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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Today is Donald Trump's last day in office. The final Gallup Poll of his presidency finds his lowest approval rating. Just 34% plummeting from 46% on election day. Gallup also says Trump has had the lowest average approval rating of any president since Gallup started polling after World War II. Trump's average approval rating was 41% of the people polled.

It's interesting to look down that list and see the next most unpopular president on average as measured by Gallup, two actually, were Harry Truman and Jimmy Carter at 45%, then Ford and Obama at 47%, then W. Bush and Nixon at 49%. That's average approval over the course of their terms.

Those presidents who averaged above 50% approval during their terms were Reagan at 52%, Clinton and Johnson at 55%, George H W Bush at 60%, and Dwight Eisenhower average 65% approval during his eight years in office, 1953 to 1960. Different president, but also very different times and certainly different from Donald Trump's lowest average, 41% approval over the last four years.

I happened to see that Gallup chart, thanks to Susan Glasser who tweeted it. Susan's working on the final edition of her weekly New Yorker Magazine column called Letter from Trump’s Washington. How does anybody close out such a column when the last day ends with 25,000 national guard troops patrolling the streets against domestic terrorists who'd like to attack the Capitol in the outgoing president's name and when the last day coincides with the country hitting 400,000 coronavirus deaths and the death rate accelerating after he spent most of the year downplaying the threat.

Susan Glasser is also a CNN Global Affairs Analyst and coauthor of The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James Baker. With the Letter from Trump’s Washington column about to be retired, Susan Glasser is an inappropriate guest for this last day of the Trump administration. Hi, Susan, always great to have you welcome back to WNYC.

Susan Glasser: Hey Brian, thank you so much for having me. I'm sitting here typing and welcome your thoughts on this difficult task of summing it all up.

Brian: Well, and we'll open up the phones for our listeners because Susan is doing that on Twitter as well. She might as well get this quality audience and not just random Twitter readers. Helps Susan Glasser right her final Letter from Trump’s Washington column. She is soliciting that help, inviting readers thoughts on Twitter, on what she says were the most significant, memorable or simply bizarre moments of the Trump administration. Chime in if you'd like at 646- 435-7280. Letter from Trump’s Washington, how's Trump's Washington today, Susan?

Susan: Well, it's interesting when I asked people to send me their thoughts on that, I've received thousands of responses, which tells you, once again, and even on this final, full day that Trump is in the office, it's a unique, stressful combination, I think, of the anxious and the absurd that really is something we'll have a hard time explaining to our future self. This high, low combination. He spent the presidency firing the secretary of state on Twitter. That really happened.

Brian: How many times?

Susan: Also sort of dancing to the village people. [chuckles] It's just a unique moment when we've had an American demagogue as our leader. The city right now is like I've never seen it. It's basically deserted. People are hunkered down in their homes. If you go anywhere near downtown Washington, official Washington, there's a level of security and military presence that is really almost without precedent, certainly, in modern times in Washington. It's Yuri.

When I was up at the Capitol last week for Trump's impeachment, his second impeachment, there was not only this enormous security and National Guard with rifles, but then you get inside the Capitol. Recently the scene of this horrific riot, and it's this strangely deserted thing. We're a country in distress between the pandemic and these political divisions that have turned violent. It's just something that it's almost a dystopian novel.

Brian: You mentioned dancing to the village people. I have a friend who asks, "Why does this president who has used homophobia as one of his brand items, why does he dance to the gay Anthem, Village People's YMCA at all his rallies?"

Susan: I have posed this question myself before many times. The thing is, is that Donald Trump is an irony-free zone. Arguably, one of his superpowers has been the fact that he somehow made himself immune to embarrassment. He, therefore, is more breathing in every possible way. That in some ways is why he has pushed and even exploded the boundaries of our politics, I think, because he can't be embarrassed to think that if your dad did it, you'd shrink in shame. Right?

Brian: Yes. let me ask you about one last-minute policy item before we get to some calls. One of your reporting specialties is national security and so maybe you can shed some light on this because I'm confused as to whether it's important or not. I see that Trump seems to have forced the last-minute appointment of a new general counsel for the NSA, the National Security Agency. Frankly, I don't know what it means, but some people seem to be reacting to this as some kind of poisoning the well for the Biden administration. Do you know anything about this?

Susan: Well, it's interesting actually. You saw even the speaker of the house, Nancy Pelosi, taking this very unusual step of intervening with this and calling the acting Secretary of Defense in an effort to stop it yesterday. That's not something that suggests business as usual or even a normal level of Trump's late-stage grifting. I think that's where you see the alarm because this is something that Democrats at the very top level are freaking out about, in general.

