The Case for Prosecuting Trump

The Jan. 6 hearings have made it clear that Donald Trump led a concerted, monthslong effort to overturn a democratic election. The extensive interviews — over 1,000 — that the House select committee conducted prove that Trump was told there was no evidence of election fraud, but he pressed his anti-democratic case regardless. And it appears that the hearings may be making an impact on public opinion: An ABC News/Ipsos survey released Sunday found that 58 percent of respondents believe Trump should be charged with a crime for his role in the Jan. 6 attack, up from 52 percent in April. But after all the evidence comes to light, will he actually face legal consequences? If the answer is no, then what might future presidents — including, perhaps, Trump himself — be emboldened to do? And what would that mean for the future of the American political system? Jamelle Bouie is a Times Opinion columnist and co-host of the podcast “Unclear and Present Danger.” Bouie brings a remarkable historical depth to his writing about American politics. His columns about Jan. 6 — and the troubling idiosyncrasies of Trump’s presidency before it — have shown how the former president’s illiberal actions have threatened the constitutional foundation of American government. So I asked him on the show to help me process the Jan. 6 hearings with an eye to America’s past, and also to its uncertain future. We discuss why Jan. 6 may be not just an insurrection but “a kind of revolution or, at least, the very beginning of one”; how the anti-democratic nature of the American Constitution makes our system vulnerable to demagogues like Trump; the most important takeaways from the hearings so far; what could happen in 2024 if Trump is allowed to walk free; what Trump allies are already doing to gain power over elections; why refusing to prosecute Trump would itself be a “radical act”; why Republicans have grown increasingly suspicious of — and hostile to — representative democracy; why Bouie thinks prosecuting Trump would be worth the political fallout it would cause; and more. Mentioned: “Trump Had a Mob. He Also Had a Plan.” by Jamelle Bouie “America Punishes Only a Certain Kind of Rebel” by Jamelle Bouie “Prosecute Trump? Put Yourself in Merrick Garland’s Shoes.” by Jack Goldsmith Book recommendations: Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men by Eric Foner Salmon P. Chase by Walter Stahr What It Took to Win by Michael Kazin We're hiring a researcher! You can apply here or by visiting nytimes.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/News Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Rollin Hu, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair; mixing and original music by Isaac Jones; audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Special thanks to Kristin Lin and Kristina Samulewski.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Ezra Klein?

  I'm Ezra Klein. This is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:22Ezra Klein?

  So before we begin today, we are looking for a researcher to join the show. New York is preferred for this job, but we're open to remote work and we're going to be closing the listing in about a week. So now is the time to apply. The listing can be found at nyco.com/careers and we'll put a link to that in the description for this episode. And I do apologize. I know it's frustrating, but you do have to apply through the NYT jobs website. You cannot just send it all to our email. But for today, I don't know if you're watching, but the hearings by the Congressional Select Committee charged with investigating January 6th and all that led to it, they're ongoing. And I think on the merits, they've been pretty remarkable.

• 1:02Ezra Klein?

  The breadth of their interviews, the clarity of the presentation and the simple work they've done, I don't think it's been simple, but it's been clear. Constructing and sequencing a record here, just creating that record is invaluable. And there is some evidence on the margin that the public's view is changing. There was an ABC News Ipsos survey released on Sunday and it found that 58%, 58% of respondents believe Trump should be charged with a crime for his role in the January 6th attack. That is up from 52% earlier this year. But in terms of real consequences for Trump, that's still to be seen and looks a lot murkier. And that gets to the deeper questions of these hearings.

• 1:48Ezra Klein?

  This is really about fundamental questions of our political and legal system. Is the president actually above the law? What happens when the norms that truly govern American politics break down and we're left with what the rules really say? How have we punished and pardoned those who have threatened the system before? And what can we learn from that? And I think maybe most importantly, what would happen if Attorney General Merrick Garland actually decided to prosecute Donald Trump? What would happen if any sitting Attorney General decided to prosecute the previous president from the other party? What does that do to American politics? So I wanted to talk to somebody who could put these hearings in context, who has a bit more of a historical view. And that made guest selection easy. My colleague, Jamal Bowie, is a columnist at Time's Opinion, and I think he's just

• 2:32Ezra Klein?

  one of the best writers going today at connecting the present moment with America's still living past. He also, I should say, co-hosts a very fun podcast, Unclear and Present Danger, about 90s post-Cold War thrillers. I do want to note, we recorded this conversation on Wednesday, June 22nd, so that was before the Thursday hearing. As always, my email is [email protected]. Jamal Bowie, welcome to the show.

• 3:02Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me as a guest this time.

• 3:05Ezra Klein?

  I know.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  I haven't done this yet.

• 3:07Ezra Klein?

  The other side of the mic. So I want to begin with a frame you offered in a past column that I've been thinking about a bit. So we often hear about January 6th as an insurrection. It's how I talk about it typically. But you say that it's best thought of as, quote, "a kind of revolution," or at least "the very beginning of one." Tell me about that.

• 3:27Speaker 01

  So one way I've been looking at January 6th is from the perspective of what in the political system enables this? What in the political system sort of allows something like this to happen? And one of the things I have identified, and lots of people have identified, is simply that the odd mechanism we have for electing a president has all these stop points and points at which you could interrupt the process. And historically, the process hasn't really been interrupted. It's all been kind of a formality. The moment of counting the electoral votes, the moment of... You know, the states certifying electors, all this stuff has been mere formality for

• 4:08Speaker 01

  most of American history, at least the the large part of American history during which people have been voting for the president. And it was, I think, people expected it to be a formality again going into this. But what happened, you know, between November election and January 6th was that Trump and his allies and his supporters decided to contest these parts of the process that were understood to be formalities. And although at the beginning of all of this November, you know, there was a lot of talk that, well, the president has the right to, you know, sue in court and have a stay in court and contest these things. I think what people missed was that the mere decision to contest them is a sea change from the past.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  It is it is making these moments, these procedures, grounds for political contestation. And it is introducing the idea that if you were to somehow win the political contestation, then you could kind of subvert or overturn the results of the election. And that, to me, is a kind of revolutionary idea. It fundamentally changes what we think presidential elections are, who we think counts in them, and what purpose they serve in a representative democracy. It sort of, it it completely turns around this ritual we have, making it less of an affirmation of Americans' democratic will and more of a game of, you know, elite machinations

• 5:36Speaker 01

  and legal chicanery.

• 5:38Ezra Klein?

  I want to zoom in on the verb you used there, which is changes, which you're talking about all this in in the present tense, and it's there in your your point about revolution, the very beginning of one. There's a tendency, an allure, to seeing what the select committee is doing, to seeing that period of time from the November election to sort of the immediate post-January 6 certification as over, and that the period we're in now is the after-action report, where, you know, trying to recover the black box on the on the the 2020 airplane crash. But that's not the way you talk about it. You're talking about this as something ongoing, something where the damage of it is still

• 6:20Ezra Klein?

  seeping through the system, something where the story is by no means over. Tell me why.

