Scott Jennings

Let’s start back with 2016 and Trump as the insurgent candidate, the candidate that’s out there sort of promising a hostile takeover. Does the GOP sort of know what kind of president they’re bringing, is slowly turning out to be the candidate? What’s sort of the overview of leadership, do you think, of this very different kind of Republican candidate?

Well, I think a couple of things. Number one, if you look at the results of the 2016 primary, Donald Trump overall won less than half the votes, so there was obviously trepidation among Republican voters. At the same time, though, he was espousing a message that had been appealing to Republicans for a number of years, and that was that politicians are problems and that outsiders are needed to change—fundamentally change Washington—that Washington needed to be shaken up, and that ultimately was an appealing enough message to win a multi-headed primary.

And then, lo and behold, he got a chance to run against the ultimate insider, Hillary Clinton. And so it felt like, I think, to a lot of Republicans that even though he was indicting the whole system, the whole political system, both parties—that the message actually set up pretty well for the general election. And of course he did end up tripping into the presidency even though he lost the popular vote.

So I think Republicans were nervous about what kind of a candidate Donald Trump would be, but he found a message and he found a marketing scheme that seemed to meet the moment. Now that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to be good at governing, but it certainly meant for the momentary politics that Republicans were willing to overlook a lot of red flags in the hopes that that kind of message would sell in the 2016 general election.

Talk a little bit about the choice of Pence, certainly a man 180 degrees different than Donald Trump. What was the thinking in that sort of relationship? I know the GOP leadership was pushing for it. I know the Trump people in the beginning were not overwhelmingly happy with it. What was the analysis of why that relationship would work?

Well, I mean, with Donald Trump, a lot of his relationship with the Republican Party has been purely transactional, and with Mike Pence, I think it was a choice to complete the transaction with conservatives, evangelical Christians and others that make up the Republican coalition to say, “I’m not necessarily one of you, and I haven’t been one of you for my entire life, but Mike Pence is.” And to me, it showed Donald Trump actually did understand something about the Republican Party and American politics in that he knew he had deficiencies in certain parts of his appeal to the Republican base, and therefore he had to find a way to shore those up.

And part of the way you do that sometimes is adopting certain policy positions. And in the case of running for president, sometimes you take on a running mate that makes up for your deficiencies. It’s actually something Barack Obama did, you know. He thought his deficiencies were in foreign policy and in understanding how Washington worked, so he picked an old foreign policy guy, Joe Biden, who was in the United States Senate. George W. Bush picked, you know, somebody who made up for deficiencies in certain areas.

So Trump actually showed, I think, some political acumen in picking someone that filled in some gaps in his conservative or Republican resume. And Pence, of course, was someone who was well liked by Republicans and an authentic conservative and certainly someone who espoused the social conservatism that motivates a great many Republican voters.

Were you at the convention?

Yeah. I’ve been a delegate to the last four conventions, yes.

So you’re watching this convention, and Pence is up there on the stage. What do you think his feelings were? Why did he want the job? What did he think his role would be? And how do you think he helped the GOP by being that man to take on that role?

Well, I think Mike Pence—look, I don’t know him. I’ve met him; don’t know him very well, and I haven’t been a consultant for him. But my assumption is that Mike Pence thought that he was going to bring to Donald Trump authentic viewpoints about what motivates lifelong actual Republicans. I mean, remember, by the time the convention rolled around, Donald Trump of course had won the primary, but he hadn’t been a Republican for all that long, and he wasn’t really steeped in what it means to be a Republican and what motivates actual Republicans and conservatives.

But of course Mike Pence was very steeped in all that, understood it very well, spoke the language of the modern conservative thinker. And so my assumption is that he thought he would be bringing all of that knowledge to Donald Trump so that Donald Trump would not only be an effective campaigner in the fall, but that he would then be able to implement, you know, those kinds of views when he became—if he became the president.

So I think Mike Pence saw himself as at least an ambassador from the authentic conservative, but maybe more than that, more of maybe a minister—ministerial in that he was there to deliver on the promises that the Republican Party had made to conservative voters, not just during the 2016 election but for a long time.

What was the opinion of the leadership, of McConnell specifically, that here was a— [audio breakup], basically to sign the bills that they put forward, the things that were on the agenda for the Republican Party. Was there some sort of feeling that it didn’t matter that Trump would have to learn the ropes, but in fact he would be very helpful, because he was the guy that would be able to allow them to get through the legislation that they really needed?

Well, I think everybody had some trepidation about Trump’s lack of experience and his lack of experience at being an actual Republican. But the fact that he did run as a Republican and then the fact that the voters of the party ultimately awarded him the nomination I think caused a lot of people to say, “Well, they have some say in this as well.” And I think if you’re Mitch McConnell, and you are going to run the Republican Party in the U.S. Senate, you want to achieve outcomes. Any Republican president would have supported and pursued a lot of the goals that Donald Trump signed onto.

