Trump already ‘gave us warnings’

The morning after the event celebrating the 25th anniversary of the collaboration between Kathimerini and The New York Times for the former’s English-language edition, thanks to which American columnist Susan Glasser was in Athens for the first time, we meet at the cafe of a hotel in central Athens.

Few journalists have a deeper knowledge of what goes on in Washington than Glasser, who, in her 33-year career, has worked for The Washington Post, including serving as Moscow bureau co-chief with her husband, now chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, Peter Baker. She was editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy, as well as Politico. Together with Baker, she has written three books – the latest on the presidency of Donald Trump. Now the author of “Letter from Biden’s Washington” writes about politics in the American capital.

The interview is dominated by the 2024 American presidential election. According to Glasser, the future of democracy is at stake next year. But the two people who are likely to face each other again for the presidency – incumbent Joe Biden and Donald Trump – could not be more different, she tells Kathimerini.

Biden is a “creature of Washington,” Glasser says, while Trump is a product of the New York media and tabloid culture. Biden, who became a senator in 1973 at the age of 31, “has been doing this for so long that… he was the first senator to endorse Jimmy Carter when he ran for president.” He is a very shrewd politician, while Trump is “astonishingly unaware of most things.”

“He did not know that the US Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war. He did not know how World War I started. He invited the leaders of the Baltic states to meet with him in the Oval Office and then he confused them with the Balkans. He did not know about the nuclear triad when he was running to be the commander in chief of our nuclear forces,” she explains.

Biden, in a way, “is a kind of a voice from this previous era… His transatlantic commitment to to Europe and to NATO in a way is generational. He is the last politician of the post-World War II era.”

Glasser, who with her husband interviewed Trump twice for their book, believes that the latter is not smart, but that he is very skilled – “and therefore very dangerous communicator.”

He spends his time watching and absorbing media “and figuring out how to navigate a media environment to an extraordinary degree,” she says. “He tells lies like he breathes.” When she and Baker interviewed Trump for their book, which was during the pandemic, he told them he had been asked to do a public service announcement encouraging people to get the Covid-19 vaccine and that he was thinking about it. In their next interview, when they asked him why he hadn’t done it, he said: “No one ever asked me to do an ad. Who told you that?”

Biden is “a much more conventional figure… He’s good with children and grandmothers.” If you say your mom is a big fan of mine, he’ll say “let’s call her.” His main problem is his age, Glasser explains. If he is re-elected in 2024, he will be 86 years old when his term ends. Trump, now 77, won’t be much younger. Their most fundamental difference is that the latter has fanatical voters. “He has activated a significant portion of the Republican electorate who are like super-fans.”

“It’s not a majority of the American people, and it’s not even a huge majority of the Republican Party that are his super-fans, but it’s a committed, mobilized, significant chunk of the Republican electorate,” she says.

On the contrary, polls show that Biden’s popularity is lower than that of the Democratic Party. “It’s not really ideological. The reason that Biden is not doing well in the polls is because a certain amount of Democratic and independent viewers who supported him are concerned about him,” she adds.

The White House believes that if the choice is between Biden and Trump, people will vote for Biden, no matter what condition he’s in. “But that’s very risky,” Glasser notes. Many voters may not even vote. US professionals used to say that politics is a game of persuasion. “It’s about who you get to come more than it is persuading somebody to vote for you… they’ve decided that people already think what they think, that they can’t really convert them. And it’s very hard to change somebody’s mind.”

Discussing the post-truth phase of US politics, she said the country has become much more polarized and partisan. “And I think it’s because, in part, they are living in their own reality. They are either immune to facts that contradict their reality or increasingly being spoon-fed completely alternate versions of reality.” And so it is like Biden and Trump are “competing in different elections.”

If Trump is re-elected, which Glasser thinks is highly likely, his tenure will be worse than the last, she says. “The last time it was a surprise, even to him. He didn’t have a whole team in place. He picked a lot of people who turned out to be more establishment, less willing to blow things up than he wanted. This time that wouldn’t be the case,” she explains.

‘I don’t think Donald Trump would be going to war for America, never mind for Greece… He couldn’t find Greece on the map,’ Glasser says

“He’s not really an ideologue. He’s a narcissist. He wants glory for himself… He needs conflict and enemies to flourish… So to win power, he has to make deals. Right-wing evangelical Christians elected him in 2016. What was the deal? Appoint all the judges we want transform the Supreme Court. Donald Trump doesn’t give a shit about abortion.”

