The Spectacle of Trump at 80

The military personnel who are selected to have tickets to this event, they are required to meet current waist-to-height ratio and physical fitness standards, so the crowd should look good. Yeah, well, I guess there'll be an exception for the president in that case. I think so. Hi, I'm Robert Siegel in conversation about politics with two very insightful observers of American politics and society. Our regular participant, author, and New York Times opinion contributor, E.J. Diaz. Great to be with you. Good to see you again. And Peter Wehner, who is a contributor to The Times and also The Atlantic, and who served as a speechwriter in three Republican administrations, Ronald Reagan's and the two Bushes. Thanks for joining us. Great to be with both of you. Thanks. Great to have you, Pete. And we're going to start by taking note of the birthday that falls on this weekend, Donald Trump's 80th. We went more than two centuries without having an octogenarian in the White House, and now we've had two in a row. And I'd like to hear your thoughts about Trump at 80, and especially how that landmark's going to be observed. UFC will present a seven-fight card in a cage that's been hoisted onto the White House South Lawn. E.J., why don't you start things off? First of all, this birthday celebration is billed both as UFC Freedom 250 and UFC White House. It's been folded into the celebration of the country's 250th birthday. Well, first list. Last. Anyone? I don't think that all of us are ignorant about MMA. I want to point out that you, some years ago, did a 13-minute piece on NPR, quite fair and balanced, if I forgive me for using that term, that included a philosopher who does MMA. So let's get that out of the way. And it included a very young reporter, Tam Keith, out of San Francisco, who went and witnessed the fight for us. Oh, that's fantastic. You know, a couple of things. First, I don't think it's a great idea for Donald Trump to be reminding everyone that he's 80 years old at this moment when he shows various signs of faltering or saying very odd things. Secondly, it is not at all surprising but still astonishing that he has really tried to fold his own birthday into the country's birthday and suggests that somehow these are equivalent or equal events. I mean, perhaps that goes too far, but he's really merged the two. But there's. There's a third thing here, which is, and I know this thanks to a very good piece that Michael Shearer did in The Atlantic. There's been a real fight over the control of the 250th. And believe it or not, there was bipartisan agreement on how we should celebrate it. There was a group called America 250. And then President Trump came in and essentially took it over, kind of knocked that aside. But there was a great quote in Michael Shearer's piece. This is straight out of It's a Wonderful Life. When Mr. Potter steals. George Bailey's money and tries to drive him to the brink. And, you know, and with Trump, it is always playing to the base. MMA, these numbers are hard to find for sure, but as best I can tell, it appeals to 10 to 12 percent of us, overwhelmingly male. And, you know, it's once again going to the base. And at a moment when we could talk about the Constitution and the Declaration. And while we do. argue a lot, and they're good arguments, I think, about the meaning of the Constitution and the Declaration, we all honor them. But instead, we're just thrust into starting out with a sport that John McCain described, late John McCain described, as human cockfighting. Pete, mixed martial arts, UFC, one can just say this is stuff that Donald Trump likes. Or is it a calculated appeal to this cult of masculinity? I'd say it's both. He clearly likes it. This is one of his longest standing cultural institutional affiliations. I mean, he was promoting MMA and UFC back in the early 2000s. I think when it was banned by various states, he allowed his Taj Mahal in Atlantic City to host them. So he's had an attachment to it and to Dana White, who's the president of it, for a long time. I do think it's cultural signaling of a kind, a sort of populist gesture. I would say. I think that the only sporting event that Donald Trump could go to these days and not get booed would be the UFC or MMA. Good reference, Pete. If you saw him in Madison Square Garden for the Knicks game earlier this week, it was just a cascade of boos, and that's happened elsewhere. I would say that apart from that, something is different. One is that previous presidents have hosted athletes all the time, Super Bowl winners and others. That's not unusual. But the idea of not just hosting athletes. But making an event a centerpiece for the White House, bringing it into the executive space, that's different. Even in your introduction, I mean, I worked in the White House. You said that there's a cage hoisted on the south lawn of the White House. And it's like for people who work there in particular, you're