Podcasting Through It with Heather Cox Richardson

Hey, everybody. Welcome to the weekly show podcast. My name is John Stewart. It is March 31st.

We are on the the lamb side of March, moving into April. And other than that, though, I would say I'm

having a feeling of I don't know what it's like to be on a Bob sled course or on a loose,

but that's what it feels like right now in this country. We appear to be

careening towards something. And you're not quite sure if we are going to stay on the track or fly

off and explode in midair. And when I when I have feelings like this, when the complexities of the

world and the velocity of world events seem to be speeding towards a frightening conclusion,

I reach to those, as Mr. Rogers would say, I reach for the helpers. I reach for the helpers.

Those that can help put this in perspective. And and our guest today is just one of my favorites

who I just I love her sub stack. I love everything that she does. But her ability to sort of

create frameworks around all these things that are so difficult for all of us to process is what

makes her such a valuable voice in this current moment. So I'm just going to I'm just going to

get on in and bring on our guest, the fabulous Heather Cox Richardson.

So ladies and gentlemen, it is my distinct pleasure and honor to welcome back once again,

the great Heather Cox Richardson, Professor of History at Boston College. Heather, thank you so

much for being here. Always a pleasure, John. Heather. John. First of all, let me apologize to you

that in times of trouble, I I hate to treat you like a sav that I reach for in in times of

of need, a bottle of of of of of volume, your your experience and your knowledge of the arc of

history and the narratives of history always bring me a comfort in that the things that we're

experiencing are not necessarily unprecedented and that there are historical analogues which

we don't want to use as a crutch necessarily. But Heather, I'm wondering in this moment, I

wanted to reach out to you because it feels there there is a toxicity that seems to be building

to some kind of volcanic eruption. And I can't shake that feeling of impending catastrophic.

So I wanted to kind of pick your brain a little bit about how you're processing this this moment,

knowing how well you're able to see the landscapes of the past and lay them into the present.

So let's start with the place it's always important to start and that's that the future is

unwritten. Like we are writing this story and we are doing it and one of the reasons that I think

people like you and me reach for the people around us is because ultimately this is an extraordinarily

human process. This is, you know, the people in the past did the same thing. Yes, though, I feel as

if like you seem to feel that we are heading toward some kind of a cataclysm in the next

soon, you know, and and that I think we should maybe unpack a little bit about what's going on

there. But again, to reach back into history, we are not the first people who are approaching a

catastrophe without really being able to understand what is going to happen or what it looks like. And

I always think of the fact that years ago, I went to write a piece on the Great Crash of 29 and I

thought, you know, everybody's done the, you know, the economics and everybody's done this and

everyone's done that. What am I going to do? So I went back to a newspaper from the time and read

the night before to see what it looked like on the verge of it. And it's really interesting. It was

the opening night of the opera in New York City. And so you had all these stories about the people

in there, you know, beautiful coaches and the, you know, the guys with the uniforms and the

people wearing diamonds and going in and going to see the opera. And there was a really small note

about a man who had died by suicide that night because his business had gone under and he was

distraught and he couldn't face the fact that he was the only failure in this entire city, country

in his mind. And that's always stuck in my mind because I just, you know, I kept saying to the

little piece of paper, dude, hang on, hang on 12 more hours because if you hang on 12 more hours,

there's going to be a whole lot of people who are there with you and who might like to hear your

perspective on things. So every time it feels to me like, oh man, I'm not sure what we're facing in

the morning. I think of that poor man who if he had just managed to hang on for 12 more hours

would have realized that he was not a failure, that the system had failed and that together they

could rebuild it. That's a beautiful way of putting it. And there's also something within that

kind of tablo that seems really appropriate, which is the cataclysm always seems to occur

the night before cataclysm eve, if you will, always seems to be draped in finery. You know,

you sort of, you almost get that sense of using the Titanic as that's, you know, and what's

happening, the band is playing in the grand ballroom and people are draped in there and they're,

they're riding in luxury on what appears to be a kind of portend for this glorious

and future of riches. And then there's one dude who's like, hey, what's that? What's that shadow

of an iceberg that's over there? And it feels that way a little bit here. And I'll tell you why

this moment for me is it is the world faces those challenges and potential cataclysm and all those

things and navigating these difficult waters. The difference for me now is the captain of our ship

seems utterly disinterested in where the icebergs seem to be. And when the crash may happen,

he just wants to get out. He wants to stand on his plane with a giant poster board of his ballroom.

It's the lack of interest in the consequences of his powerful actions.

Is, is I think what's got me on such shaky ground? I don't think I feel like we've never been

at the, you know, at the peril of a leader so disinterested in the damage of his own actions.

You're far more charitable than I am. I think the dude is Coco for Coco Puffs. I mean,

I was trying to realize. You know, so, so, you know, I'm going to push that further.

To me, the elephant, not only just in the room, but in the whole house and in the whole mansion,

you know, whatever, is that he is not mentally okay. And, you know, we have Captain Ahab

in the charge of the ship of state, which, you know, would be a lovely thing to dive into

with some other conversations. Yes. But he, no, I think it's more than he doesn't care,

because certainly we have had presidents in the past who had an ideology in their head

and acted according to that ideology, even as the country began to burn down around them.

I mean, just don't even start me on Benjamin Harrison, but we could get into Calvin Coolidge,

for example. But in this case, the man does not know if he's a footer horseback. And so, you know,

things are changing every second. And the more destruction he causes, the more he is inclined to

lash out and cause more destruction. So watching that, you know, and what that has gotten us into

with the destruction of world trade and with the destruction of our security alliances and with

the destruction of our allies and with the support, you know, the fact we're supporting

oligarchs, especially petrol oligarchs around the world. I mean, what he has done is he has

really slashed into ribbons, the post-World War II order that has brought his peace and prosperity

for 80 freaking years. So that is entirely new. And certainly there are parallels in the past,

where the American people have stepped up and said to those individuals who were advancing

ideologies, hey, dude, this doesn't work. We got to try something else. But what that has also

done is it has opened a window, I think, into possibilities for moving the world forward in the

ways that it will need to in the 21st century to do things like address climate change and to

address the migration that's going to come from climate change and to address the fact that in

that post-World War II order, you really had more even than the vestiges, I think, of colonialism,

but the kind of colonialist ideas that said that, you know, Africa doesn't get a seat at the G20

until until President Joe Biden is in office. I mean, so one of the things I think about steering

that Titanic past the iceberg or maybe at least guaranteeing that people get in the lifeboats

is people keeping a steady hand on, I'm sorry, to really push that metaphor, but the ship of state

to try and make sure that it can at least keep a float long enough that we are there

in lifeboats when we get the next way to look at the world. Right, right. Yeah, the problem

almost seems to be that Trump is destroying it faster than we can react to it, that the squandering,

it really is like, you know, this 80 year world order that you speak of was designed

and maintained by the United States. We created this stable world. That's where our leverage and power

is coming from and to see him piss it away with such velocity, I think it's, it is our system

up for being able to grab the wheel. Are we all just still trying to gain our bearings?

