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Jeffrey Goldberg: Donald Trump's allies took turns this week showing their love for the presumptive Republican nominee outside a Manhattan courthouse where he's on trial. The visits came just as Michael Cohen, Trump's former fixer and the prosecution's star witness, took the stand. With closing arguments soon, we'll look at Cohen's testimony and the tumultuous week ahead, next.
Good evening and welcome to Washington Week. We should find out next week if the probable 2024 Republican nominee for president will be running as a convicted felon. The trial in New York, most likely the only Trump trial before the election, is our main subject tonight.
Joining me at the table, Laura Barron-Lopez is the White House correspondent for PBS NewsHour, Eugene Daniels is a White House Correspondent for Politico and a co-author of Playbook, Susan Glasser is a staff writer at the New Yorker and Steve Inskeep is a host of NPRs Morning Edition.
First of all, Steve, 20 years, morning edition, you're getting used to it?
Steve Inskeep, Host, NPR's Morning Edition: Sure. Sure, I'm getting plenty.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Yes. The internship is over?
Steve Inskeep: Yes.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Congratulations.
Steve Inskeep: Thank you. Thank you. It's been an honor to do it, really. And you keep getting to talk to all kinds of people. It's really, really amazing.
Jeffrey Goldberg: That's good. I can't understand how you get up there.
Steve Inskeep: There's nowhere to go with the conversation from there,.
Jeffrey Goldberg: I can't, there's no way to go, yes. But we're going to go somewhere.
Steve Inskeep: Okay.
Jeffrey Goldberg: I'll tell you where we're going to go. We're going to go to this moment in American political history, not since the Lincoln-Douglas debates, if we had a moment, this elevated and enervating. I want you to watch this scene from the Capitol that came last night.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA): Do you know what we're here for?
Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX): You know, we're here about the --
Marjorie Taylor Greene: I don't think you know what you're here for.
Jasmine Crockett: Well, you're the one talking about --
Marjorie Taylor Greene: I think your fake eyelashes are messing up what you're --
Rep. James Comer (R-KY): Hold on, hold on.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY): That is absolutely unacceptable. How dare you attack the physical appearance of another person? Move her words down.
Oh, girl, baby girl.
Marjorie Taylor Greene: Oh really?
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Don't even play with me.
Marjorie Taylor Greene: Baby girl? I don't think so.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: We're going to move and we're going to take your words down.
Jasmine Crockett: I'm just curious, just to better understand your ruling. If someone on this committee then said starts talking about somebody's bleached blonde, bad built, butch body, that would not be engaging in personalities, correct?
James Comer: A what now?
Jeffrey Goldberg: A what now is right.
First of all, I just need to establish some rules here Washington Week is not Congress. We are going to be civil here. And I'm looking at you, Glasser, okay? I'm looking at you. But, you know, we're not going to go to that depth.
So, here's the thing that I wanted to ask you all about. It's like that is obviously an entertaining moment. It's also appalling. I mean, Steve, you've been thinking about these kind of issues since 1860.
Steve Inskeep: It's not -- since the 1860s, me personally. That's how long I've been hosting Morning Edition.
Jeffrey Goldberg: You personally have been thinking about this.
Steve Inskeep: It's not terribly surprising, given the climate that we're in. And if you think about what they're arguing about, they're arguing there about the rules of Congress. You're not supposed to engage in personal attacks. There's even a very old fashioned word that was used in the debate, personalities, by which they don't mean Jeff Goldberg's sparkling personality, they mean personal attacks. You're not supposed to engage in them.
Representative Jasmine Crockett even is asking in that hypothetical question, would it be a personality if I were to say this terrible thing that all begins with B's? And she's asking that question, and you're not supposed to do that. The reason you're not supposed to do that is, A, in the old days, you could end up fighting a duel, but, B, in more modern times, you might sometimes need to cooperate with the other person on the other side, so you attack the issue and not the person.
And the reason that I say that it's relevant now, or not surprising terribly now, is because in the House of Representatives, what's the point? There are very few occasions where some members seem to be inclined to work with the other side and seem to think that there's any point in it, so why not launch on somebody's eyebrows?
Laura Barron-Lopez, White House Correspondent, PBS NewsHour: Yes. And I think it's also important to state like where it started, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene made the insulting comment about Jasmine Crockett, which is why then Representative Ocasio-Cortez was asking about can we have that stricken from the record, which is what --
Steve Inskeep: Because it's inappropriate, right.
