Donald Trump Can’t Quit the 2020 Election

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22:12The Washington Roundtable:All right, Jane, let's pick up on that question of Donald Trump versus the deep state. His preoccupation with the 2020 election has now extended to saying that this grand conspiracy, when he himself was president, was covered up from him. before he got rid of her. He sent Tulsi Gabbard, his director of national intelligence, to be present for an FBI search of an election center in Fulton County, Georgia, looking for information about an election that occurred six years ago. He's issued two different executive orders since he came back to office about elections. He's brought countless failed lawsuits.

22:57The Washington Roundtable:This is Donald Trump's obsession. I saw someone quoted in my husband's piece in the New York Times today saying this is his Captain Ahab moment. The election of 2020 is his white whale. What is it that Donald Trump thinks he's doing here with this obsession? He seems to be determined to appoint people to senior positions in the U.S. government whose sole job it is is to relitigate an election that happened six years ago.

23:24Jane Mayer:Well, and it's become the requirement for being hired by him for any major job is you have to first bend a knee and say he's right. He was not defeated in 2020 by Joe Biden. He won. So you have to accept the delusion and pay homage to it in order to serve in his administration, which is a very interesting thing because what happens is he's surrounding himself with loyalists who will not tell him the truth about things that are uncomfortable to hear.

23:53The Washington Roundtable:All right, well, let's play, in fact, I think the most interesting clip of the week in some ways, not in Donald Trump's fulminating speech, but in the confirmation hearing for Jay Clayton, President Trump's nominee to succeed Tulsi Gabbard as head of the Office of Director of National Intelligence. Let's listen to Senator John Ossoff from Georgia ask this question. Who won the 2020 election? You know, I'm not going to do this with you. This is a job interview. We've established that you have an obligation to be honest and forthright with the committee. Yes, you do have an obligation to be honest and forthright with the committee?

24:33The Washington Roundtable:Yes. Who won the 2020 election? Like I said, I'm not going to get into that with you. But you do have an obligation to be honest and forthright with the committee? Is anything that I just said not honest or forthright? Yes, you're not being honest or forthright. Who won the 2020 election? I think I've answered the question. We can keep doing this.

24:50Jane Mayer:Well, we're going to keep doing it because you're not being honest and forthright.

24:54The Washington Roundtable:I'm not going to engage in the theater. Answer it. What is your answer? I've given you my answer. What is your answer? Okay, guys, that is a stunning exchange by any measure for a man whose job, again, is to be the director of national intelligence, not the director of the Republican National Committee. Evan.

25:17Jane Mayer:You know what I thought was amazing about that was when Clayton used the word theater, because what he was doing was he was he was explicitly describing reality as theater, saying, I'm not going to get into this question of acknowledging the reality of the 2020 election, because in his mind, or shall I say more specifically, in the president's mind, it's an unbearable. performance to have to inhabit the reality of the 2020 election, which gets into the sort of core of what we're talking about, which is the narcissistic impossibility for Donald Trump of bearing the facts of that election, which then becomes the defining framework for him experiencing what he is capable of discerning, which is that he's walking into a wood chipper in the 2026 midterms.

26:14Jane Mayer:That's what I took away from that. But Jane, I'm curious what you made of it, because that was a heck of a moment. Honestly, it's so shocking. Clayton is not a disrespected figure. He's a major lawyer in the New York scene. You know, he has a good reputation. And to see someone supposedly successful person bow like that to Trump, to Trump's lies, and he's right on the edge of parroting them. He's not saying that Trump won, but he won't admit the truth. It's just shocking corruption of the truth. And it brings back to me something that actually Susan said to me, I have to say, early on, right before this last election, having watched what happens in Russia when you get a strong man in power, she said, one of the things that's going to happen is you will not believe the people who will become complicit with the corrupt power.

27:15Jane Mayer:And I think what we're watching is an act of complicity. It's like some kind of show trial where people confess and you know that they're lying. It's just a horrible moment for American democracy.