And so for McConnell, I think in some ways it didn’t really matter who the Republican president was going to be as long as they pursued a Republican agenda. And I think when Trump came along, because he didn’t have, you know, a real governing philosophy himself, he didn’t have a core that was Republican or conservative, it did allow Republican Party leaders to say, “OK, well, here’s what you can accomplish.”

I think specifically on McConnell, he is an outcomes-based politician. He wants outcomes. What’s within the realm of the possible given the circumstances that I have been presented? And what was within the realm of the possible with Donald Trump was to maybe win the 2016 election and then use the next four years to do the things that Republicans wanted to do: cut taxes, install conservative judges. I mean, McConnell, of course, during the Obama years, had worked very hard to leave open a judiciary that would be accepting of a Republican president’s judges. Obviously the most famous one was the slot on the Supreme Court.

So whether it was Donald Trump or Jeb Bush or any of the other people in between, I think what McConnell was hoping to do was create an opening for a Republican president to implement a Republican agenda. And that’s exactly what most of the time Donald Trump did. You know, for four years, many of the bills he signed into the law, the judges he appointed, the regulations that he slashed, all of that would have been done by any other Republican president, too. Now, along the way, of course, he’s done other things that aren’t conservative or terribly useful to the Republican Party, but a great many of the policy achievements under Donald Trump, I think, would have been policy achievements under most other Republican presidents.

Obamacare. Talk to me about what you saw when—so here was the new president, thinking, OK, the legislators tell me they know what they’re doing; they’ll get this thing through, rejecting Obamacare. And then it fails. And all of a sudden, the tirade comes out about McConnell, and the tweets start happening. What’s going on with the relationship at that point, and did it send up red flags for McConnell about the future?

Well, I think McConnell had a legislative relationship with Trump, and he also had a political relationship with Trump. And again, I just—I’m going to keep returning to this word in our conversation, because it matters a lot, and the word is “outcomes.” And for McConnell, he had a couple of outcomes that he needed to achieve. One on the legislative side—the outcomes that you would hope to get out of a Republican White House from a policy perspective, but then, as a political matter, you know, he wants to win and maintain the Senate majority. He wants to be reelected. He wants the Republican Party to win as many races as it can. Those are also outcomes that need to be achieved.

So anybody in Mitch McConnell’s position is wearing a couple of hats. And I think back when the Obamacare failure—the failure to repeal occurred, you know, if you go back and look at what happened there, McConnell made an offhanded remark in a hallway to a small-town reporter in Kentucky after giving a speech to a Rotary Club or something, and that ultimately was seen by the president. 11Politico: If we can't repeal Obamacare, we'll fix itSo it wasn’t like he sat down for Meet the Press or 60 Minutes and gave some wide-ranging interview. It was literally just an offhanded and, by the way, honest remark about the president’s expectations. And that’s what set it off.

And so I think he learned at that point a little bit about how to deal with Donald Trump, but again, all in the pursuit of outcomes. I think McConnell always was thinking about, how do I keep this relationship as fresh and as vibrant and as engaged as possible so that we can achieve outcomes together? And I think from that point forward, it was a learning experience. And then if you look at what happened from that point forward, they did accomplish quite a lot together. I mean, I’m sure there’s—there’s a lot of tape of this out there, but McConnell has described his relationship with Trump and their working relationship as the most productive period of center-right governance in his career.

I mean, that’s a pretty sweeping statement. But none of it would have been possible had McConnell done what, you know, I think a lot of people in the media and the Democrats wanted him to do, which is essentially spend all day long commenting on the latest tweet or the latest outrage of the day. And I think McConnell decided there’s no—there’s no use in this. If I want to achieve outcomes, that’s the opposite of what will get me to outcomes.

One of the nonproductive events that took place was Charlottesville. The effect of Charlottesville and Trump’s reaction to that, and the hitting back, I mean, there were a lot of folks that didn’t say a lot in the GOP, but there were some people who spoke up and said, “This is a problem here.” And then, instead of backing off, instead of apologizing or whatever, Trump stood his ground and then attacked his critics, and attacked critics like Jeff Flake, Sen. Flake and others, in a very strident way. What was the lesson that we learned from Charlottesville?

As you may know, I have a job on CNN to represent Republicans and conservative views, and I was one of the first people—I remember being on the air as it was unfolding. I just happened to be there for my normal slot on that Saturday, and I was one of the first Republicans that criticized what was happening and criticized President Trump’s reaction to it.

And—and then, what was amazing to me, my memory of the whole thing, was just how obvious it was that the president had made a mistake in how he had reacted to it. If you’ll remember, he was not at the White House that day. He was somewhere else, and he was supposed to be giving remarks on a different matter. I think it had to do with a piece of legislation. And they kind of thrust him out there I think without the full facts, and he was really in a bad position right out of the gate. The reaction was bad, and it was apparent that this was just turning into a complete and total debacle, a disaster for our country. It was a shameful moment.

But what I learned in that moment is that Trump doesn’t accept the idea that his first reaction to something could be wrong, and he also is susceptible to allowing people to create narratives for him that fit a worldview in which you can never be wrong. So on the Charlottesville thing, it was apparent to anybody who saw what was happening and unfolding and how he reacted to it that that was an incorrect reaction. It was not helpful to the country.

