Preet Bharara:
From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Stay Tuned in brief. I’m Preet Bharara. This week’s episode of the podcast was recorded over the weekend, in front of a live audience at the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin, Texas. I was joined by former U.S. Attorney and my CAFE Insider co-host, Joyce Vance, as we interviewed the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine, Jeffrey Goldberg.
We spoke about his new book On Heroism: McCain, Milley, Mattis, and the Cowardice of Donald Trump. The book includes his reporting on top officials who stood up to Trump while he was president, as well as Trump’s controversial statements, reportedly calling members of the military, “suckers” and “losers.” And in a conversation exclusively from members of CAFE Insider, we spoke about the media’s approach to covering Trump in the presidential election, and what a second Trump term might look like. To listen to the full analysis, head to cafe.com/insider, and use the promo code Austin for 40% off the membership for the first year. Now, onto our conversation with Jeffrey Goldberg.
It’s great to have you both here. Before we begin with the conversation fully, if you’ve been listening to the podcast in recent times, you know I have a small housekeeping matter that I take care of at the beginning of every week, in recent times, and that is to ask Joyce Vance. On the record, Joyce Vance, are you any relation to J.D. Vance?
Joyce Vance:
I am not kin to J.D. Vance.
Jeffrey Goldberg:
What’s your middle initial?
Joyce Vance:
- If it was like Joyce Darlene, I would be in trouble at this point.
Preet Bharara:
All right. Jeffrey, congratulations on the book On Heroism. I have a copy right here. You should get a copy. It’s my favorite kind of book, short, tiny. A tiny little book. I was able to get through the whole thing. And you talked about lots of things. The title of the book is On Heroism. You also talked about its opposite cowardice. You talked about generals and military people who decided to work for Trump. Some of them explained why they continued to work for Trump, because they were trying to hold the line, and I guess I understand part of that. But what I don’t understand, given what was already known about Donald Trump, at the time, many of these people who you laud, came to work for Trump, these men who were patriotic, intelligent, thoughtful, in your descriptions. Why did they go work for Donald J. Trump in the first place?
Jeffrey Goldberg:
That’s a great question. The reason, I believe… Look, there’s always ambition. You don’t become a four-star general by being lazy and unambitious. I think in 2016, there was hope that the presidency would sober up Donald Trump, make him more emotionally mature, focused, realized the gravity of the situation. And so, I think a lot of these people who went to work for him early on, were hoping that that would be the case. What happened quick… And by the way, and let’s not discount this, some of the people who went to work for him, many of the people who went to work for him, agreed with what they thought was his policy outlook, to the extent that he has a policy outlook or fixed-
Preet Bharara:
Like withdrawal from NATO?
Jeffrey Goldberg:
Fixed positions. And so, that was a factor. What happened was… And this intensified as the term started. What happened was, they realized that, “Oh, we need to be here because he’s going to be president, whether or not we’re here. But without us here, we’re going to have huge, potentially, calamitous problems.” It got to the point where, at different times, Rex Tillerson, not a general, the CEO of a small country, James Mattis, John Kelly, people like that, they had an arrangement that one of them would always be in Washington, within a couple of miles of the White House. In other words, like a babysitter. They could not all be traveling somewhere at the same time, in case Trump started a war through a tweet or if he issued some sort of irrational order to do something.
And Trump, obviously, began to feel babysat, and began to resent. The saying is that, everybody who goes to work for Trump has a half-life, right? It could be four months in, six months in, eight months in-
Preet Bharara:
11 days. There was-
Jeffrey Goldberg:
No. And five and a half days would be the half-life.
Joyce Vance:
A mere Scaramucci.
Jeffrey Goldberg:
Yeah. I think, Scaramucci, that isotope started to decompose after five and a half, obviously. So, he grew more… The more they tried to keep him in the lane, the more he resented them. And obviously, jumping ahead, and I’m sure you want to get here eventually, the issue now is, as my colleague David Frum put it, “The velociraptor has learned how to turn the door handles.” And so, for the second term-
Preet Bharara:
It’s not that funny, actually.
Jeffrey Goldberg:
No, no. Not that funny if you’re on the other side of the door.
Preet Bharara:
Yeah.
