“HOW
MANY OF THESE PEOPLE ARE JUST BATSHIT CRAZY?”: CNN’S JAKE TAPPER ON POLITICS
AND MEDIA IN THE TRUMP ERA
The network’s chief Washington correspondent
sees a world in which Trump’s power diminishes, but may not disappear
completely. The real question, though, is how America contends with a faction
that no longer believes in facts—and how culpable Republicans are in the
crippling of democracy.
BY JOE HAGAN
NOVEMBER
25, 2020
For a while, it looked as if fiction might finally conquer
reality. For the past three weeks, Donald Trump has waged a
misinformation campaign to overturn the results of the 2020 election,
pressuring elected officials and right-wing media to
push his false claims of fraud, and sending liberals into paroxysms of
paranoia. Ultimately, much of the GOP acceded (mostly) to reality and acknowledged that Joe
Biden is the president-elect of the United States. And yet millions of
people—half of all Republicans—have
been left falsely believing Trump was robbed.
For Jake Tapper, the chief
Washington correspondent for CNN, that’s an indictment of Trump, but a tragedy
for his followers. “I feel sympathy for them, is the truth,” he says. “I feel
bad. They’re outraged because they’re being told things that aren’t true. And
that’s a disgrace for the people who are telling the lies, not the people who
are hearing them and getting outraged.”
Tapper has been on the front lines of CNN’s
coverage of the Trump White House since he interviewed candidate Trump in
2016 and afterward became an arch critic of Trump’s brazen lies, even as he’s
maintained the poker face of cable-news impartiality. In some ways, he’s become
a kind of hedge against criticism that his boss, Jeff Zucker, president
of CNN, helped invent Trump when he launched him to stardom in The
Apprentice when Zucker ran NBC. But he’s also become one of the most
forceful media advocates for checking the blizzard of falsehoods coming from
the White House. “I just think there has not been enough of that, probably not
enough by me, certainly not enough by a lot of my colleagues,” he says.
In this edited transcript of Tapper’s recent
appearance on Vanity Fair’s Inside the Hive, Tapper considers both lessons
for the media and the prospect of more Trumpism after Trump exits the White
House. “When that power is taken away, is all his power taken away?” asks
Tapper. “No, not all of it, but a great deal of it.”
Vanity Fair: Senator
Marco Rubio of Florida recently tweeted,
“Don’t want to be paranoid, but I think many in the media really don’t like
Republicans.” That got me thinking about this pernicious phenomenon: Trump and
the GOP lie every day, whether about election fraud or whatever else, but when
the media doesn’t play along, or dispels misinformation, they refer to it as a
“liberal media” attack. This has been the pincer the media has been in for the
last four years under Trump. We’ve all been turned into fact-checkers, trying
to block and tackle and ref this thing while 73 million people refuse to hear it. At some
point, don’t you feel like you’re just baling the Titanic with a thimble? Do
you ever feel defeated to some degree?
Jake Tapper: No,
I do not. I do not feel defeated. Because it doesn’t matter, by the way. Even
if the people who believe the lies, even if they had been victorious in the
presidential election, the Donald Trump brigades—I’m not talking about
Republican voters here, I’m talking about the campaign and the people whose job
it is to undermine facts and whose job it is to mislead people. I’m talking
about them specifically, not the people who vote for Trump for whatever reason,
or believe these lies that are being told to them—I feel sympathy for them, is
the truth. I feel bad. They’re outraged because they’re being told things that
aren’t true. And that’s a disgrace for the people who are telling the lies, not
the people who are hearing them and getting outraged. Even if they had won,
that doesn’t mean that my job or your job or Daniel Dale’s job or
any fact-checker or anybody who’s out there just trying to say, Look, I’m not
taking a position on tax policy, I’m not taking a position on whether or not we
should be in Afghanistan or whether or not we should be more aggressive with
regards to Iran or whatever, I’m not talking about that—[my job is just to talk
about] the facts of this election.