Laura Barron-Lopez: Right, because it's inappropriate and that's tends to what happened when another lawmaker does engage in a personal attack, then it will be struck from the record and then it devolves from there.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. Is Marjorie Taylor Greene such an outlier in Congress, or is she just a manifestation of a larger devolution? I don't know what you would call that.
Eugene Daniels, White House Correspondent, Politico: I think she's the obvious continuation, right? Like this is something that we've been seeing and people learn from Donald Trump that you can kind of say whatever you want and nothing matters. And she is probably does it maybe the best, I guess, if you're going to say it, like she's the one that gets away with it the most, most people don't. And I think Comer doesn't know how to control her. No one knows.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Comer was the chairman. Comer has been flummoxed.
Steve Inskeep: What was his quote again? A what now?
Jeffrey Goldberg: A what now. Yes, the name of our show, a what now?
Eugene Daniels: You don't have Mike Johnson who's able to control her, right, as much as everyone is supposed to be doing that when they're in leadership. And so she is kind of an outlier but a continuation of what was kind of already happening.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Susan?
Susan Glasser, Staff Writer, The New Yorker: Yes, that's right. I mean, look, we have a long way. They have not reached the floor, let's say, of congressional behavior. It was back in the 19th century that Charles Sumner, the Senator, was caned on the floor of the United States Senate.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Almost beaten to death.
Susan Glasser: Yes, exactly. And so, you know --
Steve Inskeep: But no one has yet been caned in the --
Susan Glasser: You know, we have seen the world's most creative use of baby girl as an insult.
Jeffrey Goldberg: I think George W. Bush would call this -- George W. Bush have called that the soft bigotry of low expectations.
Susan Glasser: Exactly. Well, we have a ways to go in our national devolution.
But I do think that this is representative of a new way in which our politics is going to be mediated going on. Institutions are unraveling, not just the institution of the U.S. Congress. In fact, you see the Trumpification arguably of the Senate Republican conference, where the traditions have held up of cross aisle civility much stronger up until more recently.
I think that this is -- you know, we can, and we'll talk more about the Supreme Court, we're seeing not only the hyper politicization of our institutions, but a kind of constant playing to the crowd, to the cameras, to the social media. And Marjorie Taylor Greene is a very effective example of this strand in our politics. It's not going to go away.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Let's talk about other novel congressional behavior this past week. We saw many leaders in Congress, Republicans, including the speaker, Mike Johnson, traveled to New York, to stand and bear witness and in support of an ex president, presumptive Republican nominee, who was on trial in a p*rn star hush money case.
Talk about -- maybe, Susan, I'll start with you, talk about the, the, the significance of this track, how much of it is directly related to the vice presidential search, or Trump's vice presidential search, and how much of it is just related to the idea that everybody is just acknowledging this is Trump's party.
Susan Glasser: Yes, not only is it Trump's party, but they even dress up like Donald Trump now. And that was something that -- for me, that is a visual marker, in some ways, of, you know, just what the decline of the Republican Party has been in many ways into a kind of a cult of personality, right?
So, it's not only that the Republican Party is going to have as their nominee, someone who might well be convicted of felony crimes, who's even essentially acknowledged already in a court of law to be a sexual assaulter.
Jeffrey Goldberg: He is a civilly adjudicated sexual offender?
Susan Glasser: Yes. You know, this is a phrase that you used and I thought it was really notable. I don't think it's broken through to most people, a civilly adjudicated sexual offender is going to be the third time in a row the nominee of the Republican Party, and here they are dressing up like him.
We were talking with my colleagues earlier today. Imagine if in -- during Watergate and with President Nixon, rather than going to the White House and Republican leaders urging Nixon to step aside, they actually dressed up like Richard Nixon and stood there and cheered on all of his offenses. And I think that it's a moment to be marked this trek to New York City for the trial.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Is it tragic or comic or both?
Steve Inskeep: I don't know. I will add one nuance, possible nuance here, without knowing directly Mike Johnson's motivations. The speaker does seem to be someone who wants to legislate from time to time and put himself in a situation where he bucked the right wing of his party and bucked the former president on the question of aid to Ukraine, and not only got it through the House but affirmatively said this is good.
And I imagine you can only buck the former president so many times and this is a freebie. You can give him this thing that is not legislation that is standing outside the courthouse.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Go ahead.
