>> tonight a special edition president trump and impeachment. this president believes he is above the law. >> a divided nation. >> it is a hoax and disgrace and embarrassment to our country. >> embattled esident. we go inside this moment with pulitzer prize winners maggie haberman with white house correspondent for "new york times" and historian jon meacham forio convers on the >> this is "washington week" fundin provided by -- >> there's aoment a moment of realizati

realization, of understanding, a moment where everything is clear. at fidelity wealth planning is about clarity. knowg who you are where you have been and where you want to go. that's fidelity wealth management. >> additional funding provided hugh and practice it's ewing committed to bridging cultural differences our communities. the corporation for public broadcast and by can contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> once again fro washington moderator robert costa. robert: good evening. i hope you enjoyed thanksgiving. for me it is time toil see f in pennsylvania and talk politics andake stock of the year. at this table we will did that

take stock of president trump and impeachment days after the i latest p hearings. joining me are two of the brightist minds on jon meacham a pulitzer prize winning presidtial biographer journalist and editor and contributor to time. ag will talk to him later. first magazineine a pulse -- magazigie haberman a white he correspondence kofrpbd y president trump with vigor and a ke eye back to his days in new york. welcome back towashington week." maggie: thanks for having me.rt rowhen you think about trump and confer him at this juncture do you see him employing many o the same tactics he used to use in new york when you reported on him then? maggie: i do. he's doing the donald trump p y playbook. what he is doing with

impeachment some compared to what he diduring the pro by special council robert pleural which was -- mueller which is haer at the facts argue they nde not true people are out to get him and throw up enough dust p thatple will be confused and insist he did nothing wrong. that did turn the dtl somew on public opinion before that report came out and after it came out it just sort of disappeared. there is not just particular he used with mueller. he you'd it his entire life. his entire business life and politicalife and real estate life is all about bending other people to his will and i think you are going to see thatow where he is using some combination of blunt force and typical washington wooing with republican lawmakers to keep them on his side. robert: speaking tong ben the republican party to his will how does he seehat dynamic with his own party? why does he believe there is so

much continuing loyalty withi the g.o.p.? maggie: i think he attributes it to a coupls thi but the main one is the republican establishment still i think has not come to grips with being caught off guard in 201 by his rise and his win. you have republicanbe m of congress in the house and senate who are not sure where their voters are b know they do have a sizeable portion in their districtstands of trump voters and they do not want to l nate them. they know that is a real rick risk and they know it is a risk if the president tweets about them or attacks him public. that the is why you arein s endearing loyalty. i do think from republicans a number haveome to agree they think the way the inquiry is being conducted by house democrats is not fair or proper

or stickineto practn previous impeachment inquiries bearinin mind we havenly will three others. but they are frustrated that they can't question witnesses or call their own witnesses the same way the democrats can.ou robert: when look back in your time reporting object president trump going up toow trump and him making calls, has this impeachment ocess revealed the way he operates outside the chain of d commlking to people like rudy giuliani or roy cohn or michael cohen? maggie: everything about this presidency is some version of revealing he's never chang his m.o. from the time he was at trump tower where everything was boiled down with him at thean t a bunch of orbits around him that only he knew what was g on. you see the same with the white house. he doesn't believe it following typical white house protocol and he has outside lines wndn he was first elected there were

would t to outsource certain functions to his company or aides who worked for his we haven't seenny evidence of that but we know he has invoked ople like rudy giuliani and deployed phlegm on i mission -- them on missions to find dirt on the biden family. there are other areas he outsierceds of government whether the va involving some members of his club in florida who had managed to get their hands in there. i think we playee other instances of this as the next year or five years progress. robert: he returns r turns t rudy giuliani for help on govern policy but w does he turn to inside his cabinet as he faces impeachment? who is influential right now? maggie: so many of the people who have been influential the last year are also people who are proximate to there inquiry

as subjects themselves or s. witnes the two he has trusted most the last year are is bl barr and mike pompeo. pompeo is caught up in it and giuliani has tried to throw attention back the state department way andreated atteion betwe pompeo and the president. the president is not sure who he ca trust right now. he's been relying heavily on the white house counsel. bert: is there a war room in this white house or not in maggie: yes and no.s therwar room that is not called a war room. a couple of officials who were to a month on direction of jared kushner his son-in-law an we should not the president gets close to his familiar in times

