Covering Donald Trump's Trial

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Jonathan Alter is with us; columnist, documentary filmmaker, author of best-selling books about presidents Obama, FDR, and Jimmy Carter. Some of you will remember we just recently had Jonathan here on the occasion of Carter's 100th birthday in our 100 Year series. Now he has a new book that's partly about another former president and partly about himself. It's called American Reckoning: Inside Trump's Trial―and My Own.

Jonathan, always good to have you. Welcome back to WNYC.

Jonathan Alter: Great to be here, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: The centerpiece of the book, I'll tell everybody, is your 23 days as a journalist covering the Trump hush money cover-up trial in-person in the courtroom in New York, but you start the book with some autobiography. Let's start there now. You describe your mother as the Jackie Robinson of gender politics in Chicago when you were growing up. Really? How was she that?

Jonathan Alter: [chuckles] I was born in 1957. About 10 years earlier, my mother was a student at Mount Holyoke College, and she gave Eleanor Roosevelt, the most famous woman in the world, a tour of Mount Holyoke. Eleanor said, "Now where do you live, Joanne?" She said, "Oh, on the other side of campus." "I want to see your dormitory," and Eleanor got there and plopped down on my mother's bed. My mother was from a nonpolitical Jewish family in Chicago. She says to her, "Now, Joanne, you tell me all about yourself. Where are you from? What are you interested in? How do you want to make a better world?" This just had a transformational impact on my mother, on my late mother. It changed her life-

Brian Lehrer: What a story. What a moment.

Jonathan Alter: -and in turn, changed our lives. Because contained in that exchange was what became my mother's curiosity and then my curiosity, which made me a journalist, and also my mother's intense interest in politics. She first gave that to my father and our kids, and throughout the next few decades, she was very, very involved.

Just to give you one quick example. In 1966, Martin Luther King came to our house in Chicago for a fundraiser for a rally that he was holding at Soldier Field, where the Bears now play, and I got his autograph on my school line-- I was in third grade. That had a huge impact on me, as you might imagine.

Then in 1972, my mother, who had been very active, she went to the original mayor, Daley, who she had known for a long time, and she said, "It's the 20th century. You need to let women into politics in Chicago." He, being a clever politician, turned around and he slated her to be commissioner of the Metropolitan Sanitary District, and she was the first woman elected in Cook County, which was a very big deal at the time. Cook County is the Chicago area. Then she later ran for statewide office. She's just seen as being a barrier-breaker in Chicago politics on gender.

It's interesting. Very little of my book is about this, but Susie Essman from Curb Your Enthusiasm, she was one of my blurbs, along with Stephen Colbert and a judge and a bunch of other people. Susie wrote that she was most moved by that part of the book, like the influence that women had on me in my political and journalistic development.

Brian Lehrer: That's a great story. One more thing about you. As a kid growing up in your mother's household, your parents' household, you wrote, "My little friends played with LEGOs and dinosaurs. I preferred Lincoln logs, of course. And on the wall of my room, I hung a copy of the Gettysburg Address." Did your friends think you were weird or geeky for that?

Jonathan Alter: They did a little bit, yes, because I memorized the presidents in order, and I was just very interested in history from an early age, and journalism, but I think they accommodated themselves to it pretty well.

Brian Lehrer: I'm sure. You found your ways to hang out. Part one of your book is mostly about your development as a journalist from childhood, some of the stuff you were just describing. Part two is the Trump trial itself, and part three is about the current moment in our country. Let's do part two now. 23 days covering Trump's trial for Washington Monthly in the courtroom in Manhattan. You have lots of detail in the book, so I'll let you pick out a few to focus on here. What were the most riveting parts of the trial?

Jonathan Alter: Well, the single most dramatic was sitting just a few feet away from the jury foreperson when he said guilty, guilty, guilty 34 times. A lot of people rotated in and out of the courtroom because each news organization only had one seat. Because I was the only person there for the Washington Monthly, and I wrote some pieces for The New York Times as well, I got to be there every day. I really felt that I was providing something that people weren't otherwise getting because the trial wasn't televised.

Seeing that verdict, and then seeing Donald Trump, just a few feet away, looking like he had been punched in the solar plexus after the verdict as he's walking up the aisle, and then by the time he comes out for the cameras, of course, he has his game face on, but this was the first time since Trump's father died many years ago that he was ever held to account for anything. It was kind of an inspiring moment.

