thank you all very much.

good afternoon, everyone. my colleague peter baker and not my colleague susan glasser, but spouses and coauthors. the book we're going to talk about the divider. this book was not supposed to happen because neither of you was supposed to cover trump. all right. i remember at the new york times, the there's an internal newsletter that goes around that used to be a heart ahead of the times to announce moves within times. and i remember when the announcement came out that peter baker was to be the new jerusalem bureau chief for the

new york times, which is a spot that is, you know, lightly watched who was going to have that exciting and somewhat difficult job. and so it was announced that peter baker would be the new jerusalem bureau chief. you moved there and then what happened? how did you have to cover trump? well, thank you guys for coming day. delighted to be here. that you panel doing this with us. pamela has been a great colleague both at the book review and now on the op ed page. i read everything she writes and i think you should do. we go to jerusalem. we were going to be jerusalem. susan was finishing up her stint as editor of politico, and she was going to join our son and me after election in 2016. and we settled in. we redid the apartment. it looked we were getting ready to have a fun time as foreign correspondent. it was an interesting time as foreign correspondent. and then the election happened

and with so many people, the election kind of changed for us. susan can probably recite by memory, but she sent me a text message on election night saying, one, trump is going to win. two, they're going to ask you to, come back and they're right. well, that's right we like to think donald trump for two things in our family, we got a dog as a bribe for our son to move to israel and. we ended up having to buy a whole new house actually as a result of trump's election, we had rented out our house in washington and believe me, like try to dislodge renters who just moved in a couple of months earlier. so we ended up a whole new house. and actually on january 20th, 2017, on inauguration in washington, we had the movers bringing our stuff back in. we had moved basically about a mile away from our house, but it was like a whole alter nada reality of our wash button. and i do think that, you know, that metaphor we ended up being

sort of foreign in our own in our own hometown. but i will say, though, i was i hold the distinction being the least criticized. new york times jerusalem bureau chief in many many years. that's true i just to stay on that because it's a huge transition to have to do and you must have made this decision that you wanted to both to become foreign correspondent again and then you had to that like what were your feelings and thoughts around all of that? was it an easy decision? well, it was an inevitable decision because biggest story in the world was now suddenly back in washington again. right. i mean, tony, there was no hemming and hawing. i mean, i seemed to me self evident sitting in politico's newsroom. it's about 8:00. i would definitely never forget that evening is about 8:00 on election night 2016 when you could start to see the first signs that, you know, this was not going according to.

and, you know, the thing is, is that peter had covered every single white house and every single president the second term of bill clinton and seemed to me, you know, self-evident almost as an editor, that the editors, the times were going to want to and need to have him back. you know, if is coming in to blow up the white, essentially, you know, going to want to have someone there who can say like, oh, this is how it's supposed to work or this this part is just par for the course. and this is the really stuff. and, you know, i that's the subject of our book really is four years that followed. so i remember the day the election at the new york times in the new york office. and you obviously, neither of you were there. you were a political still, but we used to have what was once the page one meeting is now called the morning news meeting and on certain days the news is so big that a lot of people show

up. and so it's all the department heads we all gathered in that conference to talk about what had just happened. and it it's almost it's very difficult to describe the mood. i'm curious for each of you. what were your first thoughts that morning? i mean, susan, you said it's going to be trump. he's going to win. is that you just do something the rest of us didn't or you know? no, no. i mean, that was by 8:00 on election night when you started, see, you know that you already had some results in key florida counties and in some other like, for example, some key in virginia as well. and started to see that things were not going as planned. and so that like between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m., obviously it took then a few hours to become clear, but i would say that was when it was in indicative. and i'll tell you, a famous new york times story about 2016 election night, they got in trouble actually, because the times did not prepare a headline

for the front page of the edition or for its website with trump winning and normally right as an editor, we also had a huge section. hillary. no, that's right. you know, you have to pre write all of these things and, you know, as an editor, normally you would have a kind of trump wins and, hillary wins. and for whatever reasons, obviously i wasn't party chair, but at politico we also did not have you know, we had spent lots of time crafting our kind of glass ceiling shattering cover. and so that was all done. and so we had a 4 p.m. normally like page meeting and so we on election day we sat there and we really have anything to do, right? we'd already finished our like historic first woman president thing. so we actually spent our entire home page meeting doing trump wins. and it was interesting and it was sort of not necessarily it's not that we knew that trump was going to win, but i think it was

