Washington Week with The Atlantic full episode, 1/5/24

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: It's the third anniversary of the January 6th insurrection.

In just over 300 days, the country will elect its next president and the leading Republican candidate is the man who inspired the insurrection.

DONALD TRUMP, Former U.S. President: I want to be a dictator for one day.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: President Biden, who is 81 years old and is sagging in popularity, is warning about the threat to democracy.

JOE BIDEN, U.S. President: Trump's assault on democracy isn't just part of his past, it's what he's promising for the future.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: It's going to be a tense 2024, next.

Good evening, and welcome to WASHINGTON WEEK and Happy New Year.

It's not too late to say Happy New Year.

So, in my family, we have pretty regular calendar meetings, or I guess I should say that we aspire to have pretty regular calendar meetings.

And when we actually have them, they're very, very useful.

So, that's what we're going to do tonight here with my other family, my WASHINGTON WEEK family, and we're going to do it live.

We're going to look at some key events of 2024, all of them leading up to a hugely important and potentially cataclysmic date, November 5th, Election Day.

So here to go over the calendar with me are Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, Laura Barron-Lopez is the White House correspondent for PBS NewsHour, Josh Dawsey is an investigations reporter at The Washington Post and Jerusalem Demsas is my colleague and a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Okay, so it's 2024.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ, White House Correspondent, PBS NewsHour: We made it.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yay, we're 2024.

We're here.

We're here.

We're ready.

So, before we talk about some dates further down the road, I want to just bring up a date that's just come onto our political calendar, February 8th, which I think is the date that the Supreme Court is going to hear the Colorado case.

I just want to hear quickly from the panel about the meaning of this and what could happen.

Peter, why don't you just start us off?

PETER BAKER, Chief White House Correspondent, The New York Times: Yes.

So, the Supreme Court is going to take this case on a relatively quick basis.

February 8th will be the oral arguments before the court, and they expect to give a ruling relatively quickly.

And the reason is because, of course, it matters whether or not Donald Trump is excluded or disqualified from the ballot as we have these primaries going on.

In fact, by February 8th, we'll have already had a couple states give us their verdict on the Republican nomination.

So, they need to decide this quickly because, obviously, it has bearing not just on Colorado, where they have taken him off the ballot, because he, in their view, committed an insurrection in violation of the 14th Amendment.

It actually could apply to many, many states, if not all states across the board.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

Laura, what's going to happen?

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: With the Supreme Court case?

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: Look, I think it's anyone's guess, but I will say that I know conventional wisdom is that maybe the Supreme Court will rule in favor of Trump, that they don't want to get involved in this messy political issue and take him off of the ballot.

Though if you talk to very conservative jurists, like J. Michael Luttig, you know, they say that if the Supreme Court justices read the very specific texts and are actually originalists and textualists, as many of them claim to be, of the Constitution, then there's only one way to interpret it.

And the way to interpret it is that Donald Trump is disqualified.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

Josh, what would it mean for Trump if he actually is thrown off the ballot in Colorado?

JOSH DAWSEY, Investigations Reporter, The Washington Post: Colorado, it probably wouldn't mean a lot, actually, because he's not really looking to Colorado, he's not looking to Maine, but it could set a precedent for other states to do things that matter, right?

The actual electoral map for him is pretty thin, and the 270 votes that he needs to get are only in a number of states that I'm not sure would kick him off the ballot.

Maybe they would, but I'm not sure they would.

But they could set a precedent for other states to maybe take further action.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

And, Jerusalem, what do it mean for national unity or this fracturing that we're worried about if the Supreme Court actually intervened and said, no, this -- our reading of the Constitution says that Colorado can do that?

JERUSALEM DEMSAS, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: Yes, I mean it's difficult because part of the reason why the Supreme Court is weighing in is that it's really problematic to have every state Supreme Court kind of issue different rulings in either direction, Colorado, Maine, and who other else might, and there are challenges building across the country.

But I think it would be a real problem for America whether or not there's a correct kind of legal analysis if people feel that they were not able to make a decision.

Though it is the case that much of our legal system does take its, you know, democracy out of our hands.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

We'll come back to Colorado in a minute, but I want to go to some of the broader issues that we're dealing with.

And I've asked all four of you to pick for yourselves a date that has some import on the calendar this year.

And, Laura, let me start with you, because I know you've picked a date that's where we're at the date, essentially, January 6th.