It hasn't gotten as much attention, understandably, because of the attack on the Capitol and Trump's attacks on trying to overturn the election results. What's been going on since the election at the Pentagon, in general, has raised all sorts of concerns with national security officials. Remember that Trump fired Mark Esper, his Secretary of Defense, right after the election thing. He wasn't sufficiently loyal in a fact, and has since installed, not just an acting Secretary of Defense, but a whole cast of characters who have ties on to Capitol Hill, to Devin Nunes and the effort to contest the Mueller investigation.

I think there's a worry, the NSA is one of the top intelligence agencies, and is this an effort to declassify information that Trump thinks would be embarrassing to Democrats? Is it an effort to have an unqualified Republican operative burrow in and stay past the duration of the Trump administration? Those are the questions that are being raised by that appointment.

Brian: Arturo in Colts Neck, you're on WNYC with Susan Glasser as she is preparing her last Letter from Trump’s Washington column for The New Yorker. Hi, Arturo.

Arturo: Hi, good morning. My comment is that the Trump four years started with an imagined carnage. The one he mentioned in his inaugural speech. Now it's ending with a real American carnage or two. One of the virus and the second one of the attack on Congress.

Brian: It's so true. It's a very good way to put it. Don't you think, Susan?

Susan: Yes. There's always been this sort of self-fulfilling prophecy aspect of that bizarre inaugural address four years ago. The thing is that what it signaled from the get-go was that the divider was not even going to seek to unite. That, in some ways, is the defining political characteristic, I think, of his presidency was this refusal ever to even pretend that he was aspiring to be the president of all Americans. He saw himself as the president of his minority of Americans. He catered to them politically, he governed through and for them. It was at the expense of the rest of the country, the majority of the country. I think that's what that bizarre inaugural address was really seeking to tell us in some way.

Brian: Yes. I mean, one way that I think of the past four years is that Trump was campaigning for re-election from day one. He took the tact that maximum polarization, infuriating as many people who lean right as possible, with him as their authoritarian-style savior in the script was his path to re-election. He played that card over and over and over again for four years straight, including even managing the COVID crisis as mostly a lever for more grievance which might have been a counter-intuitive bet for most people but not for him.

He did actually grow his vote total by 10 million people compared to 2016, but ultimately he gambled on government by extreme polarization, permanent polarization and he lost. How much would you agree with that as kind of one defining arch of the last four years?

Susan: Yes, I definitely agree with that, Brian. I think that Donald Trump is not only the most polarizing president that we've ever seen, but essentially, it was the hyper-politicization of everything. He had no governing agenda. Perhaps this wasn't a surprise at all from someone who came into the Republican party only opportunistically in order to run for president. Donald Trump was not a man who had an ideology. The only ideology of himself and promoting himself and winning in politics.

I think that that in the end, it's not that he had an approach to the pandemic, is that he had an approach to his presidential campaign. He, from the get-go, saw the pandemic as a terrible, unwelcome distraction that could wound his political fortunes. By the way, that also become, in some ways, the self-fulfilling prophecy. His failure to want to address this public health crisis and in fact his extreme denialism that it even was a crisis in the end is part of what doomed him politically.

I think that, to me, that's the striking thing. It's still hard to wrap our minds around it because it's actually unthinkable in some ways. Why would you run for president if you don't actually want to be president and do the job of president? I think that in the end, that's how we should understand Trump, that he had no interest. He wanted to be president without doing the things that a president does, without governing. That wasn't his interest. His interest was in being the president and winning the presidency again.

Brian: You know what's most troubling, maybe, to me, in that context as he leaves office and he's done having official power is not even what Trump himself did, but if we accept the premise that he is basically an authoritarian narcissistic conman, the number of Americans who are attracted to that. It's a chilling lesson about this country or about human nature in general or maybe both, or do you think that's just a New York biased blind spot analysis?

Susan: Well if it is, I guess I share it. All right, look,-

Brian: [crosstalk] You do write for The New Yorker.

Susan: -the truth is, is that if you look at polls, we didn't really process this information before Trump but there has been a worrying decline in democracy around the world over the last decade. That includes increases in the number of Americans expressing authoritarian views that predates the Trump presidency but of course is both accelerated and exacerbated by having as a leader someone who shared those views. It's not that we have never had an American demagogue before. It's that we haven't had one as president at least in modern times.

