Dean Obeidallah, Salon

Former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele wants Democrats to know that the 2022 election will deliver lots of surprises — including some Democrats may actually like. Where's he coming from, given that so much of the corporate media can't stop (gleefully) telling us about the impending "red wave"? As Steele explained in our "Salon Talks" conversation, "Republicans are flooding the zone with a lot of bad polling," creating a false sense of where this election is heading. In fact, Steele said he "believes the political landscape favors Democrats in the key races."

Nonetheless, Steele was eager to slam Democratic leaders from the top down for what he views as their terrible messaging strategy this election cycle. "I've never seen such an inept political operation in my entire life," Steele said. "The Supreme Court delivers you a major upheaval in politics with the Dobbs decision [which overturned Roe v. Wade], and everybody's all jacked up about abortion" — but Democrats still let the GOP refocus this election on inflation and crime.

Steele, who became RNC chair in January 2009 after the Democrats' big victories of 2008 — when Barack Obama was elected and the party won big majorities in both the Senate and House — also offers some advice for Democrats in case things actually do go badly in this election. "Every ounce of energy needs to be focused on two words, only two words, for the next cycle," he said, "even though it's a presidential cycle." What are those words? "State legislatures." That's the strategy Steele employed as RNC chair beginning in 2010 and the result was Republican victories in "over 800 state legislative races," as he noted. Those victories meant that Republicans controlled most state legislatures during the all-important redrawing of congressional maps following the census, which had an impact far beyond just one election cycle.

Watch my "Salon Talks" episode with Steele here or read the transcript of our conversation below for more on the midterms, why Steele thinks the Democrats are so bad at messaging and why he views corporate media as a pack of "hypocrites and liars" who can't wait to see Donald Trump back on the ballot in 2024.

The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

It's always great to see you, even though it's under increasingly challenging times. I thought when we beat Trump it was all going to get better. Not so fast!

Oh no, baby. I never thought that. That's not how infection works. We're on the cusp of a big decision the country's got to make.

You're a former chair of the GOP. I'm sure that, years ago, if I'd asked you, "What does the Republican Party stand for?" you'd have been able to tick off policy positions. Can you tell us today, when you look at the Republican Party, what it stands for?

The country has to answer a deep question: Do you love me enough to keep me? That's the question democracy is asking.

Whatever Donald Trump wants it to stand for. Whatever Kari Lake or Marjorie Taylor Greene or Ron DeSantis espouses, whether it's burning books or going after people who don't look like you or live where you live. It is a different America that they're trying to make. It is an idealized version of America that never existed, and to the extent that it did, it was rife with all kinds of issues around race and economy and prosperity for people.

The reality of it is, this party in 2016 began to abandon its core values and roots, and in 2020 completely tossed them into the ash bin of history when they decided we didn't even need a platform to tell you what we believe, because it only mattered what the wiles and whims of a small group of very angry white people was all about. That's been the animating feature. It's interesting to see: Here we are now, almost two years out from a horrific moment in our history, on Jan. 6, 2021, and we're about to go into a midterm election in which the country has to answer a deep question: Do you love me enough to keep me? That's the question democracy is asking.

To that point, President Biden made his speech about democracy, and he had a line that really jumped out. He said, "What we're doing now is going to determine whether democracy will long endure." He literally defined autocracy on television. What is your takeaway from the president of the United States pleading with people to choose democracy over autocracy?

Well, a couple of things. The first is that he is got to make that plea on the heels of Jan. 6, 2021, and you would think that the natural American response would be, "Oh, hell no. We're not doing that anymore. No, absolutely. Democracy all the way. And these election deniers and half-beat wannabes who are out here shellacking and shilling for autocracy, get away,"

"Out damned spot," as Lady Macbeth would say. But the reality of it is, they've leaned into it, and the fact that the president has to get out and make that address says that.

I'm not feeling people really understanding what it'll look like in nine months, with Kevin McCarthy sitting there with Marjorie Taylor Greene on his left and right shoulder.

What's more troubling is the fact that for the press, for the corporate media, it was like an equivalency test. It was no different than a football team winning or losing a game. For them, it's all about the horse race. "Who's winning? Who's losing? Who gets control and power?" And democracy is sitting in the corner going, "Hello, what about me?" Nobody is really responsive to that, and those of us like yourself, me and so many others out here are trying to shake America, as in that infamous moment where Cher slaps the crap out of her male lead in "Moonstruck" and says, "Snap out it."

Wednesday morning when we wake up, elections will not have been decided. There will still be ballots to be counted, and there will be narratives promulgated by the corporate media because again, it feeds the horse race, acting as if that's somehow unusual. There's something wrong there, and they want to put these liars on television who've already told us, "If I don't win, I'm going to claim fraud."

The big setup is the space we've been in, and unfortunately, democracy doesn't have a lot of defenders. I hate to say that, but if the president of the United States has to go on national television to remind people that this stuff matters, I don't know. Maybe I missed something, but I don't think people are seeing it the way it is.

President Biden's speech didn't even make the front page of the New York Times in the print edition the next day.

There it is.

That's not Fox News, that's The New York Times. Decisions have been made. Do you think the corporate media is excited about this election?

Oh, they can't wait. They cannot wait. They cannot wait. They are such hypocrites and liars. They're like the top of the pile because the money that flows into their networks and their cable stations and their newspapers and their websites, every little clickbait that they put out there about Trump is gold, and that's their bottom line. Again, democracy is in the corner going, "I ain't that easy. I get it, right? I'm not going to show a little leg because that's not how I roll. I require hard loving. I require hard work." It's too easy for them, Dean, to just give into that. I just watched today as this news was being leaked out that on Nov. 14, Donald Trump is going to possibly, or very, very, very probably, announce he's running for president." Who gives a you-know-what? But a lot of people do.

Michael, if the election deniers win, the more visible ones, like Kari Lake in Arizona, Tim Michels in Wisconsin and Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania, what does that do in terms of the GOP doubling and tripling down on democracy-denying? I call it "democracy-denying," because election-denying is backward-looking to 2020, and they're forward-looking. It is denying democracy. Does it embolden that wing of the GOP to go forward?

Why wouldn't it? Look, there were no consequences for four years of Trumpism, right? There were no consequences for what happened on Jan. 6 so far, and I doubt the DOJ does anything now that there's rumblings that Donald Trump may run. That's like saying, "You can't arrest me because I'm about to go do a job interview next week." "You can't arrest me because I'm about to be named CEO of my company." "You can't bring federal charges against me for the crimes I've committed because of something else I'm doing."

Every ounce of energy needs to be focused on two words, only two words, for the next cycle: state legislatures.

This idea that somehow this one ass is above all the rest of us is galling beyond galling. We are now sitting here staring this in the eye and blinking. The GOP sees that and they're like, "Oh shit, we're actually getting away with this? OK! Then let me look in my bag and see what else I can come up with." Of course — what do you think tomorrow looks like if you give up on today? I just don't understand it, but maybe it's me. I'm actually tired of saying it because I don't know what else they can do. I don't want to prejudge the outcome of the November election, but at the same time, I'm not feeling people really understanding what it'll look like in nine months, with Kevin McCarthy sitting there with Majorie Taylor Greene on his left and right shoulder.

If Trump runs and wins and the media says to him, "But you can only serve one term. Aren't you going to be a lame duck president as soon as you get in there?" Is he going to push back on the whole 22nd Amendment idea that you can't serve another term?

Is this a softball question?

Yes, so Michael Steele could hit it out of the park.

Does Donald Trump dye his hair?

Do you think the GOP openly pushes to amend the Constitution, or makes some other kind of argument?

If they have the House and the Senate, you've already seen from the Jan. 6 committee what their lawyers tried to do, the lies they tried to bake into the system, the rules they tried to pull over the judiciary. What makes you think that all those Trump judges out there — at least they can find one or two of them that are like, "Oh, OK, yeah this works." What's to prevent him creating the chaos that would ensue anyway in another four years, or declaring martial law and suspending elections? People act like that's just fiction and something that'll never happen. Well, the last six years weren't supposed to happen either.

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Jan. 6 was never supposed to happen. In the worldview of America, no one ever thought that its citizens would rise up against the government after an election like that and declare that after losing by eight million votes that guy actually won. Everything is on the table with these guys, and they'll have enough glossed-over beautiful people like Kari Lake stealing for him and making it all sound so reasonable and so together and so smart. It is the worst form of the Garden of Eden, where the snake was in there just working and just sounding so pretty: "Just eat the apple. Take a bite. Just a little bite. Baby, come on, take a little bite."

Look, Democrats, objectively speaking, delivered on a bunch of policy things. They did it on COVID relief, then they did the infrastructure bill. They helped veterans. They helped invest in electric vehicles and climate change and the Inflation Reduction Act. What were they missing? What happened?

You get the Supreme Court not by winning the presidency, but by winning the state legislatures that draw the congressional lines and reinforce those lines — and by focusing on the judiciary, like the Republicans did for 30 years.

What was missing was actually saying what you just said. You and I know that, but go out there and stand in the grocery line and ask the person in front of you or behind you if they know that. Because the only thing they know is that they just saw a 30% increase in their grocery bill. The only thing they know is that they paid an extra $2 more per gallon to get to the grocery store. That's what they know. So to the extent that you don't have a ready, viable communication strategy …

When I was RNC chairman, I was adamant about that, to the point I went through a number of communications directors until they got what I was trying to say, which was, "When you are in this position where the odds are stacked against you, the narrative is not your friend, you have to change the way the discussion is had." You've got to change the way people engage around the things you want them to talk about, and they didn't do that.

Obama, for all of the great stuff that he provided this past week, where was that six weeks ago? Why didn't someone pull Obama into the political shop, pull his team in to sit down and go, "Let's coordinate a messaging strategy. We want the president, cabinet folks, etc., out here saying these things because America doesn't realize that this could have been a whole lot worse had Joe Biden not been here." I've never seen such an inept political operation in my entire life.

Are you speaking of the Democrats now, the messaging?

All of it. Yes. You get a windfall when the Supreme Court delivers you a major upheaval in politics with the Dobbs decision, and everybody's all jacked up about abortion. Meanwhile, Republicans are sitting there going, "OK, so here's the deal. No one talk about abortion. You get an abortion question, your response is, 'You know how much I paid for gas today?' You get an abortion question, you say, 'Inflation just ticked up to 8.3%.'"

And then throw in crime.

Meanwhile, Democrats are here fretting over policy, fighting with Sinema and Manchin over getting basic stuff done, and the country's sitting there watching this going, "OK, so who's running this show? What's happening?" The whole COVID narrative gets blown up, gets consumed by Afghanistan, which wasn't Biden's policy, by the way. He was just executing what Trump had started on the way out the door. No one understands how these pieces fit. So yeah, Dean, it's been very difficult to watch. I know a number of former Republicans, and some current Republicans, who offered their services to be helpful, but apparently no one really paid attention.

I recently spoke to Rick Wilson and they're doing their stuff at the Lincoln Project. I know you know them well. Thinking about when you were RNC chair after Obama wins, you helped build the infrastructure on the state level to have long-term victories. If Democrats don't do well — let's say it turns out a little worse than we think. What would you recommend for Democrats, to rebuild for the next two years?

There should be a very quiet meeting, pulling in key players across a number of sectors in politics: messaging, money, grassroots, constituencies, things like that. Every ounce of energy needs to be focused on two words, only two words, for the next cycle, even though it's a presidential cycle. Two words: state legislatures. That's how I won in 2010. I didn't win top-down in 2010, I won bottom-up. I'm a grassroots guy. I come from the greatest municipality in the world, Washington, D.C. I learned the art of municipal politics, legislative politics, from a good friend and a good political leader, Marion Barry. I applied those strategies in 2010 and won over 800 state legislative races.

You get the Supreme Courts you get not by winning the presidency, but by winning the state legislatures that draw the congressional lines, by winning the state legislatures that reinforce those lines. Those congressional lines then give you the numbers you need in the House. Those congressional lines, ironically enough, feed the statewide races. The second thing you focus on is the judiciary. Republicans have been focused on the judiciary since 1988, '89, '90 — for 30 years. Meanwhile, everybody else was whistling, "Yeah, we're out there fighting for Roe," but we're like, "OK, how do you change Roe?" Well, you got to get judicial appointments. It's not rocket science.

So they need to figure out the strategy by looking at where the legislature opportunities are available. The races could be close in the next cycle. Legislative races, depending on the state, are on-year or off-year, meaning they're in an even year or an odd year. For example, in 2023, you'll have races for those legislatures that got elected in 2019. Are you thinking about that?

Right now, we're not. I think Democrats are going to be talking about, "What do we do? Who's going to be our nominee for 2024?" That kind of stuff.

Of course they are.

Right. As opposed to investing in an infrastructure. What you did was remarkable. I've talked about it with other people who've not necessarily said it in the nicest ways. But what you did — I think it was called RedMap. You invested big time in state legislatures. Eric Holder tried to do that the other way in 2020 and got close, so at least they're engaged in the battle.

Remember, Dean, I got roundly criticized for that. Karl Rove and a lot of folks didn't want me putting money into Wisconsin and Idaho and Arkansas and places that weren't battleground states. Well, we're not in a presidential cycle. Why the hell am I spending money in just Pennsylvania or Wisconsin or Illinois or whatever? So we put money across the board in all 50 states, including some of our territories. We won the governorship in Guam for the first time in 2010. It's how you see the chessboard, how you see the map. I saw the map from the bottom up. Most people look at the map from the top down.

I believe you win races not from the top down, but from the bottom up. That juice flows up, because if I'm excited about a local race, more than likely I'm going to vote for the top of the ticket. But, you know, if I'm just excited about the top of the ticket, I'm ignoring down ballot.

Well, Michael, the stakes are very high in this election. We'll have to regroup after the election. We can chat about what you think Democrats should do then. Maybe there are some surprises here and there. There's been huge early voting turnout in Georgia that could surprise people.

A) There will be surprises. B) If you want to get a good feel of where this landscape is, I think it still favors Democrats a little bit more than the false polling that's out there. Republicans are flooding the zone with a lot of bad polling, and they're doing that for a reason. If you want to understand the reason, go check out Simon Rosenberg. He is a Democratic pollster who is the real deal, and he's not trying to show for one side or the other. He's just giving honest information. I've had him on my podcast, and we've talked about this stuff. We line up a lot, we agree a lot on where this map looks like it's headed. So people should still be enlightened, heightened up for sure, but there's some real sweet spots out there.

Michael Cohen, the longtime personal attorney and "fixer" for Donald Trump, who went to prison for helping Trump pay hush money to porn actress Stormy Daniels, is after "Revenge." Indeed, that's the title of his second book, which is out next week. As I discussed with Cohen on "Salon Talks" this week, that revenge does not stop with Trump. Cohen's takes on the corruption of the Justice Department under Trump and his experiences being investigated for lots of stuff he didn't do (as well as what he did). According to Cohen, the FBI spent time and resources "running around the country ensuring that I was not where the Steele dossier" claimed he was, and looking into "11 allegations raised against me, all of which are false."

This article first appeared on Salon

It's apparent in speaking to Cohen why he was such an effective lawyer and fixer for Trump. The guy is a pitbull — animated, loud, smart and damn persuasive. For starters, he says the media gets it wrong when they say he went to jail "in part" because of his role in paying hush money to Daniels before the 2016 election to keep her quiet about a past alleged affair with Trump. "I didn't go to prison in part because of the hush money with Stormy Daniels," Cohen said. "That's the reason why I went, plain and simple."

But as Cohen laid out, he fully expected to be thrown under the bus by Trump, and believes Trump will do the same to Rudy Giuliani — whom Cohen describes as an "idiot" — as well as former chief of staff Mark Meadows and even members of his own family. "What's he capable of? Anything and everything in order to protect himself, plain and simple," Cohen said.

Cohen believes, however, that the recent civil suit brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James against Trump and his family members may ultimately lead to Trump going to prison — and Cohen is undeniably gleeful that he played a role in kicking off that investigation. Even as Cohen insisted that his pursuit of "revenge is not that myopic in terms of just holding Donald Trump" accountable, I also got the sense that no one in America would be happier to see the former president perp-walked than his former lawyer.

The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

When the New York attorney general announced the massive civil lawsuit for fraud against Donald Trump, three of his adult kids and various others, she said, "I will remind everyone this investigation only started after Michael Cohen, the former lawyer, testified before Congress and shed light on Donald Trump's misconduct." Remind people about what you said before Congress that sparked this investigation?

That was a nine-hour absolute ... I don't even know what to call it. It was a circus. You had the Democrats asking me questions about Donald Trump — Jamie Raskin, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, so many of the Democrats wanted to know things about Donald Trump, which I answered. Whereas the Republicans, as I stated openly, not one of them asked me a single question about Trump, which was the purpose of having me there.

Trump said, "The FBI raided one of my attorneys." Whoa, whoa! All of a sudden, this orange-crusted buffoon has forgotten my name. Seriously?

I said, "I know what you are all doing because I was part of the group that created this playbook." Right? They received in advance, words that they wanted each and every one of the Republicans to use: liar, tax cheat, criminal, soon-to-be felon. These are all the words that Trump, the RNC and so on had forwarded to them in advance. Therefore, it was going to be each one of them spending five minutes denigrating me to the American people because it falls in line with the Trump Putin-esque playbook, which is to denigrate the other person, repeat the lie over and over and over again until the lie becomes the truth.

That's really what my book "Revenge" is about. It's uncovering the truth and showing that the true liar, which I believe we all know, the true dumpster fire that was formally sitting in the Oval Office, is Donald Trump and his acolytes and inner circle.

In your book you write, "Over the years, Trump screwed people over, manipulated them, and used them, and I helped him do it." When the FBI went through your office, Donald Trump was defending you. Did you think at that time he was going to stick with you?

No. That was actually one of the turning points, when I realized that he was not going to stand by me. When they approached him, meaning the media, and he was sitting at a table with his arms crossed and so on like this, and they said to him, "The FBI just raided ..." He was like, "It's disgusting, right?

That's when I realized that this guy is all about himself. And where I thought that I occupied a position whereby I would never be thrown under the bus by him, that's when I realized, no. This guy's all about himself and all about using somebody else to exonerate himself from his own culpability.

Rudy Giuliani has seen the same things you did and he's still sucking up to Donald Trump. John Eastman has taken the Fifth, and I don't think he's going to cooperate with anyone. Is there any doubt that Donald Trump throws those two guys under the bus to help himself, if that's what it comes down to?

Rudy is an idiot. I mean, there's just no way to describe it. Rudy Collude-y Giuliani. First of all, the guy thought he was going to get paid a quarter of a million dollars a day by the RNC. Obviously this whole BS about Trump and Rudy going back for years and being friends.

First of all, it's not true. I was there for over a decade, and Rudy was never considered a friend nor had he really ever been to the Trump office up on [the 26th floor of Trump Tower]. So I'm not really sure about this newfound friendship. But in some weird way, Rudy actually thought he was going to get paid, which just goes to show you how stupid he is. And then on top of that, he's out there defending the narcissistic sociopath in chief, thinking that Donald is going to protect him.

But let's not forget what Rudy also once said. "Donald won't throw me in the ..." He goes, "I have an insurance card." You may remember that. Well, was that another lie too, to try to prompt Trump to pay him and do the right thing by him?

We've seen that Trump doesn't care about anyone or anything other than himself, that Trump weaponized the Justice Department to go against his critics. So the second that Rudy became a semi-critic, that was the end of him. You don't see him anymore. You don't hear from him anymore. Right now he's dealing with his own personal issues. No money, having to pay his ex-wife Judy a quarter of a million dollars or go to jail. I'm sure he's out there hitting the phones and pounding the pavement to borrow money. This is what happens to everyone.

I said it to Mark Meadows, and I said it to Jim Jordan and to all the Republicans at that House Oversight Committee hearing, not to mention the six other hearings that you're not aware of that I did in the SCIF [secure room] behind closed doors. What happened to me can and will happen to you if you put your faith, your confidence and your trust behind a man that doesn't understand the word loyalty.

The title of your book speaks to the idea of how Donald Trump weaponized the Justice Department. Some people might think, well, that's because the DOJ under Trump went after you. But you talk about how it played on pre-existing weaknesses within the Department, and then later you were punished when you were trying to write a book.

Well, the weaponization of the Justice Department did not start with the unconstitutional remand of me back to Otisville [state prison] when they lured me down to 500 Pearl Street [the Manhattan federal courthouse]. You'll read about it in the book. One of the reasons that I wrote "Revenge," and of course the title is like my first book, "Disloyal," in that you're not really sure where the revenge is, who the revengee is, who the revenger is. The revenge is really the American people taking revenge on the Justice Department in order to fix it.

What we have seen with me is that regardless of who you are, regardless of whether you think you're part of this protected political class, when you fall within the ire of someone like Donald Trump — a guy who doesn't want to be president but wants to be a dictator, an autocrat, a fascist monarch — this is what will happen to you and everybody else if we don't fix the system.

My issues with the DOJ didn't start with the unconstitutional remand. It started with the entire investigation. And I begin the book by talking about the fake Steele dossier. Now, as I write in the book, I don't care about any of the other allegations in this ridiculous document by this wannabe 007, right? He's not. If this is the best that England has to offer, it's no wonder they rely on the United States as often as they do for intelligence, because this guy's a freaking idiot. What you end up having is the FBI running around the country ensuring that I was not where the Steele dossier said I was and 11 allegations raised against me, all of which are false. I've never been to Prague. I never paid $10 million to get Paul Manafort out of trouble. I wouldn't pay $3 to get Manafort out of trouble.

It goes on and on: I have a dacha in Sochi directly next door to Putin. My father-in-law is a real estate developer in Moscow, the biggest. My father-in-law's never been to Moscow. In fact, he's not Russian. He's Ukrainian, or the former Soviet Union when they were there. He's never returned in over 50 years. The whole thing is pure BS. But what happened? Media fell for it. Why? Because this is Donald Trump's true superpower. He is a master manipulator of the media. He understands people's inner desires to raise their own prestige, their own notoriety. And that's where the Department of Justice showed its first true colors. The unconstitutional remand, making me the first political prisoner in my own country because I wouldn't waive my First Amendment right. That's the subject of the lawsuit that I now have filed.

According to reporting in the Washington Post, Donald Trump personally helped pack up documents in January and then wanted his lawyers to tell the National Archives, "Hey, that's everything." Meanwhile, he had hundreds of pages of documents marked "classified." What do you think? I mean, you know Donald Trump. Why was he holding back these classified documents?

You may remember many years ago, Mattel made the mistake of making the Trump Monopoly game and sent it to Donald. And he was very proud of it. It had his various different assets and so on, most of which have gone bankrupt. But that's not part of the game. He's only interested in one thing, the get out of jail free card. And that's exactly what he saw in those documents. "You want to play with me? Really? I was the former president of the United States. I have documents that are so damaging to this country's national security. Go ahead, indict me, try to throw me in prison. See what happens." What happens is he turns over all this classified information, not as if he hasn't already done it, but he turns all his classified information over to our adversaries, right? "You want to play that game? No problem!"

What is Donald Trump capable of? Even now, he's traveling the nation, embracing QAnon, continuing to spew election lies, trying to radicalize people.

Anything and everything in order to protect himself, plain and simple. As they would say, drop the mic on that one. Plain and simple. He doesn't care about this country. He doesn't care about democracy. He doesn't care about QAnon. He doesn't care about the independents. He doesn't care about Republicans or Democrats. He cares about one thing and only one thing and that's Donald J. Trump.

Supposedly he was going to fire his daughter, Ivanka, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, by tweet. That seems so petty, as opposed to throwing them under the bus if it was about criminal charges. Is there some truth to the idea that maybe he was going to fire Ivanka by tweet?

On more than one occasion. It wasn't just Ivanka. It was Jared as well. Many times it was because of Jared that he wanted to. One of the things that drove Trump nuts is if anybody else gets any positive press. When they had Jared on the front of Time Magazine as the guy who was the reason for Trump becoming president, that sent Trump into an apoplectic fit. There was no way in the world that he was going to allow Jared, this sort of weasel, to take the credit for what Trump believes belongs to him and him only. That was one of the very first fights. Then there were a few other that had to do with policy that went wrong. With Trump, if you make a mistake, your ass is on the line. And he has no qualms about firing anyone, including his own children or son-in-law.

You went to jail in part for helping Donald Trump with the hush money payments. There's no doubt about it. We all know it. You talked about it when you were pleading guilty. What happened with that investigation? Everyone wants to know. Why didn't the Southern District of New York then go after "Individual 1," under whose direction and for whose benefit you did that?

I was also paid back for the money, which he took, by the way, as a tax deduction. I didn't know that you could end up getting your pecker pulled by a porn star and take that as a deduction. Let me tell you, if I had accountants like that, I would never have had the tax issues that I had. One of the things that "Revenge" points out — and I've been fighting to get this truth out there since the very beginning — I didn't go to prison in part because of the hush money with Stormy Daniels. That's the reason why I went, plain and simple. I never committed tax evasion. I never lied or misrepresented myself to a bank.

In fact, I also was forced to plead guilty to the hush money payment of Karen McDougal, the $150,000 payment, which if you Google it yourself now, with the drip-drip-drip of new information that's coming out, David Pecker acknowledged that was his deal. He paid it. I just looked over the agreement after their document was already done to ensure that Trump was protected, at Trump's request. But when I talk about this in "Revenge," I don't talk about it from the standpoint of, oh, Michael Cohen is saying. I'm talking from the standpoint of judges. We have statements by them. By prosecutors, other defense attorneys. We have, you name it, Congress members. I ended up going [to prison] because of the NDA to Stormy Daniels.

The prosecutors went ahead on a Friday night at 5:30, and that was the first time that I ever heard from them. They gave me 48 hours through my lawyer. I wasn't even allowed to be there. "You have 48 hours until Monday to plead guilty or we're filing an 80-page indictment that's going to include your wife and we're perp-walking both of you out of your condo." Now, I don't know about anybody else, but when you get confronted with something like this — I want everyone just to think for a second. If you've ever gotten pulled over by a police officer, and your head is sort of like — it's a menagerie. You feel almost like you got punched in the temple in a fight. You're not sure really where you are. Now put that with the Department of Justice, the Southern District of New York, aka the "Sovereign District" of New York that plays by its own rules. It mirrors what went on during the days of the Untouchables with Al Capone.

They threatened my wife. What was I going to do? I'm going to put her in jeopardy of being perp-walked, fingerprinted, indicted and go through all this? She had no knowledge of any of this. They were making her as a co-conspirator to the hush money payment. Many people who were with me in Otisville who didn't do what I did — which is to protect your wife and your family at all costs — they fought it and their wives ended up at [the women's prison] Danbury. And these people don't care. When they have a high-profile case like this one, which is possibly the highest-profile case in the century, they have to win. You know why? So that they can go to [major law firms like] Guggenheim Partners, McDermott Will & Emery. They can go to Paul White, Lowenstein Sandler, and all these other million-dollar defense jobs that not one of them are competent to have.

Look, what is it like for you? You went to jail for Donald Trump. You're making that clear. You helped him and he's walking free and being celebrated by the right. It's not like he's in hiding. He's spewing the same lies that gave us Jan. 6, and bluntly inciting more violence. Honestly, I don't think he's about politics. I think he's building an army right now. That's my gut feeling.

