YouSaid · the spoken record

Susan Glasser

lines on the record: 75
first: 2018-09-13
most recent: 2018-09-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“You know what I imagine young people are graduating today in this time of very chaotic, divisive, angry politics, not only here in the US, but in Europe, a sense of economic dislocation and anxiety. It was the opposite for us, right? You know, I was a class of 1990 in college. Democracy seemed to have won. People were becoming free. The internet promised great new things and none of the dystopian things that we talk about. Absolutely. So we saw the frame around this book as sort of the man who ran Washington when Washington ran the world. That was our idea”
2018-09-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 268 — Susan Glasser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interestingly, that was what attracted, I think, Peter and I to Baker as a subject for a biography. Peter often says it's like, imagine if you rolled up Carl Rove and Henry Kissinger in one. You couldn't conceive of somebody being both the David Axelrod, you know, the political mastermind behind a big, complicated national presidential campaign and also reinventing the global world order at a time of enormous international upheaval. Those things have moved on in some ways we're beyond the age of the brilliant generalist and yet he managed to be very successful in both of those. I also think it goes to your point about that period of time 25, 30 years ago when it was this very optimistic moment, the unraveling the Soviet Union. I was lucky enough to graduate from college into almost the mere inverse of”
2018-09-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 268 — Susan Glasser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think you're exactly right about, first of all, Baker's. Reticent to a certain extent at being seen as a political figure. He obviously was a very successful Secretary of State at an enormously consequential period during the unraveling of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc and the First Gulf War in Kuwait. He assembled that coalition along with his close friend George H.W. Bush. He was a successful secretary of the Treasury, which is remarkable. He was considered the gold standard of White House chiefs of staff in many ways. Democrats as well as Republicans have long sought his counsel on how to successfully run a White House in almost direct contrast, I should say, between this White House and its multiple chiefs of staff who seem to have ignored his advice.”
2018-09-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 268 — Susan Glasser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Using information to obtain or to wield political power or power over others. Number two, the idea that there are things to be traded, the idea that the Russian government reached out in multiple different ways using different kinds of intermediaries to the Trump campaign in 2016 as if they were probing and probing and probing, trying to figure out, well, who's this George Papadopoulos guy? Is he the right figure, okay, well, maybe Jared Kushner is a better interlocutor, maybe Donald Trump is a better...”
2018-09-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 268 — Susan Glasser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Influence the election. So I think what we've seen that struck me as very consistent with the Russia that I knew and the way politics is played there is number one, this notion of compromise. Compromat and the idea that everything can be information can be bought, paid for and used in politics is at the core of the kind of dirty politics of the post-Soviet system as it emerged. And there was a sense that this applied in business as well as in politics. I've spoken with former very senior U.S. officials who say it would have been routine for Putin's government to acquire compromise on any high-ranking Americans who might be doing business in Russia. And that would certainly cover a figure like Donald Trump, who was so eager to meet with Putin even when he was putting on the Miss Universe pageant there. So number one, this pattern of”
2018-09-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 268 — Susan Glasser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Certainly evidence of Knowledge and connections between the Russian government's efforts on Trump's behalf and the Trump campaign.”
2018-09-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 268 — Susan Glasser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Saying comes bearing gifts, the gift of the Russian government to Hillary as part of its ongoing campaign to support your dad is what they tell Donald Trump Jr. Again, I find this to be what's already known publicly to be”
2018-09-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 268 — Susan Glasser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, exactly. So, what I was going to say was, so this is happening in the context where this obstruction is playing out in public in real time as if the Nixon tapes were being broadcast live on the evening news as opposed to being secretive and only released years later. Number one, this pattern of what appears to be obstructive behavior is occurring also at the moment. They're trying to suppress and ultimately are unsuccessful in suppressing the information about the Trump Tower meaning, which comes out at the exact same moment. And again, it suggests there's a connection. In other words, he's trying to obstruct it or to cover it up because he doesn't want us to know this information, which appears to be his own son, his son-in-law, and the campaign chairman, Paul Manfort, meeting with a Russian who are emails.”
