Pod Save America - Heather Cox Richardson on Donald Trump, MAGA and How We Fight Back

Episode Date: September 7, 2025

It can feel like all is lost under Trump 2.0, but America has faced extremely dark chapters before and come out on the other side. Heather Cox Richardson—professor, historian and author of the most-read newsletter on Substack, Letters from an American—joins the show to share her long-view approach for this shortsighted era. She walks Dan through the biggest challenges to American democracy throughout history, how she believes we got to this MAGA moment, and what fuels her optimism about the future of the country.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast. Get tickets to CROOKED CON November 6-7 in Washington, D.C at http://crookedcon.com

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visit simplysafe.com slash crooked to claim 50% off your new system. That's simplysafe.com slash crooked. There's no safe like simply safe. Welcome to Pot Save America. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. Read the news these days can be depressing and deeply alarming. It can feel like all is lost amidst Trump 2.0. I feel this way too often. I know many of you do too. One of the ways that I stay optimistic is reading history to be reminded that America has faced very dark moments before and always come out on the other side. With that in mind, there was no one better to talk to that Heather Cox Richardson, a historian, professor, and the author of the wildly popular substack, letters from an American. Her long view approach is the perfect perspective. for this short-sighted era. I wanted to have her on the pod to get a perspective on how we got to this moment. And if there's anything that fuels her optimism in this dark chapter of American history, Heather Cox Richardson, welcome to Pod Save America. Thanks for having me. I'm very excited for this conversation. I've been wanting to talk to you for a very long time. Yours is the first

substack I've ever subscribed to. A hundred substacks later, but you were the first. Members of my friends and family are all huge fans of yours in your substack. They are very excited for this conversation. And I have no doubt that most of our audience is very familiar with who you are. I'm sure many of them subscribe to you, given that you're one of the most Piper Substackers in the world. But I kind of want to start with your journey before we get into current events. How did you become such a media person where you write the Substack where you're interviewing presidents, former presidents. Like, how did you make the leap from historian professor to Substacker? Well, I'm laughing a little bit because when you call it a journey, it sounds like there was a plan involved and there certainly was not.

Listen, I'm a historian, and what I really am interested in as a human being is what creates change. That's what historians study is how societies either adapt to change, create change, or reject it. And that's what I'm really interested in. And that's really all I do. And in order to understand those things as a historian, you need to be able to take a really clear look at what is happening. And so I'm very good at research at figuring out what justice. happen? What are the rules by which things just happened? Where were the rules broken? How did this change society? And that's really all I do and all I have ever done in front of a classroom when I write a book, when I write the letters from an American, when I interview people, is to try and see how they think, to see how they are changing society, because that's what I'm really interested in, is the way ideas change society. So the transition, I don't think there ever really has been a transition. I still do what I have always done. I'm just doing. it with a lot more people now.

Did you have any idea when you, in the early days, how quickly you were growing. I mean, I don't know if you were checking the substack charts or you had any sense of how many people were reading, but you very quickly became the most prolifer, most popular substacker in the world, huge audience, was did, I'm sure, I'm sure you didn't intend that when you started, but when did you sort of figure out how big an audience you had? I didn't start on substack, remember. I started on Facebook, where I had been for a long time. And what happened was almost exactly six years ago.

I had been writing an essay about once a week or so, and I hadn't written since July 18th. And on September 15th of 2019, I was actually stung by a yellow jacket, and I'm allergic and didn't have my epipen. So while I was sort of waiting to see how bad my reaction would be, I sat down and figured I might as well write to my people on Facebook who were nervous about the fact they haven't heard from me. I'd heard from a number of them through Messenger. And I had about 22,000 followers there. So I wrote and just sort of said, here's what the United States looks like to me right now. And there was just this overwhelming response of people asking questions and following me and sharing things. And I actually had gone viral twice before writing from that page and had really pretty much let it drop.

But in that case, I wrote to answer their questions. And it was very clear within about two to three weeks when my following numbers, and this is not scientific. This is just sort of how I'm remembering it went, I believe, over a million that I wrote to my administration where I teach and said, hey, listen, something's going on over here and you all need to be aware of it. And then Substack was just starting. And they came to me about a month later and said, we think you would be a good fit over here. And you got to give them credit. I said then that I never wanted to do this as a job. I never wanted to do it for money because it was a labor of love. and they said, we will do it on faith with the expectation that you're going to grow enough that you're going to have to change that. And I was there for more than a year before I started taking money for writing. And I had to do that because I started to need an assistant to handle my email and scheduling and all that. And they never complained in all that time. And so that's how I ended up there. And I think the fact that I was early on Substack made all the difference,