• 6:26Speaker 01

  When you decide to do something like contest the counting of the electoral votes, turn it into a site of live political struggle, you can't just put that back in the box, right? Like, people now know that that's a thing you can do. And once people know that that's a thing you can do, it becomes a live possibility, even if in the next election and the election after that, you know, elites decide they're gonna just like leave that aside, they're gonna put that tool back in the box and pretend like they never saw it. But we all know that it happened. And I think it's important to understand politics and sort of political procedures and democratic procedures, not as, you know, rules on a piece of paper, right, that you follow, but sort of a set of agreements among everyone, right?

• 7:10Speaker 01

  A set of agreements about what actually happens after X, Y, and Z. And if one side violates those agreements, and there's no real consequences for that violation, there's no attempt to change the rules, or put right down on a piece of paper, this thing you can no longer do, and we're all going to enforce that with law, then effectively, you know, the agreement has changed, and now the realm of what you can do has expanded some. And I don't think people are taking that quite seriously enough. I mean, I don't think people opposed to it are taking that quite seriously enough. I think the people who are allies of the former president are actually taking it very seriously.

• 7:52Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, that's an important point. But this gets to something very deep, that to me has been a consistent theme of the past 20 years in American politics, which is, people tend to think the American political system works on rules, clearly defined rules governing behavior. And to a much larger extent than we learn in, you know, high school civics class, it works on norms, as you put it, agreements between the players. And when those agreements begin breaking down, and one of my theories about the period of polarization we're in is that it's a period of agreements breaking down. You can't run a system this polarized on norms. It turns out that if you try to run American politics based on the actual rules that we

• 8:36Ezra Klein?

  have set down, you find that we have a very bad system to run by rules. That those rules are unusually susceptible to bad actors. Does that seem right to you?

• 8:49Speaker 01

  I think that's right. I think that to borrow a phrase I've grown or to use a phrase I've grown pretty fond of recently. I think that Americans understand their democracy as running along the same boundaries as the Constitution, right? Sort of American democracy and the Constitution are synonymous to a lot of people. But I think that's the wrong way to think of it. I think American democracy is a set of ideals and aspirations and instincts that are much larger than what the Constitution allows. And the Constitution is an attempt to kind of limit what the possibilities of American democracy might be. And if you just read the Constitution in those terms and think about the historical

• 9:28Speaker 01

  context of the Constitution as well, which is kind of elite panic over mass political participation, elite panic over sort of like a leveling spirit that had been unleashed by the revolution and its successful conclusion. I think what you see is a Constitution that for as much as it tries to facilitate self-government, also puts a huge number of limits and really tends to clamp down on the democratic spirit and sort of coordinate off somewhat. And so you have institutions, and you've written about this, I've written about this, like the Senate, you have the Electoral College as written, which isn't what we tend to think of it was, but as written, it's kind of a temporary Congress where elites get together

• 10:13Speaker 01

  and choose the president. And if they can't figure it out, it goes to the House of Representatives, who then choose the president. And of course, the House, although elected by the people in this document, is elected by a very narrow segment of people, right? It's not really a representative process in any meaningful sense or not, certainly not in any sense that we would recognize. And I think that I think we are witnessing and experiencing is that, as you say, That the rules set out in the Constitution allow for a political system that is much less democratic than we Americans envision, think of, want to have. They allow for a political system that in some ways can facilitate authoritarianism

• 10:56Speaker 01

  quite easily. That's kind of what we're witnessing. Some states, some state legislators have floated the possibility of just like assigning their electoral votes to, you know, Trump if he runs again. And that's very much because the rulebook says they can do it. It violates our instincts. It violates what we think this process is supposed to be. But there's nothing in the rulebook that says they can't do it.

• 11:23Ezra Klein?

  I want to try a thought on you here, building on what you said there, which is, I think if you read through the Constitution, read through the way the rules of, say, the Senate, the Electoral College, et cetera, set up, what you'll see is a system, for all the reasons you described, that built in a lot of discretion for elites. It built in a role at many, many, many points in the process for elites to say, I don't like how this is going. And now, this is where we get into the problems of the word elites, because both, say, Merrick Garland and Steve Bannon are both elites by any definition of the term, but they're very different kinds. So what seems to me to have happened

• 12:06Ezra Klein?

  in an almost inversion of founder intent, is that that discretion is not really used by the elites of the establishment, you might call them, right? The kind of people you might have had at the Constitutional Convention, because by nature, those elites are pro-system. They're very bought into the system. They're the ones who came up with these agreements, who've been carrying them out for a long time, who've been socialized into them. They don't tend to be the ones to break the agreements. That discretion is being used, deployed, worked with by the populace, by the people trying to challenge the folks who have been traditionally running the system. In theory, the elites would have been used at the Electoral College to keep somebody like Donald Trump out, or at other parts in the system to try

• 12:51Ezra Klein?

  to limit his damage. But instead, a lot of the actual, like, the elites are the ones defending the norms is good enough, and a lot of the actual discretion and kind of prying open of the system's internal logic is being done by these populist challengers.

• 13:06Speaker 01

  I think that's right. I think that the, and this gets back to this idea that American democracy and the Constitution really shouldn't be considered one and the same thing, which is that in the year since 1788, which is when the Constitution was ratified, in the 250 years since then, we have moved towards basically trying to shoehorn something like a democratic system into the Constitution. And the establishment elites, you might describe them as, have largely bought into that project. They think that is the way it's supposed to go. They refer to the country as a democracy, recognizing that part of the story of the country is this attempt to take a system that on paper really isn't that democratic

• 13:49Speaker 01

  and turning it into something democratic. And it should be said that this process begins almost immediately, right? Sort of after the first decade of, you know, what you might call the founders' Constitution, you have the beginnings of the development of mass political parties. You have the beginnings of sort of the expansion of suffrage from landowning white men to sort of all white men, so that by the age of Jackson, there's universal white male suffrage. It's in the 1810s or so that Americans begin referring to their country as a democracy. And of course, Andrew Jackson's political party becomes known as, I mean, we know it as the Democratic Party, but how people talked about it is they called it "the democracy." So this, this attempt to kind of make the country more

• 14:33Speaker 01

  democratic happens very quickly. It's sort of the, the logic of the revolution pointed toward it, even as the Constitution was meant to kind of restrict that somewhat. And the logic of the revolution won out in that battle. And so what's interesting about, you know, today's contemporary populist or reactionaries, whatever you want to call them, is that they are often explicitly anti-democracy, right? Like, they, they, they see democracy as in part, part of the problem, or at least democracy that includes Americans they have deemed outside the realm of the people. And so in their anti-democratic attempt to kind of make sure only the right people have a say in the process, they've looked to the

• 15:16Speaker 01

  Constitution and the literal words on the paper, divorced from the larger kind of democratic Political culture that has developed in the United States and have tried to use the discretion and the loopholes and the literal, you know, intent of some of this to undermine American democracy. I'm sure you've, you've heard the phrase, we're a republic, not a democracy.

