out there that reflects a different kind of moral argument. I welcome it since I am broadly on that side of the argument. But I also think it's just a fact that we're going to have to grapple with.

20:08Robert Siegel:Let's talk about something that Donald Trump has contributed to this year's campaign for the midterms, which is a claim, absolutely unsupported by any facts, that there is a nationwide conspiracy to rig elections involving not just Democrats, but the media, election officials. It's all fixed. The whole thing is rigged. And I just I'm curious, it has been suggested that perhaps President Trump is laying the groundwork for dealing with a democratic victory in the House, maybe the Senate, who knows, and questioning its legitimacy. And what does that mean? How can a president simply claim that the Congress is illegitimate and not deal with him?

20:54Well, he can claim it because he's been doing it. And its effects are deeply damaging to American democracy because it presupposes a faith in the outcome of elections. And you go back to almost every election, certainly in my lifetime, including something like Bush-Gore in 2000, which was really highly contested, decided by the Supreme Court. And Al Gore gave a very gracious concession speech. This is part of the assets that he spills onto American democracy and the destruction of bonds and tearing through norms. And I do think that we should assume that he's going to make every effort to try and overturn these legitimate elections.

21:39He did it once before.