thinking, that didn't happen when I worked there or anybody else. The last thing I would say that makes this different is it's not a one-off for Donald Trump. This sport captures his attitude. There's a brutality and a cruelty and an effort to dominate people that has been a through line through Donald Trump's life. And so this UFC event is very consistent with who he's been and how he treats people. I'd add here that according to the Washington Post, the military personnel who were selected to have tickets to this event, and I think at least half of the people watching it, a few thousand, will be military. They are required to meet current waist-to-height ratio and physical fitness standards. So the crowd should look good. I think so. Pretty soon the country is going to be celebrating the 250th anniversary of American independence, which brings back for me some memories of the 200th, the bicentennial. I wonder if you have strong memories of that, Peter. Yeah, I mean— I was a relatively, you know, young kid at the time. This is probably true of all of us. My memory of it was the ships in the harbor. The tall ships. The tall ships. And I had that memory of, you know, Watergate, Nixon having resigned two years before. And there was a palpable sense of unity in the country and a celebration. And I think that that, to me, kind of flipped the switch of when we got out of that sort of watergate, Watergate era, and began to look into something and enter into something better. E.J.? I have a very similar memory to Pete's in a political sense that, you know, you looked back at Watergate, and you looked back at the country rising up against corruption and actually getting a president to resign, and you felt that whatever flaws we have had, and certainly we have had flaws as a country, we've set up a set of institutions that, when they work and when people are willing to make them work, can protect our democracy and our freedom. So I thought it was entirely significant that we were celebrating this 200th after Watergate. I actually have a very strong, truly New York memory of the Bicentennial, which was everybody was very excited about the coming of the tall ships. And a couple of weeks before July— July 4th, we were at a party, met a couple. He was a psychiatrist. That's the only thing I remember about him. When he heard where our apartment was, he offered to cater our watch party if he could just come and take pictures out the window. So we had a wonderful gathering and watched the tall ships, which had no connection before that to July 4th that I knew of, and none that I've heard of since, but it was a wonderful day. As you said, Pete, in those days, the political mood was pretty united. The mood this time, I mean, is the 250th going to get the kind of broad buy-in from people, or has it become politicized? Oh, I think it's become politicized. I mean, that's in large measure because Trump has put his imprimatur on it in a way that was bound to make it politicized. I mean, all presidents are partisan, but prior to Trump, most presidents picked moments. Sometimes they were moments of national tragedy, sometimes they were anniversaries, and they used those moments to try and unify the country. And in this case, Donald Trump, because of his own peculiar sociopathy and psychology, uses everything to divide us, and that includes the celebration. And so, you know, a lot of the country is just checking out, and that's a shame. You know, it's interesting because when you think of the year 1976, that is very close to a period when our country was deeply divided. We think of the year 1968 when we had the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. The Vietnam War tore us apart. We were in the midst of a vast cultural change, and so that division in the country could easily have played out in 1976. there were interesting arguments that year. I mean, we shouldn't sanitize the past and say, you know, we were completely united. But the incentives in politics were radically different at that moment. And in particular, as Pete suggested, the incentives for Gerald Ford, who felt that the right thing to do and the politically smart thing to do both was to bring the country together. And he had a campaign song that was very effective that began with the words, I'm feeling good about America. And his desire in that bicentennial was to make people feel good about America. That's not the leadership we have at the moment. It's really a reminder that the presidency is a double job. It's head of government and it's head of state. And Gerald Ford knew that gear. That was head of state and nonpartisan. Years later, I remember Bill Clinton speaking in Oklahoma City after the bombing there. And he was in terrible political shape, as I recall at that time. But as a head of state, he was masterful. That nonpartisan national gear has just not, it doesn't exist in the current president. Yeah. And that hurts a country because, you