  So let’s start with Trump’s inauguration speech, the “American carnage” speech. 
So you’ve written a lot of speeches. 
And how did you see that speech? 
How does it define the difference between Obama and Trump? 
How did Obama—how would Obama have seen what this new president was bringing to town?
  Well, having, you know, written speeches for Obama for 10 years at that point, you know, 
I think his view of politics, which is not dissimilar from most politicians, is, you need to use your speeches 
and big moments like an inauguration to try to point the country in an optimistic direction, 
to try to put out a vision of where we are and where we’re going that can inspire people and motivate people. 
What is so striking about Trump is his message, throughout his campaign and then at inauguration, 
is really purely speaking to people’s deepest fears: “Let me tell you how bad things are. 
Let me tell you what you should be afraid of, and what you should be afraid of are immigrants, black and brown people,” 
you know, essentially this picture of a dystopian America. 
And it couldn’t be more of the opposite of Obama. 
I think my feeling in watching that inauguration speech, like watching his election, is just how 
extreme the differentiation was between the two of them. 
You know, on the one hand, you have the first African American president who is trying to put forward a message 
of resiliency, coming back from crisis and coming together across racial and religious divides followed by someone 
who is insisting that things are worse than they seem, that we should not come together, and that, you know, essentially, 
his strategy is going to be to speak to one slice of the country about all the different things that they should be afraid of.
  And what did it say about America at that moment, as you’re watching it? 
What are you thinking?
  You know, I was thinking that—there’s no way to sugarcoat this. 
This man was not elected because he had any particular policy vision for the country. 
He was a manifestation of a grievance-fueled backlash to a lot of things: to a black president, to a woman candidate, 
to demographic change, to certainly 20 years of economic change. 
But more than that, he was an expression of all of the negativity and racism that we faced every day for eight years. 
So it was literally like watching, you know, the sea creature that has been stalking you for years, whether it’s on 
Fox News or talk radio or online, suddenly occupying the highest office in the land. 
And I think there’s no way to look at that and not think that it demonstrates that racism and white supremacy 
continue to have a powerful hold on a portion of the American imagination. 
And when I saw people, you know, consistently trying to rationalize this by talking about, you know, 
the economic anxieties of certain voters, I just wanted to say to them, like: 
“Did you not pay attention to the last eight years of Fox News? 
They were not talking about the economic anxiety of people in the Rust Belt on Fox News and on Rush Limbaugh.” 
You know, Trump essentially is that person. 
He’s a product of the media machine that has been cultivated for the last 10 or 20 years on the far right of American politics. 
And while he may have some messaging around trade, essentially what he speaks to is the grievance of 
the Fox News viewer, and that sense of grievance was made manifest in the speech that he gave on Inauguration Day.
  Obama came to town selling a belief that he could bridge the differences in politics and racial issues. 
He was—he was the uniter, the one who could conquer some of these—
these problems that had been for quite a while in Washington. 
What did he represent to voters? 
Why were voters attracted to that message? 
  Well, I think, again, people, you know, we have such a short collective memory in this country. 
Things had gone terribly wrong by the time Obama got elected. 
The Iraq War had been a catastrophic event that had deeply divided the country. 
The economy, of course, went off a cliff during the 2008 campaign. 
So there was an enormous frustration with both the status quo and a sense that kind of elites in both parties had failed, 
and the Iraq War and the financial crisis were kind of the purest manifestation of that failure.
I think what Obama represented was generational change. 
Here is a younger person unburdened by some of the old fights of the past. 
He obviously represented racial change in a way that was very motivating to African Americans 
and to younger voters who embraced a multicultural America. 
And, you know, I think he was also just an incredibly talented and charismatic and inspirational politician. 
And sometimes we kind of undervalue that. 
You know, he’s just a good politician, and he was able to carry a message that resonated in lots of different places. 
And you know, he was different. 
And he was different in part because of his race, but in part because of his age, in part because of his background. 
And Americans were ready for something different after George W. Bush.
  At the same time that he was running, of course Sarah Palin is brought on by [John] McCain. 
She—she seems to tie into a very different America, but tie in in a dramatic fashion. 
What did she see about these people that would become Tea Party people, that would become 
the “forgotten people” that Trump supposedly brought unto himself? 
What was going on there, and what were the stakes, or what was the sort of long-term result of it?
  So what was really interesting is when I went to work on the Obama campaign 
in kind of the summer of 2007, there was a phenomenon of forwarded emails, which said something about the, 
you know, technology moment in 2007, where emails that essentially said Obama was born in another country, 
that he wasn’t really American, that he was a secret Muslim would be forwarded around. 
And they would reach such a volume of people that we actually had to give our field organizers, 
the people who knocked on doors, talking points: 
You know, here, you know, Obama is a Christian; or no, actually, Obama was born on this date in this hospital in Hawaii.
But it was forwarded emails, right? 
It hadn’t broken a seal to even being on, say, Fox News. 
It was kind of subterranean. 
But what you could sense is a swelling backlash against the idea of, who is this black guy 
who thinks he can be president, essentially? 
And I remember, you know, the McCain campaign clearly was ambivalent in tapping into that, 
but they also clearly knew that it was there, because it was their base. 
And there was an advertisement in the summer of 2008 that took essentially images of Obama 
speaking to 250,000 people in Berlin, something that I thought, you know, Americans would be proud of, 
and juxtaposed Paris Hilton with this and kind of diminished Obama. 
He’s just a celebrity. 
And there was a positive response to this ad among the Republican base. 
Finally somebody is pointing out, you know, that this guy doesn’t deserve to be in this office. 
I think the lesson that they took from that is, we’re going to need to marshal some of this energy out there. 
Palin comes onto the ticket, 
and almost immediately she’s giving voice to an enormous sense of grievance about Obama’s ascent. 
She’s talking about “real Americans,” and it was pretty clear who is not the real American in her rhetoric. 
She’s talking about Obama, you know, palling around with terrorists. 
And it was like this subterranean force that had been out there is suddenly unleashed onto the national stage. 
And I believe that essentially, the selection of Sarah Palin mainstreamed a sense of grievance and racism 
that was, you know, within that party, that was underneath a lid, that was kind of boiling over. 
And it never got put back in the box. 
Once that genie was out of the bottle, it was out, and you weren’t going to put it back in, 
because Palin emboldened everybody on the right—Fox, talk radio. 
Suddenly we can say out loud all the things that we say to each other on email.
  So how was Obama looking at it? 
Did he understand this—this was out there? 
How did he view it?
  He understood it was out there. 
You know, I always tell people, the idea that Barack Obama thought he was going to usher in a post-racial America, 
he was the last person who believed that. 
That was something, frankly, that white people like me were projecting onto him. 
You know, he certainly had a message that we should come together, that we should bridge these divides, 
but he was always careful in the way that he talked about this. 
And even the speech he gave on race was not about those divides going away; 
it was about needing to acknowledge them and try to work to get past them. 
I think, you know, with Palin, what we saw was just how difficult that was going to be. 
In a way, because she crashed and burned so hard, it minimized the potency of what she was saying. 
In other words, she gives a couple of interviews, and when she doesn’t know the answers to basic questions, 
she kind of becomes a punchline on Saturday Night Live, and it’s easy to think, 
well, you know, they tried that, and look, that didn’t work. 
But at the same time, what you could tell is that the people on the Republican side 
were much more excited about her than John McCain. 
I remember talking to Obama about this. 
If you looked at a Palin crowd versus a McCain crowd, all the enthusiasm was in the Palin crowd, right? 
And that told you something about where the Republican base was headed even before we get into the Obama presidency. 
  So you’re in the midst of an economic disaster that’s rolling out when you guys come into power. 