helpful for the crazy evening to come. we actually spent about an hour sitting there and putting our heads in that space of. what it would be like for trump to win. so even then we had to do a lot of pivoting the fly. we at least had a home base ready to go and you know, but psychologically the country it really was a shock and a spectacle. and i think that what we found actually you know over the last year and a half of going and reconstructing kind of the beginning of the presidency was that many ways, you know, trump has benefited again and again. i would say that shock factor right, that, you know, people still kind of marinating in like, wow, this crazy unthinkable thing happened while the events are moving. and i think trump has repeatedly been the beneficiary, actually, of the unexpected. one of the things about reading your book, the reading experience that surprised me, is that these which took place how many years ago now, seven years

ago, felt like 10,000 years ago to me. and and it felt it feels in reading the, especially in those early chapters like i was newly interested in it, like almost as if i hadn't there. and i think that it may be because it was such a shock. so we were all just kind of recuperating from and continuing to realize that this has happened but also that so much happened so quickly. and i'm curious if it was like that for you as writers to go back like did it feel historic like like ancient history to you? did it feel recent? it's a good question, actually. we did think this is going to be a work history. now it may be a work of prolog who knows, but going back to make sense of something that didn't seem coherent at the time right, he comes in office. he's never been president, never any kind of elected official. he's never been in public first president, never have served a day in public office.

the military and they were just throwing -- at all. sorry. throwing stuff at the walls, you know, one day it's a muslim ban, the next day it's a, you know, we're going to reverse them on keystone. we're now we're going to have this policy that policy, get out of paris, get out of the iran deal, whatever. and it felt so scattershot the time. so as trying to write a history, you go back, try, make sense of it. all right. what is it all add up to? don't want to just write again what you already know. we want to say what's going on behind the scenes. what's the real thinking? and what you discover is as crazy as it looked on the outside, it was even crazier on the inside that this was not fact, you know, announced on a surprising result. this is exactly what was predictable going in because. he didn't know what he wanted to do, didn't expect to win. they didn't have a plan. and they had these tribal knife fights going on from the very beginning. and everybody was at each other's throats. yeah, i do think that the other aspect of why, you know, it almost seems like you're

encountering it for the first time or is the circus and, the spectacle of the trump years were so overwhelming and all. and i think one of the benefits for us of trying to, you know, look at it from more historical perspective and to go back to the very beginning was you actually see much more clearly some of the through lines and particular the kind of actually pretty systemic and, purposeful assault on that unfold from day one. and i think, you know, that's something that with the benefit of hindsight, when you go back now, perhaps you're more free to focus on that because you're not living each tweet and write. and, you know, you can see that the spectacle, the circus is an extremely important aspect of the politics of it, extremely important to understanding what made donald trump's presidency an outlier and different from all that came before it. but at the same time, you're

much more able to focus on these through lines and that the attempt to weaponization of the military on his personal behalf the almost de one focus on sort of co-opting the machinery the justice department and the fbi on his own behalf. you know the focus on undermining institutions of all kinds. right. that that assault actually literally on legitimacy and independence and credibility of american institutions that might rival him. again, that's that's a day one thing that unfolded and i think that, you know, it's not that we didn't see it at the time. but, you know there's this there's this great quote from, michael beschloss, that we use, i think in the very first paragraph of the book, talking about an afternoon of january six. and he is responding to people who are like, oh, you know, this is crazy. and he said and he's absolutely correct on the afternoon of

january six, he tweeted this moment, meaning january six, this foreshadowed by every single day of the trump presidency and. you know, that's, i think, right on the mark. i mean, to use just one example that you threw out the muslim called the muslim ban and to get at that sense of just how institutions and also process was challenged. because we all i think out here in among the citizens citizenry we're just thinking a muslim ban and immediately reacting to that. but what's so interesting about the book and maybe you could talk about this is, well, how does it actually he declares it what what was the process of that and different was it from the way you know, a law ordinarily or an executive order would ordinarily be carried out? yeah, it was a case study in it. just how improvization and let's say to use a nice word that white house what i think he was about to say should show don't