Jeffrey Goldberg:
And so, the worry is that, the people around Trump learn from their mistake of hiring James Mattis to be the defense secretary, John Kelly to be the chief of staff, and they won’t make that same “mistake” again. But I hope that answers the question of why. And I’ve thought a lot about this because it’s the same question that I have whenever I talk to people who served in that administration, and I’m in the camp of people who… A national security, law enforcement issues, you want the best people in government. No matter how unstable the president is, all the more reason to have people who can at least try to get something done.
Preet Bharara:
Yeah. I have a follow-up on that, but Joyce…
Joyce Vance:
Well, I have this question, and maybe it’s unsophisticated so you can feel free to treat it for what it’s worth. But these folks who went in and saw the need to always have a babysitter within spitting distance of the White House, they really gave Trump room to rumble. And look, part of that is fair, part of that is democracy, and you write about that in the book. The generals who talk about the fact that a president is elected and their job is to follow orders, as long as they’re legitimate orders, but why didn’t they do something at an earlier step? Why did we have to come down to January 3, 2021, where all 10 living secretaries of defense, right in the Washington post, this, what I thought was a bone-chilling opinion piece, saying, “The military shouldn’t decide the outcome of elections”, right? Something that shouldn’t need to be said, but they felt the need to say that on January 3rd. Why didn’t they jump sooner?
Jeffrey Goldberg:
It’s a complicated question. The first thing I would say is that, what’s interesting to me about what happened, leading up to January 6th, is that it was the Pentagon that played a key role in preserving and defending the Constitution from the civilians. Now, if you remember… I don’t know how many of you remember this movie, Seven Days In May. Started as a book. The assumption in popular culture is always that the generals are going to be the ones who try to launch a coup, right? And that the Henry Fonda or whoever, Gregory Peck comes in as the president, and says, “No, we’re not having a coup.” This was the opposite. This was the generals trying to protect the Constitution from runaway civilians. So, that was-
Preet Bharara:
There’s note, for the record, that Jeffrey’s advocating for military rule.
Jeffrey Goldberg:
Yeah. If there’s one thing that you take away from this conversation, that’s what I want it to be.
Preet Bharara:
That’s how it’ll be reported in certain-
Jeffrey Goldberg:
Yeah, please do. It’ll be on Breitbart or whatever Breitbart is today.
Preet Bharara:
I can’t.
Jeffrey Goldberg:
Are you one of the places that’s paid by the Russians without knowing or…
Joyce Vance:
No. No. For the record, we are not.
Jeffrey Goldberg:
I think that the answer is, not that I know of, right? But to answer the weightier part of your question, I would question your supposition, and I would ask the question, how much worse would it have been? Right? How much worse would it have been had they not been around? You’re asking, why didn’t they do more? I’m saying, we don’t know everything about what happened.
Preet Bharara:
We might find out.
Jeffrey Goldberg:
Well, we could find out, but may I tell you one story, in this regard? I mean, I believe, and I think that the world should know this. I believe that John Kelly may have saved us from a nuclear war. And the way John Kelly, first, DHS secretary, and then chief of staff, the second chief of staff, the way he did that was, he comes in as chief of staff right at the time that Donald Trump is tweeting, “Hey, little rocket man, I got a big, red button on my desk, and we’re locked and loaded and…” These are literal words that Donald Trump used to taunt a nuclear power. A dangerously unstable, autocratic, possibly delusional nuclear monarch in North Korea. That is extremely dangerous thing to do because you could trigger Kim Jong-un with that or trigger the people around him to say, “Oh, they’re preparing an attack.”
In any case, John Kelly spent… And this has been discussed publicly. John Kelly spent quite a bit of time trying to discourage the president from taunting… It’s crazy to think about this. From taunting the leader of North Korea as little rocket man and all that stuff, and explaining, “You could enter us into an escalatory cycle from which there’s no escape, and all it takes is one North Korean general to fire one rocket across the border, and we’re going to have to respond, where…” This is, by the way, the moment… I don’t know if all of you know this, but Trump asked Kelly, according to reporting, Trump asked Kelly, at one point, “Could North Korean nukes reach America?” And Kelly’s answer was, “Well, they can certainly hit Guam”, to which Trump replied, “Well, that’s not America.” And Kelly’s response is, “No, it is America. Not only is it America, but there’s thousands upon thousands of American military personnel on Guam.”