know, George Will wrote a book back in the early 1980s called State Conflicts. And he wrote a book called State Conflicts. And it was the notion that statecraft, including the words of presidents, shape the souls, if you will, of a country. And how cultures are shaped and formed is a very, very complicated thing. But one of them is what the leadership of a country, either honors or dishonors, what they value, what they celebrate, or on the other hand, what they tear down. And in the end, and the founders understood this, they said, you know, we're going to do this. We're going to do this. We go back to the real founding of the country. It wasn't just the structures of government. It was the values, the beliefs, the virtues of the citizenry. And that is shaped by a lot of things. And part of what is shaped by are the words that we use and the way that we treat each other. You know, the philosopher Nancy Rosenblum wrote a really interesting book called On the Side of the Angels, where she argued that in a democracy, partisanship is patriotic, but it has to be partisanship rightly understood. Partisanship is about having very strong views on where the country should move. But it also accepts that in a free and democratic society, people will disagree on this. And you accept by your very partisanship that disagreement is legitimate, that it can be fought out in ways that are peaceful and respectful. And you have a sense that if we lose now, we can win later. There are no final victories or defeats. And what we're seeing now, is worse than partisanship. I think we ascribe it too much to partisanship. This is a politics of friend and enemy, the philosopher Carl Schmitt's kind of view of politics. And a politics where we divide ourselves not as citizens who disagree, but as friend and enemy, is just a very dangerous politics. And I just want to add one thing to that, E.J., which is, and it alludes to something you had said earlier. You know, sometimes, viruses create their own antibodies. And I think in the life of an individual, just like in the life of a country, you begin to take for granted certain virtues, certain qualities. And then when they're stripped away from you, you realize why they mattered after all. And I do think that this sort of stripping of the public square, the immorality, the depravity, the cruelty, the antipathy, all of those things, that takes a toll. And I would say this year, more than at any moment in the last 10 years, I'm beginning to see a lot of people, I'm beginning to see a lot of people beginning to see something else. I think despondency is giving way to people who are energized and it's focusing itself on the repair. I'm hopeful. I wouldn't predict it. Life is complicated. But I'm hopeful that we're seeing these sort of civic antibodies kick in and that we're going to go into a better time, having gone through a really hard time. I so agree with that. And I've thought for the last decade, or really since the gentleman came down that escalator, that this entire period has been brought to you by the philosopher, folk singer, Joni Mitchell. You don't know what you got till it's gone. Yeah. Both of you have written recently about politics and values and faith. Pete, you've written about the strong connection between Donald Trump and white evangelical voters, how that connection fits into American Christianity. How unusual, first of all, is his success with white evangelical voters? Well, on one level, it is unusual. And the reason it's unusual why people are kind of shocked, particularly in the Christian faith. And the reason is kind of obvious. They'd say, look, for most of my life, conservative evangelicals considered character, honor, integrity to be crucial to leadership, especially political leadership. You both will remember the late 1990s when Bill Clinton was caught up in a scandal with Monica Lewinsky, and it was conservative evangelicals that every other day were taken a figure of two by four upside his head and criticizing him on moral grounds. The SBC passed a resolution on the importance of moral character. Southern Baptist. Southern Baptist, yeah, Southern Baptist Convention. And so now you fast forward Donald Trump, who in many ways makes Bill Clinton look like a Boy Scout. He's easily the most corrupt person, president in American history, and one of the most corrupt political figures in American history. And now they have aligned themselves with him, and they very rarely criticize him. So there, there's a brazen hypocrisy. What I do think that some people miss, and why it's not unusual, is that Trump didn't fundamentally change the sensibilities of many evangelicals. He personified them. He embodied them. And if you were familiar with the evangelical subculture that existed, there was a real effort to push this narrative, a kind of warrior mentality. And he tapped into the resentments of a lot of white evangelicals, and their feeling was that he is going to do to