Well, I think at the beginning, we were trying to gain our bearings because things were happening

so incredibly quickly. And the idea of pushing back against him through the courts, for example,

takes time. That, you know, that takes a time to play out. But one of the things, again, I,

now I'm going to be polyanna to you here. No worries. One of the things that does seem to be

developing is a number of people in other countries who at first had their jaws on their chests,

watching what was happening in the United States are now sort of standing up and saying, well,

actually we don't want to go down the route of going back to the 1890s, the way Donald Trump wants

to because let's think about what that did. Oh, I know world wars. So, you know, in places like

Italy, for example, Italy this morning said that it would not permit US planes to land at,

to land in Italy on their way to Iran. Well, what does that say about the importance in the ways

in which the Trump administration and the way it's behaving is hurting the far right in Italy?

You know, they don't want us, they don't want to be aligned with him and take a look at what

happened to the rising right wing parties in Canada and the emergence of Mark Carney, the Prime Minister

of Canada as, I mean, he's incredibly smart man anyway, but his reworking of that international order

in order to make sure that when he calls the middle countries, the middleing countries are able

to maintain some kind of global stability, you know, what's happened to the United States is heart

wrenching over the last 40 years at least. Maybe in part because we have been so powerful,

it's enabled us to get away with all kinds of crap because, you know, we didn't have to pay taxes,

we could simply borrow. We didn't have to worry about our safety because we were the United States.

What we are seeing happened to us and our role in the world is heart wrenching for those of us

who remember a period in which we were really a force for good or at least tried to be, but maybe

what we will see coming out of this is a fairer order around the world thanks to people in other

countries. Little hard to be thrown into the backwater yourselves, but you know, we did it to ourselves.

Right. It's so interesting to think of that way as Trump as almost a vaccination against far

right populism that they see how it operates, but maybe that's the difficulty we have in processing

him because we look at it, you know, you mentioned Benjamin Harrison, you mentioned Calvin Coolidge,

and we process him through our own system of constitutional republic, right? But he's kind of

thrown our lot in with a different form of government. It's hard to compare him to American

presidents. It's almost easier to compare him to strong men. I mean, I don't know if you saw

they unveiled the Trump library, but it's not a library. It's the freedom tower as if the only

tenant was Kim Jong-un. Like it's twice the size of a height of end building in Miami and then

in it are just gold statues of Donald Trump and his plane. So how do we how do we process an

American president that has so much more in common with the illiberal strong men of today and the past?

Well, so first of all, I think it's important to realize that he was not just breaking the law

in his first year in office. He was acting not acting unconstitutionally, although it was that too,

both of those things. He was acting as if there wasn't a constitution, which is one of the things

sort of extra constitutionally, which is one of the things that's been hard to chase down,

because normally if somebody breaks the law, you say, okay, I'm going to bring in lawyers,

I'm going to sue you, and we're going to get to the bottom of this. But think about the

Department of Government Efficiency, for example, we still don't know who was in charge of the

government of government efficiency. Like how do you sue anybody if you literally do not know who

was in charge of it? So there are many ways in which the way he undertook to undermine the

constitution, in fact, puts him in line with those autocrats who operate without any check by

the people. So I think it took a long time for people to get their heads around that and to figure

out how to fight back against it. And we can talk more about that. But that library, I think,

is really interesting along with the arch and along with, you know, the arch to triumph. Yeah,

I mean, and you know when they build it, they're going to drop the eye, and it's just going to be

the arch to Trump. But you just said something there. Yeah. When they build it. Yes. So one of the things

that I find fascinating and would love to hear you talk about this, because this is your medium

and not mine, is the degree to which what Trump is doing is sort of the idea of virtual technology,

that Russian concept of convincing people in the political realm of something that does not exist,

that exists only in their minds and in the technology of television and radio and the internet

to base their lives on that. The degree to which we are looking at, you know, basically Trump

running the country like a television show. No question and an ADHD. I think what you find now is,

and the only thing I can think about it is I'm trying to, again, be charitable is if you don't

think of him as a dictator, but you think of him as, all right, he believes the United States is

really just a subsidiary of the Trump organization. And so he's running it. If you don't think of it in

terms of, you know, Putin, you think of it in terms of a businessman running a company that's not

public. So all the decision-making that occurs, he is, in essence, it's monarchy,

but through a capitalist monarchy, you know, that's would be the charitable definition of it.

And I think what you see is, he's able to move using those processes much faster than we're

able to contain it. He, I think his first term struck me as he was testing the limits of our

constitution. Where are the holes? Where are the weaknesses? The second term, he's just exploiting

them. And he's doing it at such a pace. I mean, I think the real analog to that is what happened

in the East Wing, where I'm going to build a ballroom, but I'm never going to touch the East Wing.

And then it's just gone. And rather than face the consequences, he is a, he's not, you know,

they always say like it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission. The thing about Trump is he

doesn't even ask fucking forgiveness. He just moves on. He's a wreck. He is a wrecking ball

that operates simultaneously with a sort of reality distortion field. And he convinces his

acolytes, like you say, through the power of narrative. He's one of the better narrative

storytellers, but it's budding up against actual reality. And that's what's so fascinating about

the Iran situation. It's the first time I've seen him not be able to just move on.

Well, so that's really interesting, thinking about the United States of America as a subsidiary

of the Trump oligarchy or not even. It's a personalized company. And thinking of it as a media

subsidiary, basically, the United States is a media subsidiary that is you just have to tell a

good story. And we know there's a lot of stories coming out of the White House about how, you know,

White House chief of staff Susie Wiles is running a daily TV show that Trump has to win at the

end of every night, you know, the degree to which he is manipulating reality through his posts on

truth social and through the things he's saying, which change by the hour. But there is, it seems

like the way you set that up, it does seem like there has to be a way to think through this that

enables people to create their own reality out of things that are actually based in reality,

like you say, like the Iran war. And I, you know, like you, I have said for years that once people

woke up and realized what was going to happen, if in fact we put this kind of a presidency in place,

that's when we would get our democracy back. And I do think that is happening. But I also think

you just identified that it's not happening as quickly as it needs to as Congress is on break

until April 13th. And Trump is in the White House contemplating sending our men and women into

a ground war in Iran, which is already a disaster. And that when we, we started out by talking,

I was a little uncomfortable using the word cataclysm at first, but,

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So let's say if we're putting this in terms of fail safes, right? So like, you know,

if you think of it as like a circuit box and what's the first fuse to pop that you would go down

and reboot, that would be Congress. I'm laughing like you and I, we've, we've done votes. We've done

TV. We're just, here's the thing. Reality's too screwy. We have to find analogous situations.

Congress is that first you would think fused to pop that could reset and reign this in.

In your vast expanse of history, can you recall a Congress, this feckless or one that didn't appear,

I don't even know if they agree with them, but they're so cowardly as to not want to take

a chance of even a whiff of resistance. Okay. So the cowardice in this Congress is, I think, new.