His willingness to, in fact, activate and trigger that authoritarianism that existed within a subset of a population I think has been the truly shocking takeaway for me. Did you really learn all that much about Donald Trump in the last four years, his personality, flaws, character? These were extremely well documented long before he became president. We didn't need the last four years to understand what kind of man Donald Trump was.

I think what we've learned that in a way is the more alarming and worrisome thing is about the American people, and that there are in fact millions of Americans who were actually willing to go to the extent of wanting to overturn an American election in order to keep Donald Trump in power, who have been willing to follow his lies about that election rather than to succumb to unwelcome truth. That, for me, is actually the big takeaway of the last few years.

Brian: Robinson in Manhattan, you're on WNYC with Susan Glasser from The New Yorker. Hi Robinson.

Robinson: Hi. How are you doing Brian? Nice to talk to you, Susan. Actually what I had to say very much goes into that. I've been a student of American history since I was a little kid, but one of the things that really these four years have shown us and really just opened the eyes for so many people is the fact that what a lot of people feel is to be American is to assimilate into this general idea and not allow for differences, not allow for people to express themselves and express their faith.

That there's one way to be American and I think that Trump has used that idea throughout his four years to really pummel any opposition. For me one of the defining moments was seeing little Valeria and her father drown in the Rio Grande just trying to come to this country to create a better life which is what this story was for so many people unless you were brought here by force. There are people who came to this country to create a better life for themselves and their families.

The fact that that is, as American as it seems, pushing out the people that come behind you is very a disturbing aspect of our history and I'm glad that so many people have had their eyes opened up to that. I just hope that it's American tradition that we can revert because it's gotten to the point now where we're having people-- Like you've said that demagogues running for president and that people are supporting that, it's an American narrative that we really have to change in people's minds and really educate them about the true history of this country.

Brian: Yes. I'm glad you called with this Robinson and you'd be interested to know and for everybody later in the show, we're going to do another last day of the Trump administration segment that focuses specifically on Trump's original sin as many people around here see it, which is using xenophobia to sell his brand in 2015, 2016, running right out of the gate on Mexicans are this, Mexicans are that and a total and complete ban on Muslims entering the country and how to dig out from that. We're going to do that as a separate later in the show. Robert in Queens, you're on WNYC with Susan Glasser from The New Yorker. Hi Robert?

Robert: Yes, good morning, Brian. I'm honored to get an opportunity to put my two cents in. George Bush Jr. attempted to try to use this line and I'm going to do it myself and I hope I don't screw it up but, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." If we allow someone else to come along in Donald Trump's footsteps and fool us again, our democracy is in grave danger.

Brian: Robert, you know you did better than George W. Bush did with that line because he did screw it up. He went, "Fool me twice and I don't know, I won't get fooled again," something.

Robert: I kind of like it. I kind of like the way he [unintelligible 00:18:36] it. I did.

Brian: Thank you very much. Robert asked a profound question, Susan, one that I don't think we can answer sitting here today, but will the horrors of the Trump administration chill the electorate from choosing someone like him again no matter what it is they may be attracted to in that next person or maybe not? Like we were talking about before, if it's divided the country into these camps, a significant minority of which finds this attractive then, who knows?

Susan: Well, that's right. The future is unknowable but we can say that having lived through four years which the unthinkable can and did happen on a very regular basis, that it should inject a norm of humility for us. We don't know what it holds and I think that was part of Trump's success in fact was that he was able to go from unthinkable to unthinkable and he often left his haters really struggling to defeat him as much as his supporters because he was willing to do and say and act on things that we just rarely gave him the possibility for.

Frankly, that's where-- Look at what in the election and since then, as perhaps certainly along with his Coronavirus denialism, I think you've got to rank it up there as among the most significant if not the most significant actions of his presidency, because he, first of all, the election was a much closer call for democracy than you can even conceive of given that 400,000 Americans are dead and everything that proceeded it.

What happened since the election, how did he get to the point where something like 77% of Republicans to this day, even after the storming of the Capitol, say in polls, that they do not believe Joe Biden was the legitimate president. That's got to leave people deeply concerned about where we are at as a country.

Brian: Carol in Manhattan WNYC. Hi Carol?

Carol: Hi, good morning. I think that we're missing the fact that most people vote for the president they deserve and the country has been suffering in silence like a weak child on life support and nobody has paid attention. The fact is, Donald Trump is a result of our lack of understanding of our basic civics, our basic democracy and our basic unwillingness to change and to accept the future, which is a majority-minority country. Singapore is a city that has an understanding of the way things have to work. We are a melting pot. Let's live it. Let's not just say it, let's live it. Otherwise, we get the people we deserve and that's Donald Trump.

