Preet Bharara:              From Café, welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Peter Baker:                 And I think that the skillset that you look for in a leader at a moment of crisis like this is a mix of confidence and surety and reassurance, but also leveling with the American people and explaining to them just how serious it really is and find a way to connect with the people who are suffering.

Preet Bharara:              That’s Peter Baker. He’s the chief White House correspondent for the New York Times and a political analyst for MSNBC. A veteran journalist who first started out at the Washington Post, Baker’s covered four White Houses during his storied career. Clinton, Bush Jr., Obama, and now Trump. According to Baker, this White House is unlike any he’s covered before, which is something he writes about and thinks about and talks about a lot, especially in his own house given that he’s married to journalist and a guest of Stay Tuned, Susan Glasser, who writes about the latest Washington news for the New Yorker magazine. Baker’s reporting on the White House’s response to the coronavirus is comprehensive. He covers everything from the president’s marathon briefings to the administrations convoluted decision making process, to one of the major questions on everyone’s mind right now, who is actually in charge? We get into all of that and more. That’s coming up. Stay tuned.

Preet Bharara:              This question comes in an email from Stu in Portland, Oregon who writes, “Hi Preet. I just heard that the courts ruled that Wisconsin must hold their primary on April 7th as scheduled. Why would the court make that ruling? That puts voters and workers at risk and will limit the number of voters. How is this a good decision? What is the legal rationale for this decision? Thanks Preet. Looking forward to Thursday’s podcast.”

Preet Bharara:              Well Stu, I don’t think it was a good decision. And I think a lot of people don’t think it was either. There were a series of court decisions and a series of skirmishes between the governor of Wisconsin, Tony Evers, and the republican legislature that then was followed up with by suits in the courts. And the bottom line as a pragmatic and practical matter, you’re absolutely right. Going forward with the election put not only voters at risk, but also the people who work the polls, many of whom were often elderly, at risk as well at the same time that there’s a stay at home order, not only in Wisconsin but in many, many states around the country. So you’re putting in jeopardy two things. The fundamental right to vote and the fundamental human right to be safe.

Preet Bharara:              In fact, not only were there a number of skirmishes, it actually went all the way up to the Supreme Court of the United States itself. It ruled on Monday in a fairly narrow question as a majority saw it. The court was split along ideological lines. Five to four. The five conservatives voting one way and the four liberals voting another way. The way the majority saw it they were presented with a narrow technical question. And that question was, for the people who are voting by mail, could they be permitted to mail and postmark their ballots after the date of the election, April 7th. All the parties have already agreed that ballots could be counted and received up to a week after the election, April 13th. So the majority was simply focused on whether or not the ballots could be sent in late. And they said that would work an undo change to the election as people expected it at the last minute, and they said no, you can’t do that.

Preet Bharara:              What’s interesting about the majority’s opinion is they went out of their way to say they don’t have a view on whether or not it was wise or proper or safe to proceed with the election on April 7th. Just trying to limit their opinion to the question of whether or not the ballots could be sent late. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the minority in a fairly powerful dissent, obviously disagreed and made clear that what was at stake here was a lot of people being disenfranchised. And you shouldn’t have that in a modern democracy. And part of the reason for that is because of the lateness of the hour, lots of people had requested absentee ballots and wouldn’t be receiving them in time to get them done, filled out, and postmarked by April 7th. As Ginsburg wrote in her dissent, this was not a narrow technical question, but instead, “The question is whether tens of thousands of citizens can vote safely in the midst of a pandemic.” And the case is significant, not just because of what it means for Wisconsin this past week, but as a test case for future wrangling in states around the country as we grapple with the issue of how we’re going to be voting if the coronavirus has not subsided. Not just in primaries but in the federal election in November also.

Preet Bharara:              If you want to hear more about my thoughts on that case, Ann Milgram and I talked it about it at length on the Café Insider podcast. If you want to listen to that episode for free, just head to café.com/preet to sign up and receive the full episode. That’s café.com/preet.

Preet Bharara:              This question comes in an email from Molly, who writes, “Preet, I am a captain in the US Army. Up until the COVID-19 crisis I was hoping to pull a Robert Mueller. Transition out of the military as soon as my commitment was over and apply for law school. However, I’m nervous to give up a steady job in healthcare when there is so much uncertainty about the future. This leads me to two questions. One, is there a time in which it is too late in your professional career to go to law school and really make an impact in the profession? Two, what types of legal jobs should someone like me pursue after law school to continue to serve the American people honorably, but also be able to fight for the liberal causes I believe in?”

Preet Bharara:              First Molly, thank you for your service. I appreciate it and all Americans do too. I also appreciate your willingness to continue to serve once you leave your military post. I understand your uncertainty and hesitation to leave a steady job and to give up healthcare. I won’t lie to you. I think that the market for jobs in the legal sector, probably at least in the next year or two may be softer than it was before. We’ve seen that in other economic downturns. The good news is by the time you apply, enroll, finish your three years, we should have this well behind us. I think the market will be very good in the future.

Preet Bharara:              Now, as to your question, is there a time in which it’s too late to go to law school? I don’t think so at all. In fact, when I was US Attorney we hired a number of people who had served in the military for a number of years, then went to law school, then clerked, then worked at a law firm, and then came to the US Attorney’s office. So if anything I think your military service makes you a more attractive candidate, not just to law firms, but to all public service entities that hire lawyers. And certainly that was true in the US Attorney’s office. And as to your question as to what types of legal jobs should someone like you pursue, I don’t presume to know your interests and what causes you believe in, and I think that should be your guide. If you have interest in criminal justice and you believe in criminal justice reform, then there are places you can go to pursue those things. If you believe that the best way you can do justice is to become a prosecutor and apply your judgment and reasoning and good faith to making sure that justice is done and the laws are enforced fairly without fear or favor, then you might want to choose a prosecutorial career. But there are lots and lots of great places to work and you can figure that out when you go to law school.

Preet Bharara:              This question comes in a tweet from Nickels05. “Doesn’t Trump firing Michael Atkinson and stating the reason as him sending a whistleblower complaint to congress, which he was legally obligated to do, open the government up to being sued for wrongful termination? Wouldn’t this apply to McCabe as well? #askPreet”

Preet Bharara:              Nickels05, thanks for your question. Well, as you know, in the case of McCabe, and I presume you’re referring to Andy McCabe, the former deputy director of the FBI, he has sued. He’s retained legal counsel and filed a wrongful termination suit against the administration. And if you used him as a parallel to Michael Atkinson, it’s kind of interesting. Andy McCabe’s case of course was unique in various ways. The president of the United States said over and over and over again in public that Andy McCabe should pay a price, that he didn’t like what Andy McCabe had done. And the timing of the termination was also curious and seemed retaliatory, as he was taken off the job I think mere hours before he was going to vest in some portion of his pension. So the combination of the timing, the statements by the president, and the appearance that it was done at the behest of the president without proper consideration of all issues, casts the termination as retaliatory. However, if you look at the suit that Andy McCabe’s lawyer filed on his behalf in the courts, they’re not just relying on a retaliation theme. They’re also alleging technical violations of civil service rules with respect to whether or not the reasons were described properly as to why the termination took place.

Preet Bharara:              And also the allegation, under the rules through which the president terminated Andy McCabe, he actually wasn’t in a position to do so. Only the FBI director could do so. Now, Michael Atkinson presents a parallel but slightly different situation. Michael Atkinson, as people may remember, was the inspector general of the intelligence community. And he’s the person who came into possession of the now famous whistleblower complaint with respect to Donald Trump’s conversations with the president of Ukraine. In my view, and according to a lot of folks, Michael Atkinson did everything by the book. He maintained the secrecy of the whistleblower, he maintained the secrecy of the whistleblower complaint, he advised the acting DNI of the whistleblower complaint, who then presented it to the department of justice, who declined to pursue a further investigation. And only at that point did Atkinson make a disclosure to congress about the existence of the whistleblower complaint. And I guess the termination will turn upon whether or not that was appropriate.