that there are a lot of really terrific people that started later that just didn't get the oxygen I did because I happened to be there on the ground floor and with such a large back wave coming to Substack with me from Facebook. Yeah, I started on Substack in 2020 in the summer in 2020. I'm much further down the charts than you, but similar thing is there was so much less content on there. If someone went there, it was sort of a narrower menu. And now there are so many people on there that it really has changed. You've described your substack, and I thought this is really interesting, as a 19th century model to educate, inform, and build a community rather than a modern day business model. What did you mean by that? What I meant by that is a lot of people complain about modern media because they say that it is corporate driven. And of course, it does need to have clicks. It does have an uneasy relationship with money and with the impetus of those people with a lot of money who are backing it. that is a really modern model for media in the United States. In fact, the older model was what I do. That is somebody who has an idea they think is important and starts to write about it in whatever manner they possibly can. In the 19th century, which is my happy place, people literally would buy a printing press and they would start to print a sheet of paper that had you folded it in half. So each newspaper was four pages long. And you hoped you got enough printing contracts or enough subscribers to put food on the table. was never a huge money-making proposition. But because those things were mission-driven, as opposed to we need to have a huge following-driven, they became really important drivers of political opinion. And that's really what I do, is I'm interested in the world, and I care

about American democracy, and I believe that American democracy rests on the principles of the Enlightenment, the idea that if people understand what is factually happening, they will make good decisions about it for their own lives, maybe not the same decisions I would make about my life, but they will make good decisions. And that particular mission is really different than saying, I'm going to have the most eyeballs in the world. And that difference in this moment is one that has made what I do and people like me do, I think, have a huge following and a very important following. There is really terrific stuff going on right now in independent media, in smaller media, that looks to me like a media revolution that mirrors that of the 1850s,

for example, when we get the rise of a newspaper like the New York Times, or the 1890s, when we get the rise of things like McClure's Magazine, which ended up being instrumental in pushing back against the takeover of our government by a few very wealthy people and instead reforming American democracy. I take it that gives you some optimism about media in America, this sort of rise of independent journalism, whether it's on substack or YouTube. or somewhere else that there's hope there there's hope there when it comes to media?

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And I think a lot of people are not, when they complain about the media, looking at the larger media ecosystem that is not just the big legacy media outlets, which continue to be important for a number of reasons. First of all, they have very deep pockets so they can fight back against lawsuits.

But second of all, a number of them really seem to be hedging their bets about what the future in the United States is going to bring. So they look in some ways as if they're cowtowing to an authoritarian administration, but they are also supporting really terrific journalists who are really doing the work. So I'm not ready to throw any babies out with any bathwater, but I do think the media ecosystem is one heck of a lot larger than those who are tearing their hair out and saying the media has failed us are giving credit to.

You know, when you sit down at night to write letters from an American, I imagine you wrestle with what we wrestle with here at Pots of America all the time, which is of the barrage of news of the day that Trump has done. How do you sort through and separate the signal from the noise? What are the most important things that people need to know about? How do you avoid, you know, we always worry about chasing Trump down a rabbit hole. He wants us to chase down. How do you just sort of make decisions about what it is you're going to write about on a, basically on a nightly basis? So I maybe have a bit of an advantage there because I am a historian looking at the stories that change society. And that's not to say I get them right all the time by any stretch of

the imagination, but when you write a book or when you teach a course or when you think broadly about the issues you care about, some things matter and some things don't. So one of the things that I do is if there are a number of stories, the days I hate are the days when you get what I call B minus stories, you know, 14 B minus stories. There's not a lead, but there are a bunch of things that are important enough. What I tend to do is take, I think of it like an onion, I take a step back and I say, how do these things fit together in the story of America? And if that doesn't work, then I take another step back and do the same thing. And so, you know, for today, for example, when you and I are recording this, which is Friday, September 5th, I've actually written a lot of

tonight's letter because there were major stories that came out in foreign policy in the president's assumption of power to essentially kill people, let's call it that, and because of the economy. Now, those look like three very different stories, but if you take a step back in the onion, what it says to me is that we have had in the United States for at least 40 years now, this image of what it means to be a strong American leader and how one constructs a strong American state. And the MAGA Republicans are putting that image, that mythology, into place, and it's completely failing. So the story to my mind today, as I look at the United States as a snapshot, which is what I try to do, sort of a la Alistair Cook and his letters from America,

it is the story of how the United States is having to grapple with the conflict between the ideology that a certain group of American citizens have embraced now for a long time and how that ideology is clashing with reality. And at the other end of that, I find that story absolutely fascinating intellectually as well as living through it, because what does one do as a human being if the world that you have constructed in your mind turns out to be fake? Like, what does one do? And that larger story to me certainly sweeps in all the many new stories of today. But the story of humanity behind that is what does America do when it's 40 years of mythology are proven to be wrong? But even beyond that as a human being, what does one do when one has created a false sense of who we are and is forced to decide that you're either going to have to push that ideology to the exclusion of reality, which seems to be what the president is currently doing, or forced to say, crap, I was wrong for 40 years, and I need to reorganize my brain and my country in such a way that I can move forward?