And you're not wrong, Dean, because this is what every dictator has done to take control. The first thing that you do is you stifle people's First Amendment rights. You create a state-run media. We see that in Russia going on right now. And then what do you do? You empower the army to take control. Now, he doesn't have the U.S. Army, but he's building a paramilitary army that we saw on Jan. 6. QAnon supporters, these gun-toting maniacs willing to do anything in furtherance of their führer. That's what Trump is doing. He failed in my case of me, thanks to Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein and my lawyer at the time, Donya Perry. He failed. But that's just a test run. So was Jan. 6. For Trump, it's a test run which is what makes him the most dangerous person in America, not just to our democracy, but to the freedoms that we all have enjoyed.

They threatened to perp-walk you and your wife out. Do you see a day where Donald Trump is charged and we see him perp-walked?

I do. I believe that the beginning to his end started with that incredible statement by Tish James. Right now, that case will financially destroy him. Now, a lot of people make the mistake and they say that she's seeking $250 million. That's not accurate. What she said was, "There is a baseline of $250 million." That's because they don't have the full amount. They just don't. In fact, when I was charged with tax evasion from the Southern District of New York, they left that number blank because they didn't even know what I tax evaded or what it really was, was a tax omission.

The story is so intertwined in terms of the accountant, the bank, all these people who lied, including [Trump Organization CFO] Allen Weisselberg. Google that too. Allen Weisselberg lied to the Southern District of New York in my case in order to get immunity. The biggest problem is with Trump, he doesn't care about the future of the country and he will continue to grift off all these supporters until they stop giving him money.

I do believe, going back to Tish James, that's going to be the impetus because she's already referred it to the DOJ, which is now under Merrick Garland, who I'm not thrilled with, by the way, under any circumstance. I believe he's operating so slowly, the exact opposite of Bill Barr, that people are getting Trump fatigue, right? Where we're just so tired of it. Indict him or stop this nonsense. But she also referred it to the IRS. And Donald Trump has committed tax evasion, bank fraud, wire fraud, misrepresentation. He will not be able to get past that, and that is criminal.

In tandem to the AG's case is the [Manhattan] district attorney's case. Now everybody's angry at Alvin Bragg, nobody more so than me. Mark Pomerantz, Carey Dunne, the two lawyers that worked on the case for over two years. I provided 15 sessions of information, documentation and so on. They worked in tandem with each other. And there is the case against the Trump Organization. You may remember that Allen Weisselberg said that he will not testify against Donald. That's OK, you're going to testify against the Trump Organization, which is the same thing as testifying against Donald, because it's his autonomous company. He controls every single aspect. Every lever of the Trump Organization is controlled by Donald J. Trump. Therefore, we'll call it ipso facto, he'll be guilty.

Is your "revenge" that Donald Trump is held accountable and brought to justice for his crimes?

So the revenge is not that myopic in terms of just Donald Trump. It is so much more than Donald Trump. Donald Trump was, we'll call it, the denominator. But you have so many numerators in this case that need to be overhauled, need to be fixed. Like Judge Rakoff said, "In a plea deal, you can't have the judge that's sitting on the case uninvolved." You need a third party or someone involved, which they're not. They work every day with the same prosecutors. Deals are cut in the bathroom. You need an independent judge when it comes to plea deals. Otherwise, you're going to see innocent people go to prison.

Political satirist Andy Borowitz has published a new book, "Profiles in Ignorance: How America's Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber," which may surprise some readers. Unlike his New Yorker column, The Borowitz Report, this book is not cast in the vein of genial or gentle humor. It's a stinging indictment of how the Republican Party has, by design, devolved from at least somewhat reasonable or coherent discussions of politics and policy to full-on celebration of idiocy.

This article first appeared in Salon.

I spoke to Borowitz for a recent episode of "Salon Talks" about his deeply researched book on the GOP's long arc into paralyzing dumbness. He shared his insight on the GOP's "three stages of ignorance," which come with laugh-out-loud moments when he quotes actual words spoken by leading Republicans to make his point. Consider this legendary utterance from former Vice President Dan Quayle: "I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future. … The future will be better tomorrow."

But it was Donald Trump, of course, who weaponized idiocy in a way that went from being amusing to literally deadly, especially with Trump's mishandling of the COVID pandemic and the election lies that led to the Jan. 6 attack. Remarkably, there are now numerous Republicans with Ivy League degrees — or even two degrees, like Ron DeSantis — who deliberately play dumb to connect with the GOP base. All is not lost, however: Borowitz shares a few concrete ways that reasonable, intelligent people can reach at least some Republicans. Watch or read our conversation below.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

This book is not exactly satirical. It's substantive, though often funny too. Did you debate doing a book about the profiles in ignorance and making it truly satirical?

It was a departure for me, because I'm known for doing fake news. I'm known for making up stories. I think I wanted to try something a little different because the news has gotten so ridiculous recently. The idea of doing satirical news has become very, very difficult. With Donald Trump, I would wrack my brain trying to come up with something ridiculous that he might do, and then 10 minutes later he would do that thing. So the news wasn't fake anymore, it was just early. And that I found frustrating.

I was on tour a couple of years ago — I did a standup tour called "Make America Not Embarrassing Again." I got into the topic of ignorance a little bit and I had this throwaway line where I was talking about Sarah Palin and her interview with Katie Couric where she couldn't name a single Supreme Court decision that she disagreed with, other than Roe v. Wade, of course. And I thought, you've got to be able to come up with something, like Ali v. Frazier or something, just pull something out of your ass. And I realized that was significant because Sarah Palin was the gateway idiot who led to Donald Trump. And that got me thinking about this whole rise of ignorance in America.

I went back in time and really focused on the last 50 years, which I call the age of ignorance. And I think that's where, although we've always had dumb politicians in our country, ignorance has really reached critical mass. You don't need to be satirical when you have comedians like Sarah Palin and Dan Quayle writing the jokes for you. You really don't. You can't top them, really.

You write about ignoramuses and argue that they're attracted to the Republican Party, or so it seems. Democrats, by contrast, have eggheads. You mentioned Adlai Stevenson, Al Gore, even Mike Dukakis. Is there something about the parties that naturally self-select?

I think both parties started in a similar place. If you go back to ancient history before either of us was born, to the 1950s, and you look at Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, both of them were actually big readers. Harry Truman didn't go to college, but he read like crazy. He read every library book in Independence, Missouri. Ike on the other hand, was also a huge reader, but he kept it a secret. He thought it was going to hurt his image. He acted like he just played golf all the time, but Ike stayed up every night until 11 o'clock reading. I think reading is actually a really good measure for determining how knowledgeable somebody is.

I'm a little bit hesitant to say that the Democrats are the party of smart people and the Republicans are the party of ignorant people. But I think the Republicans caught on a little bit sooner to the fact that this whole projection of anti-intellectualism was a vote-winner, and they really made it their brand. The Democrats were a little bit tempted by that too. I mean, certainly Bill Clinton was looking at Ronald Reagan and saying, "Now, he's got a real winning message. How can I dumb down my message a little bit?" So the Democrats haven't been immune to it, but the Republicans really are untouchable when it comes to this movement. They are really the vanguard.

Are you suggesting that Donald Trump didn't bring home 11,000 documents to Mar-a-Lago because he wanted to read them? That's not why he had those documents there?

This shows you how bad I am at predicting events. I never thought that, of all the things Donald Trump would steal from the White House, reading material would be among them. Never. I mean, silverware, yes. Maybe some extra bottles of ketchup, I don't know. Reading material, never in a million years.

We've always had dumb politicians, but in the last 50 years, ignorance has really reached critical mass.

They were begging him to read stuff when he was there. One trick they used with Donald Trump, and this isn't made up — nothing in the book is made up — but one trick that the National Security Council would use, whenever they had a really important memo they wanted him to read, they would put the word "Trump" in as many paragraphs as possible, hoping that would catch his eye. He really likes that word. I don't think it succeeded, but it was worth a try.

You describe three stages of the "profiles in ignorance." The first one is ridicule. Tell us a little bit about ridicule.

First of all, I should say: Nothing in this book is just my opinion. As you point out, it's very thoroughly documented. It's all facts. That doesn't mean it's totally serious. It is hilarious because, and I'm not taking credit for it, I'm quoting very funny people.

The three stages of ignorance are ridicule, acceptance and celebration. Ridicule came first. That was when dumb politicians had to pretend to be smart. It was still important, we thought, for our politicians to be knowledgeable. Then after that, we moved into the acceptance phase, where dumb politicians felt it was OK and even cool to appear dumb. That's George W. Bush, the guy you want to have a beer with. And now we're in a phase, which is really the most horrifying phase, where smart politicians pretend to be dumb because they think that wins votes. You have very well-educated guys, like Josh Hawley, the world class sprinter, and Ron DeSantis, who talk nonsense because that's what they think their voters want to hear.

But ridicule — let's start with ridicule. There was an era a long time ago, say 50 years ago, where we still expected politicians to know stuff. The Republicans discovered in the 1960s, after the Kennedy-Nixon debates, that it was important to have somebody who was good on TV. Because Kennedy cleaned Nixon's clock on TV. Not on the radio, because on the radio they both sounded knowledgeable. So the Republicans reverse-engineered this and thought, well, instead of finding a politician who's knowledgeable and making him good on TV, let's just find somebody who's really good on TV and then make it appear as though he knows stuff.

And that was the beginning of Ronald Reagan. They recruited Ronald Reagan, who was at that point a has-been TV host. I mean, he'd hosted the "General Electric Theater." They hired this guy, Stu Spencer, who was a really shrewd campaign manager. And he hired — this is not made up! — some UCLA psychologists to basically, "Clockwork Orange"-style, load Reagan with information.

It was barely convincing. I mean, he would get up there and do talking points and seem like he had memorized the script, which of course he was really good at, since that's what he did for a living. But he won the California gubernatorial race by a million votes, and that really set the whole thing off. Because at that point the Republicans realized, we just have to find people who are good on TV.

Now, this backfired in 1988, because they thought they had that guy in Dan Quayle. They were convinced Dan Quayle was the best-looking guy in the world. Dan Quayle thought he was better looking than Robert Redford. That was his humble opinion. The problem was, Dan Quayle, unlike Reagan, could not fake being smart. Reagan, when he didn't know an answer to something, would just do a wisecrack. He'd say, like, "Well, there you go again," something like that. Quayle just got really, really upset. Nothing is worse than a guy who doesn't know the answer to a question and makes it really apparent that he doesn't know and is pissed off that he doesn't know. That was Dan Quayle. He just imploded every time his knowledge, or lack thereof, was tested.

Then you get into acceptance, with George W. Bush. He's asked by a radio host who the president of Chechnya is, and he goes, "I don't know. Do you know?" And they start spinning this. Instead of going, "We have to teach you more," a light bulb goes off. And that's the next stage. Share a little bit about that, please.

Well, this is where Karl Rove, who was really the Stu Spencer of George W. Bush — or Bush's brain, as he was called — lucked out, because he started with George Bush being a candidate much in the mold of Dan Quayle. Their ignorance was very similar. Their backgrounds are very similar. They were in the same fraternity, Quayle at DePauw in Indiana and Bush at Yale. And they were both knuckleheads. But the difference was, Dan Quayle would get asked these questions and then freak out.

George W. Bush would get asked questions and he would say, "Maybe I don't know that. Maybe I don't have to know that." He would sort of embrace his ignorance. And he said, "I don't have to know everything. I'm going to surround myself with people who know things." That sounds familiar, because Trump said the same thing. "I'm going to surround myself with good people, the best people." The problem is, those people didn't know shit either.

George W. Bush, just a few weeks before invading Iraq, did not know who Sunnis and Shiites were. I mean, he literally did not know. He was informed about this by some Iraqi exiles at the White House, and he said, "I thought the Iraqis were all Muslims." I mean, this was weeks before invading Iraq. While the book is funny, it also has a tragic side because we see the consequences of ignorance. It's not just all, ha ha ha. I mean, a lot of people die because politicians don't know stuff. And that's a problem.

But George W. Bush really turned ignorance into an asset. Because he didn't know anything and was like, "I'm like you. You don't know much either, do you? So I'm the kind of guy you'd want to have a beer with." That became so famous. That poll was commissioned not by an actual polling company, but by the marketing department of Sam Adams beer. So we've been living with this incredible political wisdom courtesy of the Sam Adams brewery. Well done, America.

Sarah Palin was the gateway idiot who led to Donald Trump. And that got me thinking about this whole rise of ignorance in America.

Sarah Palin, as you say, began to show us glimmers of what the GOP is today: the the celebration of ignorance and the trolling. Like, I'm going to stick it in your face and I'm going to gin up hate against people on the other side. Is that fair?

It's totally fair, because what you find, and this is true in other countries too, is that when facts and information disappear, hatred and prejudice fill the void. It's easier. Learning about geopolitics is tricky and complicated. Learning about economics, people's eyes glaze over. But if you say something like, "There are rapists coming over from Mexico," or, "Barack Obama wasn't born here," that's easy stuff to grasp. There is a very nefarious side to ignorance, which is, what fills that void? In the case of Sarah Palin, her own campaign manager, Steve Schmidt, who was John McCain's campaign manager, when he finally sat down with her after she'd been selected, he came to the horrifying conclusion, and this is a direct quote, "She doesn't know anything." And it's true.

She had never heard of Margaret Thatcher. She thought that the queen of the U.K. commanded the armed forces. She didn't know who attacked us on 9/11. She thought it was Saddam Hussein. This was somebody John McCain chose to be one heartbeat away from the presidency. I actually found her defeat, in the most recent election [as a candidate for Congress], really encouraging. I really feel that her status as a national joke may actually have caught up with her. Wouldn't that be wonderful? We say history doesn't move in a straight line. This book tells a story that's pretty horrifying. But wouldn't it be wonderful if we're actually due for a correction? You can be dumb as a politician in this country, but not that dumb. That would be amazing.

Finally, you get to the celebration phase, and this is something. The celebration of idiocy and how dangerous it is. Donald Trump ushered in that celebration.

Donald Trump actually doesn't have to make much of an effort. He is one of the most deeply ignorant presidents, probably the most ignorant, in our history. On the internet, especially on Twitter, it's so easy to call somebody an idiot or a moron. I'm sure you and I have been called that many, many times — today already. But I really prefer the term "ignoramus" because ignoramus literally means somebody who doesn't know things. And Donald Trump does not know any school subject well, even the areas of his so-called expertise, like business and construction and renovation. He doesn't know about that either. I have a lot of quotes from people who worked for him who said he was completely at sea when it came to that stuff.

But what's really horrifying about this stage — there are two kinds of ignorant politicians we're dealing with now. We have Marjorie Taylor Greene, who comes by ignorance very naturally. I mean, she's the one who says that I personally have a space laser — which I wish I had! I wish I could operate a space laser. That is such a flattering assessment of me, to think that I could operate such machinery. I barely can get on Zoom, and she thinks I can do a space laser. So she comes by it naturally. Lauren Boebert comes by it very naturally. Louie Gohmert, people like that.

But then there are these super-educated guys like Ted Cruz, Princeton grad, Ron DeSantis, Josh Hawley. These guys know better, and yet they're making really dumb decisions because it appeals to this populist sense that we don't want smart people running the show. To me, the celebration phase is the most heinous phase, because we have people who really know better who are acting like dopes, and it's hurting us. It's endangering us.

How do you think that impacts the base? When Donald Trump would say things like, "I know more than the generals. I know more than the doctors," the way I interpret it is that his base, who loves him, is like, "Oh yeah, I know more than the experts too. I'm glad he's finally saying the truth." And I'm not saying you should question experts. But there are people who are like, "No, in my gut, I feel you're wrong. I have no empirical, objective data to back that up. But because I disagree with you, I don't care that you have a PhD and you've spent your life working in this field." During the pandemic, we saw how dangerous that was.

During the 2008 election, a British documentarian went out and interviewed voters in West Virginia and was asking them about Obama. Obama wasn't very popular in West Virginia. One woman said, "I'm not going to vote for him because he's a Muslim." And the interviewer said, "Well actually, ma'am, he is a Christian." And she said, "I disagree." I mean that is where we are — we've elevated everyone's opinion to the level of fact. That is very dangerous. But here's the thing. If we're going to believe in democracy — and I hate to be an optimist, but I am kind of an optimist — we can't totally give up on the idea of Americans learning stuff. We can't just say, "Well every Republican is an idiot and uneducable, and they can't be taught the truth."

Donald Trump does not know any school subject well, even in the areas of his so-called expertise, like business and construction and renovation.

One thing that I came across from researching the book is — you remember trickle-down economics, the Republican gospel that you cut the taxes of the rich and then the poor, magically, somehow get rich too. Doesn't work. It's been disproved a million times. I think, though, that trickle-down ignorance has been a roaring success, because we're social animals and we're actually very compliant.
I mean remember during the "War on Terror"? We actually paid attention to Tom Ridge when he had that ridiculous color-coded chart and said, "We're up to orange today." We actually listened to that. So when our leaders say things like, to pull an example out of thin air, "I really think that drinking bleach could knock out the coronavirus just like that," a certain number of us will say, "Well he's really important, he's the president, so that must be true." So these people have an enormous responsibility, obviously. What they say has enormous power.

If ignorance is trickling down, the only thing I can think of is that knowledge has to somehow push up. We've got to work locally and get involved locally and try to make our towns and communities better. Elect local politicians who are well-informed, get engaged in democracy in a way that reaffirms our belief in democracy. And then hope that will eventually spread upward.

We tend to nationalize every problem. We're on Twitter constantly. We think it's all about Trump and Pelosi and Biden and all this stuff. We take ourselves off the playing field when it comes to our little community, our town. Yet that's probably where the best democracy is happening right now, at the local level. And it's probably the thing that we ignore the most, unfortunately.

Jordan Klepper, correspondent on "The Daily Show," has made a name for himself going to Trump rallies in recent years and cleverly getting Trump supporters to share their unintentionally comedic — and even alarming views. Now Klepper is traveling to the ghost of autocracy's future as he heads to Hungary in his new TV special for Comedy Central's "The Daily Show." In "Jordan Klepper Fingers the Globe: Hungary for Democracy," premiering Thursday, April 21 at 11:30 ET/PT on Comedy Central, he explores the alarming connection between the increasingly autocratic government there and our own budding autocratic movement known as the GOP. In fact, America's Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) is holding a conference in Hungary this May.

As we discussed on our "Salon Talks" episode, which you can watch below, Klepper first became aware of this unholy love affair between America's right and Hungary's autocrats when he covered the most recent CPAC convention in Orlando for "The Daily Show." That event surprisingly featured Hungarian politicians who served up all the typical GOP red meat including saying, "Let's Go Brandon," which is code for "F**k Joe Biden." As Klepper explained, "It turns out conservatives look to Hungary as a conservative wonderland."

Why? Simply, Hungary's right wing prime minister Viktor Orban is passionately anti-immigrant, has demonized Muslims, passed vile anti-LGBTQ laws, controls the media, rigged elections, banned topics in school he doesn't approve of and has made George Soros his number one enemy. Sound familiar?

Klepper warned of "Americans' lack of imagination as to what can happen to our own democracy." He aptly noted that the backsliding of democracy happens slowly. "It's the frog that's boiling in a pot of water." That is what happened in Hungary and appears the trajectory the GOP wants to take the United States.

Klepper also shared his view on why people like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin fear comedy at their expense. "Sometimes you just need the clearest way of calling BS, and a joke is often the fastest way to that."

The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

You've got this new special about going to Hungary, "Jordan Klepper Fingers the Globe: Hungary for Democracy," and it speaks to all different levels about what's going on in our country. You go to Trump events for "The Daily Show" and have sincere, earnest conversations with people, even though you're being playful. How do you get them just to have a normal conversation and not say "fake news" and that kind of garbage?

Trust me, I go to some rallies and I'm getting yelled at by folks who do say "fake news" and do want to cause a ruckus, but more often than not people want to engage at a rally. People are there to scream for Donald Trump or whoever's in front of them. And so the idea of engaging with somebody and screaming in front of a camera is appealing to many of them.

You either get the folks who see it and are like, "screw you" and walk off, or you get the folks who say, "Screw you. I want to heckle you for the next hour and a half," or you get the folks who say, "I know exactly who you are and that makes me want to engage," so we can go back and forth. Or you get people who have no idea who you are and just want to talk. They want to get their opinions out there in the public. More often, they're not ready for the follow-up to understand what's behind that opinion because a lot of these opinions are just plucked from a man who is making it up on the spot and he doesn't get a follow-up. I luckily get that follow-up and we start to see the gaps in information.

When you talk to some of these people, forget politics, do you get a sense that some of them just want to be a heard? And for some reason, in the case of Donald Trump, they feel that finally someone listens to them or sounds like them?

Well, I think the very human side of all of this, especially when you look at rallies, people want a community and a sense of belonging. I think you go to a rally where you're surrounded by 10,000 other people in a small town, it's a great event, it's why I go tailgating. It's why people join improv groups. It's a community.

They want a sense of meaning. And guess what? When the former leader of the free world says, "You are a patriot. These are the bad guys. Do what you can," you suddenly have meaning, you have meaning and community. I think a lot of these people feel empowered and I think that's very human. That's the most human thing there is. We all need this in our lives. When I engage with those folks, I think they are in a sweet spot where they feel like they are loved, they are part of something, and they are energized to speak truth to power. And also they want to try it out.

But for what it's worth, I think a lot of these people are engaging in the political world for the first time. I think that's also some of the issue, is it becomes all politics and governing completely gets left aside. So the actual issues that we engage with, those are just tools to talk about the politics. They're more interested in the "this did it wrong; that did it wrong – rah-rah" portion. The governing part, the thing that actually matters, that's something people are less versed in. And so that hasn't been thought through. I think you're starting to see people who are like, "Let me engage in this political argument. I am now a part of this. I've watched enough talking heads that I can talk about this thing, let's go. Oh s**t, you're still asking why I think that. Now we have a problem."

You mentioned some people heckle you. Have you ever felt concerned for yourself?

It definitely gets contentious. I saw a real shift after the election. Going out to rallies beforehand, people were confident because Trump was in office. He had won, and they felt very good about the election. After the election took place, even though the narrative was that they had won, people were wounded and they were angry. We were traveling with three or four security guards each place we went, and the Million MAGA March was the first time there was, I think, really palpable danger there. I was interviewing people and what happens when you interview people who are around other people who are bored, what you start to find is people are looking for things to do.

A funny story about Trump events is they're poorly organized. A the Million MAGA March, there were two stages a mile apart, with speakers. And what they didn't do was invest in a good speaker system. So if you were there to listen to the speakers, you had to be within 30 yards of the stage to actually hear it. And so what that meant is you had 40,000 people there and 39,000 of them couldn't hear any of the events so they were just milling about. And when you see a guy from "The Daily Show" starting to interview people, everybody gets activated.

Talking to one person became talking to five people, which became 30 people. And I have to be taken away because people start to charge at me. I'm brought down an alley by security, and they have to create a distraction to get away. And that was the first time it was like, "Oh things are getting palpably angry."

And that's called radicalizing people.

It is.

That's interesting for you that it gets real where you actually have to fear for your own safety. How does it affect the way you process it personally? Do you think, "I'm doing the comedy segment, but there's something deeper that's really troubling in our society going on"?

I love what I get to do. I think to go out and engage with people and hear what actually the narrative is on the ground. And more often, we walk out the door assuming one thing, but more often than not it's something else and actually this is what people care about, this is where their mind's at, this is the conspiracy that we hadn't read on the internet. But when you get there, somebody's going to talk to you about social distancing and the reason that it's six feet is because that's the sign of the devil. And you're like, "Oh, well, I guess I had to go there in person to understand the depth of these conspiracies." We'd like to reflect that in the pieces that we do.

I love finding the comedy there and I think the satire is really important to me, but I think it's also reflective of what's happening in this society. People don't get to see the conversations people are having out in the middle of America. So wherever we can bring some of that energy to the internet and to the show so people get to see, this is the conversations, this is the logic, this is sort of the anger that is there. We don't want to glorify people attacking a foe journalist, so we're not going to make heroes out of these people who are charging at me because I want to continue to have a job, but we also want to show that this isn't all just fun and games.

With this special, for example, we get a little bit more time to show what else is happening outside of here. Or even the last special I did where we showed what happened on January 6th, where you're like, "Yes, we find humor in the blind spots of Americans." I think there's also a lot of sadness in the way that it's weaponized, but there's also a lot of danger. When we can show all of that, then we're giving more complete picture.

In your special, you travel to Hungary. Before we talk about that, I wanted to mention President Zelenskyy, who we all know was a comedian, was interviewed by the Atlantic and said over the weekend that Vladimir Putin, he fears comedy because it's accessible and it's a tool that cuts through things. It's a shortcut to telling the truth. And I thought, what a great definition of it. Here we have seen Donald Trump literally call for "Saturday Night Live" to be canceled, as a candidate, and as President called for the FCC to investigate "Saturday Night Live." And he lashed out against the late night hosts and even before that, he went after Jon Stewart and Bill Maher and other comedians. Do you think there's a connection to the idea that Putin, according to Zelenskyy, fears comedy for his own reasons, and that Trump, a wannabe dictator, objectively fears comedy for similar reasons?

Look at Donald Trump, part of the reason he may have gotten into this whole thing in the first place was getting made fun of at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. That guy reacts more to jokes aimed at him than he does images of immigrants on the border, families separated, or COVID death tolls. Those seem to wash over him, but an "SNL" joke, that's going to haunt him for days. So there's something to it. One, he's a baby. That's what a child does. A child with no empathy reacts more to the jokes aimed at them, than they do the human suffering that he has a hand in affecting. That aside, I think it's emblematic of how effective humor can be. Laughter is a response of recognition and when you see a bunch of people laughing at a joke on "SNL" about Donald Trump or supporting that, it's because people see that BS that they see in Donald Trump and they recognize it. And it's a democratic response to bulls**t. Donald Trump isn't immune to that democratic response, as much as he tries to affect it in other ways.

Comedy is scary. It's also the language of the people. People understand comedy. Satire heightens the BS and the blind spots that we see in society, so that it's palpable and understood in the quickest, biggest, possible way. And in a media landscape where you're in your own bubbles, it can get overwhelming by the influx of information. Sometimes you just need the clearest way of calling BS, and a joke is often the fastest way to that. So, it depends on how you wield that, but I have no doubt. I understand why for giant men in power, whose power is based on the way in which they can control the narrative and control the people who hear that narrative, comedy is a great way to disrupt that narrative. And they should be freaking scared because these jokes are sharp, Dean, sharp.

They're sharp. Look, I have performed comedy in the Middle East and you cannot do jokes with the leaders of those countries. And not all want to truly be feared, but they understood that if you become a punchline, people might not take you as seriously. Instinctively, Trump is cut from that cloth. In Russia, there have been comedians who have been forced to leave the country. They canceled what was equivalent to almost like their "SNL" show. It's a puppet show, but it's well known. These guys don't like being laughed at.

