-Dan, have you ever seen
anything like this in your career?
-No, Jimmy, I have not.
You know, I've been blessed to live this long.
I'm 89 years old, and I've seen a few things
over the years, including the Great Depression,
World War II, Watergate, 9/11 -- so many things.
I've never seen anything like this.
You know, my reaction, I think,
was the most common reaction of the day.
I cannot believe that I'm seeing this.
I can't believe I'm watching this.
As I believe you mentioned somewhere along the way,
it was like watching a very bad horror movie --
horror movie for our country. -Yeah.
-And, no, I've never seen anything like this before.
And neither has any other American, thank God.
And let us hope we never see it again.
-The last I heard is that the Senate wanted to go back in
as soon as they can and continue and get the count.
What happens now with the vote? -Well, what happens now,
I would say, Jimmy, having talked as we have seriously
about what happened today with the mob violence
and the mob storming into the Capitol,
history is going to record --
Today's big headlines are, sometime late tonight
or sometime tomorrow, the Biden election
is going to be certified by the Congress.
The Congress is gonna have their vote,
certifying the Electoral College vote,
and Joe Biden will be officially, formally,
the new president-elect of the United States,
and Kamala Harris will be the new vice president-elect.
That's going to be -- You know, that's set.
And history will record that as the big headline.
The second headline is that the Democrats are gonna control
the Senate, if these results in Georgia hold,
and this is the way it looks.
There are gonna be two new Democratic Senators in Georgia.
And, you know, this --
this is a whole new day for the country.
In 13 days, we have a new president,
new vice president, and if the Georgia results hold,
which I expect they will, this Senate will be controlled
by the Democrats,
since Kamala Harris has the swing vote.
It's going to be a new day for the country.
And those who took part in storming the Capitol today,
history will footnote them, but it will footnote them in shame.
The real people, the real heroes of this democracy today
are, one, my old friend, the late John Lewis,
Ms. Abrams, Stacey Abrams in Georgia,
and all those people who, in the runoff election,
in both parties, did what they're supposed to do.
They knocked on doors to take part in a Democratic process.
And once the count, the final count's in, they accept it.
These are the heroes of this day.
These people who've shamed themselves
and shamed our country by storming our Capitol
and going inside and taking part in violence inside the Capitol
are the ones that should be shamed today, and that's --
that really should be the news of the day.
Unfortunately, we're gonna be distracted for some time
by this nastiness that happened at the Capitol.
-Do you think Trump really believes that he --
the election was rigged, or does he have a different agenda?
-I do not. I will say,
"How could I know what's in Donald Trump's heart?"
I don't. And the straight answer
to your question, I think he knows exactly what he's doing.
I think he knows he lost.
He's the quintessential poor loser.
I think he, all along, took the attitude,
"If I don't win the vote, then I'm gonna try to make sure
that nobody accepts the honest vote."
I think he's known what he's doing all along.
I think he knows what he's doing now,
and I think he's feeling very good about himself,
because today, he got the whole headlines,
the whole attention, all came to him and his movement
away from the fact that Biden had won the election
and that two new Democratic Senators
had been elected in Georgia, apparently,
and the Democrats will control the Senate.
So I think he's feeling pretty good about himself
at this moment.
-What's next for President-elect Biden?
He has to unite the country.
How does he do that?
How do we move forward as a country?
What's at stake here?
-Well, what's at stake is the very future
of the United States of America.
You know, we have had the world's most successful
democratic government, the most successful democratic government
in the history of the world,
that ours is a constitutional republic
based on the principles of freedom and democracy.
The question has always been,
"Can we hold ourselves together?"
And that is the major challenge of the Biden administration,
and it's no small challenge, because well over 75 million,
76 million Americans voted for Donald Trump.
And trying to re-establish some normal amount of unity
in a country, in a situation we're in now,
is a tremendous challenge for President Biden.
I do think he has to make the decision pretty early
whether he is to be a transitional president
or a transformational president.
That is, is he just gonna be sort of a president
who re-established some norms
but just was waiting for the next president
to be really transformative, or is he gonna try to be
a transformational president?
A lot of that depends on what happens
with those within the Republican Party.
How many of those in the Republican Party
hold on to the Trump fantasy and try to keep Trumpism in control,
or do they take their party in a different direction?
But the challenge for Biden right away is to decide
and to act upon whether he's transitional
or whether he's just a transformational president.
-Dan, I thank you for all the years of your work
in journalism, and I also want to thank you for your tweets,
because they are calming
in a lot of this craziness that's surrounding us.
And I thank you again for being on our program tonight.
-I really appreciate that, Jimmy.
I would like to leave it on an up note,
and I think we should.
You know, we all sang or used to sing "God Bless America."
"God bless America, stand beside her and guide her
through the night with the light from above and from within."
We might not sing it tonight, but we might want to hum it
and just play the words over in our head,
because if we hold steady, we're gonna be okay.
-My thanks to Dan Rather. You can see season eight
of his show, "The Big Interview,"
Wednesdays at 8:00 p.m., on Access TV.