IHIP News - Trump Knocked Out After He's Exposed For Secret Fascist Agenda

Episode Date: September 19, 2026

We are joined by  @heathercoxrichardson  to discuss the authoritarian slip our country has made under Trump. Pre-order Jennifer’s new book Not Today, Fascists today: https://linktr.ee/ivehaditpodcast Follow Us: I've Had It Podcast: @Ivehaditpodcast Jennifer Welch: @mizzwelch Heather Cox Richardson:  @heathercoxrichardson ​ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

what is happening in the concentration camps, and they are concentration camps in the United States of America, I think is going to make people's hair curl when we get to the other side of this and learn what actually happened in those camps. All right, listeners, we are in for a treat. We are going to school today, but the good kind of school, the therapeutic type of school, and joining me, because all of you have demanded for over a year to have Heather, Cox, Richardson, on, I've had it, and here she is. She's a professor, a historian, and author of the nightly newsletter, Letters from an American, which reaches over six million readers. Heather Cox Richardson,

thank you so much for joining me. It is such a pleasure to be here. I'm such a fan. Oh, thank you. Likewise. I want to just dive right in. Over the course of the last week or so, we had the 25-year anniversary of 9-11. And there was a split, screen that happened. And I'm going to play a video for you of Trump at the Pentagon honoring those that fell there. Kylie, play that clip. And for those of you, they're listening and not watching, he is just completely asleep, as he always is, these taxpayer-funded naps that he takes all of the time. And this is the type of stuff that if that were a Barack Obama, Kamala Harris, or Joe Biden sleeping at 9-11, the hysteria in right-wing media would just be fever pitch.

And then if you juxtapose that, Heather, with MAGA intentionally propagandized a video that was taken way out of context of Zoran Mamdani and AOC. And here's the video in its complete entirety. And then I want to get your take on the juxtaposition of these two videos. Kylie played that a clip. So in this clip, Zoron and AOC see each other hug, have a moment, and then they go right back into the ceremony. And this made the rounds all over right-wing media that they were hamming it up laughing. And this kind of split-screen propaganda that goes on right now, tell us what's going on behind all of this.

I think in order to understand the moment we're in, we've got to go back. And we got to go back at least until, sorry, the 1980s. Because I think what you're seeing playing out here is the delegitimization of Democrats being in power, of being the people who are governing the United States and the legitimation of anything that the Republicans choose to do. And that's playing out in exactly what you're showing. Trump sound asleep, whereas Joe Biden, with his speech impediment, sounded old and sometimes couldn't put a sentence together. And there was this right-wing outrage. But embedded in that are a couple of things. One that's embedded in it is the idea that Democrats, because they represent people of color,

where minorities in either ethnic, gender, religious, whatever, minorities are illegitimate contributors to the American polity, while Republicans, by sort of definition, are the people who should be running the country. So that becomes embedded in politics in the 1980s and the 1990s, and it continues forward until you get, for example, around 9-11, a religious figure insisting that the reason that the United States had endured 9-11 was because of issues like abortion and gay rights. You get that spreading forward, but I think there's also issues in it embedded in it. One is the propaganda that so much of this idea that Democrats are illegitimate and Republicans are legitimate is based in propaganda-based media. And finally, you get the fact that until very recently there was not a lot of media on the center and in the center left that was pushing back on that kind of propaganda.

So it's become embedded in our system. It's been a long process. So this propaganda started a long time ago. And we were speaking before we clicked record. You lived in Tulsa for a year. I lived in Oklahoma City for 50 years. And I saw this propaganda incubate in my childhood in the 80s. And all of my friends were very, very religious.

And the enmeshment of their Christianity with the Republican Party was very aggressive and active during my childhood. I remember driving down the street and looking at the marquee for my junior high school or my high school. And I'm not my high school, for a church. And it would say, God wants you to vote for George H.W. Bush today. And I saw that on the churches. And my friends were always trying to recruit me. I was raised by atheists.