Preet Bharara:              It is also true I believe that with respect to his IG position, termination is only appropriate for cause. You can’t just do it willy nilly. And the cause, as set forth by the president of the United States in the letter he sent, was simply that Atkinson no longer had the president’s fullest confidence. I’m not close enough to the case law to understand yet whether or not that qualifies as for cause or whether or not a further presentation of facts and circumstances and rationales has to be given. But I will note also that none other than the acting DNI himself I believe, during his congressional testimony, said about Michael Atkinson that he did everything by the book. So I don’t know how strong a lawsuit would be. I don’t know whether a lawsuit would prevail. I don’t know whether he has the interest or inclination or patience for a lawsuit. But it strikes me that the president’s actions could open him up to a lawsuit.

Preet Bharara:              And separate apart from whether or not Atkinson might take action on his own, there are members of congress who clearly have an issue with it. This week house intelligence committee chairman Adam Schiff has begun asking questions about the firing of Michael Atkinson. You can expect an investigation there. Possibly hearings on the action taken. And there are reports that a republican senator, the chairman of the finance committee, Chuck Grassley, is asking questions about it too and is apparently considering sending a bipartisan letter demanding a further explanation for the sacking of Michael Atkinson. So whether or not you see a lawsuit from Atkinson himself, I think you’re going to see some activity in the congress.

Speaker 4:                    Stay tuned. There’s more coming up right after this.

Speaker 3:                    This ad is a warning. Our democracy is under attack from the United States Supreme Court. In the middle of a deadly global pandemic people across Wisconsin were planning to vote absentee to keep themselves and their families safe. But the night before the election five republican justices on the Supreme Court told thousands of people they would have to choose between risking their lives and forfeiting their right to vote. This Supreme Court favoring republican interests over democracy is nothing new. They gutted the voting rights act. They invited billionaires and corporations to spend unlimited amounts trying to influence elections. They gave a green light to gerrymandering, voter id laws, and voter roll purges. Now a progressive movement is wising up to fight back. Because it’s quite possible the Wisconsin case won’t be the last 2020 showdown over voting rights to be settled in the courts. And we simply can’t trust this court to put aside partisan views and protect people’s right to vote. Our courts are becoming too political. It’s time to say enough. Learn more about how you can join the fight by visiting demandajustice.org/preet. That’s demandjustice.org/P-R-E-E-T.

Preet Bharara:              My guest this week is Peter Baker. He is the chief White House correspondent for the New York Times and the political analyst for MSNBC. While Baker’s definitely entrenched in domestic politics, he’s got a foreign policy bent too. He spent the early 2000s abroad serving as a Moscow bureau chief for the Washington Post and also reporting from Afghanistan and Iraq at the outset of both wars. In 2016, just as he was settling into his post as Jerusalem bureau chief for the Times, he was called back after only a few months to cover the presidency of Donald Trump. Recently Baker’s been writing about what’s going on behind the scenes at the White House as the administration struggles to respond to this public health crisis. We talk about whether networks should broadcast Trump’s full remarks at the coronavirus press conferences and how reporters should approach asking questions, Dr. Anthony Fauci’s delicate balancing act, and why the president’s usual bullying tactics don’t work on a virus. Plus whether Trump actually understands the space time continuum and why that could end up costing the country a lot. That’s all coming up. Stay tuned.

Preet Bharara:              Peter Baker, thank you so much for joining us on the show.

Peter Baker:                 Thanks for having me.

Preet Bharara:              First question I guess I need to ask every guest, how are you doing in this time of pandemic?

Peter Baker:                 Everybody here’s good. Everybody’s healthy. And like everybody else we know friends whose families have had their own issues and we’re dealing with this new reality that everybody is grappling with.

Preet Bharara:              Your different in your house from most families. You’re married to Susan Glasser who is a New Yorker writer. You and she both appear on cable television to help guide us through the news and all these things that are going on so you can’t do what other families do, which is not shower for a while, not groom, comb your hair. You actually have to appear presentable such as it is for television from time to time. So I guess my question is, when you … Is that your dog?

Peter Baker:                 That’s Elly, yes. She gets a little jealous sometimes. Yeah. She’s going downstairs now. It’ll be okay.

Preet Bharara:              That’s the nature of broadcasting in a time of coronavirus.

Peter Baker:                 The dog had a star turn on MSNBC at one point. Everybody started talking about it.

Preet Bharara:              Oh really?

Peter Baker:                 Yeah.

Preet Bharara:              So unlike a lot of families, both you and Susan have to be careful to groom and shower and put on nice clothing. I guess I have this question for you. Has there been a time when you and Susan have to be on television at the same time? And if so, who gets to broadcast in front of the bookcase?

Peter Baker:                 She gets priority, but so far it hasn’t been a scheduling issue. No, she’s number one, but we would figure it out I think. We’ve got a lot of bookcases around the house so we’d figure out.

Preet Bharara:              Oh, well yeah. You guys are so intellectual. It’s ridiculous.

Peter Baker:                 No. We’re just hoarders. We never throw anything out.

Preet Bharara:              Can I ask you a personal question? The bookcase in front of which you broadcast, did you rearrange the books? Because this has been subject of discussion online with respect to a lot of people who are coming on the air. Trying to figure out if there’s strategic placement of particular books to give off a sense of erudition. May or may not be true.

Peter Baker:                 I did not do that. We’ve not done that. I will confess that I have been thinking about what other art might be on the walls. In my office I have framed front pages. Reporters love the front page. And I have them from a variety of different events and I think my worry is if you saw a framed front page from one event but not from the others, somebody might try to take some larger lesson from it without realizing the whole context. So I’ve been taking those off the wall to make sure they’re not visible. I have for instance Obama’s inauguration, which I wrote, and I have Trump’s inauguration in which I wrote. So if you saw only one of those two frames, you might then draw some conclusion from it when I just look at as a news event. Those are big news stories and I’m happy to frame a big story. But people like to look for ways to try to peg you and to put you in a hole or something, put you in a box and assume that you are this or that.

Preet Bharara:              Well look, everyone’s really bored and at home and they’re looking for any kind of distraction so I wish you luck with the backdrop. You guys do a better job than many. It’s the subject of conversation because we’re so bored in some ways.

Preet Bharara:              Let’s talk about this coverage of the administration and the response to the coronavirus. There has been, virtually every day for a while now, a White House briefing that stars a lot of people, but virtually always stars the president of the United States. Can just ask you first before we get into the nature of it, what’s it like for you when you attend? What’s the protocol? What happens when you show up? And has it evolved over time?

Peter Baker:                 Well, we have actually not attended in person now, I think since mid March. Probably about three weeks I would guess. Last time I went was the Monday after the president’s declaration of emergency I think. And after that day we talked about it and we all decided not to go any further. Everybody had their own issues. There were concerns health wise or otherwise and we made the call that we were going to listen to the authorities in terms of staying place. So we have not physically been there now for a few weeks and that’s a little odd. Very, very odd for a White House reporter. It’s our great, great desire to be in that room, to be part of that conversation, to be asking questions. We’ve of course gone without any briefings up until the virus at the White House for a year. We’ve gotten rid of the decades long tradition of reporters asking questions every day. And so it goes against the grain not to be there physically, but that’s one of the trade offs we’ve made because of this pandemic. So we watch like everybody else does through live streaming or on television and we obviously call our sources, but we’ve not been there for a while.

Preet Bharara:              So you’re able to watch the proceedings and report on them but you’re not able to sort of do the kinds of questioning that good reporters want to do if other people don’t ask the question that you them to ask. Do you ever call up buddies at other outlets and say, “Hey, could you ask the president this?”