You know I've covered a lot of big events. I've interviewed nine American presidents. I've covered the fall of communism. I was at ground zero. This was high drama. There were other moments of high drama that didn't really come through to the public because there were no cameras. When he was held in contempt of court 10 times, it wasn't even the top story of the day. Imagine if Harry Truman had been held in contempt of court. The judge, Judge Juan Merchan, threatened him with jail time if he didn't clean up his act and stopped being in contempt. I think Judge Merchan, on November 26, if Harris wins, he will get jail time in all likelihood. If Trump wins, because of the logistics of that, he's likely to be sentenced to probation.

This was a true moment of accountability. There were other highly dramatic moments. At one point, when Trump's only witness was unbelievably disrespectful to the judge from the witness stand, the judge cleared the court. I talked to lawyers and other people who had been around courts for decades; they'd never seen a judge clear the court. It was bedlam in the courtroom.

This was a very, very exciting, sexy trial, with Stormy Daniels and the rest. The Trumpiest of the Trump cases because so much of it was about the way he acted in New York over several decades leading up to the conspiracy that was at the heart of this case involving National Enquirer. I just got a real good sense of accountability. In some ways, it's a happy story.

People forget that Richard Nixon never went on trial because he was pardoned. Bill Clinton had his law license suspended and civil action. Other than that, Ulysses S. Grant got a ticket for driving his carriage too fast on Rock Creek Parkway in Washington, and Harry Truman got a ticket for driving his car too slow on the Pennsylvania turnpike, and that's it. That's it, Brian, in terms of presidents of the United States who had a connection to the criminal justice system, much less being convicted of a felony.

Brian Lehrer: Now 34 felonies, but as you said a minute ago, it didn't even rank as the top story, the top political story of the day that day. Let me ask you, as somebody who's covered as much as you have, are you surprised by where the country is now, meaning that Trump has had so much support as he has, despite everything, and that so many other people are just complacent about it? I ask in the context of your book a decade ago. I think you were even on for it at the time about the reelection of Barack Obama. The book title, which seems chilling to me today, was The Center Holds.

Jonathan Alter: Yes, that wasn't one of my better titles, Brian, in retrospect. The title of this book, I think, reflects my current thinking. It's called American Reckoning: Inside Trump's Trial―and My Own, and so people say, "Well, what's your trial? You never went on trial." It's the trial, the ordeal that I and I think many of your listeners have been through for the last nine years. I liked, or I used to like to think of myself as John F. Kennedy defined himself, which was an idealist without illusions. Unfortunately, I had some illusions about the common sense of the American people, and the way they would respond to just unbelievably damaging evidence against Donald Trump.

Now I still hold out hope. The New York jury rendered its verdict on May 30th, and now what I call the big jury is going to render its verdict in November. There is a chance here for people to really redeem themselves. I think I'm feeling the same butterflies that I felt when the felony trial jury was deliberating. Right now, the big jury is deliberating, with early voting underway, and it's not just Trump who's essentially on trial again in front of the electorate. I think our sense of ourselves is on trial. Who are we as a people? That's [crosstalk]--

Brian Lehrer: Let's end by going back to your interest in Lincoln, which dates back to your childhood, in the context of the answer you were just giving. Because near the end of your book, you describe this as perhaps the most important election in US history, alongside Lincoln's reelection in 1864. Why that comparison, in our last 30 seconds or so?

Jonathan Alter: Lincoln was running against General George McClellan. If McClellan had won, he likely would have made a separate peace with the South, as Trump himself was urging last week, preserving the Confederacy, and he would not have abolished slavery. Those were the stakes in 1864. Brian, the book ends at Five Points in Lower Manhattan, right near the courthouse, and Lincoln went there. I conjure Lincoln in New York in 1860, and then again in his second inaugural in early 1865 before he's assassinated. He talks about the better angels of our nature and the mystic chords of memory, and he ends his second inaugural, after 600,000 Americans had died in the Civil War, on a note of hope.

While I'm not an eternal optimist, I am hopeful that whether this time or in the future, we can all do our part, as Franklin Roosevelt said, to protect democracy.

Brian Lehrer: Jonathan Alter's new book is American Reckoning: Inside Trump’s Trial―and My Own. Jonathan, thanks for sharing it with us on release day.

Jonathan Alter: Thanks, Brian.

 

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