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Brian: It's the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Before we get going today with our first guest Susan Glasser from The New Yorker, I just want to briefly mention that this is day two of our annual fall membership drive and because of the amount of news and the seriousness of the news this fall, we are doing a shorter drive than we usually do in October. It's just now through Friday.

Usually, we would go through the weekend and into the first part of next week for a total of nine days, but we don't want to impede the election coverage that much. It's just too important or all the local coronavirus information we're trying to keep you abreast of with rules and schools and neighborhoods changing literally day by day. We have shortened the drive and I'll keep this very short.

I'm not going to go on about it to start the show except this one mention, but if you are a regular listener, we help you also be a financial contributor and stand up for independent journalism on WNYC and Gothamist and stand up for the talk show that this program is a positive and constructive for us we hope. We try to think of it as remote learning of the airwave.

If you can, with however a small donation you would like to make, you can do that now on our website at wnyc.org or on the phone at 888-376-9692 WNYC, 888-376-9692 or at wnyc.org. Thank you so much for considering it in the shortened membership drive for a COVID and election season.

Now it's Tuesday, October 20th, two weeks before election day. Around 30 million people have already voted, 29.6 million is the last quote I saw from the election project at the University of Florida, which is trying to keep a running tally.

The context of that number is in 2016, a total of 130 million people voted in the entire presidential election. Here we are with 30 million votes already cast two weeks before what we're used to call Election Day and things we never thought we'd see are happening. The final presidential debate is Thursday night and the debate commission last night issued a new rule. They will keep the mics off one candidate while the other speaks part of the time, because you know what happened time. We'll get details on that in a sec.

Another thing we thought we'd never see, major Republican figures are beginning to break publicly with the president. Senator John Cornyn of Texas of all people told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram editorial board, that Trump is like a bad husband. He's, "maybe like a lot of women who get married and think they're going to change their spouse and that doesn't usually work out very well." From John Cornyn.

Transformer, chief of staff, John Kelly, have you heard this one yet? Was quoted by CNN in a Sunday night broadcast calling Trump the most flawed person he's ever known. CNN quoted friends of Kelly saying he had told them, "The depths of his dishonesty is just astounding to me, the dishonesty, the transactional nature of every relationship though it's more pathetic than anything else. He's the most flawed person I have ever met in my life." From his former chief of staff, John Kelly. Then there's Republican Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska, who said this on tape to a group of supporters just the other day in his re-election campaign.

Ben Sasse: The way he kisses dictators' butts. I mean, the way he ignores that the Uighurs are in literal concentration camps in Xinjiang. Right now, he hasn’t lifted a finger on behalf of the Hong-Kongers. He and I have a very different foreign policy that isn't just that he fails to lead our allies, it's that the United States now regularly sells out our allies under his leadership.

The way he treats women and spends like a drunken sailor. The ways that I criticize President Obama for that kind of spending, I've criticized President Trump for as well. He mocks evangelicals behind closed doors. His family has treated the presidency like a business opportunity. He's flirted with white supremacists.

Brian: Senator Ben Sasse at a Republican fundraiser for his own campaign with presumably Republican supporters saying that about the President, doesn't mean Trump is going to lose, but this amount of distancing by conservative Republicans at this point in a Republican presidents re-election campaign, well, try to think of another time. With that as prelude, we welcome Susan Glasser from The New Yorker.

She writes the letter from Trump's Washington column for The New Yorker every week. She is also the co-author of a new book along with her husband, New York Times White House correspondent, Peter Baker called The Man Who Ran Washington about former secretary of state and treasury secretary and White House Chief of Staff, James Baker, no relation to Peter. Hi, Susan, always great to have you on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Susan Glasser: Thanks so much, Brian, great to be with you.

Brian: What do you make of Ben Sasse, John Cornyn, and John Kelly saying the things that they've said recently, including Sasse on tape?

Susan: I have to say, Brian, I'm sort of conflicted. You hear John Cornyn saying that, but the truth is he stayed in the marriage no matter how bad it was. [chuckles]

Brian: [chuckles] To further the analogy.

Susan: That's right. The real story is no divorce. Look, if Donald Trump loses, you are definitely going to see a lot of Ben Sasses emerge from the woodwork of their silence of the last four years and they're going to say they never liked the guy. They didn't really support him. They just felt it was best to try to persuade him behind the scenes, which is what John Cornyn also said in that interview, but the bottom line is these individuals stuck with Trump when it mattered.

The broad story, interestingly, this year is Senate and House Republicans sticking with Donald Trump and making their political calculus that essentially there's nowhere else for them to go, that they have to have the votes of that Republican base, which is essentially made to vote for Trump one of their key criteria for supporting any other Republican candidates.

It's a real dilemma for them. We don't know how it ends yet, but I don't think you're going to see a stampede. I do think that clearly, Republican senators are very, shall we say, sensitive to how the winds blow and it's certainly indicative of their fears at this point that Trump may lose.