Did Obama—did he understand that taking upon the stimulus, dealing with the banks in the way that he did, 
was going to feed this anger that was out there that was pretty potent, even in Congress at that point; 
that he was—the ways he was doing it, the fact—the bankers come in, and he says, 
“I’m the only one between you and the pitchforks here,” and the attitude or the thought from a large group within 
the Republican realm, within what becomes the Tea Party, 
that this guy is giving away the shop to the bankers, the elites, and that’s going to cause more division, more anger?
  Yeah. He certainly understood that. 
I mean, there was a meeting in the campaign. 
You know, McCain suspends the campaign, and McCain and Obama go to meet with Bush 
and [Treasury Secretary] Hank Paulson, and what’s on the table is the first bailout. 
So before Obama is—you know, everybody focuses on the Obama stimulus. 
No, the stimulus that pissed everybody off was TARP [Troubled Asset Relief Program]. 
I mean, that was the stabilization of the banks, and that was a Bush plan put together by Hank Paulson. 
And what ended up happening is, they could not pass that plan, the TARP plan, without Democratic votes. 
And in that meeting, literally Hank Paulson begged Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, 
“If you don’t do this, the whole economy is going to come crashing down, and we might not be able to put it back together.”
And Obama had to make a decision. 
And I’ve talked to him about this. 
He said: “Look, politically, the better thing to do would have been to just let the economy 
completely implode under Bush and to come in with that blank slate and not having taken that step to bail out those banks. 
And then I could come in and just blame them and have a longer runway to put it back together again.” 
I think he knew, when he essentially gave his unenthusiastic assent to Pelosi and Reid to go ahead and let’s get this done, 
he was doing what McCain often talked about. 
He was putting his country ahead of his political interests. 
Then, when it came time for him to do his own stimulus, I think his huge miscalculation was working with, you know, 
Larry Summers and Tim Geithner and others, he thought he could put together a bipartisan stimulus. 
And so if you look at that nearly trillion-dollar package, a huge portion of it, a significant portion, at least, is tax cuts. 
So we thought, OK, let’s take a bunch of Democratic ideas, spending on infrastructure and clean energy, and let’s 
meld it together with, you know, things that are usually more popular with Republicans, like a pretty significant tax cut. 
And even once he had done that, the fact that he got zero Republican votes for this—I mean, it was an astonishing thing. 
Consider the fact that the Republican Party drives the economy into the greatest, you know, crisis since the Great Depression. 
They create the mess, and then they won’t give Obama a single vote on his stimulus to get us out of it, 
and is immediately trying to figure out, how can we blame him for the mess that we created? 
And that, to me, is the story of 2008 and 2009.
  And the results of it?
  The results of it are, while Obama is trying to govern in a crisis, the Republican Party 
is trying to figure out a language of populism that can take advantage of that crisis, and that’s the Tea Party. 
And they were wildly successful, politically, in doing that. 
Essentially, Obama is governing from a fire hose, right? 
We’re doing the stimulus. 
We are bailing out the auto industry. 
We are trying to get health care done. 
We’re putting in place Wall Street reform. 
The most active legislative period since the Great Society is happening, and all the Republicans are doing is 
trying to saddle Obama with the economy that was not his fault, 
while kind of ginning up this kind of populist outrage that was manifested in the Tea Party. 
And the result is the 2010 midterm elections.
  So let’s talk about health care. 
So the push for ACA [Affordable Care Act], the critics of him will sort of say that he should have backed off in some way 
when there was—the reality was that he wasn’t going to get bipartisan help with it; 
that you can’t change such a huge part of the economy and part of America’s life without doing what, 
you know, happened in—with Johnson’s pushing forth his initiatives and such, and FDR. 
What say you about what the stakes were and what the results were and why?
  So I think to suggest that Obama should not have done health care without bipartisan support 
is the most ridiculous and willfully ignorant of the Republican strategy. 
He couldn’t get a single Republican vote for an economic stimulus; we’re headed into a great depression. 
He wasn’t going to get a Republican vote for anything. 
He tried to nominate a Republican to his Cabinet in Judd Gregg, 
and the backlash was so furious in the Republican Party that the guy had to pull himself out. 
So essentially, if you’re going to tell Barack Obama that you can’t do anything without a Republican vote, 
you’re telling him you cannot do a single thing as president, that you just—you’re just going to sit there and do nothing, 
because the Republicans weren’t going to give him votes for anything. 
Once again, as he’d done with the stimulus, he built a Republican—or he built a health care plan 
that drew heavily on Republican ideas, that’s modeled in part on the health care plan of 
a Republican governor, Mitt Romney, who became the nominee, that had its origins in the Heritage Foundation, right? 
This is not some radical Medicare for All proposal that he had. 
This was a step towards universal health care, drawing on both Republican and Democratic ideas. 
There was nothing that he could propose that the Republicans would support. 
And so to me, this is where I get frustrated with the depiction of the Obama era. 
If the other side will not work with you under any circumstances, which was the deliberate, 
announced political strategy of Mitch McConnell and the Republican leadership, it doesn’t matter what you do. 
Obama could have spent every waking hour having drinks with those people; it would have made no difference.
I think what Obama saw is, we are in a massive crisis; we have to get us out of the economic hole we’re in, 
but we also need to start knitting together a safety net, because what we were seeing is, frankly, 
what we’re still debating in this country today, which is that working people have less and less of a margin for error. 
They’re falling behind in an economy where wages are not keeping up with growth, where the cost of health care is going up. 
And if we don’t do something to try to help people, you’re going to have more and more Americans going off a cliff, 
going bankrupt because they have a preexisting condition, 
unable to even consider the prospect of having affordable health care. 
And so he’s simultaneously trying to dig the economy out of a hole while trying to put together a firmer safety net, 
precisely to help those workers that we now talk about, you know, as people who voted for Obama and Trump, 
people who feel like the world is changing around them and they don’t have a firm footing. 
So the decision to do health care was, I think, a decision to prioritize what actually matters in people’s lives. 
We could have done climate change. 
We could have taken the energy bill that had passed the House, you know, a cap-and-trade energy bill, 
and done that and, frankly, probably made, you know, Democratic activists more excited. 
We did the thing that would matter the most in people’s lives. 
And frankly, I don’t think there’s any health care plan he could have proposed 
that would have had a single Republican vote for it. 
  So what were the results of it? 
So, you know, the dozens of attempts to destroy it over the years to, recently, the anger that it created, 
the inability to fix what you start—I mean, if you do anything big, you’ve got to fix pieces here and there, 
or else you’re going to have problems. 
And that was an impossibility. 
What were the results of it, and did he understand that moving forward in this would be a real problem, 
because there [was] going to be a lot of anger towards it in the coming years?
  So first of all, if it wasn’t health care, they would be angry about something else. 
Like this idea that, you know, everybody in the Republican Party was OK with Obama, 
and then oh, man, he did health care, and that really stirred people up. 
No. If it hadn’t been health care, they would have invented some other death panels, right? 
They were more than happy to go shopping for scandals. 
We spent, you know, years hearing about the [Operation] Fast and Furious. 
I never really understood what that was, other than a movie, right? 
So I think it’s really important to level-set here that, you know, it wasn’t health care that created the anger, right? 
Before that, it was the deficit. 
If it wasn’t the deficit or health care, it would have been climate change or this regulatory policy 
or anything about Barack Obama. 
I think the results of the health care law is, it’s remarkable that it worked as well as it did 
without legislative cooperation with the Republicans, because once we righted the ship, after the rollout went wrong, 
it started working really well, and you had 20 million people who got covered. 
And you had a law that had such public support that the Republican Party’s attempt to repeal it, you know, 
probably did more to lose them the Congress in 2018 than anything else.
And frankly, it now has led to a situation where Democrats are debating about 
whether or not to have a single-payer plan or a public option on top of Obamacare. 
That shows you that they think this is good politics, that this moved us in a direction that people are comfortable with, right? 
And so the irony of that law is that, you know, the thing that the Republicans used 
to animate their criticisms of Obama so much ended up consuming them in the 2018 midterms. 
