Alexander Burns

I want to start with the moment that does start it all, which is right in the early-morning hours after the election, and Donald Trump walks out, and he says, "Frankly, I did win this election." Can you describe that moment and what happens and how important it is to everything that would play out afterwards, going to Jan. 6 and beyond?

So that moment where Trump goes out at the White House and declares victory in the election is both a pretty ominous moment, because of what it foreshadows about what he will do in the coming months leading up to Jan. 6; but it's also a moment that reflects his real political weakness that night, that Fox News has already called Arizona for Joe Biden. The early returns looked disproportionately good for Trump in a number of states like Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania, because in-person votes are counted before mail-in ballots, but we know that when the mail-in ballots are counted, Joe Biden is going to gain a lot of ground very fast.

But that Fox call on Arizona really did set the tone for that night in so many ways, that by the time Trump is going out there and declaring victory, there's already a great deal of skepticism about whether he has a good shot to hang on.

What it does show is that he's determined to claim victory and to cast this election as a validation of a second Trump term, really irrespective of what the final results are going to be.

One of the other key players is in the room at that moment, which is Mike Pence. Who is he, and what is he confronted with in that moment, in those hours?

Already on that night you see Mike Pence put in this position where he has to choose between continuing to be the loyal cupbearer for Donald Trump that he has been for four-plus years at that point, and telling the truth to the American people about what seems to be happening in the election. And in that moment, there's still enough ambiguity that Pence can give some pretty rah-rah comments about, you know, being on track for another term without going quite as far as President Trump and just lying about the election already having been decided in their favor. And that's a balancing act that over time will obviously become totally unsustainable for Mike Pence.

… Can you help us understand who is Kevin McCarthy at that moment, and how does he handle when President Trump starts making these claims that the election was stolen or that he actually won?

So Kevin McCarthy—more than almost anybody else in Washington, Kevin McCarthy fits to a T the average American's highly skeptical and cynical view of what a politician really is. He is an ideologically flexible political shape-shifter who is all about accumulating power and status and title for himself. Before he even got to Congress, he was telling Republican strategists and political allies that he intended someday to be speaker of the House. And he spent the four years of the Trump presidency aligning himself with Donald Trump, the most popular figure in the Republican Party, and placating really hard-line, far-right members of the House of Representatives who were close to Donald Trump, because his calculation was, there's no way Kevin McCarthy ever gets 218 votes to make him speaker of the House unless he has reached an accommodation with the far right and unless he has at least the indulgence, if not the enthusiastic support, of Donald Trump.

So once the election is clearly headed in the direction of a Biden victory, and Donald Trump is clearly headed in the direction of contesting that victory and attacking the legitimacy of the election, Kevin McCarthy sides pretty decisively with Donald Trump and starts casting doubt in his own voice on the legitimacy and integrity of the vote, and going on television and vowing in pretty Trumpian language to get to the bottom of all of this apparently underhanded activity that Republicans say is going on in the states.

… What was Lindsey Graham's role in those days after the election, and how did he see himself?

Lindsey Graham has seen himself for years as a kind of ambassador between Donald Trump and the traditional establishment wing of the Republican Party. He plays golf with Trump. He socializes with Trump. He talks to Trump frequently. … He's not totally bought into the Donald Trump phenomenon, or so he says; he is just trying to make this relationship work. And he can go back and forth, and he can be a conduit and a facilitator to make the Republican Party a more harmonious organization. And sometimes that has worked better for Lindsey Graham than others. … Just as the vote is called in Joe Biden's favor, Graham talks to Donald Trump on the phone and urges him to concede gracefully and to say, "I'll be back," so not to treat his defeat as a final and complete humiliation, but to indicate that he recognizes the result of the election, but that he's not going away; he intends to be a force in American politics for years to come.

And Trump hears him out. He doesn't really respond to the idea, and then he does the exact opposite.

This raises a question, because Lindsey Graham goes on Fox, and he raises questions about the election. … He was a pretty strong advocate for Trump in this period. Does he believe these allegations?

At this point, Graham fully expects Joe Biden to be the next president of the United States, and he may believe that it's important to air these allegations and to make sure that the Republican base feels heard and that Donald Trump feels heard, but he is under no illusion in November and December that there is any realistic scenario where Donald Trump winds up getting inaugurated for a second term on Jan. [20].

He also has another part of the strategy, which is something that's going on at that time, which is telling other people, "He just needs time to process it; give him time." What was that message that Graham was giving to other Republicans?

So much of what you hear from Republicans in private—they'll say it to reporters off the record; they'll say it to other Republicans; they'll even say it to their Democratic colleagues on Capitol Hill—is this way of talking about Donald Trump that essentially treats him as an ill-tempered child or a misbehaving animal of some kind … where basically, you need to find a way to manage his behavior for him, because he can't be trusted to manage his behavior for himself.

So after the election, Graham is certainly one of the Republicans who believes that there's no point in trying to force Donald Trump's hand here and push him to concede defeat before he's emotionally ready for that. Let him go through the process, and eventually he'll get there.

But the idea among these Republicans is that if you put too much pressure on Trump, he will respond by lashing out, and then the consequences will be worse than if you let him work through his feelings at his own pace.