know no or try to clean it up here. this is a family event but it was it was a improvizational show and they literally, you know, he had this idea. he wanted to ban all he got talked out of doing it quite as expansively as that. and they narrowed down to these six, seven muslim majority states said, well, we can justify it by saying they appear on a previous list by government of blah blah. but they'd never done before. they just were basically like, you know, as one guy describe it to us, he was basically like, they took a crayon and wrote up an order as that was somehow going to be a legal decision by the united states government. and they had a couple of people in there who had this before, kept saying, no, that's not how do it. you got to call the lawyers. you got to actually cause they're literally doing this on, the fly in the limousine on the to the pentagon, where he's planning to announce. and they get to the pentagon they still don't have an order him to sign so he goes off on a tour while the lawyers are still arguing on the phone and calling in changes and know printing out a new version on parchment.

and can we get it over there in time. and they're literally making handwritten changes to even in the moment where he signed it. but from their point of view, not on the first page. so when he holds it up, nobody that they've literally just been like scratching it out and that is sort of precedent for what's going to come. this all of a piece. you know, he wants to just basically he's on the fly he wants to translate his instincts into reality without any care for a process, any care for law or precedent rules or any of that kind of thing. well, and what's amazing about that, too, is that's a good example. we remember experience, too, the muslim ban and the chaos, nobody being informed about it and people rushing to the airports in order to. and yet we learned a lot that we didn't know about the process, which it came to me. and again and again and again when we interviewed senior officials from trump's administration what they all said to us was it's even crazier

you thought it's even worse than you thought. and to me, this is actually a really good example because you actually had steve bannon and reince priebus desperate to fulfill you know, trump said he was going to do this first thing. so therefore, they have to do it first thing, they're told. well, no, you know, actually the justice department office of legal counsel needs to sign off on any kind of an order like this. and they just said, well, can we just not do that? yeah, can we just not do that? you know, is that is that a law or is that just a tradition? and that was a crazy example, too, because it wasn't a law. it was just what was expected. well, exactly. and that is another theme that runs through is that is trump. and those who surrounded him sometimes intentionally simply because they blundered it but expose the weaknesses in our system that starts almost on day one when you realize is that what we think of as ironclad

traditions policies are norms are there to be much more negotiable than we realized and to be weaponized on behalf someone who's determined not follow them. i mean, we knew that january six existed as a moment in time. we thought of it as a purely moment. like many people in washington, i was extremely concerned about trump's challenges. to the election in 2020. i thought, well, there's no way it on past december 14th to me that was the ironclad deadline because december 14th is when by the electoral college must meet and all the states have to certify the results. what can you possibly do after december 14th, by the way, bill barr, the attorney general of the united states, thought that he thought it was safe for him to resign after point in time.

mitch mcconnell, the senate majority leader, thought december 14th was the day because it was on december 15th that he finally, very belatedly congratulated joe biden for. and it turned out that actually it was january six was the date. so you mentioned going back and reconstructing this by talking to various sources to officials within the administration. and one of the things that is clear in your book right away and was pretty clear to all of us observers outside, is that there were a lot of people who were not exactly truthful and that administration are forthright, but also it was kind of it wasn't a team of rivals in the lincoln center because there was no team. it was like a battle of rivals with, all of these competing agendas for you in reconstructing what was it difficult given that you would think there would be many different versions of each story that you investigated, that you were you were able to trust your

sources? well, you're right about that. absolutely. and let's start by saying every white house has its rivalries of and that's a natural thing. you know, reagan's white house was famously, you know driven between the shultz and the weinberger wing and the mrs. the bakers and so forth. and obviously, you know, the george w administration had cheney and rumsfeld and, you had colin powell. so in other white houses, it had these big cleavage but you've never seen one that was kind of like a free for all fight hunger games kind of situation where they were. it was literally anybody is out themselves and they constantly made new allies rise in order to shaft the other guy. they hate and then turned around and shaft each other. it was never a single clear cut set of lines. there. but your to your point about having to trust i mean, the one good thing about that is they all then feel the need to tell you their side because they know if they don't, then the other side is going to be the only one that's representative for history. so you do get the three or four