But then, you know, many people came along and convinced him that, “No, no, you’re right, and they’re wrong.” And we’ve seen that play out time and again. And so I think one thing we learned about—about the Charlottesville matter is that oftentimes, while I think the president had frequently had good political instincts on some issues, his instincts on larger cultural matters are sometimes incorrect and unhelpful. And then his unwillingness to reexamine that as things are unfolding is problematic.

I mean, you have that, I guess, luxury as a private citizen or as a commentator or, you know, somebody with a lesser position. But the president of the United States should be held to a higher standard, and we learned there that Donald Trump wasn’t willing to hold himself to a higher standard.

And was it worrisome for McConnell? I mean, McConnell is the guy that is responsible for pushing the GOP’s agenda through and for the wellness of the party. Was an event like that, did that send up red flags for McConnell?

Well, McConnell has always been extremely sensitive about the Republican Party’s relationship with the African American community and on civil rights matters in general. If you read his book, if you listen to him talk about these matters, they’re very personal to him. You know, as a young man, he was in the Capitol when the civil rights legislation was signed, Civil Rights Act, and he’s always taken very seriously—I mean, he’s from Kentucky, and he represents the party of Lincoln from the state that was the birthplace of Abraham Lincoln.

So for a number of reasons, I think McConnell has always been very sensitive to these issues. And so when something like Charlottesville happened, I remember him saying, “Republicans have no margin for error on these matters, and we have to get these things right. We have to react to these things correctly.” And so I’m sure it was a huge disappointment for him. In the moment, I remember him being critical of what happened in the moment there and the way the president reacted to it.

But I think for McConnell, who tends to take the long view of issues, I mean, he knows the Republican Party brand and image better than just about anyone. And something that has stuck with me, that I’ve heard him say, was, “We just have no margin for error on these issues. We have to get these matters right if we hope to compete for voters in these groups that are highly offended by this, and should be offended by it.”

And so, you know, I don’t think it’s too flip to look at this through a political lens. But if you’re Mitch McConnell and your business is politics, how can you not? And I think in that particular moment, he and many others realized not just what a moral failing Charlottesville was, but it was a—there were political implications for that as well, not just in the moment, but for the long-term health of the party.

And as we know now, a message to some folk in the Republican Party that had glommed onto Trump that would cause problems last week.

Yeah. Yes. I mean, there are obviously people out there who feel like intimidation and violence is part of our political spectrum, that I didn’t previously think of as being a part of the American political spectrum. And look, to be honest with you, I’ve been concerned about many Republicans—many Americans, I think, have been concerned about this all year. We’ve seen political violence in America all year. Obviously, there were violent personalities at Charlottesville. There’s been a rising tide of people who are willing to accept the idea that political violence could be part of our system, and that manifested itself fully in the insurrection at the Capitol.

And so I just think, when you’re the president, when you hold high political office, even if you think the other side is doing something inappropriate or hasn’t done enough, you have to hold yourself to a higher standard. I think in McConnell’s floor speech just before the insurrection started, he said something like, “We cannot emulate what we have previously chosen to repudiate.”

And so I’ve seen a lot of Republicans in the last few days say, “Well, the other side has countenanced and accepted political violence this year. They didn’t say anything when people were burning cities and rioting, so why should we worry about it now?” Well, that—that is the exact opposite reaction we should expect out of anybody in politics. And I don’t think there’s really a future for the Republican Party in that kind of “whataboutism,” frankly. We have to hold the president and the president’s party to a higher standard.

The 2018 elections. What did we learn there? It showed a Democratic backlash certainly, with the loss of the House for the GOP. And did it show anything about Trump? Did it tell the leadership that this was an area to worry about, the fact that perhaps he—unless his name is on the ballot, he can’t win the races as much as he can when his name is on the ballot? I mean, what was the lesson of 2018?

I think—I think several things became obvious. Number one, there is—there is obviously a group of people who will turn out for Donald Trump and not for other politicians, so we did learn that. At the same time, I think we also learned that Donald Trump, whether he is on or not on the ballot, is a highly motivating item for Democrats. I mean, look at how much money they raised. Look at the turnout for Democrats.

So for everybody who says, “Well, look at all the new people Donald Trump has attracted,” I’m like, “Yeah, and not all of them vote for us.” And we saw that manifest itself in 2018. So we did, I think, learn something about the impact of him on the overall electorate.

Number two, I think we learned that the voters in the suburbs, who traditionally have been center-right voters, who were nervous about Trump but to some degree stuck with him in 2016, had started to really move away from him in 2018. And of course that accelerated even into 2020. And so I think we started to learn the limits of Trumpism on electoral success. He didn’t win the popular vote in ’16, the House got washed away in 2018, and he lost by 7 million votes in 2020.

But we started to see the seeds of—of the true limits of Trumpism in that yes, in some Senate races in 2018, we did better than expected because of rural voters that, you know, these races taking place in rural states. But in the House races and in other races where you had significant suburban populations, you could start to see how much of a problem that would be in a presidential cycle.