… What is the calculation that Mitch McConnell is making? And just as importantly, especially from what you have in your book, what does he know about what is going on, and what is he doing behind the scenes?

There are a couple of major forces weighing on Mitch McConnell at this point. One is the peaceful transfer of power. He believes in it. He expects Joe Biden to be the next president. He does not believe that the election has been stolen, and he thinks that Donald Trump's rhetoric to that effect is entirely bogus.

The other force weighing on him is that there are a pair of Senate runoff elections in Georgia coming up on Jan. 5. After the November election, the balance of power in the Senate is split 50 seats for Republicans, 48 seats for Democrats, with two Republican-held seats in Georgia up for grabs in a Jan. 5 runoff election. And Mitch McConnell knows, in private, that if he comes out against Donald Trump and criticizes Trump for attacking the legitimacy of the election, then Trump can tell Republican voters in Georgia to stay home and throw control of the Senate to the Democrats.

So that's why Mitch McConnell doesn't say very much of anything until the middle of December, when the Electoral College has voted. What he does do, without saying anything in public, is privately open a channel of communication to the man who he understands to be the president-elect—that's Joe Biden—through two other senators: John Cornyn of Texas, a Republican; Chris Coons of Delaware, a Democrat.

McConnell conveys a message to the Biden campaign not to call him. And it's not out of hostility; it's that he doesn't want Joe Biden to pick up the phone and call him and put him in a position where he either has to take the phone call and anger Donald Trump, or reject the phone call and insult the man who he believes to be the incoming president of the United States. And Joe Biden follows that request. Biden does not try to reach Mitch McConnell before the Republican Senate leader is ready to hear from him.

And what does Mitch McConnell know about what Trump is attempting to do? Is he filing lawsuits, or does he actually have a plan to overturn the election to actually win? What does McConnell know from Trump about what's going on during this time?

So he sees what Trump is doing in public, these lawsuits that are going nowhere, these overheated allegations that are obviously false. In early December, Mitch McConnell is meeting with a group of other Senate Republican leaders when the phone rings, and it's President Trump. … Trump begins the call by talking about those upcoming Senate runoffs in Georgia and how upset he is that the governor of the state, Brian Kemp, a Republican, is not following his bidding and interfering with the certification of the vote—and interfering with the certification of the state's election results showing that Joe Biden carried Georgia for the Democratic column.

… With other Republican Senate leaders listening, Trump goes on to tell McConnell that he needs to get Brian Kemp in Georgia to reverse the outcome of the election in his favor, to flip it from a Biden state to a Trump state. And he tells McConnell—again, with the other Senate Republicans listening—that if Brian Kemp does that, then Trump is going to be able to get Republican state legislative leaders in Michigan and Pennsylvania to follow suit and overturn the election results in those states as well, flipping them from Biden states to Trump states.

And the president at that point indicates that he has been in touch with Republican leaders at the state and local level in those states, and he tells McConnell that they are on board; they will go along with this plan.

McConnell doesn't say a whole lot in response on this call. When it winds up, he takes off his glasses, he rubs his eyes, he turns to the other Republican senators and says, "We've just got to stay focused on Georgia."

But when you connect the dots in the timeline of this period of silence and what he knows from the president, can you describe what he's remaining silent in the face of at that moment?

… What's clear in that moment is that Mitch McConnell knows that Donald Trump is not just popping off on Twitter and filing frivolous lawsuits, but that he is making a more concerted effort at the state level to push Republicans to overturn the results of a free and fair election that Joe Biden won legitimately.

And McConnell's reaction to that is to do very little. … He acknowledges Biden publicly as the victor of the election in a speech after the Electoral College votes to seal Biden's victory. What he doesn't do is blow the whistle on what Trump just told him he is doing in Georgia and other states to try to thwart the transfer of power.

… When McConnell finally breaks with Trump, obviously Trump is furious. You spoke to Trump about how he views McConnell now and how he views his decision to finally come out. But what's his perspective on McConnell?

Trump sees Mitch McConnell as a political traitor. They have never been close. They were sort of allies of convenience while Trump was in the White House, where McConnell would cooperate with Trump on a host of his political priorities, and Trump would give McConnell a number of policies and all the judicial appointments he was looking for. But it was never a marriage of love between the two men.

And once McConnell acknowledges Biden as the legitimate winner of the election, after the Electoral College votes, the two men have a phone call. Trump calls McConnell. He's very, very angry. And that's the last time they ever spoke.

And when we interviewed Trump in April of 2021, he just railed against McConnell at length. He said he's a weak leader. He said that if McConnell had done the right thing, then we would have been doing that interview at the White House and not at Mar-a-Lago, his resort—his club in Florida. And he said then, and he has said repeatedly since then, that Senate Republicans should get rid of Mitch McConnell and put somebody else in charge.

Senate Republicans have not seemed particularly interested in doing that. Mitch McConnell is a pretty popular leader with his fellow Senate Republicans. But there is no question that if Donald Trump had his way, he would take out McConnell and put somebody else in that job.

… And as we get towards Jan. 6, a lot of the pressure goes onto the Congress, and one of the people in the middle of that, especially in the House, is Kevin McCarthy. What was his role, and how was he viewed by people inside the White House in that run-up to Jan. 6?