Peter Baker:                 We do have a system in place now. The White House Correspondents Association did in fact, as they cull the heard, they’ve put new restrictions on who can go anyway. So even if we wanted to go, you can only go every few days or something like that because of a desire to thin the number of reporters there. And they have put in place a system where you can call in questions to your colleagues who will be there and ask them to forward them in. So every once in a while you might see when you’re watching one, you’ll see one of the reporters say, “This is from one of my colleagues.” And that’s what’s going on. So we do get some of our questions asked that way and I’ve got great respect for my colleagues who are there and I know that they’re asking the right questions almost all the time.

Preet Bharara:              You mentioned that there hasn’t been a regular White House press briefing in a long time and there was a lot of criticism of the White House for that. Do you think that the president deserves some credit for now holding one of these things every day and not delegating it to a press officer, but basically taking to the podium himself?

Peter Baker:                 Well look, I’m always in favor of more rather than less. More time with any president is better than not. That may be different than the other debate which is how long live television should be carrying them. That’s a different debate than I have as a newspaper reporter. My view is I want to see the reporter be able to ask questions, hear him talk or her talk as many hours out of the day as they’ll let us. Now, it is exhausting every day when he goes as long as he does. I’ve never seen a president do these kind of briefings at the length that he does them. This past week I think he went on one day for two hours and 11 minutes. I mean, he plus the people around him. That’s a really long briefing and it is exhausting. And it’s hard to kind of distill what really matters in that briefing into a news story or what we try to put on the web with of these live briefings. So there’s some challenges with that, but I would be the last one to tell a president not to come talk to us.

Preet Bharara:              What about then the obligation of … I guess let’s focus on the television networks. And I know you’re not in television, although you contribute. Do you have a view on whether or not the networks should be carrying them from beginning to end every day?

Peter Baker:                 That’s a good question. I think it’s a hard question and is not as easy as people on one side or the other might want to just automatically say this or that. I think there has to be a balance like with most things. In general I would air, if I were the head of a network, and nobody’s ever offered me that job, I would air on the side of broadcasting more rather than less because I think the more primary information and availability that people have to their leaders and their political leaders is better. Having said that, I don’t think it’s a requirement of television to carry them from start to finish. I do think that news judgment can apply and say we’re going to carry this part of it because we think this is the part that might be most newsworthy to our viewers, and then we will cover the rest ourselves and then perhaps show parts of the rest if we decide something in it that was said that was important for viewers to know. So I think you could apply news judgment to it. I don’t think it’s a requirement that you do it from start to finish. But again, I would air on the side of more rather than less.

Preet Bharara:              Why do you think the president is holding these press briefings every day? What is his motivation? And I know that you guys have done some reporting on this and then that will lead to my followup question.

Peter Baker:                 Look, he is a showman. His most recent job before politics was television. He enjoys being in front of a camera. He enjoys being the center of attention. He enjoys commanding an audience. He has himself tweeted about, and talked I think at these briefings, about the high ratings that these briefings get. That’s something that means something to him. When he first took office, we reported on this back in 2017, he told some of his aides, think of every day like a half hour television episode in a series. So his mindset is toward showmanship and entertainment and television and publicity and being out there. And he has no other outlet at this point. He can’t go do his rallies. He’s not going out to the helicopter and doing the talk on the south lawn. This is his one chance to be on camera every day. And so therefore he has taken full advantage of it and you can ask the question, which I think is a good question, is how does the president have that much time to be on camera every day? Isn’t there a lot of other things going on?

Peter Baker:                 I mean, what you normally hear from other presidents is, “Hey guys, I got to go. I got things to do.” He doesn’t seem to have anything else to do because he never seems in a rush. So that’s a different question. But yeah, you’ve never seen anything like this.

Preet Bharara:              The governor of New York, who’s getting good reviews for his handling of this.

Peter Baker:                 He is. Yeah.

Preet Bharara:              Does lengthy briefings every day, maybe not quite as lengthy as the president’s, so I guess you could argue the chief executive has, as his or her obligation, a duty to report to the public. I guess that leads me to the next question. If it’s the case that mostly what the president is doing is being a showman and substituting these performances for his rallies, and he’s more focused on being a person who gets a second term, and that he is gloating in private about getting all this free air time, does that change the calculus of whether or not networks should be covering him? If he’s more about himself and self promotion than about actually getting the best information out to the public.

Peter Baker:                 Yeah, I think that factors into this idea of news judgment. Again, producers, editors, it is our job to decide what we think is newsworthy and what we don’t think is newsworthy. We don’t publish everything the president says and I don’t think the network has to carry live everything a president says. In fact, presidents give speeches all the time that are not carried live on television and then only parts of them are later shown. That’s normal news judgment that goes into it. We happen to be in a moment of great concern and the country is panicked, scared. This is a country that needs and wants to hear from its leaders so that weighs in as well. And I think that one thing we have an obligation to do is to make judgments about what we put in the paper or what we show on television and also how we provide alternative information that might not comport with what the president’s saying. One thing we’ve seen with this president obviously, he’s said a lot of things that are just factually not true. It’s our job to make sure the public gets full context and as much information as possible.

Peter Baker:                 So he gets up there and says X, Y, and Z. If X, Y, and Z is not true then we as a television network or a newspaper have an obligation to try to help readers and viewers sort through that and give them the facts as best we know them.

Preet Bharara:              Why are they always late? I guess it’s not the most important thing in the world, but I mean, it must be annoying to you folks. You have to cover it and then you’re making arrangements and plans and you’re postponing appointments and calls and other such things. But on a regular basis the White House announces there’s going to be a press briefing at, say 5:00, and it turns out it’s like 6:15 or 6:30. What is going on behind the scenes?

Peter Baker:                 Yeah. That’s a good question. Look, I’ve only known one president to be … I’ve covered four. Of the four, only Bush was mostly on time. Bush had a fetish for being punctual. He thought it was really important. In fact, I once went to a group interview with him once where I showed up 10 minutes early and it turns out I was late because he’d already started earlier than scheduled. So he is the only president I’ve met who actually did things on time. With Clinton, we actually had a phrase for it. It was called Clinton Standard Time. So if he was supposed to start something at noon you could pretty much count on it starting around 1:00 or 1:15 or something like that. He was never on time. I just think presidents in general …

Peter Baker:                 This goes back to the question we just asked. I think presidents in general usually have so many demands on their time that they are often late and everybody waits for them. Nobody else complains about their time being taken waiting for a president. If you’re a president, everybody always waits for you. But you would like it obviously to be a little bit more exacting. You’d like to know for sure what time it was going to start. It would help organize the day. Because these are so long and because we do end up having to wait til they start, it takes up even more time out of your reporting day than you might like.

Preet Bharara:              I want to ask a broader question about what’s going on behind the scenes, not just in the minutes leading up to one of these press briefings, but just overall in connection with the response. Who is in charge? Who does Trump listen to? Who does he rely on, if anyone, either for factual information or best advice on how to respond, open up the country, don’t open up the country, set Easter as a date, change about Easter? Give us a little bit of a guide based on your reporting and what sources are telling you. Like what the landscape is behind the scenes.

Peter Baker:                 Well, one thing we’ve seen this president, not only is he much freer about talking in public and much looser about that than other presidents, he’s also much more accessible to a wide range of people. Now these might not all be the right people you want to talk to a president. Other White Houses, not just anybody can get in to talk to a president or call him on the phone. This is one who makes himself available to a wide range of people. There’s an advantage to that. But it also means that at any point in the day or night he may be talking to some business friend of his in New York who happened to see something on Facebook or whatever and suddenly he’s spouting that out at the briefing without actually going through any kind of process, without givings aides a chance to actually weigh in or provide him something more thought through.

