i've made my decision i'm not going to be running the party is as you know self-destructing jesse has left and that's a problem and so i will not be running the plane slams into a hotel on the edge of the airport all 109 on board killed instantly four others inside the hotel also killed elian gonzalez the six-year-old cuban boy at the center of a dramatic tug of war is in the custody of his father tonight armed federal marshals took the boy by force from his miami relatives home in a surprise pre-dawn raid the reaction in miami outraged from the cuban-american community bush versus gore tonight the world awaits the u. s supreme court in the case that will decide the next prison wow that was just a small sample of some of the major political and culture shifting events of the year 2000. those and more are the focus of a new book entitled the year that broke america and joining us now is the book's author contributing editor at new york magazine andrew rice andrew congratulations on the book what if i can't believe all the different major events that transpired in that year um but i i would think most prominently in my mind is the battle for the white house uh the year 2000.
can you tell us how that impacted the breaking of america if you think it did well i think that you know the year that broke america is it's you know it's a book about 2000 and it's also sort of about how we got to where we are today as a nation i think that you know it's it's you know when we're talking about um bushfigure the election that year it was really the uh you can see the seeds of our present day political polarization uh coming into coming to the floor and that um in that battle for the for the presidency you know we think of 2020 as this uh you know incredibly unprecedented uh event in american history but it's really uh one of several times in american history where we've had uh fights for the presidency that somehow seemed to go beyond the bounds of the imaginable or the previously imaginable and 2000 was the first time that that really happened in recent american history it was it was i i traced the breakdown of trust in american institutions and uh all sorts of other sort of societal factors that we uh that we see now to to to that year and uh the beginning of the putin reign uh the day before the year 2000 began vladimir putin came to power yes i mean one of the remarkable historical kind of eerie coincidences is if is if you go back and look at the coverage of the millennium celebrations of december 31st 1999 you know the uh that news shares the front page with the news of the shocking resignation of boris yeltsin and russia and an unknown uh former kgb operative named vladimir putin taking power initially he was he was um said to be a caretaker president um and uh of course he proved to be much much more than a caretaker but you know i think that that's part of a broader theme of this book which is that you know people in 2000 thought you know it was going to be this significant year because it was the beginning of a new millennium you know this time of optimism and prosperity america's government was running a several trillion dollar surplus you know its geopolitical dominance was un unrivaled and um you know its military was largely sort of a useless appendage and meanwhile sort of that the seeds of of the future were being sown you know andrew it's uh it's shocking in retrospect to think about all the things we take for granted today that did not even exist in the year 2000 from iphones to twitter to the expanse really of the wide world of the web the internet and everything that that provides us but i'm wondering what you think about the culture we have today and the idea that some of it some of our difficulties began in the year 2000 leading up to 2016 and the creation of a toxic political culture that is slowly eating away at the core of our democracy well i mean i think that you know one of the things that's very significant i mean you showed a little clip of it at the beginning of uh this segment you know a lot of people don't know that that donald trump ran for president one time before 2016. he ran in 2000 uh briefly to to be the candidate of the third party reform party which is the third party on the ballot that year and very significantly you know he mounted a very similar campaign in many ways to to the one that he mounted in 2016. he attacked his rivals he ironically he attacked uh pat buchanan as principal rival from from the left uh called papi cannon a hitler lover um and you know nonetheless he wasn't able to really get traction he was widely ridiculed um you know it was a big joke he went on jay leno and they played hale to the chief like it was sort of a you know all big gag and the only person who seemed to take it seriously was trump himself he had no way to actually communicate to the people who might potentially vote for him at that time because he didn't have a platform he literally he didn't have an ideological platform but he also didn't have a literal platform a media platform so we now actually see that happening again today he again doesn't have a platform uh he's been kicked off of twitter and is trying to figure out ways to communicate with his public which is why the the whole launch of this new media company that he's trying to do truth social is actually quite significant i think in terms of his future political uh ambitions what we've learned is that if you deprive donald trump of attention and oxygen he starts to wither away and that was something we first learned in the year 2000 and that's a major subplot of the of the year that broke america well and uh the run-up of course to 911 in 2001 in the year 2000 uh we had the uh pilots the 9 11 pilots taking flight school in florida well this is this was sort of the core irony of the book that i explore and you know i i think that you know one of the things that you know i i want to get across is that you know the book is there's a there's a lot of fun stuff in the book the the year 2000 was a was a time of kind of prosperity and and and lightness and um a lot of uh a lot of people were having a lot of fun during that time period reality television was coming into the four and so on but meanwhile above it all serenely flying over the state of florida were the 911 pilots they were they're here they're living among us um here in the united states in the state of florida during the year 2000.