In part because of the ways in which the primary system has been

jiggered so that the people who are in Congress, the Republicans, not the Democrats,

but the Republicans who are in Congress have almost been selected to be weenies when it came to

Trump, right? But this is not the first Congress not to do its job. And they're, you know,

we always point to the truth, the Congress under Truman, that he called the do nothing Congress.

But of more interest, I think, in this moment is the one in the early 1920s, in which the Republicans

take over from a period of time in which the Democrats have really dominated the early 20th century

under Woodrow Wilson. And they've done all kinds of stuff that a lot of Republicans really hate,

like the income tax and, you know, progressive legislation and so on. And of course all the racial

stuff, all the, you know, the race of stuff too. But the Republicans complain a lot less about that.

But when they get in control of Congress in the early 1920s, they really can't get their

feet under them. They have been an opposition party for so long that they basically don't know how

to take the reins and run anything. So they start to squabble amongst themselves, especially between

the old guard, the Henry Cabot lodges, for example, and the younger people like, um, uh,

fighting Bob LaFalla out of Wisconsin, you know, they just can't really get their feet under them.

So what happens in that case is that the power of the federal government slides into the cabinet

and the people who really begin to run the government are Andrew Mellon at Treasury

and are Herbert Hoover at Commerce. Who is president at this time?

In the in 20, that's 20 to 23. I think it is going to be Harding, 20 to 23, right? So they take over

and then Harding dies of a heart attack in California and, um, uh, Calvin Coolidge takes over.

But he does, he keeps them in power. And the reason I mentioned those names is most people,

if they haven't heard of them, certainly you've heard of Hoover when he was president.

If you go and look at buildings in your town from the 1920s, they're going to have the name of Andrew

Mellon on them because he was pretty big about sending, you know, making sure his name was on

everything. And what they did is they took the mechanics of the progressive era, the things that

were supposed to be in place to protect people, the new organizations of the progressive era.

And they stocked them all with businessmen. And this is when we, you get the era that, and this

is not actually what he said, but the idea that, uh, the business of America is business and they

rewrite, um, Jesus Christ and the apostles to be, you know, Jesus to be a businessman who took

10 nobodies and, um, yes, yes, exactly. So in that case, you know, one of the things points,

I think I made actually with you a year or so ago is that power isn't vested anywhere in the

United States really except among the people. But when it flows into Washington, it sloshes around

and sometimes you get a really powerful president who just scoops it all up. Sometimes you get a

really powerful congress who scoops it all up. Sometimes you get a Supreme Court, sometimes you

get the cabinet, but in a moment when you have a president who is not able to manage the country

in a coherent fashion and there I'm being delicate, you do have the opportunity to grab that power.

And, you know, I thought the Republicans in the Senate were going to do it. I thought that they,

at least I hope they were going to take their power and use it to stabilize the country and they

didn't. They punted. The House of Representatives under the Republicans has been laughable. It is

so badly organized. The Supreme Court has been grabbing for a ton of power for a while now.

So that's out there. But one of the things that I think we are seeing is the American people

waking up and saying, well, hey, if you guys aren't going to be using your power for us,

we kind of like it back. And that's the thing. That's where the opportunity when you talked about

the sort of optimistic vision because you think of it, you know, what do we always kind of

rest on the laurels of the system of checks and balances that were designed in the

founding fathers grand wisdom. They found ways that it was going to be a battle between the executive

and the legislative and the judicial, not sort of foreseeing that political parties might

abdicate all responsibility of power, just to hold on to power, that there'd be no principle behind

it. And I wonder if Trump saw the weakness of that system. He saw the cowardice in that system

of people not wanting to because for so long, our government has displayed a grand cowardice

in terms of bold programs designed to address the needs of the American people.

I mean, I think we know you talked about these last 40 years. I think there's been a real

erosion between the connection of people to the problems that they face every day and their

connection to a government that seems to be designed in no way that the money that you pay in

doesn't come back to you in any way that you feel like has a value. And he saw that and exploited

that weakness. And does that mean there's an opportunity now on the side of the people

to seize that and exploit that weakness. And I hesitate to even put it out there, but

not a strong man, but a powerful leader to wield that on behalf of people's needs as opposed

to their own gratification. To wield that governmental power that hasn't been used. Right.

Oh, yeah. I think so. And I think you're seeing it. One of the things that's fun is watching

the Democratic governors around the country. And perhaps even some Republican governors who are

very deliberately saying, Hey, let's take this government out for a spin and see what we can do

with people, do for people. And Zora and Mamdani in New York City. Again, same thing. Now,

that's not to say you necessarily agree with their policies or whatever, but this idea that the

government is designed for the people is very much back on the table. But I'd go back a step and

say that this is not just Trump. I actually don't think Trump saw something and exploited it.

I think he's a really simple character. He is not a politician. He's a salesman.

And he recognized that 40 years of Republican rhetoric had created a population that he could

exploit because that's what he does. He exploits people. And he did that and he did it very effectively.

But it's not just that the government sort of amorphously stopped doing things for people.

I actually think that was a deliberate decision on the part of certain Republican politicians

who took over the party in the in the 1990s, especially, but certainly were behind Reagan's

election in the 80s in 1980. And they they set up the system in such a way that the American people

would no longer have a say in it. So things like tax cuts, you know, people said they love tax cuts.

What that really did was it managed to create real deficits that made it harder for the government

to do things for people and it divorced people from having a say in their government, having,

being behind their government at the same time that we began to do everything based on extraordinary

deficits. So the money coming into the government actually didn't have a lot to do with tax dollars.

It had to do with how much the government could borrow. Now the more the American people ended up not

liking what was the government was doing, the more that the Republicans in charge of the systems

stripped those systems down so that the people had less and less and less to say. So by in 1986,

you are already hearing from the Republicans under Reagan the idea of ballot integrity.

The idea you had to go into the roles and clean them up because they were not legitimate.

So what do we get? Florida does that in 1998 and in the process of cleaning up the voter rolls,

knocks about 100,000 people off the voting rolls in Florida in 1999. You know, something happened

in Florida in 2000. I can't really remember what that was. But then you think all the way through,

you get Citizens United, which makes money pouring into the system. Well, who does that benefit

people who have a ton of money? You get the gerrymandering, the extraordinary gerrymandering that makes

it almost impossible for Democrats to win. So you've got in certain states. You get the chevron

decision, which removes agency from agencies. Right. So one of the things that that has done is

it skewed the system in a certain direction. But it's also, I think, encouraged Americans to feel

like they don't have agency in their government. And one of the things that you have seen since Trump's

was elected the second time was people saying, hey, wait, if we turn up at Tesla parking lots,

Tesla dealerships, we can actually hurt the Tesla brand. And you know, when Jimmy Kim,

we got knocked off the air, you had people saying, okay, then we're not going to buy your product

and all the sudden he's back on the air. And people are learning that they do have agency and that

muscle is strengthening in a way that it did in the 1890s, for example, in a very similar period

that led to the progressive era or the 1930s. Now, how are those muscles developed in the 1890s?

Because if I was looking for an analogous period to this, and I think you make a great point

about that this is a multifaceted assault on reducing the power of people and the consent of the

govern what it's sort of doing is it's raising the bar of consent so that you almost can't reach it.

