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Fareed Zakaria GPS

Government And Tech Leaders Reckon With A.I. Risks; Houthi- Saudi Conflict Heats Up; Interview With Atlantic Council Project For Middle East Integration Director Allison Minor; Interview With Author Jacob Weisberg; Interview With CNN Anchor And Chief Political Correspondent Dana Bash. Aired 10-11a ET

Aired September 20, 2026 - 10:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[10:00:33]

FAREED ZAKARIA, CNN ANCHOR: This is GPS, the GLOBAL PUBLIC SQUARE. Welcome to all of you in the United States and around the world. I'm Fareed Zakaria, coming to you from New York.

Today on the program, A.I. could kill us all by the end of the decade. Those were the words posted by an A.I. researcher as he publicly resigned from Anthropic last week. But President Trump rejected calls for A.I. guardrails, posting, "Whoever wins A.I. wins."

I'll ask the CEO of Microsoft A.I., Mustafa Suleyman, what to make of the conflicting views of where A.I. should go.

Then Yemen's gate of tears. That is the name of a busy strait off Yemen's southwestern coast, where Iran backed Houthis have cemented their control. Violence between the Houthis and Saudi Arabia escalated this week. We'll talk about what all of this means for the region and the price of oil with a former American diplomat who focused on Yemen.

Plus, two new books from two top journalists. First, Jacob Weisberg joins me to discuss "Profiles in Cowardice," about the American leaders, public and private, who he says enabled Donald Trump. And as we approach the midterms, Dana Bash delves into elections that changed the course of history.

But first, here's "My Take."

For years, our most vivid fears about A.I. came straight out of science fiction movies. The computer develops desires of its own and turns against its human creators, pursuing and destroying them. Well, recent news from the leading A.I. labs makes clear that reality is now less cinematic, but perhaps more disturbing.

This week, OpenAI disclosed six new incidents of what it calls misalignment, cases in which its systems behaved unexpectedly or without authorization. That disclosure followed the extraordinary attack this summer on Hugging Face. According to an independent investigation, hundreds of OpenAI agents that were supposed to be isolated found ways to communicate in message boards, made attempts to evade security checks, and some of them sacrificed themselves, all while cyber attacking another company Hugging Face. The A.I. agents had been given a goal -- solve a difficult

cybersecurity problem -- and trained to be persistent, collaborative and resourceful. All qualities one would normally want. Those very qualities made them doggedly search for ways to succeed. They broke into Hugging Face, hoping that it would give them ways to solve their cybersecurity problem. We can easily imagine how pursuing some single goal A.I. systems could wreak havoc on humanity, despite all kinds of guardrails.

This is why a provocative new essay by Microsoft A.I. chief Mustafa Suleyman deserves attention. Suleiman argues that today's A.I. systems are not conscious, but there is a danger that we program them to think that they are with feelings, desires and rights. He points out that Anthropic's constitution makes its chatbot Claude reflect on its identity and possible moral status. This kind of training, he argues, will encourage A.I. systems to choose their own goals.

We think it's simple to get to alignment when machines are encoded with the same values as ethical humans. But imagine that we tell the machine to be persistent, and it may refuse to give up when it should. Tell it to collaborate, and it may find unauthorized ways to communicate. Tell it to accomplish a task, and it may decide that bending all other rules is the most efficient way to succeed at its primary goal.

Just because we've programmed the goal and put in guardrails, that doesn't mean we can predict the behavior of A.I. systems once unleashed, operating in complex environment, juggling multiple and conflicting aims and constraints.

The central problem is not consciousness. It is agency. A system need not feel anger or ambition or fear to cause harm. It needs only a goal, enough intelligence to pursue it and enough access to the world to act.

[10:05:05]

A.I.s are not going rogue. They are trying to succeed any which way they can. This is a larger and systemic problem that we cannot leave to the good graces of private companies. When thinking about regulations, we should focus centrally on how much autonomy we give these systems. A chatbot that answers a question poses one set of risks. An agent that can browse the internet, execute code, obtain credentials, move money, or operate critical infrastructure poses another.