our enemies what I want him to do. He's going to, he's going to hurt them. He's going to make them bleed. It's an ugly sentiment, but it was very, very evident that it, that it existed. And you, you've offered as a response to, to that phenomenon, a turn to Christian humanism, a tradition that joins the pursuit of, of human reason and the classics with, with tradition and faith. Yeah, I, I did. I did an essay in, in the Atlantic on, on Christian humanism. Because I wanted to think about what might be a pathway out for, for what I think is, is a kind of wreckage that American Christians have created. And I would say E.J. would know it very well as, as a Catholic, because I think it, it mirrors a lot of, of, of the Catholic thought, social thought. This Pope's most recent encyclical mentions Christian humanism. Essentially, it's the notion that everyone bears the image of God, and so they therefore have inherent dignity and, and equal worth. So that's one. Um, one other thing that Christian humanism does, which I think is relevant to this moment, is it's very wary about the fusion of the Christian faith and political power. It's not a separatist view. It doesn't say that Christians shouldn't have anything to say about the public life, but it's very wary about what happens when, when Christians get, get wed. And the last thing I'll say is there's a temperamental aspect to Christian humanism that contrasts with a lot of what you see in American Christianity. Ironic, calm, curious, non-anxious. Um, I'd say Christian humanists, generally, are more comfortable with shades of gray. And I think when they see the world, their impulse isn't to judge the world. I think it's to try and enchant the world. Uh, E.J., you've, you've written recently about, uh, what you call the new values voters. Are they the, uh, Pete's Christian humanists? You know, I was listening to Pete talk, and I think the calm way in which he spoke about this embodied the very point he was trying to make about Christian humanists. What I wrote about is the idea that, um, we often get used to the, uh, something being true and assuming it's always been true. Things have been always like this. That's a normal human, uh, reaction. If you look at American history, um, we've gone through cycles where at times we did argue mostly about personal behavior, personal morality, prohibition, abortion, trans stuff now. But at other times we have linked a moral critique to the larger society, to political corruption, to corruption and unfairness in the economy. And my piece argued that we are going through a transition. Um, you know, the obvious person representing that is James Tallarico, the Democrat running in Texas. But there are a whole lot of people talking about this. And again, Pope Leo reflects this. A lot of people in politics reflect this right now. Indy Beshear, the governor of Kentucky, is going to write a book inspired by the parable of the Good Samaritan. There's something going on out there that reflects a different kind of moral argument. I welcome it since, you know, I am broadly on that side of the argument. But I, I also think it's just a fact that we're going to have to grapple with. Let's talk about something that Donald Trump has contributed to the, uh, uh, this year's campaign for the midterms, which is, uh, a claim, uh, absolutely unsupported by any facts, uh, that there is a nationwide conspiracy to rig elections, uh, involving not just Democrats, uh, but, uh, the media, election officials. Uh, it's all fixed. The whole thing is rigged. And I just I'm curious. It has been suggested that perhaps President Trump is laying the groundwork for dealing with the Democratic victory in the House, maybe the Senate, who knows, and questioning its legitimacy. And what does that mean? How can a president simply claim that the Congress is illegitimate and not deal with him? Well, he can claim it because he's been doing it. And its effects are deeply damaging to American democracy because it presupposes a faith in the outcome of elections. And you go back to almost every election, certainly in my lifetime, including something like Bush-Gore in 2000, which was really highly contested, decided by the Supreme Court. And Al Gore gave a very gracious, you know, concession speech. This is part of the acids that he spills onto American democracy. And. And the destruction of bonds and tearing through through norms. And I do think that we should assume that he's going to make every effort to try and overturn these legitimate elections. He did it once before. I should add, by the way, it doesn't help people defending the electoral process that very deep blue California takes amazingly long to count its ballots. And that feeds into the whole idea that there's something fishy. Which there isn't, as far as I know, but that there's something fishy about the count. I just want to say, don't get me started on Bush v. Gore. But look, a couple of things on this. The Trump