• 15:38Ezra Klein?

  I was going to say it next, simply to annoy you.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's, it drives me crazy, but this is, I mean, I think in it for listeners, it drives me crazy because if you actually sort of like break down how those words were used in the founding period and how they've been used, they're kind of synonymous. And the big difference is that republic has Aladdin origin and democracy has like a Greek one, and that's kind of it. They both kind of mean rule by the people. But in, as it's used by Trumpist political figures, as it's used by, you know, Lauren Boebert, who said it on Twitter once, and all those people, what I think it literally means for them is that the United States is not a country where the people actually decide. The United States is a country where a segment of the people who are sort of like true patriots

• 16:24Speaker 01

  get to decide. And in service of that, they're looking to, or they're using understandings of the constitution that kind of subvert, again, the democratic culture that's grown up in the United States.

• 16:37Ezra Klein?

  Right. The, the tell on this to me always is go back to 2016. Imagine that at the party convention, Republicans use some procedural maneuver to stop Donald Trump from being nominated, or, or even more to the point, at the electoral college, the assemblage of elites decide, nah, just not this guy. The people around, like the Trump movement, who like to say, we're a public, not a democracy, would not be saying, well, I mean, not the way I'd hoped it would play out, but obviously we're a public, not a democracy. And the point of a republic is you have that kind of check on the small d democratic impulse. Not only like, do people misunderstand historically what was being talked about by Republican

• 17:22Ezra Klein?

  democracy, but they don't believe it now either.

• 17:24Speaker 01

  You're, you're absolutely right. If somehow the electoral college, if all those electors had just decided, you know, we're going to ignore the directions from, by state law, we say we cannot act as unfaithful electors and give the election to Hillary Clinton, there would be pandemonium.

• 17:42Speaker 01

  Trump's allies would lose their minds and it might even rightfully so, right? Because under the rules as played, that's not how it's supposed to work. I mean, the electoral college is there, but we all kind of understand that if you win the electors, you win the electors. And, you know, if you happen to win the electors without winning the popular vote, you get to win, even if that is a, I think, ridiculous outcome, that a system that produced that outcome for this kind of office doesn't really work. It is the agreed upon rules at the beginning of the process. And so, you know, they would have had a point. But the fact that they're not consistent about this is, as you say, it's the tell.

• 18:24Speaker 01

  Like, it's really kind of a power play, looking for justifications. But I do think it speaks to like a deeper disdain for democracy and specifically disdain for the idea that all Americans, at least in some sense, have an equal say on the governance of the country.

• 18:42Ezra Klein?

  So what a wonderful bridge to the hearings themselves, particularly that point about, you know, if you win the votes, you win the electors. We talked about these hearings as the January 6 hearings. But as I've watched them and as I understand the case they're laying out, they are really, importantly in my mind, trying to say, this is not about January 6, that there was a coherent, ongoing, multi-week or multi-month plan in which Donald Trump was heavily personally involved, in which an orbit of people around him were coming up with theories and approaches and strategies and plans of attack and applying pressure to subvert the election before there was ever an attack on the Capitol.

• 19:27Ezra Klein?

  The point of the hearings, as I've understood them, is to try to lay out the nature of the plot, the scheme, that Brought us to January 6th. So can you talk a bit about what that scheme was? What it was the Trumpist people who were trying to subvert the election thought they could do and attempted to do?

• 19:50Speaker 01

  So my understanding of the scheme is it has sort of two parts. The first part, you might see the immediate pre and post-election part was to do as much as they could to delay the counting of mail-in and absentee ballots. The idea being was that Trump's voters would disproportionately come out and vote on election day, meaning their votes to be counted first. And so when polls closed from results started to come in, it would appear as if Trump had won. And if you could sort of stop, if you could delay counting, if you could stop counting early enough, I think in his mind and the mind of his allies, you could say, well, I won.

• 20:32Speaker 01

  And then, once the other votes began to come in, you then begin to contest that and say, well, those votes don't count. They were illegally cast. You know, they were cast, you know, under, under circumstances where election officials didn't follow the letter of state law. There's this whole kind of ridiculous theory of the Constitution and specifically the election clauses in the Constitution called the independent state legislature theory, which holds that state legislatures have plenary, meaning kind of unlimited power to do whatever they please with regards to elections in their states. And under this theory, if, say, a governor or a secretary of state or some other official

• 21:15Speaker 01

  changes the rules to accommodate a situation such as a pandemic without explicit approval from the state legislature, this is like null and void and illegitimate. It's all very silly, nonetheless, because every all-state actors derive their power from state constitutions. And so state legislatures don't somehow like pre-exist state constitutions. It's a very, it logically makes no sense.

• 21:38Speaker 01

  And so, under all of this, this is how they would challenge things and then they could maybe shut down the voting and Trump could claim victory. This didn't work. And so, the next part of it, the kind of post-election approach was to challenge as many ballots as they could in the swing states, try to get them thrown out and try to keep states from appointing electors by the time the deadline hit in December. This is all those lawsuits. When that didn't work, the plan became, basically, this is where things go from being sort of kind of working within the legal system, although it's all kind of like breaking all sorts of norms, to just like starting to break the law. It is, can

• 22:20Speaker 01

  we create fake sets of Trump electors and find some pretext to have those slates of Trump electors sent to Congress in addition to the legitimate slate of electors? And then, once they're sent to Congress, we'll use the counting process and we'll use sort of the Byzantine procedure set out in the Electoral Vote Count Act, Electoral Count Act. And we'll use the ambiguity in that law, which isn't really written very well, and the ambiguity of the vice president's role in accounting of electoral votes to throw out votes in states that Biden won, that Trump needs, and then have these substitute electors come in and then Trump can claim victory.

• 23:04Ezra Klein?

  It's just a genuinely weird set of ideas. And as I understand, there's also another theory of how you might have done it. So, to play out that last bit a little differently, you could have, in a set of the key swing states that they feared Trump was going to lose and that he did lose, you could have this alternate slate of elector plan going forward. So, let's call it, you know, Michigan and Arizona and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and so on. You know, Republicans in those states put forward an alternate slate of electors. They say, or their secretary of state says, in Georgia or whatever it might be, "We don't trust the vote. We think there are real irregularities here. We think something

• 23:46Ezra Klein?

  has gone wrong." And what Pence does, Vice President Pence, at that point, is say, "Well..."

• 23:54Ezra Klein?

  In a bunch of these key states, there is simply too much uncertainty for me to certify the vote. I simply cannot certify that we know what happened in Arizona. And having knocked out these states because it cannot be certified.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 24:10Ezra Klein?