It's power. These people are elevated by power, but it's the emperor has no clothes. And if you've created this world where you're like, "I am invincible because of all of these things that are mostly projections I put out onto the world, you shouldn't be able to criticize my position. I have reached this status." Why did you reach that status, Donald Trump? It's not out of things that you've earned or intellect. You reached that status because you were given money in a privileged society and allowed to fail and continue to fail up, and then bolstered by people who had other more moneyed interests and wanted you to play off of the fears of others to get into that position.

That's not earning something. That's a bulls**t institution that you've definitely benefited from. And so, you don't want people to point that out. You want people to treat you with the respect of somebody who's achieved something. But when you've achieved nothing, well then jokes are going to cut at that and point it out. And so, I don't think he's the smartest guy in the world, but he's smart enough to understand that that emperor is nude as all hell, and it ain't a pretty sight and it's not very big either.

Is there anything that you took away about where the GOP might be going?

Well, I think Americans lack imagination as to what can happen to our own democracy. I think it often gets hyperbolic and people will talk about the fall of democracy and imagine perhaps there's a militarized state and an overthrow. And that's hard for people to grasp, or it feels so far away that people don't engage with that as a real possibility. I think looking at Hungary is a great example. It's the frog that's boiling in a pot of water. It's part of the EU. It's a democracy, that you can vote. They have a free media, but like you just said, they've just been downgraded to a partly free society. And what that looks like is, smart little moves to keep people in power, in power. It means vilifying segments of the population as a way to one, push them out, two, change the constitution, and three, keep those people in power, continue to stay in power.

And so I think, when we look at what could happen in America, Hungary is a very fascinating place to look. And I think, what you see is things like gerrymandering, keeping people in power. You see, once Viktor Orban got in power and his party Fidesz got two-thirds, they started changing the constitution. They started to change what the definition of marriage looked like. So it's between a man and a woman. And that then means that there's no adoption for any kind of gay community there. They started to write vague LGBTQ laws that were vague enough to make essentially it illegal to put any kind of positive gay characters on television, because they start to conflate sexuality with pedophilia.

We start to see this game plan happening in America. I think what we saw with the "Don't Say Gay" bill in Florida, and what's happening now in places like Ohio and Georgia. This is starting to build a narrative that one, gets people scared and upset. Two, politicians start to run on. And also when it comes to immigration, Orban with Syrian refugees basically came up with the blueprint for what Donald Trump did with our border crisis during his tenure.

So I think, it's a really interesting country to look at and it is effective. And what you have is, you have a guy who's been in power for I think 12 years now, who just won reelection, is going to continue to stay in power. And you have these folks who are dissenters in what is happening in their country, losing more in power every election, because they've codified ways in which that party can stay in power. And those people who are part of minority communities have less and less say.

You visited essentially the ghost of autocracy future for America.

Well, I think as far as the culture wars go, the LGBTQ community is fascinating, and we've talked about how they're vilifying that. And I think it's vague laws that make it harder for people to know how to engage with culture without being penalized. They kicked out a university called Central European University. And that is, again, part of this whole woke war, is a George Soros-funded university. Guess what? Also a bad guy in Hungary, perhaps their original bad guy. And now that university, which is a progressive university, it's a global university, it's a giant campus in the center of Budapest; empty. It's completely empty right now. It's been kicked out and now it's in Vienna.

Why? Well, because when you have people in power, you can write very specific laws into your constitution that create ways in which that cultural institutions in your country, well, they can no longer be there anymore. So now they have to go overseas. And so I think they're effectively waging the war on higher ed. They've essentially banned the term gender in a way that has affected the culture and made it really difficult for people to protect those in need.

You start to see things like this, you're like, "Oh, this could happen with America." And again, it doesn't look like something on the surface. "What happened with CEU?" Well, when you get into the weeds about it, it has to do with accreditation, it having international status in America and what have you. And you're like, "Oh, OK. This is just a weird accreditation battle. That's going to happen with some colleges." Well, when you look a little bit deeper and what it is, is it's a progressive institution in the center of Budapest, and now it's no longer there, making way for more and more conservative ideologies. And so, I see that on the horizon in a country that finds effectiveness in its bureaucracy. You get somebody like a Ron DeSantis in office or a more competent Trump, and I think you put people in power who can control those decisions and they can affect culture in that way.

It's not enough now with the critical race theory bills, the next step would be closing down state universities or private universities that dare teach things that these leaders don't like. And that's the future.

Tucker Carlson goes there and they showed Budapest, which is a beautiful city. This is also when you imagine this like, "Oh, do I go to Hungary?" And it's this rundown spot. Budapest is a gorgeous city. And they applaud how, "Look there's very little homeless population in the downtown." And then you look into it and guess what? They've essentially made being homeless a crime. And what happens when you go to jail in Hungary? Well, they can put you to work, doing things like building a wall on their border. And suddenly you're like, "Oh, when you're criminalizing homeless people and now they're building your wall? Feels a little bit like slavery. Oh, yikes. Oh, these are blueprints we don't want getting out."

And that'll be in the 2024 GOP platform.

The crazy thing about that is you're right. Hungary has found sneaky ways to do it. I think the GOP platform in 2024 is just going to tell you, "Homeless people will build our wall for free." And if you can get that into a nice, concise, clever chant, that thing will be successful at whatever rally you go to.

It's remarkable to see the GOP, instead of having a conference like CPAC in America to bring revenue to American city, has brought it to Hungary because they're getting the access power to get there. This is like fascism. This is not the same as Germany and Italy under Mussolini and Japan, but we're getting close.

I think people have a hard time thinking of what does autocracy look like. Those ideas are so hard for us to grasp. What you're seeing in Hungary is not an autocracy, but it's a slide away from democracy and that's the dangerous place to be. That's what Americans need to be super vigilant about, because that's a scary, scary territory where things get dangerous.

Elie Mystal, attorney and author of the New York Times bestseller "Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy's Guide to the Constitution," wanted actor Samuel L. Jackson to record the audio version of his book. Mystal's title, after all, is drawn from one of Jackson's famous lines in "Pulp Fiction." But if you've seen Mystal on cable news, you know he doesn't need Jackson to provide passion and emphatic delivery. Mystal gives you all that and more, as you will see first-hand in our recent "Salon Talks" conversation.

Mystal takes, shall we say, the controversial position that the U.S. Constitution is not only "not good," but that it's "actually trash." He notes that our founding document was drafted by men who owned slaves and enshrined that evil institution with the infamous Fugitive Slave Clause and the "three-fifths compromise." But Mystal's bigger point is that our Constitution is given too much deference: "We act like this thing was kind of etched in stone by the finger of God, when actually it was hotly contested and debated, scrawled out over a couple of weeks in the summer in Philadelphia in 1787, with a bunch of rich, white politicians making deals with each other."

Mystal also lays bare the myth that the motivation behind the Second Amendment was about self-defense or a check on the government. As he notes, George Mason — then the governor of Virginia and one of the drafters of the Constitution — flat-out said that the Second Amendment was meant to guarantee that Southern states could form a "well-regulated militia" to "fight slave revolts." Mason and other Southerners feared that the federal government wouldn't help them put down slave uprisings, and they needed to have guns close at hand.

Mystal also shared his views on the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson and her ongoing confirmation hearings. As Mystal explains, the GOP has "nothing on her record that they can attack" and only has one card to play: racism. "Because they can't find anything wrong, they go to all of these other kind of racist smear campaigns because, frankly, racism always works for them," Mystal said.

This following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

You were recently on "The View" talking about your book and created some controversy. The first line in "Let Me Retort" is "Our constitution is not good," followed up a few paragraphs later with "Our constitution is actually trash." You're obviously trying to challenge people. Tell people what your goal is there.

There are two things going on there. One, the veneration that this country has for the Constitution is simply weird. It's crazy. It's not what other countries do for their written documents. We act like this thing was etched in stone by the finger of God, when actually it was hotly contested and debated, scrawled out over a couple of weeks in the summer in Philadelphia in 1787, with a bunch of rich, white politicians making deals with each other, right? These politicians were white slavers, white colonizers and white abolitionists — who were nonetheless willing to make deals with slavers and colonists. No person of color was allowed into the convention. Their thoughts were not included. No women were allowed to have a voice or a vote in the drafting of the Constitution. And quite frankly, not even poor white people were allowed to have a voice or a thought in what the Constitution was.

The thought that this document, made by one class of people, represents the best we can do in America is just ludicrous. Of course it's not very good. You only let one kind of person write it. So that's one aspect of it. The second aspect of this, and how we go from "not good" to "trash," is that structurally there are a lot of stupid things in the document. There are a lot of things that you just wouldn't think we should do if you were starting again from first principles. Like the idea that we don't elect our own president; that's pretty dumb.

Pretty dumb.

You wouldn't do it that way, right? The way that voting rights have been couched as "We will not abridge the right to vote," as opposed to "You have a positive right to vote," that's dumb. The federal system has 50 different election systems instead of one federal system, that makes us have literally 3,000 police systems — that's 3,000 sheriff's offices around the country, instead of one national police system. That's pretty stupid. If you just go structurally through the document, you see — it's not exactly bad-idea genes, but you see quite a lot of bad ideas throughout the document.

The Judicial Crisis Network has been attacking you for your comments about this, tying it to the nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. What are they saying? What did you say that they view as blasphemous in some way?

Again, here's another issue where there are two things going on. One, they have nothing on Ketanji Brown Jackson. There's nothing on her record that they can attack. They don't have a case. They don't have a law review note that she wrote. They don't have anything that she's actually done to attack her with, so they're trying to bank a shot against her off some of these other issues. And apparently, I'm one of the issues these idiot people think they can bank a shot off of, because these are the kinds of people who think that all Black people know each other — like we all go to the same barbecue and we talk about our plans for whitey and then we go out into our separate corners.

That's not how it works. I've never met Ketanji Brown Jackson. I've literally never been in the same room with her in my life. I have no idea. She probably hasn't read the book because she's busy. She's about to be a Supreme Court justice, right? I would imagine there are parts of my book that she doesn't agree with, and that's fine too. So that's part of what's going on.

The other thing that's happened is that there are people who take the Constitution as gospel without really examining what the document is — people who haven't actually read it, and even people who have read it but don't really understand what it's saying and what it's doing. So for instance, Dean — and you'll find this funny — there are people telling me the Constitution is not trash and is actually great because it's a living document that evolves with our times, which is an interesting thing for them to say because that's what I say. That's what liberals say the Constitution is.

It is the conservatives who say the Constitution is ossified in the original public meaning and intent of the slavers who wrote it. It is people like me who are like, "No, no, no, the document lives and breathes and evolves." So these idiot white people are literally trying to attack my position by restating my position, because they don't know any better, because they haven't actually read it or thought about it or understand it. And the big reason why I wrote the book is so more people could think about it, understand it. As we've talked about before on your show, I write in plain English so people can really get into what's happening and not be intimidated by the legal jargon. It's so you can understand why you'd want the constitution to live, breathe and evolve, for instance.

RELATED: Republicans know Brett Kavanaugh lied under oath: They just don't care

Your book is written very accessibly. You don't have to be a lawyer, you don't have to know the Constitution, you don't have to be Black. I'm a lawyer and there are things I learned. For example, one thing I think is vitally important for Americans to know is the origin of the Second Amendment. Today they talk about the Second Amendment as something about defending your house, or when the black helicopters coming to chase you, that kind of stuff, or for deer hunting. Share a little bit about the true origins of our Second Amendment.

The Second Amendment was here to stop slave revolts. The "well-regulated militia," which is the first part of the Second Amendment, that was a thing was because in the South, the principal way of putting down revolting slaves was to bring out the well-regulated militia. It turns out it's kind of hard to hold Black people in bondage against their will, so occasionally you have to bring in the guys with the guns to do it. Well, in the original Constitution, without the amendments, it was unclear who had the authority to raise the militia. White Southerners thought that the Northerners would dominate the federal government, wouldn't raise the militia, and when Black people rose up for their freedom and rights, the South would be powerless to stop them militarily.

The Second Amendment is there to make it clear that everybody can be armed so they can raise this militia to go and fight slave revolts. That is not me theorizing or making things up. That is what George Mason, then governor of Virginia, said, when advocating for a Second Amendment. He literally made a speech where he said that, all right? People don't know that history, and part of the reason why people don't know that history is because Republicans have purposefully obscured it.

When you fast-forward 250 years, Antonin Scalia in D.C. v. Heller, invents a right to bear arms for personal self-defense that did not exist at the original founding of the constitution. Scalia quotes George Mason's speech, because at the beginning of the speech, a lot of it is about personal self-defense — again, personal self-defense from the slave revolts. Scalia leaves that part out and talks only about this right to personal self-defense, taking out the context. That's how Republicans be!

This is something that goes through all the way through my book. Originalists have this PR campaign that they're going back to the original definitions of the Constitution as understood by the founders, when really they're just making stuff up that's convenient for their current political agenda.

You also talk about how the right to vote gets abridged all the time. Tell people what's in the actual, original Constitution. What did the framers have in mind about for could vote in the early days of this country?

The framers did not think that the right to vote, or even citizenship in the country, flowed down from the federal government. They thought it flowed up from the states. Your right to be a citizen was to be a citizen of Georgia or New York or New Jersey. Your right to vote, therefore, was determined by Georgia or New York or New Jersey or Virginia. There was no federal right to vote because all voting was done at the state level, in the conception of the framers. They weren't worried about minority voting rights because they didn't think minorities were going to vote at all.

They weren't worried about women voting rights because they didn't think women were going to vote at all. They were only concerned with making sure that the states had the power to decide for themselves who could and could not vote. So even when you go forward to things like the 15th Amendment, which says that you can't abridge voting on the context of race, color or creed; when you go to the 19th Amendment, which says that you can't abridge voting because of gender, which of course did not mean Black women at the time the 19th amendment was ratified.

All these amendments did, technically, was to say that the states could not restrict voting based on racial or gender grounds. And let's not forget that the states looked at the 15th Amendment and thought, "That's a very nice try," put it in a drawer and ignored it for 100 years. The states restricted voting on the basis of race all the time after the 15th Amendment because courts wouldn't enforce it. So the Constitution is silent on the right to vote because our election system is dumb. And it's based on, like I said, at this point 50 state electoral systems — at the founding, 13 state electoral systems — as opposed to one unified, rational, intelligent federal election system, which is what they have in all the other democracies, by the way. Let's not forget that we're the outlier here; other advanced Western democracies have a federal election system, not province by province.

You make a very compelling point that four of the 17 amendments ratified after the Bill of Rights have to do with voting. That was nearly 25 percent of the updates to the Constitution, because the framers didn't give it much thought. Later in life, the Constitution evolved and people were like, "Let's do something about it." What does that say to you?

One, it says that no matter what you try to do with your written document, it can't survive bad-faith conservatives. The reason we've had to have four different voting amendments, and probably are going to need a fifth one at some point in our future, is because at every point conservatives have tried to restrict the rights of everybody to vote. And to be clear, I'm saying "conservatives" because I don't care what conservatives call themselves in the morning. After the Civil War, conservatives called themselves Democrats. Now, they call themselves Republicans. In the future, they might call themselves Whigs. I don't care. Doesn't matter. The conservative party, however they define themselves, has opposed the idea of universal suffrage at every point, and that continues today.

The reason why you have to have so many updates is because every time you try to extend the vote, conservatives come up with some new, crazy reason to restrict the vote. One lreally small way of, I think, pointing this out is that the 26th Amendment says that basically everybody over 18 can vote. Simple, straightforward amendment: If you're over 18, you can vote. The thought being, if you can go to war, you can vote on whether or not we have a war. Makes sense, right?

So what happens if you turn 18 after the election in November, but before the end of the year? The election happens in your 18th year, but you don't actually turn 18. Let's say you have a Christmas birthday, essentially. Now, the constitutional amendment is silent about that. So conservatives step in and say, "Nope, you have to be 18 by the time the..." Why? They just made that up. That's just an arbitrary cut-off. Why wouldn't you make the arbitrary cut off the end of the year, as opposed to the end of the election? It makes no sense.

Do we really think that the difference in the intellectual quality of a 17-year-old in November changes radically when he hits his 18th birthday at Christmas? Who thinks that? Liberals are like, "We should just vote if you're..." So this is what I'm saying: Conservatives, at every point, even in really small ways, try to restrict the right to vote.

You have a chapter called "Reverse Racism Doesn't Exist," meaning of course racism against white people. But how do you square that with the Pew poll that found Republicans are likely to believe that white people face more discrimination than Black people and Hispanic people or Asian Americans do? You've got a whole group of Americans out there who think they're suffering discrimination and ask why our legal system doesn't protect white people, even though they are technically the majority.

They're technically the majority. That's exactly why. I explain protected-class status as understood by our constitutional interpretation. I'm just the messenger, don't shoot me. Constitutionally speaking, white people are not, and pretty much cannot be, a protected class, because the way that we define protected class, you have to be a minority or somebody singled out for a special historical kind of torment. So again, I'm a liberal: I think poor people should be a protected class. I think that. It is conservatives who won't let me do that. I think poor white people should be part of the impoverished protected class, but conservative white people won't let me do that.

Instead, they want to say all white people are a protected class, which just doesn't make sense based on our protected-class jurisprudence. So yes, from a legal definition, reverse racism doesn't exist. And I would say that also, from that legal basis, that extends through any kind of understanding of our social power structure.

Here's the problem when you tell white people that they've experienced privilege. There are white people who are the beneficiaries of white privilege who still have crappy lives. And they think that because I say that they have privilege, then that privilege means that they shouldn't have a crappy life. No, that's not what white privilege is. White privilege is that if you take a white person with a crappy starting position and a Black person with a crappy starting position and kind of play out the string, what we'll see is that the Black person will have the same crappy life as the white person, only a little worse. It's the whole thing of whenever white America catches a cold, Black America catches the flu.

It's the defensiveness of white Americans who are struggling who go, "Where's my privilege?" I understand. Maybe the term — it's not literal in that way, but they take it literally. "Where's my privilege? Where are my happy days?" I get it. It's actually a minority burden, versus someone white who is just living a normal life, where you're not judged by the worst in your society and the worst in your community, and politicians don't demonize you for that and don't pass laws based on this mythical caricature that they've created about your community. The list goes on and on.

White people will look at me right now and be like, "Well, I'm not doing as well as that Black guy, so how am I having white privilege?" And it's like, because if I was white I would be the attorney goddamned general. That's how you know. That's the difference.

That brings us perfectly to the nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. You had sitting senators, including Roger Wicker of Mississippi, call it a "quota hire," literally affirmative action. Ted Cruz called it offensive and said, "I guess if you're a white man or a white woman, you've got no shot at this." You're going to have one Black woman in the history of this nation and that's one too many for them, because they feel this is a zero-sum game.

There have been 115 Supreme Court justices in American history, and 108 of them have been white males. And Ted Cruz fixes his mouth to say, "I guess if you're a white man, you have no shot." It's an idiot statement, designed to play into the grievances of his idiot base, but also to be horribly offensive to everybody else because Ted Cruz doesn't care about being horribly offensive to everybody else. Again, all these attacks come because they have nothing that they can use against her. I have read her cases. They haven't maybe read her cases. She's been on the bench for nine years. That is more than four current Supreme Court justices had combined when they were elevated to the Supreme Court.

She has a deep legal record that these people could pick through and find something wrong. They picked through it, they haven't found anything wrong. Because they can't find anything wrong, they go to all these other racist smear campaigns because, frankly, racism always works for them. Show me, in the last 10 or 15 years, the white politician who got drummed out of office because they were too racist. I mean, Steve King in Iowa, maybe, after just doing some straight-up Nazi rhetoric, but that's about it, right? Ted Cruz knows that he's not going to lose a primary because he is too racist to the Black woman Supreme Court nominee, so he's just going to double down in that field. It's all he's got.

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You make a compelling case for reform. Having Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, if she's confirmed, that's not enough of a reform to make the Supreme Court what it should be. We can pass voting rights legislation right now, and this Supreme Court, with a 6-3 conservative majority, might just strike it down after all the work. What do you think fundamentally has to be done to change that institution?

It's court expansion or bust. You expand the court or you cede the next 30 years of American law to six conservative justices. And as I try to explain throughout the book, nothing survives 30 years of six conservative justices. There's nothing. Anything you want, doesn't happen. John Roberts eviscerated the Voting Rights Act in 2013, as you mentioned, in Shelby County v. Holder. Roberts and Alito ganged up on Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in 2021 in Brnovich v. Arizona. What makes anybody think the John Lewis Voting Rights Act is going to be upheld by this Supreme Court? Has John Roberts gone somewhere? Is he on vacation? No, he's still right there, and he'll knock it down just like he's knocked down everything else.

As long as you have six conservative justices, you get nothing on voting rights, you get nothing on gun rights, you get nothing on climate change, you get nothing on police brutality, you get nothing on health care, you get nothing. So you expand the court and take your chances there, or you resign yourself to getting nothing. And people will say, "Oh, well, if we expand the court, Republicans will just expand it right back." So what? How is that worse than where we are now? I would argue that if we expand the court, it makes it harder for Republicans to expand it back because it makes it harder for Republicans to control all of government, because when everybody votes, Republicans lose.

So I say, let's go. I'm on record, I think, in the book for plus-20 judges. I think there are other reform ideas. A greatly expanded court does a lot of nonpartisan reforms. It leaves the Supreme Court as powerful as it is, but it makes each individual Supreme Court justice less powerful. That makes confirmation hearings less go-to-the-mattresses kind of situations. So there are lots of reasons why I get all the way to 20, but more, at this point, is the only way to stop the next 30 years of conservative takeover.

"The pursuit of justice creates injustice," is the paradoxical line that opens CNN legal expert Laura Coates' bestselling new book, "Just Pursuit: A Black Prosecutor's Fight for Fairness." I spoke to Coates for "Salon Talks" about her fight for fairness as a federal prosecutor, how she has handled criticism as a prosecutor and her take on the prospective Black female Supreme Court justice President Biden has promised to nominate.

"I always found it to be very shocking that people have the impression that you could either be an advocate and proponent for civil rights or a prosecutor," Coates said. "You have to be both and you have to wield the discretion that you have with an eye towards what is fair." She added that the true goal of a prosecutor should not be how many convictions you rack up, but how strongly you fight for fairness, because that, as she explained, "is the predicate for any real justice system." But in that pursuit of fairness, injustice can emerge.

Her work as a federal prosecutor also included a stint in the voting rights section of the Department of Justice, where she fought against efforts to disenfranchise voters of color. At that time, however the Voting Rights Act was in full force, and had not yet been gutted by the Supreme Court in the infamous Shelby County v. Holder decision of 2013. Coates made it clear that many of the voter suppression laws passed by Republican-dominated state legislatures since January 2021 would not have been permitted if the Voting Rights Act's pre-clearance provision was still in effect — the very section of the law invalidated by the Shelby County decision. As Coates noted, the GOP's attack on voting rights has made it feel like America has gone backward in time to the days before 1964.

On the issue of Biden's yet-to-be-named Supreme Court justice, Coates made a passionate case for why nominating a Black woman is an important move, not just for diversity's sake, but for substantive reasons. "When we're talking about voting rights cases, I want a Black woman on the bench," Coates said, and also "when we're talking about issues related to abortion bans that relate to and impact disparately Black and brown people." She acknowledged that the forthcoming nominee's integrity will be questioned: "We know it's coming, but I have to just sort of smile and put America on display and say I dare you to challenge the dignity of these particular women." Read my "Salon Talks" with Laura Coates below.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

In your book, you talk about leaving private practice as a civil litigator to join the Department of Justice. Share with us a little about that.

It felt like a calling for me because I had always been very interested in civil rights, not only because, of course, I'm a student of history and I revere those who have come before me, but also as a Black woman in America. I think about just how impactful civil rights have been over the course of my generation, my parents' generation, my grandparents, my children and their children as well. I knew the story of Ruby Bridges more than I knew the stories of Dr. Seuss and all of his characters because it was taught in my home. It was an idea of being a constant, fluid forward journey, not just an era confined to some particular decade. When I really thought about what I wanted to do with the practice of law, I was instantly drawn and compelled to go, and I was glad that the calling could be received.

The first line of your book is, "The pursuit of justice creates injustice." You give us an example right away, in the first chapter, of a man who was a victim of a crime. It turned out he was an undocumented alien.

You know, I think people often think to themselves, when I wrote that first line, how could the pursuit of justice create injustice? I mean, it just seems very counterintuitive to people. I myself did not realize that when I first went from being in private practice to a civil rights attorney's office to actually being assistant U.S. attorney. I can tell you that the reason I put it out there is because so often people think about justice as a binary outcome, right? It's either a conviction or it's an acquittal. It's not something that you ever contemplate, what happens in between. To use the words of John Lennon, life is what happens when you're busy making other plans. Justice and injustice occurs when you're busy trying to get a conviction or trying to avoid an acquittal.

I started with the story of Manuel. He had arrived in this country illegally as a teenager, had spent decades in this country, had not so much as sneezed in the direction of a police officer, was gainfully employed, was raising his family. And because his car was stolen and he did what we want people to do, which is to report a crime when society is offended by a criminal, it's what we have — the "United States versus" — he reports it.

And because I had to run a background check on any witness who may come into a courtroom to alert a marshal, if there's a security concern or otherwise, it came up as an active deportation warrant. In that moment, I had to try to figure out what to do. It was an obvious unfairness. It was an obvious injustice that here we are knowing that the criminal code is such as it is, but we don't think of the person who commits car theft, the person who has a long rap sheet of violent crimes to be a criminal on the same level, if at all, as somebody who has illegally been in this country, trying to make a better life for himself and his family.

Yet they're treated the same. In the pursuit of trying to get a conviction of this particular car thief, here I was having to work with ICE to get this man deported with this active warrant. And it was one of those moments, for me, that it became crystal clear that whenever I would say "Laura Coates on behalf of the people of the United States," that included the defendant, that included the people who were in the periphery, those who were going to have collateral damage, certainly the victims of the crimes as well. It's not that there was a viable alternative without consequences, but that should tell you something about the state of affairs in America. If we know that there is an imbalance between what is right and what is lawful, what is required and what ought never to have been the only choice, that's where progress begins.

As a prosecutor, your job is to put people in jail. But really, as you explain, the touchstone is justice. Can you touch on that a little bit, so people understand that prosecutors are not just hellbent on prosecuting for the high-fives you get in your office? It's bigger than that.

Yes. If your goal is simply to get and rack up as many attaboys or attagirls as you possibly can, I think you're in the wrong profession. We're supposed to be prosecutors who recognize that due process, the Fourth Amendment, all of our civil liberties and our constitutional rights, the idea of a healthy level of skepticism and the idea of ensuring that you can meet your burden of proof, not just rely on being a beneficiary of the benefits of the doubt that law enforcement get.

For example, the idea that an officer wouldn't get up in the morning to commit a crime or that an officer would not have stopped you had you not done something wrong. We think about these things. Or, hey, the government would not be prosecuting this person unless they really had a case. I was a beneficiary of that benefit of the doubt that's extended on my cases. The issue, though, is: Are you going to exploit that and not try to meet your burden, and rely on that to carry you through and put blinders on about injustices that might occur?

There are instances, of course, when you've got exculpatory material and you can't withhold that, things that could prove the person's innocence, just because you'd like to get a conviction. You have to hand it over. You can't try to stack the deck against the defendant in a way that they have no opportunity for a fair trial, if you really believe that we have a presumption of innocence in this country.

