How to Cover Racist Tweets

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's gonna tell you the truth.

How do I present this with a class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Yeah.

Aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

This is Radio Atlantic.

I'm Isaac Dover.

This was a week when we were all talking about one thing, President Trump's tweets.

Specifically, his tweets that four Democratic freshman congresswomen should go back, as he put it, to where they were from.

They're all American citizens, by the way, and three of the four were born here.

They're also all women of color.

Here in the Atlantic newsroom and in many other newsrooms around the country, moments like these prompt hard questions.

Do you call the president a racist?

How do you not call the president a racist?

Do you give him the attention he wants?

And how do you modulate that, contextualize it, explain it?

Margaret Brennan, the host of Face the Nation on CBS, had to figure that out in real time last Sunday morning.

She was putting the final touches on her show right as the president's tweets landed and had to decide then, and in the preparation for this coming Sunday show, how to handle it.

She's a TV veteran.

She's interviewed the president at length and covered other countries going through political crises.

Experience that brings her to this week with a distinctive perspective.

So we stopped by CBS's Washington Bureau on Friday to try to talk that through.

Here's our conversation.

Margaret Brennan, thanks for being here on Radio Atlantic.

Thanks for talking to me here at CBS.

Glad to have you on your home turf.

Let's go back to last Sunday.

The tweets that started this whole week from the president came out early in the morning on Sunday.

It was about two hours before Face the Nation went on the air.

Walk me through what happens then.

When you see those tweets come across, you've got a show to put on.

You can't ignore them, but you can't make the whole show about that, right?

No, though, that's exactly right.

I mean, I remember, you know, in that, right before the show, you're in a crush of

you've pretty much done most of the prep.

You're at like 95% ready to go, but looking to see what else pops, what else has moved, what may be developing in the hours before you go on air.

And the president's tweet popped, and I looked at it and I went, whoa.

Wow.

Okay, this is not.

How often does that happen that you see a tweet that makes you say, wow?

It's,

I think we've all become a bit callous.

So it's become less common.

But

there is a pattern that a lot of these tweets that are big statements do come Sunday morning right before the Sunday shows.

Do you think that's on purpose?

Is that what you're saying?

100%.

It is a conversation starter.

It is a way to direct it.

The president knows how powerful this is as a communications tool.

It takes very little effort, and he can switch the topics for main networks, which is why we make the choice and say, that's not what this show is.

We are going to have a reasoned conversation about the things that matter of this week and try to curate and distill what those topics are.

But sometimes you get what we saw and on Sunday morning and say, this has to be integrated.

This isn't just a little bit of red meat that you can say, I see what it is and move on.

It was something that not only did we feel had to be asked of our guests, but our guests brought it up.

I had Jay Johnson, the former Homeland Security chief on the show.

And the very first thing he said was, I have to address this tweet

because he was

offended that the Customs and Border Patrol chief, acting chief who was on, when I asked him what the president meant and whether, what his thoughts were, said, I don't know.

You have to ask the president.

Typically, this is the answer.

I haven't seen it.

Don't know what he meant.

Have to ask him.

Yeah, it's this magical bubble that people seem to to live in where they just don't know what Twitter is on the days when the president tweets something.

When you tweet something like this, which is why I turned it more into, okay, let's look at what the operational sort of impact could be.

Don't get stuck in the, is he or is he not?

And where do you fall on declaring the president's true intentions and what his heart says?

It was just sort of, okay, practically speaking, doesn't this make it more difficult for you to get Democrats to work with you and all the things that you say you need Democrats for and ultimately say they're making impossible for you to improve at the border.

And that is where I took the conversation with

the CBP chief.

But it's something that continues to come up, and I know this Sunday we will be talking about it still.

And what's the right balance to strike there, do you think?

The president, a couple days before he sent the go back tweets, was at a social media summit that he hosted at the White House talking about how great it was.

He would tweets things and he can explode the conversation, determine what everybody's talking about.

That's clearly what happened.

We have spent a week talking about almost nothing else, even though many other things have been going on.

And it seems like this is at least what he wants everybody to be talking about.

There's a different question of whether this is actually in his political interest, but he thinks it's in his political interests.

So what do you do?

Are we just like dancing to the tune that

he plays for all of us?