I don't know which one of those is going to win out, but I think they are profoundly human questions as well as national questions. And at the end of the day, that's what I look for. in this room is jobs jobs works here right you do they all agree constantly going there for miles charlotte back there so many miles so many miles says everybody in this room who works here and has to say it well that settles it that settles it when we started cricket it was just a few of us around table and we used stamps dot com right from the beginning because it helped us when there was we were really doing everything and we didn't know what we were doing when we went down to the bank of america down the street and gave a hundred dollar bill with hell good open an account it'll save you time

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I take it that some combination, because of the news of the day, which included, we're going on some Friday, very bad employment numbers coming out this morning. Is it a combination of sort of America as a strong economy, America as a strong military? And then what are the other elements of that that's the image that you see Trump pushing? So remember, that I am trained as a political historian, but my degree is, my doctorate is actually in American culture, in looking at American society as a whole. My master's is in literature, for example, in American literature. And that matters in this context, because what really happened after World War II was with the expansion of the government to regulate business and provide a basic

social safety net and promote infrastructure and to protect civil rights. What happened were those people who didn't want it to do those things doubled down on the idea that if a government became powerful enough to do those things, it would become a socialist government in that it would begin to redistribute wealth from hardworking white Americans to undeserving minorities, in this case, black Americans. And that would be a form of socialism. And that image picked up directly from the period after the Civil War, when the former Confederates who ran up against the 15th Amendment and the creation of the Department of Justice in 1870, to say that they could no longer discriminate against their black neighbors on racial grounds, began to say, hey, listen,

we never had any problem with the fact our neighbors were black. Our problem is the fact that they are poor. And if you let them have a say in the government, you let them have a vote, they are going to work together with poor white Americans to elect leaders who will promise them roads and schools and hospitals and those things can only be paid for with white tax dollars because white people in the American South were the only ones really who had taxable property. So that image that letting minorities, and that's going to expand in the 20th century to include women and gender minorities as well, but that letting minorities vote have a say in their government is by definition a form of socialism. It's a political understanding, more than an economic understanding, the way

socialism becomes defined in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But that construction, which really takes off in the United States in 1871, is countered immediately in that period by the image of the American cowboy, who in reality, about a third of American cowboys were men of color. They depended on the government more than any other region of the country in the West. There are many ways in which the myth of the American cowboy doesn't stack up against the reality. But that myth of the American cowboy, that the cowboy is a true American and wants nothing from the government but to be left alone. He dominates women. He dominates the minorities around him. And he's good with the gun. And he just wants to be left alone. That image of the

American Cowboy really is central to pushing back against the government that expands after the civil war in order to promote black rights, and to some degree Brown rights, but mostly black rights. In the 20th century, that image of the American cowboy does the same thing. So those people who were trying to destroy the modern American government after World War II really don't get anywhere until Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court decision, which says that segregation in public schools is unconstitutional. With that, they begin really to lionize the idea of the American Cowboy, which had fallen out of American culture during the Depression and the Dust Bowl, when in fact, people in the American South and the American West were really keen on federal help

because they were, you know, losing their land and starving. That image comes back in the 1950s. By the end of the 1950s and the early 1960s, Westerns dominate television, which is a new medium, for example, Bonanza, that incredibly famous Western, is the first TV show in color. It goes international. That idea of the American cowboy as being central to what it means to be an American becomes a political statement by 1960 when you get the rise of Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater with his stance as an American cowboy. He's always out there with a white hat saying, I came from Arizona before we had any of these stupid regulations. His family, by the way, depended on government money. That image of the American cowboy as the central figure of American

history and of America really becomes this political statement for the people who take over the Republican Party that a true American wants nothing from the government. You should get rid of business regulation, get rid of a basic social safety net, get rid of government promotion of infrastructure and so on, and dominate others with force. And that was a rhetorical thing for Goldwater and for people like Ronald Reagan who did the same thing, even George W. Bush picks it up. But in this incarnation under MAGA, it has become the driving force. It has gone from being rhetoric to being an image of what America should be that is driving their behavior in any number of ways, right? So you're seeing this attack on the, this alleged attack on