There is a slow fear that if he wins, US foreign policy will also change completely, Glasser says. “Vladimir Putin has every reason to keep fighting until November 2024,” as Trump remains a staunch supporter. She believes that if Russia won the war in Ukraine, Putin would have no reason to stop there. “Many of his other targets are US NATO allies and partners.” But if Trump is elected, Article 5 is effectively dead for practical purposes. “You don’t have to withdraw from the treaty to undermine the principle.”

“If you have a president of the United States who says: ‘Why would I go to war for Lithuania? Or Estonia? Or Latvia?’” Or Greece? Glasser laughs. “I don’t think Donald Trump would be going to war for America, never mind for Greece… He couldn’t find Greece on the map.”

The problem affects not only Europe, but Asia too. “The US has been the guarantor of a sort of international security in a particular kind of hopefully liberal democratic world order for a long time. And I’ve heard so many versions of the view that Europe will just have to step up, but we all know the answer. That hasn’t happened. The French talk about strategic autonomy, but I haven’t seen the French building a European army,” she continues.

As for the war in the Middle East, it has become a huge political issue for the US, she says, likening it to how much the Vietnam War had divided the American people. “It’s really, again, kind of interesting to watch these protests on college campuses. They’re mad at Joe Biden for supporting Israel, but Trump would be way more supportive.”

Coming back to the issue of next year’s US elections, Glasser noted that during the campaign period, Trump will be tried in four different criminal cases. “Which is insane. And I don’t think people have really wrapped their minds around it, because it’s almost impossible to wrap your mind around it.”

“If Trump wins, that means that he has won probably after being convicted in one or more criminal cases, and that the American public would still go along with that. It means that he might very well come to office and pardon himself, which has never been done in American history… It would be an unprecedented legal and probably constitutional crisis.”

So has democracy stopped working?

“The last few elections with Trump have revealed some of the weaknesses and some of the anti-democratic tendencies within our own system. America is not a pure democracy. It has things like the electoral college, and those give disproportionate weight to certain parts of our country and certain kinds of voters,” Glasser explains. “The United States Democrats have actually won the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections… And yet, twice presidents have come after not winning the popular vote. Both George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016 became president, even though they did not win the popular vote.”

“Trump and some of those around him have shown a willingness in 2020 to stay in power even if they lost. If that happens, that would be the end of democracy,” she says.

“History is filled with the kind of warnings that Trump gave us already… He would be a very, I think, extreme and even radical change agent were he to come back to the White House. He’s made very clear what his plans and hopes would be. It would be to create a much more illiberal state and to politicize and use the non-partisan tools of power in our country. Whether the justice system, Department of Justice, the military, these nonpartisan aspects of our government, and to take that power and use it for his personal and political ends.”

A week ago, Trump joked that he would be a dictator for “one day” if he’s elected to a second term in the White House. Nobody laughed. Could he do it? How can one dismantle American democracy? “You would have to have control of all three branches of government. There is a right-wing majority on our Supreme Court now of six to three, however, they showed in 2020 that they are only willing to go so far on behalf of Donald Trump. As long as John Roberts is the chief justice it’s hard to conceive of him going along with extreme plans to create a dictatorship,” she responds.

“You would need not only a majority in both the US House and the US Senate, but you would need a two-thirds majority to do things like change the Constitution. He’s not going to get them… You would also need the states to be less evenly divided. Right now there are about 50-50. So it’s more likely that you would have something approaching a kind of a cold civil war rather than an outright dictatorship. So you would have a Red America and a Blue America with different laws and increasing hostility toward each other, perhaps. But that’s a more likely scenario and that is already happening in many ways.”

One of the reasons Biden was elected in 2020 was the promise of a return to normalcy, to the pre-Trump status quo. “And I think even those who are still very big supporters of Biden, they would acknowledge that that promise didn’t work out,” she says. “Not only because Trump literally didn’t go away, but because countries don’t go backwards.”

“The Trump experience is one that can’t simply be undone or attributed to a sort of a four-year accident. It’s a different country because it went through that, the Republican Party was radicalized and all these people who went along… I watched it happen. People in Washington who were normal said they would never go along, then they became Trumpified. And they are now going along with things that would’ve been unthinkable to those same people in 2015,” she tells Kathimerini.

But nothing has yet been decided. “We see there are cycles of history… the whole point of a democracy is that each generation has to make it its own.” But there are millions of Americans who will never vote for Donald Trump, and “will probably vote for a Democratic candidate even as long as he or she is breathing,” says Glasser. “So, you know, it’s not over.”

“I am a product of 1989… I literally was a senior in college when the Berlin wall fell. We thought it was the march of freedom. A whole new world,” she continues.

“We just didn’t know at the time that that was the exception. Yeah. Not the rule.”