That is one of the battles that I think

people in the media need to be we are in the middle of, is sort of

still trying to take a deep breath, a step back, and on the Sunday programs, particularly in Face the Nation, we have the ability to do that.

That is our role in many ways.

I don't want to be part of the cacophony.

You can get an opinion anywhere,

even when you don't want one right now on television

everywhere

and so

choosing

what is

important

and people need to know versus what is interesting and shiny is something we're constantly adjusting to when it's a tweet like that

it was so loaded

that

it wasn't just popping off of an opinion or an opinion on something that's totally just political.

It was weighted with so many different

things

and speaks to so many different experiences.

I mean, people heard that in different ways.

And so having that conversation.

A textbook example, literally, from the Equal Opportunity Commission, of what a racist statement could be, right?

Like, go back home.

The government's guidelines say that.

So, like,

literally from the textbook.

From the textbook, what the U.S.

government says is racist.

And I think that's really interesting that it took conversations in each newsroom of the major organizations to have a serious conversation because we still know the power of words.

And having that be a reasoned conversation to say, okay, if we use that term, if we use that label, what does that mean?

And ultimately, our standards and practice folks in New York and all of us together came to a conversation point where it said, you can call the phrase what it is, racist,

and not be labeling the president as such.

What does that distinction mean?

I mean, I struggle with this too, right?

Do we say the statement is racist?

That's its own debate, right?

And then if you come down on yes, the statement is racist, then can a person who is not racist make a racist statement?

Where does the transit of property kick in?

And also, of course, it's not like this is an incident in itself.

I mean, I was

doing something on MSNBC on Sunday afternoon after a couple hours after the tweets, and they said, well, are you surprised by this?

And I said, well, no, I mean, this is part of how the president thinks about things.

The go back seems to me connected to

birtherism directly, which is like, you're from Kenya.

Just go.

It's all that.

I don't know.

What do you make of it?

I'm struggling with myself.

I think we all are.

And I think you're hearing that even among the president's most,

you know, I don't want to say ardent supporters, but some of his allies in the Republican Party.

And as CBS has reported, his own family members.

His wife, who is the first lady of this country, is an immigrant.

The first daughter, Ivanka Trump, is the daughter of an immigrant.

The president is the son of an immigrant.

But the president is the son of an immigrant.

And so

the fact that his family members went to the president as we reported and said, we didn't like what happened at the rally.

It's almost like over the course of the week, as we went from that tweet Sunday morning through what happened midweek at the rally in North Carolina, where the president, again, was bringing up these congresswomen and criticizing them.

And then the crowd...

starts chanting back, you know, go home and

send her home.

That crossed the line.

That seemed to chill people a little bit to hear that and to see it and have it associated with the party.

That, I think, is where the shift happened for some Republicans who were struggling with the chanting at the rally.

The chanting at the rally.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: It seems like that's the same way that the locker-up chant started, though, and that has just become part of the fabric of a Trump rally, right?

Aaron Ross Powell, the overlay of the fact that there have been death threats against this particular congresswoman, I think, make it hard to separate that this could be dangerous.

It's been interesting to watch some of the president's supporters try to split the hair here and say, Well, I don't like what that congresswoman does, and I disagree with her politically, and I don't like the things that she's said in her language, but maybe this is a bridge too far.

Trying to have it both ways there.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Well, I mean, look, it's possible to have disagreements politically.

Exactly.

And Ilhan Omar is not someone who is

a shrinking violet

and is not someone whose politics politics are

mainstream.

But

she's also not someone who is

attacking America in the way that some of her critics, opponents, whatever you want to call them, have said.

Some of what is one way of reading what she said, and this is maybe people might find it too generous, is that she

came here as a refugee and feels like America has fallen short of the principles that she was told America stuck to when she was becoming a citizen.

But one way or the other, she

has a lot of strong views and expresses them, not always

very easily.

The whole flub that she got in over the APAC comments earlier in the year are a demonstration of that.

But it does seem like she is a freshman member of Congress who now the president has put a at least giant rhetorical target on her and maybe more than that.

Aaron Powell, and it's interesting because you talk about the political ramifications of that.

And I don't mean to in any way separate the humanity of this, that these comments, particularly to anyone who has immigrants in their family,

receives them in

a hurtful way if there is a difference drawn on where you came from.

originally and whether that somehow makes you more or less American.

That is a real thing, and the weight of history is there.