And you see Republicans, Republican officials,
Commissioner [Al] Schmidt in Philadelphia, and Secretary of
State [Ben] Raffensperger in Georgia, and the former
cybersecurity tsar at DHS, Chris Krebs, these are Republicans
being hammered for just standing up for facts.
It’s because Trump’s allies,
the Marco Rubios of the world, they’ve all learned a little parlor trick from
Donald Trump, which is that you don’t need to worry about the facts anymore,
and actually, by resisting them and forcing the media to do all this blocking
and tackling, the spectacle and outrage on its own is a kind of power that you
can manipulate.
Well, except it’s different than that. Because
I think that you don’t see, as far as I can tell, Republican senators—and look,
I might be mistaken, I might’ve missed something that somebody said—but I don’t
see Republican officials in the Senate—I’m sure there’s some in the House where
there’s a whole QAnon caucus—but in the Senate, I don’t see Marco Rubio lying,
I don’t see Marco Rubio saying things that aren’t true.
Ted Cruz has been toeing the line on the election-fraud
business.
Well, I haven’t seen that, but I’ve seen Cruz
and [Lindsey] Graham say things like, when I asked about Chris
Krebs, who is and was widely respected, and is a Republican and has been there
at DHS for years, I’ve seen them say, “Well, everybody in the administration
serves at the pleasure of the president. So, he’s allowed to hire and fire who
he wants,” which is true. It’s not really the point, but it is. I mean, I do
see an effort on the part of—I’m not praising them for this, by the way, I’m
just trying to delineate between somebody like the president, who’s just telling
out-and-out lies, and somebody like Marco Rubio, who is not, as far as I can
tell, but it’s just kind of trying to pretend that this whole spectacle of
Donald Trump phoning Wayne County election
canvassers, for instance, isn’t happening. I mean, my point is he
knows better. He knows the difference. So, I don’t think he has learned—I’m
disagreeing with you respectfully, if I may—I don’t think he has learned that
facts don’t matter, I think he has learned to not get in Donald Trump’s way,
which might even be a worse conclusion.
I think what is really
going on is they’re trying to delegitimize or create a perception of
illegitimacy around Joe Biden so that they can use it as leverage politically.
I think that’s a result. [That] you have
a majority of
Republican voters thinking that Joe Biden stole the election may end up being
a result, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on, I don’t
think that’s why they’re doing it. I think they’re doing it because President
Trump refuses to—and look, I’m not a doctor—refuses to acknowledge the reality
of what happened. For whatever emotional, psychological, political, whatever
the reason is, I’m not invoking the Goldwater rule, I just am not trained,
right? But whatever the reason is, he’s not accepting it. And because he’s not
accepting it, there’s this whole group of people around him that are either
enablers or coddlers or just “ride or die,” and they are going along with it.
And you see people, law firms withdrawing from
the cases and kind of like Homer Simpson going into the hedge, backing away,
but by the same token you also see that there is an apparatus around him. And
it’s like that episode—you and I talked about how old we are—there’s a classic
episode of The Twilight Zone called “It’s a Good Life,” with a
kid named Anthony, played by Billy Mumy, who has these powers
and the entire town like just coddles him, because they’re afraid of him. And
that’s what we’re going through right now.
I mean, there are people
in his administration that have stood up and then were immediately fired. But
Trump can’t fire a senator, so they could plausibly stand up against him, in
larger numbers than they are, but they’re politically afraid of the results,
right?
Which is weird because there have been people
who have stood up to him that have survived. For instance, I think of Congressman Adam Kinzinger, right?
He’s not a fierce Trump critic, but he has been willing to criticize Trump, and
on both policy and rhetoric. He’s one of the first to call Joe Biden
president-elect. And he was reelected in his Republican district,
overwhelmingly. He ran ahead of Trump, I think like 15 to 20 points ahead of
Trump. This is outside Chicago. So, it’s not like you can’t survive.