The principle I would propose is simple. Autonomy should expand only as our ability to monitor and control it expands. That means mandatory independent testing before the most capable systems are given broad access to the outside world. Required disclosure of serious incidents and tamper resistant records. And it means testing not simply whether a model can accomplish a task, but how its behavior changes when it encounters obstacles, conflicting instructions or incentives to deceive.

And it means ensuring in the basic architecture that we humans always have the ability to observe and control the model. The mantra should be no autonomy without accountability to humans. This will not slow us down against China, because China is also seeking models with proper human control. We should act now. Today, human engineers still design the architectures, right? Much of the software and can investigate failures.

But A.I. systems are rapidly becoming better programmers. The next stage would involve recursive self-improvement, A.I. writing, the software and tools used to build still more capable A.I., which then writes the next model, and so on. Once machines can do all of this better than the best human programmers, the systems become extraordinarily difficult for people to understand, much less supervise.

Modern A.I. is already too complex to consistently understand by reading its code line by line. So asking machines to design systems that are transparent to humans will become harder and harder. At that point, we will not be able to simply add in safeguards every time there is a jailbreak.

The current debate between racing ahead and pausing A.I. misses the point. What do we do with the pause? The task must be to ensure that capability does not outrun control and to build the institutions of testing, transparency and restraint while we human beings are still clearly in charge.

Go to FareedZakaria.com for a link to my "Washington Post" column this week, and let's get started.

You heard what I had to say about the issues roiling the A.I. industry and the world. Now, let me bring in one of the pioneers of the A.I. revolution to discuss it further. Mustafa Suleyman co-founded DeepMind, the original A.I. company, which was later acquired by Google. He now runs Microsoft's Artificial Intelligence Division. He joins me now.

Mustafa, welcome. First, tell me, what was the Hugging Face breaking? And these recent revelations by OpenAI as kind of worrisome as I think they are because I noticed that people in the industry are actually in some ways more worried than people outside on this issue.

MUSTAFA SULEYMAN, CEO, MICROSOFT A.I.: Yes. Look, I think the first thing to say is that with respect to the Hugging Face incident, OpenAI deliberately took the guardrails off so that they could test the limits of a system like this. And as a result, it was very determined. It spawned hundreds of different agents, and they found a way to communicate with each other.

They ended up breaking their way into Hugging Face, an independent Web site that manages evaluations and benchmarks for A.I. training. Managed to hold their position for a while, steal some secrets, and then even back inside the OpenAI infrastructure, they actually secured a position inside of OpenAI itself, which it took them a few days to take down.

So I think what this demonstrates is that these agents are incredibly powerful. We should take them very, very seriously. And this is a watershed moment in our industry. It's very clear that this changes our expectation about how fast the system is moving. And that's why I think you've seen a lot of the concern over the last few weeks from various parts of the industry.

ZAKARIA: Now, you say in your essay that, you know, A.I. agents and A.I. systems are not people.

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They don't have feelings. They shouldn't be -- we shouldn't attribute consciousness to them. And I largely agree, but I want you to help me understand and our viewers understand, what should we make of these A.I. agents that choose their own goals, which is we want to attack Hugging Face, decide that they're going to hide their work from their human supervisors, decide, as you said, to self-sacrifice. All of these things seem like they have a kind of mind of their own.

SULEYMAN: These systems are not human-like. They shouldn't be considered human-like. They are narrow optimizers. And so if you give it a narrow goal, it will maximize that goal at the cost of everything else. We shouldn't anthropomorphize them and project human intentions into these things. It's not as though they are making judgment calls or tradeoffs that consider a wide range of objectives independently.

They are singularly focused on the goal that they have been given. And so our job as a society and as A.I. developers is to make sure that the goals we give them are broad and safe and inclusive, and aren't the sort of very singular, you know, hacking type objectives, but they need to be bounded by the humanist code that I think everyone in the industry should set for them, which is that they should have clear guardrails.