And of course that all came true in 2020. Donald Trump did get a higher turnout and more voters in rural areas. But on the other side of the equation, we lost as many or more voters in the suburbs than we picked up in other places. So I think one of the things we learned was this is a growing problem, and we’re going to have to try to correct it if we hope to compete in 2020. But of course between 2018 and 2020, no efforts were made to correct it, and it got worse, and we saw what happened: The Republicans lost.

… Talk a little bit about how McConnell was able to hold the line on the impeachment and what the general attitude was of the GOP. Whatever the evidence that was being defined, it was more seen as a politics thing that the Democrats were doing. What was the opinion, and how was McConnell able to hold the line?

I think most Republicans on the first impeachment thought Democrats vastly overreached. It’s not that they thought the phone call to the Ukrainians was all that wise or smart or right even, but they just didn’t think it rose to the level of throwing a president out of office for the first time in our nation’s history. And so I think the way he was able to hold the line was by giving people the space they needed to criticize the act itself but then ultimately to make the decision that, even though I don’t like it, it certainly doesn’t rise to the level of impeachment.

The other thing helping McConnell, of course, do all this was that Democrats had literally been talking about impeaching Donald Trump since he took office, and so I think to many people in the Republican Party, it did seem like this was just a goal in search of whatever little evidence or moment they could find to do it. And I think Republicans also thought that Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi was simply bowing to the wishes of the most vocal and radical parts of her left flank, the progressive flank.

So all of those things combined, I think, gave McConnell and Republicans a real—a real core of an argument around which to coalesce. And you saw in the statements that a lot of Republican senators made, who ultimately voted not to convict, that they didn’t condone what had happened, but they certainly weren’t going to bow to a hyperpartisan activity just because the Democrats had always wanted to do it.

And the belief that he had learned his lesson—I guess Sen. [Susan] Collins said that at one point—now that we look back, I mean, is that true? Is this a president that learns lessons like that and decides not to cross lines again?

I mean, I think all these things are not as connected as people want them to be. I viewed the Ukrainian matter myself at the time as a dumb thing to have done, but far from impeachable, certainly something to be criticized. But I don’t—I don’t necessarily view his actions on that one as connected to his actions on this one. On this one—it’s going on right now—I mean, set the violence and the insurrection aside, the phone call that he made to the Georgia secretary of state was in and of itself an impeachable item in my opinion. I mean, ultimately, if you just want to take the violence out of it, basically the president is attempting to get other government officials, whether it’s the Georgia secretary of state, the vice president of the United States, members of Congress—either through coercion or threats of violence, he’s trying to get them to not execute the duties they have under the Constitution of the United States.

The president takes a very simple oath: “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.” None of that’s happening right now. We’re not preserving, protecting or defending it. In fact, we’re doing just the opposite. And so, I mean, I don’t know how you would look at this set of facts and come to a different conclusion.

But why didn’t more GOP folk, leadership come out and sort of say, “Listen, you know, these are Republican electoral officials, lieutenant governors, governors. These are not your enemies”? And yet they’re under attack by this president. I mean, why was that not an extremely, you know, an extreme warning sign that deserved more attention at the time?

I think most Republicans thought that letting the process run its course would ultimately bring it to a conclusion. And in our system, as McConnell and others said repeatedly, we have an election. If there are claims, they’re adjudicated in court, and once the court adjudicates those claims and then all the votes are counted, we name a winner. I mean, that’s the way we do it. It’s the way we’ve always done it.

And I don’t think that it dawned on anybody that once the process ran to its conclusion, especially with the courts ruling time and again that there weren’t anything to these claims, that the president and his team would just disregard that. I mean, every election, we all play by the same rules. People run, votes are cast, claims are adjudicated, winners are determined, and so are losers. And it just isn’t normal for people to disregard the mechanisms by which we make those judgments.

And in this case, a presidential election, voters voted. The courts at both the state and federal level adjudicated claims. Electoral Colleges met. I mean, all the things that you would expect to happen happened, and yet they were just disregarded as illegitimate when there was no evidence whatsoever that they were illegitimate at all.

And your sort of point of view on the Democrats’ claims that McConnell and other leadership just waited too long. After the 60 cases had been heard, after the debate had gone on with Republican leaders around the country in the different states who disagreed with the president, what’s your thought on this accusation by the Democrats that McConnell didn’t show leadership, that other leaders were playing a very dangerous game?

McConnell is an institutionalist, and the institutions at play here are very simple. We have an election, courts adjudicate claims, and then once all of that goes into the pot, the Electoral College meets and certifies the winner of the election. And he made his speech as soon as the Electoral College met and certified its results, and so he was operating on the clock of the institution and of the calendar that’s laid out in our normal system.

Democrats, of course, wanted people to go much sooner than that, but McConnell isn’t really on their schedule. He’s on the schedule of the institution. And in this particular case, the institution, the institutional wheels provoked his speech. I mean, if you look back on when he gave his speech in mid-December, it came immediately following the meeting of the Electoral College. He doesn’t determine when the Electoral College meets; he just responds to it.