But my friends were always trying to recruit me and I would go to church. And it was, you know, let's pray for Ronald Reagan. let's pray pray for George H.W. Bush. They really started embedding themselves in the heartland and making no daylight whatsoever with the Republican Party and Christianity. Do you have any studies or anything to add to that? I do. Actually, I'm just finishing a book that covers this pretty extensively. And what you're seeing there is actually the attempt of the Republican Party beginning back during Nixon actually, recognizing that it no longer commanded the loyalty of a majority of Americans, who really quite liked the idea of social security and clean water and clean air and,

you know, and limits to hours and minimum wages and the sorts of things we associate with a modern American state, but which in fact didn't go into place until 1933. The Republican Party wanted to overturn that, and we're pretty aggressive about it after 1971 with the Powell memo, But they recognize that Americans liked it, especially after we start to have people voting at age 18, and especially after women become more and more active in the political scene. So beginning in 1972, Nixon begins to try to overcome this popular liking of the modern state by bringing religious traditionalists into the party. And he does so by weaponizing abortion. The idea of, and remember, that's 72, that's not 73, which is Roe v. Wade, that's 72. And what they are talking about in 72 is getting rid of women's livers, these women who are

contributing to the support for the modern American state. And the reliance of the Republican Party on those religious traditionalists who characterize themselves as anti-abortion, but who are pretty clearly arguing that women should not be taking up a position in modern America, certainly not in politics, is pretty clear. And you can see the party getting more and more and more enmeshed in it. So the fact you saw those things about George H.W. Bush

is really interesting because he, in fact, supported abortion rights until he went onto the ticket with Ronald Reagan in 1980. And there was always concerned that he was a little bit wishy-washy on abortion. And you can see the issue of abortion becoming more and more of a political, sort of touchstone a political fire that is burning through the Republican Party and giving that sense

that those Americans who believe in reproductive rights, originally we get the abortion legalization in the 1960s, really at state levels in 1970s because it was an extraordinary public health crisis that women were dying from botched abortions, illegal abortions. You see that reconstruction of the abortion issue around the idea that it It's just women who are so determined to have their own way. They're willing to literally engage in infanticide, which is how you get somebody, sometimes like Ronald Reagan characterizing it. And increasingly, as the Democrats become the party of this extraordinary immorality in the ideas of people like, say, Ronald Reagan,

his famous empire, evil empire speech of 1983 was actually given to a bunch of evangelicals. And while we focus on him calling the Soviet Union an evil empire, the majority of that speech is about abortion and how it must be rooted out of America in order to reclaim American goodness. Ronald Reagan himself, of course, signed a very liberal abortion law in 1967 as a governor of California, but he clearly was trying to pick up those voters. And as that party became more and more associated with the Republican Party and the Republican Party with it, we know that it was actually evangelical. who pushed Trump over the victory in 2024, it became more and more determined that nobody else was a legitimate group of people to govern in the United States.

And I think we've seen the fallout from that on January 6th, when Trump and his supporters literally said, we don't care how the voters voted, we are going to take over the government. Yeah, I remember back when George H.W. Bush was president. I remember there was an episode on Oprah Winfrey where Barbara Bush came on. And Oprah asked her about the abortion issue. And she said, I disagree with my husband on this.

And she was kind of maverick-minded. But I remember that as being a big moment because he wasn't near the right winger that his son was, George H.W. Bush. But a lot of well-knowing men like Ronald Reagan, who probably was pro-choice, George H.W. Bush, who definitely was pro-choice and made sure his wife went out and said that on Oprah, because that stuff just doesn't happen independently when you're at that level of politics. That's intentional. They incubated and fed this thing. And for those of us that have been blue dots in red states, we have seen up close what Republican supermajorities do. So what Trump is doing on a national scale right now is familiar to me because this is what the Republican Party has been doing in

Oklahoma for a very, very long time. And it's so terrifying to see the fringe, you know, in the White House now. But as we as we see this injection of religion, Pete Hagseth, basically, there were whistleblowers in the military that said he was kind of telling them like this is a spiritual war. And you spoke there about the language of Ronald Reagan and evil empire. And in my book that's coming out, I draw the parallels of the language that I heard growing up from my very, very religious friends. They were always trying to recruit me to save me from going to hell. And it was very black and white thinking, good versus bad, don't question, blind obedience. And it was a very authoritarian religion in my view, which I think primes the psychological soil for a lot of these people to fall.

prey to an authoritarian government, which I see as abusive, they see as familiar. It's familiar for them to blindly be obedient and not ask questions. And so as we look that, you know, a lot of people in the United States just think, oh, I hate the moment Trump came down the escalator. But that's not the moment that this thing happened, right? No, no, not at all. Not at all. And, you know, I think I think you're right on the fact that this religious impulse has translated into a move toward authoritarianism. You are reminding me of a very famous letter that Eisenhower wrote to somebody who said to him, just tell us what to do. And he said, no, that's the road to authoritarianism. The point of being a citizen of a republic is having to think about this stuff and recognizing

their gray areas and having to do tradeoffs and figure out what is really happening in your world. But there's another piece of this that is also happening throughout this period. That is, as you suggested, it's not at all clear that certain of the political leaders who embrace the idea of religion and of anti-abortion and so on actually believed it. What they did believe was they didn't want to see business regulations and they didn't want to see the kind of taxation that was required to have a regulatory state that would make sure, for example, that some company wasn't pouring pollution in the middle of a city, right? So the other story here is why?

