Heroism & Trump’s Cowardice (with Jeffrey Goldberg & Joyce Vance)
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Creativity is one of the core traits that makes us human. It allows us to tell stories, to create, and to solve problems in new and exciting ways. So why does it feel so threatened? With new technological advances that can create art in milliseconds, where does that leave us? In this special three-part series, we wanted to ask, how can we save and celebrate creativity?

Tune into Saving Creativity, a special series from the Gray Area sponsored by Canva. You can find it on the Gray Area feed wherever you get your podcasts. From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Stay Tuned in Brief. I'm Preet Bharara. This week's episode of the podcast was recorded over the weekend in front of a live audience at the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin, Texas.

I was joined by former U.S. Attorney and my Cafe Insider co-host, Joyce Vance, as we interviewed the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine, Jeffrey Goldberg. We spoke about his new book, On Heroism, McCain, Milley, Mattis, and the Cowardice of Donald Trump. The book includes his reporting on top officials who stood up to Trump while he was president, as well as Trump's controversial statements reportedly calling members of the military suckers and losers.

And in a conversation exclusively for members of Cafe Insider, we spoke about the media's approach to covering Trump in the presidential election and what a second Trump term might look like. To listen to the full analysis, head to cafe.com slash insider and use the promo code Austin for 40% off the membership for the first year. Now, on to our conversation with Jeffrey Goldberg.

It's great to have you both here. Before we begin with the conversation fully, if you've been listening to the podcast in recent times, you know I have a small housekeeping matter that I take care of at the beginning of every week in recent times, and that is to ask Joyce Vance, on the record, Joyce Vance, are you any relation to J.D. Vance? I am not kin to J.D. Vance. What's your middle initial?

Duh you. If it was like Joyce Darlene, I would be in trouble at this point. All right. So, Jeffrey, congratulations on the book, On Heroism. I have a copy right here. You should get a copy. It's my favorite kind of book. Short. Tiny. A tiny little book. I was able to get through the whole thing. And you talk about lots of things. The title of the book is On Heroism.

You also talk about its opposite, cowardice. You talk about generals and military people who decided to work for Trump. Some of them explained why they continued to work for Trump, because they were trying to hold the line. And I guess I understand part of that. But what I don't understand, given what was already known about Donald Trump, at the time many of these people who you laud came to work for Trump,

These men who are patriotic, intelligent, thoughtful in your descriptions. Why did they go work for Donald J. Trump in the first place? That's a great question. The reason, I believe, it's, look, there's always ambition. You don't become a four-star general by being lazy and unambitious, right? I think in 2016,

There was hope that the presidency would sober up Donald Trump, make him more emotionally mature,

focused, realized the gravity of the situation. And so I think a lot of these people who went to work for him early on were hoping that that would be the case. What happened quick, and by the way, and let's not discount this, some of the people who went to work for him, many of the people who went to work for him, agreed with what they thought was

was his policy outlook to the extent that he has a policy outlook or like withdrawal from NATO? Fixed positions. And so that was a factor. What happened was, and this intensified as the term started, what happened was they realized that, oh, we need to be here because

He's going to be president whether or not we're here, but without us here, we're going to have...

huge potentially calamitous problems. It got to the point where at different times, Rex Tillerson, not a general, the CEO of a small country, James Mattis, John Kelly, people like that, they had an arrangement that one of them would always be in Washington within a couple of miles of

of the White House, in other words, like a babysitter, that they could not all be traveling somewhere at the same time in case Trump started a war through a tweet or if he issued some sort of irrational order to do something. And Trump obviously began to feel babysat

Right. And began to resent, you know, the saying is that every, you know, everybody who goes to work for Trump has a half life. Right. There's a you know, it could be four months in six months in eight months, 11 days, 11 days would be the half life. Yeah. Yeah.

I think Scaramucci, like that isotope started to decompose after five and a half, obviously. You know, so he grew more... The more they tried to keep him, you know, in the lane, the more he resented them. And obviously, jumping ahead, and I'm sure you want to get here eventually, the issue now is, as my colleague David Frum put it, the...