Same thing in his speech for the certification, you know. Congress has a vote. He gives his speech. He says, in fact, it’s the most important vote in 36 years. Well, he’s doing that at the moment that the institution demanded it. And I highly doubt that, if any of those speeches or comments had been made hours, days, weeks sooner than they were, it would have made a difference to Donald Trump.

I think a lot of the criticism of McConnell and others on that front—not just him but others—ignores the fact that Trump had apparently, as we know now—he wasn’t listening to anybody who was telling him that the election wasn’t— “You didn’t win the election.” And so he wasn’t listening to people; he wasn’t listening to courts; he wasn’t listening to elections officials. He wasn’t listening to anybody who wasn’t telling him what he wanted to hear.

So the timing of those speeches, I think, was irrelevant, and it wouldn’t have changed anything. And I think McConnell’s doing it is very easily attributed to—that’s when the institution and the gears of democracy demanded it.

The Georgia races, the two [Senate] runoff races, what kind of—put McConnell in a very difficult space. I mean, Trump was not on message. He couldn’t be put on message. What do you think was going through his mind at that point, and how difficult a situation it was, and the reality that he knew that the president’s actions were hurting the ability for those two candidates to win their elections? And how angry did it make him?

Well, I think, for the entirety of the lame-duck period, just to take a more broad view of it, McConnell had—and I’m going to return to the word again—McConnell had several outcomes that he needed to achieve. They needed to get the NDAA enacted into law; they needed to fund the government; they needed to do a relief package on coronavirus; and they needed to win those Georgia Senate races. So he had a number of things that he needed to achieve an outcome on. Some were legislative, and obviously there were the big political outcomes that he wanted to achieve.

And I think the goal from the time the election ended through Georgia was, can I keep the president focused enough to be engaged in a helpful way in all of that? And I think there was some optimism that that could be achieved. However, it became pretty clear in December that the president did not want to engage in a helpful way on any of that. He vetoed the NDAA. His administration negotiated the spending and relief packages, but he obviously wasn’t personally involved, because as soon as the Congress passed it, he came out against it.

And then in Georgia, he and members of his team convinced obviously thousands of Republican voters that their votes no longer count. And there’s been reporting since the election that he was delighted that the Republicans lost. So I think there was optimism that—by McConnell and really all Republican officials that hey, you know, the president could actually have a successful end to his tenure here if he’s engaged in helping us get our work done and achieve our political objectives. And of course, on every single thing I mentioned, he did exactly the opposite of what Republicans and rational thinkers would have wanted him to do.

… On election night, Trump comes out, and he disputes the election results. He is continuing his claims that the Democrats are involved with fraud and that he did not lose, and eventually he says that he won by a landslide. What is he about? And how does it affect this very large group of people, basically a movement that has coalesced around him, the people that love the president and voted for him? Talk a little bit about that, starting with the election night, and sort of what was going on.

Well, obviously he didn’t believe that he had lost, and he couldn’t believe that he lost. And he didn’t accept the idea that—that the outcome could have turned out negatively. I’ve wondered since 2016—and I think you see this in a lot of the comments made by, you know, the core Trump loyalists, and the idea that because of the way he won in 2016, they had this magical thinking that it somehow was just all going to work out. You know, in 2016, nobody thought we could win. The polling was wrong, and voila, in the middle of the night, on election night, it was obvious we had won.

I think many of his people, including the president himself, had just assumed that’s the way it would work out again. And when it didn’t work out that way, it was shocking to their systems, because there was a belief that he possessed this magical energy that just caused good things to happen to him in spite of all the evidence or needles pointing to the contrary. And so I think it was hard to accept when you consider that for four years, the Trump worldview was, it’s all going to work out. And when it didn’t work out, it shocked them.

And then after that, I think what most people assumed is that once all the president’s claims were adjudicated, and once all the elections officials certified the results, that it would just be irrefutable, self-evident that the election turned out the way that it did. I just—I think everybody was stunned that he blew right through what you would normally consider to be the stop sign of an election, which is when the states certify the final results, and in this case, the Electoral College meets. I mean, that’s normally the end of the road. There’s nothing else to do. And yet they blew right past that and just disregarded it.

Leadership, I would assume, must have been a little bit afraid of the consequences of—I mean, like when [Gabriel] Sterling in Georgia made that speech about the fact that, you know, “Hey, listen, we’re Republicans. We voted for Trump. We’re doing our job. This is dangerous. People are going to get killed. The conspiracy theories that have no reality behind them [are] making people very angry. We’re getting death threats,” do you think that that statement and just exactly what Trump was doing in refusing to pull back, was that something that, in the leadership of the GOP, was understood as being something that is a real problem and that really could cause problems sometime soon?

I can only speak for myself. I don’t—I wouldn’t know how to answer your question specifically to what individuals were thinking other than to say I think what most people believed was that no matter what conspiracy theories were tossed out that it would ultimately all be defeated by the plain truth of what happened. Votes were cast, claims were adjudicated, results were finalized, and the winner was obvious. And the winner is obvious. Joe Biden obviously won the election.