Why did they weaponize this sort of sexism, religion, and I would also add race to that in order to stay in power. What was so important to them? Well, maybe for some of them it was the idea they wanted to impose this idea of a traditional society back on the rest of us. But if you actually look at the laws the Republicans are passing in that, period, what they are chipping away on. What they are doing is they are moving money upward in a really dramatic way. More than $50 trillion moves up from the bottom 90% to the top 1%

between 1975 and 2021. That's a really major redistribution of wealth. And that's the funny thing that we're watching right now is we're sort of seeing, as you say, the culmination of these 40 years of a certain way to think about who should run things in the United States. And, you know, I don't know if you've taken a look at it lately, but things aren't so hunky-dory over there with Pete Hegseth running the war on Iran. And they're certainly not rebounding back here in the United States in any positive way as we are seeing diesel hit the highest prices they have ever hit in history. So, Heather, so much of what I see, what I call comment section politics on the right is owning the libs. And I'm going to be. And I'm going to

curious from a historical standpoint when FDR had four terms and he was very big on saving capitalism and was abundantly aware that it could lead to this point that we're in right now. And so he wanted to put up guardrails to keep that system safe. And he also wanted a very strong social safety net. And it was popular and people liked it. And people liked him. And then, of course, that's why we have the amendment and that I'm wondering if that owning the lips thing, if that's where that started. And now, of course, it's a caricature of what it was. But it just seems like these policies that were so good, that were so popular, the Republican Party, as foolish and cartoonish as the current iteration of the MAGA part of it is, they have been playing a long-term game for a very

long time to try to prevent any form of FDR-style government from ever coming back in. I'm not sure it goes all the way back there. If you think about what happens in the 1930s and into the early 1940s, yeah, the Republican Party is really in a mess because they owned the 1920s. They literally came out into the public and said, you know, the Democrats don't know anything about the economy. We own literally. We own this economy. This is our economy. You should elect forever, we have figured out how to have a permanently growing economy. This is just the best thing since, well, they didn't have slice bread yet. This is the best thing since, I don't know, steamships. They really insist that they own the 1920s. And then the crash happens. You know,

October 1929, the entire bottom falls out of the system. And the Republicans have no idea at all of how to put it back together, except for the fact that they do continue to testify in front of Congress saying, well, the real problem is that we're paying too much to workers, which is just not going to fly, right? But so that gives the Republican Party a real problem in the 30s and the 40s because they keep saying, well, we need to go back to the 1920s. And everybody else is like, I'm sorry, when we were eating out of garbage cans and living in packing boxes, like, we actually don't agree with that. So you see the split in the Republican Party in the 30s and 40s, but what emerges from World War II is a Republican Party that is firmly committed to that

New Deal state. Eisenhower calls it the middle way. But what he basically says is that capitalism can't work unless there's regulation, a basic social safety net, investment in infrastructure, protection of civil rights, and the underwriting of an international rules-based order. Now, that is the way that Americans from all parties think about the country until at least the 1950s. And then in the 1950s, with the Brown versus Board of Education decision of 1954, using the federal government to desegregate the public schools, those people, those Republicans, the very few of them still wanting to go back to the 1920s, say, aha, this is what we always said was going to happen. If you had a strong federal government, it was going to change your local

customs by which they meant it was going to interfere with segregation. You start then to see the growing power of that group of people who become known as movement conservatives, movement because they're a political movement. Conservatives, not because they are ideological conservatives, they're actually radicals, but they want to go back to the 1920s. Now, that's sort of the root of what we were talking about before, this idea that only the Republicans are legitimate governors

of the United States of America. And I think that's where owning the libs comes from. You know, it's my team versus your team. And you can get away with that so long as the Republican Party really didn't mess too deeply with Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, healthcare rights, pollution, and so on. They were certainly, you know, cutting back on what the country had done in the 1970s, but they were not really challenging that fundamental set of protections. Trump, of course, came in and has ripped that whole thing up.