Brian: We already have a listener comment on Twitter that says, "How brave of the Republicans to break with Trump now that he's most likely going to lose?" In the John Cornyn context there, does that indicate to you that Texas is actually in play as a swing state in the presidential?

Susan: Texas is one of the most fascinating stories of 2020. I've been around long enough to see many predictions of, "Texas is turning purple, Texas is turning blue," turn out to not come true. When I was editor of Politico Magazine, we ran a cover story about Texas's impending Democratic shift. That was three election cycles ago. Beto O'Rourke showed Democrats are far more competitive than they have been really in a generation in Texas, but of course, he didn't win.

I've spoken with a number of people about Texas in the last week and I think there's a sense that it's much more competitive than anyone might have anticipated at the presidential level, but the real story may be down-ballot with house races and with Texas State House and State Senate races, where you could see Democrats benefiting from higher democratic turnout, even if Biden doesn't win there.

Brian: Your last three New Yorker articles were about the last three debate nights. The Mike Pence-Kamala Harris debate, the first Trump-Biden debate, which your headline was Notes from the Worst Debate in American History, and the dueling town halls last week that you said were Mister Rogers versus Nasty Uncle.

Now we have the final debate coming on Thursday night with the debate commission's new rule issued just last night about turning the candidates' microphones off at certain times. Is it clear to you exactly when they'll do that?

Susan: No, it actually isn't because I believe the rules specified that it's in the first opening two minutes at each candidate gets. There is a period after that reserved for open debate and it's not clear to me how that's going to go at all.

Of course, you have President Trump who continues to believe, A, that he should be answering every question and, B, that if you rattle Biden, that Biden will lose his train of thought or that he'll stutter. They're openly attacking the former Vice President for this in a way that is astonishing, but just this morning on Fox and friends before Donald Trump phoned in, there was a guest actually attacking the Vice President stutter. I think this is the strategy. Sometimes it's not hidden, but hidden in plain sight.

Brian: When I heard that last night about the new rule, I thought, well, maybe Trump will bail again, like he did on the second debate when they wanted to make it virtual and choose to have a grievance rather than a debate, but instead, the campaign reaffirmed that he will attend. What's your political analysis of that?

Susan: Look, Donald Trump is the guy who's losing, Donald Trump is the guy who's behind and at this point, he needs the national television audience. He's out there wall to wall, but essentially he's mostly speaking to the converted and to us journalists who have to listen, whatever platform he's on. He's traveling around the country to rallies at people who already fervently support him. He's appearing on Fox almost all of their shows over and over again and including on Rush Limbaugh.

If he's going to have a chance at winning, he needs to appear in some sort of setting in which he's speaking, not just to people who are already planning to vote for him. I think as the challenger in effect which is what he is, it's pretty hard for him to turn down that platform.

Brian: Susan Glasser with us who writes the letter from Trump's Washington column for The New Yorker. She's also the author of a new book along with White House correspondent for the New York Times, Peter Baker, and they happen to be married. The new book is called The Man Who Ran Washington about former Secretary of State and Treasury Secretary and Chief of Staff to George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, variously, James Baker of Texas.

People of certain age will remember how prominent Baker was. You portray him, Susan, as a real deal maker compared to Trump, who's really a rejectionist, but portrays himself as a deal-maker. Now, Baker is still alive and you said he struggles with what to do about Trump. What's James Baker's struggle?

Susan: Well, look, he just turned 90 this year. I think one of the interesting things about working on this biography for a long time was watching this parallel rise of Donald Trump. That was the backup of many conversations we had with Secretary Baker over the last five years. He, like his party, really felt this was a hostile takeover in effect by Donald Trump.

He is completely opposed to much of what Baker and other Republicans see as the core values of their party or were the core values of their party. Things like free trade, internationalism, working with allies.

Of course, Baker widely considered by Democrats as well as Republicans the gold standard as White House Chief of Staff for Reagan and for Bush, offended by the sheer incompetence and dysfunction of the Trump administration but very toured about what to do about it. He very reluctantly did vote for Trump four years ago. At one point, he told us he was considering voting for Biden this year, but then a couple of months later said, "No, don't say that, I'm still a Republican even if my party has left me."

Brian: On Sunday night on the WNYC program, The United States of Anxiety with Kai Wright, he and former conservative talk show host Charlie Sykes, were discussing how much the last 50 years of mainstream republicanism led to Trump rather than Trump being such an aberration from it and the party leaving people like James Baker, as you just quoted him saying, I hope you don't let James Baker off the hook in that regard, but how do you see him?

Susan: Look, I think that if you ask somebody the same question over and over again, and they give you the same answer, you have to listen. If somebody tells you who they are, listen. He chose in the end, a definition of partisanship and wanting to be remembered primarily as a Republican. That I think is very telling why-- If you want to understand what is going on in the country right now, and why 40%, 41%, 44% of Americans are still voting for Donald Trump, even in the midst of a pandemic with so many dead, even in the midst of economic chaos that the federal government is essentially doing nothing about at this moment in time, I think it tells you a lot.