And I think there was a belief that by letting the process play out, that by letting the campaign have its claims adjudicated in court, that it would a, prove that the claims have no merit, and b, sort of bring some finality. I think there was a thought that if the claims weren’t adjudicated, that if the process weren’t allowed to play itself out, there would always be a belief that, well, you know, we were cheated, and we didn’t even get to have our day in court.

And I think people believe that by letting the entire process play itself out and giving him the leash to do that—which, by the way, is a process that’s available to any candidate for any race in America—that that would help bring about the finality that would be needed to put this election to bed. I don’t think anybody imagined that when you consider all the process at play here, that once it actually came to a conclusion that they would just disregard the conclusion. It’s just not something that’s done, and it’s totally abnormal.

The vice president and the position he was put into by Trump on Jan. 6: Define for us your overview of the position it put Pence in, trying to—being asked to do something which he clearly legally couldn’t do. What position did it put him in with Trump, and what position did it put him in with the base of the Republican Party?

Well, it was a terrible political position for Mike Pence because it was apparent what he had to do. I mean, the vice president in this thing, and really the Congress, too, I mean, they’re like a Dalmatian on a fire engine. You know, they’re purely there for ceremonial reasons. You expect to see them there, but they’re not leading the fire brigade, you know. It’s a ceremonial position they hold in this whole deal.

But Trump had come to be convinced that Pence could actually do something about it, and his team adopted the belief—his team adopted the belief that the vice president of the United States could unilaterally choose the president, which is a completely non-conservative viewpoint, when you think about, you know, the role of the government, vis-à-vis the conservative view. So he put him in a no-win situation. And based on the reporting I’ve seen, Vice President Pence did his level best to explain to the president that this is not something I can do.

…And so it put Mike Pence in a terrible position, but I think he did what was right. And he stood up for the Constitution on that day. And so that was a good thing he did. But obviously, as a political matter, he had spent four years being the most loyal person to Donald Trump, and in the end, it didn’t matter at all.

What do you think, in the end, Trump’s responsibility is for the anger of that crowd and what happened, him sending them towards the Capitol building? What’s your overview of that?

He’s fully responsible for it. He constructed the lie that—on which the whole crowd was based, that he actually won the election. He called them to Washington. He and other speakers that he had invited to the rally whipped them into a frenzy. He told them to go down to the Capitol. He told them that, “We have to go convince Mike Pence to change his mind, and we have to do it in any way we can.” I mean, he’s responsible from soup to nuts for that crowd, and I think for the actions of that crowd.

And again, it’s not just the actions that he perpetrated that day. I mean, it was a days-long conspiracy in some ways to try to subvert the Constitution. I mean, the call to the Georgia secretary of state that came just before that rally happened a few days before; there was a clear plan on the president’s mind to try to stop the wheels of our Constitution from turning.

And so my view is, he’s fully responsible for it. He has shown no contrition for it. He seems to take no responsibility for it. And it is a clear violation of his oath of office. And I think, even though a lot of Republicans in the House voted against impeaching him, they must agree that those facts are not in dispute here.

And the irony that these two very supportive men that helped the president throughout his four years are being rushed to a safe spot in the Capitol building, with people screaming about hanging the vice president, and the irony that these were the base that they depended upon to some extent to get things done, to win elections, what’s going on there? What does it say, and how ironic it is?

You know, I think it must have been jarring for Vice President Pence, given all that he had done to legitimize Donald Trump in the beginning, in the 2016 election to conservatives, to be loyal to him. He stood by him through every controversy for four years, and it must have been a moment of anger and disappointment and frustration for him to have been put in that position. But I also think for Republican leaders in general, how can you not look out at that crowd that had come to the conclusion that violence and intimidation were acceptable in our politics? How could you not look out at that crowd and say, what have we done here? How can we depend on a base that is all too quick to want to engage in violence and intimidation to achieve political objectives?

I mean, Republicans, conservatives have spent a lot of time this year decrying political violence on the left and saying that the left had coddled people who were rioting and destroying cities and saying that the left was encouraging it. I mean, we were arguing that the left was saying that as long as your cause is morally righteous, you can loot, burn buildings and violate all the COVID rules. And here, our own people, whipped up by the president, were doing all of the same things that we said antifa was doing all year long.

And so it must have just been a moment of extreme bewilderment to see that our people had become what we said the left had become all year long. And I think also, too, as a moment of reflection, I think they must be asking themselves the following question, and that is, do these voters or people that were out there even consider themselves to be Republicans? I mean, I would argue that they don’t. I don’t think people who are willing to engage in a riot, in an insurrection, I don’t think they think of themselves as members of a party in the way you would think of your local precinct chairman somewhere. I think they think of themselves as members of some other extra-procedural and extra-political group. They don’t exist on the spectrum that most of us recognize as being people who participate in American politics.

