Baker, Glasser and Marcus, who worked together at the Washington Post during President Trump’s first term, described an authoritarian takeover of the country.
Three of the country’s top political journalists described President Donald Trump on Wednesday in Jackson as an unreliable fact witness and characterized him as “Nixon’s revenge.”
Trump is accomplishing “things that Nixon was unable to do,” said Susan Glasser, a staff writer and columnist for The New Yorker. He is undertaking “the deconstruction of the post-Watergate state,” she said, dismantling “everything that was put in place” to prevent a recurrence of Nixon’s crimes.
Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times and Glasser’s husband, said Trump is “a completely unreliable fact witness [who] will change a story.” Trump makes for “a fascinatingly frustrating interview,” said Baker, who interviewed the president with Glasser twice after his 2020 election defeat.
Glasser and Baker spoke as former Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus moderated an hour-long conversation at the Center for the Arts in Jackson, hosted by the Jackson Hole Book Festival. The three worked together at the Post years ago and Marcus, who splits her time between Jackson and Maryland, is a festival board member.
Baker and Glasser referenced their book “The Divider,” about the first term, which, Glasser said, reveals “the essence of Trump.” For their book, the couple found willing interview subjects — “all Republican … from inside the room,” Glasser said. Those who talked right after Trump’s first term likely did so assuming he was not coming back.
The situation today is different.
“There’s a real fear factor in Washington,” Baker said, including sources’ fear of physical harm. “It reminds us of Moscow,” where the couple was posted from 2001-2004 as Vladimir Putin was consolidating power.
Sources “are afraid,” Baker said. “They fear retribution. It’s hard to blame them.”
Trump is laying down conditions to unravel democracy, Glasser said, undermining the institutions that uphold it while leaving their shells as facades.
Trump ‘most transparent’
Baker reasoned that Trump was “the most transparent” of the five presidents he has covered, because what he talked about during his first term — like eliminating courts or judicial authority — Trump is trying to achieve in his second.
That, and a discussion about the coverage of former President Joe Biden’s age and acuity, were two moments of respite in the evening of critique. Baker said “no” when Marcus asked whether the press had dropped the ball in reporting on Biden’s mental state, then qualified his remarks.
“They hated our age stories,” Baker said of the Biden White House’s reaction to Times reporting. “We wrote about this a lot.”
Biden’s slow decline didn’t stand out in day-to-day comparisons, he said. Baker recalled a speech Biden delivered that didn’t strike any of his regular observers as unusual. But a colleague who had not attended a Biden speech in person for a year clearly saw a change in the then-president’s capabilities.