| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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And I might find myself back in D.C. for hopefully some wonderful celebration of something good. | |
| No, I'm going home and staying home. | ||
| No commuting anymore every week. | ||
| Congresswoman, thank you for your time. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Democracy. | ||
| It isn't just an idea. | ||
| It's a process. | ||
| A process shaped by leaders elected to the highest offices and entrusted to a select few with guarding its basic principles. | ||
| It's where debates unfold, decisions are made, and the nation's course is charted. | ||
| Democracy in real time. | ||
| This is your government at work. | ||
| This is C-SPAN, giving you your democracy unfiltered. | ||
| He is the author of the book American Reckoning, Inside Trump's Trial and My Own, Jonathan Alter. | ||
| Happy holidays to you. | ||
| Welcome to the program. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Happy holidays. | |
| So great to be here. | ||
| This trial that you highlight in your title remind people about what you were writing about. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So the trial that I covered every day in the courtroom was the hush money trial that took place at the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse, and it resulted in the conviction of Donald Trump on 34 counts of business fraud. | |
| And that conviction, as we speak, still stands. | ||
| He's a convicted felon. | ||
| We're waiting for the judge to determine sentencing. | ||
| It's pretty clear that he's unlikely to have to try to have President-elect Trump serve any of his sentence given that he was just re-elected president. | ||
| But he might freeze the case and return to sentencing in four years. | ||
| We're not sure exactly what's going to happen. | ||
| But this trial was, I guess you could call it a bittersweet experience for somebody like me who I think feels very strongly, and I think I speak for a lot of people, obviously not everybody, in believing that Donald Trump is a threat to our republic, a threat to our values, and that it was important to try to hold him accountable for the crimes that he committed. | ||
| You wrote in the book, just to read a little bit of what you wrote for our audience, saying, my own reckoning with my image of America and its commitment to democracy is still underway. | ||
| I have lost my claim to be as John F. Kennedy described himself, an idealist without illusions. | ||
| I'm still idealistic, but it turns out that I have more illusions about this country than I thought I did. | ||
| My aim instead to show how a tawdry trial about a hush money payments to a porn star became an inspiring, if provincial, a provisional locus of democratic accountability, a place where for the first time since his father died 25 years ago, Donald Trump was forced to sit down, shut up, and face the consequences of his actions. | ||
| Can you elaborate? | ||
| Is that part of the trial of your own that the title of your book highlights? | ||
| And can you elaborate on that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so I grew up in an intensely political family in Chicago. | |
| My mother was the first woman elected to public office in Cook County. | ||
| And I loved everything and continue to love everything about the presidents. | ||
| And I have Pez Dispenser presidents at home. | ||
| I have a collection of presidential spoons. | ||
| I revere the office. | ||
| I continue to revere the office. | ||
| As a journalist over the last 40 years, I've interviewed nine of the last 10 American presidents, either before, during, or after their time in office, including Donald Trump years before he ran for president. | ||
| The only one I missed was Ronald Reagan. | ||
| I was a little too young when I was at Newsweek to interview him. | ||
| And so I've studied the presidency, and I assumed wrongly, and these were my illusions, that the American people would not elect a con man as president of the United States. | ||
| And so I was, you know, I was wrong. | ||
| And people simply didn't care as much about his rather long record. | ||
| You know, this was only one trial. | ||
| The others are now being thrown out because he was reelected and he won't have his Justice Department obviously continue those federal cases. | ||
| But in total, he was indicted across a few different cases on 91 counts of various offenses, not to mention the civil judgment a year ago for sexual abuse, $83 million Eugene Carroll was awarded. | ||
| And then his university, Trump University, quote unquote, was shut down. | ||
| His charity was shut down. | ||
| This is a con man. | ||
| And so my disillusionment is connected to just disappointment that more people didn't see this the way I do. | ||
| I respect people who are for Trump. | ||
| I just think that they are not looking at the totality of his character in making a judgment. | ||
| But this experience was in some ways very inspiring in the courtroom because, as you mentioned in your excerpt from my book, this was a kind of a partial accountability. | ||
| No matter what happens eventually to this case, even if he doesn't serve in jail, even if he doesn't, which he's very much not going to, even if he doesn't end up getting probation, every day in the courtroom, he had to answer for really the first time in his adult life to Judge Juan Rashan, who controlled the courtroom. | ||
| And I got a front row seat on this accountability. | ||
| The trial wasn't televised. | ||
| So while it was highly publicized, the Stormy Daniels trial, nobody really got a good sense of what was going on in that courtroom if they weren't there. | ||
| And this is the only book about this case. | ||
| It was a fascinating case. | ||
| There was overwhelming evidence of guilt on Donald Trump's part. | ||
| So I walk the readers through. | ||
| I kept a very barbed, acerbic diary during the trial, and I start the book explaining what I brought to coverage of this trial, which was not legal expertise, but as I mentioned, a long history of studying and appreciating the American presidency and American politics. | ||
| Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| If you want to call in and ask questions of our guests, Jonathan Alter, if you want to text him your questions, 202-748-8003. | ||
| Mr. Alter, you listed those various legal fronts that the president had cases in. | ||
| You chose this one. | ||
| What stood out about this one versus the others? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, actually, I was originally credentialed for Jack Smith's case against Donald Trump for trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election, the first time in the entire history of our country that we haven't had a peaceful transfer of power. | |
| And or at least Trump attempted to prevent a peaceful transfer of power. | ||
| And so I was credentialed for that case, and it was scheduled to open. | ||
| The trial was supposed to start in March of this year. | ||
| But then Trump's lawyers appealed to the Supreme Court on the basis of immunity. | ||
| And we all know what happened in that case. | ||
| The Supreme Court ruled that a president could not be held accountable for acts while he was in office. | ||
| And this delayed that case so long. | ||
| It didn't kill the case, but it delayed the case until after the election. | ||
| And now Jack Smith has canceled that case because Trump has indicated all along that he would not allow the Justice Department to move forward with either that or the Mar-a-Lago case, which related to his refusing a request to return classified documents that belonged to the U.S. government. | ||
| So he was indicted on that. | ||
| Those cases are dead. | ||
| The Georgia case is probably dead. | ||
| So this was the hush money trial. | ||
| I thought of it as kind of the runt of the litter, you know, in terms of cases. | ||
| But it was nonetheless, you know, an important case, the first time in American history that a president of the United States has gone on trial. | ||
| And obviously, the first time a president of the United States has become a convicted felon. | ||
| Just to give you a quick sense, I know a lot of people out there very interested as I am in the history of the American presidency. | ||
| So in 1872, Ulysses Grant was given a speeding ticket for driving too fast on 13th Street in Washington in his carriage. | ||
| And in 1953, Harry Truman got a ticket for driving too slow on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. | ||
| Nixon was pardoned. | ||
| Bill Clinton lost his law license. |