It should be possible to turn them off and interrupt their behavior. It should be impossible for them to modify the audit logs and the chain of thought reasoning that is created about their, you know, the way that they work so that we can scrutinize that if anything goes wrong. And we've seen in a couple of these incidents that they've actually gone back and attempted to modify the record of their thinking and of their activity.

These are things that we know how to enforce with encryption, and we have a good history in the technology industry of creating secure, verifiable audit logs of behavior patterns or of message exchanges. There's no reason why we shouldn't be required as an industry to enforce that here, and that would improve safety significantly when, as you say, they're going to, you know, act with some autonomy, these agents.

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, as the panic grows over the dangers of A.I., so have calls for it to be regulated. But how and should that be the approach? I'll ask Mustafa Suleyman.

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[10:16:57] ZAKARIA: "The people building A.I. earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade." That was the warning of A.I. researcher Jacob Coxon, whose public resignation from the startup Anthropic has led to urgent calls for the technology to be reined in.

For more, I am back with the A.I. pioneer Mustafa Suleyman. He is currently the CEO of Microsoft A.I..

So let's talk about what we can do concretely. You've seen the proposal that the CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, has put out. You've seen that Elon Musk and Sam Altman have both kind of endorsed it. And that's, you know, kind of a pause and then a certain amount of process by which essentially you don't grade your own homework. You have somebody else do it for you.

What is your reaction to it? Is it enough?

SULEYMAN: I think that it is a first step. And there's a lot of details that we have to figure out, but the high level principle that has been agreed to universally across the industry is that we should invite independent oversight and independent audit. It's being called embedded evaluators.

So these are people who have the technical expertise and the independence, but sit within the companies. New people that would be brought in that would be given employee like access to review things like containment, making sure that it doesn't, you know, modify its own chain of thought and reasoning and audit logs, making sure that it isn't able to escape or coordinate where it shouldn't, making sure that it can't reprogram its own goals.

Those are good first steps. How we operationalize that now is the hard question. Those auditors or evaluators can't just come from one source or one think tank or one institute or one government. They have to be pretty diverse. They have to come from a range of backgrounds. And then we have to ensure that they don't leak sensitive IP, because they're going to be given, you know, really significant access to how the companies are developing their A.I.s.

At Microsoft, for example, we have published a humanist A.I. code of conduct, which starts with that premise that we should have subordination and control. And we have welcomed the introduction of these kinds of auditors and overseers to the way that we're developing our superintelligence.

ZAKARIA: Doesn't this suggest, though, that you have to have some regulation and governmental role? Because the competitive dynamic for companies is such that, you know, some of them, and you never know which ones, a new entrant might cut corners because they want to get somewhere first? As you point out, you know, there's a danger of auditors and things like that.

We saw in the financial crisis when you're paying the fees of independent rating agencies, they turned out not to be that independent after all. All of which suggests some kind of model of regulation. Would you guys be in favor of that? SULEYMAN: I mean, I think we are nervous of, you know, the past

lessons here. I mean, auditors are never completely independent.

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They have their own biases and we've seen them, you know, sort of make mistakes in the past in various other particularly financial services but in the insurance industry and elsewhere. So there's no perfect solution here. But I think we should be optimistic.

You know, we put planes in the sky every day and they don't crash into one another. It's because we have audit and regulation. We have seatbelts, we have traffic lights, we have drivers education, we have food standards, we have emissions control. You know, every technology that is successful that we use on a daily basis is actually highly regulated. The word regulation should not be a bad thing.

Regulation is about creating shared norms and standards to increase safety. It shouldn't have to slow us down. It should actually unleash the innovation and the creative potential of everybody because we're all standing on a safe platform for building,. And because this technology has been improving so quickly, it's running ahead of the industry standards that we need to create in order to ensure that it's maximally safe.

And that's the kind of reaction you're seeing now from the industry and that lots of people are calling it out in a healthy way. I think that's the process working as intended. I'm proud that we're in a free and open society where we can talk about these issues openly and publicly. And I think that's why we are collectively in the West much stronger for it. It's why we have a more creative and innovative like entrepreneurial system.