In the run-up to Jan. 6, the White House viewed Kevin McCarthy much as it had viewed him for the previous four years, which is as a totally willing accomplice and enabler of Donald Trump. He has never—at no point in the run-up to Jan. 6 did Kevin McCarthy say, "Enough is enough, folks; the time to question and challenge the election is over." … In a meeting of the House Republican Conference on Jan. 5, Kevin McCarthy goes round and round in circles with every faction of the House GOP, talking about their plans to contest the election, talking about their fears of what could happen the following day if demonstrators come to town and wind up angry and disappointed that they can't stop the certification of Biden's election. He deals with members closer to the political center asking him, "What on Earth are we doing, messing around with this far-out stuff about a stolen election?"

At no point does he say, "Folks, here is the plan. This is what we need to do now. This is what it means for us to behave responsibly as a governing party." He tells Republicans on Jan. 5, over and over again, "Let's just get through tomorrow."

What was the strategy then? What was he thinking if he knew, presumably, this wasn't going to work? What was he trying to do?

To all outward appearances, what McCarthy is trying to do in the run-up to Jan. 5 [sic] is essentially allow his colleagues in the House and Republican voters around the country to let out this kind of primal scream of frustration about Biden's victory and the election and to let them try every possible avenue for challenging Biden's victory with every expectation on Kevin McCarthy's part that those options will all fail, and that after Jan. 6, there will be no more options left, and then everybody can kind of get on with their lives.

That's obviously not quite how things turned out.

There's a couple details in the book that are useful for us because we're trying to understand that caucus that votes, the majority of them, not to certify and the question of, do they believe that the election was stolen? Why are they voting not to certify? And when they're discussing it amongst themselves, what are they saying is the reason why they're going to go along with the plan to not certify the states?

So in this private meeting on Jan. 5, you hear extraordinary candor from some members of the Republican Conference about why they're going to vote to object to certifying Joe Biden's victory. Make no mistake: There are members of the Republican House Conference who believe in their hearts that Donald Trump won the election and that it was stolen from him by scurrilous means.

… But there is a sizable number of people who know that Biden won the election, who know that it wasn't stolen, and who vote to object to certifying his victory anyway because they don't want to deal with the political pain back home from voters on the right if they just did what they know in their hearts to be the right thing.

So as we get to Jan. 6, one of the details that's amazing is Lindsey Graham, who has played this game from being one of the antagonists of Trump in 2016 to being somebody who saw himself as an ambassador and somebody who can control him. And when he sees what happens on Jan. 6, what's his response, and what does he do?

… When Lindsey Graham sees the Capitol being overrun by a violent mob, you start to see him speak and act in a way that really sets aside the role of ambassador between Donald Trump and the establishment Republican Party, and that for a brief moment, you see him siding decisively against Donald Trump, calling up the White House counsel from a secure location in the Capitol complex and saying, "If you don't get this guy under control, we"—meaning Senate Republicans—"are going to demand that the 25th Amendment be invoked and that the Cabinet and the vice president suspend Donald Trump from the presidency."

This is a drastic, drastic shift on Lindsey Graham's part. And again, for this very brief moment, it's obviously clear to him that this strategy of coddling and containing Donald Trump, but not taking him on directly, has failed.

Somebody who doesn't change is Ted Cruz, or doesn't change his strategy anyway. What's his response to Jan. 6?

With Ted Cruz, you see all through the process of the election certification this effort to split the baby and split the baby and split the baby again, where he doesn't want to go quite as far as Donald Trump and his lawyers in alleging these really far-out, preposterous Dominion voting-machine-style conspiracy theories, but where he does want to be seen by the Republican Party's right-wing base as somebody who is speaking up as a voice of skepticism about Joe Biden's victory.

And so in the run-up to Jan. 6, he comes up with this plan that is characteristically rather elaborate, where rather than simply declining to certify Joe Biden's victory, Congress would set up a committee, a special commission to study the contested election and come back to them with some determinations about what ought to be done. He's not saying, "Stop this thing now and make Donald Trump president for another four years," but he is saying, "Let's find somebody else to adjudicate this whole deal," even two months into this whole thing, when it's been adjudicated in state legislatures, boards of elections, courts and so forth.

And so that's his plan going into Jan. 6. And once the attack has begun, Cruz and other senators who were planning to oppose certification of the election are huddling and communicating through their staff and facing demands from Republican leadership to back down, because at this point, Mitch McConnell and other Republican leaders feel very, very strongly that enough is enough; that the Capitol is under attack, and you can't keep on indulging these people.

And Ted Cruz's response is, essentially, "Yes, we can." Not that you want to continue indulging the rioters specifically, but he says, "My plan coming into today was not to vote in favor of certifying Joe Biden's election, and I'm not going to change my plans just because some people have attacked the Capitol." You know, his rationale is that would be letting the rioters win in a different way.

One of the things people say when they look back at Jan. 6 is, well, it was evidence that political violence doesn't work, and it didn't work in the end. But you know some details from inside the Republican Caucus about the members' fear of violence and how it influenced how they reacted. Can you describe what the fear of violence—and what you learned about some members and how they saw how it affected—how they responded?