That consent is really now formulated at the corporate board level that their speech is being far

more valued than what the individuals are, right? So they're designing that system and it feels more

like a gilded age scenario when those titans like Morgan and those guys, the government really

did have to go to them and go, hey man, can you bail us out and we'll do whatever you want?

So how did they regain the power or does gaining that power necessarily have to have something

catastrophic like the depression? Will we only regain our agency in the most dire of circumstances

or is there a path to that that is less tragic and more productive?

Well, once again, future is unwritten. We can make whatever decisions we want going forward.

I think it's a multifaceted answer that I'm going to give you. One is that even in the darkest

periods, one of the things that carries us through is art and music and the communities that those

things create. So we tend to forget that in that period of the Robert Barons and the 1880s and

the 1890s, it's also a period of extraordinary innovation in terms of technology, for example,

but also in terms of art and music. And you think about the new kinds of literature and the new

kinds of music coming out of the American South and so on in that period and the artwork in that

period. So those kinds of nurturing of the human spirit really matter. And that's one of the things I

don't think we necessarily pay enough attention to. But one of the ways that political change happens

is, you know, and I thought a lot about this is, you know, if everything's going fine,

basically no one's paying much attention to politics. And then there are a few people who are

complaining, but they're kind of voices crying in the wilderness and you're like, yeah, whatever,

you know, have a cheeto, you know. But then as people get more and more upset, more and more

people are like, hey, hey, did you hear what that person has to say? And they start to make a

community of people who are upset about one thing or another. And once again, those are people are

not necessarily in power yet. So where the thing that had me thinking for a long time is where is

the relationship? Literally the relationship between people on the ground and leadership.

That is, you know, there's a lot of people who think leaders just tell people at the bottom who

to think and there's people who think that it's the other way around. But where for me was the

connection and where I came to think the connection lies is in the more people recognize that there's

a problem with their government, the more they start to formulate a way to think about that. And

if you are trying to get elected, either are elected or trying to get elected as a leader,

you need to be able to speak to those people. So the connection between those two things are

the storytellers, the ones who take that in co-8 frustration and say, this is not our society.

A storytellers like Abraham Lincoln, for example, who say, this is not the way our society should be.

But now there's another piece to that, I think. And that is obviously somebody like Lincoln,

and but we could pick on many other people as well, is able to articulate what

the frustrated Americans would like their society to look like. But one of the things that they

have to do is have to be able to reach a lot of people. And in Lincoln's era, you got the rise

of a new kind of newspaper. People forget this, but the New York Daily Tribune, the New York Times,

the Chicago Tribune, the Philadelphia Inquirer was actually older, but it switches its orientation

in this period. You start to see the the a new media amplifying that sort of story.

And so if you jump ahead to the 1890s, once again, you're seeing people like Theodore Roosevelt

articulating a new kind of way to contextualize and imagine a new government. But crucial to him

is the rise of the new newspapers in the populist period, for example, most of which don't exist

anymore. They've all the copies were destroyed. But they grew up across the American planes and

in the American South like mushrooms after the rain. And the idea of being able to make sure more

people get access to that narrative becomes incredibly important. So if you flash forward to this

moment, one of the huge changes that you have seen really since, and it was before there too,

but really since Trump was elected the second time, is this proliferation of podcasts and

new local newspapers and you know, right in campaigns that look like the committees of

correspondence from the the American Revolution. You are seeing the the population of our intellectual

space in this country with a new slash old narrative that says the government should work for us.

It should not be beholden to kings, for example. And we need to take that back. So that was a really

long answer to say there's a lot of different things that happen. These things are all crucial.

And in each of the periods that we have identified, there was in fact a major economic crash that made

people say, okay, I can't identify with JD Rockefeller any longer because I am literally having to

walk from South Dakota to Missouri to find work. And when that that was in the after the panic of

1893 from 1893 to about in 1897. So when that final thing happens where people say, I can't

live this way any longer, more and more people jump on that narrative and we rewrite the country.

And when you see those moments, Heather, and I love the way you paint that because what it does is

it gives a framework to each of these periods that, you know, a kind of governmental or world

cataclysm or failure combined with a new way of storytelling combined with a storyteller who

is able to harness those and push us into what will be the next iteration. And I think in our minds,

the person that is always the hero in that story is the progressive.

Teddy Roosevelt jumps in in those moments of the robberbearance and he decides,

speaks softly, carry a big stick and trust bust and we're not going to have monopolies anymore

and we're going to do that. And then you talk about the 20s and the degradation of the power of

people's voices. And then FDR seizes that moment and he brings in social programs that ease the

pain and the lives of all these different people. And as you were telling it, it was what was coming

up in my head was 2008 financial crisis and the Iraq war and social media. And these are the

three ingredients, but the progressive hero didn't seize that moment. And I want to ask about this

and this is a hard one. Trump is the one who ends up seizing that form of communication,

mastering the attention economy. But before that was Obama. And are we in a situation where Obama

was it was it a slightly missed opportunity to seize upon those conditions that could have really

created that modern progressive revolution that ended up maybe dissipating because

it wasn't bold enough. Is that possible? It's certainly possible, sure. But again, one of the

things you need to see there is the enough people unhappy enough that they would not, for example,

embrace the reaction to Obama that powered the Tea Party movement and all those sort of

reframing of our country to be against somebody like Obama. And that, by the way, looks a great deal

more like the long-term rise of something like the elite Southern inslavers who managed to get

a whole bunch of people to stay behind them even though that economic system was grinding them

into the ground, grinding poor white farmers into the ground. So yes, it's possible. And certainly,

you know, there were many people who were frustrated by the fact that Obama was not as aggressive as

he could have been about embracing sort of those old traditional let's take on big money and so on.

But I'm not entirely sure that one is productive to look back to that. But two, one of the things

about Lincoln and about Theodore Roosevelt and about FDR is that the people really created

them. You know, in each one of those cases, those were people who met the moment not because they

were somehow especially anointed by God. They were certainly very bright people. But the American people

were ready for them. And I think in some ways, maybe you could say the American people were ready

for Donald Trump because he was embracing and articulating what a lot of people on the radical

right had been conditioned to believe for 40 years. They look longer. I mean, he's singing an old

song, Heather. I mean, the song he's singing about, there is a real America and a real American

and they're the ones being screwed. But like, that's a pretty old song that even goes back to what

you were talking about in the South. So yes, it is. I mean, it goes all the way back to our

founding. And but so does the other song. And I guess that's the point that I'm always trying to

make is that when we sing that other song, a number of things happen. One, the economy is better.

And when the economy is better, people, I mean, this is a, this is a connection. A few people

recognize when the economy is better, race and gender relations get better. You know, those

two things do go hand in hand. But when we think about our heroes that we look to in our country,

we don't look to the neo Nazis. We don't look to the Confederates. You know, we look to Fannie

Lou Hamer and the people that really have shown to expand the principles of the Declaration of

Independence to include more people with every iteration. And an expansion of rights and an

expansion of fairness and an expansion of of justice. So what I would love to see is first of all

the embracing of those liberal principles. But also one of the other patterns we have in the

United States that kind of makes historians bonkers is that, you know, I assume I can say the

shit hits the fan on this podcast, you know, Heather, it might be the nicest thing anybody said

on this podcast. You know, we turn everything over to the rich guys. The shit hits the fan.