  If you do it in the right way and pick the right states, Trump ends up with a majority of the votes because he's got, you know, Florida, but you know, Joe Biden doesn't have Michigan and Pennsylvania, or whatever it might be.

• 24:21Speaker 01

  The other possibility, which is something that I don't think people actually understand is a thing that can happen, which is you toss it in a vote that there's just a tie, and ties go to the House, and the House doesn't vote by member, votes by delegation, because Republicans control 26 delegations, then, you know, Trump becomes president.

• 24:42Ezra Klein?

  And so there are all these ways this plays out, goes to the Supreme Court, et cetera. But the thing I want to note about this is what the committee has done very effectively, in my view, is showing, one, how personally involved Donald Trump was. I mean, we knew a lot of this. We knew he was calling individual Republicans in individual states, trying to get them to go along with this plan. But, but not just how involved Trump was, but people around him, William Barr, et cetera, are telling him, you can't do this. It doesn't make any sense. It doesn't work. It's not legal. And he's, he's pushing forward on it, on it anyway. And something that has been on my mind in the hearings has been, I think that January 6th, in a weird way, has let Trump off easy. Because

• 25:25Ezra Klein?

  it exists in the minds of the public, as sure Trump's fault, but it's not like he was literally there in the mob. It's like the mob got out of control. He probably didn't mean for that exactly to happen. And it is overshadowed. Like, all this other work he put into subverting the election, that of course led to January 6th, it created both the sense of fury and hope that led those people to rush the Capitol, but that... It's been actually, in certain ways, hard to get the attention off of the unbelievably compelling footage of like the Capitol being broken into and back onto Donald Trump night

• 26:05Ezra Klein?

  after night, working the phones to try to intimidate or persuade or cajole officials in relevant states to go along with this scheme. And like, that is the core sin at the heart of all of this.

• 26:18Speaker 01

  I've tried to think a lot about why, not just here, but across many different Trump scandals, it's been so difficult to get attention paid to him specifically in his actions and sort of to get, you know, people to treat him as the prime mover. Some of it, I think, is just like, it largely happened in full view, right? Trump didn't ever really try to hide any of this. Going back to 2016, he said, you know, if I lose, I don't, I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna challenge the election. I may not, I may not accept the results of the election. Sort of a known fact about the guy that he just doesn't accept the idea that he can lose something. And during the months before January 6th, you know, most of November and December, it was pretty open that they were trying to do

• 27:02Speaker 01

  something. And so I think the extent to which so much of this wasn't hidden, I think, I think people take in scandal and take in malfeasance of this sort, using a heuristic. And that heuristic basically is if it seems like the person is trying to hide something, then it must be bad. And if it doesn't seem, if Trump is not trying to hide any of this, then it doesn't, just doesn't seem that bad. I think this is the thing that afflicts how the media covers these things as well, that it's the, it's the appearance of secrecy that is the juicy part and not necessarily the thing itself.

• 27:36Ezra Klein?

  I think there's something very deep in this and in the way we treat different kinds of truth, particularly in the media. I've always thought about the way in which we treat a hot mic moment. Or something that is revealed in a, you know, like a tape of a speech in a private place as more revealing of a politician's true beliefs on something than the speech they give in public or the comments they make with more thought, right? The, the idea that secret knowledge, hidden knowledge is more truthful than, than, than public knowledge. But, but here too, there is this very funny way where if all of this had come out in the hearings all at once, it would be really shocking.

• 28:18Ezra Klein?

  But because so much of it was known, because Trump, I mean, literally spoke to the Stop the Steal rally, because he said publicly that Mike Pence wasn't doing what Mike Pence should do, that it doesn't have that force of, of revelation. And yeah, it's like we somehow price it in with him, uh, in a way that I think is very damaging, but also in a way that I think the, the hearing is trying to, to combat. Are there things you've learned throughout the hearings that, that you didn't know before, or that have filled in texture on this story that, that you didn't have?

• 28:54Speaker 01

  You know, beyond the obvious and the big stuff, sort of more detail about the actual, you know, attack on the Capitol and the insurrection and that sort of thing. What's been interesting to me is actually the way in which we're seeing that there were real divides among the conservative establishment about how to approach this. The revelation, for example, that John Eastman, the lawyer, one of Trump's lawyers, who sort of helped spearhead the scheme with the Electoral College and with counting the electoral votes, that he said to someone, I think, someone on Pence's staff, that he thought that there were two votes in the Supreme Court for, you know, whatever

• 29:33Speaker 01

  happened, if it got to that point. Um, what's interesting to me, it lines up with the revelations we've gotten about Virginia, Ginny Thomas, Clarence Thomas's wife, and her active involvement in trying to persuade Republican state legislators to, um, go along with this scheme.

• 29:52Speaker 01

  It seems to me that beneath the story of integrity on part of the Georgia Secretary of State, or the Arizona Speaker of the House, or Mike Pence, or whomever, below that story, there's also a story here of how the conservative establishment might have gone along with this, given slightly different conditions from what we had. And that, to me, is, to put it lightly, very troubling.

• 30:49Ezra Klein?

  So I want to pick up on that idea of the divisions or issues inside the Republican Party. One thing that has been very striking to me about the hearings is how much the political strategy of them, for lack of a better term, is to try to cleave Trump and the people around him who abetted the scheme off from the broader Republican Party, including much of the Trump administration. So the hearings haven't made, say, Vice President Mike Pence out to be somebody who did just enough to not actually try to subvert the Constitution. They made him out to be a hero. They made Attorney General William Barr,

• 31:31Ezra Klein?

  a very complicated figure, in my view, out to be a hero. They've really tried to tell the story through the voices of Republicans serving inside the Trump administration, around Donald Trump, who didn't go along with him, and who tried to tell him to stop and were overruled. How have you understood that dimension of it, both whether they're tracking something real in the Republican Party, right, that's a cut you can actually make, and whether they're tracking a political strategy here that makes sense?

• 32:02Speaker 01

  I think this is primarily a political strategy. I think you're right to identify it as an attempt to kind of cordon off Trump from the rest of the Republican Party to kind of have a Republican Party that is largely the same as what it is, but it just does no longer has Trump as a significant part of it and has room for kind of anti-Trump energy, or at least sort of like Trump skeptical energy. The problem is that as far as the actual existing Republican Party goes, there's not really a meaningful faction in terms of the voting public, I think, that would identify in this way. You do have, you know, some more traditional Republican establishment politicians and

• 32:45Speaker 01

  figures, but where the energy of the party is, is with the kind of politics that Trump brought to the fore, is with the real disdain for broad Democratic participation among all Americans. It is with the monomaniacal culture war fights and the attempt to use the state to prosecute them. This is sort of the whole appeal of Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, to many Republican voters. And so, one of the most revealing things to me about the Republicans that have testified is they go on about how Trump should disavert the Constitution, how he was breaking the law, et cetera, et cetera. And then, you know, you ask, well, would you vote for Trump again? And they say, yes.