27:28The Washington Roundtable:Well, speaking of complicity and whether personnel is policy of a sort in a regime, a government like this. There was another hearing this week, Todd Blanche's hearing to become attorney general. Republican Senator John Kennedy asked Blanche if he was Trump's friend. Blanche said no, quote, I'm his lawyer, then corrected himself and said, was his lawyer. And now I'm deputy attorney general. Such another revealing moment, it seems to me, when you appoint your personal attorney, to be the attorney general of the United States. What do you think, if Todd Blanche gets confirmed, or even if he just remains as acting attorney general, guys, what is it that Blanche and the Justice Department can do to further any Trump campaign to undermine or challenge the results of the 2026 midterm elections?

28:26The Washington Roundtable:I'm very mindful that in 2020, when Donald Trump made his false claims about the election. It was his own very conservative attorney general, William Barr, who refused to go along with it and said, no, there is no evidence of widespread fraud. When you guys looked at that hearing this week, did you say, oh yeah, Todd Blanche, he's gonna stand up to Donald Trump and say, I'm sorry, sir, there's no evidence of widespread fraud here.

28:51Jane Mayer:No, this was like id week in Washington where everybody's underlying psychology just poured out. You know, Todd Blanche perceives himself as Trump's lawyer, and that is his self-identity. And that becomes operationally hugely significant because what we've already seen is that under his control, the DOJ has sued states to get access to their voter rolls. Right. He's already taking steps that would significantly raise the possibility of interference. The DOJ under his control has tried to get information about specific election officials in Georgia. That was blocked by the courts. But it is a real piece of evidence to understand why it's so important to Donald Trump to have his people there.

29:38Jane Mayer:This is the stage that we've entered, which is that, you know, the courts are now responding in some piecemeal fashion, but occasionally with great substance that prevents Trump from doing what he wants. The Congress now, even Republicans have interfered with his ability to get his SAVE Act passed. And so he is needing to put individuals into the essential positions that would allow him to interfere perhaps with the election. That's the stage that's significant. I mean, it's not as if Pam Bondi was exactly, you know, a pillar of integrity in the job before. So he's just moving further into that line of thinking, getting somebody who's even more his personal lawyer there.

30:19Jane Mayer:It's also something that I can't say we have not seen before. To me, it reminds me of John Mitchell in some ways, who was the campaign lawyer for Nixon and who stuck with Nixon through the Watergate scandal. And John Mitchell, as we remember, eventually ended up in jail. It has happened that there have been attorney generals who have themselves colluded in crimes with presidents. So what could he do? I mean, I sort of defer to you. What are you thinking that he could do, Susan?

30:51The Washington Roundtable:I mean, look, I just think there's a playbook. Donald Trump, at the age of 80, doesn't get a lot of, you know, big new ideas. What he's doing is he's running the same play over and over again and hoping with different people he'll get different results, hoping, you know, with more willingness to just plunge ahead, he'll get different results. So what's the playbook he ran in 2020? It seems to me that's, you know, a version of which he's going to run right now. And one of the things he wanted is he wanted to install, after Barr left, thinking that everything was OK and they weren't going forward, there was an acting attorney general.

31:25The Washington Roundtable:Trump tried to steamroll over him. When that didn't work, he tried to put in his own person. Why was the Justice Department so important? Trump wants to federalize these elections. He wants to take control, whether it's to federalize the ballots or the voting machines. He wants to say there was illegalities that need to be looked into. He had his candidate that he wanted to install as attorney general after the 2020 elections write a letter that was essentially going to say that the state should not certify the results of the elections because the Justice Department was investigating it and was concerned about improprieties and potential illegalities.