What is it -- three years later, what is its political meaning?

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: Well, for President Biden and for Democrats, it holds still a lot of salience.

And President Biden believes that this is -- that January 6th represents an existential threat, that that political violence that was inspired by former President Donald Trump and his lies about the 2020 election, that it still is an ongoing threat as Trump continues to lie about that election, as well as the upcoming election, and saying that it's rigged.

Republicans though, and these are stunning numbers that just came out from The Washington Post and the University of Maryland, show that 34 percent of Republican voters believe the debunked conspiracy theory that the FBI organized, encouraged, instigated the January 6th insurrection, 44 percent of Trump voters believe that.

And that isn't something, Jeff, that just happens in a vacuum.

They just haven't just continued to believe that.

It's because the former president continues to lie about it.

Just today, he said that the FBI was there and was instigating and leading the charge on the case.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Leading the charge is what he said today, so it ramped up.

So, January 6th is proof, if nothing else, that people live in alternate reality bubbles as we enter this election.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: That's right, the conspiracy theories are still very prevalent and the lie about 2020 is still very prevalent amongst Republican voters because Republican leaders, elected officials continue to lie about it.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Josh, what are you looking at on the calendar?

JOSH DAWSEY: Yes.

I'm actually looking later in February at the South Carolina primary.

You have Iowa and New Hampshire, the two earliest states.

In Iowa, former President Trump looks to have a pretty decisive lead at this point.

Governor Ron DeSantis has used Iowa as sort of his last stand, trying to go to 99 counties, having a pretty formidable ground game there.

But right now, he's not doing that well on the polls.

Nikki Haley in New Hampshire is putting a lot of time and energy and effort in going all across New Hampshire and trying to take Trump on there.

But in South Carolina, what will be interesting is that's Haley's home state, right?

And if Trump beats her decisively in South Carolina, you could sort of see the primary ending sooner than later.

I mean, all of these states sort of have their own eccentricities, let's say.

They all have their own sort of things that you watch and what will turn out be in this, that, and the other.

But if Trump can win these early states and then win South Carolina, you could see this whole shebang wrapping up pretty quickly.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: So, before Super Tuesday?

JOSH DAWSEY: Yes, before Super Tuesday.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.

Peter, speaking of Super Tuesday, we were talking earlier about the one unique aspect of 2024 is that we have an electoral calendar and a courtroom calendar.

Talk about that.

PETER BAKER: Oh my gosh, they're on parallel tracks, right?

And we often say when it comes to Trump, this is extraordinary, this is unprecedented, we've never seen anything like it.

But in this case, it really is true, right?

We're going to have a president, a former president, running for president, who will be spending day in and day out in one courthouse after another.

And you look at the calendar, and you see it most starkly in March.

March the 4th is the date the first of the four criminal trials is currently scheduled to begin.

It's the federal election subversion case brought by Jack Smith.

Now, that may not happen on that day because they're debating whether or not Trump is immune.

He has asked the Circuit Court of Appeals to rule on that, and then that presumably goes to the Supreme Court.

But at the moment, that's when that trial is supposed to begin.

Guess what?

March 4th, first trial starts, March 5th is Super Tuesday, right?

If they haven't decided, as Josh said, by South Carolina, they will certainly have decided by March the 5th.

And what that means is the Republican voters will make the decision on who they want to represent them without benefit of having even a single one of these trials having concluded.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: right.

And it's interesting going back to what Josh said that we might be in an unusual situation, in which by Super Tuesday, we more or less know who the nominee.

So, before the trials start, I mean, he might be the putative nominee of the -- right now, all the polls suggest that he is going to be the nominee.

Jerusalem, talk about what you're looking at.

JERUSALEM DEMSAS: Yes.

So, I'm thinking about June 30th, which is the end, sort of, of when the Supreme Court will be releasing its opinions during the primary calendar.

And, I mean, Peter, you just talked a little bit about the immunity that Trump has been asking the circuit court of Appeals to, federal circuit court of appeals to weigh in on, and, of course, Supreme Court may weigh in on that, but also the gag order.

He has been trying to get the Supreme Court to lift that from him.

But there's also a bunch of other rulings I think will have a pretty big effect on the election, of course, when we're talking about what just happened today, the Supreme Court has decided it will be ruling on whether or not hospitals, emergency rooms have to perform abortions if women's lives are at risk.