Preet Bharara:              He tends to speak a lot to very macho men who call him sir and then cry.

Peter Baker:                 At least as he told it anyway. That’s true.

Preet Bharara:              You identified any of those people? These grown men who have never cried before.

Peter Baker:                 Yeah. It’s interesting. Remember, this is a guy who tells us his friend Jim over the years has told him that Paris is a hellhole and we’ve never been able to identify whoever Jim might be. Some people don’t think Jim really exists. It’s hard to know. And he is a guy who the last person who got to him often seems to win the day. And I think his own staff knows that and his outside advisors know that and it can pretty random.

Preet Bharara:              Okay. So put aside the CEOs and other outside folks and business people. Within the administration you have the political people, you have the folks in the White House, then you have sort of career people like Dr. Fauci. I want to talk about him in particular in some detail in a moment, but is he really paying attention to what Jared Kushner says over the advice of other people? How is that working out?

Peter Baker:                 Yeah. It’s a great question. I think the whole Easter thing, as you say, that came in part because his economic people were feeling agitated about how much damage was being done to the economy and you can understand their point of view. Their point of view is supposed to be about the economy. They’re not public health officials. What a president is supposed to do is take what the public health people tell him or her and what the economic people tell him or her and what the political people and the policy people and all these people, and then find the greater good with all of that. And the president here seems to basically sort of veer back and forth in some ways. Okay, today I heard from Larry Kudlow how bad the economy’s going to get in the second quarter. Well we just can’t have that. We’ve got to get back open. So that becomes sort of his driving passion at that particular moment. It also of course can be anybody he happened to see on Fox News. Let’s face it, he watches a lot of television and he responds very quickly and very instinctively to what he sees said on television.

Peter Baker:                 In fact, people try to get messages to him by appearing on Fox News. It’s become a time honored tradition now among sort of outsiders who are trying to get his ear. And so it’s not a disciplined process in that sense.

Preet Bharara:              This might sound like a rude question about the president, but does he understand the space time continuum? A lot of people criticize his flip flopping and his going back and forth. I’m one of those people. I mean, you pointed out in a tweet recently pointing out what Trump said on February 26th. “This is a flu. This is like a flu.” Then a few weeks later on March 31st. President Trump, “It’s not the flu. It’s vicious.” And so, people who observe and who comment and have a platform make these points all the time. And I guess a fundamental question is why is that? If you know that you do this all the time, why do you persist in making blanket statements when there’s a reasonable chance you’re going to have to flip flop on it? And some of these flip flops are quite serious and quite damaging and have consequences when you’re the leader of the free world. Is it really as simple as what you were saying, that he just doesn’t think farther than 24 hours in advance?

Peter Baker:                 I’m not even sure it’s 24 hours in advance. We’ve often said, as we study the way he approaches these things, he seems to live even in a shorter timeframe. Like getting through the next 10 minutes, getting through the next half hour. And it is strange given his history in television that he doesn’t seem to remember at any given moment that he is being recorded at almost all times. Certainly any time he’s in public. And if he says something on day one, it’s going to be remembered on day 10 and they’re going to play it back to him. And it doesn’t seem to bother him, except he’ll deny it sometimes even though the tape is right there.

Preet Bharara:              Or he’ll attack the reporter as saying it’s a nasty question.

Peter Baker:                 A nasty question. I didn’t say it. Well he did say it. Of course he said it. We all heard him say it. And the thing is he has been very successful at imposing his own reality at times I think. And rewriting history.

Preet Bharara:              How does he get away with it? I don’t want to be obnoxious about your profession, but can some of the blame be laid at the feet of the journalists who do show up and ask questions at not piercing through this shield that he has with respect to things, even as simple as things that he has said himself that are captured on tape?

Peter Baker:                 Look, I think it’s our job to point it out. I don’t know that it’s our job to make people listen if they don’t want to listen. We do point that out. You read the thing I wrote the other day. Yamiche Alcindor from PBS got up there and-

Recording:                    You’ve said repeatedly that you think that some of the equipment that governors are requesting, they don’t actually need. You said New York might not need 30,000.

Recording:                    I didn’t say that.

Recording:                    You said it on Sean Hannity’s Fox News. You said that you might-

Recording:                    Why don’t you people act … Let me ask you. Why don’t you act in a little more positive? It’s always trying to get you. Get you. Get you.

Peter Baker:                 And it’s our job to point out that and we do that pretty vigorously. We try to. We have a full-time fact checker in our bureau who does nothing but fact check him and other politicians, but particularly him because so much.

Preet Bharara:              Just one? You just have one?

Peter Baker:                 Well, all of us are in some ways fact checkers right? But look, you’ve been in politics. I mean, you understand politics certainly as well if not better than I do. But I think one thing that’s different is other presidents or politicians, if they’re caught in an inconsistency, they’re embarrassed by it. And they try to explain it away. No, actually what I meant then was this and actually these are not inconsistent. Or sometimes they say, hey, I changed my mind. They’re less likely to say that because they seem to think that’s a sign of weakness. Or they try to find a way to reconcile it. I rarely find a politician who doesn’t feel bad if he or she is caught saying something different than they had said before and tries to avoid it.

Preet Bharara:              And it’s the embarrassment that actually is the undoing of the traditional politician. And maybe Trump has discovered something.

Peter Baker:                 He seems to be immune to that. He’s not embarrassed that you caught him saying something totally different. In fact, he will just continue to keep repeating the new thing as if he had always said it all along. And doesn’t mind, it seems, that you have called him on it or other people have called him on it. He’s going to continue to say what he says. And it’s interesting. It doesn’t seem to bother him, in the sense that it does other politicians that he will veer back and forth between two wildly different things.

Preet Bharara:              There’s another, I guess it’s a criticism you could say, of how questions are asked at these briefings. And also at debates and other places as well. When the president doesn’t answer a question directly and then cuts off the mic of the reporter, from time to time this does happen, mostly it doesn’t, the question is asked, why does not the next reporter just repeat the same questions the prior reporter asked, and the next one again, until you get an answer? I mean, what is the level of coordination among journalists? And what should it be? On the other hand, each journalist has his or her own priorities and things that they want their readers to understand and came armed with their own questions. But what do you make of this argument that I actually subscribe to that it’s like a chain? Somebody asks a question that’s not answered, next person asks the same question. Because that’s how you do it in real life. In for example, a cross examination in a trial you just keep asking the question until it’s answered.

Peter Baker:                 Right. Exactly. I think you’re right. I think if we had a good lawyer in there or a good prosecutor in there we would probably do it a little differently. We try, I think, from time to time to sort of follow up on each other. Does seem to go against the grain. We are independent no matter what everybody … Everybody thinks we’re a hive. There is obviously some commonality between reporters, but generally we are pretty independent cusses and I think everybody does sort of want to move on to their own question and have something in mind. But you’re right. I agree. I think that it’s one of our flaws that we do not do a better job of following up on each other’s questions and pushing back and say, “Look, you just said this, but you either didn’t answer the question the person just asked or it’s completely different than something you said on another occasion. How do you explain that?”

Preet Bharara:              So wrote an article along with Maggie Haberman, also former guest on the show, talking about how Donald Trump is used to meeting challenges with bluster and force. I just want to read you a couple of sentences because I think they’re kind of extraordinary. You folks wrote, “Mr. Trump’s performance on the national stage in recent weeks has put on display the traits that democrats and some republicans consider so jarring. The profound need for personal praise, the propensity to blame others, the lack of human empathy, the pension for rewriting history, the disregard for expertise, the distortion of facts, the impatience with scrutiny or criticism.” And then you go on to say, “For years skeptics expressed concern about how he would handle a genuine crisis threatening the nation. And now they know.”