The velociraptor has learned how to turn the door handles. And so for the second term... It's not that funny, actually. No, no, no. Not that funny if you're on the other side of the door. Yeah. And so...

And so the worry is that the people around Trump learn from their mistake of hiring James Mattis to be the defense secretary, John Kelly to be the chief of staff, and they won't make that same quote-unquote mistake again. But I hope that answers the question of why. And, you know, and I've thought a lot about this because, you know, it's the same question that I have whenever I talk to people who served in that administration. And I'm in the camp of people who, you know—

a national security, law enforcement issues. You want the best people in government, no matter how unstable the president is, all the more reason to have people who can at least try, at least try to get something done. Yeah, I have a follow up on that. But Joyce? Well, I have this question, and maybe it's unsophisticated, so you can feel free to treat it for what it's worth.

But these folks who went in and saw the need to always have a babysitter within spitting distance of the White House, they really gave Trump room to rumble. And look, part of that is fair. Part of that is democracy. And you write about that in the book. The generals who talk about the fact that a president is elected and their job is to follow orders as long as they're legitimate orders.

But why didn't they do something at an earlier step? Why did we have to come down to January 3, 2021, where all 10 living secretaries of defense write in the Washington Post this, what I thought was a bone-chilling opinion piece, saying the military shouldn't decide the outcome of elections, right? Something that shouldn't need to be said, but they felt the need to say that on January 3rd. Why didn't they jump sooner?

It's a complicated question. The first thing I would say is that what's interesting to me about what happened leading up to January 6th is that it was the Pentagon that played a key role in

preserving and defending the Constitution from the civilians. Now, if you remember, I don't know how many of you remember this movie, Seven Days in May, started as a book. The assumption in popular culture is always that the generals are going to be the ones who try to launch a coup.

Right. And that Henry Fonda or whoever, Gregory Peck comes in as the president and says, no, we're not having a coup. This is the opposite. This is the generals trying to protect the Constitution from runaway civilians. So that was note for the record that Jeffrey's advocating for military rule. Yeah. If that's what if there's one thing that you take away from this conversation, that's what I want it to be.

That's how it will be reported in certain areas. Yeah, please do. It'll be on Breitbart or whatever Breitbart is today. Are you one of the places that's paid by the Russians without knowing? No, no, for the record, we are not. I think that the answer is not that I know of, right? But to answer the weightier part of your question, I would question your supposition

And I would ask the question, how much worse would it have been, right? How much worse would it have been had they not been around? You're asking, why didn't they do more? I'm saying, we don't know everything about what happened. We might find out. Well, we could find out, but I'll tell you one. May I tell you one story in this regard? I mean, I believe...

and I think that the world should know this, I believe that John Kelly may have saved us from a nuclear war. And the way John Kelly, first DHS secretary, and then chief of staff for the second chief of staff, the way he did that was, so he comes in as chief of staff right at the time that Donald Trump is tweeting, hey, little rocket man, I got a big red button on my desk and we're locked and loaded. And these are literal words that Donald Trump used to taunt people

nuclear power, a dangerously unstable autocratic possibly delusional nuclear monarch in North Korea, that is extremely dangerous thing to do because you could cause, you could trigger Kim Jong-un with that or trigger the people around him to say, oh, they're preparing an attack. In any case,

John Kelly spent, and you know, this has been discussed publicly, John Kelly spent quite a bit of time trying to discourage the president from taunting, it's crazy to think about this, from taunting the

the leader of North Korea as little rocket man and all that stuff and explaining you could enter us into an escalatory cycle from which there's no escape and all it takes is one North Korean general to fire one rocket across the border and we're going to have to respond and then and then where this is by the way the moment I don't know if all of you know this but Trump asked Kelly according to reporting Trump asked Kelly

Kelly at one point, could North Korean nukes reach America? And Kelly's answer was, well, they can certainly hit Guam, to which Trump replied, well, that's not America. And Kelly's response is, no, it is America.