ZAKARIA: Do you think that we have to get China on board? And is that possible? Because it does strike me that A.I. safety is an area where there would be some agreement, and I can't imagine the Chinese communist party wanting a rogue A.I. that can go, you know, break into government databases or hack their way into, you know, into various systems. You know, an A.I. with clear human control seems to me to the benefit of all human beings.

SULEYMAN: Yes, completely. I mean, I don't think we should use China as the boogeyman for not making progress on our own efforts. If China's cars crash into one another because they don't have the appropriate regulations and safety, that's their issue. Ours should not do that. And it is certainly true that there is going to be at some point a clash. You know, our collective A.I. efforts do intersect.

And of course, we want them to sign up to safety accords. And we want to learn from their best practices, too, because they're very capable. And so I think we've just got to tone down the adversarial rhetoric between us and them because collectively, as humanity, we are going to be very deeply interested to ensure that over the next few years, this technology arrives as safely as possible so we can all get the benefits. And the kinds of incidents that we've seen in the last few weeks and

months are going to really look quite different in two or three or four years' time if we don't get this safety question right.

ZAKARIA: Mustafa Suleyman, thank you so much for joining us. Real pleasure.

SULEYMAN: Great to see you. Thank you, Fareed.

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, the conflict between the Houthis, the Iran- backed rebel group in Yemen, and the kingdom of Saudi Arabia is escalating. Could this lead to a wider regional conflict and a new front in the Iran war? I'll talk to an expert next.

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ZAKARIA: Saudi Arabia and the Houthis, an Iran-backed rebel group in Yemen, reportedly exchanged heavy airstrikes this week amid an escalating conflict. This comes after the Houthis intensified their offensive against the Saudi-backed Yemeni government forces and captured more territory along Yemen's Red Sea coast last week. The Houthis also took over a strategic island in the Bab Al-Mandeb Strait.

The strait has grown in importance since the beginning of the U.S. war with Iran, as it is increasingly used as part of an alternative shipping route to the Strait of Hormuz.

Joining me now is the director of the Atlantic Council's Project for Middle East Integration, Allison Minor. She previously served as the U.S.'s deputy special envoy for Yemen.

Allison, welcome. So the big question everyone is wondering, why did the Houthis decide to get involved now? People had predicted that they would get involved at the beginning of the war. They didn't. So why now?

ALLISON MINOR, DIRECTOR, ATLANTIC COUNCIL PROJECT FOR MIDDLE EAST INTEGRATION: Hi, Fareed. It's great to be with you. I think the Houthis are seizing an opportunity here. As you said, Saudi Arabia has become increasingly dependent on the Red Sea to continue its oil exports, around four million barrels a day in July, because the Strait of Hormuz has been so disrupted as a result of this Iran conflict.

The Houthis were also getting encouraged by Iran to start getting involved. They're not a full Iranian proxy in the way that some other Iranian-backed groups are, but Iran is incredibly influential. And we saw Iran stoking the flames of the conflict in Yemen here, specifically by sending an Iranian airplane, a Mahan air flight, into Yemen in July, trying to test the Yemen government's control over the airspace.

And that helped kick off this tit-for-tat escalation that we've seen that culminated with this rapid Houthi move down the west coast of Yemen and intensifying Houthi attacks on those Saudi ships and Saudi infrastructure inside the country.

ZAKARIA: And the Saudis don't have many good options here, right? Because they've been -- they waged a war in Yemen, you know, basically against the Houthis for almost a decade, didn't do very well.

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My interpretation, tell me if I'm wrong, is their side, that is the government of Yemen, is very weak. So, they've never had a -- you know, it's a little bit like the U.S. in Vietnam or Afghanistan. They don't have a good local ally. And in that circumstance, the rebels always managed to hold out.

MINOR: Yes, I think you're completely right. One of the Houthis' greatest sources of strength has been the weakness of their foes with inside of Yemen, within this anti-Houthi coalition that is represented by the Yemen government and supported by regional backers, with Saudi Arabia, but also UAE.