You know, in an ideal world, yes, absolutely, you would have spent 2015, 2016 
patching that law, trying to figure out how to deal with some of the challenges presented with a shift of that scope.
But again, if you have Republican governors who are acting in their own interests, and against their own interests, 
in rejecting Medicaid expansion to their state, I mean, there’s a nihilism in the Republican Party that can’t be ignored. 
And that’s the problem. 
I mean, the problem is, it’s not—you know, there’s these divisions. 
The problem is, one party has become so extreme that even governors of states whose people would benefit greatly from 
just having a Medicaid expansion get—literally rejecting funding, you know, saying like, “I”—you know, “Because it’s 
called Obamacare, I will not take money from the federal government to help people in my state get access to health care.” 
That’s the problem in American politics. 
And until I think people recognize that, we’re just going to be going around and around in this loop.
  So put into perspective then the 2009 Tea Party revolt that summer and what was going on. 
What was—what did that define in the White House as you were looking at it? 
How was Obama, how were his aides looking at what was going on? 
What part of it was racial? 
What part of it was economic? 
I mean, you certainly got the racial demonstrations and pictures of Obama looking like a gorilla and everything else. 
What was going on, and how did you guys see it in the White House?
  I think that, you know, there were kind of two different views of this, right? 
One is, this is a time of massive economic disruption. 
We’ve just been through the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression that took away a lot of people’s sense 
of economic security; that in that climate, a lot of people are going to be angry, scared, and that, you know, when there’s 
also a sense that there are these huge changes being made to the economy, there’s—there’s going to be this blowback. 
That—that was kind of one view. 
And we have to manage this and—and try to speak to people’s fears. 
I think there’s another view that looked at this and said: “This is just about race. 
These people are yelling about taking their country back.” 
Taking it back from who? 
For who? Right. 
These are people who, you know, polls start to show 
the majority of Republicans don’t even think Obama was born in the country. 
Their grievances could be about anything, right? 
So one day it’s about the deficit; the next day it’s about death panels. 
And so I think it was hard to sort out how much of this is about race and how much of this is about 
kind of people’s sense of economic insecurity. 
I will say that, you know, there are a lot of people who aren’t white and don’t live in the South and Midwest 
who had economic insecurity, and they weren’t in the Tea Party, you know? 
I mean, so to me, when I look back on it—and I’m not saying I kind of had fully figured this out at the time—
of course it’s about race. 
I mean, we’re sitting here. 
The deficit, which was literally supposedly the animating reason for the Tea Party, is exploding under Donald Trump. 
Where is the Tea Party? 
Are they out in the streets? 
Are they demanding that we take our country back from these out-of-control spending, you know, elites in Washington? 
No. 
So when I look back on it, I think that question of how much of this was about race and how much 
was about kind of economic anxiety, you know, the answer is pretty clear based on what’s transpired since.
  And Obama, did he understand that? 
I mean, what was his perspective on it?
  Obama’s perspective, you know, and I would talk to him a lot about this over the years, 
—it was essentially, in his private moments, like he would acknowledge to you, this is about racism. 
And you know, it would come out in—in different ways, you know. 
We would be preparing for a press conference, and you know, you drill different questions. 
And you say to him: “Well, Mr. President, you could be asked, you know, how much of the opposition view is about race? 
Is this because there’s racism on the other side?” 
And he said: “Yes, of course there’s racism on the other side. 
Next question.” 
And then he’d kind of laugh and say, like, “Oh, I’m obviously not going to say that, right?” 
And you know, and he would get really frustrated sometimes, when the onus would be put on him, 
that there was kind of a line in the commentary for all the years that he—
if only he would sit down and have drinks just like Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill did. 
And he’d make the point, like: “These people won’t have drinks with me. 
I can invite them. 
They don’t want to be seen with me in public, right?” 
And a lot of that is because he’s black. 
Because, like, let’s face it. 
He wasn’t that radical a president. 
You know, this is not some guy who came in, and he didn’t try to nationalize the bank. 
You know, Bernie Sanders would be a much more radical president than Barack Obama. 
So of course he thought a lot of this is about race, but he also thought that his capacity to puncture that was somewhat limited. 
The very important event in the Obama presidency, an underappreciated event, was this “beer summit” thing. 
In 2009, he’s giving a press conference, and like, when the last question is, “What do you think about Skip Gates”—the
 most, you know, prominent African American intellectual in the country probably, Harvard professor—“being arrested 
in his own home in Cambridge, Massachusetts?,” and Obama said, “That was a dumb thing for the cop to do.” 
And like, people lost their minds. 
He had the largest drop in his polling numbers of anything that happened in the eight years of the Obama presidency. 
People on cable news were freaking out about this—you know: “What’s he doing? 
He’s dividing us. 
Why is he attacking the police?” 
Then we had to have this kind of contrived beer summit, where he and Skip Gates and the cop sit down and have a beer. 
And the lesson he took from that is like: “This is a loser. 
Like, if I’m, you know, if I’m weighing in on these racial issues, I’m not going to be able to talk about health care; 
I’m not going to be able to talk about the economy. 
And frankly, it’s only going to galvanize the—the forces against me.” 
And so the way in which he was going to address race is by being the best president he could. 
I’ve talked to him about this, the example of Jackie Robinson, right? 
Jackie Robinson, when he was standing on first base and getting heckled and people were throwing things at him, 
he didn’t turn and yell back. 
He was like: “I’m going to hit 340. 
I’m going to be the best baseball player on this field.” 
And I think that was how Obama decided to deal with this. 
“I’m going to be the best president I can. 
I’m not going to make mistakes. 
I’m not going to get dragged down by scandal. 
I’m going to carry myself with kind of meticulous dignity. 
My family is going to do the same thing. 
And that’s how I’m going to deal with it, rather than having an eight-year conversation about race.” 
  So talk a little bit more about how right-wing media, how Fox, how talk radio, 
how the growing, I guess, web presence at this point, how is that affecting all of this and how different is it than it had been. 
How are you guys looking at it as something that is pushing forward agendas which are very dangerous to the presidency?
  Well, you know, I think what people fail to recognize is 
there is not an equivalency between, say, Fox and MSNBC or—you know. 
Yes, MSNBC is liberal, but Fox is a different beast. 
One, it really will function as kind of an extension of the Republican Party and whenever the Republican Party 
wants to get airtime. 
But then it will also create its own stories and stick with those stories.
And so what we started to see early in the Obama presidency with like Glenn Beck, for instance, 
was the kind of seeding of this conspiracy theory, you know. 
Obama is seeking to control your lives. 
You know, Obama has a secret plan to do X or to do Y, or this shadowy figure in the Obama administration wants to regulate every aspect of your life. 
And it kind of starts there, and then it gets darker and darker, because it starts to be about the New Black Panthers, 
or, you know, ACORN, this community-organizing group. 
I often had never heard of these groups until they start appearing on Fox. 
But what’s happening: Fox’s ratings are going up, right, and then suddenly, the Republican Party doesn’t control Fox; 
it’s Fox that is driving the Republican Party, because they are demanding that the Republican Party look into these things. 
And so you take some of these early scandals in the Obama administration, you know, the Fast and Furious scandal. 
Like, again, I worked on the National Security Council; I didn’t understand. 
You know, somebody might have made a mistake, and some guns fell in the wrong hands, but this is stuff that happens way down the food chain. 
Like Barack Obama, the president of the United States, isn’t being briefed on kind of pretty minor operations around the border. 
But Fox is blowing this thing up. 
It’s like the dominant issue for the Republicans in Congress, right? 
And so this is first term. 
And what we’re seeing is this kind of radicalizing effect, where Fox is going deeper and deeper into kind of 
conspiracy theory, racially motivated programming, racially motivated enemies, like the New Black Panthers. 
And then this is starting to color who’s politically emerging in the Republican Party. 
If you look at that class of people elected in the Tea Party in 2010, but then look at the 2012 presidential election 
compared to the 2008, right, like the people on that stage are much further to the right. 