… So in the aftermath of the attack on the Capitol, there is a broad sense of revulsion, even among congressional Republicans, at the extent to which Donald Trump's most radical and violent supporters took this attack on the election. And for a period of days, or in the case of some lawmakers, weeks, there is a sense that something's got to be done about this, and it's time to crack down on Trump, and it's certainly time to crack down on his enablers on the far right.

And when you talk to Republicans about this period, you have some of them who feel so strongly that it was a moral imperative that Trump had to be punished one way or another. Some of them believed that he deserved to be impeached, and a smaller number actually voted to impeach him. And every time you get closer to actually taking action, the group that we're talking about gets smaller. There's this group that believes that Donald Trump has gone too far; there's this group that believes it's important to punish him; and there's this group that is actually willing to put their names on the record as being in favor of punishment.

And when you talk to the folks in that smallest group, every single one of them will tell you that they heard from colleagues in Congress, privately, sympathizing with them, telling them, "You're absolutely right." Telling them, "I wish that I could have cast the same vote as you," but ultimately declining to do that, in part because they were afraid for their lives, for the physical well-being of their families, and that they simply did not want to feel like they were going to be under siege at home and in airports, because that's exactly what happened to a number of the lawmakers who carried out their private vows to take on Donald Trump.

… Where is Liz Cheney on Jan. 6? What does she do? How does she respond?

Liz Cheney is in the Capitol on Jan. 6, and she's in the Capitol when Donald Trump is on the National Mall, telling a mob of his angry supporters that they need to take on the Liz Cheneys of the world. He mentions her by name. And when the Capitol is evacuated and she is being rushed to a secure location, she turns to a Democratic member of Congress and says, "We've got to do something about Trump."

And when she's finally in the secure location, with a large bipartisan group that is in hiding from a violent mob … one Democratic member of Congress approaches her and tells her that he thinks it's time to do something about Trump, and he begins to say to her, "We've got to—," and she cuts him off and says, "impeach the son of a bitch." So she finishes his sentence, making it, "We've got to impeach the son of a bitch." And already, the Capitol complex has not even been cleared of rioters or secured. It is very clear that Liz Cheney has made up her mind, and there's no going back.

And why Liz Cheney? She had fought back against the first impeachment. She maybe didn't like Trump, but she had been on board on the Republican leadership, and McCarthy will go a different way. What makes her make that choice, in those days after the election and on Jan. 6, that takes her on a different path from the rest of the Republicans?

Liz Cheney is somebody who, for obvious reasons, has a real sense of history and the history of the Republican Party and a real sense of the presidency and the power of the presidency and the White House. She's a vice president's daughter. She served in the State Department. She has been a Republican leader since virtually the moment she got to Capitol Hill.

… And Liz Cheney, like some other Republicans, never warmed to Donald Trump but tolerated him for four years. Opposed his impeachment the first time, but was never one of the Republicans who would be out in public spinning Trump's most preposterous lies or defending his most outrageous behavior. In a lot of ways she takes the Mitch McConnell path for most of the Trump presidency: not going to war with him, but not hanging out with him and playing golf and trying to make him her best friend either.

And it's clear in the run-up to Jan. 6 that she is going to be in a really different place about the outcome of the election than President Trump. And when violence strikes the Capitol, and when Donald Trump whips up a mob to go after the seat of American government and attacks her by name, Liz Cheney makes an immediate and irreversible moral judgment in a way that very, very few other Republicans do.

What happens in those days right after Jan. 6 is so clarifying, because it's a necessary context for what happens later and for understanding why—when people change, they make different decisions. And one of the first details that seems revealing is a meeting that Mitch McConnell has on Jan. 7 with his staff, and you can sense from that how he actually feels about what's happened. What does he say? How does he describe the president? How does he respond?

… After the senators have returned to the Capitol and the complex has been secured again, Mitch McConnell calls his staff together. Mitch McConnell is not a man given to big, explosive speeches, but in the privacy of this meeting with his staff, he is very blunt about describing Donald Trump as a "despicable human being" and telling them that they should be proud of the work they've done for four years to essentially work around Donald Trump to achieve conservative policy goals, even with the impediment of Donald Trump as the president they have to work with, and telling them that things are going to move to a new phase now, where there are times where you work with Trump; there are times you work against him; and that after Jan. 6, things are going to be in a different stage.

… The other person, of course, is Kevin McCarthy. … He has his own meeting on Jan. 10, where you can describe how he understood that moment in the post-Jan. 6, the politics, how he was coming to understand what was going on.

On the night of Jan. 6, even after the riot has taken place, Kevin McCarthy returns to the Capitol and votes to object to certifying the election. So he has seen the consequences of Donald Trump's behavior and of his attacks on the legitimacy of the 2020 vote, and he still, that night, decides that he's going to side with the majority of the House Republican Conference and pander to the Republican Party's electoral base and vote to oppose the transfer of power to Joe Biden.