• 33:30Speaker 01

  And that, to me, is the whole story, right? That's, that's the whole thing, that their complaint is with Trump doing this one thing that they thought was unwise. Their complaint really isn't with Trump as a political figure or the Trump movement as a political movement. And I think the Republican Party, by and large, has reconciled itself, even embraced whatever Trump brought to the party. And unfortunately, what Trump brought to the party was just a, if not disdain for, then at least indifference to Democratic ideals, to Democratic aspirations, to the idea that people who do not vote for you are nonetheless, you know, deserve political

• 34:12Speaker 01

  representation and the right to, to have an impact on the governance of the country.

• 34:20Ezra Klein?

  So I hesitate to ask this question because I worry that this kind of conversation almost instantiates the problem that it is tracing. But then, who is the, the audience for these hearings? What would it mean for them to be effective? Is being effective, from, from your perspective, even something that is within the power of the committee to, to achieve?

• 34:44Speaker 01

  That's a good question. So I imagine that the audience for these hearings, I imagine that the audience that maybe the, the committee might want are sort of ordinary Republican voters. I think they want them to see that the President of the United States was trying to break the law and subvert the Constitution. For these hearings to be a success, then you can't count on them necessarily persuading Republican voters or Trump voters. I think for these hearings to be a success, you should aim at kind of helping to establish the political ground for prosecuting Donald Trump, for taking this into the legal system. Because we're kind of past the point where there can be kind of direct political consequences

• 35:29Speaker 01

  for Trump. This is kind of the failure of impeachment. Impeachment is kind of made for exactly this situation, but he wasn't removed. And because he wasn't removed, that means he can run for office again. So the next best thing is the criminal legal system. And I think that what the committee has done quite effectively is shown that Trump was engaged in a conspiracy to break the law and knowingly engaged in a conspiracy to break the law. And then the political question becomes, does, you know, does the Department of Justice, does sort of the, the federal law enforcement apparatus have the will? And does the President, Joe Biden, who is nominally not supposed to have any influence on this, but come on, does he have the will to do this?

• 36:13Speaker 01

  And are people willing to accept that, yes, a third of the country is going to reject the criminal prosecution of Trump at the legitimate? But that's just something we're going to have to live with because the alternative is to let this guy who...

• 36:27Speaker 01

  It's beyond obvious at this point that if he gets a second shot at the White House, if he gets another bite of the apple, he is going to do very terrible things with the power he has. Are we just gonna let that happen? Or are we gonna try to do something about it? And are we going to try to use a prosecution to send the message that needs to be sent to Republican elites? That there actually does come a point where you have to face a real accountability? Because part of this story, I think, in the broad sense, is of the complete absence of accountability from the high levels of American politics. That, you know, Nixon said that when the president does it, it's not illegal, or some version of that. And effectively, that's become the case.

• 37:11Speaker 01

  You know, going through the second Bush administration and the torture controversy. I mean, as you begin to look at the totality, what Trump kind of represents right now is the culmination of the project of making the president essentially above the law. And I think that's what we're, we'd really be staring at in a scenario where the commission, the committee, provides all of this evidence of lawbreaking, of severe lawbreaking, of the kind of lawbreaking that, you know, I, I'm not, I'm not like a worshipper of the framework of the founders, but they would be very upset about this. This is exactly the kind of thing that they're very much afraid of.

• 37:50Ezra Klein?

  I want to take this at two levels, the substantive and then, and then also the political, because I think it gets to something deep. When I said a minute ago, who's the audience? Who is the plausibly persuadable audience? I think actually, the most honest answer to that is Merrick Garland. I don't know how much influence President Biden has over him in this. I think Garland probably takes his independence here fairly seriously. I've heard some reporting, although you never know what these leaks are actually motivated by, that, that Biden feels Garland has been a little wan on these issues, a little overly restrained, which, I don't know. I feel like bringing back Merrick Garland as an AG is some kind of weird callback to the last season.

• 38:32Ezra Klein?

  It was such a strange decision from the beginning that I'm not surprised it isn't working out great. But Garland has to make this decision about whether or not to prosecute. And one thing that has been so frustrating to me, watching the, the narrative and the, the conversation over this play out. Is first, as you say, we seem to have backed ourselves into a position where if you're an ordinary American who believes the president is telling you the truth, and he tells you the election is being stolen, that there is a generational level political theft, a definitional political theft, taking place just a couple of blocks that away,

• 39:17Ezra Klein?

  that you are responsible, legally culpable, for overreacting to that information and rushing the Capitol, but he is not responsible for inciting you, right? He's the person there with the power and the information. And similarly, that it seems plausible, you know, Peter Navarro is, you know, in trouble for not cooperating with the committee. It seems plausible that some of the people right around Trump will fall for this, but again, not him. So one, as you say, I think that creates a very dangerous dynamic where the fact of it is that to be at the center of politics, to be the most powerful person, means you're the most unaccountable. And then secondarily, you'll get into these weird discussions where people are like, well,

• 40:00Ezra Klein?

  you know, these are kind of complicated crimes, conspiracy to obstruct the proceedings of the blah, blah, blah. It's like, do you know what people go to jail in this country for? It's a lot less than trying to subvert the 2020 election. Like, it is things that in any consequentialist analysis are much more modest than I tried to break American democracy in half for my own political gain. We'll get to the real difficulties here in a second, but I think the conversation really, really seems to skip over that.

• 40:29Speaker 01

  No, I was, I was actually very recently complaining about this exact thing to a friend, that in this country, if in this country, you drive a buddy to a convenience store and you're waiting outside and your buddy decides he's going to rob the place and then kills the clerk and then gets in the car and drives away and you guys get arrested, the driver... Who may have not had any knowledge of any of this, surely wasn't holding a gun or didn't pull a trigger, the driver can go to prison and can go to prison for a long time. I happen to think that that's sort of ridiculous. But if that's the case, if we can, if you can go to prison for being an unwitting accessory

• 41:13Speaker 01

  to someone else's crime, then it does not make any sense to me that somehow Donald Trump, who in addition to actively taking a role in trying to subvert the election, literally stood outside and said, Mike Pence needs to do the right thing. And if he isn't, you know, we have to be strong, we have to be tough, pointing an angry mob at the Capitol. If that doesn't arise to something, then there's, I think, a real problem. I had mentioned earlier that sort of it's kind of a real shame that the impeachment process didn't result in his removal from office and him losing the ability to run for