Peter Baker:                 I think that pretty much says it. It’s because he’s on stage now so much every day, an hour or two hours a day, and because in fact, as he points out, the ratings are higher, I think Americans are seeing him in his totality as a president. And you can’t say he’s new anymore. He’s been there now three years. He’s had as much experience at being president as only a handful of people in the country. So this is who he is. This is how he governs. And I think that the traits that have made him strong in other circumstances just aren’t suited necessarily for this one. Why is he a strong president? Well, he’s a strong president because in some ways he likes to have a foe, a foil, an enemy, an adversary, somebody he can go against. Whether it be Hillary Clinton or Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer. And he can give them derogatory nicknames. That’s in his element. That’s where he feels most comfortable. That’s where he feels most confident. That’s where manages to set the tone of the dialogue. He commands the dialogue in a way that nobody else can, partly because he’s president and partly because of the force of his approach.

Peter Baker:                 It doesn’t work with a virus. It doesn’t work with a pandemic. He can’t tweet it away. He can’t bully it away. He can’t talk it away. And I think that the skillset that you look for in a leader at a moment of crisis like this is a mix of confidence and surety and reassurance, but also leveling with the American people and explaining to them just how serious it really is and finding a way to connect with the people who are suffering. It’s really interesting. The people he brought in or talked to on conference calls in the last few weeks have all been for the most part corporate executives. People from the cruise boat industry or the hospital industry or the sports commissioners just the other day. We haven’t seen a lot of discussion about individual families who’ve lost somebody now or who are sick. We haven’t seen any demonstration of the front line workers. He talks about it a little bit, but he hasn’t called them or brought them in in a way that made it visible. That’s not where he feels most comfortable I think.

Preet Bharara:              To the extent he talks about his own expertise and he boasts about how he knows better than the generals and he knows a lot about pandemics, do you believe that’s a sincerely held view or is that just showmanship on his part? I mean does he think that he knows better about the proper course than Dr. Fauci because Dr. Fauci is part of the deep state or what?

Peter Baker:                 Yeah, that’s a good question and it requires getting into his head a little bit more than probably I am. But I think you’re right. I think he has shown repeatedly over the years that he believes he knows better than, and you fill in the blank. You mentioned the generals. I know about war than the generals. Well, he obviously never served so how does he know more about war than the generals? How do you know more about ISIS than-

Preet Bharara:              Yes. He says it. We all hear him say it. But do you think he believes it or is he just saying it to project strength?

Peter Baker:                 I don’t know. Maybe. I’m loath to say what I don’t know and I’m not sure I guess. He has a bombastic quality to him. He always going to brag about being the most and the biggest and the first. How much of that he really believes and how much of that is from some need to project, I don’t know. It’s a good question.

Preet Bharara:              I should point out that we’re recording this on Monday, April 6th and it won’t be available for a few days so maybe something with the storyline will change, but one of the reasons I’m asking is that there’s been an extraordinary debate out in public and certainly behind the scenes on treatment for the coronavirus. And there is this drug called hydroxychloroquine that I understand, and you can enlighten us more, has been the subject of debate, whether or not it’s something that should be recommended for people. I know personally that there are doctors in this country and it’s been reported doctors in other countries who are prescribing it in a controlled way to people who have been hospitalized for coronavirus. The president seems very, very bullish on it. I mean so bullish that some commentators cynically speculate that he has some financial interest in the drug company that makes it.

Recording:                    As you know it’s a great malaria drug. It’s worked unbelievably. It’s a powerful drug on malaria and there are signs that it works on this. Some very strong signs.

Preet Bharara:              Do you find it extraordinary that there is basically in the White House briefing room sort of an open dispute between Dr. Fauci and what his view is of the efficacy of hydrochloroquine and what the president says about it? I mean that’s something that’s very specific to expertise. It’s not a general boast about knowing more than the generals.

Peter Baker:                 Yeah. No, exactly. And I’m writing about that today in fact. I think it is a big thing and a really telling moment. Do you want your medical advice from Dr. Fauci or from President Trump? And I think that it’s part of his anxiousness to find a way out of this. There must be something he can grab onto that is the miracle that will get us out of it. And I think that’s as much as anything else. I don’t know of any financial interest. I think it is as much as anything else, somebody’s told him this is a good thing, so he says, “Yes, let’s do that.” Because he wants to get this over with. And that’s a natural, understandable tendency, but there are processes for how you prescribe drugs. Even drugs that have been used before successfully for other ailments. And it may be that this is a good thing for coronavirus. As you say, a number of doctors are using it and there have been anecdotal evidence of some possible good effects. But it hasn’t gone through the process. And to watch him and Dr. Fauci up there every day … And even yesterday on Sunday, he wouldn’t even let Dr. Fauci answer the question because he already knew what Dr. Fauci would say.

Recording:                    And would you also weigh in on this issue of hydroxychloroquine? What do you think about this and what is the medical evidence?

Recording:                    You know how many times he’s answered that question? Maybe 15. 15 times. You don’t have to ask the question.

Recording:                    He’s your medical expert, correct?

Recording:                    He’s answered that question 15 times.

Peter Baker:                 A little more caution would probably go a longer way, but I think that he gets up there and says what do you got to lose? Well, that’s not a scientific way of looking at it.

Preet Bharara:              I think you’ve hit it on the head. And I was thinking as you were speaking that it’s all about the role of caution. And this president has none. And he has no training in caution. So in the same way that lawyers are cautious and like to be rigorous and careful about what certain statutes mean or how viable certain arguments are, doctors are the same way and they proceed with caution. And the same with clinical trials for drugs. I mean, I think to myself sometimes how interesting it would be if Donald Trump was in one of these other professions as opposed to the hotel business or the casino business. Any time you go to get a medical procedure of any kind of seriousness, even of the vast, vast, vast likelihood is that you’re going to emerge from it fine. Colonoscopy, getting an amnio is something that is mostly okay. And don’t take my word for it. Follow the medical advice on being cautious myself right now. But I’ve been struck when I have gone and had procedures where the doctor is not prepared to say that you are going to be fine and signals that you could die from this ordinary procedure.

Preet Bharara:              And that’s because the ethics of that profession prescribes caution. And you never want to say never because there are times, extraordinary, unusual, and frequent where the things go bad. Now, imagine what the president’s bedside manner would be if he were a doctor administering those procedures. So I think a little bit you’ve hit the nail on the head.

Peter Baker:                 Well look, he himself said the other day, I’m a cheerleader. I’m a cheerleader for the country is what he was talking about. But that is his nature. His nature is to say, yes, it will be done, even if it won’t be. And he may be right here. We just don’t know. And it may be that a month from now or two months from now after some more scientific look at this, the scientists all come out and say yeah, let’s do it. This is the right thing. Or this is the right thing in these circumstances. Or maybe not these, but these. And he’ll no doubt claim that he knew all along if that’s the way it turned. But he doesn’t want to wait for the process. Now, we are in an emergency situation. The argument would be medical bureaucrats are still bureaucrats and maybe they need to be pushed a little more to be a little bit more daring in an emergency situation rather than … That would be the argument you would hear from, say Rudy Giuliani who I think was quoted as saying that in the Washington Post this morning, and some of these other non doctors who are apparently advising the president on this.

Peter Baker:                 And you could sort of understand that, but this is the president. It’s not just a TV commentator. This is the president of the United States and there are consequences to what a president says and that’s why most presidents are usually very cautious about stuff like this. Because they don’t want to be out there giving advice that may or may not be good advice for everybody. It may be good advice for 80%, but we don’t know. And it’s not his expertise. I think there’s a risk in having a president prescribe medication.

Preet Bharara:              Do you think Dr. Fauci’s job is in jeopardy at all?