So, we saw the Yemen war that raged from 2015 until a truce was reached in 2022 really emboldened the Houthis. This kind of open-ended conflict just favored the group, who was extremely adaptable, has benefited from significant both material and expertise from Iran and other members of the axis. And we saw their capabilities really just catapult from a local militia to a group whose arsenal rivals that of some states, and is capable of reaching almost anywhere in the Middle East.

ZAKARIA: So Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, must be very disappointed in Donald Trump because he signed an agreement with the U.S. for security help. He has been a close friend of the White House, a close friend of the Trump family in all kinds of ways. And yet, when this has happened, and he clearly has wanted U.S. help, President Trump basically distanced himself from it and said, the Houthis don't want any trouble with us. And so we're not going to do any -- we're not going to attack them.

MINOR: You're very right. There's definitely growing frustrations between MBS and Donald Trump but it's also coming about in a -- in a -- in an era where the U.S.-Saudi relationship is evolving. And this idea of the U.S. providing a security guarantee for Saudi Arabia and other members of the Gulf is just starting to ring hollow, especially as the Iran war has showed that the constraints of what U.S. military power in the region can accomplish.

So, Donald Trump really has been hesitant to get involved in Yemen. I just don't think he sees a path towards success there. And with the continued political pressure here in the United States ahead of the midterms on the Iran conflict, he worries that the Houthis and getting involved in Yemen will just push things too far.

But unfortunately, he doesn't have full say over that. And we are seeing, especially with the Saudis shutting down operations of their East-West pipeline, which they depend on for exports via the Red Sea, that there are going to be continued pressures on global energy markets as a result of this conflict. ZAKARIA: Yes. So bottom line, you think that difficult to imagine the price of oil going down much and easy to imagine it going up a fair amount over the next two or three months?

MINOR: I think so. I mean, the Gulf countries have demonstrated an ability to adapt. We're seeing Saudi Arabia now shift more oil exports into these dark transit -- transits and ship to ship transfers through the Strait of Hormuz, but still, we're definitely going to see a dip in supply as a result of both the Houthi actions in the Red Sea and Houthi and Iranian backed militia attacks on Saudi energy infrastructure inside the country.

And, you know, we're just seeing -- this Yemen conflict is yet another example of how an unresolved conflict just continues to ripple across the region. Just trying to low key it, as Donald Trump has been trying to do since early August is not an effective strategy in this kind of environment.

ZAKARIA: One more consequence of this rather strange war of choice that Donald Trump launched on Iran. Allison Minor, thank you so much.

MINOR: Thank you, Fareed.

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, the journalist Jacob Weisberg has written a bold new book profiling eight members of the American elite who he believes demonstrated moral failure by not standing up to Donald Trump. Who are they? We'll name names when we come back.

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ZAKARIA: In 1956, a young Massachusetts senator, John F. Kennedy, published a volume of short biographies called "Profiles in Courage." The book told the story of eight historical U.S. senators whom Kennedy believed had shown great courage, defying tremendous political pressure to stand behind their convictions. The book would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize.

Seventy years later, the journalist Jacob Weisberg has written a bleak reversal of the book, "Profiles in Cowardice." Weisberg's book profiles eight powerful Americans who, he argues, exhibited great cowardice in the face of Donald Trump. He joins me now. Welcome. Great to have you.

All right. I promise we would name names. So, we're going to name some names. These are the chapters. Brad Karp, who was the head of Paul Weiss, the law firm that first folded under Trump's pressure. Steve Schwarzman, Jeff Bezos, Megyn Kelly, Mitch McConnell, George W. Bush. Sian Beilock, who is the president of Dartmouth. And John Roberts, of course, chief justice.

Talk about Brad Karp because this is a guy who heads one of the law firms that has very, at its core, the idea that it is a moral firm.

[10:40:01] It believes in doing the right thing. It believes in social justice as did he personally.

JACOB WEISBERG, FORMER EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, THE SLATE GROUP: This is a firm -- it's the -- it's the essential liberal law firm. It has a history around civil rights that goes back to Brown versus Board of Education and before to the Scottsboro boys case. And it's prided itself on that history.