• 41:56Speaker 01

  office, because this, this really is the kind of thing that impeachment is made for, the sort of both legal and political question. I think a lot of the impeachment of Andrew Johnson here, Andrew Johnson was nominally impeached for his violation of the tenure of office act, which was probably not even constitutional to begin with. But that's what he was impeached for. But what he was actually impeached for, and what everyone kind of recognized he was impeached for, was not just sort of like essentially trying to reconstruct the South in basically its antebellum glory, just without slavery, but also for kind of his reckless and inflammatory

• 42:36Speaker 01

  rhetoric that many of his opponents felt was emboldening sort of ex Confederates to do violence to freed slaves. Sort of, there's a recognition in that impeachment trial, a recognition in that whole moment that a president's words aren't just words, that they, they carry an entirely different weight than a private citizen than any other elected official, that the president's words hold unique import and influence and power and should be treated as such. And so even if Donald Trump didn't directly say to the people gathered for the Stop the Steal rally, you need to go in and grab Mike Pence and hang him from the gallows.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  His rhetoric, his demeanor, everything about him in that moment signaled basically that. And there needs to be a process to be able to hold him accountable for that, even if he's no longer in office, no longer, even if he is now technically a private citizen, which of course, he's not just a private citizen anymore. That's, that's the other thing.

• 43:44Ezra Klein?

  Also, on that Pence thing, one of the things that came out at the hearing, or at least was told really well at the hearing, is there is this moment when Pence is in the Capitol, when the mob is in the Capitol, when they are ultimately only 40 feet away from, from Pence. And the people around Trump get to him and they say, you gotta send a tweet or make a statement telling people to calm down, like this is getting to be a really bad situation. And then one of the people testifying at the committee says they look at the notification that comes up on their phone for a new tweet from Donald

• 44:24Ezra Klein?

  Trump, and it's attacking Mike Pence, right? It is focusing the crowd's rage on Mike Pence. So it's just something to say here, like, this was all happening in real time. Like, Donald Trump was watching this stuff on, on TV. He knew this was happening. People were trying to get him to calm the mob down, or to deploy troops or something. He not only doesn't do that, he directs their ire at Mike Pence. When you talk about there being these hang Mike Pence chants, that did not come from nowhere. That was not some kind of fun invention of the crowd. That was Donald Trump, who had pointed them at the Capitol, pointing them at the Vice President.

• 45:02Speaker 01

  Right. That's exactly right.

• 45:03Ezra Klein?

  In real time.

• 45:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, in real time.

• 45:05Ezra Klein?

  Sorry, it's just, the whole thing is so, is so unbelievably nuts. And the fact that the Republican Party is not more upset about it is, is really unbelievably nuts. I mean, oh my God, can you imagine if it were, like, it would, it would look totally differently somehow, if it were, had been a Democratic mob in the Capitol that's trying to hang Mike Pence. I mean-

• 45:25Speaker 01

  If there had been a Democratic mob in the Capitol trying to hang Mike Pence, inspired by, I'll say that, inspired by a Democratic president or Democratic ex-president or something, first of all, the hearings would not be happening a year after the fact. They'd be happening immediately. And second of all, we wouldn't be trying to guess if there was going to be criminal prosecutions of that political figure. There absolutely would be. I think that if this were all reversed, the Republican Party would be much more politically aggressive about pursuing it and using it for the sake of establishing its political position.

• 46:36Ezra Klein?

  So Jack Goldsmith, who's a former Assistant Attorney General, had, I thought, a pretty thoughtful piece in the Times opinion recently, laying out both the case Garland could and would have to make to prosecute Trump, but also the political considerations he's probably weighing as he decides whether or not to do it. And so he writes on the one side, a side we've talked about a bit here, quote, "A failure to indict Mr. Trump in these circumstances would imply that a president who cannot be indicted while in office is literally above the law in defiance of the very notion of constitutional government. It would encourage lawlessness by future presidents, none more so than Mr. Trump should

• 47:17Ezra Klein?

  he win the next election." But Goldsmith goes on to also lay out, I think correctly, what is the other side of the case. And I want to hear how you respond to it or think about it. So he writes, quote, "Indicting a past and possible future political adversary of the current president would be a cataclysmic event from which a nation would not soon recover. It would be seen by many as politicized retribution. The prosecution would take many years to conclude, but last through and deeply affect the next election and would leave Mr. Trump's ultimate fate to the next administration, which could be headed by Mr. Trump." So how do you think about the balance of considerations weighing against prosecution? And I think particularly that first bit, that idea that to actually prosecute the

• 48:00Ezra Klein?

  previous sitting president would be a crossing of the Rubicon and an opening of a box that we don't want to cross or open?

• 48:09Speaker 01

  I take that argument, I take that fear very seriously. And I do think, I do think that it would represent a crossing of the Rubicon. As I said earlier, when there are things that once you do them, they are done and they are part of the political realm of possibility now. And so prosecuting Trump would put the prosecution of an ex-president within the realm of possibility. But that, I think, is why it's important, if this is going to be done, and I think it should be done, to make it clear politically. And this is what the committee is doing to show, A, that this is not happening because Trump was a Republican, because Trump was the kind of Republican he was.

• 48:53Speaker 01

  It's not happening because, you know, Trump was unpopular. It's none of that stuff. It's happening because of a specific discreet event which resulted in people dying and was a threat to the integrity of the United States Constitution and which broke actual laws that we have. And establishing that from the top through the committee, continuing to put that into the public eye, to make it part of the public's understanding. And then for this to be reinforced by a prosecution has to be part of the process because I do think that there's going to be a segment of Americans who just reject this outright. But we actually don't know how big that segment is going to be. Is it going to be half of Americans?

• 49:38Speaker 01

  I don't think so because, you know, recent polling suggests that more than half of Americans, quite a bit more than half of Americans, think Trump should be prosecuted. Is it going to be a third of Americans? That seems kind of reasonable. Is it going to be 20% of Americans? That could be it too, right? And so. It's not to say that there's nothing to worry about if only 20% of Americans think the president was illegitimately prosecuted, but the alternative to that is effective presidential lawlessness, that the president is above the law and there's nothing a president can do in office that would, that would bring legal consequences. I believe this opens up the door to, especially since Trump has said that he would pardon January 6 participants

• 50:20Speaker 01

  if he were elected to the office again. So I think it's opened the door to the president like directing, you know, goon squads to attack opponents, then pardon them after the fact, right? Sort of like, there's nothing in the rulebook that says I can't do this. Pardon power is pretty unlimited. So why not? And there's not going to be any consequences or repercussions after the fact. So I think the real danger this may pose to the political culture of the United States, the way that this, this may produce even, you know, civil unrest among Trump's strongest supporters. I think that's a risk that needs to be taken. I think we're sort of in a place where there are no longer any good options. There are no longer any options that are going to be non-disruptive to the functioning of American

• 51:03Speaker 01

  political life. We're past that. So now we're in a place where we have lots of bad options. And I think the least bad option is a prosecution because at least that communicates the essential message that presidents are not above the law, that the law applies to president as well, even when they're out of office and that a president who is tempted to use their office to attempt to subvert the constitution, hold on to power, subvert an election, if, you know, if they fail, will be subject to real consequences. That's a message that would be taken, I think, from all, you know, people looking to, to hold that office.