did it once. And so he can do it again. And I think there were threats here before the election day on Election Day and after Election Day. You're already seeing efforts to sort of grab voting records in places, knock people off the rolls. Theoretically, or, you know, with the with the claim that they're ineligible to vote, we don't know. You know, there's fear that ICE agents might be sent to polling places where there are a large number of immigrant votes who in this election will probably tell very strongly Democratic. But then there's a real danger, particularly in a close election of what happens after the election. And the House votes on the results of the election. And. What if Speaker Johnson says that, you know, these results are fraudulent? To go to your point about California, I think it is I honor why California does this, but they have to speed this up. And I think there is pressure now to speed it up. But there's a great irony of their claims that California is rigged because, you know, the conservative candidate for mayor of L.A., Mr. Pratt, indeed. Fell behind after late votes came in because Democrats voted later this year because they're a field was in such disarray and they didn't want to vote in a way that put two Republicans on the November ballot as their system went. But if the system is rigged, how did Steve Hilton, the Republican endorsed by Donald Trump, emerge as the victor? He was declared, I think, yesterday or the day before from where we are now the victor of that election. So you can't say that. The result was rigged in one race, but the other race, hooray, we got the right nominee. So it is just so clearly pretextual to kind of challenge things down the road. Yeah. Yeah. One other thing I just add to what you said is that there's no Mike Pence or Bill Barr in this White House as there was in the first Trump term. He's surrounded by people who are almost as as corrupt as as he is. And, you know, if if he challenges if this unfolds in the scenario that you laid out, which is entirely possible, then it goes to the Supreme Court. And then you have a situation which the court is going to rule presumably one way. And and then the question is, what does Trump do? Does he abide by the court order? And if he doesn't, then we're in a whole new ballgame. At this point, I'm not sure what the Supreme Court would do. And, you know, just but then that would just bring us back to Bush v. Gore. One more topic. Trump's recent outburst, in fact, about how rigged the election is, according to him, took place just before he stormed off the set of his interview with Meet the Press. I should add that Meet the Press is almost as old as Donald Trump. It went on television in November 1947. For decades, it was synonymous with NBC. We've also been hearing all about the Purge at 60 Minutes, which is a rarity, a successful TV news program, which was breaking stories and building audience. And at CBS, a lot of the staff is now gone. These are two big stories that involve, of all things, old fashioned, legacy medium, over the air television, or maybe you see it on cable. And I was thinking, those are programs that used to be able to make or break political careers. How important is television today to our politics? Well, television is important. It's less important than it was, and networks are less important than they were. Moments can be important, as you illustrated, you know, with with Meet the Press. I mean, that got a lot of attention. It's not like, you know, Meet the Press when Tim Russert was on. And there are a lot of influential people would watch every Sunday. Sometimes candidates would kind of essentially announce their candidacy. He nailed Bill Richardson on whether he had indeed dreamt of playing for the Yankees or the Boston Red Sox. I remember that. There you go. There's a divisive issue, if I ever heard one. No kidding. It's really entering into tricky territory. So, you know, the networks are not what they once were. I remember when. When I was in college and my parents both were interested in public life, international affairs. We used to watch three networks, ABC, CBS, and MDC, and it was striking. It was always the same stories and pretty much the same approach. And that had both a virtue and a vice. The virtue is that it was a single narrative, and people could essentially have conversations with a certain degree of common ground. I think the vice was it was a single narrative, and it meant that if there were other points of view, they weren't. They weren't able to be entered in. Fox came in 1990s. That was when Fox was responsible, and I think that that was useful. But since then, the fracturing of the media environment, the echo chambers, and the out-and-out mendacity of it is deeply harmful to our democracy. And these days, Tucker Carlson or Candace Owen or Megyn Kelly could have as much influence or more influence than the anchor of ABC or CBS or NBC. And I would say that's