32:06The Washington Roundtable:That wasn't true. The Justice Department had already decided there wasn't anything to investigate. And basically, Donald Trump only stopped from sending out this letter because his entire class of political appointees at the Justice Department came into him, an extraordinary scene on Sunday before January 6th, meeting in the Oval Office, and his entire political appointees, all Republicans, said they would all quit en masse if he went ahead with that plot. So obviously, Trump thinks the Justice Department, if only they'd done that in 2020, maybe they would have, you know, stopped Congress from certifying the election.

32:42The Washington Roundtable:So I don't exactly know, you know, what Todd Blanchard, what Trump has in mind. But clearly, it seems to me the president envisions a significant role potentially for the Justice Department in persuading states not to certify certain elections that might tip the balance of power in either the U.S. House or the U.S. Senate. Does my scenario, what do you guys think of that?

33:04Jane Mayer:Yes, and that was Jeffrey Clark, who he was trying to install. And the particular election he was trying to decertify or deny was Georgia. And of course, he's back focusing on Georgia again, sending the FBI down there to try to take a second look at the ballots, spreading weird conspiracy theories about it yet again. You're right. That makes a lot of sense. Jane, I'm curious, do you look at this as an attempt to try to intimidate election officials on the ground into doing things or at least holding back or frankly, just not wanting to work on this election at all? Or is this about laying a predicate so that after the fact, he can go in and use some of these tools to try to either prevent certification of an election or try to muddy the result?

33:58Jane Mayer:I think both. Honestly, I mean, Evan, I think both. I mean, and a good point you raise about the intimidation because the Trump administration has sent out letters to election officials in every state warning them that they could be arrested and criminally charged if they allow non-citizens to vote. I mean, they're basically saying you're on the edge of committing crimes if you don't do what we want in elections, which is, I mean, first of all, let's just put this out on the table. It's already a crime for non-citizens to vote, and there's no evidence that this is an actual problem. And it's a trumped up, so to speak, problem.

34:39Jane Mayer:But it is an incredibly intimidating thing to send such letters to election officials.

34:46The Washington Roundtable:And speaking of intimidation, Donald Trump, you had to note, was so angry at major networks, ABC, NBC, for not carrying his primetime speech last night that he explicitly perhaps ad-libbed a threat to them. He said networks that didn't carry his very important speech, they should have their licenses revoked. That is almost the very definition of presidential intimidation.

35:13Jane Mayer:I'll tell you one thing that really did strike me, guys, is you probably had a similar reaction was, you know, I'm a child of the 70s and the 80s. And it used to be that when a president would call a primetime address, this was a big deal. And it was just one of these little markers of the strange degraded quality of this presidency that I think to the network's credit, they realized, no, we're just not going to be enlisted into this charade. And so they made choices. They made journalistic choices despite facing what is quite a credible business threat that he was issuing. It's worth just pausing and taking note of how different that is from 40 or 50 years ago.

35:54The Washington Roundtable:Yeah, a historical note. Interestingly, when Joe Biden gave an address in the midterm election season, you might remember it with the dramatically blood red backdrop in Philadelphia about Donald Trump's threat to democracy. The networks, many of them did not carry that live. And so they were able to cite that precedent. If they didn't carry Joe Biden talking about the threat to democracy, they didn't need to carry Donald Trump threatening democracy. So there you have it. We've come full circle in just a few years.

36:26Jane Mayer:The interesting difference, though, is that Joe Biden didn't then say the FCC is going to pull your licenses to the networks. And so, I mean, it's a journalistic dilemma how much attention to give to a speech filled with lies. Because you don't want to spread his lies, but at the same time, the lies themselves are so newsworthy, you know, you don't want to normalize them either.

36:53The Washington Roundtable:Well, on that note, we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we'll talk about the things that Donald Trump didn't talk about in his address, very notably the fact that the United States is at war once again. The political scene from The New Yorker. We'll be back in just a moment.

37:24The Washington Roundtable:Let's talk for a second here about the war in the Middle East that Donald Trump has said is over, I don't know, 80, 90, 100 times before it coming right back in his speech. I noted there was one line about it. He said, we won in Venezuela and we're winning again. Very, very big in Iran. More on that later. And then never said a word about it again. Again, why doesn't Donald Trump want to talk about this war against Iran, Evan, if he's winning it so big?

