Susan Glasser: The Irredeemable Republicans

**Tim Miller** (0:13)
Hello, and welcome to The Bulwark Daily. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Delighted to welcome back to the show, staff writer at the New Yorker, co-host of its political scene podcast. Her most recent book is The Divider, co-authored with her husband. I think there's another book coming. It's Susan Glasser. What's happening?

**Susan Glasser** (0:26)
Tim, happy August. It's so good to be with you.

**Tim Miller** (0:29)
Good to be with you. Our friend and frequent guest of the show, David Frum, posted this on X this morning. I thought it was a good way to frame up the start of the conversation. The war on the Eastern Front is lost. The economy is collapsing. His body is decaying. The leader escapes from intolerable realities into fantasies of monument building and renaming things for himself.
That's pretty much the story.

**Susan Glasser** (0:54)
I think it falls into the established genre of, if I were a foreign correspondent, how would I cover this madness?
I'll tell you, Tim, because you're not here, I had this classic Washington in the age of Trump out of body experience. The other day, I was going across Memorial Bridge for the first time in a while, and I was in an Uber, and I was looking down at my phone, and I happened to look up at the exact moment these two gigantic golden statues were literally inches away from my car window, and I couldn't help myself, I sort of shrieked out loud. It was just like, you know, I got in.

**Tim Miller** (1:33)
An actual shriek, like audible shriek?

**Susan Glasser** (1:36)
I did, and actually the Uber driver was like, oh my God, are we getting in an accident?
I said, no, I'm sorry. It just Trump's goldification of the city.

**Tim Miller** (1:46)
Is that the gold fingering of the existing statues or are those new?

**Susan Glasser** (1:50)
Apparently it's the gold fingering of existing statues. What we're living in here is the gold maxing of Washington, I guess, by Donald Trump.

**Tim Miller** (2:01)
Part of my holiday was in Berlin and Paris. So I saw two arches and it took a little bit of the joy away. It was maybe the only time that I let him invade my holiday, which was, and the Brandenburg Gate is fine, it was focusing more on history. The Arc de Triomphe is awesome.
But I just found myself thinking about how it really all this is was just Napoleon's, Napoleon Trump small man syndrome wanting to create a bigger one, and it took me out of the moment a little bit.

**Susan Glasser** (2:35)
It's so sad because for me, the Brandenburg Gate and just standing there in a plaza is a reminder of what I suppose in hindsight was probably the best moment of our lives. We just didn't realize it at the time, which was the fall of the Berlin Wall and the final end of, in a way, World War II and the Cold War was in that moment. I was in college when that happened, and I've always felt like it's so rare that you wake up in one world and go to sleep in another. That's what that day, in November of 1989, felt like.
I realize now, of course, that this sense that we had, which we really had, it's hard to communicate that to young people today, but we really had a sense that this moral arc of the universe that Barack Obama loves to talk about, that it really was bending in the right direction after a lot of twists and turns. It's such a freaking tragedy. But for me, standing in that plaza in Berlin is always this incredibly positive thing. So I really, really don't like that you're now connecting it here to...

**Tim Miller** (3:46)
Yeah, I'm sorry. It was really more about the Arc de Triomphe, but I felt it more, because the Napoleon Trump parallels. Trump has stated them. He wants to be like Napoleon and Stalin, interestingly.

**Susan Glasser** (3:57)
What a joke, though. I mean, let's pause for a second to say Donald Trump is to Napoleon, as Donald Duck is to him.

**Tim Miller** (4:08)
I don't know. Who is a great duck? I don't know.
We're going to keep working on this.

**Susan Glasser** (4:13)
Didn't actually Donald Duck, wasn't there a whole series where they had Donald Duck playing historical figures? I feel like there was a kind of-

**Tim Miller** (4:21)
Maybe it's like Darkwing Duck is to Donald Duck. We'll keep working on it. But yeah, no, that's fair.
I mean, Napoleon has some bad marks on his track record, but yeah, to compare him to Trump is rude. The East Side Gallery gave it to me though.