I mean, you meet all kinds of people who are in politics: donors, people who knock on doors, folks who make phone calls, folks who run for local office, folks who run for, you know, chairman of their local party. I mean, you meet all kinds of people who are participating in some role in politics. But what you don’t ever expect to meet is someone who views themselves as, “Well, I’m the guy who goes out and breaks the windows at the Capitol.” I mean, that’s not a position that any of us recognize or should recognize as being acceptable in our political spectrum. Yet there they were.

But this anger about the election, the belief that it was stolen is a big part of the Republican majority at this point. And so what does that mean for the party? I mean, what does it mean for democracy, but what does it mean for the party in proceeding if that anger continues, if the disbelief in elections is so widespread, and if the idea that violence is a necessary way to move forward? There’s a big percentage of people that actually are starting to believe that.

Yeah. There is no future for a political party that doesn’t believe in the legitimacy of elections. I mean, political parties exist to win elections. But in order for there to be winners, there have to be losers. And if you don’t believe in a system that produces winners and losers, then ultimately you don’t really have a party. And there’s no future for a party that believes that ultimately, if we don’t get what we want, we’re going to immediately resort to violence. There’s no future in that. There’s no future in—there’s no future for any political party that believes violence instead of self-reflection and “Let’s do better next time” is the path forward.

And I think before Wednesday, before the insurrection, we had already seen through empirical evidence the limits of Trumpism for the Republican Party, and now that limit is even lower given what people have seen that it has devolved into. And so I think what the Republican Party has to do is repudiate the idea that political violence is acceptable, and we have to repudiate the idea that—that our elections don’t matter. Otherwise, if you believe elections don’t matter and that outcomes don’t matter in elections, then you don’t really believe in self-governance.

What did it say—what’s the importance of, what is the ramifications of the idea that—so, after they cleared out the rioters from the Capitol—that the House came back, and half of the Republican Caucus proceeded to vote in the way they would have voted before; that despite the fact that they were chased, running for their lives basically, by people that were angry due to the belief in the conspiracy theories that the election was stolen, that they still came back to sort of say they want to kick it back to the states again, create more anger? Your overview, as someone who’s been a Republican probably all your life, who has been tied to a lot of people that have been in very powerful positions, what message did that say, and what damage does that do to the party?

I was shocked, frankly. I thought, as I was watching it unfold, that the riot and the insurrection was the perfect reason for everybody to take a moment and reflect on what they were doing and then go back later and get it right. I mean, in the moment, you know, I guess they thought, before the riot that, well, I’m going to cast this vote, and I can tell Trump supporters that I stuck with him until the end, but it’s ultimately a protest vote, or it’s a meaningless vote; that it didn’t mean anything at all.

And then when the riot happened, and it became apparent that it did mean something, and that there were consequences to these actions, I thought for sure a great many people would go back and change their position and say, “This has gone far enough,” especially in the Senate. I really thought that. And a few did. A few did peel off. But I was a little surprised that more did not and that more didn’t take the opportunity to get it right and to just tell people the truth, that, “Look, I know what you believe, but what you believe just happens not to be correct in this instance.” But they didn’t. And I think they’re going to regret that vote. They may think they did it for short-term political gain, but in the long term, it’s going to be a bad vote.

… Look, if you think your future is wrapped up in a political base that was breaking windows and doors, running around the Capitol, erecting gallows to hang Mike Pence, I think you need to rethink why you got into politics in the first place, because look at what’s come out since the riot: the videos of people beating cops with American flags; running around, “Where’s Mike Pence? Hang Mike Pence.” Is that who you want your political base to be? Is that—do you feel the need to pander to those folks? I would hope the answer to that would be no. But that’s exactly what that vote was. It was a pandering vote to people who were resorting to violence and willing to do terrible things.

And by the way, I think we were lucky that—I mean, five people died, and it’s tragic. I think we’re lucky it didn’t turn into a mass-casualty event, because obviously people showed up there with the tools and the intent to really hurt people.

You had lunch with Leader McConnell the other day, and I’d just be interested, can you give us a sort of understanding of what’s his big overview now of these events, what it means for the party or sort of his general attitude about what we’re going through?

I’d rather not share my private conversations, but I can generally just characterize what I think a reasonable view would be, and that is he’s worked in the Senate for 36 years, and when he goes down to the floor and says, “This is the most important vote I’ll ever cast,” I think the gravity of that really needs to be considered. I mean, he has voted to authorize war. If you think about all the issues that have come and gone in 36 years, and when he went down there and made that speech and characterized that vote as the most important one of his career, I think that gives you a pretty good indication of how seriously he took the threat to the Constitution, to the institution of the Congress and to democracy that had become this conspiracy theory.

And obviously, mere minutes after he had finished his speech, you could see that he was proven right, because people were taking it farther than any of us could have ever imagined. And so I think he views all of this as a direct threat to American democracy, to our constitutional order, and to the institution of Congress. And I think he made the speech because he needed to lay down a marker, not for political reasons but for history.