Remember, the three biggest examples of Republicans who crossed
Trump, that are cautionary tales, are Jeff Flake and Bob
Corker, both of whom resigned, or didn’t run for reelection. Ben
Sasse was a critic and then he went radio silent for a year, got reelected,
and now he’s starting to show life again, but in any case, the third example
would be Mark Sanford, who was defeated in a House race, but
that was a complicated situation. In any case, I don’t know that it can’t be
done, but yes, of course, it is fear that is motivating these Republican
officeholders because Donald Trump, even after he has returned to Mar-a-Lago,
is still going to be a force in American politics, enabled and amplified by not
just Fox, but all the other even Foxier Foxes that are emerging up there.
GOP senators are in a
paralysis waiting to see whether Trump will carry his political power into next
year and past his own presidency, and that is a question. I know some people
say it as if it’s a done deal that he will transfer his political celebrity
into the coming years and become the GOP kingmaker. Others, and I’m one of
them, are skeptical of that because I think a lot of his power has come from
our attention to him. I know that he could get a 24/7 feed on OANN and Newsmax,
but that’s not really the kind of media power that has made him a
celebrity-spectacle politician of the kind he is. And my question is, don’t you
think to some degree when we take our cameras off of him, when he’s no longer
in power, and the things he’s saying are just the opinions of an ex-president,
that that will reduce some of his political influence?
Yes. I do, but I don’t know. I mean, I’m
willing to be proven wrong on this. I think that is likely just because one of
the reasons why what he says right now matters is because he has power. I mean,
look, I would not be paying attention to ex-president Trump railing about
Dominion software or phoning, you know, I can’t even believe I’m saying it, but
Wayne County election canvassers. I wouldn’t be paying attention to that if he
were not president, but because he’s president and he has control of the
federal government, it’s much more important.
When that power is taken away, is all his
power taken away? No, not all of it, but a great deal of it because he’ll be
able to maintain a fundraising apparatus and a disinformation megaphone, but
there won’t be as much consequence. The truth of the matter is that he has
white male non-college-educated voters, that is his base. And they’re with him,
but that’s a real minority of the American people. And so I don’t know how much
having that solid base—I don’t want to patronize them, but being believed by this
group, by this demographic, I don’t know how much that continues to give him
power with Republican officeholders going forward. I suspect that Mitch
McConnell will not pay as much attention as of January 20, 2021, to
Donald Trump. And so that is also some of his power being taken away.
ABC News had an interview
with three Trump voters who all said, Oh, it was a
rigged election, it was stolen by Biden. And they all had conspiracy theories.
And my immediate thought was, Why is ABC putting these people on here? You
know, on one level you’re asking, 73 million people did vote for him, so let’s
find out what their emotional temperature is, but on the other hand, once
again, the media is platforming these fake views as if they are on balance with
reality. And that made me think a lot about the lessons of the last four years,
about what the media has learned. Did you notice over the four years you were
covering Trump that the media figured out how to modulate how it was being
abused or used by Trump for attention and for spectacle?
Well, first of all, I didn’t see the ABC News thing that you’re
talking about, so I can’t really comment on it, but as a general note, I agree.
I could interview three people who think that the moon landing was faked, I
could interview three people who think that Jews control the world, I could
interview three people who think that there’s no such thing as blood, like we
all live on peanut butter coursing through our veins. There are a bunch of lies
out there and I don’t know what it gets us to, even if they’re widespread, even
if a lot of people believe them—a lot of Republicans during the Obama years
thought Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States. I don’t
think it’s worth interviewing them. They’re wrong, it’s a lie.
And now, take that same
logic to the president. He’s spouted many a lie. Tens of thousands; Daniel Dale could probably tell you the exact
number. There were instances where a lot of network news organizations and the
crack-addicted media on Twitter just couldn’t look away, and that was part of
Trump’s genius, to call us the “fake news” and incite people and constantly
have the camera on him. I think you recently said that you never had an
interview with Trump. Is that right?
I haven’t interviewed him since, I think it
was June 2016, when I challenged him on—he was saying that Judge [Gonzalo]
Curiel, who was hearing the Trump University fraud case, he was saying, the judge couldn’t
do his job because he was Mexican, even though Curiel’s from
Indiana. And I was pushing to the point of, if you’re saying he can’t do his
job because of his race, isn’t that by definition racist? And that was the last
interview I was able to do with him.