Peter Baker:                 Probably not. He’s got such stature, he’s got such gravitas that it would be hard for me to imagine a president trying to get rid of him. He actually has a civil servant job. My understanding is I don’t think he can be literally fired from it. He could be sidelined though and we might not necessarily have an announcement or a big confrontation about it. And I think that’s why you watch him, he’s playing such an interesting role right now. And as I watch, seeing him on television, and I know him a little bit from years ago, but not very well, you watch him trying to on the one hand not hold back giving his professional opinion when he’s asked. On the other hand he’s clearly trying not to get in the president’s grill so ostentatiously that it does get him cut out. He’s trying to preserve his viability within the system that he’s got because it’s better that he be in there than not. That would be my guess is his rationale or his thinking about it.

Peter Baker:                 But boy it’s a tough position to be in because, you’re right, he is from the president’s point of view part of the deep state.

Preet Bharara:              Yeah. I suppose if he wanted to have a reason to fire him he could just ask Rod Rosenstein to write a memo of some sort.

Peter Baker:                 Yeah, well, you know. I mean-

Preet Bharara:              I mean, I’m joking, but he’s not beyond creating … Look, they just fired the captain of that … Was it aircraft carrier?

Peter Baker:                 Yeah, aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt. And what he had done was he wrote a letter. Didn’t publicize it. He wrote a letter inside, but it was not classified. Saying basically, we need help. And it then leaked. And the Navy secretary is saying, well he should have known it would leak and therefore he was either careless or intending to bring the Navy into a bad light. But I think firing him only … It seemed to upset his crew anyway who clearly were cheering and on his side when he was brought off the ship. And I think that the message that they sent is no dissent allowed. That’s the danger of an action like that. Even if the captain didn’t necessarily follow the chain of command the proper way, the message that people are taking from that is don’t speak up and make everybody look bad.

Preet Bharara:              Lots of folks have been chronicling all the ways in which the administration seems to have been caught flat footed and didn’t have tests in place, and didn’t have proper information in place. And there are some things that were positive to do, including what seems to have been not a highly successful but at least partially successful ban on travel from China fairly early on. And because this is a political year and because the actors here we’re talking about are political figures, there’s an attempt at some justification on the part of the allies of the president. One of the things that you’re starting to hear now is part of the reason we were behind the curve, and to the extent there’s an argument we were unprepared, they say it was that Trump was distracted by impeachment. Now, you have a unique perspective on this. You covered the Clinton impeachment. Isn’t there some fairness to that argument?

Peter Baker:                 Well, it’s interesting. The president himself rejects that argument ironically. He was asked about that the other day.

Preet Bharara:              He kind of has to because he can’t say that he can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.

Peter Baker:                 Yeah, exactly. But look, let’s just say that that’s true, that he was distracted and diverted, and there’s no question that we know from that period he was certainly focused intently on impeachment. And that has always been the consequence or trade off of any of these kind of big political confrontations like this. Certainly that was true with Bill Clinton’s impeachment in the 1998-99 period is danger of taking your eye off the ball on other things. If that were true in this case, it still doesn’t then explain what happened after February 5th because that’s when the senate voted. The senate voted to acquit him on February 5th and we saw through the entire month of February and into March and clear impression of a president who didn’t think that the coronavirus was going to be the big threat that it turned out to be. There’s no question I think that when you do an impeachment you have to be aware that you are going to consume the political system. That nothing else is going to get through necessarily. At least you can’t count on it getting through. But of course in this case it was over by February 5th.

Preet Bharara:              Will this response to the coronavirus be what people remember about this term of the president?

Peter Baker:                 It’s interesting right. The last three years have hardly been dull and you would have thought-

Preet Bharara:              They have not been.

Peter Baker:                 Right. We would have thought that this year would be fought out on the ground of how good the economy was or the Mueller investigation or the impeachment or what to do about North Korea or all these different really big, big issues and big moments we’ve had over these last three years. And now it seems all about this. If the experts are right, I don’t see how it’s not going to be all about this by fall because the economy will not be all the way back, even under the best of scenarios that people have outlined. So yeah, suddenly his … I think he knows that. I think he knows his presidency’s on the line. That’s one reason, in answer to your earlier question, he’s out there every day. He’s fighting for his presidency as well as trying to provide whatever leadership he can for the country. He knows everything else before, in a way, doesn’t matter now nearly as much as what happens now.

Preet Bharara:              It’s very funny, speaking of the space time continuum, as we were earlier. I was going to ask you the question half seriously, which was longer ago, the Trump impeachment or the Clinton impeachment?

Peter Baker:                 They both feel like 20 years ago don’t they?

Preet Bharara:              They both about 20 years ago right?

Peter Baker:                 Yeah. It’s amazing how … Trump era years, it’s like dog years. Like every day is a year unto itself.

Preet Bharara:              There’s something you said that was interesting I think back … I don’t know if it was in writing, or you said it somewhere. But it was something along the lines of presidencies can often be defined by unscripted moments. And I think you were referring to the Bush administration and there was that moment right after 9/11 when George W. Bush came to ground zero and he stepped up on some rubble and he said something like-

Recording:                    And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.

Peter Baker:                 Yep.

Preet Bharara:              And it marked a high point of his presidency. And I was thinking about that and I think at the other end of the spectrum, another unscripted moment, offhand remark by George W. Bush marked probably the lowest point of his presidency when, in the midst of Katrina, he said-

Recording:                    And Brownie you’re doing a heck of a job.

Preet Bharara:              And in some ways that was the high point and the low point of his presidency. But they were both unscripted moments. And here you have a president who every day has like-

Peter Baker:                 He’s all unscripted.

Preet Bharara:              All unscripted. So what does that do to your theory of unscripted moments and defining of presidencies in this case?

Peter Baker:                 One of the things is, going back to our earlier conversation, because there’s so many unscripted moments, the one that would stand out in any other presidency and be talked about and debated for days and weeks is overshadowed by the next day by something else. So no one of them ever seems to sink in in the same way as you’re doing a heck of a job Brownie or the people who knocked these buildings down will hear from all of us. Those moments rang so resonantly because they were so against the scripted, disciplined words we usually hear from a president. And here, how many things has he said in the last few weeks that by themselves would have been a defining moment for another president? The question is that one of the probably, or some of them, or the totality of them will be. We just don’t know which one yet. Which one will end up standing out? He’s being held account repeatedly for some of the things he said early on about the coronavirus that seemed like he didn’t take it very seriously. It’ll all go away. It miraculously will go away. Some of those, you’re already starting to see in the political ads. How much will that sink in then as a memory of his presidency versus any of the others? I don’t know yet. I don’t know which one that’ll be.

Preet Bharara:              Do you think it matters … And every time I think about this issue, I feel like it’s a terrible thing to think about the deaths of people in this country, all innocent, from the coronavirus through a partisan lens. Because it happens to be the case so far that the brunt of it is being felt in urban areas. In part that’s natural. Science tells you that, with respect to this, where there’s population density there’s more transmission of the disease. And those tend to be blue areas and democratic voting areas. And the places that are strong for Trump have not felt the impact yet. And I find that to be a horrifying, but necessary observation. Do you think some of the outcome of this and how the president decides to react, not just what the reaction of the public will be to him, will depend on those kinds of political considerations?

Peter Baker:                 Well, I don’t know. It’s a good question. I think that I’m not an expert on the virus. What I read suggests that it’s only a matter of time til it hits other places as well and that while New York and New Jersey and parts of California and so forth got it early doesn’t necessarily mean that other places aren’t going to get it. We’ll see. Look, the president actually seems to be pretty engaged on this, even though it’s a blue area. He’s from New York. When he’s talked about it lately in any kind of human way, he’s talked about it in the sense of his own upbringing in Queens. I know that hospital, I know the people there, I now have a friend from New York who’s in the hospital. So I think that while he’s never going to win New York politically, he does seem to be quite engaged on the fact that he needs to do something to save New York. And I just don’t know where it’s going to go from here.