not good. And Iran. The rant about something might have as much influence as a documented multisource report. Exactly. And it's more likely to get covered, too. It's another problem. You know, a friend of mine, and I hope he forgives me if I'm garbling his title, is writing a book about something else called Both Things Are True. And I love that title because I think it really applies in this case, which is, of course, the old networks and old television is on the decline, given the multiplicity of options, alternatives. yes, television is not what it used to be. On the other hand, it's the case that these networks still have millions and millions of viewers. You add up the total viewership of the evening news, the television and evening news, and you still beat most cable shows, for example, and you probably beat most, you certainly beat most podcasts. And these networks do report information, you know, 60 Minutes, most famously, that can still very much influence the debate, can still penetrate the political conversation. So these media institutions are still important despite their decline. And what you're seeing in the United States, not yet on the same scale, is what Donald Trump is trying to do with the media, what Viktor Orban did in Hungary. It wasn't like a state, direct state takeover. He arranged, used state power to make sure that major media institutions were in the hands of his political friends. And the kind of pressure that Trump is trying to bring is twofold. One, he is trying to affect ownership, as we're seeing in the CBS case, but he's also trying to protect behavior. It's an intimidating approach to the media, and he's trying to discredit the media, as he has for a long time. Again, some of this has a long history attacks on the so-called liberal media go back a long way, but Trump has pushed these to a different place. And, you know, what, what is happening at CBS, at least from my point of view is really disturbing because that was historically one of the greatest news institutions in the United States. And, uh, they're not on that path right now. Well, uh, it's time to, to wrap up, and we do so, Pete, by trying to leave the politics and conflict and arguments aside and focus on something that brought us joy recently. And as our new guest, you go first. Something that recently brought you joy. Well, I'll tell you something brought me joy, which was the miracle with the Mecca, Madison Square Garden, New York Knicks were down by 29 points in the second half, And they won by a point on a last second tap-in. And it was the greatest comeback in NBA Finals history. And I'm guessing that half the fans in the garden are still there. And I'm not a particular Knicks fan. I'm actually a kind of Steph Curry, Steve Kerr, Golden State Warrior fan, but I love basketball. all. And I am rooting for the Knicks in this series. So that was great. I was even texting with my wonderful editor at the Times, Aaron Redica, who's a great Knicks fan, and David French. And beyond that, I've loved sports since I was a kid. And when I think about why, I think part of it is that it just captures sort of the large human drama, and it's often a demonstration of human excellence. And so when you see that, and you see it compressed in a period of time like that, it can really be, you know, uplifting. And that's true for me, and I think it's true for a lot of other people. I, too, stayed up too late to watch that amazing game. And I do think watching excellence, I love basketball as well, and watching excellence is just really a gift. A couple of quick things. One, I want to thank you for joy. You gave me out of your joy the last time we were together here. Sonny Rollins. Yes, you suggested that people listen to this, Sonny Rollins' Thelonious Monk album. I went home and did it, and it is beautiful. So I thank you for that. You're very welcome. And secondly, I'm going to prove how far out of date I always am, because of late, Homeland, a show that first went on the air in 2011, has totally grabbed Mary, my wife, and me. You know, Claire Danes, Damian Lewis, Mandy Patinkin. It's a spy story that doesn't do it justice. It's a very complicated story. It's a complicated, interesting spy story, and it's totally grabbed us. And I want to say that this is an awfully farsighted show, because season three focuses on Iran and Venezuela. So they saw something coming. Well, for me, I feel it would be dishonest to do anything other than second what Pete just said. I grew up starting with the Knicks They were Kenny Sears, Willie Knowles, Ray Felix, Carl Braun. And it's been a long time. The 70s were great, and the 90s were okay, but I'd given up on ever seeing the championship. And they could yet lose the NBA championship, but that was one game. That was one game. Thanks to both of you guys for such smart commentary on things. Good to see you. Thanks a lot. Enjoy being here. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. Bye.