The president of the United States goading — in fact, threatening — a state official to swing votes his way sounds like something out of a pulpy political thriller, but it's actually reality. President Donald Trump called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger this weekend and tried to muscle him into overriding the will of Georgia voters. Boston College historian Heather Cox Richardson has been tracking the Trump presidency through her newsletter, Letters From An American. She discussed Trump's phone called and the broader efforts of some Republicans to overturn the presidential election with GBH All Things Considered host Arun Rath. This transcipt has been edited for clarity.
Arun Rath: Max Boot of The Washington Post describes this latest recording as completing a trilogy that reveals Trump's range of abuses. First there was the Access Hollywood tape bragging of sexual assault. Then there was the call with the Ukrainian president seeking dirt on then-candidate Joe Biden. Now this. Before we dig into the details, in broadbrush, what does this reveal about the Trump presidency for you in its final days?
Heather Cox Richardson: I think it's important to remember that this is simply the way that Trump does business. One of the things you didn't mention, something that was revealed by John Bolton's book, is that Trump actually put a similar sort of pressure on the leaders of China to go ahead and come up with an agricultural deal that would help him in the middle of the country to win this election. So one of the things that this says is that this is who he is. Character is destiny. This is a man who sees the world as transactional and believes that what he really needs to do is, as you say, muscle people and threaten people into doing what he wants to do. One of the things that interests me, though, that we're not talking about very much is why. Why is it so important to him that he is willing to go to these lengths, as an older man, simply to do anything he can, including destroy American democracy, to stay in office? Why is it so important to him? He's the first president ever to do this. So what is that driving him to do something so extraordinary?
Rath: Let's talk about that, because I'm curious as well. In hearing these tapes, it sounds like Trump actually believes these things about what he calls election fraud. Do you have a sense of what the motivation is there?
Richardson: Yes, I do think he believes that at this point. It's not true. I mean, we need to emphasize that this is absolutely not true. But Trump and the people around him in the Republican Party who are enabling him these days have really put themselves into a bubble into which reality cannot penetrate. You can see that in his insistence on things that have been repeatedly debunked and were debunked again by election officials in Georgia. So I think he lives in his own bubble. One can speculate about why he doesn't want to leave office. I do think the fact that once he leaves office, people will be able to indict him - something his administration has made a great deal about, that as a sitting president, he cannot be indicted — I don't think we can overlook that. The other issue, though, that I think is really important here is to recognize that this is not just Trump, that he is certainly trying to go ahead and remain in office, but there are a lot of members of the current Republican Party who are enabling him and are supporting that.
Let's be very clear: What Trump did on that tape is the most extraordinary — and I don't say that lightly — the most extraordinary attack on American democracy in our history since 1861. The fact that the president of the United States would try to overturn the will of the American people with essentially the assumption that a Democrat cannot win an election is a blow to our democracy from which it cannot recover unless we go ahead and address this issue now and address the fact that we've got ourselves a real problem if our politicians are willing to say, oh yeah, that's not such a big deal that the president tried to overturn an election.
Rath: For this kind of conduct, which is quite possibly illegal for the reasons you talked about, as well as improper and wrong, what is the appropriate remedy? Would it be impeachment or criminal charges sometime after Jan. 20? What should be done?
Richardson: Let's be clear that I am not a lawyer, nor am I a prosecutor. What I am is a historian, and I can tell you what will happen if we don't do anything, because we have been here and done that, and that is that this is very similar to what happened in the American South after the Civil War, when Democrats at that point in the South decided that it would not be reasonable for Republicans to win elections. They managed to suppress their votes in the late 1860s and early 1870s, and finally to go ahead after 1876 and make it so that a Republican could never again win office. When you do that, when you make sure you are a one party state, what happens, first of all, is that your government loses legitimacy for people who don't believe in it. But also you end up without anybody to stop corruption, because there is no oversight without any way to make the people who are in power have interest in developing the country. If you remember, the South after the Civil War, during Reconstruction and right up until the years after World War II, was an incredible economic and social backwater because of that political system. So the idea that we could delegitimize either party, Republican or Democrat, basically says that you can't have a democracy in this country any longer. If that happens, we will end up with an oligarchy that does whatever it wants because we will not be able to stop corruption within it. That's really quite similar to what we're looking at in places like Russia.
Rath: Beyond that, how do you see this playing out once Trump is actually out of office? Getting back to the why question, for the Republicans who are supporting this, a substantial number of them in in Congress, where do they go from here after Donald Trump is out of office? What's the path?
Richardson: If you can divorce yourself from the the moment we're in right now and look at it as a historian, it's very interesting. I can't possibly tell you what's going to happen. I can tell you what's happened in the past and what might change our future. If you look at why things played out the way they did during Reconstruction, basically the Democrats in the South had gotten so strong that the Republicans in the North said, whatever, we can work on this. They turned to other issues, and of course the entire country has paid for that ever since. Now, one of the things that we're paying for now in the present is the fact that we permitted Richard Nixon in 1972 and1973 to go ahead and commit a crime against the United States and then cover it up and be pardoned for it. There was never any reckoning there, and we got this idea somehow that the president was above the law. I maintain that had we gone ahead — and who knows how this would have played out, of course, because we don't know the road that was not taken — but if, in fact, Nixon had had to stand trial for his apparent crimes —again, I'm not a lawyer — I don't think we would have had things following up like the Iran-Contra affair that ended up putting a lot of people in prison, because people like John Poindexter and Oliver North and the advisers in the Reagan administration would have recognized that they, too, could go to prison. I think that idea of returning us to the concept that everybody in America is answerable to the law is crucial in this moment, because if we don't maintain that people must answer to the law, that we are all equal before the law, in fact, as Abraham Lincoln said, we basically have given up the whole game.