They’re much more willing to entertain kind of weird conspiracy theories or apocalyptic rhetoric 
about Obama in a way that, you know, John McCain and 2008 Mitt Romney and, you know, 
even conservatives like [Sen.] Fred Thompson, you know, would never have done in 2008. 
So just in those four years, I think Fox and the kind of right-wing media had already changed the Republican Party. 
Then this takes off on steroids after 2012.
  So take us, though, to the moment of 2010. 
You write about the GOP sort of making—I think the way you put it … was that they decided to ride the tiger. 
They’re sort of pushing Tea Party folk out there to run and to win. 
Did they understand what was going on? 
What—how does that add to the direction? 
Or what will happen with the GOP? 
  Well, I think two strands come together in 2010, right? 
One is the kind of older, moneyed kind of corporate-interest Republican Party that I would suggest is, 
you know, best represented by donors like the Koch brothers and people like Mitch McConnell that are 
just seeking to get power by any means. 
And they achieve something remarkable, which is the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, 
which says now there can be unlimited money in politics, and nobody will know where that money comes from. 
At the same time, you had this bottom-up, populist, right-wing, racially motivated movement that are the foot soldiers, right? 
And in 2010 they hit the jackpot, because they win the Congress, and they also get to redraw all these districts. 
And I think the deal with the devil that was made is the more recognizable Koch brother–Mitch McConnell, you know, 
Republican Party is more than happy to tap into the energy that is emerging from this kind of grassroots Tea Party, 
kind of, you know, “alt-right” movement that is building and that is finding itself through right-wing media. 
And essentially, the Mitch McConnell–Koch brother wing succeeds in getting a majority in Congress, 
but they lose control of who is in that majority and what the people in that majority care about, right?
And essentially, ever since then, the party has become more and more like Sarah Palin and the Tea Party 
and less and less like the Chamber of Commerce and John Boehner. 
And that was the experience of the Obama years.
… And I’ll just give you one example. 
Like John Boehner is a great example. 
John Boehner—Obama used to tell me, “John Boehner is just like the Republicans 
that I worked really well with in the Illinois State Senate.” 
Like, in the Illinois State Senate, Obama did a lot of bipartisan stuff, and he was in poker games with the Republicans. 
All the things people said he should have done as president, like, he did that. 
He backslapped; he had drinks; he cut deals. 
And he’s like: “Boehner was exactly like that, a Midwestern country-club Republican. 
He’s not a racist. 
He’s a good and decent man.” 
He has serious ideological differences with Obama, but they could get stuff done together, right?
Boehner finds himself the speaker of the House of this caucus, and he never had any control of this caucus, you know. 
And what was most interesting is, he actually got along really well with Obama, and he wanted to do big things with Obama. 
He wanted to do a huge deal on the future of, you know, fiscal policy in the United States. 
He wanted to do comprehensive immigration reform. 
And frankly, they would meet a lot, and because it was so difficult for John Boehner to be seen as 
working with Barack Obama, he would be snuck in the back door of the White House. 
I mean, think about this. 
Like, he couldn’t be seen as working with Obama, so he’d come in on the weekends, or he’d come in at night 
And then, whenever he took anything back to his caucus, they just tore him apart and ate him alive, right? 
So I think what happened to Boehner in miniature is—is the best example of how the Republican Party of 2016 
bore no resemblance to the Republican Party of, say, even 1996 after the [Newt] Gingrich revolution.
  And the results of the grand bargain? 
  Basically, so—and this is important, because it ends up happening on immigration. 
But on the grand bargain, right, Obama says: “Look, let’s sit down. 
Let’s—let’s actually make this deal, you know. 
People have been talking for years about, you know, this grand bargain in which each side 
is going to have to give something up, and there are going to be these significant cuts in spending, 
but we’re going to have to take some action to protect entitlements.” 
And the two of them sit down and hammer this out, right?
And as soon as the Republican Caucus in the House would get any wind of what Boehner was negotiating, 
they would lose their minds. 
And you know, suddenly, Fox is activated; talk radio is activated. 
A guy like Eric Cantor, who was supposed to be the number two for Boehner, is you know, 
knifing him in the back essentially. 
And then Boehner starts breaking all of his promises to Obama. 
And meanwhile we’re still trying to get something done. 
But the outcome essentially is that Boehner ends up having to publicly excoriate 
the very deal he negotiated with Obama, right, because if he didn’t, he would have been ousted as speaker. 
And so then we realize there is no grand bargain to be had with these people. 
And then, at the same time, they’re using the debt ceiling to essentially threaten to destroy 
the entire American economy for reasons that were never clear to me. 
And Obama told me that that was his—his worst moment as president, at least as a matter of policy, 
was when he thought we were going to go off this fiscal cliff with the debt ceiling, and all this work 
we had done to save the economy was going to be erased, and essentially, we ended up with a deal that nobody likes, 
not Republicans, not Democrats, just to get through that debt ceiling crisis, 
just to get the routine action of Congress passing, you know, an uptick in the debt ceiling. 
Again, if that doesn’t show you that the problem was the radicalization of the Republican Party, I just don’t know what will.
  And this goes back to your point about the riding-the-tiger situation. 
In 2010, during that election, one of the things that leadership was, you know, Cantor and others that he was working with 
were selling, was, you know, “We can use threat of the debt ceiling, for instance, to get what we want.” 
And this is something that the Tea Party folks sort of took in and sort of ran with, eventually.
  It’s a great indication of how the Republican politicians think they’re using right-wing media and Fox, 
when, in fact, it ends up using them, because they’re like: “Well, we’ll stir these people up. 
We’ll make all these promises, you know, that we’re going to leverage the debt ceiling, 
and we’re going to get rid of Obamacare, right?” 
And then they get in there, and of course they can’t get rid of Obamacare, 
because the president of the United States isn’t going to sign a law getting rid of his signature legislative accomplishment. 
And meanwhile, they know better on the debt ceiling, but they had promised all these people that they were going to do this. 
And then meanwhile, some of these Tea Party people who were elected, they really didn’t care. 
They would have gone over the debt ceiling. 
They were prepared to do that, the Freedom Caucus in the House. 
And so if you’re Eric Cantor, you have gotten on the back of that tiger and used Fox News and talk radio 
to gin everybody up and told everybody, “We’re going to—you know, if Obama doesn’t do what we say, 
we’re going to, you know, send us over a fiscal cliff, and he’ll be the one to pay the price.” 
And then they act kind of surprised that the very same media that they used, 
and the very same voters that they manipulated, are demanding that they do exactly what they said. 
  So the 2012 election. 
Obama basically, you know, states that he talks a lot about, at that point, about the “breaking of the fever,” 
that he felt that this was the situation. 
Did he misunderstand the tenacity of those that were in power, now really in power of the Republican Party? 
Did he—because when Newtown, [Connecticut], happens, and that just falls apart in a way that is almost unimaginable, 
I mean, take us there, if you want, otherwise. 
But was there a misunderstanding of what his election—reelection should have meant, could have meant? 
What was going on?
  So, you know, Obama gets reelected, you know, rather decisively. 
And you know, he was hopeful that this fever would break. 
He kept saying, like, “Hopefully this breaks the fever.” 
Hopefully, though—I mean, he wasn’t certain about this. 
But, you know, what was interesting is, in a way, the fever broke among certain Republican elites, right? 
So the RNC [Republican National Committee] does this “autopsy” of the election, and their conclusion is: “You know what? 
We lost this election by a large margin, in large part because we’re not seen as appealing to Hispanic voters, 
so we should do comprehensive immigration reform.” 
And that was the fever breaking, right? 
That’s what we wanted to happen. 
The problem is, that’s not where the Republican voters were, or the majority of the Republican House Caucus. 
That’s the first thing.
So then—so we’re coming out of that election thinking, you know, that immigration reform will be priority one, 
that we want to get it done, that the Republicans have signaled that they want to get it done. 