I mean, this is what we’re dealing with. We’re dealing with someone who didn’t know that Guam is an American possession. So, Kelly-
Preet Bharara:
Did he mean that? Or did he also mean, “We don’t really care about you”?
Jeffrey Goldberg:
He probably meant both, but I would always err on the side of he doesn’t know… If the explanation could plausibly be, he didn’t know, then that is probably the explanation. I don’t know if he has enough knowledge about Guam to be prejudiced against Guam, I guess is the way I would put it.
Preet Bharara:
Yeah, but it sounds foreign.
Jeffrey Goldberg:
Yeah, it’s a weird foreign place with foreigners. And so, Kelly did, I think, one of the most clever things somebody in the White House has ever done. Kelly repositioned Trump’s thinking. Kelly said to Trump, “You’re one of the great deal-makers. You’re probably the best deal-maker we’ve ever had in American business. Imagine, you are the guy who makes the deal with Kim Jong-un, to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula. You could reach out to him.” And this is the start of the love letters. This is the start of the process that led to Donald Trump walking into North Korea. Remember that he took 10 steps into North Korea, at one point.
And I think this was an extraordinarily clever, manipulative move on John Kelly’s part, is to appeal to his ego, to get him to stop taunting North Korea, to try to convince him that he’s going to be the guy to deliver a good relationship between North Korea and the United States. He got Trump off this escalatory framework, and he moved him toward appeasement. Now, obviously, Kelly didn’t think that North Korea could ever be appeased, but it got us out of a cycle that was very dangerous.
Preet Bharara:
Yeah. So, the other thing, with respect to John Kelly and some of the expert reporting that you did and the stories that you broke, relate to Trump, apparently, on multiple occasions, showing his contempt for our military, calling them suckers and losers, not understanding what sacrifices, not understanding what patriotism is, not understanding what it takes to defend the country, not understanding what pain and sacrifice John McCain went through. You talked about that in the book.
And my question is two-part. A, with respect to his supporters… Because they deny all these things. Other than the thing he said publicly about John McCain, “I like people who weren’t captured”, but the rest of it, as far as I’ve seen his allies, they don’t say yes. So, when he said it, they deny it, and they called John Kelly and others, liars. Do his supporters just don’t believe that he said those things, or they actually don’t give a shit? And then, second, with respect to major leaders and politicians, to me… Joyce and I were talking about this. One of the more arresting things in your book was the answer to the question that a lot of people have had in their minds, how does someone like Lindsey Graham, love like a brother, John McCain, and also then be an acolyte of Donald Trump? And you quote him as saying to you, “You think I’m going to go into exile?” Can you just talk about those two things?
Jeffrey Goldberg:
Lindsey Graham… I knew Lindsey Graham well when he was John McCain’s wingman, because I knew McCain well. And Lindsey Graham’s great fun, he’s smart. My national security proclivities lean more in his direction than in McCain’s direction when they were both operating in that sphere. Everybody’s always looking for, what is the secret reason for Lindsey Graham’s abandonment of McCain and what he stood for, and his adoption of Donald Trump? And Occam’s razor here. It’s like, what is the most obvious explanation? Is that, Lindsey Graham is empty inside, and that emptiness needs to be filled by something. He needs a father figure. John McCain was that father figure, Donald Trump becomes a father figure. And he said to me, he said… I mean, he said this to others, too. He says, “If you know anything about me, you know I need to be relevant.”
I was with him once at an event sort of like this. We were about to go out on stage, and his phone rings. And this is during the Trump term. And he holds it up, and said, “Look, president’s calling me.” And I was like, “Good for you.” I don’t know. What am I supposed to say? You’re a senator, that’s not so surprising. I mean, his joy at that, at being part of the game, being in the game. I think there’s an emptiness there, and that’s something we’ve learned about a lot of politicians, that the fear of irrelevance is greater than the fear of unethical behavior or the fear of being exiled.