or five different versions of what happened in a room to talk to you. that kind of a setting you're not relying just one, and then you try to reconcile events and try to see what makes the most sense. it's like a rashomon kind of scenario, like a rationale. yes, exactly. well, that's right. and just on the point about the war of all against all, which was sort of the permanent nature of combat in donald trump's, i think it's important to understand, too, that part of the reason that this kind of conflict and infighting was so endemic to the trump white house, because it's endemic to anything that's around donald trump. and, you know, there's this incredible, you know, how he had this habit of sourcing the quiet part out loud, as people would say. washington well, in march 2018, that's when he has like his first really big perch. and he realizes that he mistakenly a appointed a number of overly conventional establishment thinkers and he wants to get rid of rex tillerson wants to get rid of h.r. mcmaster he wants to get rid of gary cohn. so that sort first generation of

what was called sort of some tongue in cheek that the adults in the room he's he's getting rid of them. he's taking and you know, the white house are clamoring and saying what's it's chaos in the white house and trump says, no, i like conflict. and i think that was one of his very revealing comments. he sought to the gladiator real combat of those who surrounded him. he encouraged it. first of all, he loved nothing more than to sort of pit advisors against each other in the white house, apprentice absolutely. but of course, that maintained himself as the kind of constant in this cycle in and out, in and in and out white house that we've had. we forget how crazy that, by the way, we're now two years plus into the biden not a single cabinet member has left and here we are you know in donald white house.

i mean, how long did it take about? i think it was 24 days. was the national security advisers tenure, which is a record, of course, since the job was first created. you know, it's interesting when you say that, i realize, oh, of course that's true and yet and i it's possible i missed it, but i haven't read articles, news articles that say oh, by the way, it's been two years and no one has resigned yet. so i'm curious, you know, use the word unprocessed. we use it so much that, you know, there were directives like stop saying unprocessed content, you know, in the media for the administration and how it worked itself. but was also, i think, unprecedented for people who covered it right. this a new way of having to cover politics and, cover the white house. and i want to talk a little bit about that. peter, i know in your case and susan, i'd be interested to hear your on this. you're kind of famous at the new york times internal as someone

who really has very specific rules for yourself. right. am i that you don't even vote? right, because you want to be completely non and down the line. and susan, i be curious if you have a of this. was this especially then to maintain in that position, did you rethink it is a great question, yes. the answer is yes. it was a challenge and you're right. i do. i cover the white house. susan said since clinton, with exception of four years when we were in moscow and and it's really important to me to be neutral, independent. i mean, i understand that the word objective is wrong these days. there's no such thing as objectivity. we're all human beings. we all have come to everything with our own personal biases in history. so that's fair. but i think as a reporter who covers politics, particularly the white house, what you want to do as much as is be independent of the people that you're covering and see them as

clearly as possible, not through a partizan lens, but a truth lens, right through a fact lens. that doesn't mean some artificial false equivalence, which i we get criticized for. it doesn't mean he said she said we just take it on value. we do try to get past that and out what's really going on with trump it was it was of course more of a challenge. there genuinely was never like him before, just you cannot say, well, every president has this or that or the other thing happened. not very many cases in his presidency. it was unprecedented. and you had to say that and you had to be honest about and when he the biggest example of this and i'll let susan answer but the biggest example, of course, was how do you deal with a president who lies? okay, now let's just start with the obvious, which is that every president lies on some level or another. certainly every president is not always told the full truth. we as journalists are responsible for calling them out when they do that, pointing out where they have varied from the