of stress and i kushners basically running the impeachment battle plan for the he struggled the whour white house to hire two who are favorites of the president defendinm. they have been running not a convential war room. they are n pushing a lot of things out publicly. there's not a ton takinglace on television. the president is still his own best pubc facing message. but they are doing a lot of coornati coordinating communication with the hill and daily meetings and making sure they are on the same page and thatw.s robert: does he ever grapple with the charges against him oni l hill with concerns about his own conduct or is this a president who remainsen changed and really unwilling to examine his own behavior? maggie: self-reflection is noto of his familiar suits, not a

strong suit. i have seen no indication or heard any that he thinks he did anything wrong in how he handled this ukraine matter, whether it was the military aid he put a freeze or the call with president zelensky july25. he's been frustrated for several weeks thatepublicans hav been fighting hill on process grounds impeachment the process was unfair but not delving into the question of his conduct on the call. he wants people sayin d he nothing wrong and that is part trial appeals to him on some level. he likes the idea of beingto ab ring out witnesses to say he didn't doing in wrong which would be contrary primarily to what we saw in the house inquiry. robert: so much of what happened with the phone call with president zelensky was driven by the 20 presidential race and vice president biden. when he sees the ent of player bloomberg from new york and biden still doing o ithe

polls, mayor buttigieg rising, what is his own understanding of that contest? maggie: it i interesting, bob. his understanding of that contest nd to relate a most things back to himself. he's been surprised that he h not permanentlyestroyed joe biden. he is very surprised he didn't permanently destroy elizabeth warren. he said both of those things to people. he still thinks i bidens somebody who would be an easier opponent bloomberg is an x factor. he has i would not say a friendip but they know each other from bloomberg days. bloomberg took lot of whacks at him at the 2016n convent and bloomberg has a much larger bank account and that get in there president's head. he knows bloomberg can spend ways this president never could andever would. he tends to resort to using other people's money in that

situation. but bloomberg is running as otsomethingly different and bloomberg will talk about jobs. the only other iersonn the campaign you hear really talking about jobs as aessage across the board isonald trump. bloomberg's ad focused on the word jobs aggressively and the president knows this. hiseides h he will not be baited into a back and not with blagojevich. robert: you studied him and you reported on him. is it constant war, political tord between now and november 2020? what is the end game? maggie: i -- the ends game is winning. the strategy is an open question because as younow he tends to treat the world in terms ofin de with the 10 minute increments of time he has to get through. right now that increment of time is the impeachment inquiry and that i where his focus is. i think what you wl see if

what weec e happens happens, if there is no further information that comes fout, i there are no additional witnesses and there could be but if they stay as they are the i anticipati he is going to be impeached inouhe vote and acquitted in the senate angry president trump a very campaigning over what he feels like he went through this ar. i always go back, my framework is that weekendhat "access hollywood" tape october 7 to october 9, re2016, w he was suffering his worst ever wounds of any kindhen that tape came out and his response was to go to the debe in st. louis against hillary clinton and savage her by forcing her to walk across a parade of women will accused her husband of sexual improprieties or one case rape. you can speck -- expect next year to be ly. robert: maggie, thank you for joining us.

maggie: thank you. robert: now a turn to history. jon meacham recently wro for "time" magazine a grasp of the past can be orienting as americans navigate the turbulence of impeachment proceedings and rise of populism he and abroad. it is hard to predict the waynt the cur impeachment debate will ends noting andrew johnson ived and richard nixon held until the last moment of watergate. whatever happens the start of 9 lakers mark the beginning dark -- hearings mark t start of a test fhe country. joining me is jon meacham. what stands out to you about how this president and this nion are handling that test? jon: well, i think we are having a basic argument in the country about whether the facts are and -- what the factors are and what we should make of them. andom that is at that has

been bubbling along, forming, really, for 50 years or so. but these areen pal forces. walt lippman wrote a book called publice opinion and h defined the besettingroblem of the modern age might be we would define and would see instead of seeing defining and it has onlyotten worse. so i think we have to find two things. s a common of facts and if we can agree on them the there is basic democratic lower case d health to that. then we enve an arg of what to make of the factsment my own sense is thate live in these, on these two condition planets and the fate ofryhe cou may well hang, the fate of the republican syst,ay well hang on the people who are willi to

admit that their minds have been changed. d part of the reason we were able to undertake this experiment was the insight that the enlightenmentad created an era where wect could r to changing circumstances and change our opinions based on differing discernible realities as we were able to see them. and that iight that reason will to take a stand against passion in the arena was very much in some ways the formative insighinto the constitution that is being tested now. robert: take us back tohe constitutional convention when the founders came up with the idea of impeachment and included it. why was it important then and why mes itter now? maggie: it fits into the checks and balloances.