2018-09-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 268 — Susan Glasser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. And I think that, again, so we've known since last year facts that argue toward a pattern of obstruction and undermining an ongoing investigation of himself and those close to him.”
2018-09-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 268 — Susan Glasser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's right. The Trump Tower meeting, remember back when that first became public, it was also in the context of Trump's extraordinary May of 2017, right, where he sets in motion the events that were still living with right now, the investigation by firing the director of the FBI in what appears to be an effort to halt or mitigate the investigation of him and his campaign and his top advisors. And he admitted to that publicly, by the way, in that Lester Holt interview again.”
2018-09-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 268 — Susan Glasser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things up for the sake of shaking things up, but actually to be more of a systematic attack on the institutions of democracy and talking about what did that look like. For example, the first thing that we saw Putin do when we lived in Moscow was to take over Enteve, the only independent television network that had ever existed in Russia. That's what an authoritarian, unchecked by institutions can do. Now Trump has been checked in many ways by our institutions, but he has not been checkmated. His takeover of the Republican Party probably has surprised many people in both speed and relative thoroughness, for example. That's something that's always worried me regardless of the outcome of the Mueller investigation.”
2018-09-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 268 — Susan Glasser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I worried and actually wrote a piece in February of 2017, right after Trump was elected for the New York Times Sunday Review section, comparing Trump and Putin not When it comes to what alliance they did or didn't have in 2016, but comparing them as authoritarian leaders, I do think that whatever we ultimately learn about the Trump campaign and its dealings with Russia, and we've already learned an enormous amount since I wrote that in February 2017, things that I never thought we would learn about the Trump Tower meeting, for example. Even back then, what was already apparent was that Trump was really our first, in my view, authoritarian-minded president of the United States and that his disdain for the basic institutions of a democratic government combined with his ignorance about how our government actually works would act in a toxic and not merely disruptive way on Washington, not just, in other words, shaking.”
2018-09-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 268 — Susan Glasser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trump and Russia and how to think about the Russia Gate investigation. First of all, obviously I don't know and you don't know what Mueller will find. We'll wait and see. That being said, the frame I've had about Trump from the beginning is that many of these things, when it comes to Russia or even how he's handled the office of the presidency, are shocking but not necessarily surprising. Will you really be surprised if the independent council, the special counsel's office comes out and tells us that Trump was dealing extensively with Russian business people, for example, in his business, and that's why he withheld his tax return? No, you won't be surprised, but there still might be shocking revelations contained within it. So I don't know. But I'm fully prepared for shocking revelations that nonetheless will not fundamentally change the frame around how we view Trump, first of all. Second of all,”
2018-09-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 268 — Susan Glasser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or everything that's on the website, or everything that's on Twitter, how could I create something each week that taken together would tell the story? One of the first things I did was actually read Elizabeth Drew's Washington Journal, which is her book out of her weekly New Yorker letter from Washington com that she wrote in that fateful Watergate year 1974. She's still around. She's been very helpful to me. Absolutely. And she's helped inform.”
2018-09-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 268 — Susan Glasser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Should I do? And I already had decided to go back to writing, and I thought, you know, there's no bigger story on the planet. As much as I'm interested in Turkey or Venezuela, the United States and Washington, D.C. right now is the epicenter of global instability, as Strobe Talbot put it to me in one of my podcasts last year. And, you know, this is the biggest not only foreign policy, but domestic policy, politics story in the world today. And so it was almost like, okay, to have this opportunity weekend and week out to write a chronicle that almost sort of looks as directly at the eclipse as I can each week. And to write it down, what would you want to read 20 years from now? I figure that people are going to say to us, wait a minute, you know, what was that like when Donald Trump was president? And, you know, there's an overwhelming flow. You can't reread every New York Times article.”