Abortion, of course, is a huge issue for both Democrats but also Republicans this year.

And there's another ruling which is going to be really impactful as well, which is whether or not the FDA appropriately made it easier to get access to an abortion drug, Mifepristone.

And these were decisions made in 2016 and 2021, and it's happening right in the middle of an election year.

And they're all trying to run away from this issue, but the Supreme Court is clearly not staying out of it.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

Well, let me stay with you for a minute, because there's an issue, a cultural issue, a culture war issue that Republicans are running too right now.

I think we all agree, raise your hand if you disagree, that abortion doesn't look like a great general election issue for Republicans, it looks like a good issue for the Democrats.

But over the last couple of weeks, we've seen this with the resignation or forced resignation of the president of Harvard, we see that the Republicans are developing a pretty potent narrative around DEI, diversity, equity and inclusion, and the sort of broad basket of affirmative action subjects.

Would you talk for a minute about whether the Republican Party and whether Trump is going to pivot hard toward this apparently more winning issue for conservatives?

JERUSALEM DEMSAS: Yes.

I mean, I think in 2020, people often criticize Democratic Party presidential candidates for being too Twitter-brained.

I feel like this is another example where potentially Republican candidates are that way.

It is something that has been gaining traction amongst a bunch of candidates.

But when you look at polling, and there was a Pew poll in May 2023 that showed 56 percent of Americans, of American employees, think that DEI in the workplace is a good thing.

And when you look at the partisan splits, there are pretty big partisan splits, but still only 30 percent of Republican employees are saying that DEI in the workplace is a bad thing.

And then another poll in July, a Times/Sienna poll of Republican likely voters found that if they're picking between a candidate that is trying to attack the woke agenda or one that believes that corporation -- that government should stay out of what corporations are saying and doing and believing, only 38 percent of Republican primary candidate or voters, likely primary voters are actually in favor of the candidate that is focused on woke elections.

And so this has been a big focus for Ron DeSantis.

It's been something that's really animated a class of people that I think are really vocal in the media and, of course, it's in the big debate around the Christine Gay and the Harvard president.

But at the same time, it doesn't seem to me the kind of issue that's really going to animate people at the top of their ticket, at the top of the issues that they care about or in the general election, which I think people think it's more of a distraction.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Peter, any chance that this becomes a winning issue for conservatives or Republicans, or do you agree with Jerusalem?

PETER BAKER: Well, no, I agree with Jerusalem.

I think that's right.

And I think the Harvard thing obviously has provoked a lot of conversation.

But the truth is there's a lot of people out there who don't really care that much about who's the president of Harvard.

It may be an elite -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Hard to believe.

PETER BAKER: Hard to believe maybe to kind of have an elite conversation that we're having here.

But I think you're right that they would rather talk about DEI than, say, abortion.

I mean, they're trying to move the culture war to turf that they seem to think is more fruitful for them.

But, you know, DeSantis' failure so far to get much traction in the Republican primaries isn't going to encourage them to do that because he was sort of the avatar of that.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.

Laura, let me ask the flip side of that, which is how bad is the abortion issue for Republicans?

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: It's very bad because of the fact that, look, not just polls, more abortion access is popular when you poll it, but also the elections themselves.

We saw that in the 2022 midterms, I mean, the whole reason that Democrats didn't lose the Senate and didn't lose massive like margins in the House, as was expected, it was expected to be a huge takeover of the House for Republicans, and it was actually a slim, marginal takeover, the reason that that happened was because of abortion.

And so Biden's campaign, Democrats up and down the ballot believe that abortion could be a really good issue for them, especially if they're able to get it on state ballots, like Arizona could very well have an abortion access question on the ballot this year.

And if it does, Republican strategists I've talked to there say that that's it, that's the ball game.

You know, Republicans will run off the cliff and we could lose Arizona.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I want to -- maybe part of the answer has to do with abortion here, but I want to ask Josh, you just had some very interesting reporting on how Trump solidified control of the Republican Party over the last three years.

Remember, it seems like distant history now, but there was a moment right after January 6 before, let's put it, that interregnum between January 6th and when Kevin McCarthy -- remember him?

JOSH DAWSEY: Yes.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: We'll do a little recap on that.

Kevin McCarthy went down to Mar-a-Lago, sort of hat in hand, and asked for forgiveness or something.

There was a period when it seemed like maybe Trump was finished.