james madison put the clearest ar took legislation that divided sovereignty was essential because if you mad any one branch or element in the compact too powerful the interests of thatakect would over and run away with the system. they were aiming for a balance. that we were all sinful and ight driven by appetite and ambition and therefore we d to divide authority, divide power in a way that would prevent any one element from knocking the whole system out of whack. impeachment was one of the checks and balances on the executive and judicial branches. came o of the english common law and 14th century idea. the three things that were named in the constitution, it is a brief article, treason, bribery or other high crimes and

misdemeanors. as gerald ford said in the 20th century high crime and misdemeanor is whatever a majority of the house of representaves decides it is at a given moment. but the essential element, the reon for having impeachment as orge mason said of virginia shall any man be above justice and can that and should that man who has the most extensive power tit commit the m extensive there was this clear stice and understanding there had to be a fail safe to mix metaphors. a final check on an executive or uphi judge who was violating the compact of divided sovereignry respectinghe rights ofot the r contractors to the american compact. robert: you wro a biography of

andrew jackson. are we in another populist moment and the institutions and new orlea norms being tkhrald? jon: we are in a populist and nationalist moment. the forces flowing are perennial american forces. xenophobia, racism. nativism. isolationism. they ebb and ow. we have always been divided. we were divided patriot vers torey and north versus south and jim crowersus integration. now we are divided in red versus blue. the key element andway, what history tells us about how we have gotten out of tse moments we have managed to understand that our best moments come when we more generously apply the plications of what was the most important sentence ever rendered in english by thomas jefferson that all men were

created equal. it is ue. a home myly or prayer. when we think of the eras that one would adm they want to go back to they are era where we have morene widely o our arms, not where we closed doors. populism doesn't have to be a disruptive force to the constitutional orders. in thisase in many ways it is. president trump is i think not jacksonian in the sense that jackson for all his faults believed in the union. he believed in that system howeverlawed it was at the time. for him it was an end. for jackson populism and america feels theng consu drama. for president trump the nsuming drama is president trump and that is an essential difference. what about the republican party? you have often spoken of the

mccarthy years and g moreta -- margaret case smith spoke up against him and senator gold water went to the white house on confront confronted president nixon. where is the again today? jon: they are nowhere near theb y goldwater of fine 74 and not in the same z code as margarethase smith. she gave a speech shortly of a h lincolns birthday address in wheeling where he launched his crusader and called it the declaration of conscience. she only got six republicans to supporter. he dismissed them as snow white and the six dwarfs yetr f years later that is where 22 republicans voted to censor him.

we are here and this is what i woulay as to republicans who have suspended in many cases their critical faculties i exchange for raw power, you know there very well. the reason republicans are acting the way they are acting theyre seeing numbers showi republicans in their state or district not only support the president but strongly support. that is the category that is so disorien disorienting to them. the republicans we talk about, the democrats webo talk in a warm and venerable a way the leaders who took a risk and actually told their base oft supp something that they didn't want to hear.th k of american presidents. what is the one thing we think when we think ofixon and on the positive side. going to china the old cold warrior opens up this vastis comm nation. lyndon johnson from a segregated state in texas does civil rights.

ronald reagathe colds warrior ends the cold war. we honor people, presidents and lawmakers w tell us what we don't want to hear. whatca would urge repub to do is think what you want us to think whenoo we at your portrait on the wall and it has a small chanc of working because no politicn can imagine a world where we are not staring adoringly at their picture. it is whatet will you viewed in history the way that you would wan your family i view you and the way you would want history to talk about you. robert: we just have a few seconds. you have written about america's soul and better angels.ou remain an optimist on this thanksgiving week or not? jon: am if only because as well ton said getting america this far was damn closeest thing and winston churchill is said it

you can always count on the ericans to tdo everything right once they did everything else but i think the 242 year experiment and 55 year sincehe voting rights act that will win. robert: we will have to leave it there. i will bring you back for a show on churchill. thank you for joining us fis pecial edition of "washington week." i'rort coa. good night. > corporate funding for "washington week" is provided by -- >> additional funding is provided by koo and patricia ewing committed to bridging cultural differences in our it

comms. the corporation for public broadcasting. and by i contributiot your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you.

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