2018-09-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 268 — Susan Glasser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first of all, I think it has been an incredible opportunity to not only write for the New Yorker, but also to write this weekly letter from Trump's Washington is what we're calling it. And at the very beginning of the Trump administration, when we decided to come back from our abortive Jerusalem, in my case, it was after three weeks after the election. I think there was really a choice about...”
2018-09-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 268 — Susan Glasser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so we actually did move to Jerusalem. Peter, the opportunity came up and he became the Jerusalem Bureau chief for the New York Times. He started work there in August of 2016. My son started to school there. I was coming back and forth, still overseeing Politico's coverage through November 2016. And then we planned to live there for three years and then come back here. I would say it wasn't that the New York Times had a different idea. It was more that world events had a different idea. Well.”
2018-09-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 268 — Susan Glasser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And divisiveness. Peter and I had this idea in our heads that we're going to become foreign correspondents. Again, we wanted our son to have a little bit of the experience that we had had in Russia. And we decided after the 2016 election that we were going to move to the Middle East for a few years before our son entered high school.”
2018-09-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 268 — Susan Glasser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I came back to politics, because in some ways foreign policy was a very entrepreneurial challenge, I loved that and I loved learning in a way. It was the most learning I've ever done in a journalism job. So coming to Politico, starting Politico magazine, coming back to politics, having started my career at roll call and on Capitol Hill so many years before and covering campaigns, I found it very dispiriting. And then the whole 2016 election cycle played out. You know, it was both a great story, but it wasn't an invigorating, exciting, you know, version of a great story. And maybe it's just because I wasn't 23 years old anymore. But I found it very dispiriting that what politics has become in many ways is this ceaseless, endless drum beat of negative.”
2018-09-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 268 — Susan Glasser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is now his third newsroom. He must have unbelievable energy because essentially parts of the Washington Post, not all of it, are now entrepreneurial startups with all that that entails from the Silicon Valley culture. It's very different than the traditional, almost like a factory-like newsroom that you probably experience in the Chicago Tribune.”
2018-09-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 268 — Susan Glasser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think, you know, you just had this really fast. 50 or 1975 or even 1985, there's a state of permanent change and disruption to even the very forms of our journalism. That especially when you combine it with uncertain and perilous economics, you have anxiety levels always high in a newsroom off the charts as people don't understand what their jobs are even going to be a few years from now. That's enormously creative and stimulating, but it's a much more competitive universe, first of all, that any editor operates. And I like that aspect of it. I like the strategic aspect of it. Startups can be a huge challenge even if they're startups plus seven years. And I think that is the grueling part of these jobs for any of these people.”
2018-09-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 268 — Susan Glasser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Washington junkies did they not like that because it wasn't little bits and pieces? Of course not. They loved it. Their subject is Washington and they want to understand it and unpack it in as many ways as possible.”
2018-09-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 268 — Susan Glasser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I always thought that was kind of hilarious, right? The idea that do you only consume one kind of news about Washington? Imagine what kind of readers and people we would be if all we consumed were breaking news alerts from the AP. And that, of course, trying to understand Washington, if your business is politics, if your business is Washington, you want to know as much about it in as many different ways as possible. And I found that to be the case when we started the magazine, our very first issue was a 7,000 word cover story inside the dysfunctions and quirks of the Obama cabinet as a way of looking at the Obama presidency. And, you know, of course, guess what? The core political junkies who had been the initial audience for Politico joined, of course, by millions of other readers around the country and around the world.”
2018-09-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 268 — Susan Glasser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it is, it's one of the biggest newsrooms, of course, covering Washington, if not the biggest in some ways aside from the Washington Post itself. There were more than 200 journalists covering policy and politics when I left Politico. I don't know the current number right now, but obviously I went there. The chance to start a magazine from scratch, especially one devoted to politics and policy was a great opportunity. That was also in print and online. And again, to challenge this notion that people had about Politico as just sort of quick breaking inside.”
