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Welcome back to the Lincoln project. I'm your host, Reed Dela.

Today, I'm joined by Susan Glasser and Peter Baker co-authors of the New York Times bestseller, The Divider.

Trump in the White House 2017 to 2021, available wherever fine books are sold.

This is the first definitive account of the full four-year Trump presidency and I can promise you that when you read it, it will feel definitive.

Peter is the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times responsible for reporting on President Biden, which is the fifth president he's covered.

He previously covered President's Donald Trump and Barack Obama for the Times and President's Bill Clinton and George W. Bush for the Washington Post.

Susan Glasser is the staff writer at The New Yorker where she writes a weekly column on life in Washington. Prior to The New Yorker, she was editor of Politico and founded the award-winning Politico magazine, served as the editor in chief of foreign policy, and wrote for a decade at The Washington Post where she was the editor of Outlook and National News.

Today, they're coming to us from their home in Washington, D.C. Yes, they are married, Peter and Susan, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much. It's great to be with you, Reed.

Thanks for having us. We appreciate it. So, this is going to sound like an odd question.

How do you write a book about a guy whose literal every emotion was made public either by himself on his Twitter feed or to the press or by someone in his immediate vicinity leaking?

How do you even decide to comprehend that kind of work when so much of it was in our faces for four years?

Well, part of the challenge, I think, of writing about or seeking to understand the Trump presidency, in fact, is finding a path to navigate through that, you know, flood of angst and emotion and all caps tweets that we all lived through, right?

And I do think for Peter and I, this was about setting out on a mission to record for history, as well as for ourselves, how we ended up in this catastrophic ending in 2020.

And I think the point is that this was a four year assault on the institutions of American government and that you had to see the through lines.

It wasn't some kind of like violent, crazy outlier, but in fact, there were a lot of warning signs all along the way.

And part of it is getting out of Trump's head and his Twitter feed looking at the people around him and trying to understand, you know, what was the damage that they actually ended up inflicting on the American system of government.

And Peter, you know, Susan mentioned the people that worked around Trump and the through line with them seems to have been with the exception of the true believers fanboys and fangirls is that whatever remnant of the Washington Republican establishment that was willing to go work for him, these people knew at least some level of what they were getting into and it seems like they all knew better than probably to go join this guy. They couldn't have been under many illusions that this was ever going to work out well for them.

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