Preet Bharara:
And what about the voters? Do they just not believe he said these derogatory-
Jeffrey Goldberg:
Well, that’s one of the strangest things of all. I know John Kelly, and I know a lot of these other people, and if John Kelly says that Donald Trump turned to him in Arlington National Cemetery, over the grave of John Kelly’s son, a marine captain killed in action in Afghanistan, and says, “I don’t get it. What was in it for him?” Why would John Kelly make that up? That’s insane. And by the way, John Kelly doesn’t look so great in that story, by the way, in the sense that he made his compromise. Again, that goes back to your first question about, why do you stay with this guy? It’s like, if John Kelly had said, “Mr. President, I quit. Thanks”-
Preet Bharara:
On the spot.
Jeffrey Goldberg:
On the spot. “Mr. President, please step away from my son’s grave. Let’s leave, and I don’t want anything to do with you anymore.” The interesting thing about John Kelly, just as an aside, when… Two interesting. Can I tell you two interesting things about John Kelly’s-
Preet Bharara:
Two and a half.
Jeffrey Goldberg:
No. All right. We’ll see. I don’t know how much time we have. The first interesting thing about John Kelly is that, in moments of real, dire pressure, he would leave the White House in the middle of the day and go to Arlington, and just sit alone by his son’s grave. And he himself has explained that as, “I just needed to remind myself why I’m doing this, why I’m going in every morning at 4:00 in the morning.” Remember, the president doesn’t come down from the second floor of the White House, from the living quarters till 11:00 in the morning. John Kelly is there at 5:00 or 6:00, drives in from Virginia. “Why am I doing this? Because my son did more. My son did more for the country than I’m doing.”
The second thing about John Kelly that is amazing and not well-known is that, John Kelly, like Donald Trump… Or unlike Donald Trump, I should say, actually had bone spurs. And John Kelly, when he went to the draft board, they told him, “Well, you have bone spurs. You can get out of this.” John Kelly asked the doctor to lie and say that he didn’t have bone spurs, so he could join the Marines and go fight in Vietnam.
So, to me, the symmetry there is so astonishing that one used fake bone spurs to get out of Vietnam, the other pleaded with the doctors in the Marine Corps, “Just ignore my bone spurs. It’s not that big a deal. I just want to go serve my country.” I don’t know. I mean, you can’t find two people who are more different than John Kelly and Donald Trump.
Joyce Vance:
I think you dig down on what we see from leaders and people who go to work for Donald Trump, right? Some of them, Lindsey Graham, who need to be relevant, others want to serve their country. But to Preet’s point, what’s in it for the rest of America? The people out in the country who vote for Donald Trump, did they believe the lies he’s peddling, or is there something else in it for them?
Jeffrey Goldberg:
I don’t know. I mean, none of us can know. A lot of us, in my profession, have talked to Trump voters. We go to those rallies. I used to go to those rallies, at least. I try to understand how much of it is, “I just don’t like Democrats and what they stand for.” And so, this guy… A lot of people are, “He’s going to lower my taxes.” All these kind of things that you tell yourself, “I like this policy” or “I like that policy” or “I’m a born Republican and I’m going to die a Republican.” I find it hard to believe, on the one hand, that people don’t believe that he has this kind of contempt for, basically, everyone.
We notice it more when it comes to veterans and war heroes and POWs, because we generally accept, as a society, that we hold those people in high esteem. It’s kind of the social contract. It’s like, you volunteer to put your life in danger for the country, well, thank you for your service. Right? So, we notice it more. But contempt is a kind of a through line. But the flip side is this, to me, on the question of whether they believe it or not. Remember, you can’t have a grifter without the grifted, right? People who are willing and ready to be grifted are necessary prerequisite to being a successful grifter, right? So, for whatever reason, people buy the Professor Harold Hill act, and they buy what he’s telling. I don’t know. I can’t explain it.
Again, this is not ideological, and I have to always say this. The Atlantic is non-partisan. We are a big tent. We publish conservatives. We publish liberals. Donald Trump does not provoke negative feelings in me because of any set of policy. Policy is policy. Argue it out. There’s no one American ideal. Let us all just argue together. Let’s have a strong liberal party and a strong conservative. But it’s not a conservative party anymore, it’s an authoritarian cult party. Obviously, there are a lot of Republicans, many have been here at this festival. A lot of Republicans, Liz Cheney. Obviously, the Cheneys and the Bushes and all the rest, who are waiting for the fever to break, and so we can get back to having a strong conservative party again. I don’t know when that fever is breaking. But there are a lot of people who are fine being grifted. I can’t explain it. Can you?