But your larger point about calling out the
president’s lies has been a deep frustration of mine with the news media since
2015, 2016, when I think a lot of people at CNN, hopefully including me, just
started really specifically and deliberately pointing out how much he lies. And
for me, I think I’d been doing it in interviews and coverage, but for me, I did
my first, I wouldn’t call it a commentary, but my first kind of “putting a flag
in the ground” on it, after he accused Senator Ted Cruz’s father of maybe
playing a role in the Kennedy assassination.
And I came out and I did a thing, saying, “This
is not pro-Cruz, this is not anti-Trump, this is pro-truth, and this is
deranged.” And I did it and I’ve been doing it since 2016. And I just think
there has not been enough of that, probably not enough by me, certainly not
enough by a lot of my colleagues. And I think that it is indicative of Donald
Trump turning facts and decency into partisan issues, so that if you say,
“That’s not true,” then, well, then you must be a liberal, you must be a
Democrat if you’re standing up for the idea that the moon is not made of green
cheese, because Donald Trump said the moon was made of green cheese. I’m
joking, but that’s an example.
I mean, that’s basically
where we’re at. By calling out the truth, you’re the fake news, you’re opposing
the Republican Party.
As a general note, yeah, I mean, Donald Trump
has turned facts and decency into partisan ideas, partisan footballs, and they
shouldn’t be. And in general, Republican officials have sat back and relied on
schmucks like me to do the work, and it’s not fair, because I shouldn’t be
braver than a U.S. senator, I’m just a cable-news anchor, but there is such a
thing as empirical truth. And whether it has to do with the coronavirus
response or the election, I mean, this has not been good and it’s been
dangerous and it has...you know, you can’t directly draw a line between point A
and point B, but I don’t know how you escape the conclusion that this has cost lives.
Just the other day, there was a nurse or a doctor from one of
the Dakotas talking about after having come off a watch on their hospital, that
there are people that are sick with coronavirus or even dying who continue to
believe it’s a hoax. I mean, these lies are taken in so deeply and passionately
by some people that they’ll take it to the grave.
Yeah. We had that nurse from South
Dakota on CNN saying there
are people literally dying who will not believe that they have COVID, who are
arguing that they have lung cancer instead. And it’s, yeah, it’s tragic, but we
started seeing that happen in like March or April, people who believed that
this was all a fraud and a hoax and thought that the media was hyping this in
order to score points against Donald Trump would get the virus and die. I mean,
that happened over and over and over again.
And you can’t say, “Well, he believed this
politician, or he believed this channel,” but we know that there is this
network of lying going on, and we know that there are people who heard the lie
and believed it, and it ended up costing them their lives. You know, it also
reminds me of something that I still worry about in this day and age, even
though you’d think by now people would have learned lessons, which is this
notion of stochastic terrorism.
Stochastic terrorism, if you look it up, it’s
the idea [that] you put out a lie, you put out a deranged conspiracy theory,
and you’re a powerful person, whether it’s because you have an anchor chair or
because you’re a politician, whatever it is, you put it out there, and then
people act on these deranged beliefs and kill people, but there’s no direct
tie. So, when somebody is out there saying, George Soros, the
rich billionaire philanthropist, who happens to be Jewish, and maybe it’s only
Jews and anti-Semites who know that, but it’s known, that George Soros—and this
is a lie, let me again underline—funds a plan to bring dangerous Mexicans into
this country to replace white people. Now, that’s a lie, but that lie motivated
at least three acts of domestic terror, in California and at the Tree of Life synagogue in
Pittsburgh, and then in El Paso, and you can
find all sorts of people, starting with Donald Trump and ending with a bunch of
people on Fox, who contributed to this lie and to this day contribute to this
lie of master puppeteer George Soros. And it’s the same kind of danger as
playing with fire that we see today and we saw it before. And again, there’s no
fingerprints, but it’s dangerous.