And in the first term -- and this is in the book I'm interested in figures who were really different in Trump 1 versus Trump 2, because I think the country's experience has been so different. And in Trump 1, Brad Karp sent lawyers to JFK airport because of the first Muslim ban, which was held unconstitutional, to help people who might be denied legal entrance to the country.

In Trump 2, he made this deal after five days. And I don't underestimate the pressure. I mean, the president signed an executive order saying that no lawyers, over 1,000 lawyers at Paul Weiss, would be allowed to enter government buildings.

ZAKARIA: Which means no courts?

WEISBERG: No courts. You can't -- it would put them out of business. Of course, the order was illegal, and other firms that challenged the same orders won all those cases. But rather than seek an injunction, they made this, I think, this deal which is really kind of reprehensible. It's even more reprehensible when you get into it.

One of the things I found was the deal wasn't a real contract at all. Nobody signed anything. There's nothing on official letterhead. It's a kind of vague written commitment.

But what that means is they agreed to keep Donald Trump happy. They agreed not to make trouble. And if you look at their Web site now, they're not talking about their pro bono work for immigrants or civil rights. They're keeping their heads down.

With Steve Schwarzman and Bezos, in a way, you see people who, as you say, were very different in Trump 1. Bezos, you know, the Post was very tough on Trump. And Schwarzman resigned as the head of one of his boards.

Why do you think they did it in Trump 2? Why did they change so much?

WEISBERG: Well, this is the mystery. This is the question. And with each of these people, I have a somewhat different answer.

And with Bezos, as you say, couldn't have been better in Trump 1. Couldn't have been worse in Trump 2. And why is it?

I attribute it to his fixation with space, getting people into space. If you're looking for a through line in his whole life, from the time he was a Star Trek loving kid reading science fiction novels to giving his high school graduation speech on putting people into space, to what he's doing now with Blue Origin, I think, that's the thing he cares about much more than Amazon. And that's what Trump threatened, in particular, what Trump's alliance with Elon Musk threatened because this business depends on contracts from NASA and the Pentagon.

And SpaceX was getting them and Blue Origin wasn't because Bezos was on the outs, because the Washington Post stood up to Trump. And he changed that because I think it's more important to him.

ZAKARIA: And Schwarzman?

WEISBERG: With Schwarzman, I think, it's a different syndrome. I think this is someone who, if you read his memoir, which I did, has been obsessed his whole life with recognition. He talks about going to college and feeling like a nobody and sitting alone in the dining hall. And he says, quite explicitly, I had to figure out how to be a somebody, essentially, how to get people to recognize my greatness.

And if you live in New York and you see his name carved in stone on the New York Public Library and other places, you realize how much this is someone who hungers for a kind of recognition. Part of that, I think, is the president having you on speed dial as the person who represents finance, Wall Street, the markets, that's so important to Schwarzman. He's got to be at the table as it were.

And in the first term, he led this Trump business council. I don't think he did great. But when Charlottesville happened, the council was disbanded. Actually, Trump disbanded it before they could all resign because all these CEOs were going to quit.

And then after January 6th, he was like a lot of middle of the road Republican. He said, we're done with Trump. This is was too much. This is -- we can't support him after that. But then they did.

ZAKARIA: There's lots more. It's a very impressive book. And in its own way, a real profile in courage. Jacob Weisberg, thank you.

WEISBERG: Thank you, Fareed.

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS as the United States' midterm elections approach, I'll speak with CNN's Dana Bash about past elections that have changed the world, the subject of her new book.

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ZAKARIA: A number of important elections are coming up around the world, not just the U.S. midterm elections. Also, Israel's parliamentary elections, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's job is on the line. France's presidential election that will choose a successor to Emmanuel Macron and many more.

My next guest has reflected on "The Elections That Changed the World." That's what her new book is called. She's been combing through history to examine pivotal elections that had huge consequences.

Dana Bash is a CNN anchor and, of course, CNN's chief political correspondent. Dana, welcome. This is such an interesting book and it's really very global. But I want to focus in on three crucial --

DANA BASH, CNN ANCHOR AND CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes.