Joyce Vance:
I live in Alabama, so I’ve experienced some of it, and I wonder what you think about this. I mean, there’s a demographic shift going on in this country. Things are changing in Texas, in Alabama, in Georgia. It may be that we will well soon live in states that are not majority white, and people who are used to having power and control may lose that. Perhaps, there’s some element of fear. I’m not sure what those folks think Donald Trump is going to do for that.
Jeffrey Goldberg:
It’s the, again, in Make America Great Again, that matters there. But here’s the short-sighted thing that I don’t understand, and literally can’t understand this. If you go to South Texas, you go along the border areas, and you find that the federal workforce, border customs, ICE, etc., you find thousands upon thousands of Mexican Americans who are doing that work, running in those roles. You find a lot of sympathy for Republican positions on immigration, and you find, obviously, and we saw this especially before Kamala Harris came into the picture as the nominee, you saw a lot of sympathy for Trump, especially among Black males, and you obviously have a lot of Asian Americans and other recent immigrants who are running family businesses and who would identify with what we think of as traditional Republican values. The Republican Party made a choice when it went with Trump to go with racism, as opposed to a kind of race-blind ideological tent for people who believe in a strong border, who believe in low taxes.
I guess, what I’m saying is… I’m trying to phrase this analytically. If I were a white person in Alabama who was worried about a change in America, I would look beyond the skin color, and say, “Well, what values do I share with some of these recent immigrants?” or “What values do I share with somebody who crossed the border illegally from Guatemala, but works 14 hours a day, washing dishes?” And then, sort of say, “Ooh, maybe the Republican Party could actually be the big tent party and could be a majority party.” But they went toward a nativism that ultimately won’t work, I think. But it’s just very interesting to me.
Joyce Vance:
I mean, I think that’s our answer, right? If they would look beyond their skin color. So, we’ll just leave it there.
Jeffrey Goldberg:
Yeah.
Preet Bharara:
Can I ask you another question about heroism? And you talk about, it’s in the subtitle, the Cowardice of Donald Trump. Did Donald Trump show or exhibit courage or valor on the evening he was almost assassinated.
Jeffrey Goldberg:
Not valor, but… It’s interesting. I want to say this in a way that doesn’t sound like I’m a jerk. Good luck, right? Either way is good-
Preet Bharara:
Go forward. Yeah, it works for the podcast, either way.
Jeffrey Goldberg:
My favorite military rule, it can’t get… Yeah. Now, I’m obviously-
Preet Bharara:
You’re already in a hole.
Jeffrey Goldberg:
There are autonomic nervous system responses to danger, and you don’t really know how you will react to mortal danger, until you’re shot at. I’ve been in various situations as a foreign correspondent where you know bad things will happen, and you kind of don’t know how your body reacts, how your mind reacts, what chemicals, what particular chemicals work on you. Yeah. Like everybody else, I was impressed. Well, he ducked down, he followed instructions that they teach all protectees the first thing to do is drop down below the podium if you feel something’s going on. And then, he gathered himself, which was impressive. He didn’t put himself into this position. It’s not a soldier going to the battle, right?
So, let me separate that out from what heroism is. I was honestly a little bit surprised that he showed that level of thought in the minute or so from when he went to the ground, to realize, “Oh, I can take advantage of this situation. I could say things that will get my followers. I could do the fist.” And so, that was-
Preet Bharara:
Are you saying that’s just showmanship?
Jeffrey Goldberg:
Well, you know what? Guy got shot at, he got shot in the ear or took… Something happened to his ear. We’re not a hundred percent sure. There was a bullet involved in damaging his ear. That’s bad. I mean, it’s scary. It’s scary to get shot at, and he handled himself well. Obviously, it’s the Secret Service people who, when you watch that, that’s the crazy thing, is people who are paid a government salary to run in front of between gunmen and the people they’re protecting. Those people in that moment. I mean, I realized, the Secret Service messed up bureaucratically and strategically a lot of that, the moment. But man, that is something.