In private, in the days after the riot, McCarthy is much, much more ambivalent about Trump, and he wrestles in a different way with the implications of Trump's behavior and the implications of the broader Republican attack on the 2020 election. On Jan. 10, he has a phone call with a small group of Republican congressional leaders, and he speaks with extraordinary candor about the danger of that moment and of feeling that Donald Trump has crossed a line that should never have been crossed, that far-right members of the Republican Conference have done and said things that have put people's lives in danger. And he tells those other Republican leaders on that small, intimate and at the time confidential call that Trump had to be punished, perhaps pushed out of office, pressured to resign, and that the extreme right in the House of Representatives had to simply knock it off, because if they did not stop attacking each other and attacking the election, then there could be more violence, another insurrection, and more people could get hurt.

When you listen to that … what does it tell you about Kevin McCarthy, about the decisions he would make later and the calculations he would have to make?

I think there is a general perception of Kevin McCarthy as this totally cynical character, who is either totally unable to distinguish between right and wrong, or indifferent to the boundaries between right and wrong, as long as something serves his personal ambitions. What you hear on that call is that Kevin McCarthy totally understands the difference between right and wrong in that moment, and he knows that Donald Trump has done something deeply, deeply wrong, and that members of his own Republican Conference have done the same and collaborated with Trump and even gone beyond Trump in ways that he cannot sanction.

And what he does about all of that is virtually nothing. He says on that call that he's going to call Trump and tell him that it would be his recommendation that Trump resign rather than face another push from Democrats to impeach him. By McCarthy's account and by Donald Trump's account, Kevin McCarthy never made that phone call.

… In a matter of days or weeks, Kevin McCarthy has almost entirely reversed himself on the commitments he made on that call. He never calls Donald Trump to tell him he ought to resign. He makes some discreet phone calls to far-right members of the Republican Conference, but he never publicly dresses them down, and he never repeats the kind of stern denunciation that you hear from him in private.

And by the end of January, before the month is out, he has flown down to Florida after Donald Trump has left office and posed with Trump for a photo at Mar-a-Lago. So the idea that Kevin McCarthy on Jan. 10 sounds like he is poised to do an unprecedented thing for him and break decisively with Donald Trump because of the president's conduct on Jan. 6, by the end of the month, that has totally evaporated.

Why? What happens between those two moments?

A couple of things happen between those two points. McCarthy speaks to the Republican Conference as a whole the very next day on Jan. 11. He doesn't tell them that he thinks Donald Trump ought to resign. He doesn't tell them that he thinks Donald Trump ought to be punished in any way. He tells them that Trump bears responsibility for the attack on Jan. 6, and he tells them that he conveyed that to Trump and that Trump agreed with him.

So on Jan. 11, you have Kevin McCarthy claiming to hundreds of Republican members of Congress that, in private, Donald Trump recognizes that he behaved improperly on Jan. 6. Trump says that that never happened.

What Kevin McCarthy gets back on that phone call is a cacophony of voices from the middle of the Republican Party to the far right of the Republican Party. The call itself is relatively orderly, but the message coming out of it is chaos, because there are people on that call who clearly believe that Donald Trump has done something impeachable that demands immediate and severe punishment. You hear from Liz Cheney on that call. You hear from other lawmakers like Adam Kinzinger, who will ultimately go on to vote for impeachment in just a few days. And you also hear from Republicans who are—some of them are further to the right, some of them are not even all that far right, but they come from very conservative districts, and the feedback McCarthy gets is there's not a whole lot of appetite from these members of Congress to take on Donald Trump and then go back home to their overwhelmingly Republican constituencies and face the consequences. …

That same day, I think, Mitch McConnell is talking about impeachment. … The question had been, was McConnell serious that he believed that Trump could be impeached, that they could rid him from the Republican Party through impeachment? What was McConnell's attitude towards impeachment?

On Jan. 11, the Monday after the attack, McConnell has lunch in Louisville with two of his longtime advisers. And in that conversation, he certainly sounds like he's serious about formally punishing Donald Trump, perhaps through the process of impeachment.

It's obvious to him, at that point, that Democrats are going to have the votes to impeach Trump in the House, and that that process will move to the Senate. And what he says on that day is, "The Democrats are going to take care of this son of a bitch for us" ... meaning that this impeachment process is going to deliver the kind of disqualifying political blow to Donald Trump that Mitch McConnell believes he so richly deserves.

He says that if Donald Trump's behavior on Jan. 6 wasn't an impeachment offense, he doesn't know what is. And he predicts in that moment that there will be the votes in the Senate to convict Donald Trump. That would mean all 50 Democrats plus at least 17 Republicans for the two-thirds majority required for a conviction.

And after a conviction, the Senate and the House could vote by a simple majority to bar Donald Trump from ever holding public office again.

… So from there, can you take us through how we end up with McConnell, who gives a strong speech against Trump, but who will delay the trial and who will vote to acquit? How does he get from that point, where he sounds like he's going to be morally righteous and he's going to finally get Trump, to where he ends up being?