facts. with trump, it became such a late motif that you just couldn't simply say, you know, trump said something, here are the facts, had to call it out more vigorously. in fact, our friends at washington post literally counted the number that they came up with over his four years, 30,000 false or misleading statements, 30,000. so that's not the same thing as every other president. we shouldn't treat it like it's the same thing as every other president. and the big debate and i'll finish the big debate was do you use the l-word as an example right. do you say it's a lie and we struggle with this? this is a big debate within our newsroom. and i think other newsrooms as well, because it's a lie to say somebody is lying. on the one hand presumes, you know, that they know what they're saying is false right. we are not mind readers. we then assume that donald says something that is false. we can say it's false. factually false. a question does he know it's that presumes a certain level of intimacy that we don't want to

overly presume. on the other hand, if he says something that is false so many times and he's been told, in effect it's been false so many times at that point, it's it's fair to assume he knows it's not true and that it is a lie. right. so we were very careful, i think, about using the word sparingly, but occasionally we did use it. and the other thought dean baquet, who was our executive at the time, had, was, if you it, then you just look like you're screeching and people tune you out. it loses the power of of the of the word. so we struggle with that. how do you how do you deal with politician and frankly, a president who doesn't tell truth? well, i think i think we a balance in which we call him out regularly. we had our own fact checkers regularly say not true, false you know, we try not to we try not to make it. you know, we caught you but we did try to say this is our role in society to say what the present united states just told you is factually not true. yeah, i mean, unfortunately, as you all know, you know, donald

trump, one of his great geniuses, is not only marketing, but specifically, he he thrives when are enemies. if he doesn't have one, he creates. and he was very and purposeful in sort of pre-positioning the media as an enemy throughout his campaign with the explicit not only of discrediting what we do, but of devalue our reporting criticism, even when it's very legitimate so that it simply becomes, you know, another item on in in his own defense to say, well, look at the you know, left wing washington post calling me a liar. how dare they call me a liar? they're a liar. i think this is an important question i have a slightly different answer and i played a different role. obviously as a columnist for the new yorker. but to me, the trump presidency was really a return, an important way to first principles for journalists. this is, as i see it, you know what? we're here for. and, you know, i think having

spent a long career in washington, i can't think of a moment, you know, that more offered the clarity of a mission driven you know kind of renewal of of of what journalism is all about. you know, this is a sort of, you know, red alarm, you know, slide down the fire and, you know, show up for duty kind of moment. and so for me, certainly, it made the decision about jerusalem versus washington pretty easy. you know, this is an unthinkable crisis that happened, frankly in our democracy. had you told me 20 years before or even ten years previous that we would be facing this kind of a challenge to our democracy in washington? i wouldn't have believed it. i don't think most of you would have believed it. and, of course the catastrophic ending of trump presidency and the continued denial of the election results, the, you know sort of almost extra

constitutionalism of a large faction, one of america's two great political parties this is about as big a sort of crisis in democracy as i could imagine. and, you know, to be honest it was very interesting in the obama years and, this may have influenced our decision in why we wanted to sort of take a tourist correspondent. again, it was a technocratic moment. right. you know, was a sort of behavioral economic. it's like, you know, how can we sort of fine tune the machinery? you know, there was a perceived consensus. now, obviously, we see in the kind of politics of rage that that helped trump come to office that that that was a sort of a a bubble in its own right, you know, i think it was there was a certain moodiness, a lack of clarity, you know, and i think that that sort of faded away. you know, this is really important for journalists. and by way, you know, we journalists are, the canaries in the coal mine of under assault. and if you look at a checklist

of, you know, the countries in the world where, there has been this kind of democratic back sliding over the last two decades. and unfortunately, as our friends at freedom house have have well documented, you, that's what it is. democratic backsliding in country after country around the world, going backwards. what's the first target? as peter and i saw in russia when we were correspondent at the beginning of vladimir putin's was the first thing he did. he went after the independent media and ntv was the only independent national television network that had ever existed in russian history. and the very first thing he did essentially to renationalize ntv, to you know, purge and exile of its leadership and, you know, the same story has played out in recent years in. turkey, in the philippines, in hungary, in poland. and, you know, a reason for that

being the checklist. so i want to go back to something you said earlier, which is that you are calling the so there are a lot of challenges coauthoring a book no matter, what there are probably a lot of additional to coauthoring a book with your spouse. but there's another challenge here, which is that a reporter and you're a columnist, you know, at the new york times, for example there is a very there's this kind of state divide between opinion, between news and you are each on, you know, on an opposing side. does that pose did that pose in terms of how you approach the subject matter both, you know, as writers and as married and then also while working on the book? well, it's a great question. i the good news is, as far as the married part, we're on speaking terms. so you and actually it's our third book together so i'm look, i'm a columnist at the new yorker. not enough. i don't define myself as an opinion columnist or as an ideologue.