Laura Barron-Lopez: The other thing that they're doing is that Trump has been slapped with a gag order. And so they are going up there and doing what he can't do, which is circumventing the gag order for him, standing outside the courtroom, attacking the system, attacking the judge's daughter, attacking, you know, everything about what is unfolding in New York because he can't do that or he may end up in jail. And so that's also a part of this.
And then I think another thing that we should mention is that when they're up there, you know, Matt Gaetz, who also was dressed like Trump and the other Republicans, the congressmen from Florida, he tweeted out president, we're standing back and standing by, which is a very clear nod to what former President Trump said during the 2020 debate, where he said to the Proud Boys, stand back and stand by. And those Proud Boys ended up on the steps of the Capitol on January 6th leading that insurrection.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Yes. You might have actually hit on the most ominous aspect of this past week, that very direct call for preparation for some kind of disobedience. You wanted to add something?
Eugene Daniels: Yes. Because, I mean, that part of it is probably the most ominous, but it's also something that we've seen over and over again. I think the folks that are paying attention right now are were all kind of nervous about it, but the American people really aren't making those kinds of connections, right? When you talk to the American people, they say Congress is broken versus the Republican Party is, you know, all going on the Acela up to New York to dress the same, to defend Donald Trump, to do all the things he can't do, and also to wink and nod to the most dangerous aspects of the Republican Party, the most dangerous aspects of the Trump base, that, hey, we may need you to do something here. And this would be hyperbolic if the insurrection hadn't happened on January 6th. We've seen this already play out multiple times.
Susan Glasser: And also, Jeff, you made the point, and I didn't answer this question about the veep stakes. That's the other thing that was going on here, is that you had, basically aspiring vice presidential candidates trying out for Donald Trump, including people like Senator J.D. Vance, previously a scathing critic in the pages of your magazine of Donald Trump. Now, he shows up and he is live tweeting from the courtroom. What is he saying? Poor Donald Trump is being subjected to psychological torture.
Jeffrey Goldberg: He needed a friend, so he went. It's -- no, you mentioned a piece that J.D. Vance wrote for The Atlantic in 2016. I want to read you just a small bit of it. It was titled Opioid of the Masses and the opioid was Trump in Vance's mind at the time.
During this election season appears that many Americans have reached for a new pain reliever. It too promises a quick escape from life's cares. He's comparing this to opioids and fentanyl, an easy solution to the mounting social problems of U.S. communities and culture. It demands nothing and requires little more than a modest presence and maybe a few enablers. It enters minds, not through lungs or veins, but through eyes and ears and its name is Donald Trump.
If this doesn't show you the transition of the party from what it was when Donald Trump wasn't, before Donald Trump became president, to now, I don't know what does.
Steve Inskeep: I think though that I have to expand on something that Eugene mentioned, which was that most voters probably are not following this much at all. I think -- I mean, I go out and I knock on doors and talk to voters. And I think that if we knocked on the doors of ten people who will actually vote in November, most of them did not follow the events of this past week or only followed them glancingly.
Jeffrey Goldberg: But what's going on in New York right now was J.D. Vance, this person who once thought this, trying out.
Steve Inskeep: I get it, yes.
Laura Barron-Lopez: Yes. And I think something in that what you just read really stood out to me, the enablers, which is, you know, he has become an enabler of Donald Trump and so many of these Republicans, whether it's Ted Cruz, whether it's Marco Rubio, who said that he should not lead the party, whether it's Lindsey Graham who said that this person should never be our nominee or be the leader of the Republican party, and now they've all fallen in line and are saying that they are going to vote for him in November.
And it's rare when you see a Republican like Geoff Duncan, the former lieutenant governor of Georgia, who says, I can't do it anymore, and has actually taken the step to say that he's going to vote for Joe Biden.
Jeffrey Goldberg: I mean, there are several people who have said they can't do it anymore, Mitt Romney, obviously, but they tend to depart the political scene because there's no room for them.
Eugene Daniels: And Liz Cheney being one of those.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Well, yes.
Eugene Daniels: And for Trump, this is also him showing his dominance, right? Them having to get on the Acela, come up there dressed like him, try to talk like him, do the finger thing that he does, the cadence even, that is them saying -- that is all of them kind of kowtowing to him, bow down to the king. I think it's this, right?
Jeffrey Goldberg: I don't know.
Susan Glasser: Is that like a baby girl moment?
Eugene Daniels: It is. It's the baby girl of Donald Trump.
Jeffrey Goldberg: It could be. It could be.