I mean, these are elements I always found shocking, in that people have the impression that you could either be an advocate and proponent for civil rights or a prosecutor. You have to be both, and you have to wield the discretion that you have with an eye toward what is fair. And the title of the book really was "Just Pursuit: A Black prosecutor's Fight for Fairness," not just for justice, because fairness really is the predicate for any real justice system.

So often we are a legal system trying to become a justice system. That linchpin is fairness and we profess to care about those things. Then in reality, in practice we say, well, the prosecutor's supposed to be this caricature, unfeeling, robotic, only interested in the kill, so to speak. In reality, you ought to be interested in fairness.

In your book, you share an exchange where a Black female defense attorney clearly feels some contempt for you and the idea that you're helping put Black people in prison. It's a funny chapter, the way you wrote it.

Yeah. Because I was minding my own business in a restaurant, having a nice quiet lunch!

Did you ever worry that you were not helping your community, or even that you were hurting your community? Or did you actually think you were helping your community, in a certain way, because of your pursuit of justice?

I knew that was the perception. But I also knew who I am and what I stood for. But the perception sometimes can really guide the way you approach different scenarios and can guide the way people receive you and the way they're willing to cooperate or not do so. And frankly you need not even go to officers about officers. We watched the woman sho is now vice president, who before that was U.S. senator and presidential candidate, where she had to face the ideas of, could you really be on behalf of reform or the people of a community if you were the top prosecutor in a state like California?

I found a kindred spirit in all the prosecutors in that notion, and it's really this fallacy that Black and brown people are only expected to fill one role in the justice system, either that of the defendant or maybe defense counsel and that what seat you have at the table is somehow going to convey who your allegiance is owed to and whether you have power.

That conversation we had was really about power. The idea of both of us feeling like we were in the right seats. I, as a prosecutor, felt like I was in the right seat because I had the opportunity to use my discretion, exercise it to, in many ways, be a gatekeeper, in many ways to bring my lived experience as a human being and Black woman and wife and mother and civil rights attorney to really question whether the Fourth Amendment had been followed, to question whether this was going to be a viable case, to question what was going on. And in the same instance, she thought that she was in the best position to react to those exercises of discretion.

This notion of whether to be proactive or reactive, we never can resolve it. But it does tell you why it's important to have Black and brown people and those who are civil rights advocates in all parts of our justice system, whether it's law enforcement, prosecutors, defense counsel, judges, whether it's members of Congress, state and local officials, community boards, mental health advocates, parole board. It runs the gamut on all these things.

It's interesting because I transitioned, as you know, from being in the voting rights section of the civil rights division. It was a foregone conclusion to people, no one questioned my allegiance then, no one questioned for whom I was a champion. Nobody questioned whose side I was on. And then under the same umbrella of the Department of Justice as a criminal prosecutor, that was immediately questioned, the idea of "Whose side are you on?" and the audacity for me to say that I believed in civil rights and then to be standing where the stereotypical man, the stereotypical white man would have been, was one that left me scratching my head at times. But I understood that because of the fundamental distrust that we have so often with the justice system in America.

The laws on their face are racially neutral, but with their application, there's a big debate about institutional racism. The data is all there. You're three times more likely be killed by the police if you're Black versus white. The bail you get will likely be higher if you're Black versus white for the same offense. It shows up in sentencing, in chances of parole. What do you suggest, as someone on the inside? How do we effectively address institutional racism in terms of legislation?

I think one of the big disservices of the justice system, and I know it sounds odd, is its mascot. This idea of a blindfolded lady justice because somehow that conveys that if we don't see it, then it really didn't happen, right? The idea of the three monkeys in a row: Hear no evil, speak no evil, say no evil. This has helped no one over the course of history. We have to actually see and actually say what we have seen and address it. And this idea of essentially blindfolding ourselves and pretending like the justice system is the one place in this country where race has no influence whatsoever, where gender and bias mean nothing, that's preposterous. But I think it makes people feel as though, if we say phrases like, well, "no one is above the law" or "justice is blind" or that we're "colorblind" or in a "post-racial" world.

These somehow make people feel as though America is no longer the experiment that say, Justice Breyer recently reaffirmed and spoke about, talking about the Gettysburg Address upon his retirement, or the idea that we feel safer if somehow we can hold ourselves as the America on paper, out to the world, as opposed to who we are oftentimes in reality. You hear phrases like, "This is not who we are." And then there are moments when you say, well, I want to know why you think that's not who we are, because it is definitely who we've been in some places. So I think the first instance of why I wrote this book was I wanted people, when you're trying to speak truth to power, to first know what the truth is. to actually acknowledge and understand the ways in which race and bias continue to infect and infuse and disrupt our areas of justice.

We have to get out of that mindset, just as it's not a binary system where it's conviction or acquittal, and then the end justifies the means. We talk about reform. It's not just about acknowledging the impact of race. It's not just about looking at police encounters. There are so many areas we can look at. For example, the judicial adoption of qualified immunity, the idea of the Graham v. Connor decision that gives officers the "reasonable police officer" standard, rather than the reasonable person standard. There's the idea of the power of unions. There's the idea of the presumption of innocence and our bail system, up to and including issues surrounding these slogans around how to reallocate resources to officers. There's so many different aspects of it, and I think that the conversation begins by un-blindfolding the nation.

You worked with the DOJ's voting rights division. In the Shelby County v. Holder case in 2013, the Supreme Court gutted the pre-clearance provision, and since then Republicans have passed 34 laws restricting voter access in 19 states. If Shelby County had not gutted the Voting Rights Act, would you feel more confident in our election system, which would have required pre-approval of these laws to make sure there was not a disproportionate impact on people of color?

The majority of the laws that have now passed muster would not have under the pre-clearance requirements. And that's by design. It's no coincidence, right? When I was in the voting rights section, I had the benefit of Section 5 pre-clearance still being intact. I had the benefit of the Supreme Court not rendering it anemic through making it harder to challenge under Section 2, and even then it was difficult under public policy considerations, and perceptions of a political Department of Justice.

In our pandemic, we talk about prevention being better than cure. Well, you're asking people to simply treat the symptoms after someone's already been infected when it comes to voting rights cases. If we are going to actually hope to have a strong democracy, then you can't be weak on voting rights. You can't be. And you know as well as I do that it's no coincidence that our criminal justice system is tied to voting rights. It's no coincidence that people are trying to take away something they know is powerful. It's no coincidence that when there's no oversight, when the cat's away the mice come out to play. Unfortunately, we are being impacted every single day, challenged on the principles of one person, one vote, and being told, as you said, that here we are in a land of progress and it feels like 1964 all of a sudden.

RELATED: From SCOTUS to "critical race theory": There's no law or fact the GOP feels bound to respect now

A Supreme Court seat will soon be open, and President Biden has committed to nominating the first Black female justice in the history of this republic. What is the significance of that to you, and to young Black girls growing up in America now?

To me, it's extremely significant and not because it's diversity for diversity's sake. Have you seen the embarrassment of riches that this president has to choose from? We're not talking about people that he's picked out of oblivion and said, "I hope this meets the standard." They have surpassed it in their legal excellence. They are revered and renowned for their intellect, for their impartiality, for the idea of being able to have the integrity we want on the bench. It's high time, past time that we have the bench more reflective of the people of the United States. Women, Black women in particular have been a part of the bench and lawyers since the 1800s, and have been judges since at least the 1960s. And yet here we are, still grappling with the idea that people say, "Well, you have a woman up there. Isn't that good enough? You got two, isn't that good enough?"

Black women, as you know, continuously find themselves from the feminist, womanist movement and beyond of having to answer the question, well, ain't I a woman and ain't I qualified in so many respects? So we're talking about the standards now that will be applied, the idea of, well, are they qualified enough? Yes, they all are. And while it's an embarrassment of riches, it is an embarrassment that the intellectual wealth of Black women as legal scholars and advocates has not been fully recognized until now. For most people, when they think about a Black woman in the Supreme Court confirmation hearings, they think of Anita Hill. And we all know the treatment of Anita Hill, whose career was incredible and she herself is a force to be reckoned with in her own right, yet that's overshadowed by her relationship with respect to a man.

I think it's high time we bring that perspective to the bench. Now I don't in any way suggest that it's a foregone conclusion I will know how a Black woman will rule on every matter that comes before her. But you know what? I want a Black woman on the bench. When we're talking about voting rights cases, I want a Black woman on the bench. When we're talking about issues related to abortion bans that relate to and impact disparately Black and brown people. When we're talking about defense cases and issues about reform and issues about the treatment of defendants. I'd like somebody who has a defense-minded perspective as well on these issues. All these things are important. All these things are impactful. And it's time that we brought that perspective to the bench. This president has had his work cut out for him and that in and of itself, Dean, makes me very proud.

You have already have Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and others on the right, smearing a person who's not even been nominated. To me, the question isn't why should it be a Black woman, the question is why hasn't there been a Black woman in over 230 years? But what's your reaction: Do you expect them to smear this person even more in a heightened way because she is a Black woman?

Let me say on behalf of all of them, boo, because it's time for people to actually understand what that fear comes from. And if it's a fear of one having so much integrity, so much competence and credibility, that it might actually challenge the assumptions and ridiculous comments you make, well then so be it. But I'll tell you, when we've heard people make comments like that, why on earth would you say that? Why would you essentially act, Mr. President, as if you shouldn't cast a wider net? That's not very impartial.

We've heard, even since Reagan, discussions about wanting to have a woman on the bench. Now, Black women seem different all of a sudden? We had former President Trump even outsourcing, frankly, his list of nominees to the Federalist Society, asking for somebody who would overturn Roe v. Wade. Now that is the height of what is not impartial. So if anyone comes to talk about the hypocrisy or what this could possibly mean, I hope they came with the same energy and charisma and condemnation related to those who were looking for a particular reversal of precedent as they intend to come to challenge somebody who has criteria that frankly might make the sitting Supreme Court justices go, "Let me up my game."

You're talking about former clerks and solicitors general in respect to this. You're talking about the most recently installed Supreme Court justice, Amy Coney Barrett, who — I'm not taking away from her mind at all, she is a force to be reckoned with and should be acknowledged as that, but I've heard already comments about, "Well, if somebody hasn't been on the bench for a set number of years, they ought not to have a chance." She had a very relatively short tenure compared to other justices. Justice Elena Kagan had never been a judge a day in her life before she became a Supreme Court justice. I could go on with others as well.

So we know it's coming. but I have to just smile and put America on display and say, I dare you to challenge the dignity of these particular women. If you have things that need to be addressed, by all means let the American people know. But these coded dog whistles about why a Black woman's not qualified, or President Biden is wrong to hone in on particular criteria, that are an asset, an addition — not a credential, but an asset in addition to the credentials that are already there? Please.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat, opens his bestselling new book, "Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy" by sharing "two impossible traumas" he suffered in the same week: "the shattering death by suicide" of his 25-year-old son, and the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. As Raskin discussed during our recent "Salon Talks" conversation, these two losses obviously are not equivalent — but in linking them on some level, Raskin is also sharing his deep love for America.

I have interviewed Raskin many times for my SiriusXM radio show, and he has always been a thoughtful, measured person when it comes to talking politics of the day. The fact that he's a former constitutional law professor likely contributes to that professorial nature. That's also why we should all take heed of his words when he states point blank that today's Republican Party has launched a "fascist attack against the constitutional order." In his book, Raskin writes that the GOP is now "the party of Trump, authoritarianism, corruption, and insurrection."

That has become even more obvious in recent weeks as Donald Trump suggested he would pardon the Capitol attackers if returned to office, and the Republican National Committee approved a resolution describing the Jan. 6 attack as "legitimate political discourse." Raskin, who is a member of the House select committee investigating the events Jan. 6, shared his belief that the panel's upcoming public hearings could be the most important in American history, saying they will "certainly up there with the Watergate hearings." You can watch my "Salon Talks" with Rep. Raskin here, or read our conversation below to hear Raskin discuss the "maddening and frustrating" fact that Trump has yet to be brought to justice.

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Your book "Unthinkable" went straight to No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list. The book is a love letter to your late son Tommy, who took his own life last December, and on some level a love letter to our democracy and what this nation stands for. But I wanted to start with Tommy. You go into detail about his struggle with depression, writing, "Depression, it entered his life like a thief in the night and became an unremitting beast." What do you say to families out there where people are struggling with depression?

Well, I don't claim any particular medical expertise. But I will just say as a dad who's gone through this, that it's obviously important that each person who's facing a mental health struggle be in a therapeutic relationship with doctors and get whatever medication we have that might work. But also, build a close social network to stay on top of the situation. Obviously I've asked myself a thousand questions since all of this happened, but the thing I probably most regret is not talking about the topic of suicide and not confronting it directly.

I think parents probably have an instinct that talking about it will somehow conjure it into existence or cast some kind of spell that will make it happen. But that's obviously just superstition, and it really works in the other direction: To not talk about something is the risky thing, it's to endow it with more power and mystery than it should have. I say that about suicide and I also say that about the word "fascism" in the book. We can't be afraid to talk about that, like somehow that's a breach of etiquette or something.

Switching to politics here, right in the beginning of your book, you talk about how in the week between Dec. 31, 2020, and Jan. 6th, 2021, your family suffered two impossible dramas: One was your son's death by suicide, and the second was the Capitol insurrection. You're not equating the two things, but I can sense your love for this nation. Is that fair to say that: You have a deep love for this democratic republic and what it's supposed to stand for, and you feel compelled to defend it?

Well, I think that's right. It's kind of you to say that. I certainly feel it. And I have felt that Tommy's with me, and he is in my heart. He's in my chest. He was during the impeachment trial in the Senate. And unfortunately we didn't have enough Republican senators to join us in convicting Trump. I mean, it was the most bipartisan, sweeping impeachment result in a Senate trial in American history, but we still fell 10 votes short. And for that reason, we're still in the thick of this struggle.

Like I told the impeachment managers before we went out there, the facts are overwhelmingly on our side. The law is overwhelmingly on our side. I want to make sure that people understand that the passion for our country, the patriotism in your hearts is what's motivating the whole thing. So show your emotion about what just happened to us. They stormed our house.

You write about going into the Capitol on Jan. 6, bringing your daughter Tabitha and your son-in-law Hank with you. So during the siege, you weren't just worried about yourself, you had to worry about your family. We have the footage of this horrific attack on our Capitol by people dressed in Trump regalia and chanting, "Fight for Trump." Yet now we know, thanks to the work of your committee, that Donald Trump, for 187 minutes, watched that and did nothing, even when Ivanka Trump came in twice asking him to intervene. What does that say to you about how Trump viewed this event?

The violence was strategic and political, but it was also sadistic too. He had unleashed primitive impulses in this mass demonstration, which became a mob riot. I view the activities of Jan. 6 as being in three rings of sedition, Dean. There was the mob riot, which surrounded the ring of the insurrection. And that was the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, the Aryan Nation, different white nationalist groups, the Militiamen, the First Amendment Pretorians, there were some religious cults in there. These people had trained for battle and they were the first ones to come and smash out our windows and attack our police officers. They helped convert the demonstration into a mob riot and an attack on the officers. But the scariest ring was the innermost ring, the ring of the coup, which is a strange word to use in American political parlance, because we don't have a lot of experience with coups.

We think of a coup as something that takes place against a president, but this was a coup orchestrated by the president against the vice president and against the Congress. And the whole purpose was to get Mike Pence to declare lawless, extra-constitutional powers, to exclude and reject and repudiate Electoral College votes coming in from Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania to lower Biden's total from 306 to below 270. That would have triggered, under the 12th Amendment to the Constitution, a contingent presidential election. And you ask: Why would Donald Trump want Speaker Pelosi's Democratic-controlled House of Representatives to decide who's president? Well, in a contingent election, we're not voting one member, one vote. We're voting one state, one vote.

After the 2020 elections, they had 27 state delegations, we had 22 and one, Pennsylvania, was split down the middle. So even had they lost the at-large representative from Wyoming — my new best friend, Liz Cheney — they still would have had 26 votes to declare Donald Trump president and seize the presidency for another four years. I think they were also prepared at that point to invoke the Insurrection Act and declare martial law, and finally call on the National Guard, that had been held back, to put down the insurrectionary chaos he had unleashed against us.

Are you surprised that we don't even hear an inkling that Trump is being investigated by the Department of Justice for potential crimes?

Well, yeah. I mean, I'm a little bit softer on Attorney General Merrick Garland than some people are, because he's my constituent. I still remember, so bitterly, how they prevented him from even getting a hearing when he was nominated by President Obama to the Supreme Court. But look, people were on Garland's case about the fact that there had been no indictments for seditious conspiracy. And then there was a huge indictment on seditious conspiracy against the Oath Keepers, and presumably more to come. They obviously weren't the only group there. There were these overlapping circles of conspiracy to knock over the Capitol and take down our government. I mean, that was the interruption of the peaceful transfer of power, for the first time in American history, for four or five hours. And we didn't know which way it was going to go.

Trump will get his comeuppance. I know how maddening and frustrating it is to people. I share that feeling, having been an impeachment manager. I mean, he's as guilty as sin. He's a one-man crime wave, and it's amazing that his dad's money and this pack of lawyers he travels with have been able to get him off everything up until now. But I'm with Dr. King that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it tends toward justice. It's going to catch up with Donald Trump too.

You write in the book that we can now say that the Democratic Party, whatever its faults, is the party of democracy and that the Republican Party is the party of authoritarianism, corruption, and insurrection. Can our democratic republic continue if one party is embracing autocracy and fascism and the other party is playing by the rules?

It's a good question. If you look at it historically, liberal and progressive parties have never on their own been enough to defeat fascist and authoritarian coups. It's always the liberal and progressive parties, the left and the center-right together. And when they come together, they can reject and defeat a fascist attack against the constitutional order. And that is the importance of Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger and Mitt Romney. We had 10 Republicans vote to impeach in the house. We had seven vote to convict in the Senate. So that's like 14 or 15 percent of the Republican Party. If that block holds and comes our way, and we're able to build a cross-party coalition with a lot of Independents and Greens and Libertarians and Republicans and Democrats to defend democracy, we can do it.

The Democratic Party can't do it alone. It's going to have to be the base of it, but we also need to assemble all the other institutions in American life that are part of democracy, because democracy's not one thing. I mean, it is the legislative branch, yes, obviously. But it is courts. It is the states. It is the press, the media, the universities, the colleges, the schools, civil society. Everybody needs to stand up and reject authoritarianism at this point. When people ask what they can do: You can do things every single day to stand up for strong democracy in America.

After Watergate, Congress passed reforms to try to rein in a runaway president in Richard Nixon. I know some have been proposed now. Is there any hope of legislation that will curtail another potential Trump or another person cut from that cloth, regardless of party, who really tries to abuse their power?

In a certain sense, this is what we've been trying to do with all the voting rights legislation. We've been trying to solidify and protect the right to vote and protect the integrity of elections against these outrageous efforts to convert bipartisan or nonpartisan election commissions into partisan election commissions, or to put them directly under the control of GOP legislatures. The problem is that the Republican Party, which is a minority party and a shrinking minority party — remember, Hillary beat Trump by three million votes and Joe Biden beat him by seven and a half million votes. The young people are coming in our direction.

That demography is totally against the GOP, but they've got this bag of tricks that include the most anti-democratic instruments in the country. It's voter suppression statutes. It's the filibuster. It's right wing court packing and judicial activism. It's manipulation of the Electoral College. It's a race between the will of the majority, trying to defend democratic institutions and liberal democracy, against one-party rule, which is what they want. They are a rule-or-ruin party, and I've been calling that them that for a while. I was glad that President Biden picked that up in his democracy speech because they either are going to rule or they're going to ruin our ability to make any progress as a country.

With the Jan. 6 committee, you're going to have public hearings coming up at some point this year. I'm not sure if there's a schedule that we don't know about. Is there any sense of what we might expect to see, or the types of witnesses that you might bring forward in these hearings?

I'd hoped it would happen in March. I think because of all the obstruction and roadblocks thrown up by the entourage around Donald Trump — Mark Meadows, who's kind of doing the hokey pokey, one foot in one foot out, Steve Bannon, Roger Stone — that it's going to be later in the spring, April or May more likely. But I think these could be the most important hearings in American history, certainly up there with the Watergate hearings. I hope we will do them during prime time. I hope we will see them every single day, so we can tell a complete story to the American people about how this took place. It's obviously enormously complex. But people are following it closely.

The vast majority of Americans who we've approached as witnesses have testified. So most people, including people who participated, are cooperating. They understand that they've got not just a legal obligation but a civic obligation to help us figure out what happened. It's only when you get right to that bullseye core around Donald Trump and his innermost confidants that people think they're somehow above the law and can just give the finger to the U.S. Congress.

The way you envision this, it wouldn't be like the first hearings we saw with the Capitol Police, which was months ago? This would be more like lining up a bunch of nights in a row, as opposed to one hearing and then coming back three weeks later?

Yeah, it would not be episodic. We want to tell the whole story. I felt very strongly that we'd go to the police officers first. That was my great frustration about the Senate trial, that we weren't able to have them come and tell the story of what had happened. We wanted to shock the public into remembrance of what this was about. I mean, this was a violent assault on American democracy, a riot surrounding an insurrection surrounding a coup, and it was our officers who stood between us and losing it all. So there were a lot of heroes on that day and we can't forget who those heroes were.

Newt Gingrich literally said that you and others on your committee are going to jail if Republicans get control of the House. I don't know what the justification would be, but when you hear that, does that ring bells of fascism to you? The idea of threatening to put political opponents in prison simply because they're doing their job.

Well, of course that was the direction that Donald Trump took their party in, because the moment he got in, the Department of Justice was treated like a group of lawyers who were supposed to follow his orders in prosecuting his enemies and excusing and protecting his friends. It was like that from the very beginning, and all through the administration. It doesn't surprise me that Newt Gingrich, who's an utter chameleon and total moral invertebrate, would just follow Donald Trump down into that cesspool.

You mentioned that 10 Republican House members voted to impeach Donald Trump, and seven Republicans voted to convict in the Senate. We heard Kevin McCarthy go on the floor saying, "The president's to blame." But that same Kevin McCarthy now is sucking up. What do you make of this, in terms of that party losing its way? Is it just the pursuit of power at literally any cost?

Of course. I mean, the framers understood this. If you go back and read Federalist No. 1 by Alexander Hamilton, he says that the major threat to the Democratic Republic is going to be politicians who act as demagogues pandering to negative emotions who then come to power and go from being demagogues to becoming tyrants. So, exploiting negative emotions in people, racism, hatred, stereotyping, scapegoating and then becoming tyrants over the people. So that's an old story. It's obviously a different story than Donald Trump was telling, but it's one we can recognize immediately.

On another point, you have a documentary, "Loving the Constitution," coming out on MSNBC. It was shot over three years, following you through everything. What can you share about this?

Madeline Carter was someone who was a college classmate of mine, and she kept bugging me for more than a year that she wanted to make a documentary about me and Trump. The constitutional law professor who gets elected the same night as the would-be authoritarian dictator of America — following his story and mine. Of course history takes us places we never imagined going. But I finally relented, I said, "Fine, if you think there's something there, you can make the movie about us." Of course she ended up filming a lot of stuff I wish had never happened, along with some things I'm proud of and some things I regret. But it is what it is. I confess I have lived, as Pablo Neruda said. It is what it is, and I'm curious to see what it's all about.

When Justice Breyer had his press conference, talking about retiring, he mentioned the Gettysburg Address and talked about the experiment this country is. I went back and read the Gettysburg Address, and the very last line is that the government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from this earth. That was the hope of Lincoln. You get the sense that some of our fellow Americans just believe it won't perish from the earth and they don't have to do anything to preserve it.

I mean, I don't blame those people. Most of us grew up with the sense that there was stability and durability in our democratic institutions and that they would grow stronger over time. But of course there are people who also have much more of a tragic sensibility and understand the ebb and flow of history. There are periods of progressive evolution and change, and then periods of profound reaction and destruction, and we obviously just witnessed one of those with these nihilists who took over and tried to destroy everything that had been built for decades. I mean, they just put the civilizing movements of our time in their crosshairs: the civil rights movement, the women's movement, the LGBTQ movement, the human rights movement, the environmental movement, the climate movement and so on.

So yeah, I don't really blame those people. But I think Lincoln was trying to say, if democracy's going to survive, we all have to fight for it. And there will be a spectrum of sacrifice. Some people will give their lives, like the thousands who were killed in the battle at Gettysburg. But all of us have got to be engaged in this. I mean, that's what democracy is. It's something that we take care of together.

Lincoln was posing that as a real question, not as just some kind of rhetorical flourish. I mean, for most of the history of our species, people have lived under despots and tyrants and dictators and bullies and kings and queens and all that. So our American experiment began with some very high ideals. They were compromised from the beginning, with the viciousness of slavery and other kinds of repressive political features. But at least the ideals were there and successive social and political movements have been able to transform the country. And that has left us, even through Donald Trump, the greatest multiracial, multiethnic, multi-religious constitutional democracy that's ever existed. So that's our legacy. That's what we're fighting for now.

The Jan. 6 committee's plans to hold primetime hearings has been slowed down significantly by stonewalling efforts from former President Donald Trump's inner circle, Rep. Jamie Raskin, one of the committee's members, told Salon this week.

In particular, Mark Meadows' game of "hokey pokey" has vexed the panel, which has subsequently been forced to push back its planned public testimony to April or May.

"Well, you know, I'd hoped it would happen in March," Raskin said on the video interview series "Salon Talks," adding that he hopes the hearings will now be held "later in the spring, April or May more likely."

Meadows initially cooperated with the committee's requests but then quickly changed his mind, turning over thousands of documents before refusing to sit for a deposition. These included a number of bombshell texts and emails, as well as a 38-page powerpoint titled "Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN" that was reportedly shopped around Capitol Hill in the days before the attempted insurrection.

The plot included plans to declare a national emergency in order to delay the certification of the 2020 election and the outlines of a wild conspiracy that the country of Venezuela had taken over voting machines in a large number of important states, among other debunked and unverifiable allegations.

Raskin lamented "the obstruction and roadblocks thrown up by the entourage right around Donald Trump — Mark Meadows, who's kind of doing the hokey pokey, one foot in, one foot out — Steve Bannon, Roger Stone."

"It's only when you get right to that kind of bullseye core right around Donald Trump and his inner most confidants that people think they're somehow above the law and can just give the finger to the U.S. Congress."

Still, despite the confounding efforts of Trump's inner circle, the Maryland Democrat believes "these could be the most important hearings in American history."

"I mean, certainly up there with the Watergate hearings," he added.

The comparison is especially apt given Raskin's hopes that the committee will format the hearings as an every-day-for-however-long-it-takes phenomenon, similar to the those conducted in the wake of Watergate.

"I hope we will see them every single day so we can tell a complete story to the American people about how this took place," he said. "It's obviously enormously complex, but people are following it closely."

The committee has been ramping up over the past few weeks to take its findings public, hoping to put the finishing touches on its findings by inching its way toward Trump's inner circle in recent days. The panel has conducted hundreds of interviews — upwards of 300, according to some news reports — and collected tens of thousands of documents, all while traveling extensively to battleground states where TrumpWorld's efforts to subvert the election were focused.