But on the political side of this, too, it's this interesting dynamic.

And we spoke about that immediately on Sunday, which was

so

this progressive, very liberal

part of the party represented in some ways by Congresswoman Ilhan Omar and the squad, as they're called.

The squad, and the tweet said they should go back home wasn't just she should go back home.

And they and the other three of them were all born in America.

Right.

exactly.

So, the commonality being they are brown or black, right?

Um, so that's why it was heard by some people to say, wait, if I'm an immigrant and I'm brown or black, does that make me less American than somebody else?

Or if I'm not an immigrant and I'm brown or black, right, right.

And that is where the painful part of that is.

Um, and

as Kamala Harris called it, the un-American part of that is.

But on the

those were her words, but on the political side of it, it creates this weird dynamic where all of a sudden this

person who is, as you say, a freshman and other freshmen around her becomes representative of the Democratic Party when they are not.

They are on the edges of it.

And one way or the other, they are four freshman members of the House.

Right.

Right.

Like four members of the House don't usually matter in any way, no matter who they are.

And it comes in this moment when they were arguing vocally.

There were cracks among the Democratic caucus from their own leadership.

Speaker Pelosi, remember, that was that argument that was playing out up until the president said this.

So the speculation was, oh, so now does this unify Democrats?

Is the president against his own interests?

The other side of that is the president knows what the symbolism is, and that Democrats now have to rally around someone who they don't necessarily think represents the rest of the party.

Right.

And is this the

people say, oh, maybe this is the 3D chess going on, which seems like a little bit much.

The one thought I had when we have this debate over language too is when you get to,

can you call the phrase racist and the rhetoric racist, which is what CBS did do,

it was reminiscent to me of that Clinton-era debate and follow me here at the State Department about labeling what was happening in Rwanda at the time, the mass killing, acts of genocide rather than genocide.

Because if you call it genocide, you kind of have to do something about it, right?

Legally.

Okay, so then take me through the

come back.

What is

because it sparked this debate.

How many acts of genocide add up to genocide?

How many racist comments add up to racism?

Now you have this forced conversation and debate that has nothing to do right now truly with policies that remain

stuck before Congress or undelivered on on the campaign trail or real questions for the people who want to be in the Oval Office.

Now we're talking about whether something is or isn't racist rather than everything else around it and the guts of the policies.

And that's this thing we're all caught in.

So is there a point where you

that acts of racism add up to racism and you have to do something about it?

Right?

That's

isn't that where we go next?

Do you do something about that?

Or does that

mean that?

Or do we accept that we have a president who says things that are racist?

That's a really hard thing to wrap your head around.

And maybe it shouldn't be that hard anymore.

Maybe that's,

I'm sure some people listening would say, like, well, you guys should accept it already.

We're going to take a short break, be back with Face the Nation's Market Brennan in just a moment.

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The New York Times TV critic wrote this, he tweeted this on Monday.

A real problem is that politics in Trump's era has taken on a moral dimension that news outlets either aren't equipped to cover or think it's their duty to avoid.

And if they avoid it, they avoid their job, which is to accurately represent to their audience what's happening.

Anything about that?

I think

this is a really, really difficult conversation.

It was a difficult conversation when we had it about Charlottesville.

And I think

this at this point in the campaign does not bode well for where we are going

until that election night

in 2020.

I think.

Why not?

What do you think?

What is that you I think it's going to be dirty.

I think it's going to be hard.

I think it's going to be rough.

I think it's going to be

some of this

where

you hear and you feel from people frustration and anger, and constantly the calls to bridge the partisan divide, but then these fractures that are constantly being sort of found.

And

I think it's an interesting conversation because beyond that, the language and beyond the debate about who we want to be as a country, there are these bigger society-wide conversations to be having about massive social change, income inequality,

that you also see just changes in the workforce.

Are Americans equipped to be

dealing with the economy that we are heading towards technologically, the race that the U.S.

is facing off versus China on, all these big picture questions about where we're headed as a country, and we're not really having them much.

We're not having them at all.

At all.

Right?

And like, this is a week that was consumed by, are these tweets racist?

What does it mean that they are racist?

But you know what happened over the course of that week is like there was another week of China progressing on all the fronts that they were progressing on that is a week that we don't get to make up, right?

Right.

