"This Will Not Pass": Chronicling America's imperiled democracy

By Tom Hall,

Published August 22, 2022 at 12:05 PM EDT

Alexander Burns, with his New York Times reporter colleague and co-author Jonathan Martin, offers a compelling new account of how COVID, Donald Trump and the January 6th Insurrection have challenged American democracy like never before. (Burns photo (c) Cassidy DuHon/cover image Simon and Schuster)

(This conversation originally aired on June 9, 2022)

“Let me be very clear to all of you, and I've been very clear to the president. He bears responsibilities for his words and actions, no ifs, ands or buts. I asked him personally today, does he hold responsibility for what happened? Does he feel bad about what happened? He told me he does have some responsibility for what happened and he needs to acknowledge that.”
— House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, speaking with fellow Republicans about Donald Trump’s culpability for the attack on the Capital on January 6^th 2021.

The House Select Committee investigating that attack and efforts to overturn the election held its first public hearing on the 9^th of June, 2022. It was a prime-time event, viewed by 20 million people.

Today, on this archive edition of Midday, we’re going to listen to a conversation Tom had, on the afternoon of that first hearing, with New York Times national correspondent Alexander Burns. With his Times colleague, Jonathan Martin, Alex has written a compelling and comprehensive book about the last year of the Trump administration, including the months preceding the insurrection, through the first months of the Biden Administration.

Burns and Martin make a strong case for the fragility of the basic architecture of American Democracy. They argue that government cannot function in a two-party system in which neither party is internally coherent and serious about governing. Their book is full of excellent reporting and trenchant insights. And given, what we have all since learned from testimony by many witnesses presented by the January 6^th Select Committee, we thought it would be interesting to re-visit Tom's conversation with Alex, and think about all that led up to that terrible day, in which for the first time in our history, we did not experience a peaceful transfer of power between one administration and the next.

The book is called This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future. Alexander Burns joined us on the phone from Washington, DC.