That’s the terrifying
thing about it. I trace a lot of this back to the fallout from the 2008
financial crash. There were these different characters who began to emerge on
the mainstream networks, like Glenn Beck on Fox News, even Alex Jones, who had
a seat at CNN once in a while and would say insane things.
Alex Jones?
Alex Jones, yeah. I wrote a profile of
him, and he was on CNN.
Not since Zucker’s been there. Not since I’ve
been there?
It predated you guys, but
just generally speaking, they were allowed into the mainstream for a period and
they began to metastasize or people took some of their techniques and expanded
on them because they were successful.
You don’t have to look in the fringe though, this
stuff is mainstream.
That’s the point—it’s become mainstream. In 2008, that’s not
that long ago, it was the paranoia around Goldman Sachs and Wall Street and
this idea that there was a kind of conspiracy of the 1% to save themselves and
crush others. It birthed the Tea Party; on the left there was the Occupy Wall
Street movement. But is it possible to put this genie back in the bottle? When
Trump leaves office, do OANN and Newsmax go back to being a marginal thing, a
circus on the edge of town, or do they give Fox such a run for their money that
they inflame more of it?
It’s such a good question. I don’t know. I
fear the latter because you see Republicans in Congress either embracing
conspiracy theories, like Congresswoman-elect Marjorie Greene, who
has espoused all sorts of just flat-out insane theories, including 9/11
trutherism, by the way, including that the plane that hit the Pentagon could
not have been…I mean, she questioned that. I
can’t wait for Liz Cheney to weigh in on that if she ever
does, Congresswoman Cheney, but there’s that. And then also we’ve seen people
like Ron Johnson giving credibility to some of the more
deranged conspiracy theories.
You might remember a few weeks ago when
Republicans, not everybody, but a bunch of Republicans, were acting as if what
was on Hunter Biden’s laptop was the greatest scandal in the
history of the country. They seem to have forgotten that, but in any case, Ron
Johnson was out there putting out the vilest, vilest rumors and innuendo with
no apparent recriminations whatsoever within the Republican caucus. And so I
don’t see any disincentives being offered by Republican leadership for this
stuff.
And that’s the question:
Can Trump’s ability to use lies and conspiracies as a political tool be wielded
by others successfully without him there as cover? The little ray of hope I’ll
hang onto is that once Trump has gone, a lot of this pressure or opportunity
that they see in being able to do that might become less effective politically.
We don’t know that.
We don’t know but also don’t forget, Joe, that
some of these people are actually nuts. I mean, again, I can’t be specific
because I’m not a doctor, but some of these people actually believe this.
They’re not just pretending for the sake of votes, for the sake of support,
some of these people are…I mean, this is one of the great unexplored aspects of
public life, both media and politics, is how many of these people are just
batshit crazy, legitimately so? And I’m sure we could have a very fruitful
conversation with the microphones off and beer in hand about who we think are
the craziest people, legitimately crazy, not just playing a role on TV, but
there are a bunch of them out there because a lot of them have been
mainstreamed by the Trump administration because they couldn’t get jobs in
previous Republican administrations.
Well, yeah, under Trump,
being crazy was a benefit. If Trump is casting for his staff in the White
House, he was casting for that kind of crazy. And it was politically effective
as long as it was under the umbrella of Trump. I’m not saying there haven’t
been crazy people in politics on both sides before this…
Democrats and Republicans. But the idea of the
number of people who are just loons, people who just believe crazy things,
deranged conspiracy theories, who don’t care about evidence, who don’t care
about facts, who are willing to suspend all skepticism and allegiance to
empiricism just to be part of the gang or for whatever reason, again, this is
something for a doctor to explore. It’s just, again, not just in the
administration, in Congress, but also on TV news, and I use the word news
loosely—it’s remarkable.
I think it all fits into a larger conversation that we can also
have another time about the entertainment-circus aspects of politics that Trump
helped ultimately fuse. They’d always been going in this direction, but once it
becomes a pure circus, more clowns get into the tent. Let me also say, though,
that—
Let me just do this, because this just
happened while you and I were talking: The CEO of One America News, OANN, which
is not a place to get facts, it’s deranged and [has] crazy stories, he
has tweeted, “Why is Biden
still trying to act like he’s going to be president when he knows the Dem
cheating has been uncovered? He should be working on a way to clear all the
charges he faces.” And then he tags @realDonaldTrump.