you know, i'm not like, you know, here's my plan for you know a single payer health care system. you know, here's my prescription for how to win the war in ukraine. you know what i'm writing each week is a sort of a letter from trump's washington biden's washington. and i do see the goal as being, you know, as clear as i can manage it, calling it like i see it, you know, in in at times unsparing, you know, sort of language. suppose that that probably would be very hard, peter, to put on the front page of of the times. but i certainly don't define my role in any ideological way unless i suppose a general i do subscribe to the idea we are a democracy and we should remain one. and i am i am unabashed about, you know being pro small d democracy in the column, but i do think it might be more of a problem if you defined yourself being sort of more of an ideological writer. yeah, i think it's a good question. i actually it was i'll be honest, i was worried about this before we started because.

we did come at it from different from putting aside our marriage. our marriage is very healthy, but put it in terms of our professional. she's not an ideological, but she does say things i would ever, never be able to say in the new york times. obviously, as a news a news page, and rightly so. it's we serve different functions. so when we started book, i'm like, okay, is this going to be an issue where she's pushing me further than i'm willing to go? am i going to be holding her back from what? like just sharing this for the first time? oh, ask me beforehand. are there going to be any tricky questions i didn't ask? tricky. well, i always worry about it and i've we've talked this but the truth is actually which surprise me, i was surprised that once we actually started writing chapters and we divide them up, she'd do this chapter, i'd do that chapter, we'd trade them back and once we did that, actually, it really, really melded. i would say that we did not. it's not a opinionated book. yeah, no. our mission here, as we defined it, was to write history. and i think that, you know, we stuck pretty closely to that

mission. and by the way, when you have material like this, you know you don't. yeah, you don't need to spin on the wall. yeah. no i'm very comfortable with the language of the book and actually i think language of the book could pass muster in the news columns of the new york times for the most part, i think that that, in fact, she did not feel that. i don't pardon respect my view. i should not feel the need to put her foot on the pedal because the facts for themselves they were they spoke themselves and the conclusions that we draw and the prolog and the epilog or what have you are conclusions on facts, not based on opinion. i see it, and i think that i think it worked out very i'm surprised i will work. we thought more about things like, columns and commas. we thought about our conclusions. so covering trump was not in the plan, but also writing this book was originally not your idea. it was lindsey graham's. not surprising to me. what? how did that come about? yeah, well, you know, so we went to dinner one night in september of 2019 and it was about 24

hours into the, you know, sort of ukraine scandal metastasized into trump's first impeachment and we were walking down the street on 19th street in washington. lindsey graham came out of the palm after having had dinner and he was in a sort of i would call it sort of a braggadocious, you know, kind of expansive mood. and he was very eager. peter he had first met peter when peter his first book, which was about bill clinton's impeachment, an excellent book. i can plan it since i didn't write it called the breach inside the impeachment and trial of. william jefferson clinton and lindsey graham was a big character in that book. remember he was a house manager and one of the public faces of the republican efforts to impeach and try bill clinton. and he then parlayed that into the senate seat where he now remains. and so, you know, i think that's the context graham saw.