And automation proceeding, to your point, or changes in the economy, or people who are just trying to figure out what they're going to do to pay their bills that are not happening on the level of us having this obviously very important and deep conversation that goes to the root of what America is, right?

Exactly.

And that's

I wonder too, when people talk about the lessons of 2016 and the campaign and covering it,

all these things that are important and weighty and need to be discussed, how do we also know what is

you know, resonating with people and giving it its full weight and its full importance.

2016, trade was not covered and not handled with the level of importance that it should have been.

You know, I spent a decade covering Wall Street and financial news, and so I clearly was interested in that.

And I think you clearly saw from Bernie Sanders to President Trump how that resonated with their voters and the frustration and the feelings of income inequality and dislocation.

That message, how is that being covered now?

How are we bringing that into the conversation now?

We're talking maybe about trade deals happening or not happening, but what about the underlying issues that happens?

There's so much, I think, just for us, books are going to be written about how we as journalists, how we as a society, how these institutions are trying to cover these changes, but also

the incoming.

Right.

Just missing it because you can't keep up.

But everything, right, this is the issue is that no matter what,

whenever you make a journalistic choice, you're making a choice to cover one thing versus another thing, right?

You have the guests that you put on versus other guests, right?

You'll have Corey Booker on this weekend.

You could have had literally two dozen other presidential candidates.

There's a reason why you wanted to have Booker on, and it makes sense in the context of this.

But no matter what, when I write a story, I'm deciding I'm going to put my time into that versus anything else.

But so

when we look at

which also doesn't necessarily mean some of these things aren't covered.

It's just maybe you're not finding it.

Maybe it's on the back page.

Maybe it's on the website or it's a reader and a broadcast.

But like, I mean,

I don't think it makes me a biased journalist, but I personally don't think that there's like such a thing truly as objectivity because I'm making a choice that this is worth my time to cover and saying to the people who read my articles,

this is what I'm providing for you today or this week or whatever, rather than any of the other things, right?

And so we have to make a decision when we cover these tweets or cover this ongoing incident of what to do and to say, again,

we're doing maybe what the president at least politically wants us to do.

Well, it's

whether it's the president or it's the people auditioning to be the next president, I think certainly on Face the Nation we have this conversation throughout the course of the week about

separating the interesting and the important.

And what happened Sunday was the interesting was also important in some way.

But it's often difficult as well to cover in the right way.

I mean, it's Face the Nation.

It's supposed to be a serious conversation.

It's a 65-year institution.

So what do you...

Is it hard to have a serious conversation in the middle of these things, to have the reason to step back

as you want to do it?

We have, and we've had the editorial support to be able to still make those choices.

The example I'd point to is how I handled that on Sunday, the tweet.

It wasn't, tell me what is in the president's heart, you represented of the administration, or you Democrat, you defend all Democrats.

The life isn't that black and white.

It's more gray.

There is more nuance to it.

And okay, so

I'm not going to make you pick a side on what label you put on the president, but I am going to point out that this makes it hard for you to deliver on what the president says he wants to do and to get Democrats to work with you.

That's the dot that is, that you can connect that makes it relevant.

Seeing those things, and

I think is where the moderator in the conversation, the responsibility lies to not tell the audience, viewers and consumers of the news we're putting out there what's important so much as how it impacts them, possibly.

That's where we're making those choices.

And so I'm not going to spend necessarily eight minutes on, well, is he or is he not?

Scold the people.

You find that on a number of different channels and blogs and Twitter.

That's not facination.

Face a nation is understood.

And I think

I have faith in our viewers that when they hear a talking point that is just a talking point, that they know what is authentic and what is not.

And if I will point out a fact that contradicts that,

pointing that out, it's an interjection

of fact into a conversation that may not be,

that may be very emotional.

And that's how I filter it, if that makes sense.

Yeah.

Well, let's talk about facts for a second as it relates to this.

The president was on Wednesday night in North Carolina at that rally

and the crowd started chanting, send her back.

As you were saying,

that seems to have been too much for a lot of people who were having trouble distancing themselves before that.

We're told from your reporting, from other reporting, that Ivanka Trump and Melania Trump were among the people who interceded, as well as Mike Pence.

And then the president on Thursday in the Oval Office said, oh, well, I didn't like this chance.

And I tried to stop them.

And the tape shows a different.