We haven't spoken to the people of America for a long time. Presidents have not spoken truth to Americans. Forget about truth to power. Truth has been in short supply for a long time, and I miss it. I miss the truth. Thank you.

Brian: Thank you, Carol. Susan, what were you thinking listening to that call?

Susan: Look, I do think that untruth is a hallmark of this and almost all aspiring authoritarian regimes around the world. The trackers of The Washington Post are putting out their final numbers of Trump's misstatements and lies over the last four years and it's going to be over 30,000, something like 30,500 lies. By the way, an accelerating number too. I think that's one thing, if you have the sense that things got nuttier and nuttier, and that Trump spiraled down pretty radically in the course of his four years, I think there's some real evidence to agree with that.

A year ago, it was 15,000 lies at the end of 2019 until it doubled in just that final year in office. I do think that the lack of truth and the disinformation and misinformation will be remembered as a hallmark of Trump's presidency and also the way in which he bound his followers to him. I think that until there's some way of restoring a common truth in the country, it's very hard to imagine that there's going to be a common politics in the country that flows from that.

Brian: Kevin in Babylon, you're on WNYC with Susan Glasser. Hi, Kevin.

Kevin: Hi, how are you doing? I just want to talk about Trump as a New Yorker. I find him like most New Yorkers we're pretty obnoxious when it comes to being just who we are. If you travel or if you live in other parts of the country, everyone likes New Yorkers, or they hate them because they get pushed and shoved to get ahead and we're just obnoxious people. I think that played into how Trump was perceived in the country.

The other point is he's just a regular guy. He wasn't a politician. I actually would like to see more non-politicians in government to actually have term limits and have more people involved in government. I think we're talking about civic duty that we should all be striving for. I think if more normal people got involved,

Brian: There's a difference between non-politicians though, Kevin, isn't there? And "normal people" as you say. Donald Trump was never an average guy. He was a real estate mogul who inherited wealth and has been provocative, racist in all the ways that he's been provocative and racist and a conman in many people's eyes over the course of his career before the presidency. I don't know if you can really tag him with average New Yorker, can you?

Kevin: Well, it's just almost like an affront to me as a New Yorker because I've lived around the country. I also get upset when people talk about racism in New York. We're the most diverse city in the country. I just think we all-- It's not racist, I don't know, it's just that who you are, you treat everyone the same. If you treat someone poorly you can't go there right away for-- I don't know, it's a New Yorker attitude. Yes, he's not normal in a sense, but he's not like a politician. It's almost sad that this country embraced Biden because he's just a career politician that over history has shown-- He's made mistakes in his policy.

Harris brought it up during the debate, she was bashed in San Francisco. Well, he was against bashing her. There's a lot of things in history, but I just think that as-- I guess maybe Trump and maybe he is a new wave that could come because it just seems like our country, we couldn't challenge ourselves to have someone else in office, that we're reverting back to what's comfortable. As we all know, humans don't like change

Brian: Kevin, thank you very much. I would say by the way, on the racism, he didn't treat people the same. He treated them differently. Birtherism, central park five should be put to death even when they weren't accused of murder, even when people thought they were guilty and he refused to accept the exoneration by the courts and so many things we could list. Susan Glasser, how much does Kevin's take reflect something that you think is out there in substantial numbers?

Susan: Well, thanks, Brian. I would, I definitely agree with you. I don't think he was the best reflection of New York for the rest of the country. More like if you elected a wealthy, entitled Archie Bunker to be the president of the United States, that's the side of New York city I think that many people saw reflected in Donald Trump and his [unintelligible 00:27:40] on the world stage. To the point about the extreme appeal of Trump as an outsider, as a businessman, I think the caller reflected that in his statement. I'm amazed actually even now after everything we've gone through to see someone still expressing that view.

It's very interesting to me. You see the political potency then of Trump's appeal as I'm an outsider, I'm going to drain the swamp. Politicians are so devalued that even now after everything, you would have somebody expressing that. Interestingly, listening in on focus groups with Republican voters, especially over 2019 and 2020, I heard a lot of disillusion that with Trump, these were primarily focus groups, which Republican women who had voted for Trump in 2016 but had showered on him.