And then I remember sitting in the Situation Room and getting, you know, passed a note about this shooting in Newtown. 
And it was such a horrifying event. 
And I remember seeing Obama several times that day, and he was like I’ve never seen him as much of an emotional wreck. 
I mean, he was just bursting into tears throughout the day, because all he could think about was his kids, you know. 
I mean, he kept saying, like, “All—I don’t think I can talk about this publicly, 
And so the scale of that event, and the horrifying nature of that event, you know, 
I think made him feel like, “I have to do something on guns.” 
Nobody would have, you know, chosen that as, you know, the politically most logical first legislative priority. 
It was Newtown that compelled it to be the first priority. 
Unfortunately, what ends up happening is we try to get, you know, pretty minimal—I mean, obviously, 
we would have done more, but pretty minimal, you know, background checks, and pretty noncontroversial, 
in that they poll at 90-plus percent with the American people. 
Tried to get that done in legislation. 
And Mitch McConnell essentially takes the exact same approach to that as he took to everything in the first term. 
And what you see is, oh, wait. 
The fever is not breaking here. 
You know, if we can’t get background checks done after Newtown, like these guys are not going to compromise on a thing. 
The other thing it does is it burns a few months off the clock so that when we do turn to immigration reform, 
we’ve already lost like, some precious time. 
And you know, we get this bipartisan bill through the Senate on immigration reform. 
People forget, you know, that this bill passed with more than, you know, two-thirds of the Senate, 
and you know, Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio are some of the co-sponsors of it. 
But we just could never get the House to even take a vote on it. 
  And the results of that, the results of Cantor losing his seat to a large extent because of it and 
what it says about sort of how the Tea Party anger over previous issues is morphing or being morphed by powers that be, 
the media and stuff, into some—this next issue of the fact of immigration.
  So this is a great—you know, this is another perfect example. 
So the Senate passes this bipartisan bill that has something for everybody, you know, border security, path to legalization 
for the 11 million who are here, but really stringent path, I mean, getting to the back of the line, deals with the “Dreamers.” 
Obama immediately sits down with Boehner, and Boehner says to him: 
“Look, I need for my caucus to kind of be able to walk towards this bill. 
I need to let them take some votes on certain things that are all border security. 
Work with me on this. 
Don’t criticize me on this. 
Give me some time and space.” 
Obama says: “Absolutely. 
I want to get this done. 
That’s all I care about.” 
He even asked Obama to make certain public statements about, you know, 
how he would approach the enforcement of immigration law, so Obama did. 
I mean, everything Obama is doing is to try to give Boehner the cover to essentially take this Senate bill and bring it to a vote. 
It comes to the beginning of 2014, and Boehner finally goes to his caucus at their annual retreat and says, “Here 
are the elements of the immigration bill that I think we should vote on,” and it includes the elements from the Senate bill. 
And the Republican Caucus collectively kind of loses its mind on Boehner, you know, and says, 
“We can’t possibly accept this,” even though everybody knows that this is the only bill that could, frankly, pass.
Even after that happened, you know, Boehner says to Obama: 
“Look, I’m going to have to go out and say all kinds of terrible things about you publicly. 
But let’s keep working together privately.” 
And that kind of continues. 
And we’re trying to fix pieces of this bill. 
And we’re trying to bring in other Republicans. 
But it’s kind of—the writing is on the wall here. 
Then what happens is, you have this primary in Eric Cantor’s district that is a great distillation of the whole phenomenon, 
because this guy, Dave Brat, enters the primary talking about tax and spending, you know, the old Republican issues. 
Well, he quickly figures out, with the help of Steve Bannon, that nobody really cares about that. 
What they care about is illegal immigration. 
And so he’s whacking Eric Cantor for being for amnesty, and you know, being for this immigration bill. 
Great irony being, Eric Cantor had been part of the problem for us. 
Eric Cantor had been part of the—the forces that were pulling Boehner back from the deal he was making with Obama. 
The second that Eric Cantor is defeated in that primary was the death knell of immigration reform, 
and also was a signal that the Republican Party was no longer just kind of talking publicly about 
Obamacare and spending and a little quietly to their base about immigration. 
This was going to become what the party was about, which is racially or ethnically fueled grievances 
with immigration at the center.
  Right. 
So the 2014 midterms. 
GOP takes the Senate. 
And this is the point where a lot of people say if Obama had not given up on bipartisan actions, 
it certainly is at this point pretty apparent what’s going on. 
He decides that if anything is going to be done, executive orders are probably the way it has to happen. 
And so therefore, we’re interested in the results of that because, of course, that gets a lot of play. 
And the bigger part of this is, here is a president who had—the promise was that he could bridge the divide, 
and he’s at a point now in his presidency where he understands that that is, in fact, not a possibility. 
So what—what is going on? 
What are the results of that? 
And how are you all viewing it? … 
  Well, again, I think the overview is, Barack Obama said he would try to bridge these divides. 
He couldn’t. It wasn’t for lack of trying. 
I mean, just the fact that it was six years before he really just said, “I’m going to stop trying,” shows you he tried for six years. 
And to me, that’s about the radicalization of the Republican Party, that—I mean, look at immigration. 
We really angered our own base for years with deportations, with uncertainty hanging over the Dreamers, 
or then their families. 
And so after the election, yes, he builds on DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals]. 
You have protection for Dreamers; you have protection for some other immigrants. 
And we say we’re only going to deport violent criminals and recent arrivals, right? 
That’s been his his preference at least, for six years.
The fact that, you know, to say to a president, “You can’t do what you want unless—you know, 
even if it’s within your executive power, unless Mitch McConnell says it’s OK,” 
well, then Mitch McConnell is the president, you know. 
I mean, that’s what that means. 
And so if you look at the last two years, yes, we do additional protections on immigration. 
We do the Paris Climate Accord. 
We do the Iran Nuclear Agreement. 
We do the normalization of relations with Cuba. 
We do a number of things around criminal justice reform… 
It’s a pretty progressive agenda. 
Frankly, none of those things would have gotten any Republican support. 
And so, you know, because we did the Paris Climate Accord, there’s 200 countries in a global climate change agreement. 
All of them are still in it except for the United States. 
I’m glad we did that. 
If we said, “We’re not going to do a Paris Climate Accord because we can’t get Republican votes 
to ratify it as a treaty in the Senate,” guess what? 
One hundred ninety-nine other countries wouldn’t be in the climate agreement, because the U.S. had to negotiate it, right?
So I think, frankly, that those last two years were the two most productive years of the Obama presidency, 
except for the first years, when we had huge legislative majorities. 
And I think all those things we did will stand the test of time, even with, you know, Trump’s efforts to take them apart. 
  So Charleston, an amazing moment. 
It’s sort of been defined, and you talk about it, as a pivotal point to some extent, as a guy comfortable in his own skin 
who’s now able to, in some ways, to deal with racial issues in some ways he wasn’t dealing with, but other things as well. 
Talk about that moment and the consequences of it, you know, the bigger picture.
  Well, I think, you know, Charleston came actually at the end of a week where you had these 
highs of the Supreme Court upholding the health care law, the Supreme Court affirming gay marriage in 50 states. 
And we were kind of nearing the completion of the Iran agreement, and the Cuba embassies were going to open. 
And so a lot of stuff is kind of coming together at once already. 
And then this kind of horrifying tragedy happens, where this young white supremacist walks into a black church—
and, by the way, a very prominent black church, I mean, very central to 
the history of the African American experience in this country—and just shoots a bunch of people. 
And it’s a horrifying tragedy. 
And I remember, at the beginning of the week, Obama said, “You know what?” 
He was so angry and so frustrated by these mass shootings. 
He said: “I don’t want to give a speech. 
You know, I keep—I’m out of words. 
I have nothing left to say about these issues. 
I’ll go and obviously support the community, but I’ll probably just want to sit there.” 
And we all said, “No, no, you have to speak, obviously.” 