Yeah, so what do you do then?

He's not,

it is just not true.

And there's video evidence of it.

He stands back from the microphone for, I think it's 12 or 14 seconds, letting the chance go on.

And the way that he said in the Oval Office was, oh, well, you saw I spoke pretty quickly to stop it.

But that's not what happened.

So what do we do?

Go to the tape.

Go to the tape, go to the established facts as you can.

I think there are a few things on this, but that we will do that.

We will go to the tape, show that.

What is interesting is you look at this and the choices the President makes and doesn't and how he explains his actions.

And over the course of the week, he has continued to tweet about it.

He has continued to talk about it.

He's been continually

asked about it by journalists.

So it's a story that we didn't move on from,

and that many around the president also didn't think should be just moved on from.

But

he didn't say, wait a second, in that moment or a few days later, that sentiment is wrong.

That rhetoric is wrong.

A United States Congresswoman who has sworn an oath to this Constitution is a United States Congresswoman and she is just as American as anyone else.

That is a phrase that could have been uttered.

And that choice was not made.

The choice instead was about

explaining the actions or putting a different cast on them.

And so that makes it more about the president than about the principle.

And that's where we get stuck sometimes, I think, as a country where it continues to be about the president, the person, and not about the principle itself.

But we didn't really hear from a lot of elder party statesmen standing up and saying

that.

We didn't really hear from any Republican

elder party statesmen saying that.

No, you had some, like Marco Rubio tweeted a video of himself saying he didn't like the sentiment.

He didn't like the chant, grotesque, I believe is the word he used.

But stopping short.

Stopping short and then going on to say, I don't like,

you know, whether it's a curse word or it's phrases that Ilhan Omar has said that she denies were anti-Semitic, but certainly were perceived as anti-Semitic.

And it just takes you down another rabbit hole going that way.

But I think that's interesting as a choice that the president,

and maybe he will, as we saw in the wake of Charlottesville, there were different statements and evolution of those over a few days.

Does the evolution matter, you think, or is it just like, don't we know where he stands on this?

It's

the argument can be made: the language always matters and

setting the record straight.

But yes,

which version

do you trust and do you go with?

But it also provides a lot of political cover for anyone trying to make the race for the White House right now, where

where's your nuanced conversation about all the policy proposals you're actually putting out there?

They instead can work in this realm of

racist, not racist.

Right.

Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders are back and forth about Medicare for All this week.

Well, nobody's paying attention to that, right?

I went to a speech that Bernie Sanders gave in Washington.

It was an hour-long speech.

He went through in some detail why he thinks the system as it is needs to go and why he likes the system that he wants to put into place.

And he thinks he promised that you could have Medicare for All in place in four years, no problem, which is a big promise.

Well,

that would be something that in another circumstance,

probably

a big and active Democratic field would be debating much more actively.

And instead, it was people condemning Donald Trump and standing by Elon Omar and the other members of Congress who were attacked.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Which is not a full conversation about where our country is headed.

And

does that mean we are as a country

doing the same thing that happened in the last race, where there was this

armchair quarterbacking after the fact to say, well, blame the media for covering these rallies, blame the media for covering these things,

blame the media for looking at the shiny object over here.

We got shiny objects all around us right now.

Who is

directing it towards the substance as well?

So, when we have Senator Booker on the program on Sunday, will we talk about this issue of the week?

Yes, we will, particularly given his focus, that his entire message is about the soul of this country, as he phrases it, and love being the best

back to counter

controversy and crisis and and hate

does that resonate right now as a message does he need to sharpen his tone um to look like he can challenge the president in a way that uh on a on a debate stage potentially um and win but also we will get to the rest of what is happening with his agenda.

I think that's a good idea.

You're going to talk about his gun plans.

And I mean, like, right?

Like, that's that's the problem.

I will try to get to at least one policy matter, if not two, if not three.

But yes,

in a live extended interview, you make those choices and you make those conversation choices as you're having it.

It's, you're calling audibles the whole time as the moderator, as the host, to respond and to listen to what someone has said.

That's the beauty and the challenge of live television.

But it's also one of the few places where, as a country, I think we can go right now.

And yes, I'm talking my own book, but I do firmly believe that Sunday shows and face the nation are one of the few places you can do that.

Where else can you have seven, eight, nine-minute

with follow-up questions?