• 51:46Ezra Klein?

  I think that point, that there are no good options here is a really important one and one that is not front loaded actually enough in the conversation. I mean, I remember writing about this when Trump was being banned from social media, that you didn't have to like the bans. To recognize that Trump had put everyone now in a position where there were no good options, that it was a bad option to ban the president from major social media platforms, and it was a bad option to have the president spreading election misinformation and arguably inciting violence on those same platforms. Like, all the options now were bad, and he had forced us into into bad options. And I think a similar dynamic lurks even in the language we use here, even in the language I used a second ago. So, you know, I tried

• 52:31Ezra Klein?

  to to echo that that view that we'd be crossing a Rubicon, that we'd be opening a box, that, you know, to to use Goldsmith's language, that it would be a cataclysmic event. And it's interesting how that hides the idea that the Rubicon has already been crossed, the box already opened, the cataclysmic event has already happened, when a sitting president tried to overturn the election, first, you know, through this scheme, and then, second, by inciting a mob. And somehow, that, I don't want to say it's faded into the background, but it is, it's like, we've absorbed that. And so now, the idea there'd be true consequences

• 53:13Ezra Klein?

  for that act, that feels like the line you can't cross, as opposed to saying, well, the line has already been crossed. We're just now in this horrible space that we have to figure out what to to do with it. And to do nothing, I think, at the very least, should be admitted to be a radical act, right? It might be the radical act you want to take. You might say, as much as it is a genuine, obvious danger, both to the rule of law and to future precedent in this country, I think it's better for the country not to not to prosecute Trump. I think that's fair. But it is radicalism that hides under the guise of doing nothing, because it is a status quo. I think it manages to sneak in a kind of normalcy that it does not deserve.

• 53:59Speaker 01

  I think I think that's very much right. I think that's right.

• 54:04Speaker 01

  One thing I'm sure you've noticed this is that in talking about January 6th and talking about everything, kind of one of the refrains is that, you know, it didn't work, it didn't succeed, and the peaceful transfer of power continued this great American tradition stretching back to 1800, we continued to do it. And I think that's wrong. I think, I think January 6th was that we did not have a peaceful transfer of power. We had a transfer of power under, you know, under duress essentially with the threat of violence at the door. And I think the extent to which we talked about as if that is if we did have a peaceful transfer of power is indicative of sort of how I don't think the the true

• 54:45Speaker 01

  break that January 6th represents is really sunk in with even the people prosecuting, you know, the political case against Trump right now, that the issue here, the the task before us isn't to, as you said earlier in our conversation, produce an after action report for something that happened in the past and is over in a discreet moment. No, the task ahead of us is that January 6th opened up a whole realm of new possibilities, none of them good for the American political system. And that now we have to close those possibilities as much as is possible. Some of them will not be closed, but some of them

• 55:27Speaker 01

  can be by the use of methods and mechanisms of accountability and of punishment for the relevant actors. And if we're not gonna do that, then we just have to admit that for the the aesthetics of American politics may kind of seem the same, but the actual underlying thing has changed in a fundamental way that may result, well, I think in my opinion, will likely result in if not another attempt, a literal January 6th, than at a concerted attempt at trying to basically subvert the democratic culture of the United States and and subvert that from within for the purpose of, you know, narrow partisan gain.

• 56:12Ezra Klein?

  There's also a question here from, I don't want to exactly call this a media perspective, but let me call it the attentional perspective, which is, I think, the view that

• 56:24Ezra Klein?

  Many have about January 6th and the whole election scheme was that the country to some degree has moved on. I mean, a couple of tens of millions of people have watched the hearings to some degree or another. Those are probably mostly pretty liberal people. I would I would bet money on that. And there's a feeling that, yeah, this is a maintained obsession of liberals and liberal commentariat and people with Trump derangement syndrome, but but the country doesn't really care. And I think that treats the question of what the country cares about as, to use like the social science term, exogenous to what the political system and the judicial system do as opposed to endogenous to it.

• 57:07Ezra Klein?

  So the country doesn't care about things when those things fall out of the news and it seems like the political system doesn't care. And on the other hand, if the Attorney General of the United States opened up criminal proceedings against a former sitting president, I think that would generate a lot of attention. A lot of people would have very strong feelings about that. Now, you might say that's a bad thing and you don't want to unleash those feelings. But the level of attention and interest, it will change depending on whether or not people think this is a live question in American politics. To the extent it is treated as dead, the Republican Party is not itself going to sanction Donald Trump and so Donald Trump will not be sanctioned, then I think it's a genuinely rational question

• 57:49Ezra Klein?

  as to why should anybody spend their scarce hours, minutes, energy, time trying to build in their head an ever more detailed view of these events and a view of what should be done about them. Whereas if the question is actually what should be done about them and there's legal proceedings and a lot turns on how you understand the events of that day, that that has a different implication for whether or not people are going to pay attention to it and who will and how many of them and and how it will or will not reorder American politics.

• 58:21Speaker 01

  I mean, I very much think that the public, public concern, public beliefs, what the public is interested in is often incoherent. It doesn't have any, doesn't take any particular form. The form it takes is very much shaped by the actions of political actors and those actions as interpreted by and broadcast by the media. And so this is why, I mean, this is why. I think that Democrats in particular, since I think that here they are kind of the prime movers, would do well to talk about this in terms of a prosecution for Donald Trump. Because I think that will, that will catch the attention, right, of people who report

• 59:02Speaker 01

  on this. It will mean something for individual voters and it means something for Democrats, especially. Just Democratic voters will take the message and begin to, you know, act and respond to polls accordingly. And it, it, it may, it may sort of give the question more and greater political salience for someone like Merrick Garland. And then if he takes that step, then yeah, we'll have to deal with the fallout. And I don't know what the fallout's gonna be. And I don't know, you know, this would have a major effect on how people take in American politics. Voters would, would immediately see that, oh, this is serious. This is something I should care about. This is something I should have an opinion about. And that will begin to shape things. The parties will have to respond, all sorts of

• 59:44Speaker 01

  things. It will be the kind of splash that forces everyone else to reorient themselves and figure out how they're gonna react to it. I'm of the view that those sorts of attention grabbing moves are actually kind of important. And they're, they're a way that a party begins to seize control of the political narrative. And although I think that the substantive reasons for prosecuting Donald Trump are very, very strong, if you think about the political reasons as well, if, if the end of the summer or in the fall, Merrick Garland announces charges against Trump, that changes the conversation and narrative around the elections happening. It turns the elections into, into a, a way

• 1:00:26Speaker 01

  to contest and talk about this thing. And I think that actually might be, I think that might be a good thing to happen. I think that this is a thing that needs to be, you know, litigated out in public as well as in the courtroom.