And I would suggest that a lot of what you're seeing now in the owning the libs is quieting down a lot of, lot because it turns out the LIBs like things like health care and social security and like, you know, protecting our national parks and so on. And so we're sort of watching this system that has been there for 40 years get utterly torn up, both at the domestic level and also at the international level. And while on the one hand, I find it truly heartbreaking, especially the loss of the the rules-based international order and the role that the United States could play in that for good, even though we often played in it for bad. We also did play in it a lot for good, more than a billion people lifted out of poverty after World War II thanks to that international

rules-based order. But while that is heartbreaking in many ways, it also means that we now get to decide what we think the United States of America should look like going forward. And, you know, I'm not sure anybody could have done more damage to the Republican brand than Donald Trump and Pete Hagseth and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and so on. Yeah. And let's talk about now it's shift to where we are currently. And in my lifetime, I'm 52. And my lifetime, I saw the first president that I thought, he's not very smart was George W. Bush. I remember thinking that this guy just is not very smart at all. And then the second one that I saw. saw that they were trying to catapult to the national stage with Sarah Palin. And that's in my recent memory, the normalization of kind of having politicians that are not objectively really smart, mindful, methodical people, whether they're conservative or, or progressive or whatever.

And so then now we have, you know, the biggest dipshit of them all, Donald Trump. Right. It makes Sarah Palin and Debbie. You're in forever, but you're, I'm with you. Yeah, that's a great term. You know, and so now we have this. And this is what's been so hard for everybody to understand that he is so flawed as a person. And he has chosen people that are even more flawed than he on purpose.

And it's the on purpose part of this fascist project that I think is really difficult for everybody to understand that they display this moral collapse. by design. So will you please talk to my listeners about that component of it? First, it's worth remembering that this is pretty typical of rising authoritarian to surround themselves with idiots. And that's what's the one is because they don't want to be shown up. And two, it's because those people will need the authoritarian going forward. That is, they recognize that in a merit-based system, they would never have gotten a job like that, ever. So, I mean, look at somebody like Pete Hagseth, who was a weekend host on the Fox News Channel and a bit of a doofus, really.

Suddenly becoming the Secretary of Defense, it's unthinkable, really. And at the time, you know, of course, they had to break a lot of rules to get him there and so on. And so they tend to recognize that they're in that position only because of the authoritarian, and therefore they are fiercely, fiercely loyal to that person. And that's the dynamic that you're seeing. But I also think that there's another one that goes back to where you started with this idea of there being this media portrayal in which Trump can do no wrong, even if he's falling asleep, even if he's, you know, one of the things that I do a lot of my newsletters, I reproduce what he says exactly because it gets so sanewashed by the media and, you know, trying to say, listen, the guy is behaving in a way that you quite literally would not trust him into your house to water your. plants when you're away. And he is now in charge of the United States of America. One of the things that has really fed this division of our country, because as you know, polls show that, in fact, Americans are not deeply divided even on hot button issues. But one of the things that has driven

that is the, you called it propaganda, and I echoed that word propaganda, but I would almost say it's like the television show of the United States of America. You know, it needs to look good. It needs to make sense in a sort of sitcom way, as you say, like black and white. It's easy to understand. And Trump is very deliberately surrounded himself with former Fox News channel hosts, with people that he thinks looks the part. We know that his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, has been looking at each day as a day of a television show that has to have an ending that benefits Trump.

You know, you see all this developing. And that idea that it doesn't matter if you have any skill, it only matters how you look, I think, is part of that. And then there's the really big piece behind it. And that's that if your only job as part of this group of MAGA now, which grew out of the movement conservatives, if your only job is to destroy the government, all you've got to be able to say is no. And Tommy Tuberville is a great example of that, the senator from Alabama, who is dumb as a haddock, right? I mean, he just like didn't even know the three branches of government when he became a senator. But, you know, it doesn't take a lot to say no. It's a ton of work to say, hey, we got a problem with health care in the United States of America.