"The full picture is coming to light, despite President Trump's ongoing efforts to hide the picture," Rep. Liz Cheney, the committee's vice chairwoman and one of its two Republican members, told the Associated Press earlier this month.

"I don't think there's any area of this broader history in which we aren't learning new things," she added.

But there's one important factor weighing on the panel's timeline: Republicans will likely disband the effort should they re-take the House this fall.

The panel apparently hopes to have a completed report by this summer — but as with all predictions, that timeline is subject to change. And, given TrumpWorld's successful effort to push back the committee's timeline, it also appears that strategy is not likely to change anytime soon.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston is not giving up on exposing how Donald Trump and his family fleeced America while he was in the White House. To that end, the bestselling author is back with a meticulously researched new book, "The Big Cheat: How Donald Trump Fleeced America and Enriched Himself and His Family."

I recently spoke to Johnston about his new book for "Salon Talks" and one thing is clear: His enthusiasm to see Trump held accountable has not waned just because the Trump presidency is over. In "The Big Cheat," he uncovers details on Trump's scams that began with his inaugural committee and ran straight through his "Stop the Steal" fundraising grift. In between, Johnston notes a range of corruption by Trump, such as stopping in front of his Washington hotel during the inaugural parade in 2017 to send a clear message: "If you want something from the Trump administration, you will first pay tribute to Donald." As Johnston writes, spending money at Trump's hotel was one way to do just that.

Johnston also takes aim at Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, who saw their collective wealth rise by somewhere between $200 million and $600 million while working in the White House. This wasn't by happenstance, as Johnston details: It was because Javanka cashed in on Trump's presidency, with sweetheart deals from the Chinese government, the United Arab Emirates and more.

In our conversation, which you can watch or read below, the nearly 50-year veteran reporter also lays out safeguards that Congress should enact to prevent Trump, or another morally bankrupt president, from ever repeating this Trumpian fleecing of America again. But one of the best deterrents to future corruption, Johnston argues, would be the criminal prosecution of Donald Trump himself. "I would be eternally in favor of a long prison sentence," he told me.

The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Your book has granular details about Trump, some I knew and some I had no idea about. Let's start at the beginning: You go into great detail about the inaugural committee. Trump raised double the amount Obama did, and there are questions about where that money is. The D.C. attorney general is suing the Trump campaign right now about this very thing. Tell us more.

Well, Donald Trump raised $107 million for his inaugural, that we know of. The previous record was Obama in his first inaugural: $53 million. The inaugural for Obama had eight or nine balls. It had lots of events. They had numerous headline musical acts whose expenses had to be paid. Donald Trump had the skimpiest, cheapest possible thing you can imagine. Two balls, with almost nobody around, and yet all that extra money: $107 million. One of the key stories I tell is about Stephanie Wolkoff, who was Melania's best friend, and who is someone who puts on events. She's the person who puts on the biggest social event for the American elite each year, the Met gala in New York. And she was pulled aside and asked by Rick Gates, the corrupt deputy to the corrupt Paul Manafort, to take money off the books because they didn't want to report it, meaning foreign money.

It took her a second. She was so stunned by this. And then she said, "No, I'm not going to do anything like that." So that's why I say they took in $107 million, that we know of. I think they took in more money than that. And I hope we find out through the attorney general's investigation — but also the Trump White House dirtied up Stephanie when they knew this was going to become public. They said, "Well, you got $26 million." No, she got $480,000, which for the kind of work she did may sound to most Americans like a big fee. But that's, in that business, a more than reasonable fee. And all the rest of the money was directed to Trump cronies. She was told, "Here's the money. Now write checks to these people." And that's how the people around Trump were profiteering right at the start. That very moment, at the inauguration, they've got their fingers in there to grab the money.

Not only that, Trump used the inaugural parade to do a commercial for his hotel. I think people have forgotten it, but it was right in our face all the time.

None of the TV networks explained when this happened what was going on. I was astonished by that. When Obama was elected, the crowds lining the road to the White House were curb to building, packed thick as sardines. When Trump came, in many places there were more law enforcement and military guards than there were cheers. But when they got to a place about five blocks from the White House, the motorcade stopped and everybody got out, Melania in that beautiful ice blue dress that she was wearing. The family took a two-minute turn on the pavement.

What every lobbyist, every foreign agent, knew was they did it in front of the Trump Washington Hotel, the old post office. And Trump, by law, should not have had that lease. It should have been taken away from him. And I explained this, how the bureaucrats avoided this in the book and were later taken to task for it, though nothing happened to their careers.

But the message was very clear. If you want something from the Trump administration, you will first pay tribute to Donald. And his restaurant, in the first 90 days, took in money at the rate of $25 million a year. Anybody in the restaurant business knows the thought of being able to take in $25 million in a single restaurant is mind boggling. The Saudi government took out two floors at rack rates. When the head of T-Mobile's American division wanted Trump to approve the merger with Sprint, he made a big show of repeatedly going there, sending his executives there, spending money there. There are parts of three chapters that talk about the $26 billion favor Trump did for this guy who made a big show of going there.

Right until the very end, it doesn't end and it continues to this day. Tell people about how Stop the Steal turned into a scam to enrich Donald Trump.

Donald Trump has raised somewhere close to a half a billion dollars at this point, through his "Stop the Steal" claims that the election was stolen. Of course there's no evidence of that and all sorts of Republicans have said there was nothing improper. We've had lots of audits and recounts and recounts. It's all nonsense, but he's raised a lot of money off it. He said, "I need the money to hire lawyers to stop the steal." He spent $9 million on lawyers. Well, that's a lot of money, except that he took in close to a half a billion. And Donald can spend that money on himself under our laws. So I call Donald today America's "beggar in chief." I don't know if you get these, but every day I get texts and emails from Donald Trump asking for money. I love the ones from Don Jr. that start off: "I just spoke to my father. You're the only person in America who didn't respond to my note earlier today, and Dad asked me to call you since you've been such a generous supporter in the past." It's just a con.

And we're supposed to believe that Donald Trump Jr. didn't tell his dad about the meeting with the Russians in Trump Tower, with the person who announced that they were there on behalf of the Kremlin to help Trump defeat Hillary Clinton. It isn't just that they were Russians, They said they were proposing a criminal scheme under American law in which — you're a lawyer, you know what I'm about to say! The duty of any American made that offer by a foreign power, especially a hostile foreign power, is to pick up the phone, call the FBI and say, "I need to speak to someone in counterintelligence."

The lack of accountability in all of Trump World is what is so concerning going forward. You document that Jared and Ivanka had unpaid jobs in the White House, but they made somewhere between $200 million and $600 million while in the White House. As you know, Jared was not a good businessman going into the White House. Let's start with him: How did Jared make all this money while in the White House?

Well, before Donald Trump took office, Jared had this problem with 666 Fifth Avenue, which is right down the street from Trump Tower. He paid $1.8 billion, 99 percent of it borrowed money. And the building two years later was worth maybe only $600 million. Talk about being underwater in a disaster. So he goes to the government of Qatar. America's most important military base in the Middle East is in Qatar. Our central command base is there. And he says, "Wouldn't you loan me $800 million under very favorable terms?" And the Qataris said, "No, we're not that stupid." What happens next? Donald Trump is president. He turns against Qatar. He begins arguing in favor of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, who are scared to death of the Qatar government. Trump accuses the Qataris of financing terrorism. They finance two terrorist groups, they absolutely do. But the Saudis finance 60 of them, the State Department says, and with vastly more money. So this is absurd, and it's indicative of Donald Trump's total ignorance about these matters.

But in Jared's case, he got people from the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia to bail him out of his problem, and that's why they went on the attack against Qatar. Later, the Kushner family — who are very much like the Trumps, they're both white-collar organized crime families — got 18 sweetheart loans guaranteed by a federal loan agency. You or I would never have gotten such loans, interest-only for 10 years, which increased the Kushner cash flow and increased your and my risk as taxpayers.

We would never have gotten these deals, and nor would they but for Donald Trump being in the White House. And, Dean, to make a point here, these facts that I report all came out, one way or another. But something was in the Washington Post, and then the Wall Street Journal, the L.A Times, the Seattle Times. But you never saw pictures. So I took all these threads and wove them into a tapestry, a narrative, so you could understand it. In fact, the Washington Post gave me a rave review on Dec. 5, including the line pointing out that I long ago predicted Donald Trump would not leave the White House peacefully. I was told it was crazy for me to say that. I was vindicated.

I think with what we went through with Trump, that at this point if anyone says you're being over the top, they're denying reality. Your book is one-stop shopping for some of these scandals. Share a little more about Ivanka. It seems to me she has escaped the spotlight out in the post-Trump world, but she may have profited more than anyone beyond Donald.

Well, Ivanka, with whom Donald has an incredibly close relationship, got these trademarks in China in rapid time. If you want a trademark, a service mark, a patent from the Chinese government, you have to spend a fortune on the right Chinese lawyers who are members of the Communist Party, and then you still might not get it. When President Xi was coming to meet with Donald at Mar-a-Lago, there was just rapid-fire approval of these things, the functional equivalent of overnight. And among the patents and other intellectual property rights Ivanka got, some were for voting machines. What a strange thing to get from a country that's a dictatorship, not a democracy! Now, she had a clothing business, and my younger daughters who are in their 30s tell me that her dresses were actually quite nice, but they weren't selling in the department stores. So they were all taken out of the stores, they tore out the labels and put in different labels and put them back in the stores. And they all sold, because they were basically good dresses.

But most of her business enterprises failed because she's incompetent. There have been lots of reports, especially in Vanity Fair, that she thinks she's going to become president of the United States. And there's a wonderful YouTube video of her with Christine Lagarde, the head of the European Central Bank, and several women who are foreign ministers or finance ministers of foreign governments. It's very clear, when she tries to walk into their crowd that their body language says, "You have no reason to be with us. We're accomplished women. Go away."

"The Big Cheat" also discusses how Trump and his family cheated not only in terms of personal profit, but cheated us out of things. One that jumped out is Steve Bannon. As you know, we didn't get justice for Steve Bannon. Could you remind people, who may have forgotten completely that he was charged with federal crimes by the Justice Department. He earned his pardon for what he did in the post-election stuff.

One of the very first organizations to report about this charity scam was the one I run, DC Report. There was a seriously disabled veteran of the Middle East wars named Brian Kolfage who was raising money to build the wall: "Congress is not going to fund the wall, we'll raise the money." Never mind that it would cost tens of billions of dollars. There's no possibility of that. His promise was, "Not one dollar will go to me or anyone else. It'll just be to build the wall." Donald Trump Jr. and his girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, fly out to New Mexico to a fundraiser for this, to raise more money. They show off this thing they've built, which is inconsequential garbage that wouldn't stop anybody on the Rio Grande. Steve Bannon is involved and Steve Bannon steals $1 million from the charity. The government has the documentation. Kolfage bought himself a yacht and jewelry and spent $350,000 on himself.

The Justice Department indicted these people, and Donald Trump gave Steve Bannon a pardon for his million-dollar theft from charity. Of course Donald Trump stole from charity, as I show in the book repeatedly. And the other three guys, by the way, the ones who weren't part of Donald's coterie, they're going to go on trial and they're probably going to get prison time once they're convicted. But there's no shame among these people. Absolutely no shame. Donald Trump, if he steals money from a baby, would say, "Well, it's my money. What are you complaining about? It's my money." Donald creates his own reality. In his own mind, he shouldn't just be president for life with total powers. He talked about that: "I have the power to do anything as president." He believes he should run the whole world, because everybody else is an idiot.

Be glad you're not Donald Trump, Dean, because I've known the man for 33 years, and he is a miserable human being. Try to find him laughing when it isn't forced or for dramatic effect. It doesn't happen. I've tried to get him to tell jokes in the past. He can't tell a joke. He's a miserable, sad story.

It's a lack of humanity, when you can't tell jokes and can't laugh at jokes about yourself. I think it's great that you point on the book that Steve Bannon stole from Trump supporters, who sincerely were giving money to build a wall because they believed in it. We could debate the policy there, but it doesn't matter. They were giving money because they believed in the wall, and Steve Bannon stole it. We know from other reporting now that Bannon played a huge role from Election Day in November to the insurrection on Jan. 6. He earned that pardon, and this was a quid pro quo relationship if you ever saw one. Trump only pardoned one guy in that scam, his BFF.

Donald is even more corrupt than Steve Bannon, hard as it is to believe that. During his campaign, there were people who sent in money. Rush Limbaugh told the story of one man, Stacy Blatt. He's dying. He's in hospice care, his monthly income is $1,000. He sends $500 to Donald Trump, after Rush Limbaugh says Trump needs money to overturn the election. The next thing that happens is the Trump people tap his bank account again and again and again and again until they take every penny the dying man has. He meant to give one contribution, a very generous one. They did this to thousands of people, thousands of them. If you or I did that, we would be arrested. I don't know why Donald Trump and the people around him haven't been arrested for this. This was thievery, plain and simple.

It's like RICO. This is a racketeering plot. It's remarkable. What happens if Donald Trump somehow gets back in the White House? Based on you knowing him for 30 years and writing about him, what do you think he does?

Oh, this time around he will not be holding back at all. He will put people in place and it will be the end of American democracy. He will make himself our dictator, which I've been warning about since 2015, when he first announced. He won't need the support of the military to pull it off, because he'll do it in a soft way. But he will see to it that all your rights are gone. And right now, you're seeing the Republican Party — which is no longer the Republican Party, it's the Trump party — passing all these laws, including, in some states, where with Republicans in control and they don't like an election because Democrats won, they can throw out the results. That's inherently anti-American. At the same time, Donald keeps pressing about why he should be back in the White House, and making up ridiculous lies about what's going on.

And in all this, we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that the Mueller report, even with all the shackles put on Mueller — which most people, I don't think appreciate, where he disclosed that they were not allowed to pursue lots of things — the opening line of that report says what they found was systematic interference in the 2016 election by the Russian government. It's the very first thing they say. And Don Jr. and Trump's campaign manager and his son-in-law and others took part in a meeting with someone who declared they were an agent of the Kremlin trying to win the election for Donald Trump.

There's a foreign power here that has benefited. And it's not that Vladimir Putin wanted Donald Trump. That's not his goal. He didn't want Hillary Clinton, because she was going to make him give up Crimea if she could, the only violent takeover of property in Europe since World War II. But he wants to get rid of democracy. And he's on the record all over the place about this. Vladimir Putin believes all countries should be run by dictators, and Donald Trump was an instrument to help Putin. And by the way, Russian state TV, which is totally controlled by the Kremlin, said that Donald Trump was Putin's puppet. And the hosts on that show, the producers, they're all still doing really well, which tells you that was just fine with Vladimir Putin. Donald Trump is his puppet.

Are you surprised the Justice Department has not charged Donald Trump? And if he's ultimately not charged, what is the message that sends to Donald Trump and Trump-like Republicans going forward?

Well, I am very troubled by this, because if the law applies equally to everyone, then it shouldn't matter that he was president. On the other hand, it's pretty clear that Merrick Garland has taken the position that, absent something he has to act on, he doesn't want to get in the business of indicting a former president, because that road leads to a lot of problems we don't have. But Israel indicted Benjamin Netanyahu, the French have indicted former presidents, and a number of democratic governments have put former leaders in prison.

With Donald Trump, I think they should pursue the case that Michael Cohen went to prison for. They have a perfect case. I don't know how a jury would do anything but convict Donald Trump. My guess is, though, that the internal argument is, "Well, it's relatively small potatoes." They brought the case against Michael Cohen to punish him for breaking with Donald Trump, as part of the effort to control him.

I'm confident, however, that the Manhattan district attorney — who has hired the best expert on RICO in the country — will indict Trump under the New York state RICO law. A tax charge he can get out of by saying, "I didn't understand what was going on," even though he claims to be the world's greatest expert on taxes. But a state RICO charge — ordinary people can understand racketeering. They've got plenty of evidence of it, so why haven't they done it yet? Well, when they got the document dump, Trump held it up for four years, and it turns out it wasn't a million pages — it was 5 million pages. And you know, as a lawyer, they've got to look at every single page. So something doesn't hit them as a surprise at trial. That's a lot of research.

That's a lot of Bates stamping, as we used to say.

A very little story about this. Thirty years ago, after I revealed Donald was not a billionaire, there was a particular document I knew he was going to have to put in the public record. And the morning of the day that was to happen, a bunch of guys wheel in an entire wall of banker's boxes, the whole wall, like six high. And Donald taps me on the shoulder and says, "Lots of luck, pal." So anyhow, I go to the men's room at one point, when I see one of the detectives go there. We stand in the urinals and he says, "Box 14, J69." Because everybody knows what I'm looking for.

So when the meeting ends, I go to the flack for the Casino Control Commission and said, "I want to look at the files." He said, "Oh, it's going to take us months to sort through." I said, "No, no. I just want this." I pulled out box 16 and said, "I just want to look at J69." He looked at me and said, "Oh God, you're going to make my life miserable today." I said, "Sorry about that." That's what Donald does. He dumps all sorts of stuff to avoid you seeing the thing you wanted.

And he hopes you don't find it. What's your reaction to Trump's media platform, Truth Social. It's gotten a billion dollars from investors. Does it smell like another scam to you?

I think it is. In fact, the news just broke that the SPAC, the special purpose acquisition corporation that they're using, is under investigation. A lot of these SPACs have turned out to be frauds. Why doesn't Donald just do it an upfront way? In fact, why doesn't he just fund it himself, given all the money he's taken in? Well, he's going to need that money to pay criminal defense lawyers when he's indicted, and to live on. But I also don't think it's going to be successful.

Donald's audience is in fact shrinking. His audience is intense, people are willing to die for him. Somebody said the other day that the difference between a religion and a cult is that in a religion your savior dies for you and in a cult you die for your savior. But it is shrinking, and over time will continue to shrink, barring some unexpected development. But the people who remain, they're intense and some of them are dangerous, as we saw on Jan. 6. They will literally kill people in Donald's name.

One last thing, David: After Watergate, there were a vast amount of reforms put into place by Congress, ethics reforms, campaign finance reforms. As of now, there have been some introduced, but nothing really passed. First of all, are you surprised by that? And second, what would you like to see, in broad strokes, to prevent Trump himself — or another Trump — from doing what he did in office?

Yeah, I've been at this so long. After Watergate I was covering the reforms and they've all backfired. They made our campaign finance situation vastly worse than it was when Nixon was in office. They weren't carefully thought through in how they would be manipulated. In the end of the book, I provide solutions for a whole variety of issues. And many of them are actually quite simple. I'll give you one example. There are people who say, "We should pass a law making people who run for president reveal their tax returns." You can't do that. The Constitution doesn't allow that. What we can do is pass a law saying that once you reach some threshold — let's say you came in first or second in two primaries — the IRS is required to release your tax return. Congress has the power to do that. That's an easy, simple solution which we should impose, and we should release six years at least of tax returns, plus any record of audits that resulted in additional payments being due.

On campaign finance, there are all these side ways that foreign governments put money into our political system. We ban foreign corporations and foreign individuals from donating money, but Toyota USA contributes because it's an American company. We've got to fix that. We have to tighten up those laws and we need absolute transparency. And we also need to take away many of the defenses. Let's say you took in money and it turns out it came from Vladimir Putin's lackey. OK, if you promptly go to the government, tell them you found out and give it right back or, better, give it to the government, then you should pay a fine. But if you lie, deny, hide and collaborate, you should go to prison and we should take away most of the defenses for that.

If you say, as the Trump people would say, shove off — well, I would be eternally in favor of a long prison sentence. And I generally don't like long prison sentences, I think they're bad policy. But these are threats to national security. This administration, as I show in the book, again and again submarined our national security for money. Nobody did that before, nobody. We didn't have any president who's ever done that. Remember, Jimmy Carter had to put his little two-bit peanut warehouse into a trust. He didn't run his business. We should never again have someone in the White House who is operating a business.

Former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner has been speaking the blunt truth about Donald Trump's criminal conduct for years. He's not stopping now just because most of the media, and most Democrats in Congress for that matter, have moved on. I spoke to Kirschner, who is now an NBC News legal analyst, in a recent "Salon Talks" episode about Steve Bannon's indictment and more.

During our conversation, we kept coming back to is Kirschner's conviction that the disgraced former president is still a very real threat to our nation. And Kirschner, who served for more than 30 years as a federal prosecutor, is adamant that the only way to neutralize that threat is by prosecuting Trump for his crimes, ranging from those he may have committed in his effort to overturn the 2020 election to possible crimes arising from his mishandling of the pandemic.

Kirschner believes there's actually a case to be made against Trump for all the lies and misinformation he spread about the coronavirus and how to defeat it, from his intentional falsehoods about the nature of the threat to his disgraceful conduct designed to undermine safeguards, such as mask mandates, entirely because he believed it helped him politically. Kirschner, who formerly headed up the homicide unit of the U.S. attorney's office in Washington, D.C., told me that Trump's "grossly negligent conduct was reasonably likely to result in death or serious bodily injury to another."

RELATED: Trump and his regime committed — or at least condoned — mass murder. America just doesn't care

Regarding the possible crimes arising from the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, Kirschner said this about Trump's apparent role: "If you don't punish an attempted overthrow of the government, an insurrection, a rebellion, we're going to get more rebellions. That's just common sense." Watch my Salon Talks interview with Kirschner here or read a transcript of our conversation below to hear him lay out the case for manslaughter charges against Trump himself, and discuss the likelihood that prominent Trump allies are on their way to prison.

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Let's start with Steve Bannon. He's been indicted. Can you explain why there was a delay in this indictment? What do you think actually prompted the Department of Justice and the U.S. attorney in D.C to finally indict him?

We were on Steve Bannon indictment watch for 22 days from the day he was voted in contempt and referred for prosecution to the D.C. U.S. attorney's office until the U.S. attorney finally presented it to the grand jury and the grand jury indicted him for two counts of contempt of Congress. Twenty-two days. We know historically it's been done in as few as nine days. It was done to a Reagan-era EPA official named Rita Lavelle. Twenty-two days may sound like a long time. First of all, it wasn't that long. It takes some time to put a quick investigation together, present it to the grand jury and have them vote out an indictment. But I really think the holdup was because there was an acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia in place at the front end of that 22-day period.

I've worked for more than 10 U.S. attorneys in D.C. Some of them were acting, some of them were interim, some of them were presidentially appointed and Senate-confirmed. Ordinarily when you have an acting U.S. attorney, that person just tries to keep the trains running on time, not make a lot of waves, not take on a lot of high-profile decisions. The new permanent U.S. attorney was confirmed by the Senate and took over one week before Steve Bannon was indicted. His name is Matt Graves, a former colleague of mine. He's a good man. He's a thoughtful man. He was a public corruption prosecutor when he was in my office. One week after he arrived, bam, Steve Bannon indicted. I think that's an important tell and some foreshadowing about how promptly the new D.C. U.S. attorney is going to go about his business.

Steve Bannon said at his press conference, after going to court for the first time, "They took on the wrong guy this time." He said, "It's the misdemeanor from hell." You know the new U.S. attorney in that district. How do you think he's going to respond to that?

Steve Bannon has a rude awakening coming, because he's going to be convicted if he opts to go to trial. Why? Because the offense he committed, contempt of Congress, requires the prosecutors to prove that he was served a lawful subpoena and that he failed to appear. The fact that he is raising executive privilege — first of all, he doesn't have any. He could say, "I am invoking magical unicorn privilege," and it would be equally persuasive.

I don't want to get down into the weeds of executive privilege, but when you get a subpoena, you have to show up. If you have any privilege — executive privilege, attorney-client privilege, parishioner privilege, doctor-patient privilege — you begin answering questions. If the questions begin to make their way into privileged information, you say, "I hereby invoke the privilege." The Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, for example.

The way you don't handle it is to thumb your nose at a subpoena and refuse to show up. This is going to be a very easy criminal case to prove. Steve Bannon will be convicted. And under the statute, if he's convicted of contempt of Congress, each count carries a minimum of one month in jail and a maximum of one year in jail. He will see jail time in the event he's convicted.

In your view, it's clear he has no legal defense. What about the case of Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff? He seems to be communicating, through his legal counsel, with the Jan. 6 committee, but he seems very reluctant to respond to a subpoena. Does Meadows have a potentially more valid defense?

Mark Meadows has no defense for failing to appear on the subpoena. Now, he may have a more legitimate, more viable executive privilege claim, because he was actually part of the administration at the time these communications were had. But what he was required to do under the subpoena is to appear and assert, question by question, whether he was invoking executive privilege or not.

I'll give you an example, Dean. The first question is going to be, "Sir, please state your name." "No, I invoke executive privilege." Mark, you have no executive privilege over your name. And the questions would have progressed in that fashion until maybe questions involving executive privilege got asked. That's when you invoke the privilege. What that does is it creates a record and defines the parameters of what the witness is actually invoking executive privilege on, and then that can be litigated.

You make a great point for people who think, well, maybe Mark Meadows has executive privilege, as he was White House chief of staff until the very end. You've got to go there, and you or your counsel invoke the privilege. You don't just blow off a subpoena. I saw you tweeting about Stephen Miller, yukking it up on Fox News. He was served as well. Maybe Meadows sends a message to Miller, Kayleigh McEnany, Bernard Kerik and all the rest, because I imagine they're going to follow suit. If nothing happens to Meadows, they're going to claim the same things.

You are far more likely to see the McEnanys and the Stephen Millers appear on the subpoenas now and then maybe try to invoke whatever privilege they believe they have. I do predict that, as you say, other witnesses are now going to begin appearing and they're going to challenge the subpoena in other ways. That's why this was a really important step for both the House Select Committee and the Department of Justice to have taken against Steve Bannon.

I want to shift gears a little bit. A lot of people have talked about the potential criminality of Donald Trump in connection with Jan. 6, which we'll talk about in a minute. But everyone has just forgotten or not even addressed the idea of Trump's potential criminal culpability for his lies and what could be manslaughter charges around COVID. You just put out a video on this very point. Please tell people why you think, as a former federal prosecutor who was chief of the homicide unit in D.C., why Trump may have committed crimes in connection with his handling of COVID.

If you look at a relatively low level of homicide, every jurisdiction, every state has its own laws, its own statutes. They call the crime different things. Some jurisdictions call it negligent homicide. In D.C. we call it involuntary manslaughter, but it's a relatively low level of homicide. Donald Trump's conduct, even just what we've seen publicly reported, satisfies — in my opinion as a former career homicide prosecutor — the three elements that we're required to prove to hold somebody accountable for involuntary manslaughter.

Those are that somebody acted in a grossly negligent way. Donald Trump acted in an intentionally criminal way when he lied to the American people about the nature, the transmissibility and the way that you can protect yourself against contracting COVID. He lied to the American people about that. We can prove that because he told Bob Woodward, on tape, the true state of affairs and then he walked right out to the cameras and he lied to us.

The one incident that really sticks with me, that I think would be a marquee piece of evidence in a Donald Trump prosecution for avoidable COVID deaths, would be when he told Jeff Mason, wonderful reporter standing in the Rose Garden during a press conference. He told him, "Take off the mask." And Jeff Mason said, "Mr. President, I choose to protect myself. I'll speak up my more loudly but I'm not going to take off the mask." Trump then mocked him and said, "Oh, I guess you want to be politically correct."