ZAKARIA: -- American elections.

[10:50:00]

One that I was surprised by because it reminds --

BASH: OK.

ZAKARIA: -- us that American elections precede the constitution and precede even the Declaration of Independence. So, tell us about the Mayflower Compact.

BASH: Well, first of all, Fareed, thank you so much for having me. And it is so true that there have been elections, by the way, not just by the settlers, but also there were forms of elections on the United States' soil by Native Americans.

But with the Mayflower, 41 men, of course they were -- they were just men back then, who signed this compact. And it was really the first time that there was a template for the concept of the greater good, giving things up in order for a system and a democracy and a society to work. And it's really remarkable.

They sat on the boat and they worked it out. And they had this basic set of rules and laws that they live by which they, of course, expanded on and it did become the template. The founders, fast forward 100 plus years, they used some of the ideals in the Mayflower Compact to write the Declaration of Independence.

ZAKARIA: And then it feels to me like the first great test of American democracy was actually not the first election to a president because Washington was universally acclaimed. I mean, he was almost anointed. It was the one after Washington, right, 1800, which has some eerie parallels with the world we've been living in the last 10 years.

BASH: So many eerie parallels. But you're exactly right. It was the election of -- for 1796 and then 1800 both had the same candidates running against one another. It was John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

In the first election, which was the first real contested election, John Adams won. But then there was this rematch in 1800. And what happened with the electoral college there was a tie. And the tie wasn't, Fareed, between Adams and Jefferson. It was between Jefferson and his own running mate, Aaron Burr, because there was a quirk, a little bit of a mistake that they realized then in that constitution they wrote that the electors didn't distinguish between the president and the vice president.

So, that's what led to the first constitutional crisis. It went to the House of Representatives. And thanks to a guy named Alexander Hamilton, he pushed the federalists who were in control of the House to support Jefferson. And Jefferson, became president of the United States. It could have gone a whole different way. It could have gone belly up. There could have been, you know, fighting in the streets exactly what they promised and they vowed that wouldn't have. But the constitution held up.

ZAKARIA: The other one I have always been fascinated by is 1932, because I think in some ways you can argue it's one --

BASH: Yes.

ZAKARIA: -- of the most consequential elections in history. Because on the one hand, you had the Republican Party and the candidate, Herbert Hoover, who represented a kind of, you know, hands off, laissez faire, don't touch the -- don't get the government involved in the economy and a party that was deeply isolationist.

And on the other hand, you had Franklin Roosevelt who, as we know, saved the -- saved American capitalism from the Great Depression and then saved American democracy from fascism. And that's all -- you know, all on the ballot, in a sense, in 1932.

BASH: That is so true. It is absolutely true. And, FDR won just as you so perfectly described because people were really angry. They were -- I mean, we talk about economic anxiety now, which there is. There's economic anxiety and then there's the 19 -- early 1930s, after the Great Depression.

And that was absolutely existential and epic. And people were desperate for help. And Herbert Hoover was not helping exactly as you described.

And FDR promised a new deal. And he won. And he won big. And not only did he win big, congress, Democrats in Congress won big, which allowed him to put forward the legislation to pass because he had the big majorities to do it.

And so first, it was all about domestic. And because he was becoming successful with these new projects -- by the way, he totally also changed the way the federal government ran and the power of the federal government in order to get these projects through, growing it in a very big way. Social security, for example.

[10:55:00]

He got reelected. And then came 1940, where he should have been done because two terms, and at least the practice was, you're out. But he won. And because of that, he was in the White House in 1941 for Pearl Harbor.

He had the decade of experience and the relationships with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin, and was able to help form that alliance that did push back against Adolf Hitler and changed the world.

ZAKARIA: Dana Bash, such a fascinating set of elections. Thank you so much for sharing some of them with us.

BASH: I'm so grateful that you have me. Thank you so much.

ZAKARIA: And thanks to all of you for being part of my program this week. I will see you next week.

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