We got this patchwork system of private insurers and public systems and, you know, and all these places in which the economy is affected. How are we going to alter this in such a way that we get coverage at less cost? I mean, it's really complicated. So for that, you actually need people who know what they're doing. And that's, you know, those people are not the ones who can provide a black and white evil empire kind of speech because it's not that simple to govern. And I think all of those things are adding into the idea that we are being governed right now, as you say, not entirely by morons. There's some very bright people doing a lot of damage. But the very visible people who are just, just not smart

is pretty dramatic. Yeah. And then I'm noticing at the same time, there is a lot of thought police and a lot of desire to censor speech. I mean, recently we have Macklemore who was canceled because he said Free Palestine on a concert stage. And I'm just the type of person that when I hear stories like this, my whole life, artists and creative people have always done this type of thing at concerts. My entire life, college students have always protested wars. These are not new things. It's like, you know, college freshman smokes weed. It's not that big of a news flash. And they seem to want to take the speech away from people. And I have a book coming out, and I intentionally titled it, Not Today Fascists, because I wanted to use the word fascist.

But they have a problem with that. And I think you're probably aware that Stephen Miller has this national security memo where they're trying to predict pre-crimes of people like you and me, which they would say a huge threat to democracy, the liberal white woman. You know, I don't know why these men say on the one hand, we're so strong and tough, but also we're terrified of these white ladies. But, I mean, I'll let them figure that out. But I go on to Pierce Morgan, and he tries to ask me a question about the title of my book. And I want you to hear the way he phrased his question and then for us to talk about it. Play the clip. The moment I hear people calling him a Nazi or liking Trumpism to Nazism, they lose me.

And you've done this. You know, you said if any chicken ship, pearl clutches get their panties in a wall, because we call Trump a fascist or a Nazi, step aside and let the grown-ups fight. I don't think it's grown up to use an analogy of Trump to Nazis. And the reason is, Adolf Hitler was one of the most despicable genocidal monsters of modern times. He murdered 12 million people with his Nazis, killing six million Jews and a Holocaust. You can hate Trump, and you can have a lot of issues about the more authoritarian style that he's developed and so on. All those things can be debated.

No one can look me in the eye with a straight face and say there is any comparison between Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler or Trumpism and Nazism. So as you can see, he wants to jump to the camps part of the Nazi project. He wants to completely fast forward to all of that. And I want you as a historian

to explain to my listeners the parallels with this regime, the MAGA regime, with other authoritarian regimes and how it starts and how they keep turning the heat up. So you put your finger on it exactly right there. He jumped to outcomes, not to the political systems that create those outcomes. And because this is something I feel really profoundly about, I'm going to do a little bit of a parenthetical here. say that the evidence that we already have about what is happening in the concentration camps,

and they are concentration camps in the United States of America, I think is going to make people's hair curl when we get to the other side of this and learn what actually happened in those camps. We know people are dying and so on. So this idea that somehow, oh, the United States doesn't do this, that ship has sailed. And by the way, that ship had sailed historically before that anyway. But so back to the question that he posed about the difference between the Nazis and the United States of America, as you identify, they are similar in the construction of that political system. And what we mean by that when we study political systems is there's a range of them, right? There are people on the far left, communists, for example, who don't believe in the idea of liberal democracy.

and decide that they want to get rid of that system because it is so tainted by classism and sexism and racism that it's never going to be able to achieve the things that a society should. And that's something you hear about all the time in the United States. But there's also something on the right that seeks to do the same thing. And that's the system, it's a number of systems, but the system of fascism falls on that side. And fascism grows out of the 1920s and out of Benina Mussolini, who looks at what happened, in World War I in Italy and looks at how unified the country seemed to be and felt that he could, the only way that you could get a country to the kinds of the system that he wanted it to be in

was for the government and business to start to work together so that they could bring the people of Italy together in such a way that they moved as one, they moved as a juggernaut, and they erase their individuality in a larger societal movement. Now, the way you do that is you create an enemy. You make sure that your people feel very loyal to each other and disloyal to a different group. So you can get them to adhere by forcing other people out and saying those people are your enemy. And then you take the people who are inside and you work, you put them in, you use them in such a way that they are working to develop that government and they are working to develop that government. and they are working to develop that economy.

So you get a really tight relationship between business and the government, and it's worth pointing out that Trump has taken stakes in a number of U.S. businesses at this point. It's characterized by having an outgroup by focusing strongly on nationalism and by deciding that your country

is going to reinforce its strength at home by spreading and taking over other countries as well. Now, that's a system called fascism. It is a political system. It's in books right there with communism and socialism and liberal democracy and so on. I would challenge that host to tell you how the United States is not doing that. That's not to say we're a fascist country yet. That is, you know, a lot of people like we're all fascist and it's time to give up.