But talk about your reporting just for a minute on how did he come back to have this kind of total domination.

JOSH DAWSEY: Well, the most dominant factor that sort of crystallized his support with the Republican Party were the 91 criminal cases, cases he's had against him, filed by both Jack Smith, the special counsel, but in Georgia and New York.

What those have done, according to voters across the country, strategists in other camps, folks, even other candidates, is they've brought the Republican Party back wedded to him.

If you even look in late 2022, which is far past what we were talking about with Kevin McCarthy, Trump and the Republicans have a very disappointing midterm showing.

He then announces he's running for president.

If you remember, he has dinner with Kanye West and Nick Fuentes, the white supremacist on Mar-a-Lago's patio.

And DeSantis announces he wins 59 to 41 as governor of Florida, right, and he's toying with running for president.

And there was a sense among a lot of the party's elite that DeSantis was the future of the party and that Trump was fading.

And then what you see are these indictments across the board, a failure by DeSantis to get in the race for several months.

Then when he gets in the race, he's positive towards Trump, he's not critical towards Trump, he has no message that takes on Trump in that period, right?

And Trump just begins slashing him left and right and takes away a lot of the things that Republican voters liked about him.

He drives his numbers down in a pretty significant way.

And then Trump hired a fairly sophisticated team of political operatives around him, unlike he had in some previous campaigns, who started working the rules.

They went to all of these states.

They changed their rules that made it really hard for other candidates to gain traction.

Then they started demanding endorsements and saying, look, if you're not with us now, we're going to be the nominee, you're going to regret it.

And they started twisting arms.

And they created this sort of patina around him that it was inevitable.

And then most importantly, I think he skipped the debates.

There was a lot of pressure on him to go to the debates, particularly early on from the Republican Party.

And he said, I'm not doing it.

I'm not going to give them the chance to attack me.

I'm not going to give them the stage to give them the oxygen against me.

And it turned out, by all accounts, to be one of his smartest moves.

And so what you've seen over the course of a year is the sort of confluence of decisions that have put him back in the catbird seat of the Republican Party.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I mean, I feel a little bit like we're in the upside down in the sense that 91 indictments, 91 counts, saved his candidacy.

So, 182, he would have been president, he would already be president.

PETER BAKER: Well, it's one of these don't try this at home kids kind of things, though.

It may not work for other candidates to go out and get themselves indicted in order to -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I mean, it's not working for Menendez, obviously.

But, I mean, I can't think of any other candidate in history where this would -- LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: But there's much more of a cult of personality around Donald Trump.

And also, I will say, it has helped him within the base and clearly amongst the primary voters.

But I think that it's not going to help him in the general election and that there are a significant number, yes, maybe at the margins, but that's all you need in swing states, of disenchanted Republicans, of independents who don't want someone, who don't want a candidate who is indicted with 90-something felony counts, and they don't want someone who could very well be convicted.

By the general election, he may have at least one conviction.

PETER BAKER: That brings us back to your calendar, right?

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: Right.

PETER BAKER: By November 5th, are any of these trials over, at least to the point of a guilty, not guilty verdict, and it's very possible one or two of them will.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

So, Jerusalem, this is the great unknown.

The great unknown is we've never had a presidential candidate convicted of a felony during the general election campaign.

So, we don't know how the public will react.

I mean, do you think there's a good chance that people will wholesale abandon him, or is the cult, called a cult, because it's a cult?

JERUSALEM DEMSAS: Well, I think it's not good to get convicted of crimes.

I think it's probably not something that most people want to hear their candidates have done.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: That's the kind of people I hire at The Atlantic, people who are against doing crimes.

JERUSALEM DEMSAS: Yes.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes, we have a high standard.

JERUSALEM DEMSAS: But I also think there's going to be like a varied reaction from different sorts of people, people who are diehard Trump people, folks who believe that what's happening to him is a witch hunt, it's corrupt, deep state coming against him.

They're not going to, I think, really see much out of a court than saying, oh, another new story showing that he is a corrupt person, the establishment doesn't like him.

But I do agree that the general election is different.

I think the general electorate are often -- you're looking at often suburban voters who don't like the chaos of the Trump years, and that will remind them of that.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: There's also -- we do have some polling.

We have somewhat of a picture on this.

I mean, nearly a quarter of Trump voters say that he should not be the nominee if he's convicted.

So, the conviction element, if there is at least one, could change the dynamic.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: But again, we don't know.