Right. Everybody steps up and says, Oh, gee, we really need some regulation. We put the

regulations around it. Everything stabilizes. And then somebody goes, I'm not making enough money.

And so all of a sudden we turn it back over to the rich guys, the shit hits the fan. And, and,

you know, our example of that in American history is the cattle industry, believe it or not, which,

you know, is this boom and bust industry. And every time things go really bad, the cattle ranchers

say, Hey, you know, we really need some regulation over here. And the federal government steps in.

And then everything stabilizes. And they go, Hey, I'm, you know, Clive and Bundy get out of my life,

right? So if we can figure out how to stop that constant swing back and forth, because every time

we do that swing, it hurts people a lot. And it hurts the environment a lot. When I think about

the 21st century, I want to get back to a country that does expand the rights of the Declaration

of Independence and that puts us on the same plane that we've been in our better moments.

But I would also really love for us to find some way to create those guardrails so that people

can't say, Oh, wow, we have the strongest economy in the world. Well, you know, let's do, let's

screw with it, you know, or we have the safest world we've ever lived in. I've got a great idea.

Let's turn it over. Let's go to war against Iran, you know.

Is part of it because it strikes me. This is a great discussion to have about. It's how you

convince people because I think the cattle rancher thing is a great historical precedent. And you

can look at it today with the farmers. What I find is if the government does something that for someone

that you yourself don't need, well, that's an entitlement and you resent it. But if the government

does something that you need, well, that's just and that's just them giving you back your money.

You know, and they always make this case, by the way, like why are we putting tariffs on? Well,

because certain policies that were put into place hurt the rust belt and hurt manufacturing

and made it so those people's lives would be lives more of despair. And we must

we must repair the damage that's been done by those policies. But if you say the same thing about

redlining or racially exclusive policies, we need to create ways to repair that damage. What?

That's an entitlement. They're free riders. They don't view it as investment.

How do you convince people like the immigration situation right now in this country is a great,

it's it's resource guarding. How do you reshape the narrative so that we're able to invest once again

in our in our people and not have those investments be so resented by anybody that might not need it.

How do you broaden people's perspective in that way?

Well, what you just identified there was missing one big word and that's race. You know,

that that literally that language literally comes out of the 1870s and the idea that the federal

government was going to try to level the economic, especially, but also the the I won't say social

because they weren't really into that. They were trying to make sure that black Americans weren't

killed by their white neighbors, which seems like not a very high bar, right? That's when you get

the language in 1871 saying, Hey, hey, we don't have a problem with race. We have a problem with poor

people voting, you know, you've got to pay $10 to go to the polls and you've got to do right, right?

Right. All of that stuff that comes straight out of the 1870s. And again, we could spend a long

time on that. But crucially, we know what language works to get rid of that. And that is the language

of community. And that is the idea that we are all working together to achieve something as a

country. And, you know, again, one of the things the radical right did really brilliantly after

1960. There's a famous article that comes out in 1960, addressed to politicians saying,

stop talking about democracy and stop talking about, you know, the values of community and

making sure everybody's got a shot at the American dream and all that because we all agree about

that. Republicans and Democrats agree about that. So stop with that. It's a waste of your time

and money. Instead work in putting together coalitions. So basically the traditional Republicans

and the traditional Democrats listen to that and started to just try and to nail together

coalitions, you know, we'll give you a bridge and we'll give you, I don't know, a new hospital

or whatever. Pure transaction. Transaction, yes. It was the radical right who said we are going to

defend individuals to make them able to take on the empire, able to, you know, tie into all those

tropes of literature and sort of mythology that said, you're going to matter to us. Your vote

matters for something way bigger than you are. Something that is the United States of America.

Sometimes something that is God, you matter. And one of the things that I try and do and that I

think we all should be trying to do more is recognizing that the values of humanity, the idea of

self-determination and the idea that you get to create a government that allows you to have the

freedom. And by freedom, I don't mean a lack of government so much as government protections to

enable you to get an education and have health care and so on. So you can become whoever you want

is actually a profoundly moral and a profoundly principled thing to do. And you think about all

around the world where people are in the streets fighting for their right to vote, for example,

or the right to have a say in their government. And then in the United States, people saying,

I'm not going to bother. We need to get more of that. This matters not just because I want to

knew, want the potholes outside my house filled. This matters because the human

effort for self-determination and a government that reflects that not only in my own government

but around the world matter morally and for society, that kind of language is what gave us the

attempts in the 1950s to level the playing field for people of color, for example, and in the 1970s,

including women as well. That language really works, but we have to stop thinking, it's a done deal,

we don't have to worry about it any longer. Right. Well, they always say the arc of, you know,

the moral universe bends towards justice, but they don't explain life. Yeah, but not by itself.

And there's a bunch of people on the other side trying to bend it back the other way. And I wonder

when we talk about the moral argument, do we have to connect it to more earthly values for people

because it feels like that's the backlash that we're facing, that if the right was going to draw a

line, like what you and I might do is draw a line at the depression, right. And we might draw a

line at FDR coming in and creating a government that is more designed for the benefit of the people

it purports to represent. They would draw a line at 1964 and 1965. They would draw a line at the

Civil Rights Act and they would draw a line at the Immigration Act, which led in people from

countries that they didn't quite have, ignoring the fact that they hated the Irish and they hated

the Italian and they hated the Jews back when they came. But now you're bringing in people. And so

their perspective on that is now our country is being given away to people who don't have

shit. They even use the phrase, the heritage Americans are more important than the other Americans,

that there are somehow the Scotch Irish that were here in the 1850s were somehow better Americans

than the ones that came in in the 60s and 70s. So in some ways, what's happened over that time

is the backlash, right. They've all been convinced that their country's been given away

to those that don't deserve it. Do we need to make the argument for them? Will they ever be convinced

on the morality of it or do they have to also be convinced that it's actually a more prosperous union

that it makes it a safer and more prosperous place? Oh, I think those two have to go hand in hand.

But they do. They do go hand in hand. So it's a really easy sell in the 1950s because people

had watched what happened under fascism in Europe and not just the horrors that we tend to think about

when we think about those regimes. But also the fact that when the Europeans and the allies

and the Americans came in, they were feeding those people because they literally couldn't eat.

Or if you look at what happened in the Soviet Union and in China when there was an attempt to

impose an ideology over the agricultural systems, you had these horrific periods when tens of

thousands, hundreds of thousands and even millions of people died. But one of the key things that you

are identifying, I think, is, first of all, yes. I mean, I think we need to talk a lot more about

the American dream and that is not having a car in your garage or whatever. It means that you are

able to work hard and rise, whatever that looks like for you so that your kids are going to have a

better life than you did. Again, whatever that looks like for you. I do think we need to keep that

as part of our language and the reality of it. But there's also something key to what you said.