And then it’s one of these things where I remember, you know, the speechwriter, it was a guy named 
Cody Keenan, who’s like one of my close friends, and he did a draft. 
And sometimes, us speechwriters, you do a draft, and you send it up, and you never hear anything back. 
And you’re wondering, OK, either this means he loves it, or, you know, he hasn’t read it. 
Or the third category is, he’s just going to write his own speech. 
And this is what happened, which is, you know, Cody gets the edits the—I think that morning or maybe the day before. 
And Obama has written all this stuff out longhand, and, you know, really leaning in on all the issues, right? 
What everybody remembers is him singing, but if you go back and read, he talks about the Confederacy, 
and he talks about the criminal justice, and he talks about racial prejudice in hiring. 
I mean, there’s, you know, it’s all in that speech.
And he said before, you know, he took off to go, you know, he’d built this speech around this concept of grace. 
And he said, “You know, maybe I’ll sing ‘Amazing Grace.’” 
And so that was kind of planted in my head. 
And I remember watching the speech, and you know, it was very powerful. 
And he kind of got to the end, and he stopped. 
And there’s this kind of long pause, and I remember sitting in my office thinking, like, oh, my God. 
Like, I think he’s going to sing. 
Like, there’s no other reason for him to pause that long. 
And he starts to sing, and the whole crowd gets to its feet. 
And I remember sitting in my office, and behind him, the emotion on the faces of these African American pastors, 
you know, is this kind of weird mix of joy and sadness. 
And it was like in those notes of “Amazing Grace,” the entire history of the Obama presidency, 
all the adversity he’d faced, all the opposition he’d faced, everything he’d repressed was coming out. 
But also, the entire African American experience in this country, you know, 
it was like somehow coming out in this one moment, you know. 
And I remember just sitting there and sobbing at my desk in a way that I never did, 
because it was like, he’s finally being his complete self in full view of the country. 
He’s finally—here he is, you know, in this community, the community that has backed him up. 
The black community in this country had got his back every single time and didn’t ask for much, you know. 
And here he is, at a very difficult time for that community, just transcending. 
I mean, there are moments in politics that transcend any policy or—and that was one. 
And you couldn’t look at that—I mean, I remember thinking, like, people would often ask me, like, 
“What is he really like?,” about Obama. 
I’m like, I don’t have to ever explain that anymore. That’s it. 
And if you—frankly, if you can look at that and hate that guy, there’s a problem with you, not with him, you know. 
I mean—and that’s how it felt. 
It felt like a catharsis for the entire experience. 
  It was also kind of a catharsis to sort of, I guess from, back to Ferguson, [Missouri], 
and other shootings that had happened, where he was seen as not being able to answer the call in some way. 
And it brought about a black voice, you know, on the streets to come together and sort of say, 
“If you can’t do it, we’ll do it.” 
I mean, talk a little bit about that and what the frustration of that must have been.
  He was really frustrated. 
And you know, we would talk. 
And again, it would come out in these, you know, kind of quick moments, where, you know, 
we’d be preparing for a press conference and saying, you know, “What do you think needs to be done to address 
the tensions in Ferguson?,” and he would just say, you know, “Well, cops need to stop shooting unarmed black kids.” 
Like, that’s what he thought.
But he also recognized and was very disciplined about the fact that he was president of the United States and frankly, 
in that capacity, had responsibility to law enforcement in the United States, and that the way in which he was going to 
respond to Ferguson was not the same way that a civil rights leader would. 
As president, the way in which he was going to make a difference is, the Justice Department was going to 
open an investigation into the Ferguson Police Department. 
There was going to be many months of work. 
That work was going to be published, and then there would be reforms at the Ferguson Police Department.
And so in his mind, he was doing something about it. 
It wasn’t the direct emotional connection of being in the streets and 
embracing people and speaking out against police violence. 
It was the hard work of governing, which, again, is very much how he thought about these issues as president. 
But I think it was very frustrating to him to be criticized when he thought he was trying to do the right thing, and to—
to kind of not be, you know, the guy in the streets. 
But he’s the guy trapped on the podium, kind of making policy announcements. 
But he never doubted that that was the right course.
That’s his approach to governing. 
That’s his theory of change. 
His theory of change is, you need people in the streets, and you need people like me in office. 
But in Charleston, he could be both the president and essentially the community, you know, leader and healer.
 … One more last thing on Obama; then I’ve got to turn to Trump, 
or else we’re not going to cover Trump here. 
The last State of the Union, it’s a very open speech, and he talks about his regrets, that the rancor and suspicion 
between the parties has only gotten worse. 
How—how big a moment is that, and how it sort of defines, and in some ways encapsulates that failure 
of being able to bridge that divide?
  I mean, I think the thing about Obama is part of his effectiveness as a politician was his authenticity, 
in the sense that he’d just tell the truth, right? 
And so it’s an acknowledgement of something everybody knows. 
And frankly, that’s what Obama, you know, would often do in speeches. 
Again, I don’t think that he felt like he could have necessarily done much different, but it was the reality. 
  And so when you heard the speech, your thoughts?
  Oh, I worked on the speech, you know. 
I—you know, I mean, I’ll be honest with you. 
By 2016, I was very angry. 
I did not think that this was on the level, which is a phrase that Obama and I used a lot; that look, partisan differences, 
policy differences, fierce debate should be part of politics. 
… I accept that, you know, not everybody’s going to like the guy I work for, Barack Obama. 
But something different was happening. 
And—and we’re just kidding ourselves if we’re pretending like it wasn’t; that—that the conspiracy theorizing, the kind of 
ugly, racially motivated attacks, like the fact that the guy has more than half of the opposing party doesn’t believe 
he’s born in America, like that’s not—that’s not someone disagreeing with your—your health care plan, right?
And then the fact that like, you know, we’d worked really hard on certain things, 
that the stridency of the opposition went way beyond what I knew the other people actually thought. 
You know, the criticisms, the apocalyptic criticisms of things like the Iran Nuclear Agreement, 
that’s not what people would tell you privately, right? 
And so to me, you know, it was—I was sad watching him say that, because I’m thinking, it’s not your fault. 
I mean—and there’s this kind of “both sides,” you know, approach to political analysis. 
Well, they both couldn’t come together. 
That wasn’t what happened in the eight years of the Obama administration. 
It’s not to say he was perfect. 
It’s not to say, again, that I wouldn’t accept that half the country wouldn’t like a lot of the stuff he does. 
But there was something darker at play. 
  So let’s—lo and behold, 2015, a blond man comes down a gold escalator, and he has a message to give. 
It’s a very divisive message, specifically focused on immigrants.
This message resonates in a way that Republicans didn’t expect, I don’t think, and Democrats didn’t expect. 
What’s at stake here? 
What’s going on?
  Well, again, I think the bill was coming due for the Republican Party on that escalator. 
You know, if you look at Sarah Palin talking to “real Americans,” the Tea Party talking about “taking the country back,” 
all of the hyperbole around Benghazi, the birther movement itself that launched Trump, 
by the time he came down that escalator, he was the obvious Republican front-runner. 
He was the guy saying the same thing that they’d all been saying on Fox and on talk radio and on Breitbart 
for the last six and a half years. 
How they thought that you could do that and act that irresponsibly and not end up with a guy like Trump, 
that to me is the crazy thing to think, not the fact that Trump ends up being the front-runner.
  Let’s finish up on the birther thing. 
So talk a little bit about Obama’s anger over Trump’s statements around the birther issue and the way that the media 
ran with it as well, and the fact that it fed off of each other, and it continued and continued and continued.
  Obama’s anger at the birther movement was at the media. 
Donald Trump is a racist buffoon. 
He’s a charlatan. 
You know, he’s a joke, and he needs attention. 
And so he pops up in 2011 and starts saying that Obama wasn’t born in the country. 
It’s not just Fox. 
He was on The View; he was on Good Morning America; he was on the Today Show; he was on CNN. 
He was everywhere. 