37:56Jane Mayer:Because it's profoundly unpopular. And the data on this is just thundering at him. I mean, even he knows in his own secluded way that, look, according to a new Washington Post poll, only 29 percent of Americans approve of the situation with Iran right now. And the war has been consistently unpopular from the beginning. And even his handling of the military, which is amazing, guys, because he kind of comes in with this cultural head start in terms of being a Republican president who has made this such a big piece of his identity. Even that is down into the 30s. It's like 38 % approval. So he is facing this profound structural problem that he can't dig out of.

38:44Jane Mayer:And he's got his chosen team of envoys, Jared Kushner and Steve Whitcoff and J.D. Vance, who are over there. but they are by their own description sort of almost strangely flamboyantly uneducated when it comes to dealing with Middle East negotiations. This is like really, I'm not making that up. This is like part of their self-advertisement is that we're not burdened by all the expertise of having done this for years and years, but they found themselves announcing a deal, quote unquote, on Iran that was a non-entity and has now collapsed. The Iranians are very experienced at driving trucks through any hole in the arrangement.

39:27Jane Mayer:I don't even want to call it a deal. In the arrangement, and sure enough, now the Strait of Hormuz is back into their control.

39:34The Washington Roundtable:Evan, I want to pick up on this point about the Strait of Hormuz because, Jane, we're still in the position of getting back to the status quo ante before the war. I guess they've fired all the lawyers, except for Todd Bland, in the Trump administration, because from the very beginning, I highly recommend, there's a great piece by the, I think it was the State Department correspondent to the New York Times this week. Go back and read this. It talks about this memorandum of misunderstanding, and that when I read this, I thought it's going to collapse from the very beginning, because Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, they said, well, we've got this great deal with Iran, and it's going to reopen the Strait of Hormuz immediately.

40:13The Washington Roundtable:And it's, you know, they're not going to charge any tools and it's going to be back. And then the Iranians from day one said, no, no, no, actually, this solidifies and confirms our control of the Strait of Hormuz. So it was always destined, it seemed to me, Jane, to collapse. But even by Trump's standards this week has been dizzying and embarrassing, right? He said he's going to charge tolls for the Strait of Hormuz, which, of course, is a complete violation of international law, is absolutely, you know, freedom of navigation, the idea that the U.S. is going to be some rogue pirate power charging people to pass.

40:51The Washington Roundtable:Within hours, by the next day, he backed off of that plan. What does it say about America's superpower status right now?

41:00Jane Mayer:Oh, it's just an embarrassment. The amateurism of the people conducting this policy is just glaring, and that's what we're all seeing. I mean, honestly, the flip-flop on the toll-taking at the Strait of Hormuz, it's sort of unthinkable. I mean, one minute we're charging, the next we're not, and we're accusing Iran of doing exactly what we've just said that we were going to do. It's ridiculous. I mean, of all the lies that were said last night in Trump's speech, one of the biggest ones maybe was the very beginning of his speech. It had nothing to do with the election. It was when he said, we are more respected in the world than we have ever been before.

41:41Jane Mayer:I mean, there are polls out, there's a new poll out that shows you can just see the numbers cratering in terms of respect for the United States because of this kind of amateur hour performance. And I hate to say it because it seems, you know, it's horrible for our country, but it seems that he has walked us into the Q word, the quagmire in Iran. You know, Susan, I think your point, too, about freedom of navigation is specifically important because it's such a signifier of the way that the United States has inverted precisely the role that it played essentially for six or seven decades. You know, that was one of the core elements of, you know, what we used to refer to as the U.S.-led international order was protecting freedom of navigation.