And that, I think, is something that is fascinating. That when you listen to people nowadays talking

about their desire to shut the door for other immigrants because their country is being stolen

or whatever. And again, I'm not putting aside, I'm not going to talk here at all about the reality

that to the degree our country is being taken over. It's actually being taken over at corporations,

including foreign corporations, right? So this idea that some family from Ecuador is taking

something from me is just a pure fantasy. But that world that they are describing is a world

where there is, there are limited resources. That there's only, the pie is only this big and by

God, you've got to get your piece. But in fact, the United States are stealing it from you.

Well, but the reality of the way that people like me think about the world is that in fact,

the pie is expanding. And I, again, don't necessarily just mean the economic pie, although certainly

if you look at the last 80 years around the world, more than a billion people have been raised

out of poverty, which is a good thing. You know, they're not dying of starvation and lack of clean

water and so on. Others still are. We could address that if we chose to. But the idea of keeping

the pie small so that I can get my half or whatever basically says that we are trying to limit

the ability of individuals to grow and improve this world because only by keeping it small can we

monopolize it. Whereas if you say, hey, as Abraham Lincoln did, sorry, but also Theodore Roosevelt,

whereas if you say, hey, we want you here because we want your ideas and we want your labor and we want,

you know, your view of the world, what you are saying is we don't have limits. And again, I'm not

saying we don't have economic limits. I'm very concerned about climate change, but there are ways

to address that if we have those new ideas and those new people and that idea of looking at the

world as a world of possibilities rather than limitations seems to me to be what the United

States of America has always done particularly well. And these people are saying, no, no, no, no, no,

forget our past. We just have to hang on to what we had in the 1920s because that was the best.

And you know, that was a cramped world that excluded most of us. So let's not go back to the 1920s.

And that's that angle of, are we looking for an expansive economy, an expansive world,

an expansive intellectual understanding of the 21st century? Or are we going to go back to the,

even a back, if Trump talks one more time about William McKinley, my head's going to explode,

because it wasn't a great time, you know. We were the richest we ever were. We were the richest

country. Well, McKinley and his people were, but you know, talk to the little girls who were working

in the factories. But that's what they've gone back to. What's so interesting to me, Heather, is

everything that you lay out is so factually evident through the prism of history. And what they've

done is say, no, what we need to do is close our doors and go back to a more imperialistic

exploitative model of economics, which is we don't build our own strength up to make ourselves

through education and science and innovation and all these other things inevitable.

What we do is we close our borders and we use our military might to extract the resources that we

need at the most exploitative manner of price that we can colonialism, which works so well for

everybody. It's a stunning display of self-immolation.

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I was talking with another historian the other day and we were mutually expressing extraordinary

frustration because, you know, in fact, one of the things that's cool about history is that you

can't look at tomorrow and know what's going to happen. You know, you can kind of read the T-leaves.

And we know a lot about what has happened, but not about the future. But one of the things that

we can all say with great clarity is we know exactly how this turns out when a group of people

try to monopolize resources, close the expansion of their societies, and turn everybody else into,

you know, their surface-basical. Vassals, right. You know, we don't know if it's going to happen

tomorrow or in five years or in 10 years or in 40 years, but it always, always, always ends up

the same way. And to sit there and watch us playing this out step by step by step, you know,

a lot of us are like, can we just go to that last scene because we all know what that last scene

is going to be? Now, if we do the other thing where we empower individuals to, you know, to innovate and to,

you know, to move and to do the things that they do best, we don't know how that's going to turn out.

We know it's going to create a world that you and I can't even imagine. And given those two options,

man, why on earth would you choose, you know, sorry, but the pitchforks and piano wire?

And the crazy part is that the ultimate paradox or contradiction is exactly what you're describing

is the story of America's founding, that it was a rejection of that particular system,

that an exploitative system where the voices of the government were ignored because of the

resources that they could extract out of the population. And that's why we began. That's what birth

thus, that fight was our fight. And so to see us become the very thing that we rejected is so hard to

process, especially when you think about how that movement, Trump's movement, wraps themselves in

the iconography of our founding. How many buses have you seen there were that we the people and

don't tread on me and all those sorts of the totems of our revolution while creating a system

that's antithetical to the entirety of the purpose of that revolution. And I don't know if they,

well, I certainly don't think that they in any way see that contradiction.

No, but you know, that's one of the things that makes the United States so cool is that in many

ways, we act out humanity. You know, you're always going to have those people who want to control

others. You just are because humans are going to human. But it's got to be a bumper sticker, Heather.

There you go. It's my next career. Humans are going to human. Yeah. But you also have human

beings trying to do what is right, not just for other people, but also for themselves. And when you

think about this moment and its parallels to the American founding or to the other periods in which

there have been those trying to literally get rid of human equality in the case of the

elite and slavers who put together the Confederacy or the the Robert Barons in the 1890s or those

looking to create an international business system in the 1920s that created, you know, large pools

of labor. When you think about that and you think about Americans kind of looking at each other

and going, Hey, you know, I disagree with you about finances or immigration or internal

improvements or whatever. But I can agree with you that we need to control our own destinies.

In the past, that is always one and come out stronger for these moments. So, you know, first

frustrating as this moment is in so many ways and as depressing as it is in so many ways,

you know, one of the things that you can take to the bank is the idea that it might make us

stronger again to and renew our faith in those American principles that led those colonists to

throw off the greatest empire at the time in the world, a seemingly impossible task that they did

and then to sit down young men all by the way. We talked about himself founding fathers. They

were barely old enough to be fathers to write a system that worked and has worked for almost

250 years. Kind of cool to be part of that whole history and that trajectory through our past.

So, that at least is a way to look forward to these next really rough weeks and the next

rough years and think, you know, maybe we're given the opportunity to do our own part.

But I love what you're saying with that, Heather, and it reminds me, you know, to wrap it around,

you know, you said sort of early on one thing that I think has to be a top of mind, which is you

don't know the future. It hasn't been written and as we watch these sorts of almost slow motion

car crash happening, the fact of the matter is we can in our frustration overturn those injustices and

we can in our frustration regain and have a more we can reaffirm our desire to create the society

that we think is fair and to do that in a way that isn't necessarily over an epoch, but it can

happen in a moment. It really can, you know, and I had again, now I'm the polyanna, but I do think

that in the way that we've been caught off guard by these last 10, 12 years or maybe even the slow

erosion of it through the last 40, there exists great opportunity. And I guess I want to ask you

sort of, as we wrap it up, do you see that opportunity? Do you think of it in terms of, well,

we can overturn citizens united, we can do these things? Or do you think it's going to be a bolder

form of change that's going to come through now that the executive has been supercharged,

use that to our benefit? Which way would you like to see it go knowing that we can't know?

Oh, I think it's got to be big. And you know, I certainly would agree with overturning citizens

united and all the pieces that you are talking about. But those are only mechanics for a reworking

of a government and a country really that has been dramatically degraded since the 1970s.