Peter Baker:                 I mean, Florida may be a pretty big hotspot soon because of the spring breakers and the age of the population and the fact that they didn’t close down earlier. I don’t know. If that’s the case, that’s a pretty important state for him. And I think the people of … New York is just unique in America. It is America’s city in a lot of ways. A lot of people in America may not be from there, but they’re watching what’s happening there with a great deal of pain for the suffering that they’re seeing on television. And that was true after 9/11. And I think it’s true today.

Preet Bharara:              What’s the actual role that Vice President Pence is playing and does Donald Trump trust him?

Peter Baker:                 Yeah, that’s a good question. Look, Pence actually runs the task force meetings. The president doesn’t attend them, at least not from start to finish. Pence runs them and he’s trying to coordinate the information from the different agencies and make sure everybody’s, to the best possible way, staying on the same page. I mean, he’s doing what a chief of staff or a coordinator would do. Remember this is a White House that didn’t have a chief of staff for three weeks during the height of this. The president fired Mick Mulvaney, his acting chief of staff, on March 6th and it wasn’t til just last Tuesday that Mark Meadows, his replacement, officially started the job. So Pence I think is playing as much of a coordinator role as he can. But I think he was originally going to be the front man for this. That obviously is not the case anymore. He does say the things that you would normally expect a president to say. He’s not getting in fights with governors. He’s not arguing with questions. He’s not prescribing medication. He’s actually taking a calm, measured, here’s how serious it is, but we will get through it. I mean, I see Pence and I see what I’ve seen in other presidents in that sense.

Preet Bharara:              He’s kind of a like movie president in that way. He intones with proper sobriety the things he’s supposed to be saying. But of course that always follows five minutes of praise for the president.

Peter Baker:                 Yes. Well he understands his system that he’s in. The system he’s in requires it seems that you have to start off by saying all the good things the president has done. But beyond that he sticks very carefully obviously to the script. He’s very disciplined, Pence is. He’s not rattled. He’s not thrown off course.

Preet Bharara:              There was that one example of, I’ve forgotten it now exactly, from a week or two ago where the president gets asked a question, what do you have to say to people who are concerned and scared, and he said it was a nasty question, you’re a terrible journalist.

Recording:                    I say that you’re a terrible reporter. That’s what I say. I think it’s a very nasty question and I think it’s a very bad signal that you’re putting out to the American people.

Preet Bharara:              Pence was asked the precise same question a few minutes later and he gave a standard politician’s answer. You would think it wouldn’t be that hard.

Peter Baker:                 It’s not hard. That’s a softball question to a politician. Rather than a nasty question it was actually-

Preet Bharara:              Imagine how Bill Clinton would have answered that question. I feel your pain.

Peter Baker:                 Absolutely. Or George Bush by the way. Those two presidents in particular, of the ones I’ve covered anyway, are the most emotive, the most connected to human reactions. And Pence is less emotive, but he at least gave the answer that you would normally have heard, which is in effect, I hear your pain, I get it, we understand how horrible this is and we will get through this. That’s the message that you would normally hear from a president or politician in this kind of circumstance.

Recording:                    I would say do not be afraid, be vigilant. All the experts tell us that the risk of serious illness to the average American for the coronavirus is low. But we need every American to put into practice the president’s coronavirus guidelines, 15 days to slow the spread.

Preet Bharara:              I’m going to ask you one more sort of shrink question about the president and then probably not that many more. Do you think that Donald Trump is actually trying to do the right thing in this crisis or is he more concerned about his own personal standing? Or does he think those two things are the same?

Peter Baker:                 Well, that’s a good question. He has said that in effect in the past that his success is good for the country. And there’s no question he has at times equated his own political standing with the health of the country in a broader sense. So it would not surprise me if he saw these things as married together.

Preet Bharara:              You mentioned other presidents that you’ve covered and you have a deep understanding and you’ve written multiple books about not just presidencies but other matters. Do this thought experiment. How would this pandemic of this scale and this size have been handled differently or the same by say George W. Bush or Clinton or Obama?

Peter Baker:                 We think about that a lot actually. I do. And I want to say that it’s very possible that any president under the best of circumstances, the most talented, the most adept, the smartest, most experienced presidents could have not been perfect in handling this. This is an extraordinary challenge and one that has clearly overwhelmed the system to some extent. And that goes beyond any single president. Having said that, other presidents did think about this. Colleague of ours, Matt Mosk from ABC wrote the other day about George W. Bush reading John Berry’s book in 2005. The John Berry book wrote about the influenza pandemic of 1918. And after reading that book he sat down with his homeland security advisor and said, “We’ve got to start really thinking about this as a possibility. It might not happen on our watch, but it’s going to happen on somebody’s.” And he really pushed the system under him to think about pandemic preparation.

Peter Baker:                 So in that sense, I think other presidents did think ahead. With this president, you’ve heard him say, who could have imagined this could have happened? Well, a lot of people imagined this could have happened. But it wasn’t on his radar screen and therefore it wasn’t something that he was ready for, that he was prepared for. So I think our understanding of this virus changed by the day, by the week. It’s possible other presidents would have likely maybe also have underestimated just how bad it was going to get at times. But I do think that others would have been more disciplined about how they handled it than President Trump. As in less ad hoc, less fly by the seat of his pants.

Preet Bharara:              At least. Well, you said something more generally about the differences between White Houses. I think you said something like you assume there were certain basic things about any White House that were the same, democrat or republican, structurally and otherwise. And this administration has shown to you that that’s not true.

Peter Baker:                 Yeah. No, that’s true.

Preet Bharara:              It’s fundamentally different. How do you mean?

Peter Baker:                 Yeah. That’s exactly right. By the time President Obama was leaving office, I actually had begun thinking well, it’s too much to say they’re all alike exactly, but I covered three at that point. I’m like, I see commonalities. I see things are the same and party only matters on the edges to some extent. The types of problems that most presidents confront and the range of solutions they have in front of them are really often not that different in the broadest sense. And the constraints on them of the system, how they can operate, the lessons they end up learning, feel very familiar from president to president at times. And I used to boggle the mind to hear Barack Obama say words I had heard George W. Bush say. But in fact, he often did. And he probably might not recognize that he did, but he did because they would experience the same dynamics about the job. One thing that President Bush was asked by an aide as he was leaving office after eight years is what has surprised you the most about the job? And he said, “How little power I have.” And by that he meant you come into the presidency thinking you’re the king practically. You can do anything.

Peter Baker:                 And in fact there’s so many constraints on a president’s ability to act and you don’t really quite recognize it. Partly because of the media. Because we focus so intently on one person and yet we have a big system, three branches of government. Anyway, President Obama basically said the same thing when he was asked late in his term what surprised you the most. And I’ve forgotten his exact answer but it was pretty similar. So Trump comes along and before him I thought well, I’ve seen this show a couple of times. And Trump has basically thrown out the rule book. He’s thrown out the play book. This is a very different movie than any other president. And it’s partly because he doesn’t care that this is the way things have always been done and that’s one of the things that makes him popular with the people who like him is that they don’t want somebody who’s simply going along. They see him as a system crasher, as a disruptor, and that is what’s appealing about him. But it also of course has its trade offs in your ability to make the system work because the system is the system and no one president’s going to make it go away and you have to find ways of turning it to your policies and your priorities or you’re going to end up being at war with it. And I think he likes being at war with it.

Preet Bharara:              You’ve covered four presidents now as you’ve said, and they’re all different. And some are more interesting than others. And some are, to the extent you have privately held political views, better or worse for the country. But as a journalist, indulge me in this other thought experiment. And you could only cover on president, which one would you pick?