So, like everybody else who was watching it, I was sort of like, “Oh, wow.” And remember, when we were watching it, we’re like, “Well, that guy’s won the election.” Biden was still the candidate, then.
So, my idea of cowardice… And one of my colleagues said, “Maybe it’s not cowardice, maybe it’s just a kind of self-absorption and self-protectiveness.” My idea is putting him in balance or putting him opposed to people like the generals, the ones who volunteer to serve the country and put themselves in danger and get shot at. Donald Trump has never done anything, as far as we can tell, for anyone but himself.
Preet Bharara:
Yeah. And part of the reason I ask the question is that, you recite in one or two chapters of your book, the fact that people have said about Trump, he’s really afraid of dying, and other people have said he’s really afraid of jail.
Jeffrey Goldberg:
You know what? What prompted me to use the word cowardice is the extreme difficulty he has being around visibly wounded veterans. I mean, some of the most egregious things he’s done. I mean, I think, probably the most egregious is sort of making fun of people who are handicapped. Obviously, that’s not high on anyone’s list of what good character is. But he goes to France in 2017, sees the Bastille Day parade, wants one for himself, so he tells John Kelly and others, “We should have a parade like that in Washington.” Various people in the White House and the Pentagon state, “Well, look, the French have their thing, and we’re cool with it. They’re our ally. It’s great. But we, here in America, we’re kind of more of like a citizen army. Also, we’re the biggest army in the world. We don’t have to put out our missiles. We don’t have to show everybody our missiles”, if you know what I mean. And he’s like, “No. I-”
Preet Bharara:
What do you mean, Jeffrey?
Jeffrey Goldberg:
Preet, I’ll explain it to you later. And so, they explained that, and they said, “We don’t really do that.” And then, the greatest argument against having a parade was, “You see, the Washington streets can’t handle the weight of a tank, so we’re going to have to spend more money to buttress the streets.” But in the course of these negotiations, which the Pentagon kind of diverted, in the course of these negotiations, he said, “The thing I don’t want is any wounded veterans in the parade. They make me look bad.” But what he was saying was, “I don’t want to look at it.” He’s a very, very, very fearful of injury and being… This is what I was thinking about in the cowardice more than anything else. Very fearful of injury, very fearful of death, very fearful of being wounded.
Look what he said about the Medal of Honor two weeks ago. This was one of the… I mean, not a shrink, but I’ll play one on this podcast. He has this thought pattern that I can’t fathom. He says, “The Medal of Freedom…”, which is the civilian equivalent, “you can get without dying, so it’s a much better prize than the Medal of… He’s sort of disparaging the Medal of Honor by saying, “The only people who get the Medal of Honor are suckers. Why are they suckers? Because they put their life and limb at risk for their government, for their country, and there’s such an easier way to get a medal.” He said, “I would love to get a Purple Heart, but I didn’t want to get hurt”, which is like the prerequisite for getting a Purple Heart.
But I’m at the outer limit of my understanding of this personality because I don’t know people like that. I can’t explain it, but he has a fear that energizes this. I don’t know if his contempt for service for military service comes from fear of death, fear of injury, or just the idea that you would do something where there’s “nothing” in it for you.
Preet Bharara:
Thanks for listening. As a reminder, in a conversation exclusively for members of CAFE Insider, Joyce and I spoke with Jeffrey Goldberg about the media’s approach to covering Trump in the presidential election, and what a second Trump term might look like. To listen to the full analysis, head to cafe.com/insider, and use the promo code Austin for 40% off the membership for the first year. Thank you for supporting our work.
For more analysis of legal and political issues making the headlines, become a member of the CAFE Insider. Members get access to exclusive content, including the weekly podcast I host with former U.S. Attorney, Joyce Vance. Head to cafe.com/insider to sign up for a trial. That’s cafe.com/insider.
If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me @PreetBharara with the #AskPreet. You can also now reach me on threads, or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338. That’s 669- 24-Preet. Or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com. Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The deputy editor is Celine Rohr. The editorial producers are Noa Azulai and Jake Kaplan. The associate producer is Claudia Hernández. And the CAFE team is Matthew Billy, Nat Weiner, and Liana Greenway. Our music is by Andrew Dost.
I’m your host, Preet Bharara. As always, stay tuned.