Right here.

This, well, there you go.

Besides a podcast,

where, you know, right now it's the hot take, it's the tweet, it's a video clip.

There's not a lot of follow-up or nuance, or but wait, how does that actually work being asked when someone throws those bumper sticker slogans out there?

So that's how I view the role: don't get too sucked into those rabbit holes.

Give them their due, address them, but also also get to the kitchen table issues that people are worried about.

And are polling consistently, healthcare, as you were just laying out with Medicare for All, how that's climate change, you know, these things that are huge, complicated problems.

And matter to voters.

And they're telling us that.

And will matter in their lives that have to do with what

literally life and death issues are.

I have found myself learning over time, not

pull yourself away from Twitter.

But now, like whenever the president tweets something, whatever it is, but certainly when it's anything like this, you see so many people, whether they're activists or politicians on one side, but also journalists who like want to get one good line and one good quick analysis of the tweet, retweet it, and hope for, oh, I'm going to get a thousand retweets off of that, maybe.

And when you can break yourself away from that, the sound of your own voice, the retweeting of your own tweet.

There's a great uh aziz and zari has a netflix special that just came out and there's a there's a moment where he says like oh did you guys see all the thing about like the the pizza place that made the swastika out of pepperoni and he gets the the crowd to start like oh did you guys did you see the swastika and some people cheer and

how many people didn't see the swastika and then he asked somebody he goes you saw it and he said yeah and i just made that story up why did you think you needed to have an opinion about that right and he says like that's what's going on and it's true right Having a hot take.

And I think, and CBS across the platforms right now

has rededicated itself to saying, look,

you know, and particularly with Face the Nation, Mary Hager, the executive producer and myself constantly have this conversation of,

you know, separating the interesting from the important, giving context, having a conversation.

We're not casting a Republican and Democrat to ghost shout at each other.

You can get that a lot of places, and you, frankly, probably don't learn anything at the end of that.

And I want people at the end of the program to learn something about that.

And it is a moderator.

You are not turning in to hear my opinion.

If I'm giving you an opinion, I'm not doing my job, right?

I don't.

It's frankly the job to be giving everyone a hard time.

That is the privilege of this position.

So that they all think that you are a pain.

And if that's true, then you're doing it right.

Right.

Or at least push people past the slogans, past the 140 characters.

So what do you you have had the experience of interviewing Donald Trump.

I have not interviewed Donald Trump.

I have asked him questions in

groups of reporters.

With what you think of it as the way that you go about asking questions, what you're trying to get out of it, what was that experience of trying to get that from the President?

President Trump is a fascinating person to interview.

He's very tough to prepare for as well.

I think he's someone who just, as a, I had been a White House correspondent covering him from the day one of the administration before I became moderator.

And I always learned that reading the transcripts of his remarks is something I did, but I had to hear him.

I had to hear.

It's so much in the delivery.

It's so much in the delivery.

It's the phrasing, it's the intonation.

You really have to hear him to get where he's going or what he's implying.

So I think, you know, television is his medium, but certainly hearing him out and being able to follow things up with him is a privilege to be able to interview a president, but particularly this president.

I'd had the experience of standing in that scrum with other White House reporters shouting questions when he goes to board Marine One.

What happens in that moment?

That is a choice.

That is a choice to say, I heard your question.

I didn't hear yours.

You can choose to be in control over who you're responding to.

What?

Can't hear you over the engine.

Sorry.

Sorry.

And move on.

That is something that is different from the setting of a briefing room where there's a large level of decorum and calling on people where

it may not be as

fast moving, but allows you to have that give and take.

When you're sitting down across from him, as an interviewer, there are so many things that go on, but I made the choice that

I wanted wanted to stay focused on a set number of topics.

Whittling that down was really hard and be able to push for answers on them.

That sounds basic, but it's actually very challenging to stay on that initial topic because the president moves quickly.

He jumps topics, sometimes within the same paragraph, same issues, jumping to a completely different one.

And it's a way of challenging the interviewer because you go down different pathways and rabbit holes, maybe away from the original conversation.

And knowing that people are going to be watching that and saying, I can't believe Brennan let him get away with this.

Exactly.

And look, that was one of the things I've also had to learn, right?

You get incoming from literally everyone on, well, why didn't she argue with him on this?

Why did she let him get away with this?