Peter Baker:                 In one way you would have to say Trump because from a journalist’s point of view he is endlessly interesting. He is endlessly surprising. One thing that reporters hate are predictable events. The very definition of news is something that is not something you expected. And every day he gives you something you don’t expect. The trade off for journalists of course is the open hostility that he demonstrates toward our profession in a way that goes beyond … Again, you’ve been in public office, you know this. Any public official doesn’t like their press coverage a lot of the time and may have reasonable grounds to be upset. Certainly I heard plenty from Clinton and Bush and Obama that they didn’t particularly like our coverage at times. But this president goes much further of course than any of those in his hostility and the enemy of the people, fake news, all these kinds of things. So that wears on you. But as a journalist if you want to cover a big story, he’s a big story.

Preet Bharara:              Do you think that a lot of your colleagues would have the same answer?

Peter Baker:                 Probably. Yeah. I would say probably.

Preet Bharara:              It’s interesting for a lot of reasons. One of which is that you have a lot of folks who would pick Trump to cover even though it seems apparent that he loathes a lot of them.

Peter Baker:                 Yeah.

Preet Bharara:              I think it says something about their fortitude or the purity of wanting to cover things that are interesting. I don’t know what it says. I have to think about that some more, but I find it interesting.

Peter Baker:                 I think too many people think of journalists as if we’re political creatures like everybody else. We take sides. And some people think we’re too lefty or we’re too on the right or whatever they want to think. And in fact, our bias … And there’s bias. We’re all human. But the real bias of a journalist is we want a big story. We want a big story. That’s what we got into this for. The old cliché is the journalists are the ones who are riding to the sound of the guns. When you cover a hurricane and there’s a huge, big traffic jam of people escaping whatever city, the one car heading the opposite direction is the one with the journalist in it because we’re looking for the big story. And I mean, a hurricane’s not good for the country, but it’s a big story and you want to cover it. So in that sense, that’s how we look at it.

Preet Bharara:              I’m just thinking about the analogy maybe to criminal defense lawyers who don’t judge what kinds of cases they want to do based on how good or bad the conduct was. They want to do the big case. And if the big case is a double homicide, then the big case is a double homicide.

Peter Baker:                 Certainly they want to go and do the most interesting and challenging case. You don’t want to do a case you’ve done a million times before. You want something that would push you on the top of your game I would think.

Preet Bharara:              Yeah. So where do you think we’re headed? What can we expect as we have clearly many weeks if not months of this being the dominant story? How many flip flops are we going to see the president engage in? Who’s going to be up, who’s going to be down? Do you think Florida will get its act together? Do some mild predicting for us.

Peter Baker:                 One thing we should have all learned is 2016 is that predicting is the worst business in the world to be in.

Preet Bharara:              I didn’t ask you who’s going to win the election. I guess let me ask a different way. You’ve seen crises before and you’ve covered a number of presidencies and you’ve covered this presidency pretty intently for three years. How does this arc play out? What can we expect the news to look like in the coming weeks?

Peter Baker:                 It’s a good question. The question is whether or not politically people get tired of the briefings. How long does it continue to hold people’s attention? How long are people going to listen to their leadership and authorities about what’s going on? I think when we first started some of these stay at home, close business, close school things, the original projections were let’s do it for a couple of weeks, and now if we’re really talking about not just weeks but possibly months, that’s a very different ask of society and you and I are lucky we can work out of our homes. A lot of Americans can’t. 11.7 million people are now applying for or on unemployment. That’s 50% higher than the worst week in the great recession of 2008. I mean it’s affected so many lives and I don’t know where this goes. The president isn’t wrong to say that the close down also has an impact on the society as well as the pandemic itself. And a lot of people are being hurt. As a newspaper, our job is try to bring the stories to life so that everybody understands them as best we can and everybody can then respond to them accordingly, but I don’t know how this story going to play out.

Peter Baker:                 It’s such a singular story right now. This happens from time to time when we go to war or we have a big terrorist event, but I’m trying to think of another story that was so dominated our news landscape for as long as it looks like this one is going to and it’s hard to think of a parallel.

Preet Bharara:              Yeah. I mean, I was seeing someone commenting that no matter what discipline you’re in in the press, if you’re a business reporter, a political reporter, a science reporter, a medical reporter, even a sports reporter, no matter what you’re doing, this is the main story of your life.

Peter Baker:                 Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Because it touches every part of our society. I was trying think of this too. I can’t think of another story in which almost every American in some way or another was affected in their daily life as a result. Terrorism was horrible and obviously there were parts of the country where life changed desperately after 9/11, but really there were parts of the country where it didn’t. And while it was an obsession or a passionate concern, it didn’t necessarily day in day out change people’s lives in Oklahoma or Idaho or Missouri or whatever. And this is changing everybody’s life no some level or another. Whether your kids are out of school, whether your job has disappeared, whether you just have to stay at home. And I can’t think of any story in our lifetime like it. And it’s really, really something. Our challenge as the news media is to rise to that occasion just like it’s the challenge of the political system.

Preet Bharara:              Peter Baker, thank you so much. Thank you for your writing, thank you for your service, and thank you for being on the show.

Peter Baker:                 Oh, thanks very much. Great talking to you. This has been terrific.

Preet Bharara:              The conversation continues for members of the Café Insider community. To hear the Stay Tuned bonus with Peter Baker and get the exclusive weekly Café Insider podcast and other exclusive content, head to café.com/insider. Right now you can try a Café Insider membership free for two weeks at café.com/insider.

Preet Bharara:              I’d like to end today’s show by highlighting a few more folks who are doing a lot of good right now. Last week I read a note from a doctor in Arizona who wrote so beautifully about making sure that patients in her hospital know that they’re not alone and know that they’re loved. Healthcare workers are rightly getting a lot of attention, as they should. In New York City, every day at 7 p.m. folks do what many others have done in cities and countries around the globe. They cheer for healthcare workers. It’s a daily gesture to show that their incredible sacrifice is noticed and appreciated. But there are lots of other folks doing good things too and I’d like to highlight some other people who aren’t medical professional and are still doing what they can to help. Because I find it inspiring, as I’m sure you do, to see that actions large and small can make a big difference in real people’s lives.

Preet Bharara:              Like Mario Salerno, a Brooklyn based landlord, who decided to wave April rent for all tenants in his 18 residential buildings. That’s 200 to 300 tenants total. When asked about his decision that would probably cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars, Mr. Salerno said, “My concern is everyone’s health. I told them just to look out for your neighbor and make sure that everyone has food on their table.” And it’s not just landlords. There are small businesses like locksmiths who have stated that for the time being they will now provide locksmith services for evictions. And there are larger companies too like Airbnb who recently announced that they’d provide free or subsidized housing for healthcare workers. A decision partly driven by hosts on the site who reached out to the company asking how they could volunteer their space to people on the front line of fighting COVID-19. And their goal is to provide housing to 100,000 medical and relief workers.

Preet Bharara:              And there are so many others too who are making donations of time and money. There are young people who are offering to deliver groceries to elderly folks in their communities and the list goes on and on. As this crisis continues to touch all of our lives in different ways, it’s uplifting to see how we can all play a part to help each other in this trying time. I say this a lot, but I really mean it. Be kind to each other. Right now the world could use a little more kindness, empathy, and generosity. And if you’re in a position to extend a helping hand, do it. You won’t regret it. Be well and stay safe.

Preet Bharara:              Well that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, Peter Baker.

Preet Bharara:              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 hashtag, #askPreet. 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 staytuned@cafe.com. Stay Tuned is presented by Café. The Executive Producer is Tamara Sepper. The senior audio producer is David Tatasciore, and the CAFE team is Julia Doyle, Matthew Billy, David Kurlander, Calvin Lord, Sam Ozer-Staton, and Geoff Isenman. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m Preet Bharara. Stay tuned.