Oh, my God.
Now, here’s my question: Does Robert
Herring believe that, or is Robert Herring just saying that as a
business model and a decision so as to get viewers for his network and have
Donald Trump promote it? I don’t know, and at a certain point it doesn’t
matter, but if he believes it, that is a crazy thing to believe.
And if he doesn’t believe
it and it’s done for cynical purposes, in a way that’s even more evil. This
inability to figure out whether you’re dealing with insanity or cynicism is one
of the maddening aspects of the Trump age. I think one possible way for facts
and fiction to be delineated and some of this to be corrected would be a
special counsel to investigate some of what the Trump administration has done,
some legal fact-finding in which we can actually see justice done. I don’t know
what that will end up being; it could be that Trump is completely innocent of
rule-breaking and law-breaking and whatever crimes the Democrats might accuse him
of, but if people could see everything laid out, would that just become
politicized again? Possibly, but I feel like there has to be some national
reckoning with what these conspiracies and loose use of facts or use of
nonfacts, how it has damaged people’s faith in the government and damaged the
government itself.
Well, I mean, I’m not going to propose a truth
and reconciliation committee like they have in South Africa, but I will tell
you that it’s been damaging to the United States of America to have had so many
people either willing to destroy or willing to sit back and let others destroy
institutions such as people having faith in elections, people having faith in
courts, people having faith in news media, people having faith in government,
people having faith in just empirical fact, in science, in health officials. I
mean, of course it’s damaging. It’s literally causing deaths.
And I don’t know where we go or how we do it.
I’m just going to keep doing what I do, which is when it comes to having
spirited debates about political issues on which reasonable people can
disagree, fostering those debates on my shows. And when it comes to standing up
for things that are true or false, standing up for the truth. But I can’t go
and say to Congressmen X, “You need to apologize for such and such,” and they
wouldn’t listen to me anyway.
Here’s my last question
for you. If next year Trump is out of office, if he agreed to come on your show
and do an interview with you, I imagine you’d take that interview.
Donald Trump?
Yeah.
I have no idea.
Tough one.
Well, first of all, I don’t think it’s ever
going to happen. That’s like asking me, “Would you take Elvis?” Like, I mean,
it’s not going to happen, so why even discuss it? I can’t even get Obama much
less Trump because of the kinds of questions I ask. So, I doubt it.
Is there worth in having somebody who is willing to aggressively
stand up for facts and truth try to hold any politician accountable for
decisions he or she has made? As a general note, I think so, yeah, I do. But, I
mean, if Donald Trump were to sit for an interview with me, I don’t think
anybody would expect that it would be an interview that would be soft, but
again, it’s such a hypothetical that he hasn’t given…I mean, CNN made it…well,
I mean, we’re almost there, January 20, the entire Trump era, I mean, the
entire Trump presidency, we’re the only network that he’s not given an
interview to. Period. The only one.
What do you chalk that up
to?
I think there are two things. I think that
people like me and Anderson [Cooper] were willing to say
things that he didn’t like, including like me calling him out on being racist
about Judge Curiel. And I think the last time Anderson was with Trump, it was a
town hall with his family, and Anderson said one of the arguments that Trump
was making was like something that a five-year-old would say, or something like
that.
So, I think the fact that we’ve been willing
to aggressively call him out to his face respectfully but directly. He expected
Jeff Zucker—because he knew Jeff Zucker from back when Jeff was head of NBC
and Celebrity Apprentice started—he thought that because of
that relationship that Jeff would be soft on him, and that wasn’t the case. And
so I think that he’s very personally upset about that because he thinks that’s
disloyal of Jeff, which of course it is in a way because Jeff’s loyalty has not
been to Donald Trump. He’s the head of a news division, and our loyalty is to
the facts and the truth.