And again, I'm not an activist and I'm not there to debate.

I am there to pull information out and to get that

closest

approximation of the truth and new information.

And I think we did accomplish that.

I thought it was also really interesting.

And my colleague Leslie Stahl of 60 Minutes, who was the first female moderator of Face the Nation, I spoke with her before our interview in February around the time of the Super Bowl.

And I said, okay, so how did it go when you have interviewed the president?

And she's had a number of exchanges with him.

And it was really helpful to think through what that was going to be from moment one.

Who was going to walk into the room that day and sit across from me?

Was it going to be at that time someone who felt defeated by the 35-day government shutdown that had just happened?

Where at the end of it he didn't get the because we should place this.

This was the Super Bowl.

Exactly, this was a Super Bowl interview,

coinciding with the fact that CBS had the broadcast rights for the big game, and we were having, as always happens with the Super Bowl, record numbers of people tune in.

So it's a great opportunity for the president and has been

kind of a tradition

to give an interview with the host network because you reach so many people.

And we certainly did that day.

And he walked in not defeated,

also not necessarily doing a victory lap.

The president turns defeats into what he says are victories for him.

He was on the attack from the get-go on Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, who had not delivered the things he was demanding of Democrats at the time on immigration.

But I didn't stay there.

I moved into other things, and particularly national security policy, that we don't really ever hear the president with follow-up questions, really.

And so I learned from that interview.

I thought it was really interesting.

And the best feedback I got was tough but fair, which is kind of the best you can hope for.

That's the best you can hope for.

Let me close with this.

You have spent some of your career before this job doing foreign affairs reporting.

A question that sometimes comes up, certainly in a week like the one that we've had, is

what if it were happening in another country?

How would we report on it?

If what was going on with President Trump, what was going on with the way the opposition party is going through this?

So if you can, put yourself in those shoes.

If you were seeing what we've seen in the last week in America go on somewhere in Europe and Asia, Africa, How do you think we'd be thinking about it?

I think it's an interesting question because I think some of what is happening here is happening elsewhere, different ways, different contexts.

But at this moment,

what we have seen, certainly it's a story I covered going back to the European debt crisis when I was covering financial news, when you saw these fissures surfacing coming out of economic strain, where you saw rise of nationalism, rise of populism, different conversations about what's worth spending taxpayer dollars on or not, whether someone deserves help or not, who's to blame for.

These conversations started bubbling up back then

and

covered them critically, certainly when they were starting to bubble up in Greece.

It's a different thing here because Americans, we love to think we're the center of the world.

Even if the story is not about us, we make it about us.

And as someone who covered things overseas quite a lot, I know that i get it it's the american conceit uh we are the most powerful economy in the world the most powerful military in the world but it is not about us all the time but if you saw a foreign leader saying

that some member of his or her government should leave the country right

what i mean how would we if that i don't even know if it's worth trying to pick a country where that would happen but a country where that happens no issues that you saw bubble up in germany and italy in the wake of the migrant crisis, where it became what defines you as German, what defines you as Italian, all those nationalistic tones, that overlay of extreme nationalism is a really dangerous thing.

And sometimes we don't have the historic reference quite as fresh in our minds as perhaps others in Europe do

with that.

But you are seeing some of that.

come up.

And in the UK right now,

it was interesting getting

the Prime Prime Minister of the United Kingdom was being asked about commenting on President Trump.

World leaders are being asked.

And I think what's so

unique about the American experience and the American example is it is an example, or it has been up to this point, in terms of values and principles and laying out the Western ideals that Vladimir Putin tells us are in decline in the West.

So these conversations suggest maybe

his predictions, they support his argument, right?

That we're having these really ugly, messy conversations.

The optimistic tone to put on all of this is you have to have the conversation to move beyond it.

But what would we be covering?

I think we'd probably CBS would make the same decision in terms of having the debate and then the decision to go with calling the rhetoric what it was, which was racist, but not to call the president that, because that is not your value judgment.

That is not knowing what someone's heart, bones, or mind truly are.

But facts and establishing that in a historical context is important, and that's what we did.

All right.

So, you went in that answer from pessimism to optimism to facts, which I think is a good place to end it.

So,

Margaret Brennan, thanks for being here on Radio Atlantic.

Thank you.

That'll do it for this week of Radio Atlantic.

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