42:28Jane Mayer:And here you had a president, to use your good language on this, you know, acting, essentially threatening to be a pirate power. That is as clear as you can get of how the United States has taken an order that was of its own creation and to its own benefit and has now flipped it upside down. It's frankly further than I would have even imagined. But even as pirates, they're not successful pirates. Instead, they're not taking tolls. Instead, everybody else is paying more for gas. You know, it's... They're pirates. They're pirates stealing from our pockets. Yeah, so...

43:07The Washington Roundtable:Well, okay, one quick other flip-flop from the Trump administration before we end it today. Evan, just quickly, because to me, this is really important. And obviously, it might actually have a real impact on the elections here. ICE back in the news this week, killing two people in traffic stops, one in Texas, one in Maine, not coincidentally, both places of major Senate races this fall. In the immediate aftermath of those horrific incidents, you saw DHS actually walk back and say, well, we're going to halt traffic stops for now. And then just, again, a day or so later, Donald Trump saying, absolutely not.

43:43The Washington Roundtable:No, we're not going to do that. You know, when in doubt, look for Trump to want to continue the extreme action. What did you take from that back and forth? I just, for Americans, I think there's just nothing more upsetting than remembering, you know, the trauma in Minnesota earlier this year to see this visuals of, you know, this family losing their father, a mistaken identity. He wasn't even the person that these ICE agents were going after. I mean, it's horrible.

44:13Jane Mayer:It is a revival of a real set of sensations that I think we all had months ago that because of the sheer volume and pace of new issues that come on top, it's easy for people to kind of memory hole things and to have it now come roaring back. I think what it does is partly drive home this fundamental question, which is who asked for this? Who wanted this? Did anybody really, if you look at the range of things we've been talking about today, who set out in the 2024 election and said, this is the world I want to create. And perhaps, yes, there were some tiny fringe of extremist voters who were seeking this kind of violent turn in America.

44:56Jane Mayer:But for most people, this is not anything that anybody asked for. And I think it's genuinely horrifying, even to people who might be inclined to say, I want to give him a break because it suits my other interests. But Jane, do you think this is the kind of thing that is significant or that people just are so demoralized that doesn't even produce a response anymore? Honestly, I think, you know, of the things that I've read in terms of recent analysis of what's going on right now, David Frum had a piece overnight that I thought was very good about how Trump is digging his own grave in terms of making the next election, the midterms, even harder for his side.

45:34Jane Mayer:And this is one more example of that. Maine is a must-win state for both parties in terms of the Senate election and in terms of who dominates the Senate after this election. And the Democrats have just suffered through a big mess with Graham Plattner, and it looked like it was going to strengthen the hand of Susan Collins're-election bid. And now in Maine, of all places, the Trump administration has created a kind of a nightmarish, scary, unacceptable situation where it appears that an innocent person was gunned down by an ICE officer who information's coming out saying he has a history of mental instability and violence, someone who should never have been hired in the first place.

46:24Jane Mayer:The Trump administration is making itself less electable every day and creating more and more problems for its own side. And it's done that in Maine, as well as in Iran, and as well as with some of this election denial stuff, which, you know, last time it suppressed the vote in Georgia when he came out doing this. and there was a special election. The Republicans stayed home because Trump had convinced people that the elections were rigged and the Democrats poured out. And that's how we got John Ossoff and Raphael Warnock. So in issue after issue, Trump's making it worse for his own side.

47:04The Washington Roundtable:The dashboard is blinking red for Trump. I think that is an important takeaway of the moment. I really was struck by the latest Washington Post poll, not just Trump's high disapproval ratings, The fact that they are only 15 percent support, that's strong support for Donald Trump right now. That's the lowest number he's ever gotten. It means that even his core MAGA base, they don't have that tonic that Steve Bannon was talking about, Evan. This is a world that it seems even most Republicans didn't want. And I think that's an important note to end it on here. Guys, great to be with you.

47:43Jane Mayer:So good to be with you guys. Always is. Thank you, Susan. Jane, great to see you guys.

48:15Thank you.