2018-09-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 268 — Susan Glasser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of information in facts in and of themselves, playing a role and being important to our democracy. So the idea that this is a golden age of information, how could that be a bad thing? We've now spent the last few years really dwelling on the dark side of that information revolution. But I felt that foreign policy is a great example of that.”
2018-09-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 268 — Susan Glasser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, I think my idea was that foreign policy could be treated as a startup. I never understood why those old sort of journals had made the world into a boring place. That was our joke when we were lucky enough, Don Graham, at the time, still the owner and publisher of the post, purchased foreign policy, let me go work there as an editor, and I sort of created this modern daily website along with this print magazine that was our joke, right? You know, the world is not a boring place. You're reading about it doesn't need to be either. And now you look at how we're able to get so much more and better information, right? I always up until the Trump 2016 election, I really have always been such a techno optimist, if you will. You know, I just believe certainly if you were a journalist like me, you're a believer in the value.”
2018-09-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 268 — Susan Glasser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you're right, I've been incredibly lucky. You know, I've also seen the tumult and the upheaval of journalism at firsthand over the last decade and a half since we've been back from Russia and Afghanistan's foreign correspondence. I've mostly spent that period of time, as you said, as an editor and in different editorial rules. And this, of course, has been the exact period when this disruption of the internet and social media and all the rest has really changed a profession that up until then was pretty stodgy, pretty uncreative. The journalism itself was interesting, but the forms by which we produced it were pretty similar from when I graduated from college until maybe the last decade, it didn't change as much as it has over the last decade. It's been kind of revolution.”
2018-09-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 268 — Susan Glasser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bitter, sarcastic biting in a way that he often did when asked about Chechnya. He once before that he had famously said he was going to wipe out the Chechen rebels in the outhouse using barnyard epithet that doesn't translate easily from Russian to English, but suffice it to say. You could imagine him saying something like that today. You could imagine Donald Trump saying his own trumpian version of it today. What do you want me to do? Sit down and talk about the Bible with these Islamic terrorists, which is what he called them. Why are you talking to me about human rights essentially? These are brutal people. You Americans are soft. You don't really understand essentially this clash of civilizations that's taking place. And that was a very consistent early.”
2018-09-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 268 — Susan Glasser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were going around the table, and I was towards the end of this circular table in the Kremlin Library. And when it got to me, no one had asked President Putin yet about the Warren Chechnya, which was in many ways a very brutal war, the Second War against the breakaway Republic of Chechnya that Russia had fought. Arguably, it was what helped bring Putin to political power being fought with enormous terrible human rights abuses. At the time, the United States was very critical of those human rights abuses, and I felt that this was a subject we American journalists couldn't let go unmentioned in our first press conference with Putin up till then. He'd been very technocratic, very even-keeled, even very friendly to the journalists. So how do you react to your tone and temper, his demeanor, even his facial demeanor changed? And he became...”
2018-09-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 268 — Susan Glasser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's the guy who's memorized the briefing books, who's going to spout facts and figures at you all day long. And in that sense, very different than Donald Trump, very eager to prove and to show that he was in command of the information, even on subjects like the economy where he didn't know very much.”
2018-09-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 268 — Susan Glasser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think only a week or so later to the Kremlin for the first time he was agreeing to meet American journalists in a roundtable setting. So there was about, I don't know, less than a dozen American correspondents there and I went there as the post co-bureau chief and it was vintage Putin. We were summoned to the Kremlin early evening. He kept us waiting for what seemed like several hours. As I recall it, we didn't even start this press conference until close to nine o'clock and didn't leave until close to midnight. Why Putin was early in his tenure and remember he was young, untested political figure from the KGV. He wanted to show us that he knew what he was talking about, the exact opposite in many ways, stylistically of Donald Trump, even though you could argue there are some interesting convergences in their style of politics. But as a person,”
2018-09-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 268 — Susan Glasser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it was in early summer, not quite summer, early June of 2001 after Vladimir Putin's first summit meeting with George W. Bush. It didn't go as well as Donald Trump told us his Helsinki summit meeting with Vladimir Putin went, but still you remember George W. Bush came out and he said he looked into Putin's soul and he was a man that we could do business with. And Putin also felt good about that meeting. And so he summoned the American press corps.”