Almost every single one, there would be one or two or multiple women who would say, "I voted for him because he was a businessman, because he was a successful businessman and he was an outsider. That's what we need." It was a great success in the fact of Trump's marketing, I hear, of himself. In particular, I think the role that the apprentice played in creating this image of Trump that really resonated with this audience of millions across the country who believed in the fact this artificial TV portrayal of him as a successful businessman that was responsible but how it was, he even came to be president

Brian: Elizabeth in Montclair, you're on WNYC. Hi Elizabeth.

Elizabeth: Hi, thanks so much both of you for your extraordinary work these four years and before. An iconic moment for me over the past four years was the day, actually the moment that the president fired FBI director Comey. We had organized here in the 11th district, in New Jersey, and grassroots organization to beg our congressmen at the time, Rodney Frelinghuysen to be transparent and to hold town halls, and to have more interaction with his constituents, which he never did and then he had to retire.

He did hold these tele town halls for a little while, where he would call constituents in, instead of you being able to log in. It was one of these early tele town halls where a woman who'd been inspired by our group to run for local office, got picked to ask the question and it was right. She changed her mind at the last minute about what she was going to ask. It was going to be about healthcare, but at that moment the news broke that the president had fired the FBI director.

She asked about that to this really ineffectual Congressman at the time he was not a bulwark against the really terrible things that this new president was already doing. He was completely stymied. He had no idea how to respond to there at his public town hall and he just kind of floundered and said, "Oh, he's a good man," meaning Comey. To me, that was just the end of his 12 terms in Congress that he couldn't even speak truth as we were saying in that moment, he just couldn't do it.

It brings to light, to me, what I hope part of the conversation going forward is, which is a really emphasis on transparency and accountability in our elected leaders and from our elected leaders in response to what was once hyperbole but is now reality in the erosion and the destruction of American democracy. I hope that all elected leaders can be stronger than Rodney Frelinghuysen was.

Brian: Elizabeth. Thank you. Thank you so much. One more, Dominic in Westchester, you and WNYC. Hi Dominic.

Dominic: Hi Brian. Hi Susan. Hello to you both. I'm a high school history teacher and one of the reasons I'm upset with president Trump is that a fun [unintelligible 00:32:00] game we have with our students is who is the worst president of all time, and he's even taken that away from us. What are we supposed to do now?

Brian: Who used to be the contenders in that [unintelligible 00:32:12] game with your high school students?

Dominic: Well, we talk about [unintelligible 00:32:18] he comes to mind. Warren Hardin comes to mind, George W. Bush comes to mind, but I think now the debate is kind of over.

Brian: Dominic, thank you very much. Susan last thought, I guess Dominic brings us full circle. I started with this final Gallup Poll of the Trump administration that you tweeted out, where he has just a 34% approval rating plummeting from 46 on election day and Gallup noting that his average approval over the course of his term was the lowest of any president since the Gallup Poll began after World War II, 41% average approval over the last four years.

I also noticed something else which was the pattern of gradually declining over time, president approvals from 65% on average for Eisenhower. Then the last three, Trump, Obama and Bush all had average approval ratings under 50%. The ones before that mostly had over 50%. Does that tell you something beyond Donald Trump?

Susan: Absolutely. This polarization predates him and it certainly is going to post date him as well. To the history teacher's point, I do think the ghost of Richard Nixon, Andrew Johnson and James Buchanan are breathing easier as a result of the Trump presidency. There's no question that history is not going to look well on Donald Trump.

I imagine that there will be piles of books and documentaries and efforts for decades, really to come to terms with how someone so wildly unsuited to the presidency as Donald Trump could have ended up as a leader of the most powerful nation on earth. It's really a story about national hubris. It's a story about the internal divisions and enemies that plague us as much as the external threats that we spent so much of our time talking about.

Brian: Susan Glasser from The New Yorker, working on her final letter from Trump's Washington column. I think that hits Thursday. Your columns have been on Thursdays, right? Is it Thursday the final one?

Susan: Well, this one's going to publish today. I will officially transition at noon tomorrow, along with the rest of the country and begin my first letter from Biden's Washington. I'm finishing this one up now and looking forward as I'm sure many are too moving on at exactly at noon tomorrow. The president Trump does not need to attend the inauguration for the transition to happen nonetheless, 12:01 PM.

Brian: I want to hear at least two of our callers reflected in your last letter from Trump's Washington column. Susan Glasser from The New Yorker. She is also the co-author of the book, The Man Who Ran Washington: The life and times of Jim Baker recently out. Susan, thanks as always.

Susan: Thank you so much, Brian, and thanks to your listeners too.

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