Eugene Daniels: How he uses it.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Just staying on this, I want to come to Michael Cohen and his testimony, but stay on the subject of the, quote/unquote veep stakes. J.D. Vance seems like he's in prime position in part because he's maneuvering himself so well. Am I wrong about that? Is there someone that we're not focused on that we should be?
Eugene Daniels: I'm sure there is, but most of the folks are, you know, Byron Donalds, who's a Congressman from Florida, J.D. Vance, it's kind of the usual suspects, people who for Trump represent the continuation of Trumpism, right? Because no matter what happens in 2024, the question for Republicans is just Trump is them continued. If you have a J.D. Vance who's the V.P. either the vice president or just the vice presidential nominee, in 2028, he's able to take that and continue the party in that direction.
Jeffrey Goldberg: What is he looking for? What is Trump looking for?
Steve Inskeep: I don't know. I don't think anybody at this table can definitely say, but it occurs to me thinking about J.D. Vance and whether he's a successor to Trump, it's hard for me to imagine Trump accepting a successor. Where is the moment where Trump would say, oh, I'm ready to step aside, or even be able to imagine I'm going to step aside or maybe not live forever and go for a successor?
It is interesting to think now, back to 2016, where it was thought that Trump needed something from a vice president and got that something from Mike Pence. It's hard to picture the thing that Trump would believe that he needs from a vice president.
Susan Glasser: Loyalty. the one thing that Donald Trump learned from his experience with Mike Pence, as he sees it, is that he made a mistake with Mike Pence because it turned out that no matter how much Mike Pence sucked up to him for four years, when Donald Trump really asked him to cross the line, he wasn't there.
And so, in my view, I think that Trump does have a litmus test. I think that he wants somebody who is willing to say that go along with his lies about the 2020 election and be fully prepared to do whatever it takes to take and keep power after the 2024 election.
Donald Trump has already said in May of this election year that he won't accept the results of the election unless he wins. That, in my view, is a very significant moment in this campaign. It is quite early to declare that only if you win, do you think the result will have been fair? And if not, we have to, quote, fight. That's what he said. So he needs --
Laura Barron-Lopez: A vice president who's going to agree with him on that. That's his key --
Jeffrey Goldberg: So, in other words, Laura, the, the number one qualification, overwhelming qualification, is loyalty, is do the thing?
Laura Barron-Lopez: And are you prepared to lie about the 2020 election? And are you prepared to fight if we lose this election? I mean the RNC asked staffers that they were potentially hiring who won the 2020 election, you know who lost the 2020 election. I mean, that is all based on the litmus test of whether or not you're an election denier
Eugene Daniels: And then if you watch the interviews of people, like Tim Scott, the senator from South Carolina, who also is trying out for the veep stakes, when you watch them, twist themselves into pretzels, to not say that the election wasn't stolen in 2020. When it just happened a couple weeks ago, he was on Meet the Press and they just asked him like, was the election stolen?
This is a person who voted to certify the election. But now because of the litmus test and everything that's been created, the loyalty test, he is going back on that and doing it in a way that's, frankly, if you talk to a lot of other Republicans, is embarrassing.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. Susan, let's go to the actual trial. Give me your number one takeaway from the testimony this week.
Susan Glasser: Yes. I mean, Michael Cohen, Trump's former lawyer and fixer, obviously was in many ways the most important witness in this case. The witnesses before this were building up to this. The goal of the prosecution was because of Cohen's history of not telling the truth, including under oath because of his conviction and having served time in prison, easily undermine, therefore, by the defense.
The goal of the prosecution was to have other people testify, but certain things only Michael Cohen could do. Only he could say, I, Donald Trump, told me, quote, just do it. That was the key quote from Michael Cohen. He says that Donald Trump, when he was his boss, told him, just do it. Just do it in terms of paying off Stormy Daniels the $130,000 to make sure that her story did not come out before the 2016 election. That's an important moment.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Did Michael Cohen do the job that the prosecutors wanted him to do?
Steve Inskeep: He seemed to on direct, and then in cross-examination, he gave a little bit of it back in being caught in what would seem to be a possible lie about a phone call.
One of the legal analysts we had on NPR this week made an interesting point, though. This is not a trial about sex, although there seems to be plenty of sex in it. It's not even a trial about paying hush money, which is what Cohen testified that Trump approved doing. It's a trial about falsifying business records. There's that further step that the prosecutors need to prove, and there's some question about whether they've gotten that far to that essential step that would lead to an actual conviction.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.