In part because of that myth that the radical right promulgated that you and I talked about before,

you know, you look at where the United States of America is in the 21st century compared to

other countries. And it's frankly embarrassing are, you know, a number of the ways in which we are

not keeping pace with the rest of the world. There are are in this era, you know, one of the things

that you and I are dancing around in the need to deal with our political system is the fact that

climate change is very real and must simply must be addressed. And you know who's doing it? The

Chinese, our greatest rival is already electrified. They're great. Well, which again, another question,

why is Trump deliberately, you know, deliberately and desperately trying to get us back to 19th century

technology? I mean, which is, that's a whole nother conversation. But, but this is not, you know,

I guess if you think of it in terms of, you know, health and the health of the body politic,

we have let a disease run rampant for a long time. And it's coming very close to killing us.

And you can't just say, okay, okay, I really am now going to, you know, maybe clean out the wound.

Like at this point, we have to rethink the way democracy interfaces with a global economy,

a global world. And, and that where everybody has instantaneous ability to communicate with each

other and to support each other or tear each other down, what that looks like. I don't know. I know I'm

watching Mark Carney very closely in Canada because I think he's coming up with a lot of new ideas.

But this is not going to be a case of saying, hey, maybe we can pick up a few voters over here.

This is a case of saying we need to rethink this. And, you know, in the past again, this is,

you look at Lincoln, you look at FDR, you think you look at theodore Roosevelt. These things

worked at the time, but crucial to it is going to have to be the voices and the support of the

American people. We do not want to dictate or even one who comes in and says, hey, I'm going to do

everything right. We need to have somebody who is actually reflecting the real will of the people

expressed through free and fair elections, getting rid of the partisan gerrymaning, the money in

elections and so on. So yeah, I think it's time for a bold vision. And I think, crucially as well,

to go back to nursing before, we are creating that. We are telling politicians who want to be

elected that this is what we want. And that's how we will create somebody who can rise to meet the

moment. And when you see that, the enthusiasm and almost the joy of the populace is self-evident.

And I don't know that I can recall a moment in my life. And that's all, you know,

speaking through Watergate and Vietnam and the oil shocks and all the different sorts of

difficult spikes and ebbs and things that we've all lived through, where the people feel

more ready for that vision to be laid out coherently. And honestly, like, I think somebody

who ran on sane policy, you know, competently executed, could win 60%. Like, I don't think we're as

divided as the social media would, in monetarily incentivize us to be. And I do think, and, you know,

power upwards of vacuum, right? Like, there is a moment right now for exactly what you're saying

to, it's, you feel it bubbling throughout the country. And you just know that it's going to be

harnessed. You just feel it because that's it, you know, you can feel us creeping towards an iceberg

maybe, but you also feel something else. There's also another vibration that exists that feels

optimistic and hopeful. And man and people are so much thirstier for it than, than the antithesis of

it. We're going to make you a historian, John. I wish. I love it. Heather Cox Richardson,

I got to tell you, I could talk to you forever. Just, it's so wonderful to hear your perspective

on things. And it so helps me to, you know what it is? And I don't mean to put this on you, but

you help me organize my anxiety, if that makes sense. Like, you give me a framework. And once I

have a framework, I feel like I can, I can work through it. It doesn't change what may happen,

as you said, or give me the answer. But boy, does it give me some organizing principles by which to,

you know, to place things on? I can't thank you enough for being on. Well, I'm glad to hear that.

And you know, all we're trying to do is make sure we're standing on solid ground. And that's

all I do. I helped to, I helped to show people where the ground is. You, you, you do it better than

anyone. Heather Cox Richardson, a wonderful professor, history of Boston College and, and, and author,

and you know, just check out everything that she does. She's a one man band that just is fantastic.

So thank you once again for being with us. Oh, it's a pleasure.

Man, she's so fucking good. She's so good. So smart. And I feel terrible because it really,

like, you do feel a little bit like because she's also so prolific and is like, hey, could you

just take like a couple hours out of your day of like making all this great stuff to give me some

organizing principles by which I can somehow hang my anxiety buckets on to a little bit of historical

perspective. Can you carve out a few hours to be my therapist?

All of Herb's up stack post take all of the disparate news of the day and give it order. It's

very helpful. And I think in the same way, this podcast was helpful for you. I've just organizing,

as you said, your anxiety. So you know how to process it instead of being overwhelmed by it.

I guess. And she synthesizes it. She brings it, you know, I think that's it's a gift, you know,

a lot of people can under, you know, they understand facts, but they don't necessarily know how

to synthesize it through different eras and bring it forward to here. And I still think

the most powerful thing she kept saying was we don't know what is next. But we know that we can

have a role in shaping it. I feel like Doris as well had something like that to us. And it is

really nice to be reminded of that by people who know our world best. Right. Who see it? Yeah. Yeah,

you could wake up tomorrow to a good New York Times alert if there's ever been such a thing.

A good New York Times alert. Anything's possible. I don't remember the last time. I know it's an

achronistic. It almost doesn't make sense off the tongue. Did you see so the New York Times wrote

an article about, you know, they they examined some of Trump's architectural plans for the ballroom.

And so they wrote an article saying like, Hey, there's a couple of things you might want to look at.

Like, there's no doors or these, these stairs don't go anywhere. Where these views blocked by endless

columns. It's a trap house. I think you might need a toilet. Like just little like

and the idea that he is more aggressive defending his plan for the ballroom than for the war in Iran,

or that he is he presented a more thorough case with visual aids about that ballroom.

Then he has in the entirety of this war. The man has priorities. Yes. And it is throwing a party.

Like it's starting to feel like sort of next level senile. It really, I feel like we've like,

it's different than Trump won for sure. I'm not sure I've been watching. I mean, I don't know

if he what's going on with that man's help. But something I have been picking up on is okay.

We've seen all these think pieces about the Iran war breaking up the magosphere, find whatever.

But you also see people really going to bat for him and writing the narrative for him.

Right. It's not his fault. And you're like, can you imagine them saying that about Biden?

Oh, Biden just got convinced. And we really need to blame the people who convinced him. Of course.

The man who has the greatest agency that has ever been promoted from the Oval Office suddenly

is at a whim. The thing that I get most frustrated with is I think that what is happening with Trump

right now. Like we're all pointing to well. He got convinced or maybe his mental acuity. This is

who he's been from the fucking get go. Like when people say like, well, you know, I'm upset with

him now and I regret my vote because he lied. He lied. The minute he came down the escalator,

you know, through like, oh, it's the largest inauguration that's ever been seen through history.

Like there is nothing fundamentally different about his decision making process or about the manner

in which his ADD pushes him from lurching from one endeavor to another. It's like when we said,

he's a movie trailer president. He doesn't have the stamina to sit through the whole movie. He's

just the trailers. And right now the Iran war a, the trailer is done. Now what do I do?