peter was like impeachment and everybody was already talking about impeachment. i mean, he just not stop himself from bragging to us, you know, right there on the street he's like, you know, i just got on the phone with trump, you know and he was just he this amazing thing to us, you know, we didn't have any we weren't interviewing him. he didn't say, oh, it's off the record. but he said, you know, trump a lying motherfer, you know. but then he said, but he's so much fun to hang out with. and, you know, graham was like this sort of dazzled little boy and so i think at the time, peter and i incorrectly thought that this was going to be the big of the trump presidency, this impeachment and because it involved russia, ukraine and impeachment, things that, you know, we had covered, we thought, well, maybe we should do that. and grandma says, where are you going to write a book about this impeachment? maybe you should a book about this impeachment. so that was the germ of the idea but obviously then the craziness

of 2020 and it morphed into a bigger and you know sort of more ambitious more more comprehensive project i'm tempted to ask if there are lindsey graham moods than you describe. but but we won't we won't dwell on that i'm when did you decide that you were going to write a book and how did you balance subsuming some of this was simultaneous with actually covering it for your competing news organizations. how did you decide? you know, and this is the question by the way, that everyone asks everyone who covered trump while writing a book, including several of our colleagues. certainly at the times there was jonathan and alex. alex burns in a book, maggie haberman did a book like how do you decide like does this go in the book file? does this go the paper or in the magazine or something, you know, in television commentaries? how do you do that up? yeah, i think i'm glad you asked, because these are a misconception, i think a little bit about in our case. i don't for anybody else in our case, we didn't really start the

book until it was over. so we didn't start until february of 2021 when he was out of office and the final impeachment trial had happened. so there was never for us a conflict between, oh, gosh, do i save this for the book. everything we had, we put out there, we put it out, we left it on the on the on the table, as you will. right we put it all on the court or whatever the sports metaphor is. but i'm mangling here. during his presidency, there was nothing knew during his presidency that we did not report. we could report it and had it confirmed. so we never had that conflict. now that then the question becomes, okay, as you're doing your book, after he's left office, is there anything comes up during that reporting that requires you to be more urgent about it and put it out the magazine or the newspaper right away, and that did happen. susan wrote a column in the spring of 2021 about some of the things we had discovered about the last ditch effort to hit iran, that there was discussed in the final days of the presidency and, you know, i know that we published a couple of other pieces, but, you know, months the book came out based on some of the reporting. the january six committee was beginning to do some of this investigation.

and we thought some of our was relevant to that. but broadly, you know, part of the miss part of the the assumption by people who are critical of authors who do books like is aha, if you had told us everything would have been different, but you saved it for your books in order to make money. okay couple of things. one, you know these books. i mean, i hope they make money, but that's not why we do books. and, you know, all journalists know have a salary. so we do, you know, work for for for for cash. you know, that's a that is a thing. a journalist do we don't we're not becoming rich of this we don't save anything in order to become rich. these are not like, you know obama bush level of dollars of books. secondly, the book has now come out it's been out for four months and the world did not change after this information did come out, having it come out four months earlier, under thesis would obviously not change anything because it was all after he left office. but i think that the critique of

people doing books is missing the point because the books are important in and of themselves, not some factoid, not some. one thing that might have been a newspaper story on a given day, but putting all together, trying to make sense of it and that there's a value you to books that you cannot accomplish a newspaper story or in a magazine story and that we should we should encourage books, not criticize them. and no, i just want to echo that we had the opportunity to debrief about hundred trump administration officials after the end of the presidency we didn't do any interviews during the presidency was all after february 2021. and second impeachment. and this was this was invaluable as as two people who covered presidency who lived through it as americans. you know the opportunity you know, i saw it as taking test timony for the record in just the way that the january six committee was taking testimony. now, of course, every journalist dreams of having subpoena power. we didn't get that.

but, you know, i will say we learned a lot of the stuff that actually the january six committee only months later learned about by able to go back. there were many people who weren't willing to tell their stories contemporaneously who were to sit down in interviews for, history and for a book. and i have no doubt obviously the trump presidency was an extreme and divisive in american history. have no doubt that there are many things that we still don't know about the trump presidency and that, you know, just as with nixon and, watergate, people would be writing books about this for four generations to come. but you when we learned you know, probably one of the most striking things in the book to me was, our reporting that we were able to do on the conflict between donald trump and his generals and, you know, we one of the things we obtained in the course of doing the book was this resignation letter that milley, the chairman of the joint chiefs, wrote but did not send in the aftermath of the