Similar to what happens with Kevin McCarthy in the House of Representatives, in the Senate, Mitch McConnell starts out taking the very strong view that Trump deserves punishment, he deserved impeachment, he deserves conviction, and that he's open to voting to convict him. Then he meets with his Senate colleagues, and it is unmistakably apparent to Mitch McConnell that there is actually not much of an appetite among other Senate Republicans for punishing Donald Trump, for the exact same reason there's not much appetite for doing it among House Republicans. Republican voters, by this point, have made it apparent that they're sticking with Donald Trump. There is not a rush to the exits from the Donald Trump wing of the Republican Party. And while Mitch McConnell may be nearing the end of his career and the end of his time as the Senate Republican leader, there are a whole lot of other Senate Republicans who are planning to serve for years or decades, who may play to run for president themselves sooner or later, and who don't want to take on the voters back home who are sticking with Donald Trump.

And so when the impeachment process begins, McConnell's fellow Kentucky senator, Rand Paul, offers a resolution disapproving of the whole process, because Donald Trump has left office at this point. The impeachment process begins in the House while he's still president, but it only moves to the Senate after he has left office. And Rand Paul offers a resolution saying this is improper; you should not impeach a former official. It is not within the power of the Congress. This is very much contested as a legal point.

But Senate Republicans overwhelmingly vote for Rand Paul's resolution, and one of the Senate Republicans who votes with him is Mitch McConnell. And at that point, he's signaling that maybe he's not entirely sure that he can go through with convicting Donald Trump. And when one of his political allies looks to him for some kind of explanation, McConnell's response is, "I didn't get to be leader by voting with five" other senators. That's how lopsided the vote was, and he wasn't going to be in the minority.

… But you did talk to Liz Cheney about her view of McConnell, and apparently she had even her own communications with McConnell. How did she view that decision that he made, to walk away from where he had been; to go silent on Trump; to say he would support him? What was her perspective on that?

Liz Cheney's view is that Mitch McConnell is being politically naive about this whole question of how to dispense with Donald Trump; that McConnell's hope is that you can avoid all-out war with Trump, but just kind of quietly move on and hope that Trump will lose strength and momentum with the passage of time and with the emergence of other Republican leaders; that he won't always be the king of the GOP; and we don't have to go to war in order to dethrone him.

Liz Cheney believes that that is a fanciful proposition and that the only way you can get rid of Donald Trump is by getting rid of Donald Trump. And she and McConnell start out pretty closely aligned politically, despite their differences on the matter of impeachment. McConnell defends Liz Cheney publicly when there's an effort to kick her out of Republican leadership. Cheney privately expresses respect for McConnell, despite him not following through with a vote to convict Donald Trump.

And then as the months go by, and Liz Cheney suffers more consequences for having taken on Donald Trump and persists in taking him on anyway, and as Mitch McConnell backs further and further away from confrontation with Trump, the relationship grows more strained, and there's more of a mutual recognition that, you know, maybe we're not on the same team after all.

… The last thing on McConnell is the bipartisan commission. Why does he oppose the commission, which seems like a chance to—I mean, bipartisan, to bring everybody together. It seems like something he would have supported earlier on. Why does he say that he's going to vote against it?

Well, in private, for all his authentic indignation about what happened on Jan. 6, Mitch McConnell is a political animal through and through, and he sees a bipartisan investigation of the Jan. 6 attack that would stretch on for months and months and into the 2022 election as a political headache every step of the way. … He sees it as a vehicle that Democrats could use to embarrass the Republican Party, and more than that, he sees it as a force that would stoke further conflict between him and between people he sees as responsible Republicans and Donald Trump.

And so his preference is to, again, make all of this go away, turn the page. … In his view, he has said his piece on Jan. 6, and he has said it in no uncertain terms. But he sees no political benefit to continuing that conversation, continuing to reiterate his outrage about Jan. 6. And his goal at this point is not to punish Donald Trump; it's not to purge the Republican Party of Donald Trump and his supporters. It's to win back the Senate majority in the 2022 elections, and he sees an ongoing investigation of Jan. 6 as an impediment to that goal.

… Before we go to that final breakup between Kevin McCarthy and Liz Cheney and the party choosing its place, let's go back for one second to a moment you mentioned, which was at Mar-a-Lago, which is, how important was that for Donald Trump? And what did Kevin McCarthy do? What were the consequences of him being in that photo at that meeting at that moment?

For Republicans who wanted Donald Trump to disappear, whether they were willing to take him on themselves or not; for Republicans who hoped that Donald Trump would fade away after leaving the presidency, that he would become something of a political and social and cultural pariah; that photograph with Kevin McCarthy represents a pivotal moment at reviving Trump as a political force and reintroducing him into the American mainstream, if he ever really left.

So if you talk to members of Congress who voted to impeach Donald Trump or who simply wish that he was no longer the leader of the Republican Party, however they voted on impeachment, one way or the other, they see that photo with McCarthy as a deeply, deeply fateful moment.

And McCarthy took some heat privately after that photo. Members came to him and said, "What on Earth were you doing there?" And he offers this very tortured explanation, that he was sort of in the neighborhood; he was doing fundraising in South Florida already, and Donald Trump invited him over, so surely it would have been rude and more provocative not to go. And he tells one lawmaker, you know, "I didn't know there was going to be a photograph," which is really a pretty feeble excuse, given Donald Trump's record of posing for photographs with basically anybody who visits him. … So from that moment on, any possibility that Trump was simply going to be shunned by the mainstream leadership of the Republican Party simply disappears.