2018-09-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 268 — Susan Glasser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And by the way, that's the first thing that authoritarians and would-be authoritarian to do is they attack the press and they take it over. And that's something that I saw happen firsthand in Moscow in 2001. And it has absolutely influenced my views about democracy and authoritarian leaders ever since”
2018-09-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 268 — Susan Glasser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Clapdrop, but it's certainly part of the narrative that has been told to Russians about themselves. It's their story of themselves, at least for a part of the Russian population.”
2018-09-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 268 — Susan Glasser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He saw Putin and Russia politics as like a river, and essentially Yeltsin and this sort of turn toward the West he saw in the context of essentially trying to artificially turn the direction of the river. Did Vladimir Putin create an authoritarian state from scratch? No, you know, in the view of his pollster, he allowed the river to be released of its artificial blocks and to flow with the river. He gave the Russian people what they wanted in this view of things. Now, that's a very essentialist view of Russians, you know, the idea I don't accept it, by the way, the idea that Russians aren't suited to democracy. Here's things like this. I think that's”
2018-09-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 268 — Susan Glasser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They call it managed democracy, was the term. You know, David, I often think back to a conversation I had with Vladimir Putin's pollster, Alexander Oslin, Kremlin Polster, who said to me, I asked him this question more in the context of Russian politics, but it's applicable to this question of Russia as a kind of threat to its neighbors too. He said, you know,”
2018-09-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 268 — Susan Glasser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The United States did not provide the economic aid nothing comparable to Marshall plan-like levels at all. That is a critique. Politically speaking, that was a non-starter for Republicans and Democrats alike. The Bush administration wasn't prepared to do that, and neither was that Clinton administration. And then when it comes to the security piece in NATO, this was a huge debate. I was just graduating from college at the time and not participating in it, but it was a fascinating almost chicken or the egg debate that resonates today. Did Russia return to a more suspicious of the West posture because it felt encircled by NATO or was it necessary to neighbors like Poland repeatedly invaded over the centuries by Russia? Of course, the first thing they wanted when they gained their independence once again was to provide for security.”
2018-09-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 268 — Susan Glasser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, those are two very different questions, the security piece and the economy piece. I think a lot of people feel like”
2018-09-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 268 — Susan Glasser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The decision to get nuclear weapons out of the former Soviet countries that they were essentially left behind in. And that included Ukraine. It included Kazakhstan. And people forget this because Putin has since invaded Ukraine, but Russia signed a treaty as a result of Ukraine agreeing to peacefully give up its nuclear weapons, return those to the territory of Russia. Russia said it agreed to the territorial integrity of the borders of Ukraine. So that was explicitly something agreed to when they gave up the nuclear weapons. That was negotiated by the United States during the Clinton administration and midwife, you could say.”
2018-09-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 268 — Susan Glasser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, that's the subject of many books. And partially something we're excavating in the book we're working on now about Jim Baker, who was the Secretary of State at the time, of course, of the Collapses Soviet Union. Then it was the Clinton administration that came in and built some of the architecture. And by the way, had some great successes. We forget that one of the most successful things that occurred during that time was”
2018-09-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 268 — Susan Glasser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Democratic handover of power from one to the other. It was praised as a peaceful transfer of power. Never mind that Putin was an unknown, unqualified former KGB agent. People were really wrong about it in ways that I think was very helpful for me understanding Washington too. To leave Washington in order to understand in many ways how our conventional wisdoms are often wrong. And they were really wrong about Vladimir Putin.”