june first lafayette square photo op. you know, all remember that, i'm sure exactly. and you know, this document, you know, it doesn't you already at this point had been public. you know, many colleagues. i had also written, as peter said in the new the basic news was largely that there had been a conflict between trump and milley, the generals, that there was, you know, disagreement. milley had basically publicly come out and apologized for this. it was obvious after. the election that these were on different sides and yet to read this document. i feel it's one of the most amazing things that as a as a journalist, i had the chance to publish essentially it. it shows you it's not it's not like news headline per se, but it shows you that the chairman of the joint chiefs came to believe that the president, united states was a bigger threat to american national security than any other threat at that moment in time, he was

caught doing grave and irreparable harm, you know, to the national security of the united states that he was did not subscribe to many of the principles that the united states fought for in world war two. and so, you know, again, feel like i'm glad were able and had the opportunity you know, to work on this book in order to do reporting like that. there are so many more questions i want to ask and we have less than 5 minutes left. so i'm going to jump to question. i have to ask, you went to mar a lago twice. speaking of opportunity, and i think everyone you know has that lingering question like what is he really like? are you able to actually get anything out of him and also what is it like going alagoas how does that play out? so i'm curious do we do see all the classified documents on his desk. yeah we did not the documents on his desk. so we failed in that regard. we did interview him twice during the post-presidency. and because short on time, i'll

give the shorter version of the speech, he is basically what you see in public now. there are some people who say well, he's more charming in private than is in public. and he it is true that he more restrained he's not often at least yelling at you in private, and he's more in a solicitous do you want a diet? can i get you a better table? he is, after all, a hotel guy. that's of his nature, but he otherwise does. same guy. it's the same guy. stream consciousness. you try as an interviewer to nail him down on a question and he's off on three other tangent before you're able to kind of bring the conversation back to where you started. susan likes to say he, you know, never a a noun, a verb an object and a period. it's a it's a one long dial dialog in some way. but is as a historian or somebody trying to rewrite history, he has a challenge interview subject because he is not a reliable fact witness. you cannot assume he has told you is factually correct, even if he's not meaning to lie, he simply not going to remember things the way they happen.

so why do it that right? and the answer is to understand mentality. you understand point of view, understand how he thinks to get into his head a little bit and i think that's still worthwhile. and were you able to get anything of it? i mean, did you discover about him that you felt like you didn't know before going down there, you know? well, first of all, i can definitively tell you all, if you ever hear somebody repeating this canard about oh, well, trump in person is actually quite charming, feel free to say that that is actually not true. okay. i feel like, you know, i had heard that over the years a little more opinion. yeah, well, i mean, he's even just said the same thing, but i had that over the years. not as well from a journal who, you know, had encounter. oh, well, in person he's talking about defining our expected options down you know essentially i think it's it's an important thing to see i came away feeling there was a certain pathos to. trump, you know, in exile in mar

a lago, he was sort of like napoleon in elba, but, you know, meet banquet hall greeter. you know, i mean and really you got to see that to it. remember these this man is it's sort of a grift, right? he's hosting people paying in his club. he these interviews sitting in the lobby of mar a lago you know when we walked there's a big sign on board there says sign for mother's day brunch. okay. and then you walk in and there's donald trump sitting in the sort of tacky gilded lobby of mar a lago, the couch facing, the people, so that they all see, you know, the journalist. or here's today's authors, you know. so he's like, you know, the big man, the only relic of his presidency. and again, the pathos of this is it is a model of air force one, as he wanted it to be remember, he wanted to get rid of the historic colors, the historic. air force one, and he wanted to turn it into sort of navy blue.

and you red and white sitting on the coffee table. and the people would come in and he would interrupt. it's on tape. right. so he's like rigged election and blah, blah, blah. oh, nice to see you this evening, you know, how are you doing? so is that a big news revelation. you know, i don't know. but for for peter and i, it was valuable to see america's own napoleon in elba. wow. okay, we are out time. unfortunately, so please read the book. thank you, suzanne. thank you, peter. thank you. thankhis book is called "hangry"

in the meantime, joining us is author chris whipple. his most recent book is "the fight of his life: the inside story of joe biden's white house.