Why? 
What on earth was the news value of a New York real estate developer reality star saying the first black president 
wasn’t born in America? 
We have not come nearly as far as people think on race. 
The fact that anybody thought that that was newsworthy, why? 
Why is this man on television saying these things? 
And by the way, there’s a cost to it. 
The cost is the polls that show majorities of Republican voters don’t think Obama was born in the United States. 
You give somebody like that a platform, and people are going to listen to what he says. 
And so Obama was furious, because he was thinking, I’m going to have to release my birth certificate to 
at least put a stop to this. 
That’s the only thing that put a stop to the mainstream-media coverage. 
I mean, think about that. 
It wasn’t Trump; it was the media. 
Like, you know, Trump, I mean, lucked out. 
If Trump couldn’t get booked on all those shows, he’d just be some other whack job, you know, 
tweeting about conspiracy theories and maybe getting booked on Fox. 
He’s a—Donald Trump is a creation of the American political news media, and that’s what angered Obama. 
That’s what angered us in the White House. 
And then I remember Trump started floating with running for president. 
This was going so well for him in 2011. 
I remember sitting in my office and watching cable channels covering live, like Donald Trump just visiting New Hampshire. 
I’m thinking, what on earth are these people doing? 
Like we were at a war in Libya that had just started, and—and—and the thing that they think is newsworthy is 
Donald Trump talking about whether the black president was born in Africa? 
Like, this is—you know, this has not gotten enough attention. 
Like, this is the story of how you get Trump. 
As much as the Republican Party, it’s the media that couldn’t resist giving this guy free air time 
that no other American politician would ever get. 
  … What’s going on in the Democratic Party?
  I think the Democratic Party has a harder challenge than the Republican Party in a way, 
because the Republican Party is basically ethnically homogeneous, you know. 
There are divides, but they’re basically among white people. 
And if you look at the Democratic Party, you know, we had this sprawling series of constituencies, ethnically, economically, 
everybody from, you know, highly educated, wealthy white people to 
Dreamers, you know, I mean, who obviously can’t vote but looked to the party.
And having this kind of fractious coalition, we had to sort out a lot of things. 
I tend to believe that it’s right to take a lesson from the Obama years, that you know what? 
Like, we’ve got to fight back just as hard as these people fighting against us, you know. 
I’m probably in a minority among people, you know, who have actually kind of been in the White House 
and always looking at the center. 
I’m not saying Bernie [Sanders] is right about all his policies, but the idea that—that we’ve been 
bringing a knife to a gunfight in a lot of these battles, I think you know, there’s something to that. 
And what does that mean? 
I think that means that we have to take democracy seriously. 
When I look back at our regrets, for instance, you know, you asked me was it wrong to do health care? No. 
We should have also done voting. 
We should have done a voting rights bill in 2009. 
We should have made it easier for people to vote. 
We should have tried to get a national holiday on Election Day. 
We—you know, we should do what the Republicans do, which is, when you’re in power, you know, you do things 
to try to help support your capacity to promote an agenda.
By the way, I don’t think any of those things are nefarious. 
It’s just about more people voting. 
They want less people to vote; we want more people to vote. 
Let’s own that, and let’s do it, right? 
And so, you know, let’s get rid of arcane, you know, tools like the filibuster, which only empower a bunch of people 
who represent states that are a fraction of the population of the neighborhood that you and I are sitting in right now, right?
So to me, the Democratic Party is going to have to sort out not just a policy agenda, but its orientation to the radical opposition it faces.
 … In [Peter] Baker’s book [The Call of History], he talks about the fact that 
Obama came to a point at the end where he questioned, did he drive events, or did they drive him? 
And there is this question of, does a man make the times, or do the times make the man? 
At the end of all this, what’s his—what’s his thinking about that?
  Well, so we had these series of discussions over the years, and one of them was about 
how much do social movements produce change, right? 
Civil rights movement comes to mind. 
How much do individuals make change? 
You know, kind of great-man-and-woman theory of history. 
And we kind of argued both sides of this. 
And I actually kind of usually was on the times make the man or the movements make the change. 
You know, I think, at the end, you know, the way in which he resolved it is he kind of found the middle, and he said, 
“Well, teams make change, right?” 
So that was a generous way of him, I think, including us in the change he made. 
But I think it is the case that individuals make the difference in the long run, and the way I think about this is 
not so much the policy score card that you have when you leave office. 
I think about how I think of presidents, you know. 
I couldn’t tell you 10 legislative accomplishments of John F. Kennedy. 
I can tell you that I went into politics because I was inspired by his speeches, and I know millions if not billions 
of people around the world have probably done things that they didn’t think they would do or would not have done 
were it not for the example of John and Robert Kennedy. 
I think Barack Obama is going to be one of those people, right? 
So I think the individual makes a difference because he stirs something that is going to last longer than even his presidency. 
That’s my view. 
If Trump wins out, he won’t, right? 
In other words, America has two pretty distinct stories to choose from here. 
There’s like, the Obama story of progressive change and growing inclusivity and growing international cooperation, 
and the Trump story of I would say white privilege or exclusivity or keeping people out or pulling back from the world. 
If we end up moving in the Obama direction, I think history will record him as one of those people, 
one of those individuals who helped lead us in a certain direction. 
If the backlash overwhelms that, he won’t. 
And that’s how I think of the legacy. 
 The Trump election itself, can you talk a little bit about how Obama saw it? 
I mean, it’s certainly a humbling experience, certainly an understanding that this guy is going to, you know, take a bat to his legacy.
  I think what’s so complicated about the Trump election—and we had these debates 
after the election like everybody else, you know. 
I’d sit with Obama in the car, on the plane, in his office. 
And on the one hand, you could chalk it up to a whole bunch of crazy things, you know, that happened: 
Jim Comey writing a letter a week before the election; the Russians interfering in the election; 
the whole email thing to begin with; the media’s obsession with the email thing, 
or—like 10 car crashes had to all stack up on the highway to allow Trump to get past, right? 
On the other hand, you had the stark reality of this extremist being elected president of the United States, 
I mean, someone who should not be president of the United States. 
In history, there’s just never been someone so unfit for the office. 
And he’s getting elected by stoking the darkest elements of the American character—
you know, racism, xenophobia, anti-immigrant fervor; you know, even the trivialization of culture, the reality show culture. 
And so you can’t ignore how important that is and how real that trend is.
And yeah, so we could sit there and debate, “Well, why didn’t Hillary [Clinton] go to Wisconsin?” 
But we also had to reckon with this. 
And I think for Obama, you know, it was this reality of just how contested all of this is. 
Like, America is just a story. 
Like, America is not an ethnicity; it’s not a religion. 
Like, we’re a story, and we’re either the progressive story or the reactionary story. 
And again, I think Trump’s election throws that in stark relief.
You asked about the party. 
One of the fascinating things for me was watching 2018, the Democrats who got elected, though, they’re black; 
they’re brown; they’re younger; they’re more progressive; they’re more women. 
It looked like an Obama campaign rally from 2008. 
I actually felt really good about that. 
And even the fact that some of them were criticizing Obama is good. 
That’s kind of what Obama would want, right, more progressives getting activated. 
And I knew a number of people who got elected, and not a single one of those people would have run if Trump 
hadn’t gotten elected president, right? 
So to me, you know, the election of Donald Trump is—is an enormously important historical event, 
but it’s not the end of the story. 
We don’t know the end of the story.
  The Lima drive [in Lima, Peru, during Obama’s last foreign trip]. 
Talk a little bit about that. 
We’re questioning—or Obama was at that point questioning why Trump had won, and had he been wrong; 
that people perhaps fall back to tribes? 
Take us to there and sort of what that story means. 
  Well, you know, we had been debating all the causes for the electoral loss, 
and Obama had been very dark about this, you know. 
Went from a Great Recession and two wars to all the indicators being teed up, you know. 
Economy is growing; 20 million people are covered; you know, prevent the war with Iran. 