So now I just got to lead like it's so it's so frustrating to me that all these people on the

writer like, well, this boy, this really pushed me over the edge and like, this is the same fucking

thing we've been dealing with for 12 years or 14, like 80, 100. He's always. Yeah. I just

think about how Iran now speaks to him too in trailers. Like everyone kind of sees it. They make

these fake Lego propaganda videos to get attention. Yeah, it is so weird that like he'll say to them

through truth, social like, I will bomb you if you don't do this. And you're like, why are you

telling us? Tell them if you're like, what is the point of posting? And apparently they create trailers

that they showed to him of like bombs going off, intercut with like the guys from Top Gun playing

volleyball. Sure. Ship go boom. Two minute highlights. And that's it. Yeah. Heather brought this up

in one of her recent sub stacks that people are starting to get concerned because he doesn't know a

lot and about the war. He's perpetrating. And if his briefings are two minute blow-up sequences,

like makes sense. So much you can learn. You know, that's a good point. And but anytime you get

the sense that somebody is sparks noting their way through a war, like that's the part that,

you know, we've all been asked to sacrifice for his vision of America's greatness, whether it's

inflationary tariffs or whether it's through higher gas prices or whether it's through a removal

of some of our civil rights protections. But we keep being told, like, you've just got to be put,

you know, this guy's got a vision. And you, but he doesn't have to ever change anything. He can still

in the middle of a war do fucking five minutes on Sharpie pens. And we're all supposed to just be

like, hey, Trump's going to Trump. Like, when is he the one who is going to have to own up and take

accountability and responsibility? Why is it on us? I was coming off of the Heather conversation

very grounded. And this conversation you one did all the good. Get Heather back on the line.

All right. Brittany, what do we got from the people? Okay. First up, John, do you think I'll

have the government building's Trump renamed after himself? We'll revert back to their original

names once he leaves office. Here's my hope. Here's what I think happens. I think RFK Jr. gets

elected president. And then he renamed it the Kennedy Trump Kennedy Center. I was going to say

luckily his name's already on shit. Yes. So what we do is whoever gets elected next, I think we

just use Trump as our maiden name. So we leave it in there. Just hyphenate it. Yeah. That's right.

We got from now on, we'll just hyphenate everything. According to the new president. And then by

the end of whatever, how long this country gets to go, we just have these super long attaining you

with the truck. But everybody's name was there. Delas. Why not? Kennedy. Yeah. What did you see,

by the way, did you see the rendering of his library? Yes. Was it a rendering or was it just like an

AI? That's what it was. And Eric Trump was like, I've been working so hard on this. I'm so proud

of it. And you're like, really? Because it looks like you could just plug in, like,

make a skyscraper in Miami look like Vegas. And then the interior of it is literally just gold

statues of Trump. And I'm like, what? Wait, I think somebody actually said that the flag had like

54 stars or something like it literally was just, it was so AI. Well, that's including

Canada, Greenland, Venezuela, Iran. Are we taking it all? It's an aspirational flag. It's the

future. Just in like a practical sense that it is going to get confusing if too many things are

named Trump. Like I'm going from Trump station to Trump station. You know, it's like in Washington,

DC where you have four eighth streets, but they don't intersect. Or like Penn station, New York,

Penn station, Newark, like, there are, it does get confusing. So it's, you know what it's going to be?

It's going to be like when you live in with the Smurfs, where everything is just Smurfs,

that the language is, it's Trumpity Trump Trump Trump. You know, all right. What else? What

else they want to know? John, do you ever miss the simpler days of QAnon?

Oh, they're still, they're still there. They're just trying to figure out, look, they, I think

they've had a rough ride because imagine if like your hero, the guy who was going to bring the storm

turns out to be the guy who's like, storm, what storm? What do you, there's no storm here?

They're like, no, I think we have the storm. I think it's right there. If you could just bring it

out here, like, I don't know what you're talking about. You know, they, they cast someone as a hero

who not only turned out not to be the hero, turned out to maybe be working in league with the villain.

Yeah, I think they're having difficulty coming to terms with that.

Is that now, I assume it lost some steam? Wasn't, that was more first semester, Trump, wasn't it?

Yeah. And then when the storm never came, it felt like that movement sort of dissipated.

I don't think, I think they're interested in, and to give the movement credit beyond the conspiracy

theories of it, the idea of protecting children from sex trafficking is a pretty good one.

Sure. Can support that. Yeah, where are they now? Yeah. I honestly didn't know if it wasn't,

if it didn't fit into their sort of more partisan mindset, maybe they dropped it. I honestly don't

know. It felt like the Epstein case was at least a good tent post that they could work off of,

but it feels like it's dissipated. Yeah, their main bad guys not even really around like,

was Biden there, was Biden their bad guy? I guess. Yeah, but I'll be honest, like,

Brandon is still all over Long Island. Oh, yeah. The signs are there. It's on the back of trucks.

Like, oh, yeah, what do they think he's up to now? They just don't take the bumper stickers on.

I mean, it's like, they have old cars. It's hard to get bumper stickers off you guys.

Like, you have to get the vinegar. You got to get the nail polish remover.

You have no idea how many fuck Biden cars I drive behind. Yeah. And I always just think, like,

is the emotion still there? Like, are you still fiery? Or you literally just don't have a scraper?

Like, I just don't know. It's hard to even understand it, but a lot of the accoutrement,

the festivist Trump decorations are still up. I can't wait for the summer to see if the flags

are still in the water. Oh, that'll be interesting, because Trump, no matter what you think of his

popularity, he does rule the sea for sure. All right. Last one. John, is your wife as funny as you?

She's funnier than I am and nicer than I am and sweeter than I am and better look in than I am.

And I'm actually, as I'm getting older, I think she might even be taller than I am.

It's so that was not that was not our relationship when I first met her, but there are certain times

I'll be saying in the kitchen, be like, are you are you where you're not even in heels? What's what's

going on? I think, you know, as they say with cereal, contents may have settled during shipping.

I have a feeling that I'm slowly compacting, but no, that's everybody thinks that she's just

funniest and her laugh is like sunshine. It's just a little ridiculous. She's just one of those

people that lights it up. That's so sweet. That's so sweet. Yeah, she's all right, that chick.

She's all right. But very cool. Brittany, how can they, how can they keep in touch with us?

Twitter, we are weekly show pod Instagram threads TikTok Blue Sky. We are weekly show podcast and

you can like, subscribe and comment on our YouTube channel the weekly show with John Stewart.

Sweet and we're off next week back April 15th. I don't know what we're going to be talking about

because, you know, the world is static. So we'll probably, you know, we'll plan something out for

those for those two weeks. Oh, what are we doing? Ben McKenzie. Oh, he's coming up for the crypto

book. Yes, he is. Oh, what a perfect, that'll be a perfect tax day. A lot of those in there.

And his and his crypto book about corruption and all those things. And as always, I hope you guys

have a great week off. And thank you once again for a boy. This, this episode is just one of my

favorites. Just put together so nicely by everybody. Lead producer, Lauren Walker, producer,

Brittany Mimadevich, producer, Jillian Spear, video editor and engineer, Robert Tolo, audio editor,

and engineer Nicole Boyz. And our executive producer is Chris Moshane and Katie Gray. Thank you,

guys so much. We'll see you next time. Bye, boy.

The weekly show with John Stewart is a comedy central podcast is produced by Paramount Audio

and Busboy Productions.