Not only is it in America, but there's thousands upon thousands of American military personnel on Guam. I mean, this is what we're dealing with. We're dealing with someone who didn't know that Guam is an American possession. So Kelly... Did he mean that, or did he also mean we don't really care about Guam? He probably meant both, but I would always err on the side of... He doesn't know. If the explanation could plausibly be he didn't know Guam,

Then that is probably the explanation. I don't know if he has enough knowledge about Guam to be prejudiced against Guam, I guess is the way I would put it. It sounds foreign. Yeah, it's a weird foreign place with foreigners.

And so Kelly did, I think, one of the most clever things somebody in the White House has ever done. Kelly repositioned Trump's thinking. Kelly said to Trump, you know, you're one of the great dealmakers. You're probably the best dealmaker we've ever had in American business. Imagine you are the guy who makes the deal with Kim Jong-un to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula. You could reach out to him.

And this is the start of the love letters. This is the start of the process that led to Donald Trump walking into North Korea. Remember that he took 10 steps into North Korea at one point. And I think this was an extraordinarily clever, manipulative move on John Kelly's part. He said, appeal to his ego to get him to stop taunting North Korea to try to convince him that he's going to be the guy to deliver a good relationship between North Korea and the United States. He got Trump off this

escalatory framework and he moved him toward appeasement. Now, obviously, Kelly didn't think that North Korea could ever be appeased, but it got us out of a cycle that was very dangerous. Yeah. So the other thing with respect to John Kelly and some of the expert reporting that you did and the stories that you broke relate to Trump apparently on multiple occasions.

showing his contempt for our military. Yeah. Calling them suckers and losers, not understanding what sacrifice is, not understanding what patriotism is, not understanding what it takes to defend the country, not understanding what pain and sacrifice John McCain went through. You talk about that in the book. And my question is, two part, A, with respect to his supporters, because they deny all these things, other than the thing he said publicly about John McCain, I like people who weren't captured, but the rest of it,

As far as I've seen his allies, they don't say yes. So what he said it they deny it and they call John Kelly and others liars Do his supporters just don't believe that he said those things or they actually don't give a shit and then second with respect to Major leaders and politicians to me Joyce and I were talking about this one of the more arresting things in your book Was the answer to the question that a lot of people have had in their minds How does someone like Lindsey Graham?

Love love like a brother John McCain and also then be an acolyte of Donald Trump and you quote him as saying to you You think I'm gonna go into exile. Can you just talk about those two things? You know Lindsey Graham I knew Lindsey Graham well when he was John McCain's wingman because I knew McCain well and Lindsey Graham's great fun he's smart my

national security proclivities lean more in his direction than in McCain's direction or did, you know, when they were both operating in that sphere. Um, and so, you know, everybody's always looking for like, what is the secret reason for Lindsey Graham's abandonment of McCain and what he stood for and, uh, and his adoption of Donald Trump. And I don't think, uh,

Occam's razor here, you know, it's like what is the most obvious explanation is that Lindsey Graham is is empty inside and Here that emptiness needs to be filled by something He needs a father figure John McCain was that father figure Donald Trump becomes a father figure and he needs to I mean he said to me he said if you know I mean he said this to others too. He says if you know anything about me, you know, I need to be relevant and

I was with him once at an event sort of like this. We were behind stage. We were about to go out on stage and his phone rings and this is during the Trump term and he holds it up and said, look, president's calling me. And I was like, good for you. Like, I don't know what, what am I supposed to say? You're a Senator. That's not so surprising, you know? But I mean, he was like almost like,

His joy at that, at being part of the game, at being in the game. You know, I think there's an emptiness there. And that's something we've learned about a lot of politicians, that the fear of irrelevance is greater than the fear of unethical behavior or the fear of, you know, being exiled. And what about the voters? Do they just not believe he said these derogatory things? Well, you know, that's one of the strangest things of all. Yeah.