Dean, what message did Donald Trump's base, the people who for whatever reason, decide to listen to and credit what Donald Trump says, what message do you think they took away from that? "Oh, the president just told me I don't need a mask. And beyond that, he would mock me. He would belittle and demean me and call me 'politically correct' if I wore a mask. I am not wearing a mask." Donald Trump put people in harm's way unnecessarily.

The three elements: that he acted in a grossly negligent manner. He did. That his grossly negligent conduct was reasonably likely to result in death or serious bodily injury to another. When we're dealing with a deadly pandemic, you can check that element off the list. The third element is the one that sounds more complicated or harder to prove, which is that your grossly negligent conduct caused the death of another. But causation has a legal definition. It is that your conduct is a substantial factor in bringing about the death of another. And Donald Trump's conduct was a substantial factor in people declining to protect themselves against the coronavirus. That is a strong case for involuntary manslaughter. It just takes some strong, brave prosecutors to bring the charge and then put it in front of a jury. As long as it's a fair and impartial jury, they will hold Donald Trump accountable, in my opinion.

To remind people, because so much has gone on since then, on Feb, 7, 2020, Trump told Bob Woodward point blank that COVID-19 was "deadly stuff," noting it was five times more deadly than even the most serious flu. Then, on Feb. 26, Trump goes before the cameras, when America's looking for answers, and says, "We view this the same as the flu." He lied to the American people, knowing the risks. That's really where the crux of the criminality could be in this: knowingly misleading people when you know the risk, you know people are looking to you, you have an obligation. You're not some random guy. You're the president of the United States and people are misled to their death because of this. What would it take for a prosecutor to have the courage to file that complaint against Trump?

If I were still at the D.C. U.S. attorney's office, working murder cases on Jan. 21, I would have begun presenting evidence to the grand jury of Donald Trump's responsibility for avoidable COVID deaths. The Department of Justice could not have stopped me. They could have fired me. That's the only way they could have stopped me, because it's the right thing to do to honor the victims and to the community.

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What is it going to take, Dean? I think nobody, no prosecutor in New York or Georgia, at the Department of Justice or elsewhere, wants to be the first person to bring criminal charges against a former president. I predict, though, he will be charged and then every prosecutor will want to be the second one to bring charges, because the white-hot glare of media and political and citizen attention will be on the first prosecution. But because Donald Trump committed crimes in virtually every jurisdiction in our nation, anywhere someone died of COVID and they didn't have to, there is criminal liability. You're going to begin to see a tidal wave of criminal charges against Donald Trump, I suspect, once the first jurisdiction indicts him.

There's two other buckets of potential criminal liability against Donald Trump that I want to cover. One is the lead-up to Jan. 6. We've learned more about what we saw that day. We keep learning more and more information about Donald Trump behind the scenes, working with people, trying to get the DOJ to help him overturn the election based on a lie. There was no good faith. It was corrupt. It was bad motive. What potential criminality could Trump face?

There is one overarching conspiracy to commit offenses against the United States that I believe Donald Trump and Jeffrey Clark and John Eastman and Donald Trump Jr., Rudy Giuliani, Mo Brooks — all the people who participated in not only the run-up to Jan. 6, lying to the American people to gin them up, to get them upset about their vote being stolen when in fact it wasn't stolen, but then also participated in the events of Jan. 6 and beyond. I believe there is a very easy charge and it's been brought in the recent past by Bob Mueller. It's called conspiracy to commit offenses against the United States.

I urge everybody to go to the DOJ website because it sets out in a paragraph, in layman's terms, just how broad and sweeping a criminal offense that is. Remember Bob Mueller indicted the Internet Research Agency in Russia on that charge. Why? Because they interfered in our free and fair elections. That is precisely what Donald Trump and company did. They tried to overthrow election results, overthrow our democracy.

That is one overarching conspiracy charge that they're on the hook for. There are lots of other pigeonhole crimes. There is a seditious conspiracy, rebellion. There are any number: Inciting an insurrection is a crime I maintain that Donald Trump fulfills all those federal criminal statutes. I'm optimistic that the Department of Justice is quietly, the way they should be, investigating all these crimes. It's not just a House select committee. I believe in my heart of hearts, knowing many of the people at the Department of Justice, that they're quietly going about their business. How can you not? When you see all this evidence of criminality and there's clearly what we call adequate predication — enough evidence to open a criminal investigation — I don't believe for a minute DOJ is turning a blind eye and saying, "We're happy to give our republic away to Donald Trump. We're not going to investigate these crimes." I don't believe that for a minute.

For Jan. 6, you touch on the idea of seditious conspiracy, which is a crime. But what about the simplest one, incitement to riot? Because we're learning more and more that it seems that it really was, I'm not going to say organic. Those people showed up because Trump lied to them for two months. He radicalized them like an ISIS recruiter. They came there for that but it doesn't seem they planned it, "We're going to attack the Capitol this way or that way." Trump's speech, the fact that he brought them there, incited this. That was what lit this fuse. What rises to the level of inciting a riot? Which was on federal property so it would be a federal crime.

I think one of the most important evidentiary components of what Donald Trump did on Jan. 6 that makes him criminally responsible for what his supporters did after he ginned them up is that everything he said and did came from a place of fraud and lies and deception. He took that group of people and he said to them, "Your vote was stolen from you. Your election was stolen from you. Your president is being stolen from you and if you don't go up the street and fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore."

Then Rudy Giuliani said, "Go down there, trial by combat." Mo Brooks, Don Jr.: They said, "Go down there, kick ass and take names." This all came from a platform of lies, fraud and deception, which gives not only the act that you need but gives the mental state, because he lied to the people about all of it. He basically used that angry mob as a weapon in his hand. He pointed that weapon at the Capitol and pulled the trigger. And that bullet headed up the street and they attacked the Capitol. To do what? To stop what was going on in the certification of the Electoral College vote count.

That's what Donald Trump told them to do. He gave them a directive, an action word: Go up there and stop it. And the fact that he called it a steal, he was saying, "Stop the vote count" — that is an attack on our democracy. He used the word "steal," which is a fraudulent word. That's what gives him the corrupt intent necessary to hold him accountable for those crimes.

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And think about what came before this: His Department of Justice officials telling him, "Mr. President, there is no systemic fraud that undermines the election results." Donald Trump said, "I don't care. Just say there was and leave the rest up to me and my Republican friends in Congress." Dean, what I've just described in the last three minutes is the opening statement in the trial of Donald Trump for inciting the riot and the insurrection. It's right there plain as day, we just need to present it to a jury.

Let's take it a little broader. Right now we're seeing violence from people on the right against school board members, against nurses and doctors over COVID mandates, even against Republican officials who speak out against Donald Trump. If Trump is not prosecuted criminally for his actions — the fact that he's not been prosecuted so far, is that emboldening his people to do this?

Yeah, not only is it emboldening everybody because, listen, if we didn't punish bank robbers, we'd have a whole lot more bank robberies. If you don't punish an attempted overthrow of the government, an insurrection, a rebellion, we're going to get more rebellions. That's just common sense. But even beyond emboldening people, here's how Donald Trump will spin it if he is not indicted by the Department of Justice for the many crimes he inarguably committed. He will say, "The Department of Justice has given me a stamp of approval for everything I did because if it was a crime, they would have prosecuted me. They didn't. That means they vouch for me in everything I did. It wasn't criminal and I'm going to do it again." Again, this is not rocket science. This is just common sense law enforcement.

When you take a big-picture look at where we are now as a nation, how concerned are you for our democracy given that Trump has not been prosecuted and people on the right are celebrating, including Republican elected officials. We're seeing Republicans who are more upset with other Republicans who vote for the infrastructure bill than with Congressman Paul Gosar, who put out a video cartoon where he's literally killing AOC. It seems that the GOP has embraced violence or at least has no problem with it. And at the same time, they're passing laws — at least 33 laws in 19 states — to make it harder to vote.

Here's something that I think is a positive that is likely to come out of all of this. I think the Republican Party is writing its own obituary because I don't believe that what they're doing is sustainable. I don't believe it's a way to grow the party or even to keep the Republicans that have thus far not walked away. When everything you're banking on involves voter suppression laws and demonizing minorities, whether immigrants or African Americans, or when you have no actual agenda to offer, all you have is hate and division and propping up a criminal former president, that's not a winning formula for the future. It may be the only thing they feel like they have at this moment to try to retain power, but it's not a long-term winning strategy.

I think the Republican Party falls and there's probably a new version of it that is born from the Liz Cheneys and the Adam Kinzingers of the world, who retain their conservative principles but they also retain their morality and their love of country and their defense of democracy. That is where the future of the Republican Party is. But the old Republican Party is dying. I think it has to die completely and then a new Republican Party has to come up from the ashes to replace it. That is what I see as the long-term strategy, as long as we can keep our democracy up and running in the meantime. That, I think, is the challenge.

Rep. Adam Schiff, the California Democrat who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, is not the type of person who uses hyperbole just to create soundbites. This former prosecutor has a clear record of sober, measured public rhetoric. So we should all take note when Schiff states that the Department of Justice "should be doing a lot more" when it comes to investigating "any criminal activity that Donald Trump was engaged in," as he did in our recent Salon Talks conversation. In describing the former president's long list of possible or apparent crimes, Schiff said, "I don't think you can ignore the activity and pretend it didn't happen."

This article first appeared in Salon.

I spoke to Schiff about his new book, "Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could," which is currently at No. 1 on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list. The clear message Schiff has for America is this: "We came so close to losing our democracy," and that threat is far from over. One of his main motivations in writing the book, Schiff said, is a sense that most people don't "feel a sufficient sense of alarm" over the threat posed by Trump and much of today's Republican Party.

To that end, Schiff opens the book with a gripping retelling of the Jan. 6 act of "domestic terrorism," as the FBI has officially labeled that attack. Schiff says he felt compelled to give that personal account in order "to bring the reader inside that chamber, let them know what it was like to hear the doors being battered, the windows breaking as this mob was trying to get in."

Schiff also discussed what it was like to become a "villain" in Trump's world, as the recipient of a barrage of crude insults launched by the former president and his supporters. Schiff says his sense of humor helped him cope with those slings and arrows, but it was more difficult to face the death threats from those incited by Trump.

Watch the full interview with Schiff here, or read a transcript of our conversation below to hear more about Schiff's warning and call to action. "We don't have the luxury of despair," he told me. "It needs to motivate us to be active."

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Your book opens with a retelling of Jan. 6. You paint a great picture — first of all with your sense of humor, but also of the fear involved and how this was very real. Can you share a little bit about what you went through, and other members went through, with gas masks being handed out and everything else. There are Republicans, as you may have heard, who are trying to depict Jan. 6 as a "tourist visit." So I think the reality needs to be relayed to people about what really went on from the inside.

This is one of the reasons that I wanted to write this down. I wanted to bring the reader inside that chamber, let them know what it was like to hear the doors being battered, the windows breaking as this mob was trying to get in.

I wasn't on the floor the whole time. I had been assigned by the speaker to be one of a handful of managers to oppose the Republican efforts to decertify the election. I really was focused on what I was speaking, what I was saying, what the Republicans were saying. Then I looked up and the speaker was missing from her chair, which struck me because I knew from the preparations she planned to preside the entire time. Soon thereafter two Capitol police rushed onto the floor, grabbed [Majority Leader] Steny Hoyer, and whisked him off the floor so quickly. I remember thinking I'd never seen Steny move that fast.

It wasn't long before we started to get messages from the Capitol police, one after another, of increasing severity, that there were rioters in the building, that we needed to get out the gas masks from under our seats, that we should get prepared to get down on the ground, and ultimately that we needed to get out, and that a way had been paved for us to get out. But I still hung back because there was now a real scrum to get out the door behind the chamber. I still felt relatively calm and was waiting for other people to go ahead. A couple of Republicans came up to me on the floor and said, "Basically, you can't let them see you." One of them said, "I know these people, I can talk to these people, I can talk my way through these people. You're in a whole different category."

At first, I was kind of touched that they were worried about my safety. And then, you know, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that if they hadn't been lying about the election, I wouldn't need to worry about my safety. None of us would. One of them, when I finally did head to the doors when they were really starting to break glass to get in, and I walked out with a Republican who was holding a wooden post — it wasn't just the Democrats were worried here — he was holding a post to defend himself. And I said to him, because he had a member pin on, but I didn't recognize him, "How long have you been here?" He said, "72 hours. I just got elected."

As you mentioned I used my sense of humor in dark moments to try to alleviate the stress. So he says he'd been there for 72 hours. I looked at him and I said, "It's not always like this." But I tell you, the anger after that day only grew. What I was most angry at was not the insurrectionists who really believed the Big Lie, although I was furious at them too. It was what I described as the insurrectionists in suits and ties, these members that I work with that knew it was a big lie. And even after that brutal attack, when we went back in the chamber with blood still on the floor outside of the chamber, they were still trying to overturn the election. That to me was unforgivable.

To watch it play off from our side, on TV, was stunning. For me, I'm Muslim and the same people on the right had demonized my community for years, saying we knew who the terrorists were and we weren't turning them in because we were soft on terrorism. All of these are lies. Now we actually have Republicans literally defending terrorists by name. You have Donald Trump defending the terrorists, the same man who wanted to ban Muslims from entering the country. I find that hard to process intellectually because it's just so devoid of any decency whatsoever. You mentioned a Republican congressmen saying to you, "These people might hurt you or kill you." They know their base, they know how dangerous they are. So what do we do?

I thought the most powerful speech that day came from a source I was not expecting. It came from Conor Lamb [a moderate Pennsylvania Democrat], this former Marine, generally very soft-spoken. When we went back on the floor after that insurrection to finish the joint session, he talked about how these people had come in and attacked the Capitol and they'd done so because of the big lies being pushed on the other side of the aisle, and how a lot of them had walked in free and walked out free. And he said, "I think we know why they were able to simply walk away."

What he was saying, of course, was that because of their color, because of who they were, because they were white nationalists and not people of color, that they were treated very differently. It was an inescapable truth. This was not just an insurrection against our form of government. It was also a white nationalist insurrection with Confederate flags and people wearing Auschwitz T-shirts. This too was a very sobering thing for me, which was to see where this was coming from and realizing just how far our country still had to go.

In your book, you share things about your family and growing up. One thing stuck out and it's a small thing: You write that in 2010, you were on a plane flight with Kevin McCarthy, a fellow member of the House from California, a Republican. It was before the midterms and you had a conversation. Then he literally goes out and fabricates something, claiming you had told him, "Republicans are going to win this." That was a lie and you went and confronted him. And I was stunned by his reaction, considering this is the man who might be the next speaker of the House. Can you share a little bit about that story?

Yes, and I tell this story because sometimes little vignettes tell us a lot about what people are made of. One of the most frequent questions I get from people is: When you talk to Republicans privately, do they really believe what they say publicly? And the answer, all too often, is no, they don't. They don't believe what they're saying publicly and they will admit it. In this particular case, I was seated next to McCarthy just by coincidence on United Airlines, flying back to Washington. We were having a nothing conversation about who was going to win the midterms. I said I thought Democrats would win. And he said he thought Republicans were going to win. Then the movie started and I was like, "Thank God the movie started."

So we get to D.C. and we go our separate ways and he goes off and does a press briefing and he tells the press, "Oh, Republicans are definitely going to win the midterms. I sat next to Adam Schiff on the plane and even he admitted Republicans were going to win the midterms." The next morning, when that came out, I was beside myself and I went up to him, I made a beeline for him on the House floor. And I said, "Kevin, I would have thought if we're having a private conversation, it was a private conversation. But if it wasn't, you know, I said the exact opposite of what you told the press."

He looks at me and says, "Yeah, I know Adam. But you know how it goes." And I was like, "No, Kevin, I don't know how it goes. You just make stuff up and that's how you operate? Because that's not how I operate." But it is how he operates, and in that respect, Kevin McCarthy was really made for a moment like this, when the leader of his party had no compunction about lie after lie after lie. You say what you need to say, you do what you need to do. The truth doesn't matter. What's right doesn't matter. And someone like that can never be allowed to go near a position of responsibility like the speaker's office.

You also write about being the brunt of Trump's attacks, over and over. Were you able to laugh it off? What was it like to be a Trump villain? Was it more fun to be villain than a hero like they say in the movies?

You know, much of the time I was able to laugh it off, and my family helped me laugh it off. In fact, I remember walking down the street in New York with my daughter, who lives in Soho. I was wearing blue jeans and a canvas jacket and sunglasses, and I was getting stopped. And I was astonished that I was getting stopped and eventually it started to get annoying to my daughter, because there's only one center of attention in our family, and it's her, not me. So finally, Lexi says, "Enough already." I said to her, "I'm just shocked that people can recognize me." She looks at me and she says, "Well, you know, Dad, it's the pencil neck." This is what you get from your own kid.

I do want to say, on a more serious note, that I found it so upsetting that he would demean his office by engaging in these kinds of juvenile taunts. It just brought the presidency down. But the more serious thing were the not-so-veiled threats he would make, calling me a traitor and saying, "Well, we used to have a way of dealing with traitors." At one point he met with, I think, the president of Guatemala and said, "Well, you know, you used to have a way in your country of dealing with people like Adam Schiff." Something along those lines. And, you know, that reaches people that are not well. I get death threats, and that part, you really couldn't laugh off.

In the book, you write that after Jan. 6 there was no need for impeachment hearings just to have the vote: "No investigation would be necessary given we were all witnesses to his crimes," speaking of Trump. When you think back on that now, do you think the Department of Justice should be doing more in terms of criminal prosecution of Donald Trump and the people around him?

I do think the Justice Department should be doing a lot more than what I can see — which is, with respect to some things, nothing at all. What I would point to most specifically is Donald Trump on the phone with the secretary of state of Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, essentially trying to browbeat him into finding 11,780 votes that don't exist. I think if you or I were on that call, or any of my constituents, they would have been indicted by now. I understand the reluctance on the part of the attorney general to look backward, but you can't have a situation where a president cannot be prosecuted and when they leave office they still can't be prosecuted — that they're too big to jail, somehow.

I think that any criminal activity that Donald Trump was engaged in needs to be investigated. It may be ultimately that the attorney general makes the decision after investigating that for what he thinks is the country's best interests it makes sense not to go forward with a particular charge. But I don't think you can ignore the activity and pretend it didn't happen.

Last week we had the vote in the House on charges of criminal contempt against Steve Bannon. Then it goes to the Justice Department. Do you have any sense what they will do? If they choose not to indict Bannon or to prosecute him, would you be calling for changes in the DOJ?

Well, first of all, I think they are going to move forward. That's my personal opinion. It's my hope and expectation. I say that because of a couple of things. They have repeatedly made it clear now, as they did to Mr. Bannon but in other contexts as well that they are not asserting executive privilege, that the public interest here far outweighs any claim of privilege. So Steve Bannon had no basis in which to simply refuse to appear. I also think that because the Justice Department itself has not resisted our efforts to interview high-ranking, former Justice Department individuals, they understand the importance of this. Should he not get prosecuted, it will essentially send a message that the rule of law doesn't apply to certain people close to the former president. And I just cannot imagine that's a message that the Justice Department wants to send.

Rolling Stone recently reported about certain members of the House, including perhaps Rep. Paul Gosar [of Arizona], meeting with some of the Jan. 6 organizers. It's not completely clear because it's from anonymous sources, but there was an allegation that Gosar promised blanket pardons to people through Donald Trump. I know you're on the Jan. 6 committee, will you be investigating that?

Yes, we will be investigating these issues to see whether the public reports are accurate or not accurate, what role members of Congress played or didn't play. We are determined to be exhaustive. Nobody gets a pass, so yes, we will be looking into all these things. Look, you can't dismiss those allegations as being too incredible to be true because Donald Trump was dangling pardons to people like Paul Manafort. He was attacking those who did cooperate, like Michael Cohen, calling him a rat. The idea that they would dangle more pardons cannot be excluded. And if members of Congress played a role in that, then the public has a right to know. Ultimately Congress and the Justice Department will have to figure out what the consequences need to be.

There was reporting in the Washington Post on the Willard Hotel war room and there were things in it I had never seen, including that Donald Trump and his allies in early January, after all the appeals were done, recounts had been done, the Electoral College had voted, and Trump was on the phone with over 300 state legislative officials in battleground states, telling them essentially to decertify the results. Could that potentially rise to a crime?

That ultimately would be a decision the Justice Department would have to make, whether it violated specific statutes and whether they could meet their burden of proof. But what we are most focused on is this violent attack on the Capitol, just the last stage in an effort to essentially bring about a coup. When all the litigation failed, when all the efforts to coerce the vice president failed, when the efforts to get Brad Raffensperger to find votes that didn't exist failed, then that was the plan: to use violence to intimidate the vice president or the Congress into not doing its job, to interrupt that peaceful transfer of power. Was that the plan all along, and what role did the president play, and people around him?

I think the biggest black box in terms of unknowns, is what was the president's role in all this. We know he incited the insurrection, and that was sufficient grounds to impeach and remove him. But what role did he play? How much was he aware of the propensity for violence, the participation of white nationalists? How much was he celebrating as he opened those doors and windows and heard the sound of the crowd the night before that they would use violence if necessary to make sure that he stayed in the office?

You're a former prosecutor. If Donald Trump is not punished some way criminally for his actions, what would stop Trump or a democratic demagogue one day or another president from mimicking the same conduct, thinking you can get away with this? This was a scene of two-prong coup attempt, one behind the scenes and one right in our face on Jan. 6, how could this be permissible in the United States of America?

It's a very good question and I think you can draw a straight line between the Trump's Russia misconduct in which he invited a foreign power to help them cheat in an election and then lied to cover it up. And feeling he gotten away with that after Bob Mueller testified, and that leading the very next day to his Ukrainian misconduct and new and different ways to try to cheat in the next election. And when he got acquitted and escaped accountability for that in the first trial, you can draw a straight line to the insurrection and even worse ways to help to try to cheat in the election.

If he were to ever take office again, where does that straight line continued to go? So, yes, I think the danger is real and what's going on around the country right now in which the Republicans are running with the big lie to strip independent elections officials of their duties and give them over to partisans seems to be the lesson they learned from the failed insurrection, which is next time, if they couldn't find a Secretary of State in Georgia to come up with votes that don't exist, there'll be sure they have someone there who will. And to me, that's why I titled the book "How Close We Came to Losing Our Democracy and Still Could." Because the danger that we still could is all too real.

In the book, you quote from Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night" talking about what we saw and went through and with Donald Trump. If this were a play on a stage now I can condemn it as an improbable fiction, but unfortunately it was real where we lived through this. And at this point I'm thinking of "Hamlet" and our democracy: To be, or not to be. It really seems that's where we are, and that it's that dire. Do you get a sense that enough Democrats, enough people in the media, share the dire view of the trajectory of our nation and where we're going? Where just because this republic has been here for 240-plus years doesn't mean it will be here for eternity, and that something needs to be done to save it?

I don't think people feel a sufficient sense of alarm. It's one of the main motivations for me to write this book. I got together recently with a couple of friends of mine. They're both a husband and wife married for decades. They're in their mid 90s. And I asked them, have you ever seen anything like the present? And they told me, "Look, we remember World War II, the Great Depression. We remember Korea and Vietnam, the Civil Rights struggles, the Cuban Missile Crisis. We've never been more worried about the future of our country and democracy than we are today. Because during all those former crises, we always knew we would survive and we would survive as a democracy. But right now we just don't know." And people do need to feel that sense of urgency, not despondent state, not despair - we don't have the luxury of despair. It needs to motivate us to be active.

I paint a portrait of a lot of the heroes that came through this period of time, Marie Yovanovitch and Fiona Hill and others. We need to use them to inspire us to act. We can't all be Marie Yovanovitch, but in our own way we can figure out what we can do to come to the rescue of our democracy in this dark hour.

It can happen here. The "it" ought to be obvious by now: an authoritarian or even fascist regime in the United States. That was a big reason why Harvard professor Steven Levitsky, along with his colleague Daniel Ziblatt, published the 2018 book "How Democracies Die." They wanted to warn Americans of the dangerous signs they saw in Donald Trump's presidency that followed the authoritarian playbook.

So where are we now in terms of our democracy? I spoke with Levitsky recently for Salon Talks, and here's one line that really stood out: Levitsky told me, "Five years ago I would have laughed you out of the room if you suggested our democracy could die." But today, he added, we see the Republican Party apparently focused on breaking our democracy. In a nutshell, Levitsky believes the threat to our democracy is more acute today than when Trump was in the White House, since the GOP is desperate to retain its fading power in the face of hostile demographic change.

Levitsky describes today's GOP as "clearly an authoritarian party." Worse yet, it's no longer all about Trump. He sees the GOP continuing on its anti-democratic path for years to come, saying that even the contested term "fascist" is becoming more defensible given the GOP's defense or denial of the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.

You can watch my Salon Talks episode here, or read a transcript of our conversation below to hear Levitsky's suggestions about how Democrats can strengthen our democracy while they still control the White House and Congress, and why that might involve progressive swallowing some of their policy goals.

As always, the following interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

In 2018, when your book "How Democracies Die" came out, on a scale from zero to 10 — with 10 being the most dire concerns about our democracy and zero being, no, everything's fine — where were we then in terms of your concern about our democracy?

I would say if 10 is most concerned, we were at five or six. We wrote the book because we were concerned. We wrote the book because we saw warning signs. But where I'm going is that I think we were too optimistic because we blamed the Republican Party for dropping the ball and allowing Donald Trump, a demagogue, an authoritarian demagogue, to be nominated. We thought they should have broken with Trump in defense of democracy. They obviously didn't. But we believed at the time — not long ago, three years ago — that the bulk of the Republican Party was minimally committed to small-D democracy.

We believed there was a faction in the Republican Party, particularly in the Senate, that would be able and willing to draw a line that they wouldn't let Trump cross. And we were wrong about that. The speed and the extent to which the Republican Party has been Trumpified is way beyond anything that we expected.

It's enough to have an authoritarian president — that's threatening. One of the two major parties has now basically given up on playing by democratic rules of the game. That's a new level of threat. And so now I would say— it's hard to put a number, but I would say seven or eight.

I'm afraid to see what nine looks like, if this is seven or eight. You mention in your book the idea of using democratic methods to save our democracy, one being the election. The idea was that defeating Trump through the election might help preserve our democratic institutions. I imagine you could never have predicted what Trump would have done after losing the election, or what happened on Jan. 6. So even though we had a democratic election, are democratic institutions actually weaker now, after November 2020?

Let me answer that in two parts. First of all, we did have elections as an escape hatch, and we used them. And it's a damn good thing we did. We would be much, much worse off had Trump managed to retain the presidency and stay in power for four years. The fact that we sent him to Mar-a-Lago is very important, and shouldn't be understated. Now that said, I don't predict things accurately very well. One thing I did predict, I knew would happen.

I knew that Donald Trump would not accept the results of the election. What I did not anticipate is that the vast bulk of the Republican Party would go along with it. And of course, I didn't anticipate anything remotely like Jan. 6. So yes, things have gotten much worse, because not only has the Big Lie taken hold among the vast bulk of the Republican Party, to the point where you can't be a member of the Republican Party in good standing if you don't adhere to the Big Lie.