2018-09-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 268 — Susan Glasser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, my boss, exactly, exactly. So we felt we had big shoes to fill, but actually people commiserated us with us. When they found out we were moving to Russia, even the Russia hands that we got to know, they said, well, we're so sorry, the story's over. People really thought here in Washington and around the world that Russia had graduated to be just another normal country and that the story of the late 1980s and 1990s, this dramatic, incredible transformation largely peaceful from the break of the Soviet Union to a modern democratic Russia integrated into Western institutions, that that had happened, that that was behind us, and that somehow the transition even from Yeltsin to Putin was seen as a great success, never mind some of the troubling signs that were there from the beginning, the fact that it was completely undemocratic, even anti-”
2018-09-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 268 — Susan Glasser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had studied that in high school as well. Always had a desire to do that, had been inspired, of course, by the great Hedrick Smith and his reporting for the New York Times. You know, we were lucky enough to move into the apartment that David Remnick and his wife had occupied when he was the Washington Post.”
2018-09-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 268 — Susan Glasser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's unbelievable. It's certainly, let's just say, not Foreordained. Not the result of any force. Trust me, no one could have written this novel. No one could have written this novel. So Peter and I went there. I was always interested in Russia. We had this wonderful opportunity to become foreign correspondence for the Washington Post. They paid for us to learn Russian.”
2018-09-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 268 — Susan Glasser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first of all, it is crazy, isn't it, that basically the two places that I've spent my career in would have converged in this weird way. I mean, basically been in Washington, you know, except for this stint from the end of 2000 to the end of 2004 in Russia with some detours, by the way, after 9-11 to Afghanistan and Iraq. And so here we are in 2018 talking about Russia and Washington all the time in a context that”
2018-09-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 268 — Susan Glasser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Institutions of government and accountability. And so that whole farm system that used to exist in American journalism has been decimated over the last decade and a half. The number of political reporters aggressively covering state capitals has withered in many, even big cities. There's not the kind of real journalism and reporting that there used to be. And so we're missing our warning system. We're missing many of the key building blocks that used to tell us what was happening in the politics around the country. And it's a terrible thing for our democracy. It's really scary.”
2018-09-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 268 — Susan Glasser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely, and I think it's so important to say both how has the structure of national political reporting changed, but also and probably most significantly our state and local institutions of journalism not only are not what they once were, they're dying. There's been an absolute catastrophe when it comes to journalism at the state and local level, especially around politics.”
2018-09-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 268 — Susan Glasser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Known about what exactly were his campaigns, dealings with Russia during 2016 or his financial dealings, say, of his business in Russian interest. But in general, my view is that actually Donald Trump was as thoroughly aggressively unwell covered as any candidate has been. It's also my view that Washington coverage the political coverage. Country wasn't well covered. It's far better than when I started out as a kid at roll call. I was a terrible reporter.”
2018-09-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 268 — Susan Glasser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think that's right. But again, this does go back to all your excellent questions about the role of journalism given that I can't say that I have answers to it, but those are the things I've been thinking about. For example, on the Baton Switch question, I was the editor of Politico during the 2016 election cycle. My view, which is not shared by everybody, but is that the problem was not that we did not have aggressive coverage of Donald Trump before the 2016 campaign can people really say that they went to the polls on Election Day and they didn't know a lot of details. Now, of course, there's still much to be”
2018-09-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 268 — Susan Glasser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Under a pedestal might be more, but listen, you know, Trump, that is what makes him so unique. It's partially also why I tell people when they say, don't pay attention to the tweets, don't pay attention to what Trump says, just pay attention to what is the actual policy in the administration. You hear that a lot, especially in the world I come from these days, foreign policy a lot. I think that's wrong. I think that's wrong. I think that Trump has shown that there's a connection, first of all, between what his rhetoric is, what his tweets are, and what he wants to do. It may take him some time to actually do it, but frankly, if you listen to a certain category of kind of foreign policy wise man in 2017, or you looked at Trump's tweets in 2017 when it came to foreign policy, you'd have been better informed about the direction he was going to take.”
2018-09-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 268 — Susan Glasser · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source