I know John Kelly and I know a lot of these other people. And if John Kelly says that Donald Trump turned to him in Arlington National Cemetery over the grave of John Kelly's son, a Marine captain killed in action in Afghanistan and says, I don't get it. What was in it for him? Like, why would John Kelly make that up?

That's insane. And by the way, John Kelly doesn't look so great in that story, by the way, in the sense that, you know, he made his compromise. Again, that goes back to your first question about why do you stay with this guy? It's like, you know, if John Kelly had, you know, said, Mr. President, I quit. Thanks. On the spot. On the spot. Mr. President, please step away from my son's grave.

Please, let's leave. And I don't want anything to do with you anymore. You know, the interesting thing about John Kelly, just as an aside, when... Too interesting. Can I tell you two interesting things about John Kelly? Two and a half. All right. No, all right. I don't know how much time we have. The first interesting thing about John Kelly is that in moments of real dire pressure...

He would leave the White House in the middle of the day and go to Arlington and just sit alone by his son's grave. And he himself has explained that as I just needed to remind myself why I'm doing this, like why I'm going in every morning at four in the morning. Remember, the president doesn't come down from the second floor of the White House from the living quarters till 11 in the morning. John Kelly is there at five or six, drives in from Virginia. Why am I doing this? Because my son did more.

My son did more for the country than I'm doing. The second thing about John Kelly that is amazing and not well known is that John Kelly, like Donald Trump, or unlike Donald Trump, I should say, actually had bone spurs.

And John Kelly, when he went to the draft board, they told him, well, you know, you have bone spurs. You can get out of this. John Kelly asked the doctor to lie and say that he didn't have bone spurs so he could join the Marines and go fight.

In Vietnam. Isn't it? It's just so, to me, the symmetry there is so astonishing that one used fake bone spurs to get out of Vietnam. The other pleaded with the doctors in the Marine Corps, just ignore my bone spurs. It's not that big a deal. I just want to go serve my country. I don't know. I mean, you can't find two people who are more different.

than John Kelly and Donald Trump. So I think you dig down on what we see from leaders and people who go to work for Donald Trump, right? Some of them, Lindsey Graham, need to be relevant. Others want to serve their country. But to Preet's point, what's in it for the rest of America, the people out in the country who vote for Donald Trump? Do they believe the lies he's peddling, or is there something else in it for them? I don't know.

No, I mean none of us can know we've all you know a lot of us in my profession have talked to Trump voters We go to those rallies. I used to go to those rallies at least I try to understand how much of it is I just don't like

Democrats and what they stand for. And so this guy, you know, a lot of people are he's going to lower my taxes. You know, there's all these kind of things that you tell you tell yourself. I like this policy or I like that policy or I'm a born Republican and I'm going to die a Republican. I find it hard to believe on the one hand that people don't believe that he has this

kind of contempt for basically everyone. We notice it more when it comes to veterans and war heroes and POWs because we generally accept as a society that we hold those people in high esteem. It's kind of a social contract. It's like you volunteer to put your life in danger for the country. Well, thank you for your service, right? So we notice it more, but contempt is a kind of a through line. But here's the other, the flip side is this to me.

on the question of whether they believe it or not. Remember, you can't have a grifter without the grifted, right? People who are willing and ready to be grifted

are a necessary prerequisite to being a successful grifter, right? So for whatever reason, people buy the Professor Harold Hill Act, you know, and they buy what he's selling. I don't know. I can't explain it. I think the record is, again, this is not ideological, right?

And I have to always say this. The Atlantic is nonpartisan. Like, we're a big tent. We publish conservatives. We publish liberals. Donald Trump does not provoke negative feelings in me.

Because of any set of policy per view what policy is policies argue it out, you know, there's no one American idea Let let us all just argue together. Let's have a strong Liberal Party and a strong conservative, but it's not a conservative party anymore It's a it's a it's an authoritarian cult party Obviously, there are a lot of Republicans many have been here at this festival a lot of Republicans Liz Cheney obviously the Chinese and the Bushes and all the rest

who are waiting for the fever to break and so we can get back to having a strong conservative party again. I don't know when that fever is breaking, but there are a lot of people who are fine being grifted. I can't explain it. Can you? You know, I live in Alabama, so I've experienced some of it.