It’s all teed up, and then this happens, right? 
And we’re driving back to Air Force One on his final foreign trip, and he looks at me, and he says, 
“You know, what if we were wrong?” 
I’m thinking, wrong about what? 
And he’s like: “You know, what if people just want to fall back into their tribe? 
You know, what if people’s identity, their kind of sense of racial or ethnic identity is just more powerful?” 
And what I realized he was saying is not whether we were wrong about our agenda, but you know, 
I think progressives tend to assume like history is moving in a certain direction, right; you know, that society has become 
more inclusive; that—that we leave behind, you know, the kind of people that talk about “American carnage.” 
And, you know, it’s a big question. 
And you know, he also said, like, you know, “Maybe I was like, 10, 15 years too early.” 
And what he meant by that is the demography of America is changing, and it’s going to be more diverse in 10 or 15 years, 
and a coalition like Trump’s probably couldn’t get someone elected in 10 or 15 years, right? 
And, you know, I’ve thought a lot about that question. 
And frankly, I don’t think we know the answer yet. 
I think, though, we were right, because I think any progressive change in history, there’s a backlash to it, always. 
There was a backlash to the freeing of slaves. 
There was a backlash to the civil rights movement. 
And if you say, “Well, we’re not going to try to bust through a ceiling because there will be backlash to it,” 
you’ll never do anything. 
And my hope is that Trump is that expression of that backlash, and he’s transitory. 
And if we just pick up and keep moving forward, you know, we’re going to be living in a country in 20 years 
where there is more diversity, and where people have health care, and you know, 
that looks a lot more like Barack Obama than Donald Trump. 
If that’s the case, then—then we will have been right.
  The Trump meeting in the White House with Obama. 
Afterwards, [Obama] comes and talks to you guys, to you and some other people, about what he found out 
about the guy, and he calls Trump, in some ways, a cartoon character who’s caring more about crowd size than policy. 
What was his evaluation of that meeting, and, you know, why it’s sort of a fascinating understanding of who this guy is?
  Well, I think part of what’s so wrenching about that meeting is that Obama had basically 
inherited this gigantic mess from this one deeply flawed Republican president, spends eight years kind of cleaning the desk, 
as it were, and then, you know, here is what he has: Donald Trump walking in. 
I think his understanding of the meeting, you know, first of all, Trump—Obama’s seeing this meeting as an opportunity, 
“I need to tell him about all these things, you know, how health care works in this country, North Korean threat, 
what’s going on with Iran,” and Trump is totally disinterested at any of this, 
totally disinterested in the gravity of the job he’s walking into. 
Just doesn’t care, you know. 
No curiosity about these issues, really.
And he’s saying to Obama, you know, “Well, you got big crowds, and you saw I got really big crowds, 
but Hillary, you know, she couldn’t get crowds.” 
And this is the kind of stuff he wanted to talk about, right? 
And, you know, Obama is always thinking historically, and he was trying to situate him in history, you know, 
and the closest thing he could settle on is that he’s kind of the conman, the, you know, the cartoon character, 
the, you know, the—the guy trying to sell something in Huckleberry Finn, you know. 
Like—and that was like kind of the only way to place him. 
But, you know, I think for Obama, it was like, “I took this job so seriously, and all of us took this job so seriously.” 
And there was something like a gut punch that the guy, you know, not that the guy had attacked Obama, 
but that the guy didn’t even care about the job he was about to do.
  Charlottesville, what Trump said, how the establishment sees it as a disaster, 
and yet there’s no blowback, or very little blowback on him; that it enlivens the base, and the GOP basically gets in line. 
  First of all, I don’t know why everybody is always surprised when these things happen, you know, 
when Trump says, “There are good people on both sides in Charlottesville,” or Trump, you know, tweets something racist. 
Like, how much evidence do we need that this guy is an extremist, he’s a racist? 
And how much evidence do we need that the Republican Party has been totally radicalized? 
Look, I—I travel a lot around the world. 
There’s no political party in the world, far-right parties in Europe, that doesn’t believe in climate change. 
Like, this—this is not a center-right party; this is a far-right party, and—and that has gotten into bed with some of the worst elements in society, and we see that in Charlottesville. 
I think that the continued—you know, what Trump benefits from is this mix of being able to motivate all of these people 
who are racist, who are angry; frankly, unfortunately, some people who aren’t racist, but they’re just angry, 
and Trump, you know, provides a useful outlet, you know. 
And then the media and kind of political culture of this country or, you know, kind of mainstream Republican Party 
such as it used to be, political media, they can’t kind of come to grips with what’s happened. 
And so they’re constantly trying to pull him back into being a normal president, right? 
And—or they’re constantly—they can’t take their eyes off of him. 
I mean, the media, you know, I would always say to them, like, “Why do you have to cover these tweets?” 
And they say: “Well, he’s the president. He tweets.” 
And I’m like: “Barack Obama tweeted. 
Barack Obama used to say things on Twitter like, ‘Climate change is an existential threat to our children.’ 
Nobody talked about that on cable television. 
Why is it such good television when Donald Trump says there’s an invasion of brown people in a caravan, 
and you all have to talk about it for a week on television? 
When—if Barack Obama said something was a big threat, it’s like: ‘Well, that’s not newsworthy. 
He’s just talking about climate change.’” 
So, you know, I think we have to look inside of ourselves and think, why can we not take our eyes off of this? 
And you know, maybe we should, you know. 
Maybe the reason he is where he is not just because he stirs up a bunch of people in his crowds; it’s that pretty powerful 
institutions in this country—the Republican Party, news media, the business community, which likes its tax cuts—
are willing to tolerate this, because it’s good for the tax bottom line; it’s good for the ratings; it’s good for the party. 
That’s the failure as much as Trump. 
  … A decade of two change-oriented presidents, a uniter and a divider. 
They both sort of have defined themselves as that. 
Where are we now? 
  I think we have a pretty existential decision to make in 2020. 
The cliché, “most important election of our lifetime,” this is it. 
I’ve been there for eight years. 
The amount of change you can make in eight years is exponentially higher than what you can do in four. 
You know, in four, you can kind of set a direction, pass some laws. 
By the end of eight years, you have not just turned around the ocean liner; you have moved it. 
The government is staffed by your people; you know, the—the laws that you’ve passed are being implemented; 
the foreign policy directions you’ve sent are either manifest in war or peace.
I don’t think people understand that four more years of Trump, this country is not recognizable. 
So that’s where we are. 
We’re on the precipice here. 
And if we go over with Trump, like I just don’t think we’re ever going to live in quite the same place. 
And that’s already the case, but I mean, even more so. 
On the other hand, if we kind of pull back from this, what I actually think people will probably want is a break, you know. 
Like the next president, you know, might benefit from being kind of boring, you know, just—just technocratic, 
like “Let’s kind of stabilize the ship here.” 
I think a lot of work needs to be done, around the world, to just reintroduce ourselves. 
I don’t think you can possibly minimize the negative effect of Trump’s election around the world on this country, 
because it’s not just the fact that Trump is president; it’s the fact that we elected Trump. 
So these countries are like: “Who are you people? 
We thought—you know, we didn’t agree with everything you did, but we thought you kind of had your stuff together here.” 
What’s interesting is, these debates we have here, like nobody’s having those debates anywhere else. 
Like Trump’s polling at 10 to 15% everywhere in the world, with the exception of, you know, Israel, Russia and Saudi Arabia. 
So we’re all sitting here debating, is he a racist or not, or is he an extremist or not, or is he a secret genius or not? 
Like, nobody else around the world is having that debate, right? 
They don’t need to.
So for me, you know, we’re—we’re basically either going to affirm that actually we are a country that has lots of demons, 
like any country, but generally moves in the right direction, or we’re a country that says, “OK, we’ve 
taken a look at what it’s like to have those demons manifest in the highest office of the land, and let’s keep doing that.” 
That’s a pretty profound choice.