Inside the party, the tensions are growing. It seems like McCarthy in February thinks maybe he can have a big tent; he can have Liz Cheney; he can have Marjorie Taylor Greene. Can you describe those internal discussions that the party is having? It seems to be very clear that they realize they are making a choice, that this is a moment they have to decide who they are as a party. What does that conversation inside the caucus—over Liz Cheney, over the future of the party?

After Liz Cheney votes in favor of impeaching Donald Trump, she faces ferocious backlash from other members of the Republican Conference: some who sincerely believed it was the wrong vote, and others who see it as a real pain politically to have a member of the Republican leadership team doing what they weren't willing to do and actually taking on Donald Trump directly. They don't want to deal with voters back home berating them about this member of House Republican leadership attacking President Trump, and they don't want to deal with reporters asking them, "Why do you disagree with Liz Cheney that what Donald Trump did was totally unacceptable and impeachable?"

And so there is this push from the right flank of the House Republican Conference to kick her out of leadership in early February, and what happens at that point is the sort of mainstream conservative center of the Republican Conference sticks with her, and so does Kevin McCarthy, who gives a speech in her defense in a meeting of the Republican Conference and basically makes the argument that they ought to be a party that is willing to tolerate differences of opinion about Donald Trump. That he obviously didn't agree with Liz Cheney—he voted the other way; so did every other member of the leadership team—but that it would send the wrong message to purge her from leadership for having taken that vote, because, by the way, there are 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Donald Trump. That's a good number in the House Republican Conference, and if you start purging people who took that vote, it's not going to stop with Liz Cheney.

She is reaffirmed as a member of leadership in early February. The effort to kick her out fails. But still, there's a substantial vote in favor of purging her.

What McCarthy and other Republican leaders … hope, and convey to Cheney, is that she will just sort of move on; that she had her say about Trump, she voted to impeach him. But like most Republican members of Congress, Kevin McCarthy and the rest of the Republican leadership team does not see any political benefit in a drawn-out conflict with Trump, and they ask Cheney to consider seeing the world in that way, too, and she declines to do that.

… What does he say to her about her approach? Does he try to stop her from speaking?

… So in private, he [McCarthy] doesn't scold her, but he does convey to her in so many words, "You know, Liz, you're killing me here; that this is a real political inconvenience for me, and I really wish that you would stop doing this."

And there are moments where Cheney seems to recognize that this is maybe not the most constructive political course for her own future … that she does not have the majority position in the Republican Party, and that if she's going to continue poking the bear and provoking Donald Trump, there are going to be consequences for her, and there are going to be consequences for the party as a whole.

And when she keeps on criticizing Trump, other Republicans who are sympathetic to her position, including at least one Republican, John Katko of New York, who voted for impeachment, start to complain that, you know, every time she opens her mouth she is making it harder for me to get reelected.

… The joint commission is not created, and a committee is going to be a select House committee, and he's choosing who is going to be on it. And what does he decide? How does it play out? What's the effect of his decision and how America will understand what happened on Jan. 6?

So there's an opportunity here for McCarthy to actually play a significant role in steering the Jan. 6 investigation, because it is set up to be a bipartisan commission. He names a set of lawmakers to the panel that includes some respected, mainstream Republicans who Democrats believe they can work with. It also includes two very, very right-wing Republicans who have said and done some things around the 2020 election and around Jan. 6 that, in the eyes of Democrats, make them totally unacceptable. The most provocative choice is Jim Jordan, the congressman from Ohio, who has been one of the most extreme-right members of the chamber, one of the most unflaggingly loyal Trump surrogates in the House. And those are provocative choices. … It's almost a dare to Nancy Pelosi to allow these hard-line, pro-Trump lawmakers to be in the room with the other members of the special committee for the most sensitive parts of the investigation and the most fateful decisions that that committee will make. And Nancy Pelosi decides that she is unwilling to do that. So she rejects those two appointments, and Kevin McCarthy responds by pulling all of his selections from the committee and saying, "If you won't take the most hard-line, pro-Trump members I've chosen, then you don't get any Republicans at all."

The catch is that he doesn't actually control every member of the Republican Conference at that point, and so what Nancy Pelosi does is, she picks up the phone and she calls one Republican who she feels confident will take her up on an invitation to join this select committee, and that's Liz Cheney.

And she calls her. Liz Cheney is at a doctor's appointment with her father when she gets the call, and Pelosi tells her that she admires the way she has conducted herself since Jan. 6 and that she would like her to be part of the committee, and Liz Cheney immediately says yes.

… Where does Lindsey Graham end up after we leave him on the floor, threatening Donald Trump? What's his journey?

By the time spring rolls around in 2021, Lindsey Graham is back to his old role as the ambassador to Donald Trump. And in the Senate Republicans' weekly lunches, he is briefing them on Donald Trump's thinking, and he is sharing Donald Trump's latest mean or quasi-affectionate nicknames for different members of the Senate Republican Conference. And he's going back to Donald Trump, and he is trying to guide his hand politically in what he, Lindsey Graham, believes to be a more productive direction.