And I wonder what you think about this. I mean, there's a demographic shift going on in this country. Things are changing in Texas, in Alabama, in Georgia. It may be that we will well soon live in states that are not majority white, and people who are used to having power and control may lose that. Perhaps there's some element of fear there.

I'm not sure what those folks think Donald Trump is going to do for them. It's the again in Make America Great Again that matters there. But here's the short-sighted thing that I don't understand. I literally can't understand this. If you go to South Texas, you go along the border areas, and you find that the federal workforce, border, customs, ICE, et cetera, you find thousands upon thousands of Mexican-Americans there.

who are doing that work, running in those roles, you find a lot of sympathy for Republican positions on immigration.

And you find, obviously, and we saw this especially before Kamala Harris came into the picture as the nominee, you saw a lot of sympathy for Trump, especially among black males. And you obviously have a lot of Asian Americans and other recent immigrants who are running family businesses and...

who would identify with what we think of as traditional Republican values. The Republican party made a choice when it went with Trump to go with racism as opposed to, um, as opposed to a kind of race blind ideological tent for people who believe in a strong border, who believe in low taxes. So like, so it's not all, I guess what I'm saying is I'm trying to be phrase this analytically. If, um,

were a white person in Alabama who was worried about a change in America, I would look beyond the skin color and say, well, what values do I share with some of these recent immigrants? Or what values do I share with somebody who crossed the border illegally from Guatemala but works 14 hours a day washing dishes? And then sort of say, maybe the Republican Party could actually be the Big Ten party.

and could be a majority party. But they went toward a nativism that ultimately won't work, I think. But it's just very interesting to me. I mean, I think that's our answer, right? If they would look beyond their skin color. So we'll just leave it there. Can I ask you another question about heroism? And you talk about, it's in the subtitle, The Cowardice of Donald Trump. Did Donald Trump show or exhibit courage or valor on the evening he was almost assassinated?

Not valor, but kind. You know, it's interesting. So I've been... I want to say this in a way that doesn't sound like I'm a jerk. Good luck, right? Either way is good for me. Go forward. Yeah, it works for the podcast. Either way. In favor of military rule, it can't get... Yeah, no, no, no. Not that I'm obviously opposed to the Constitution. You're already in a hole. There are...

autonomic nervous system responses to danger. Um, and you don't really know how you will react to mortal danger until you're shot at. I've been in various situations as a foreign correspondent where, you know, bad things will happen and you kind of don't know how your body reacts, how your mind reacts, what chemicals, what particular chemicals work on you. Um,

You know, yeah. Like everybody else, I was impressed. Well, he ducked down. He followed instructions that they teach all protectees to, like, the first thing to do is, like, drop down below the podium if you feel something's going on. And then he gathered himself, which was impressive. He didn't put himself into this position. It's not a soldier going to the battle, right? So let me separate that out from what heroism is. I was...

honestly a little bit surprised that he showed that level of thought in the in the minute or so from the when he went to the ground to realize oh i can take advantage of this situation i could say things that will get my followers i could do the fist you know um and so that was um that was are you saying that's just showmanship i don't know what you know what

guy got shot at he got shot in a year or took something happened to his year but not 100 there was a bullet involved in in damaging his ear um that's bad i mean it's it's scary it's scary to get shot at and he handled himself well um obviously it's the it's the secret service people who i mean that's the the

When you watch that, that's the crazy thing. These people who are paid a government salary to run in front of, between gunmen and the people they're protecting. Those people in that moment, I mean, I realize the Secret Service messed up bureaucratically and strategically a lot of that moment, but man, that is something. So I was, like everybody else who was watching it, I was sort of like, oh, wow. I remember when we were watching, we were like,

Well, that guy's won the election. Biden was still the candidate then. So my idea of cowardice, and one of my colleagues said, maybe it's not...