And the answer to that is you and I wouldn't be here talking if we were a fascist country. But there is very little doubt in my mind that that's exactly the system that the Trump administration is trying to put into place. And the thing I didn't mention there is the degree to which it denigrates obviously not only people of color and certain religions, gender minorities, but also tries to put women back inside the church, the kitchen, and bearing a lot of children, which is literally part of one of the things that the administration is talking about. They are clearly there. But what's so heartening in this moment is that Americans, regardless of their political affiliation, the letter after their name, are saying, no, actually, we don't think that's a very good idea. We kind of like liberal democracy. And we're fighting for that.

Of course, our issue is that Trump's trying to rig the midterms in 2026 and we can't even foresee 2008. But this is the fight we're in to preserve liberal democracy against a very small group of people. who are trying to impose a system of government on us that will destroy that liberal democracy and impose, I actually would go beyond fascism and say authoritarianism in this moment. A couple more questions. I want to talk about how the people that had garnered trust, whether that trust was real or not, is another podcast for another day. But things that were trustworthy institutions, industry titans, the media, these people, universities, law firms, the people that seem to be a lot stronger, a lot better positioned than the average

American joke, capitulated first. The strongest capitulated first. The weakest are the ones out in the streets and on independent media. And there's something beautiful in that to me to see everyday Americans standing up being stronger than these billionaires. I love that. That to me is like, that is America. But talk to my listeners about these people

that have all of this perceived power and who we attributed trust and things to. We're the first to capitulate to this. You know, this is what literally keeps me up at night because I'm with you. And for me, it's the Republican senators. And by that, I mean that literally the framers of the Constitution set up a system that was designed to prevent the rise of a dictator, a demagogue, as they would have said, a tyrant, another word

they use a lot, by guaranteeing that the people who sat in the Senate would be so jealous of their own power that they would stop such a thing from happening. And the same, of course, is true the House of Representatives, but especially the Senate. And they rolled over and played dead the minute Trump got into office. And it still makes my head explode. And so that's really who I have focused on. And I've heard a lot of explanations for it because if you follow me, you know that I do a lot of interviews. And I literally ask people this.

Why? Why did they give up? And I think there's a bunch of things. First of all, some people are complicit, just literally complicit. And they're in for a penny and for a pound. Then there are a bunch who are just cowards. They like being the person in Washington that can get a table at their favorite restaurant on very short notice.

And so if that means they got to shut up and keep their heads down, they're going to do that. Then there are some people, I think, who thought that this was just business as usual. Yeah, maybe Trump was a little bit out there, but you know, you could still pretend to look the other way. And then there are those people who really believed the pundits. And this was a new, this was news to me. I've been into this lately because I didn't see it as much as I probably should have because I don't do a lot of reading of that sort of punditry.

But there were a lot of people who looked at the outcome of 2024 and said, oh, it's a permanent political realignment. The American people have spoken. Trump picked up all these young people. He picked up all these Hispanics. We're going to have to go along with this because this is the way the future is going to be. And you got to follow the American people.

And I think you can probably put a lot of those people who capitulated into one of those buckets. Maybe if you're looking at law firms, you also have to look at where the money from clients is coming, because law firms, after all, are there to make money. And certainly in the case of a number of media outlets, not all of them, but a number of media outlets, they are in many ways one branch of a larger corporation that we might say is the most important part of that corporate. but the bottom line says, hey, my cloud computing is a lot more important than my newspaper. So you might have all of those things in there. But one of the things that, as you say, has emerged in this moment is an awful lot of people who say,

I'm here for principles. I'm not going to compromise my principles. And there's a fascinating study done of two very similar people, one of whom became a Nazi supporter, one of whom did not. And one of the things that showed up was the person who did not, didn't wake up in the morning and say, I'm going to stand here and I'm going to take on the, you know, the empire. The person just said, I can't. I just, I don't know why, but I can't. And you look at the people who have stood up to Trump, especially the ones who stood up to his face. They're not necessarily people that you would have said, we're going to be leading the charge. But it appears they

stood up and said, I'm sorry, I just can't. And that speaks, I think, for a lot of the people with a less high profile who have stepped up to the plate here, not because they were trying to make a big statement or anything else, but when push came to shove, they just couldn't. And in a, my example of that, today I've actually been writing the day we are recording is the day after, Representative Joyce Beatty of Ohio stood up to Trump into his face over the Kennedy Center. But it reminded me of Governor Janet Mills from here in Maine, who, you know, it was in February of 2025, I think. I might have the date. Right. No, I was right after he was sworn in.

