Welcome to the Dispatch Podcast. I'm Steve Hayes. Today I am joined by Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns of the New York Times, who have a new book out, This Will Not Pass.

Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America's Future. You probably have heard about the book. You may have read passages from the book. It's certainly been the subject of a lot of discussion and reporting out of Washington over the past couple of weeks.

They join me for an hour-long conversation on the details of the book and their reporting and what it all means.

Jonathan Alex, thanks for joining us on the Dispatch Podcast.

Thanks for having me.

Thanks Steve.

I want to focus first on Republicans, then on Democrats, on a mix in some questions about reporting and writing process, which I find interesting. I think our listeners will find interesting, and then I want to finish with a couple of questions about what it all means.

But I'm going to try to be sort of fast so we can get to as much. My book is totally marked up in dog year, the way that a good book should be. I want to cover a lot.

I want to start on January 6th. You're reporting the book that both Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell believed that Trump's behavior that day was appalling and impeachable.

And you also report that in the days after the violence, both Republican leaders believed that there would be enough Republican support to impeach and remove him.

This is why McCarthy said he was going to call Trump, to tell him to resign, and what McConnell told two aides in a meeting.

This section jumped out at me for as much reporting as I had done as many conversations as I'd had about January 6th and about Republicans and the days and weeks after that.

I never sort of jumped out at me the way that it did in your really terrific reporting.

Is it fair to conclude that if Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell had led, if they'd acted on their convictions, Donald Trump would have been impeached, convicted, and removed?

I think they certainly would have gotten real close. One of the things that we report in the book from the Democratic side is that as the impeachment trial was unfolding in the Senate, the impeachment managers felt like they were going to get a decent chunk of Republican votes.

They might get in the high 50s, which is obviously where they ended up getting. But that, basically, their Hail Mary was if we get McConnell, then suddenly a whole bunch of other votes come into play.

People like your John Thunes and your John Cornens, right? People who are by no means a sort of moderate Republicans or solid ideological conservatives.

But left to their own devices and given the kind of cover of McConnell voting to convict, maybe they would be in play.

I think most of our reporting from the Republican side supports that idea that if McConnell in particular had led in the way he sounded like he was open to leading in the days immediately after January 6th, maybe you still only get a 64 or 65 votes to convict.

It's not a sure thing, but you certainly get really, really close to conviction.

And there was reporting in real time in the times that McConnell was leaning towards that kind of a vote.

What happened? Can you just take us through that time period and sort of McConnell's thinking and his conversations and how he ended up being so disgusted with what he had seen and so offended, sort of as an institutionalist, and yet ended up giving a tough speech about Trump but not pushing to convict.

...