And people in politics do all kinds of things all the time for political gain. But I think he would say that sometimes you have the luxury of wetting your finger and sticking it into the wind, and sometimes you don’t. And this is one of those moments where I think he views the moment as too important for our country and for history to start casting about for a political angle. I mean, there’s a clear right and a clear wrong here, and he laid down a marker for doing what’s right.

The state of the party now, looking into the future, the role McConnell will have, will he be able to retain control? Or will Trump, out of office, be still a powerful leader of the party? And this very, very strong, powerful movement that he’s created, does that fade when Trump has no longer got the bully pulpit? What’s your sort of overview of the party moving forward, where it is now?

Well, I think, setting aside the events of last Wednesday, just coming out of the election, obviously the party has realigned to some degree in who is inside of it. It’s become a different composition of who’s voting Republican than what we’ve been used to over the years. Same for the Democrats, by the way, as well. And so I do think there is a future for the Republican Party, where it is attracting more working-class Americans while at the same time trying to reconnect with the people that we’ve lost to the Democrats in the Trump years.

I think the future of the party is to find people who can do both. The question is, though, are the people that Trump attracted, are they interested in anything other than Trump? And are they interested in a future where sometimes we have to tell you the truth? And I don’t think we know the answer to that question just yet, and we don’t know how all that is going to shake out. I do think, though, it’s apparent that there are limits to Trumpism electorally, but if you could take away, you know, sort of the most corrosive parts of what he brought to American politics but maintain, you know, some of the viewpoints that he espoused that were obviously appealing to some voters, that’s a workable future.

But right now, given what happened last Wednesday, the threshold for the Republican Party is not “Hey, do you mind if I tell you about my tax views?” The threshold is “Let me—let me convince you that I could be entrusted with a position of responsibility in our government,” because right now, I think a lot of the swing voters and suburban voters and other people who fled the party must be looking at this and thinking, how could I ever go back to a party that can’t even be entrusted to uphold its duties under the Constitution?

And so we have to cross that threshold with people, I think, before we can start discussing our policy views again. And by the way, our policy views are not unpopular. Look, in the election, even though Trump lost, Republicans actually did win a lot of races that they weren’t expected to win, because I do think there are also limits to how far left the Democrats have gone, and there are people who understand that we do need a balance on the progressive viewpoint. But that balance has to come from, you know, having common-sense policies. That balance can’t come from being a violent mob. And if the choices are dealing with people who seem too liberal but at least they’re not trying to overthrow the government versus people who are willing to resort to violence because they didn’t win an election, I mean, we’re never—that’s not a winning hand for the Republican Party or any party.

And this war that is raging in the Republican Party, how do you think it affects Joe Biden’s next four years? How much does it complicate him being able to govern?

Well, you know, the American political system depends on a loyal opposition and the push-and-pull of what that means. I actually think most people in the middle in this country want policy to be made between the 40-yard lines, and so if the two parties sort of recognize that, I think there’s actually political gain to be had for both of them, for Biden and for the Republicans.

Right now, I would assume Joe Biden is worried for our country but also thinking that, just as a raw political analysis here, you know, having a very, very fractured opposition is going to make it easier for me to do a lot of the things that I want to do, and maybe even go further than I would have been able to have gone if my party—if my opposition was unified against me. So as long as the Republicans are fighting each other, maybe they’re not as focused on fighting, you know, the progressive Democratic agenda.

So I think for him, what he’ll be watching for is, can the Republicans leave the internal fights behind and sort of correct itself in time to unify around being an actual legitimate opposition to the Democratic agenda? I personally think the first two years of his presidency will be defined by whether he gets the vaccine distribution correct, because it seems to me that that will—that will determine whether our economy actually comes back faster or if it continues to limp along.

And so to the extent that he needs Congress to help him do that, I think there could be real-world implications there. So it’s—in the moment that we’re sitting here, I mean, we’re having this conversation literally while the House is voting to impeach Donald Trump. I think so much of how the Republicans act over the next several weeks is undetermined. But I would just offer that if we continue to be defined by our view that Donald Trump didn’t actually win the election, instead of being a legitimate policy opposition to what Biden and the Democrats want to do, that is a recipe for disaster for this party and is a recipe for losing elections for a long time.

And lastly, McConnell’s future, his ability to sort of regain the majority at some point, to maintain his position as someone who manages—steers the party in the direction to go. What do you foresee for Sen. McConnell?

Well, I think you can look at his leadership record, you know. Since he’s been head of the Republican Conference in the Senate, he has done a very good job keeping the conference united. Whether that’s on legislation or on nominations like the Supreme Court or on politics, he has always kept and worked really hard to keep the conference united and focused on goals and outcomes.

So, I would assume that that’s what he’s thinking today, is coming out of this debacle, we have to find a way to unite this conference around a goal, around a preferred outcome. And I would think that goal is convincing Americans that the Republican Party can be trusted to be in a position of governing responsibility in this country and can be an effective counterbalance to a Democratic agenda that’s too far left for most of the country. That’s the outcome that would be best for us next November, and so my assumption is he’s going to be working as hard as possible to find ways to unify the conference after a period of fracture.