And, you know, he was trying to, he called her out after having the governor stuck in the room for like more than an hour. He called the governor out on the fact that the state of Maine was still because of state law saying that trans Americans, trans kids could play on sports teams in high school. And the governor was following the law. And, you know, she is a lawyer. She had been an attorney general, I think, and now she was a governor. And she just kept saying, well, we're going to follow the law. We're going to follow the law. And he kept saying, you've got to change it.

you've got to change it. And then he said, we're going to come down on you. And she just, she just looked at him and said, we'll see you in court. And it was sort of like, I can't. You know, whatever you say, I can't even not answer that. And so I think that maybe what we're seeing a lot of right now are the people who around us, who just can't go there. And that's so heartening because it shows up in places you never would have expected to see. it's a little disheartening the degree to which it's not showing up in places where we did expect to see it. Yeah.

Okay. Well, I want to leave with, you have a project that's giving people a lot of hope and it's called the 250 to 250. And I think I always like to end these heavy episodes with a little bit of hopium. So how do you feel about the incoming mentors and tell my listeners about your project? About the 250 price? So that was actually came out of the fact we were celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

And you know, the Trump administration took over the funding and it was clear they had their own plans. And my team and I were like, we want to do something that does exactly what you and I were just talking about that calls out the people in the United States who woke up one day and just said, I can't. I can't do life that way. And so what the project is, is one minute videos of Indeatians. individuals who have seen a situation and made it better.

And you know, in the United States, we have architects, we have Norman Borlaug whom everybody should know. He's the guy who was one of the key founders of the Green Revolution that saved more than a million people from starvation. I mean, just these people doing amazing things when confronted with pretty outrageous situations in some cases. There's a few of the videos that I insisted on just because people should know about them, even though we didn't really have somebody being a hero in them.

And by hero, I mean taking on a problem and trying to fix it. And they've been so much fun. I've learned so much, but what is really cool about them is from the beginning, we wanted to make sure that the narrators matched the people they were highlighting. And so we got Dana Tiger to do Jerome Tiger, both very famous indigenous artists. We got, you know, well, Harrison Ford did the Civilian Conservation Corps. We tried to match people with things they cared about. And watching who the narrators are is as much fun as watching the videos.

So the idea was to remind people that America is about us. It's about us getting up one morning and doing the next right thing, even if we're not billionaires, even if we're not brilliant, even if we don't have special skill sets, because so many of the changes that we enjoy today are somebody, or come from somebody like Fannie Lou Hamer, who just said, I got the right to vote, no matter how many times you tell me I don't

and how badly you beat me. And here we are all these years later, and people have the right to vote because of Fannie Lou Hamer. So that's what that project was about. And about the midterms, the American people are 100% in the right place. and they will work to vote this administration out of power. It's going to be a fight between now and then because Trump has his tail in a crack

and he's going to get worse, not better, between now and then. We've got the rising price of oil that's going to drive inflation. Things are going to be a really rough road, not just through November and through January when the new Congress sits, but through the 2028 election

and then crucially the 2030 election when we have the Congress of the United States and also state legislatures will determine how states are divided by gerrymandering. And those elections are going to be crucial to getting free and fair elections in the states by having nonpartisan gerrymandering going forward. So do I think we can do this?

Absolutely. Do I think we have to be prepared for a really rough fall and winter? Unfortunately, there too. absolutely but I do think the American people can do it we always have in the past so Heather Cox Richardson I've enjoyed this so much I hope to have you on mid-November and I hope that we are talking about the blue tsunami and then I want you to lay out for me in our next episode we're manifesting this together you and me Heather and lay out

how aggressive the Democratic majority both in the House and Senate have to be in investigating, providing a guardrail, and ripping up everything that this man did. And I'm very much looking forward to that episode, aren't you? I will. I am very much looking forward to that. But before I agree to that, how about I do an interview with you about your new book? I would love that. Yeah, I would be absolutely honored. It would be a celebration. All right. Sounds great. Heather Cox, Richardson, thank you so much. Please go join her. It's your substack, right? Letters from an American. Yes, and it's sort of everywhere. Just Google it. It comes up.

Great. Thank you, Heather. Thanks for having me.