Look, some of this is obviously self-justification on the part of a politician who kind of can't stay away. Donald Trump is the biggest figure in the Republican Party. Lindsey Graham loves to be at the center of the action, and so, whatever he was thinking and feeling on Jan. 6, once it becomes inescapably clear to him that Donald Trump is here to stay, then he returns to his old role.

When we were interviewing Donald Trump in April of 2021 at Mar-a-Lago, his phone rang, and at first he screened the call, and then his phone rang again, and he picked it up, and it was Lindsey Graham, who was persistently trying to reach him. And he put Graham on speaker so that he could show off the phone call to the reporters who were visiting him, and Graham didn't want to have the full conversation within earshot of reporters, because he wanted to share some sensitive political information. But within full earshot of reporters, he allowed Donald Trump to nudge him on the question of how good a golfer Donald Trump is. And he told Sen. Graham, "Tell these guys about Trump's golf game," and Graham fully and enthusiastically obliged.

And it was an extraordinary thing to hear this figure, who we knew, at that point, had only three months earlier gone to the floor of the Senate and said, "I am done with Trump," acting as this kind of chortling sidekick on speakerphone, knowing full well that there were reporters listening and that that exchange would become public; that this goes beyond just sort of privately serving as a go-between and facilitator. It was really embracing that role again in a way that surprised me.

One of the important things you say in the book is that the explanation—is that Donald Trump is very powerful inside the Republican Party, but that of course he's powerful because people like Graham are going to him. So that's the question: Did the Republican Party have a choice after Jan. 6 about the direction that they were going? And why is Donald Trump so powerful? What was the Republican Party's role in continuing him in the position he's come into?

If there had been a decision among Republican leaders immediately after Jan. 6 that they had to risk everything to punish and purge this man from the party and from the political system, they certainly had the opportunity to do that: through impeaching him, through convicting him … through barring him from holding public office in the future, and through turning their backs on him, and not visiting him in Mar-a-Lago, and not soliciting his endorsement for political campaigns, and in not saying that they would support him if he were the presidential nominee again in 2024.

And the problem is that that would have carried an enormous political price for these Republican leaders, that they would have risked losing the support of voters back home. They would have risked losing the support of their colleagues in Congress. But they could have decided to do it anyway. They could have decided that that was a risk worth taking, and they didn't.

And what almost every single one of them has done since then has been either to actively enable and encourage or to passively allow Donald Trump to reclaim his grip on the Republican Party and to tighten it heading into the next election.

When you talked to Donald Trump, he said something that seems striking, given his power inside the Republican Party about the next election and about how angry people are if he doesn't win again. How did you understand what he was saying to you and what it says about our politics and where the party is?

In our interview with him, there was no apparent shred of remorse about Jan. 6. And in fact, there was almost a veiled threat about the future; that he said that if the next election goes the wrong way, people need to understand there's a lot of anger out there. There's a lot of anger about what happened in 2020, and there's a lot of anger about the direction of the country.

He didn't say that he was glad Jan. 6 happened. At that point, he was saying that he thought it was antifa and other sort of left-wing provocateurs who had stirred up the riot. But he also never said, "That kind of thing should never, ever happen again." And he did say that there was a lot of anger out there, and that people should be very, very sensitive to that.

… Having studied this period, having studied what happened before Jan. 6, what happened when this happened after Jan. 6, how do you understand the Republican Party? How do you understand American democracy, what the threat is, where we are at this moment?

… Donald Trump's attack on the 2020 election, and the Republican Party's decision to participate in that attack and to shield him from punishment for that attack, has put American democracy in an extraordinarily dangerous place. Whatever traditions we have had in this country around the peaceful transfer of power and around the responsibility of a defeated candidate, and especially a defeated president, to accept the outcome of the election and go quietly, have been strained to the point of irrelevance. … I don't know that we can look to 2024 and say we're headed for another Jan. 6, but I also don't think that anybody can look to 2024 and say we can have confidence that the peaceful transfer of power will happen, mainly because one of the country's two political parties has shown over and over again that it is not willing to take serious political risks in order to rein in a leader that they know to be profoundly dangerous.

… In the context of all you've reported on, when you look back on the lead-up to Jan. 6, you look at what happened after Jan. 6, how important were individuals and individuals' decisions in what happened and in the strength of American democracy?

… Donald Trump's attack on the 2020 election and the events of Jan. 6 were disturbing enough as it is, but they could have been so much worse if a relatively small number of people had not decided to act responsibly. If you had had Republican governors like Brian Kemp in Georgia or Doug Ducey in Arizona going along with Donald Trump's attack on the election, or if you had had a handful of federal judges deciding that they were going to really take seriously Donald Trump's ludicrous claims about a conspiracy to steal the election, we could have come a lot closer to the edge than we even did.

And part of the problem with getting as close to the edge as we did is that it makes it easier to go there again next time, and maybe it makes it a little bit easier to go a bit further than that.

So the notion that the American political system, that the country's political institutions and traditions were built to last, I think we can look at that notion with a great deal more skepticism than we did even a couple years ago.

And heading into the 2024 election, Americans need to take very seriously the possibility that a handful of individual actors, determined to inflict real damage on the system, might succeed in a way they did not in 2020.