And they're acting upon that, right? They are now taking steps in various important states — Texas, Arizona, Georgia — to make it easier to overturn an election. So I think there's a good chance that the Republican Party, not just Donald Trump but the Republican Party, tries to overturn the results of the 2024 election. And that is, again, a worse place than we were a few years ago. But we would be even worse off had Trump remained in power.

If Trump ever got back in office, I don't know if he would ever leave. If you look at the GOP now from an academic point of view, how would you describe it? People throw around terms: It's autocratic, it's fascist. But how do you look at it?

I think ideologically it has evolved into something fairly similar to European far-right parties. It's primarily an ethno-nationalist nativist party. It is essentially preserving the identity of a white Christian America, and that is fairly similar to what we describe as far-right parties in Europe. The thing about far-right parties in Europe is they win 12, 15, 17, 18 percent of the vote and they're at the margins of politics. At best, they're a junior partner in a coalition government, but mostly they're in opposition. So they're kind of at the margins throwing rocks at the boat of the system, but they're not in power. There's no country, no established democracy in the world, with the exception of India, in which one major party is an extremist ethno-nationalist party.

That's frightening. So they are sort of like the AFD in Germany, let's say.

Yeah.

AFD didn't do well in the last election in Germany, they are nowhere close to electing a prime minister or chancellor. But we have a party here that's knocking on that same door that controls more of the governorships. When there's no resistance within the GOP to Donald Trump, drawing on history, what alarm bells does that raise about what could happen in the future?

It means that the Republican Party, as has been the case since 2016, will be following and acting in service to an authoritarian leader. I mean, there are many, many leaders past and present in the Republican Party who I may disagree with on policy, but I know at the end of the day, they're going to play by democratic rules. That's not true of Donald Trump. And we know very well, more than we did three years ago, that the vast bulk of the Republican Party will line up behind him. They stuck with him even after he instigated Jan. 6. I mean, that's worse than shooting somebody on Fifth Avenue. It's now crystal clear that they will follow him to whatever authoritarian destination he takes them. And that's more dangerous than just one guy. He has a party behind him.

In America, there's this sense by some that it can't happen here — whatever that could be, an autocracy, a dictatorship, a fascist regime. I think it is happening here. And I think a lot of people are not equipped, in the Democratic Party or in the media, to see what's going on right now. Is Donald Trump how democracies die?

Potentially. I mean, interestingly, we may have an election in 2024 where the election is stolen by the opposition party. That doesn't happen very often. But look, we wrote "How Democracies Die" precisely for the reasons you said. Americans take our democracy for granted, all of us. Me growing up until five years ago, I would have laughed you out of the room if you suggested that democracy might die. For 99 percent of Americans across the political spectrum, we took for granted that no matter how recklessly our politicians might behave, we couldn't actually break our democracy.

We wrote the book because we started to say, yeah, well, we might break our democracy. And even though at the time we may have only seen the risk level as a five or a six, we thought it was worth trying to raise the level of awareness, which I think we've done. Americans are much more worried than they were five, six, seven years ago, but I think you're right. We in the media, most Americans and most in the establishment and even the Democratic Party, even the Biden administration, doesn't quite have the level of urgency that we need to have.

I've never heard an American president talk about the battle between autocracy and democracy the way President Biden does. A lot of times it's talked about in the foreign context, but he brings it home domestically as well. There was a CBS poll in July in which 55 percent of Trump supporters — not Republicans, but Trump supporters — viewed Jan. 6 as an act in defense of freedom. How alarming is that for you? Are we getting to the point where if the GOP base is saying they're OK with violence, then they can be called a fascist movement and it's not hyperbolic?

I've always personally resisted the "fascist" label. I think it gets thrown about for right-wingers we don't like way too much. I think the label is growing more defensible now than a couple of years ago. But I think it's more straightforward and more defensible to say that this is now clearly an openly authoritarian party.

There are different kinds of measures you can use, but a couple of clear indicators that scholars of regimes all agree on is a party that embraces, condones, accepts and promotes political violence and a party that does not accept electoral defeat, that can't accept defeat. On those two criteria, especially between November 2020 and January 2021, we saw the bulk of the Republican Party swing and miss on those two criteria: Always renounce violence, always accept defeat. They are no longer doing either of those things. So I wouldn't have said this to you when we first published the book, but I think the Republican Party can be legitimately labeled an authoritarian party.

After Jan. 6, I was as surprised as you. I actually thought the GOP was going to jettison Donald Trump and go, "He's gone. He lied for two months. He clearly incited this attack. It might be a criminal violation, it might not be, but it was clearly, it was him. He did it." A week later on the floor of the House, Kevin McCarthy was denouncing Donald Trump. Then time went on, and now they celebrate the people who did that. Worse, they're making martyrs of people like Ashli Babbitt, who was killed jumping into a secure area against the directions of an officer who knew there were elected officials behind him in the area. What does that mean to you? What concerns do you have when you hear Donald Trump defend the attackers, calling them persecuted, calling them political prisoners and defending Ashli Babbitt by name?

I mean, this is what authoritarian political movements do. I don't want to go rushing to the comparison to Italian fascism or German Nazis, but this is the kind of stuff that fascist parties did. They glorified, defended, promoted violence. And violence is the path to power, so they became OK with it from top to bottom, from grassroots activists to voters to leaders. They became OK with violent seizures of power. How else do you read Jan. 6 and the reaction, and now the glorification of Jan. 6, other than these guys are going to be OK with a violent seizure of power?

I had the same reaction as you did in the days after Jan. 6. I really was hopeful, listening to Mitch McConnell on the floor of the Senate, listening to McCarthy, that finally this would be the turning point. But I think that the Republicans took a few days, put their finger to the wind and realized that the base was still with Trump. And because of the existence of primaries and because these guys are just too small to stand up for democracy over their own political careers, they went where their base was.

They were unwilling, for whatever reason — with the exception of Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney and a small handful of others, many of whose careers are over — they were unwilling to stand up to the base. Standing up to the base means probably ending your political career and they just didn't want to do it. They'd rather end democracy.

It's their pursuit of power at all costs. It's something that you read about in history books. I'm reading "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" and "The Gathering Storm" by Winston Churchill at the same time, which is scaring the crap out of me with what we're going through. It's actually cruel to look at Germany and the rise of the Nazis, where Churchill says, "We had numerous opportunities to stop this and we didn't do that." I'd love you to share what has worked in other countries, and maybe could be a model here, where even competing political parties join together to form essentially a pro-democracy coalition — not ideologically aligned, but at least pro-democracy.

First of all, let me say there is no magic solution. When you're in a situation where one of the two political parties representing almost half the country is committed to an anti-democratic project, there is no easy out. And we're going to be in this battle, I think, even in the best of cases, for 10, 15, 20 years. This is not something we're going to put to rest in the next couple of years.

The good news is that we're probably not on the brink of sort of long-term, single-party rule. The U.S. has a lot of things going for it as well. The small-d "democratic" opposition, mostly the Democratic Party, is strong. It's well organized, it's electorally viable, it's well-financed. This is not an opposition that can be steamrolled like in Russia or Hungary or Venezuela. So even in the worst case, even if the Republicans steal the 2024 election, ending democracy momentarily — and that could happen — that's not going to be the end of the story. We're not going to slide into 30 years of authoritarianism. The Democrats are going to fight back. There will be protests in the streets. There will be another election. It may not be an entirely fair election, but the Democrats will continue to contest for power. It's more likely that we reach a period of sliding in and out of crisis than sliding into outright long-term decay.

What do we do? I personally think that the key, and this is a lesson we've taken from other cases, particularly in Europe, is a broad small-D democratic coalition that has to range from the progressive wing of the Democratic Party to include democratic conservatives. As many Republicans as want to join, have to be embraced. Now, that's not an easy message for progressives. It means swallowing some policy goals and programmatic goals and getting into political alliance with people you really do not like, and you've really disagreed with in the past.

Liz Cheney is nothing compared to some of the people who might end up being in the democratic coalition. But it's the only way that we ensure that we win, that we build a coalition that includes as many Republicans and as many conservatives as possible: evangelical Christians, business people. It's got to be a broad coalition. If it's a blue-state coalition, it's not enough.

It's almost surreal to be having this conversation in America in 2021. It's like something out of a Philip Roth book. This is real, it's happening right here. Are you optimistic? You mentioned certain things that give you hope. On a practical level, while Democrats control Congress, would it give you more hope if they passed a voting rights act, a "freedom to vote" act or something along those lines?

Oh yeah. I mean, I look back to the Lodge Act of 1890, right before the consolidation of Jim Crow. There was a law to establish much greater federal oversight of elections that passed the House, that had a majority in the Senate and was blocked by a filibuster. But that majority eventually cracked because the Republican Party, which at the time was the more pro-voting rights party, disagreed over trade and had other priorities. They gave up and didn't pass the bill, and immediately the former Confederate states, Southern states, started enacting constitutional forums and electoral forums that disenfranchised African Americans, who were almost half the population in the South. It ushered in 80 years of authoritarianism in the South because we didn't pass that democracy bill in 1890. I don't think things would get quite as bad this time around, but it is consequential if we don't take steps to combat voter suppression and election subversion.

What gives me hope? I mean, a couple of things. I think the raw materials for democratic survival exist in the United States. The kind of extraordinary imbalance of power between one side and the other that you see in Russia or in Venezuela or in Turkey or in Hungary doesn't exist in the United States. It's a pretty evenly matched fight. It could get ugly, it could slide into some pretty nasty crises, but the Democrats are going to continue to have a fighting chance for years to come.

What really gives me hope is I think that we're actually on the brink of establishing an unprecedented multiracial democracy. That's a really hard thing to pull off, and arguably no other society has really pulled it off. We have not, but we're on the brink of it. We got there in a formal sense in 1965, and we've been inching in the direction of making that real for half a century. That's what this war is about. That's what this Republican reaction is about. But if we prevail — and it's not going to be easy, or be quick — if we prevail, I think on the other side could be a remarkable democratic experiment that could be a model for the world. That's what allows me to sleep at night and get up the next day and keep going.

A lot of people talk insist that Donald Trump should be prosecuted for Jan. 6. Does that actually end the threat or at this point does it transcend Donald Trump?

I think it definitely transcends Trump and pervades the GOP overall. Trump could go into exile to Iceland tomorrow, he could pass away tomorrow, and that's not going to end this. This ideology is going to persist, whether it's out of Tucker Carlson or someone else. There are many, many political entrepreneurs who, now that Trump has gone there, now that he's crossed that line, now that he's established that identity, I don't think there's any putting it back in the bottle.

Trump is a unique figure and certainly nobody will replicate him. I think there is a good argument to be made for prosecuting Trump. It's double-edged, but I think a pretty good case can be made. But even if they did, it's not over with that. The Republican Party will continue to be in essence, a Trumpist party, I think, for a while to go.

Recently Democratic members of Congress, Adam Schiff and others, introduced legislation to reform the system so when they looked at what Trump did in the White House. Not about the election so much as about how he exercised power. We had a lot of reforms after Watergate. Do you think the Democrats should make that a priority, as well as voting rights? Understanding that the next president might not be a Democrat — it might be Trump, or it might be another person like Trump — should they enact reforms now?

Absolutely. Obviously, enacting reforms is really difficult now because it's difficult to peel away even a single Republican vote. It's much easier said than done, but what Adam Schiff is saying makes a lot of sense to me. In our system, as we wrote in "How Democracies Die," for years the rules were actually under-specified and we relied a lot on the restraint of politicians.

We trusted that politicians wouldn't go there. They wouldn't blatantly make millions of dollars out of being president. They wouldn't pardon their friends or people who conspired with them. And now it's clear, given the level of polarization given the example that some have set, that we're going to have to formalize what used to be informal norms. We can't rely on self-restraint anymore. We can't rely on forbearance. We need to create hard guardrails, rather than soft.

If you were emotionally invested in battling Donald Trump while he was in the White House, then you have suffered from trauma. There may be no one better equipped to help us cope with that trauma than Mary Trump, who is both a psychologist and a niece of the man who caused that pain.

I spoke to Mary Trump for "Salon Talks" about her new book, "The Reckoning: Our Nation's Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal." Arguably, Mary played a key role in defeating her uncle last year, from her TV appearances and to her runaway bestseller about Donald and the entire Trump family, "Too Much and Never Enough."

In her new book, Mary looks back at our nation's collective trauma caused by her uncle's presidency, his mishandling of COVID-19 and his attempted coup on Jan. 6 aimed at overturning the 2020 election. She also takes a broader look at the historical trauma that Black people and Native Americans have suffered and how the effort by some on the right today to whitewash that with laws attacking academic freedom and "critical race theory," seeking to enforce a particular version of history, makes it more difficult for these communities to heal from generational trauma.

Our conversation, which you can watch in full or read as an edited transcript below, focused much on the present and the threat that Donald, as Mary Trump refers to her uncle, poses to our nation. Mary told me why she thinks Democrats have so far failed to call out the danger presented by Donald and the GOP as they continue to misread the character of the contemporary Republican Party. She said that her uncle is still hungry to wield power, and that if he were ever returned to the White House, she doesn't believe he would leave peacefully. Before the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, you could dismiss that idea as over the top. If you dismiss Mary's warning now, you do so at the peril of our nation.

We talked about your bestseller "Too Much and Never Enough" the last time you were on Salon Talks. Now you've got a new book, "The Reckoning: Our Nation's Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal." Let the healing begin, Mary, because I could use some.

Yes, let the healing begin. Man, we've been through the wringer.

Your last book was about your family, about the trauma your late father was put through by his father, who was also Donald Trump's father. On some level, Donald Trump is slightly sympathetic as a human being who went through trauma. I have no sympathy for him now, but as a human being reading your book, you can't help but feel that. Now we look at our trauma, and your new book looks at the collective trauma of African Americans and Native Americans on different levels at different times. Let's talk about what we've been through the last four years. You note candidly that you went for treatment at a place that deals with PTSD in mid-2017. First, as a psychologist, what is the working definition of trauma, so we're all on the same page.

Trauma can be many things, and it can lead to many different outcomes. It could be a car accident, it could be being in war, it could be being denied medical treatment. It can be a very quiet thing as well. People think of trauma and they think explosions and plane crashes, but as we've seen in the last year and a half, it could also be being isolated, living in fear of a silent enemy, living with the kinds of division that my uncle has gifted us over the last four or five years. It's really anything that makes you feel like you are not in control of your safety. As we've seen, it can really have an impact on people's mental health. We're seeing it already, but going forward, we still haven't emerged. We're still being traumatized. It's going to manifest itself in many different ways.

I'm sure the incidents of PTSD will rise, but we're also talking about anxiety and depression and substance abuse and domestic abuse situations worsening. The one thing that would've helped mitigate the effects of the stress of COVID and the fear and the sense of constant danger we couldn't have, because of the fact that we were not allowed to unite as a country. The us versus them should have been us against COVID. Instead, Donald and Republican leadership made it Donald supporters against everybody else. That's also going to take its toll.

I know every person is different, but how do you address trauma in a way that's productive and can actually help people?

The thing that makes it difficult to deal with trauma, in terms of recovering from it, is that you have to be very honest about what happened to you. That includes feeling the feelings that maybe got split off at the moment of traumatization. Disassociation is a very common symptom for people with PTSD because the attended feelings are unbearable. That also distances you from your ability to heal from it. We see the same thing, and this was the similarity I saw with what this country is going through. We continue to be re-traumatized because we've never dealt with our foundational traumas in a way that is honest, straightforward and healing.

What do you say to people who feel like they've been put through an emotional trauma by your uncle's presidency, which continues to this day because he's not gone. We just had a man in D.C. who claimed to have bombs and who wanted to eliminate Joe Biden to put Donald Trump back in office. That's not an outlier — we're going to see more of that. What do you tell people about how to heal?

First, I would just validate that feeling: You have been traumatized. That's one of the most egregious things about the last few years. It's people with empathy and compassion, who really do care about what happens, who have been the most negatively impacted by what's gone on. The people who are, quite frankly, the worst among us have been empowered and enabled by the horrors that Donald inflicted on us.

I know we're talking in generalities here, but people are still going through difficult times, they don't want to hear his name. People will say to me, "It bothers me so much I change the channel. I don't want to hear his voice anymore." That was when he was the president. Now I really find no excuse, no reason, for hearing his voice.

This is the problem, though. We can't ignore him. We ignore him at our peril, because Republicans are keeping him relevant, keeping him empowered. Who knows what's going on behind the scenes. I wish I never had to speak his name or think about him ever again, that would be healing. It's tricky because we're all so exhausted and demoralized, but things are only going to get worse if we look away. I agree with you, we shouldn't be playing clips. It's gratuitous and it feels mean to be subjected to him.

There are two different ways to look at this. There is the direct mental health aspect and strategy, and to that I would say there should be a Cabinet position dealing exclusively with the mental health fallout from COVID. I'm not kidding, this needs to be a structural innovation that operates at the local, state and federal level. People need access to resources. I am not the only person on the planet who came into this with complex PTSD. A lot of people already had pre-existing conditions that made them more vulnerable. Then there are those of us who were perfectly fine, but now find themselves with stress-related disorders or anxiety, etc. The fact that everybody doesn't have the same access, it's ridiculous. Mental health isn't a luxury. Mental illness isn't a moral failing. Everybody should have access to trauma therapy, regular therapy, EMDR, etc.

The second thing I would say is that in order to help those of us who've suffered so much over the last four years, and particularly the last year and a half, and continue to suffer because we're being held hostage, again, by the worst among us, the Democrats need to take the gloves off and start acting as if they understand the unbelievably dangerous situation we currently find ourselves in.

I want to touch on one more thing about healing and how it intertwines with today's GOP. You've got the GOP today banning and threatening to defund schools that teach what they call "critical race theory," which, if you look at the laws, it's not critical race theory. It's literally teaching about the history of systemic racism, of slavery, of Jim Crow, of Native American genocide. You note Rick Santorum's infamous statement, talking to a group of young white people about white Europeans saying, "We birthed a nation from nothing." With this white fragility in play, how much harder does it make it for people who are African American, Native American and others to heal, if we're not going to talk about what really happened to them as a people.

It makes it impossible. Just a small data point: So far the few reviews I've read of my book have all been by old white guys who take great umbrage with what I have to say. They're very defensive about it for some reason. It is this knee-jerk need to look away. We saw it with the Capitol police officer's testimony. Not one Republican admitted to watching that hearing, as if it wasn't worth their time. Ted Cruz was playing basketball, for God's sake.

It's as if they feel that facing this stuff head-on somehow makes them guilty when the truth of the matter is, by continuing to ignore racism, not just our racist past, but the fact that white supremacy is currently a major platform of one of our two political parties, then we do become guilty of the thing we want to avoid being guilty of. It's terrible for all of us to fail repeatedly, to grapple with why we are where we are. It's not an accident; this isn't because of Donald. Somebody said to me recently, "Donald Trump was 250 years in the making," and that's exactly right. This isn't just something that happened over four years. We've been building towards this for centuries. When did taking personal responsibility become a terrible thing? It's mystifying to me.

We're seeing that right now in current events with Afghanistan. You've got your uncle spinning a new tale, yet you actually have people like H.R. McMaster, who was Trump's national security adviser, saying that Trump's secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, signed a surrender agreement with the Taliban. What's your reaction — I'm sure it's not surprise — about how Donald is trying to say this is all Biden's fault when it was Trump who pulled our troops out. We got nothing in return, zero. He pressured for 5,000 Taliban prisoners to be released over the objections of the Afghan military, and released the co-founder of the Taliban from prison in Pakistan, after Obama put him there in 2010 for killing our troops. What's your reaction to Trump, again, doing the blame shifting?

First of all, the master deal-maker is at work, as always. I'm not surprised. Listen, I'm not an expert in Afghanistan by any stretch of the imagination, but the revisionist history we're seeing is just appalling. It's literally as if Joe Biden started the war seven months ago, and just decided to pull out five minutes ago, and that George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump had nothing to do with it. Simultaneously, they're basically saying, "Just give us 20 more years, and we'll get there. Who cares how many other lives are lost, or how many more trillions of dollars we waste."

The fact that Donald is evading responsibility makes perfect sense. One, because he never takes responsibility for anything, but also because he's still on a mission to delegitimize and undermine President Biden. We also see this with what he said about getting a third booster shot, that it's just a money-making thing for Pfizer to push a third shot onto people, when it's actually because the efficacy of the first two shots loses power over time. It's just to keep people safe. Nothing Donald does in that regard should surprise us. Again though, it's the fact that he's continuing to be amplified and enabled by the Republican Party.

This deal that Trump made with the Taliban is really like the Trump vodka of peace deals.

Or the steaks, too.

In your book, you quote President Biden on Jan. 20, being sworn in and saying, "We've learned again that democracy is precious, democracy is fragile, and at this hour, my friends, democracy has prevailed." Why doesn't it feel like democracy has prevailed? It doesn't feel like that at all to me.

Because it hasn't. We're still on a knife's edge here. If Democrats fail to hold both houses in 2022, I think the American experiment will have failed. It's not just 2024 we need to worry about. The other reason it feels like democracy hasn't prevailed is because there was an armed insurrection against our government, incited by the person in the Oval Office, encouraged and participated in by members of Congress, many of whom were trying to overturn the results of a free and fair election, and yet they all still roam free. All of them, with the exception of Donald, are still running our government. How is it possible that traitors to this country, active seditionists who no longer believe in American democracy, if they ever did, are still allowed to be sitting senators and representatives? It's appalling.

If Donald Trump is not charged and prosecuted for his crimes in connection with Jan. 6, do you think that will lead to even more violence down the road by his supporters?

Of course it will. The message that is always sent with Donald is, "I can get away with anything, and if I can get away with it, so can you." That's the message that's being sent by Attorney General Merrick Garland. I don't know who else could possibly investigate these things, but anybody who has the power to and isn't, is failing us. This guy in D.C. [Floyd Ray Roseberry] is a direct result of two things, what happened on Jan. 6 and the fact that it was done with impunity, just as so many other things in our history have been done by powerful white men with impunity. Also because of this misinformation echo system that our politicians seem not interested in doing anything about. Why is Fox News allowed to spread propaganda and misinformation and white supremacy, and racism on a daily basis? It's killing us.

I think more and more people are asking themselves that question. Before, I think we were all defending it by saying, "Freedom of speech and the First Amendment, but there are limits that our Supreme Court has recognized regarding freedom of speech, and I think that knowingly misleading people to their death is crossing one of them. Cheerleading for terrorists who wanted to overthrow our government. These people are literally defending the people who attacked our Capitol, who are terrorists, because the FBI has said that Jan. 6 was an act of domestic terrorism. I think people are saying, "What about the lines?" The FCC, I really believe, should look into Fox News. The FTC should look into violations of the COVID-19 Consumer Protection Act by Fox News. I believe we're at that point.

I completely agree. I also believe that governors like [Greg] Abbott and [Ron] DeSantis are committing crimes against humanity on a daily basis, yet they continue to be allowed to advocate against the best ways to keep people safe. It's quite horrifying. The problem is, as you say, there could be adverse long-term effects. On the other hand though, the situation is so dire, it's such an emergency that I think the Democrats need to govern as if they have the majority, which they do, while they have the majority. They need to understand that playing by rules that no longer exist, because the Republicans burnt the rulebook to a crisp, is going to lose us our democracy.

People like Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin are pretending that the filibuster is some great mechanism of democracy, which it's not. By clinging to that, they are literally risking the future of this country. We have to play hardball and we have to think short-term right now, because otherwise there won't be another free and fair election, and Democrats won't be able to win states like Arizona, Georgia or Pennsylvania. What good does that do anybody?

You write in your book that Democrats continue to misread the character of the Republican Party and that they fail to realize the rules no longer apply. What would you like to hear Democratic leaders say?

I would like to hear them say that the filibuster is an anti-democratic, racist thing that needs to go, and that we, the Democrats, believe in democracy. We believe that government is a force for good, and we're going to do everything in our power to make sure that we make the American people's lives better. Even though the Senate is split 50-50, the 50 Democrats represent 41 million more people, and we should have the power to enact whatever legislation we believe will make the biggest difference during this incredibly fraught period.

Do you think Democrats should be calling for the criminal prosecution of your uncle?

Yeah. Again, this is what's so mind blowing. They're more focused on bipartisanship, which legitimizes the people who tried to overturn our election. It legitimizes Donald, in a way. This was the biggest problem, in my view, in his not getting convicted in the Senate both times. There was plenty of evidence to prove that he should have been. He gets away with it. He gets impeached, not convicted, and then the media treat him, in the fall of 2020, like he's just a normal, legitimate candidate, when in fact, he was trying to steal an election. It's this need to normalize things, which is so powerful and destructive that it's all the more important that we stop pulling punches, that we use language that's accurate. It took the media three years to call Donald's lies "lies." I'm not entirely sure they ever called his racism "racism."

I don't know that they have it in them to use the fascism word. We've got to be really clear about what's going on. Republicans can call us Marxists, communists, socialists, Leninists, whatever, but they're never asked to define their terms. You ask any of us who are calling them fascist why they are, we can explain it to you. The Democrats just need to stop pretending that we can all be polite and get along under the current circumstances.

The GOP today is not a political party as Americans understand it. It is a white nationalist movement. Because we only have two parties, I think it's hard for Democrats to say that. Because they're like, "We got to work with these people a little bit." I think they're doing it at our nation's peril. Before we wrap up here, I've seen you say in other interviews that you think your uncle will run for president in 2024. Things could change, but if he runs and wins, does he ever leave the White House peacefully?

Nobody will be able to make him. By then, the Republican Party would have consolidated power. I think a lot of Republicans would be perfectly happy to turn this country into a theocratic apartheid state. I think that's what Mitch McConnell has in mind. It will be minority rule. If he were to get in again, first of all, he wouldn't win, because he would be cheating. I don't think he could win legitimately, but if the voter suppression laws are enacted in just three states and he feels like he can't lose, then sure. And then four more years of that. How do we ever regain power? I don't think we do, which is, again, why I completely empathize with your frustration at the Democratic Party. Can they not see what's coming our way if we don't head it off immediately?

When it comes to politics, Chris Matthews has just about seen it seen it all. His career has taken him to the White House, as speechwriter for Jimmy Carter to hosting "Hardball" on MSNBC for more than 20 years. He even served as a U.S. Capitol Police officer in the 1970's. But he says he's never witnessed anything close to what we are seeing with today's Republican Party.

In our Salon Talks conversation about his new book, "This Country: My Life in Politics and History," Matthews didn't hold back on Donald Trump or the Republicans, arguing that the former president has consistently "been trying to undermine democracy," and that a swath of his party no longer believes in it. "I do believe there are a number of Americans, I don't know whether it's 10% or 25%," Matthews told me, "who do not believe in majority rule."

Over the last few months, we've seen Republicans openly waging an assault on voting access in state after state. Their goal is straightforward, Matthews explained: to ensure that the GOP's opponents — minorities, the young, etc. — can "never vote," which is the only realistic way Republicans can win.

Matthews also made the important point that in the past, when the GOP saw extremists seek to join its ranks — such as anti-Semites or white nationalists — Republican leaders would publicly condemn them, as Ronald Reagan did when he was endorsed by the KKK during his 1984 re-election campaign. With today's GOP we don't see that, which as Matthews notes should concern us all.