• 1:00:37Ezra Klein?

  So I want to end on a bit of historical perspective, because you had a, an interesting column that bounces around in my head a while back, on which kinds of rebels and rebellions America punishes, and which kinds it doesn't. Can you talk a bit about that?

• 1:00:58Speaker 01

  So that column, if I remember correctly, began by noting that many of the leaders of the Confederacy basically died in their beds, died at home, in their beds, outside of any kind of, you know, not incarcerated or not under any sort of, you know, police or federal supervision, but they died in their beds peacefully. That the federal government, for a variety of reasons, did not pursue really any kind of charges against the leaders of the Confederacy, right? The leaders of the most significant rebellion in American history that claimed, you know,

• 1:01:37Speaker 01

  between 600,000 and 800,000 lives, you know, a real catastrophic event. And generally speaking, when you look at sort of the late 19th century and you look at all of the political violence that's happening in the South, there's very little legal accountability for any of the people who are behind it or who've inspired it. One of, you know, one of the people who participated in a attack on black voters and white Republicans in South Carolina in the 1870s, a man named Benjamin Tillman, went on to become a long-serving senator and governor of South Carolina. He even had a fun nickname as an homage to his activities. He was Ben Pitchfork Tillman, you know, very, very fun. And this is in contrast to, you

• 1:02:18Speaker 01

  know, radical figures who are, who have been, you know, punished, held accountable by the state and who their targets have, you know, often been trying to undermine, either the left-wing radicals trying to undermine, you know, the capitalist system, trying to do something like that. And sort of the thing I think I suggest at the end of that column is that rebellion, insurrection, what have you, that doesn't seek so much to undermine the established hierarchies, but reify them and reestablish them, tends to get a softer

• 1:02:57Speaker 01

  reaction from the state than rebellion that tries really to undermine existing hierarchies in the country. And I think, I do think that there is some of that happening here. I think it's significant, right, that the insurrectionists on January 6th were all a bunch of, you know, they're white and middle class. I think the- The sense to which these people are coded as ordinary Americans does something in terms of shaping how the public, how political figures, how certainly conservative elites react to what was a moment of profound disorder.

• 1:03:42Ezra Klein?

  And does that simply reflect the dynamic we're talking about? It gets a sepotheosis with the president, which is if the president does it, it's not illegal. If you have enough power and enough followers, that your prosecution would impose a political cost, it would be divisive, it could reopen the wounds. Then you're allowed to skate by. And if you don't have enough power, if you're from a marginalized ideology or group, I mean, then you can be locked up, you can be made an example of. But that in this way, particularly when the crimes are fundamentally political in intent,

• 1:04:28Ezra Klein?

  what matters is not the law, but the power of the law breaker.

• 1:04:33Speaker 01

  I think that's a good way to put it, that the issue, and this gets back to an earlier part of a conversation as well, that the issue with Trump ultimately isn't a question of what kind of laws he's broken, but is a question of what political power he still retains. When he left office in January 2020, 2021, rather, he still retained a great deal of political power and influence. He still retains a great deal of political power and influence now. And as long as that is the case, it is going to be very politically risky to attempt any meaningful accountability against him. And I think that it's worth taking that risk.

• 1:05:17Speaker 01

  The risk incurred by not taking that risk is much, much worse. The last thing I think I'll say on this is that one way you can tell the story of Trump in American politics is the story of everyone trying to pass the buck to someone else. Right? Trump enters the Republican primary, begins to pick up support and steam, and Republican elites, rather than try to consciously coalesce around an opponent to Trump, kind of decide to fight it out. And when it's clear that Trump is going to win the nomination, they say, well, the Democrats will beat him. And then, you know, what is there, what is there to lose here? Nothing to lose. The Democrats do not beat him. Trump becomes president.

• 1:05:59Speaker 01

  And then his transgressions and his lawbreaking becomes a problem. You know, the Republican Party is sort of in on it and does not decide to resist really in any serious or meaningful way. And the buck goes to the Democrats, who are have to be pressured considerably to pursue serious investigations and then impeachment. And even during that process, part of the conversation is, well, we'll just hold him accountable in the next election. And the next election happens, Democrats win it. They have this influence now, and there is very clearly a hesitation about holding him accountable. But sort of there is no, there's no one else to pass the buck to now.

• 1:06:44Speaker 01

  It's just sort of like, you gotta have to do something. And if you don't, then you just need to live with the fact that you've, you've made a pretty significant choice about the direction of the political system.

• 1:06:52Ezra Klein?

  I think that's a good place to end. So always a final question. What are three books you would recommend to the audience?

• 1:06:59Speaker 01

  So I am reading, also what I'm reading right now is three books. I'm rereading Free Labor, Free Soil, Free Men, which is Eric Foner's book on the history of the Republican Party and the development of Republican Party ideology in the 1840s and 1850s. I'm also reading, kind of related to that book, which features, that book features a whole chapter on the figure of Salmon P. Chase, who was Lincoln's Secretary of the Treasury and later Supreme Court Justice appointed by Lincoln. And I'm reading a recent biography of Salmon P. Chase, whose name I cannot recall at the moment, that kind of goes through his life and his emergence as one of the leading figures of political antislavery in the 1840s.

• 1:07:39Speaker 01

  And I'm also reading, kind of the last book on my, my plate here is What It Took To Win, which is a new book by the historian Michael Kaysen. It's a history of the Democratic Party from its beginnings in the early 19th century to the present. And the thing, these are all very interesting books. They're great. They're very readable. I highly recommend them. But the thing I'm interested in right now is sort of the, the fluidity of the American party system and the sort of the years leading up to the Civil War. Not because I think we're on the lead up to a civil war, but I do think we're at a moment of fluidity and change and that there is something new coming out of this moment and we just can't really

• 1:08:20Speaker 01

  perceive it. And I'm interested in how individual politicians and social movements and political parties have, you know, developed new ideologies, developed new approaches, developed new politics in response to these underlying changes happening in society. And I think all those books deal with that question of how do you respond to shifting political forces?

• 1:08:45Speaker 01

  Jamel Bouie, thank you very much. Thank you for having me.

• 1:09:00Speaker 01

  So that is a show. I'm about to do credits, but there's a name you're not going to hear in credits today. Jeff Geld, our engineer, sort of the rock of the show. He's gone on paternity leave for a little bit. We are very happy for him. We're going to miss him very much and we're excited to see him on the other side of his leave. But as of today, The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Andy Galvin and Marjorie Karma. It's fact checked by Michelle Harris, by Roland Hugh, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Original music by Isaac Jones, mixing by Isaac Jones, audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi and special thanks to Kristen Lynn and Christina Samueluski.