It's a very revealing insight into what today's Republican party is. One final thought though, Brian, the differences in the time in which Baker operate, in the '80s and early '90s, the end of the Cold War, we didn't have the luxury of just sitting around and doing nothing. While he was very partisan in election years, in non-election years, he sat down and he made real deals with Democrats because that's who you had to deal with. They reformed social security, they reformed the tax code in 1986 with Democrats and Republicans working together.

The first thing that they did after the very partisan scorched earth campaign against Michael Dukakis in 1988, was to sit down with Jim Wright, the Democratic Speaker of The House, and to find a way to end US support for the contra wars and the most divisive foreign policy issues of the 1980. The difference is that governing doesn't work anymore.

Brian: Let me push you on this a little bit. I haven't read your book yet, but James Baker helped get us into the first Iraq War, admitting that it was a war for oil, but saying that was okay. He enabled Reagan's culture war presidency. My own sense of the arc is that it has very much led to Trump on racial polarization and "law and order" on the way they politicized patriotism. Not that it's been an aberration over the last four years. What about your sense?

Susan: Well, Brian, that's the history that we're examining in the book and interestingly, whatever you make of it, Baker was actually on the other side of all those internal fights in the very backstabbing Reagan world. He was the one who was the anti-culture warrior. He was the one who said to focus on things like the economy and ultimately on getting deals done like tax reform.

The movement conservatives were always very, very suspicious of the Bakers, the pragmatists, the people who wanted to figure out how to work with Democrats, the people who brought Tip O'Neill in to make deals with Ronald Reagan, that was the Baker faction.

It's interesting, it won arguably in the short term and lost in the longterm. That Republican Party that you describe is ascendant is the one that won. Part of the history we're bringing it out, you had this sort of master tactician and fixer who was on the other side of all those internal fights.

Brian: Susan, how are you anticipating election counting going? Let me give you a smattering of headlines from swing states from The New York Times in the last day. In Pennsylvania, election officials are staring down possibly the biggest ballot processing backlog in the country with no means of even touching the absentee ballots until polls open on election day.

Because of a late start to counting, Michigan anticipates being one of the last states to report full results with election officials estimating that it's unlikely to happen before Friday, November 6th. In North Carolina, thousands of submitted absentee ballots are currently in purgatory, neither rejected nor accepted, but "under review" amid a back and forth court battle over so-called ballot curing.

Oh my goodness, Susan, for some of those scenarios, and those are in three of the most important swing states, what are you expecting in two weeks?

Susan: [laughs] Well, that's right. It gives new definition to the term election night. It's going to be election week or election weeks or election month. I think a lot of the preemptive anxiety we're all feeling is not only just flashbacks to 2016, but also I think a very real and palpable sense of the unknown as far as what's the process by which we're even going to arrive at an outcome.

I would throw in even the Supreme Court uncertainty. You have Republicans moving ahead right now with pushing through a 9th Supreme Court justice last night. We saw the importance that that could make because there was a 4/4 Supreme Court decision that essentially left intact and gave a victory to Democrats, so what if the fifth justice arrives to change that outcome of those election cases?

I think we're really looking at a period of uncertainty about who's actually going to be able to vote, whose votes will count, and realizing we might not and are likely not to go to bed on election night with an outcome. The only way that isn't the case, of course, is if one of the candidates, and that would likely be Biden at this point in time, were able to win a decisive enough victory that even were all absentee votes counted, it wouldn't change the outcome. That's hard to see in a state like North Carolina, where the polls-- I just saw this morning, the polls are two points essentially within the margin of error.

Brian: This brings us back to James Baker in a way, because one thing that he got very involved with was the Bush versus Gore Florida post-election day battle in 2000, that, of course, ended at the Supreme Court. You portray this as Baker was so good at being a fixer that once he got into the battle on the Bush side, the Gore people were more worried than they were before. What was Baker's role, but for the present, what lesson does it provide perhaps for what to expect this year from anyone?

Susan: Well, it is interesting. We definitely spoke with Democrats who said, as soon as they knew that it was going to be Baker up against Warren Christopher, that they had a pretty good sense that the Republicans would have the advantage in that. Look, in reality, of course, it was the Supreme Court that made the decision.

Even the Republicans, interestingly, were not 100% convinced when they took it to the court what the outcome of those votes would be. Baker in this story is a story about not standing on principle, and that winning was his goal, as he defined it, it was the only goal, as he defined it, and he's willing to do things that went up against Republican orthodoxy.

There's a very strong predisposition among Republicans to keep things in the state courts to let the state courts to decide a state election dispute, but Baker saw right away that that probably wasn't going to work out very well in Florida where the entire Florida Supreme Court, at that time, had been appointed by Democrats. He pushed them successfully, as it turned out, just to go ahead and go right into Federal Court. He had a very clear sense that he was there as a lawyer representing a client and that winning was essentially the only goal.

Brian: Susan Glasser writes the letter from Trump's Washington column for the New Yorker every week, and is now co-author of the book about James Baker, The Man Who Ran Washington. Susan, we always appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Susan: Brian, great to talk with you. Thank you.

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