Laura Barron-Lopez: It's about falsifying business records to influence an election to make sure that voters were not aware of this hush money payment.
And so two kind of key things that I think stood out, not just from Cohen, but also from other testimony was that, you know, Cohen said that Trump urged him to delay sending the payment to Stormy Daniels until after the election, because what does it matter after the election. And then also hope Hicks earlier, I think, her testimony could kind of be key here.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Trump's former aide.
Laura Barron-Lopez: Yes former communications director and aide. And she said that it was he -- that Trump told her in 2018, when The Wall Street Journal story came out about the payments to Stormy Daniels, the hush money payments, that Trump told her, you know, thankfully this didn't come out before the election and it's good that Cohen made those payments.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. Eugene, I'm going to ask you to speculate a little bit and speculate responsibly.
Eugene Daniels: I'll try, baby girl.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Does it -- we don't want a baby girl moment. Does this matter? If he's convicted -- you've studied polls and you've looked at the way the Trump base feels about these cases, this is probably the last time Trump is going to be in a courtroom before November, what are the consequences if he's convicted?
Eugene Daniels: Yes, it doesn't matter with the Trump base. Like they have made that very clear when he said he could stand on 5th Avenue and shoot someone, that has -- up until that, that has proven true. I think it matters to the moderates and independents and even some Republicans, people who consider themselves actual conservatives. Because what they have said in polls and in interviews and in focus groups is that if he is convicted, they're not interested in sending a felon to the White House, and that's key for them.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Steve, you were just in Arizona talking to voters. Any sense of what a conviction would mean in their calculus?
Steve Inskeep: I think a lot of voters, including the ones that we would perhaps think of disparaging as low information voters or swing voters, a lot of those voters make a choice based on their own interests, their own understanding of what matters. They're thinking about the economy. They may be thinking about immigration in a lot of cases. Some people may be thinking about abortion. But they're not necessarily thinking about the individual's criminal record that they're thinking about sending to the White House. That, to them, is noise, if they're following it at all.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. Go ahead.
Laura Barron-Lopez: I'd say in a state like Arizona, which I spent a lot of time in, in 2020, and I've talked to some voters still since that are there, these independent McCain Republicans, Mitt Romney Republicans, who could very much be influenced by a conviction, potentially in any of the cases, not not just ones that we consider the more substantive ones like, the January 6th one, but even a hush the hush money payment one, and that's kind of unique to Arizona in a way, the number of Republicans that are there that are these independent streak-type Republicans. I don't know if there's that many of them in states like Michigan or Georgia, where I was just in Michigan and some voters were saying that they weren't watching or paying attention or following the trial.
Susan Glasser: I would just caution that those poll numbers suggest there's a large number of even Republicans as well as independents who are willing to -- who say they won't vote for a convicted felon and wouldn't support Trump again, I would take those poll numbers with a grain of salt. I think we have eight years of experience in which, essentially, the previously unthinkable and unacceptable to a large swath of the Republican electorate has become accepted because of the overwhelming predominance of partisan considerations again and again and again.
So, the difference is that this is a very close election. So, even a small percentage of Republican voters who said they couldn't go along with a convicted felon, it still might matter. But I just think those numbers are very high when it comes down to actually judging Donald Trump.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Steve, I just want to ask you to switch subjects to another trial that is coming next month, the Hunter Biden trial, gun possession. Now, Hunter Biden is not running for president, there's a big difference. But the question is, how is this going to affect the mood and happiness and effectiveness of Joe Biden?
Steve Inskeep: It's clearly going to take -- he's going to take it personally because he takes this personally. But it's not like he's going to be surprised by it. And the larger question, I think, is how it affects people politically, and it might be a little bit of a reverse of the trial we've just been discussing. For Democrats, this is going to be noise.
I presume, without knowing their programming choices, that it's going to be all over Fox News, that it's going to be all over right wing media, and there's going to be a lot of focus and a lot of attention and a lot of energy directed at that.
How it affects the president, which is your question, I can't tell.
Jeffrey Goldberg: He's a father and it's going to affect him.
Steve Inskeep: Yes.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Unfortunately, we need to leave it there for now. It's been a great conversation and we're going to continue next week, of course. But I want to thank our panelists for joining us and for sharing their reporting.
For a deep dive on the factor shaping this year's election, check out David Graham's piece on theatlantic.com.
I'm Jeffrey Goldberg. Good night from Washington.