Maybe it's not cowardice. Maybe it's just a kind of self-absorption and self-protectiveness. My idea is putting him in balance or putting him opposed to people like the generals, the ones who volunteer to serve the country and put themselves in danger and get shot at. Donald Trump has never done anything, as far as we can tell, for anyone but himself. Yeah, I mean, part of the reason I ask the question

Is that you recite in one or two chapters of your book the fact that people have said about Trump he's really afraid of dying. Yeah. And other people have said he's really afraid of jail. You know what prompted me to use the word cowardice is the extreme difficulty he has being around visibly wounded veterans. I mean, he has some of the...

Some of the most egregious things he's done. I mean, I think probably the most egregious is sort of making fun of people who are handicapped. Obviously, that's not high on anyone's list of what good character is. But he has, he goes to France in 2017, sees the Bastille Day parade, wants one for himself. So he tells John Kelly and others, we should have a parade like that in Washington.

various people in the White House and the Pentagon say, well, look, the French have their thing and we're cool with it. They're our ally. It's great. But we here in America, we're kind of more of like a citizen army. We don't like have to, also we're the biggest army in the world. We don't have to like put out our missiles. We don't have to like show everybody our missiles, if you know what I mean. And he's like, no, I- What do you mean, Jeffrey? I'll-

Preet, I'll explain it to you later. And so they explain that and they say, we don't really do that. And then the greatest argument against having a parade was, you see, the Washington streets can't handle the weight of a tank. So we're going to have to spend more money to butcher the streets. But in the course of these negotiations, which the Pentagon kind of diverted, in the course of these negotiations, he said,

The thing I don't want is any wounded veterans in the parade. They make me look bad. Make me look bad. But what he was saying was, I don't want to look at it. He's a very, very, very...

fearful of injury and being, this is what I was thinking about in The Coward is more than anything else, very fearful of injury, very fearful of death, very fearful of being wounded. Look what he said about the Medal of Honor two weeks ago. This was one of the

I mean, not a shrink, but I'll play one on this podcast. He literally, he has this thought pattern that I can't fathom. He says the medal of freedom, which is the civilian equivalent, you can get without dying. So it's much better to,

It's a much better prize than the Medal of Honor. He's sort of disparaging the Medal of Honor by saying the only people who get the Medal of Honor are suckers. Why are they suckers? Because they put their life and limb at risk for their government, for their country, and there's such an easier way to get a medal. He said, I would love to get a Purple Heart, but I didn't want to get hurt.

which is like the prerequisite for getting a Purple Heart. But I'm at the outer limit of my understanding of this personality because I don't know people like that. I can't explain it. But he has a fear that energizes this. I don't know if his contempt for service, for military service, comes from...

Fear of death, fear of injury, or just the idea that you would do something where there's, quote, nothing in it for you. Thanks for listening. As a reminder, in a conversation exclusively for members of Cafe Insider, Joyce and I spoke with Jeffrey Goldberg about the media's approach to covering Trump and the presidential election and what a second Trump term might look like.

To listen to the full analysis, head to cafe.com slash insider and use the promo code Austin for 40% off the membership for the first year. Thank you for supporting our work. For more analysis of legal and political issues making the headlines, become a member of the Cafe Insider. Members get access to exclusive content, including the weekly podcast I host with former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance. Head to cafe.com slash insider to sign up for a trial.

That's cafe.com slash insider. If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me at Preet Bharara with the hashtag AskPreet. You can also now reach me on threads, or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338.

That's 669-24-PREET. Or you can send an email to letters at cafe.com. Stay Tuned is presented by Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tadishore. The deputy editor is Celine Rohr. The editorial producers are Noah Azoulay and Jake Kaplan.

The associate producer is Claudia Hernandez. And the cafe team is Matthew Billy, Nat Wiener, and Leanna Greenway. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I'm your host, Preet Bharara. As always, stay tuned.

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