In our wide-ranging conversation, we touched on everything from Matthews' teenage past as a Nixon Republican to his resignation from MSNBC after women came forward to say that he had made inappropriate comments about their appearance — which he admits to, and apologizes for again. Watch our interview below or read the following transcript, lightly edited for length and clarity.

It's a great book. First of all, you were a 15-year-old young Republican? You rooted for Nixon over Kennedy? You, Chris Matthews?

Well, it was complicated. I was for Nixon because my family was Republican and I was going along with that. And then I fell completely in love with the glamour of the Kennedy crowd. I also rooted for Nixon because he wasn't glamorous like the Kennedys. He didn't have all the money and the charm and the social confidence. He seemed more like my dad or somebody, a regular guy. And I guess I rooted for the underdog.

I think my book "Bobby Kennedy" is the most popular because Bobby hits the right chord today. He's a progressive, and also he's tough. He wants people to meet their responsibilities. It's not just about entitlement, it's about duty. One of the things I pointed out in my book is that he was the only one of the liberal Democratic senators back in the '60s and '70s who made a point of saying hello to the Capitol policemen, showing a little dignity, a little, "Yeah, we're in this together. You're protecting me. And I agree with you, what you're doing, protecting the Capitol."

Most people don't know that about you: You began working on Capitol Hill with the Capitol Police?

I was working in the senator's office for four or five hours in the morning, at least four hours. And then I'd go over and put on my uniform and my gun at 3 o'clock in the afternoon and work until 11 o'clock at night. So I was putting in a full day and I was learning a lot in both jobs. I was very proud to be a Capitol policeman. I learned a lot of life lessons from these guys. A lot of country guys from West Virginia who didn't get to go to college, didn't get a lot of the breaks we got in life. I learned from them and I was rooting for them, especially when I found out how good a job they did trying to stop the insurrection on Jan. 6. When I got a clearer picture of it and could see that they risked their lives, in some cases lost their lives. And I will never forget that African-American officer who was leading the mob in the wrong direction to save Mitt Romney. Come on. That's a great story.

Your life has been a remarkable journey.

Isn't it? Aren't you impressed? Isn't it something? Air Force One, back rooms with Tip O'Neill, Berlin Wall when it's coming down, Cape Town when they're voting the first time, Belfast and the Good Friday Accords, then to the Pope's funeral. I got to see history as it was happening from inside politics in America. And, I'll be romantic here, people in the world who wanted what we have, which is democracy, which we better hang onto. Nelson Mandela, you know what he did for South Africa? He said to the Black majority, "We're going to get to the voting booth. We're going to take over this country with the vote. That's how we're going to do it, by long election lines, not through a war. We're going to do it the right way."

There's also something else people might not know. You ran for Congress in 1974?

I was running to get the big politics away from dirty money and all this money and buying everything. I could see it on the Hill and you can see it's just going to be with us until we got a better system, but it wasn't so bad 30 or 40 years ago. You had guys like Gale McGee. He was a professor at University of Wyoming who ran for the Senate. You had people like Mike Mansfield, who were academics. Try that today. The self-funders own this process. Except for the really skilled people like Bobby Casey, because of his family name, and Sherrod Brown, because he's so darn good at it, at being a good working-class politician and knowing how to talk to Trump people really.

Why didn't you ever run again?

Because I didn't have a career in Philadelphia. I had to have a law degree. That's why it's great to be a lawyer. Everybody listening, if you're 22 years old and you want to have a political career, get that law, get that sheepskin. Because then when you lose, and you will lose at some point, you can fall back in that law firm and run the next time.

But it's very hard to do that if you don't have that parachute. My dad was pushing me to pay my bills for the campaign. He wasn't going to pay the bills. It wasn't a lot. It was $1,500 bucks for the literature we had. But he wanted me out of the house basically. He wanted me to go back to Washington. He put up with the campaign. He was all for me. He even switched registration for me. But I think he was happier with me in Washington. He thought that was where I belonged. He said, "That's your city." And he was right. I got to the White House after that.

Well, the reason I went to law school was because I was going to run for office. I ended up not doing it. If you come on the campaign trail, you'll have the fun with the honking and holding the signs up.

Oh, I love that stuff. It gets back to my romance about politics, that you can actually campaign with little money like Ed Markey did up in Massachusetts against Joe Kennedy. A lot of young people, they're excited about issues. You got to get them excited about you and the issues and social media makes a lot of things possible. I'll tell you one thing I know. If I were running, I'd go home at night, I'd sit up in bed or at my desk, and I'd start typing out a message to the campaign workers and the people I know adore me, the No. 1's. I'd be talking to them every night. My dad once taught me, he said, "Get people involved. Tell them what your strategy is. Tell them why you need their help, what their enemy's up to. Bring them in, mentally and emotionally. Share." That's what you can do on social media. You couldn't do that 20 years ago.

In your book, you talk about working for Frank Moss. He was a Democratic senator from Utah. But he lost in 1976, after three terms, to Orrin Hatch. We all try to figure out when the hyper-polarization began in this country. It could be Goldwater in '64. It could be Orrin Hatch winning in '76. You've traced this?

I'm going to say something that cuts across me. I think we all agreed on foreign policy when it was fighting communists globally, because we saw what was going on. It may not have been a right metaphor, but when we saw Yalta and we saw Eastern Europe, we saw China, we saw Ben Bella up in Algeria. We saw countries in Latin America, Castro, and some other countries. You could see them moving toward that red part of the map. And we go, "This looks like World War II coming. This looks like the same spread of the enemy. And appeasement is not the right answer. We got to stop them somewhere."

So Harry Truman tried to stop them, somewhat effectively, in Korea. And then looking at that same model of stopping them in their tracks, our government tried to stop the communists in North Vietnam. But the trouble is nationalism was working on the side of the communists in Vietnam, just like nationalism was working on the side of the countries of Eastern Europe. They saw communism as an enemy of their nationalism. Whereas in Vietnam, communism was the friend of nationalism and we were on the outside.

We should have realized that the people are still going to be in that country when we come home, and we will come home eventually, and they will be calling the shots. And we should have understood that when we went into Afghanistan. You can only temporarily control a country with military force. Eventually you leave and the natural spirit of the country takes over and we got to deal with the Taliban. The only example I can think of was that the Brits did a darn good job of selling democracy in India. Whatever else they did in their history, the Indian people are a democracy and they learned it from the Brits, the idea of Westminster-style democracy, parliaments built by different political parties, coalitions that lead to cabinets and prime ministerships. Find another example. We've never been good at it. Maybe the Philippines, I don't know. But it's very hard to sell a form of government.

We have a hard time right now keeping the democratic spirit in this country. I do believe there are a number of Americans, I don't know whether it's 10% or 25%, maybe in that range, who do not believe in majority rule. They want to reduce the size of the electorate. They don't want everyone voting. In fact, it used to be in the good days of politics, and we did it on MSNBC, you spend months saying to people, "Get out and vote. Get out and vote. Everybody." Vote, vote, vote. We always said, the more the merrier to vote.

Only lately has a political party pretty openly said, "No, not the more the merrier. The less the merrier. The fewer people, the fewer minorities, the fewer young people. Just have the older usual white voters show up and that'll be good for us." I think it's the first time a party has so openly said that, as they're saying right now in politics. The party was the segregationist party under Roosevelt. Let's face it. That was the deal. The New Deal was for white people, right?

Yes, exactly. The policies actually matched that. Home loans to the GI Bill, Black veterans coming back from World War II did not get the same benefits as white veterans.

Well, people like me and my family lived entirely on the fact that my dad got to come back and went to engineering school on the GI Bill and became middle-class. That's how we grew up middle class as opposed to working class. That's the fact. The GI bill created the large American middle class. That was wonderful. That was Roosevelt's wonderfulness, that he thought of that as being a No. 1 priority coming out of the war.

You have people right now who don't view each other as fellow Americans. They're enemies almost. How concerned are you for the future?

I am very concerned about Michael Flynn. But you can see the pattern. And back in the '60s the pattern was the antiwar movement was getting more bitter from '68 to '70, much more bitter than it was when I was marching around the Pentagon. Right now you can see that, first off, Trump wins the presidency by losing by almost 3 million votes. It doesn't seem to bother him. In fact, he thinks it's cute. It's neat. I would think that if I got elected president, or somebody I cared about got elected president, and lost by 3 million votes, I'd feel a little humiliated by it, a little humbled. I'd be saying things, "I got to be careful here. A lot of people voted against me. I don't quite have a mandate yet." And then this time he loses the Electoral College and says he didn't lose, like he's in Zimbabwe or Pakistan. "No, no, it was rigged. It was rigged."

No it wasn't. We have honest elections in this country. Usually elections are decided by 20,000 or 30,000 people anyway, so luckily there's room for a little margin of minimal corruption here and there, but very little. And the margins are always well beyond any hanky-panky that went on. For him to walk around and say, "These elections are rigged," that's rotten. That's anti-American. And he knows it. He knows he lost. Look at him. The Democrats didn't like Trump, but they knew he was damn well president. You know how they knew it? They tried to impeach him twice.

How do you think Democrats should be framing Jan. 6, to be effective? You've got some Republicans now literally saying, "Oh, it's a tourist visit."

They came in to kill. They came in to kill. I used to say about Watergate, suppose Nixon got away with it. That would have been much worse, if he'd gotten away with it. What would the second term had been like with his secret operatives and all this stuff he was pulling? It wasn't just screwing around. Some of the idiots with their clown costumes on and hanging from the rafters. There was some menace in that crowd that was stopped by law enforcement.

You faced early retirement last year because of some comments you had made. You don't defend them, you've been very clear about that. How much do you think we are learning, you are learning, from the MeToo movement?

Well, there was a great line in a cult film years ago. I watch movies, I love cult films. "We only truly believe what we discover ourselves." You can hear about a rule. You can generally obey the law. But you don't have a personal connection to it. And when you get involved like I did, by making too many comments about appearance on and off the air — I made too many, certainly one too many, and I was wrong. When I think back on it, and I did give a lot of thought to this over the last year and a half, why should an average looking person, a woman, have to put up with somebody talking about how somebody else is good-looking? Why do they put up with this walking Miss America contest? Why should anybody put up with it? Men don't generally have to put up with it. "Joe McGee and his lovely wife have just arrived." Why do we talk like that? We don't say, "Mary McGee and her lovely husband."

I have a granddaughter. She's very smart. She just turned nine, Juliette, very smart. And a friend of mine came by the house and said, "Your granddaughter's so pretty." So I went up to Juliette and said, "That guy came by in the car just said how pretty you are." And she said to me, right to my face, "Grandpa, I'd rather he said how intelligent I was." And then she said it to me in French. There's a real cultural change about this among young people. They don't want to hear it anymore. It's not just the rules at work that are ascribed to them by their bosses. People don't like it. I was wrong. What used to be seen as a compliment is not taken that way. I can go on on this because I've been thinking about this, Dean, for so many months.

You finish the book by talking about your hope for America. What is your hope for this country going forward?

Well, I've been lucky to have had a life where I have been on the political inside. I've been up there in Air Force One with a president fighting for his second term. I've been up with Tip every morning, with the legendary speaker fighting with Ronald Reagan, trying to get things done and trying to beat him politically. I've been overseas watching people at the Berlin Wall, waiting for the wall to come down and asking them about freedom. And they said, "Talking to you is freedom." I've been in South Africa watching people get to vote for the first time in their own country. I've seen people that want democracy. They really want it, and they know that it's better than anything else. Nothing's perfect, but they want to be able to decide whether we have capitalism. East Germans said, a lot of people I interviewed there at the time in '89 said, "We want capitalism. We want socialism. Let us decide. Let us make these decisions." They weren't able to make them under the communist rule.

But I worry now, as we were talking about a few moments ago, I do worry about Americans because they think their side, especially if they're conservative white people, they feel their side's losing demographically. So, oh, we're going to change the rules. We're going to make it harder for other people besides white people to vote, we're going to make it harder for young people to vote. We don't like the way young people are thinking. But you can't change the rules of democracy.

We talked about the founding fathers because even though that's hundreds of years ago, we believed they were right. We're all created equal and being able to speak freely and being able to vote freely are tied together. If we lose the ability to speak, like you don't have in Cuba today, for example — I don't mind bashing the communists because I don't like them — but if you can't speak, you're unlikely to win the vote. And if you don't control the vote, you're unlikely to keep your rights because the vote guarantees your rights.

You can knock people down like Nixon when they blow it on rights and undermining people's democratic freedoms. I think freedom and democracy are intertwined. I think we've got to be vigilant, and we got to call these conservatives out. God, how do you say "Put on your big boy pants" to Kevin McCarthy? OK buddy, are you a leader or are you a front man? If you're a front man, we get it. But if you want to be a leader, say, "Biden won." Say it loud. Say it every morning when you go to the House. You want to be speaker, act like the speaker. Say, "We have a constitutional system."

If you're Michael Flynn, remember your oath to the Constitution and remember what you owe, loyalty to this country and its Constitution. It's what you sign up for when you become an officer. And he was a flag officer.

Anyway, I do worry. Steve Scalise ought to stand up. I have talked to these guys. They're normal people. They're Americans. They're one of us. They should be able to say, "Here's where I draw the line." Back in the old days, when the Republican Party was joined by the John Birch Society and the antisemitic stuff, people like William F. Buckley said, "No, you're not here. You don't belong here if you have those attitudes. Go away." The John Birch Society was a real bad shadow of the Republican party. They should clean it up today and hope they can win some elections positively.

Even if you follow politics closely, there are numerous moments in Edward-Isaac Dovere's new book, "Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats' Campaigns to Defeat Trump," that will make your jaw drop. His book conjures up the classic politics series of books by Theodore White, "The Making of the President" but with Dovere, the story doesn't start on the campaign trial but right after Hillary Clinton's defeat in 2016.

The detail in the book is simply remarkable from the list of comfort items that Sen. Bernie Sanders requests for his speaking engagements (none are truly that demanding) to a nervous Andrew Yang before the first Democratic presidential debate throwing up so loudly in the dressing room bathroom that other campaign staffers could hear it.

But it's the substantive issues that stand out. On top of the list is that Barack Obama, after leaving office, expressed concern that Donald Trump would potentially come after him or his family personally, such as by ending Secret Service protection for his daughters. As Dovere explained, people have "a sense of Obama being cool and detached … he was not." In fact, as Dovere shared in our conversation for "Salon Talks," the working title of the book was a line Obama said to Democratic donors in 2018, "You are right to be concerned."

Dovere also details how Joe Biden's team was fully aware that Trump might try not only to litigate the election if he lost, but also in essence try to steal it. They had a legion of attorneys across the nation prepared for various "doomsday scenarios." But not even these stable of lawyers could have predicted that Trump would incite a terrorist attack on the U.S. Capitol in an effort to overturn the election results.

Some of this book is things we've lived through, if you follow politics closely. Some will be completely brand new. It begins with 2016, and I just want you to remind people, to give them a sense of where we were then.

It was a devastating election, 2016. People can think about it as Trump winning and beating Hillary Clinton, which was a big surprise in every way. If you're a Democrat, that was terrible. But what was also terrible for Democrats was that there were Senate races, all over the country, that Democrats thought they were going to win and they didn't. From North Carolina to Wisconsin, right? And House races too, governors' races. There were not that many governors races on the ballot in 2016. But when you look at what happened, I traced some of this during the Obama presidency: Almost a thousand state legislature seats that were held by Democrats when Obama won in 2008, were held by Republicans by the time he finished. There was a decimation of the Democratic Party.

And most of the book starts from 2016 forward, but there's a chapter at the beginning that cast back a little bit. So how is it that the Democratic Party got into this terrible state? It's about those dynamics happening. It's about Obama not really investing in the Democratic Party and not doing things to build the party up. Some of this he can't be blamed for. He didn't realize it, or he was struggling with how to grapple with it. But the issue of wages, of how people were feeling, the real economy in their lives, which obviously was very important for Trump to be able to key into in 2016 and use that as an argument that pushed him forward, that's all going on. And those were the circumstance that the Democrats found themselves in, even before the devastating loss of 2016.

Then there's a sort of a parallel process that starts to happen between a small group of Democratic leaders — most people wouldn't even know who they were, except if you're really an insider Democrat — who have meetings, start to plan things. There's a dinner at the beginning of the book that I described happening at John Podesta's house. People may know about Podesta, because he was Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, and they start to plot things and think about how to change what the Democrats are doing.

But at the same time, this activism blossomed that nobody was expecting, the biggest example obviously was the Women's March. I was there in D.C. covering it. One of the people that I talked to for the book is Cecile Richards, who was then at Planned Parenthood. She told to me something to the effect of, "If an organization had tried to plan the Women's March to be what it actually was, it would have taken millions of dollars and years." And it just happened on its own. Those things are happening simultaneously and help create the atmosphere for Democratic primary campaign and the Democrats sorting out who they wanted to be their nominee.

It's interesting when you talked about the meeting with these Democrats getting together after the election in 2016. Living through it and covering it on my show, it was a grassroots movement that led the party, it was not leaders that did it. What's your reaction to that?

Look, I think it was both those things happening, right? The airport protests that you're talking about, remember part of the reason those got elevated was because members of Congress were showing up, governors were showing up at the airports and demanding to see the people who were being detained, and that helped drive the news coverage. But of course that wouldn't have happened if the protests weren't happening to begin with. So there's this back and forth that's going on. At the Women's March, there were leaders that I talked to at the time and then reflected on it, who were aghast that there weren't people walking around with clipboards and getting the names of all these tens of thousands of people who were there. And you know what, those people didn't need to get activated in the traditional way that Democratic leadership thinks about it.

But it was really hard to predict how this was going to go. And part of what the book aims to do is to trace how those two streams were happening and then how they started to intersect. And what happened when it became a question of like, well, what role does the Bernie Sanders movement that was obviously very powerful in 2016, what does that have in the Democratic Party now? How much is it the Bernie Sanders thing, or how much of it is just grassroots energy? How much does it split off to Elizabeth Warren? How much it was interested in just beating Trump, no matter what? Those are all things that are happening and playing out in the primary campaign.

Share a little bit about what the goal of that meeting was and what really happened? Did reality land on them, that we can have an impact? They raise a lot of money, they can do different things. But to think that the party was controllable, then or now, is ridiculous to me.

That dinner sort of has all the hallmarks of what people think happens, right? It was at the Four Seasons in Washington, right on the edge of Georgetown. It was in December of 2018. It was the night that Nancy Pelosi had been elected speaker, after Democrats won the House. It was organized by a big Democratic donor who sends out these invitations, you got to come. And it's this strange collection of people, some Democratic donors, some group leaders. Pelosi is there, Schumer is there. A bunch of others: Pete Buttigieg is there, Eric Swalwell is there, Chris Coons is there. Nobody's quite sure how this guest list exactly was the one that they landed on.

And they're sitting around a table. And yeah, the whole question was how do we keep the primary campaign from getting too crowded? The not-very-subtle subtext was that if it's crowded, Bernie Sanders is going to be the nominee and we don't want that. And they're having this debate around this big table in the Four Seasons private room, and that's another element to it. Not only is it at the Four Seasons, but in a private room. They say like, "How do we put some guardrails on this process?"

Guy Cecil, who runs the Priorities USA super PAC, said to me, "That was the last moment when the people who thought that they could control things thought that was going to keep going." Because within a couple of weeks of that meeting, all the candidates start announcing. Biden was the last major candidate to announce. But within a couple of weeks, Elizabeth Warren announces, Kamala Harris announces. They're popping up everywhere. Kirsten Gillibrand announces on the Colbert "Late Show." right? It's all over the place. This idea that the primary campaign is going to be kept in control by the leaders, that's ridiculous.

Obama had plans for his post-presidency, and they changed because of Trump. Share a bit, what was going on? There were concerns about what Trump might do?

Yeah. When Obama thought Trump was going to lose, he felt a little uncomfortable in the final days of the campaign. I think most people, Donald Trump included, never thought he'd actually win. And then he had a plan for his post-presidency: OK, Hillary Clinton's going to be president and I'll build my foundation, my library. I'll make some money, I'll write a book, it'll be fine. I'll enjoy myself, I'll go have nice vacations. And everything changes, obviously very quickly. He had never thought he'd have to be involved with picking the next DNC chair as he then was, and got very involved making sure that Tom Perez was the DNC chair instead of Keith Ellison.

He couldn't talk about things publicly, about issues, because he knew that every time he did it, he might trigger Trump and give Trump fodder to attack him and make news cycles out of it, and he didn't want to do that. When Trump tweeted accusing Obama of wiretapping Trump Tower, Obama was very upset by that, and disconcerted about it. Not just because "This is an attack on me," but because he thought that was just so outside the bounds of what a president should accuse another president of doing. And then there are other things, like Trump attacking Susan Rice and Obama thinking about standing up for her.

I have a moment in the book that's right after Election Day 2018, when the Democrats win the midterms. Trump fires Jeff Sessions as attorney general. And there had already been a lot of concern in the Obama post-presidency world of, okay, what do we have to get prepared for? What's going to happen? And they had drafted some statements, because who knows, we've got to have this ready to go, rather than something wild happening. At that point, the wiretapping accusation happened, all these things were going on. And when Trump fires Sessions, of course, Robert Mueller is already deep into his work. They think maybe he's going to fire Mueller now. What do we do?

And they're talking about it back and forth. And this idea starts getting talked about, well, maybe what we should do is try to do something like a statement with George W. Bush and Barack Obama together. And the idea of it in their minds would have been that Bush had hired Mueller as FBI director and Obama extended his term. So they would say, here's a Republican, here's a Democrat. We're both presidents. You don't agree on much, but we both hired Bob Mueller. He's good, protect him. And put that up preemptively to stop Trump from getting to Mueller. This idea never actually got broached with Bush directly, but there was a a feeler put out to his staff to see what they thought about it, and there was not a lot of interest. Bush has been very committed to staying far away from politics.

You just see the level of concern there. There was this sense of [Obama] as cool and detached and away from things. He was not, he was really worried about it. The working title of this book, I should say, was "You Are Right to be Concerned," which was a line I heard Obama say at a fundraiser in Beverly Hills in 2018. He was sitting and talking to Democrats and he said, "Look, if you're looking around the country, you are right to be concerned with what's happening." Right? And that carried through.

And then "Battle for the Soul" is where we landed. The story that I've told about that is that when I was speaking to Biden at the end — I talked to him in February, so the interview with him is at the end of the book. And I said to him, "So we're calling it 'Battle for the Soul.' that's title of the book." Of course that was drawn from what he had talked about. And he said to me, "Yeah, the difference between you and me, pal, is I actually believe it." And I said to him, "No, I think you may have actually been onto something here with how it all turned out."

There were other things in your book that are riveting, and I'm not sure how much reporting there has been on this. I'm talking about the post-election period, when the Biden team actually had these doomsday scenarios. Take us through a little bit of that. I've not heard that talked about in detail.

Yeah. I mean, it's funny. I was reporting this book for four years and there were a lot of conversations that I was having with people that were embargoed until the book came out. The Obama conversation — why isn't he doing more? Why isn't he more worried? And I would say, like, I know actually some of what's happening. This was another piece of it that I had heard a little bit about before the election, but it wasn't until after the election that the people involved were willing to talk to me more about it. Starting from not long after Biden sealed the nomination, and certainly from about this point last year, there was a lot of work going on, about 600 lawyers around the country who were secretly putting together essentially template briefs.

They had war-gamed all the scenarios that, OK, what happens if there's this close result in Arizona, or they try to make this kind of claim in Georgia or wherever. All the different things that Trump's lawyers, whether it's his Justice Department or his allies and state parties could try to bring to court. They also had done a war-gaming of what the election certification process would look like and had been talking about it, Biden's lawyers with Nancy Pelosi's and Chuck Schumer's lawyers leading up to Jan. 6.

And they had gotten as far as like, what happens if in the middle of it, Mike Pence, because he's presiding over this, pulls out a separate slate of electors from his pocket? Literally. And what if he refuses to recognize people from the floor, one of the parliamentary procedures? They had that all mapped out. What they didn't have mapped out is that there would be thousands of violent protesters storming the Capitol. They did not anticipate that. There's this moment in the book where Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell, all the leaders are together, Kevin McCarthy is there too. But the three of them say, OK, we've got to make this happen now — that's why they move so quickly that night to get everything certified. And McCarthy is not part of that conversation. They kind of don't invite him in because they think he's off on his own place on it. But they had the basis from all these preparations that they'd done. Again, everything short of a violent mob storming the Capitol.

You close the book with Joe Biden, talking about making his late son proud. Share a little bit about who Joe Biden is as a person, his humanity, his empathy?

I started covering Joe Biden when he was vice president. I spent a lot of time with him, interviewed him on a couple of occasions. Two of those interviews are in the book. One of those was one of his final interviews as vice president. There was a week before Trump's inauguration, and he's sitting in his office in the West Wing. The second one is where the book ends. It's two weeks into his presidency, at the beginning of February. For that one, he was in the Oval Office. It was still COVID restrictions, so I was on the phone talking to him. I've been around the country with him on the campaign trail, and when he was VP. There is no more human person, I would say, than Joe Biden who has been elected president in modern history.

The sense of loss that he carries with him always is really, really important. Of course, there's the tragedy in 1972, when he was not even sworn in as a senator, that car crash that killed his wife and his baby daughter, and that put his two sons in the hospital. And then what happened with Beau Biden, who died in 2015 of brain cancer. That devastated Biden. I was there covering the funeral. Every time I talk about it, I get goosebumps because there was this moment where everybody was in the church and the Biden family — it's like a clan, it's so many people and they're very close. The hearse pulls up and they're all walking together and Biden is at the center of it, leading them.

There's an interview with Beau Biden that I did in 2012. I knew him just a little bit. But there was a general feeling that Beau Biden was kind of like Joe Biden. He'd gone and served in the National Guard and done all these things. And Joe Biden had definitely wanted to be president of the United States for a long time. There's this quick story in the book when he's leaving a job in the early '70s. He gives somebody a stapler and he says, "Oh, I'm going to be president one day. Hold on to that."

He ran for president in 1988. He almost ran a couple of other times. He ran in 2008. He had kind of given up running and had thought, "I'm transferring the dreams to Beau, to my son. It'll be President Beau Biden." By the way, Beau's full name was Joseph R. Biden III. Joe Biden is Joe Biden Jr. And then the cancer hit Beau and he died. In the summer of 2015, Biden was thinking about running, in part as a coping mechanism for himself, and in part to carry Beau's legacy. He was too overcome with grief, in part, that was why he didn't run in 2016. Through 2020, Beau is always with him in every way. He's always thinking about him. In one of the debates with Trump, they saw something on his sleeve. It was Beau's rosary that he was wearing. When there was that article that ran in the Atlantic about Trump calling the military suckers and losers, Biden carries a gold star with him that the Delaware National Guard gave him.

Beau was in the Delaware National Guard. He was not killed in battle, so in this case it's an honorary thing. Biden took it out of his pocket because he was so mad that day. And then at the end, in that final interview, I said to him, "Well, what do you think Beau would think about this?" And that's the way the book ends. I'm reluctant to do a spoiler here, but you see all of that really building with him and this deep emotional connection that runs through family and politics and blood and legacy and everything.