I mean, we just don't know.

We've never seen it.

JOSH DAWSEY: The core strategy of a Trump legal team is to delay all of these trials as much as they can, to throw as much chum in the water, to file as many things as they can, to postpone things as long as they can, and to push them all until after the election.

They're trying that at court -- they're trying that.

Every way they can, every motion they can, every procedural thing they can do, the entire strategy is to push this into -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Which suggests that they while they understand that being indicted is good electoral strategy, being convicted is a bad -- JOSH DAWSEY: Right, they know that.

Being convicted in some of these cases, particularly the J6 case in Washington, which they fear a lot, because they think it will be a more liberal jury, they worry about that.

JERUSALEM DEMSAS: And the backdrop of this though is that the parties are so much weaker now, right?

You say we haven't really seen this before but also we haven't seen such an apparatus, Republican Party, Democratic Party.

They probably, in another era, would be able to replace a candidate, would be able to either create the pressure or to have the sort of control over the way that the primaries play out that they don't really have at this point.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

I want to -- in our last few minutes, I want to talk about sort of the mirror image of this conversation, Joe Biden's decision to talk about the Trump threat to democracy as an electoral strategy.

Obviously, it's a moral issue, it's an existential issue, it's a constitutional issue, but it's also an election strategy, the Valley Forge speech that we just saw.

And before I do that, I want you to listen to something that Trump just said.

This is kind of evocative, I think.

DONALD TRUMP: Crooked Joe is staging his pathetic fear-mongering campaign event in Pennsylvania today.

Did you see him?

He was stuttering through the whole thing.

He's got a -- he's a threat to democracy.

They've weaponized government.

He's saying I'm a threat to democracy.

He's a threat to democracy.

Couldn't read the word.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: So, okay, like vintage Trump with this democracy overlay.

I mean, mocking stuttering and all the rest, put that aside for right now.

So, my question is, it's as stark as can be, Biden is out there saying Donald Trump's behavior is a total threat to democracy.

Trump is doing what he does best, which is flip the accusation.

He's accused of something, he accuses his opponent of doing that same thing.

My question is, Laura, do the people of America care about the threat to democracy as much as they care about economic issues, abortion, social issues?

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: I believe that they care about it a lot.

Now, is it at the same level as the economy?

I mean, polls would say that the economy is still number one.

But the 2022 midterm election results, plus polling, has shown Biden's campaign that Democratic voters care about this.

They care about what happened on January 6th.

They are fearful of political violence.

And I even heard that when I was out on the campaign trail in 2022 from voters in states like Michigan and in Georgia, that they were worried about this.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Josh, give us 20 seconds on what you saw there and what it suggests to you about the campaign as it unfolds.

JOSH DAWSEY: The Trump campaign definitely knows that democracy is going to be one of the leading lines of attack from Biden's campaign.

I mean, you see what they've tried to do since January 6th, 2021, to sort of whitewash what's happened, to sort of make it into something that it wasn't, to try and keep him from talking about electoral fraud, even though he does it all the time.

A lot of his advisers wouldn't talk about everything else.

They understand it's a vulnerability for them.

They think their strengths are attacking Biden on immigration, on economy, on other issues, but that is fundamentally, and they know that, a weakness of their campaign, that they have to deal with the fallout of all of this.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Peter, have you ever seen a campaign that's this stark in the sense that the two candidates are ready to argue about the nature of democracy itself?

PETER BAKER: No, because it's about the fundamental nature of America at this point, right?

It's not about, okay, who has a tax plan is better than the other guy's tax plan or a health care plan.

This is about something whether you believe in the system as it has existed or whether you're trying to blow it up.

And Trump is not trying to tell us anything other than what he wants to do.

It's not a Democratic talking point to say that he's out for revenge, that he talks about termination of the Constitution.

Those are Trump's talking points.

He has been very open that he wants to get back into power to get revenge against those who crossed him.

And if he has to terminate the Constitution to do it, as he has said, he's willing to do it.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Well, it's fascinating, but, unfortunately, we need to leave it there for now.

I want to thank our panelists for joining us and for sharing their reporting.

On PBS News weekend tomorrow, a look at the devastating impact on the children caught in the crossfire of the Israel-Hamas War.

That's Saturday on "PBS NEWS WEEKEND."

I'm Jeffrey Goldberg.

Good night from Washington.