the cigarette boat that theoretically, according to the administration, was smuggling drugs. We're having the report that just came out in the New York Times today of the Navy SEAL attempt in 2019 to bug North Korea that ended up in the unacknowledged death of two to three Korean fishermen who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. You're seeing this idea that the government can simply do whatever it wants to assert its will by force. And at the same time, this concept that if you get rid of the government intervention in the economy through regulations, for example, and social safety nets and so on, you will return America to this great past is, I think, where you're seeing the extraordinary attempt of the administration to throw its weight around and simply dictate what the government thinks should be happening with the economy when the actual numbers are devastating. So that's what I mean by the idea of the mythology coming up against

the reality. And I will say one of the things that I think is fascinating in this moment is that image of the American cowboy was always just an image. We have these wonderful reports of people who knew Buffalo Bill, for example, and he knew quite deliberately that he was constructing an image. He would literally wear certain clothes when he went to perform some great feat of bravado so that he could then go on stage and say, these are the very clothes I wore. But there was another image in that same period of what it meant to be an American

that was much more true to American history. And that was to be somebody who believed, in community and believed in making sure that you protected your weakest members and made it possible for everybody to have a shot at equal access to resources so they could work hard and rise. And the replacement of the cowboy image with that image of America is one that has real possibilities, I think, for our future. I mean, isn't that sort of, I mean, the tension or the back and forth we've been going through in this country for a long time, right, between those two things? Like, you have George Bush, who really did George.

W. Bush, who modeled a cowboy in so many ways invaded the country for basically no reason. He was clear and brush all the time. That was a big part of it. And then you, like, you pivot, then you go to Obama, who's sort of the opposite of that community was the core part of his message. He was a community organizer. Red states and blue states. We care about our neighbors in the red states. We all, you know, we, why, you know, so much of his message from my work from was like, why you have to care about the homeless veteran three states over or the kid who's not getting educated or the family who's going hungry, why that matters to you, even if you're not that person, and then you revert back to Trump, right? Is that sort of the push and pull that we've been in

for centuries now, basically, as a country? I wouldn't go as far back as centuries. I would say since at least the 1950s, but there's a critical piece that goes back to what we were talking about before. And that's one of the real strengths of the movement conservatives who took over the Republican Party was their sense of narrative, was their storyline. You know, the little guy against the empire, right? That's Star Wars, 1970s. that's Reagan rising. That's exactly the sort of ethos that Reagan picks up when he runs for office for the president in 1980. And that's a really powerful myth, the idea that, you know, you are in charge of your destiny, even though the reality is that you're deeply tied in our era into so many different parts of a global economy, for example, a global political system, health systems, climate change, and all of the different ways in which we are reliant on and reflect a larger national and international community. That story is really important. And from the 1980s, at least, 1987, after the end of the fairness doctrine and the rise of talk radio, which did not begin as political, that simply

began as a way to use the AM radio dial, as the FM dial was taking off much more effectively because of its higher quality. You had the right wing pushing this image that every man, and that was a deliberate word, can do it on his own. What we are seeing now, I think, with the rise of independent media and people like you and so many individuals articulating a different vision of the country, is a narrative pushback to that other powerful storyline. So even though people like Barack Obama and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris talked a lot about the importance of community and people who are within those communities believe,

it simply was not getting the national grip on the imagination that the individual imagery did. And one of the key aspects I think of what I do, and one of the things that I think is most important about American history that has been stripped out of it for a long time, is the sense of agency. You know, the idea of community is not about, you know, here we're all sort of in this mush together and, you know, somehow the government will help us. The idea of community in our history is that if you are an individual, you have the power to change the country. You have the power to change your life, you have the power to change the country, and you have the power to change the world by working together the way the people did during World War II or the strikers did in the late 1890s, the civil rights workers did in the 1860s, 1870s, and 1960s and 1970s. And that concept that you actually can play a heroic role in the world as part of a community,

not simply as part of, you know, the cowboy riding off into the sunset, I think that focus on agency is a much more engaging narrative than one that simply says, hey, we need to be nice to the kindergartener three states away. Yeah, I think that's a very, very important point. It is, I guess the, and I want to get to more Trump stuff, but you, this is fascinating exactly, I wanted to have you on the podcast is, I mean, the Republicans really, or the conservatives, I guess I'd say it latched onto an existing American self-image, right? The cowboy, the individualism, the frontiersman, you know, go west, young man, all of that. And sort of have taken that to their own for, they've latched onto that and made that their own ideology and sort of fit their

conservative policy preferences in under that. I take it that 1950s is when this started is because it's once, now there were, is Brown v. Borg, right? It's that now all of a sudden we are, the quest of a democracy becoming a multiracial democracy is what sort of leads to the conflict here. Yes, but I'm going to take exception to the use of the word conservative to encompass this radical right, because they have been radical since the very beginning. And by that, I mean that traditional conservatism, as it was conceived as an ideological principle by Edmund Burke during the French Revolution, said that it was a grave error for any country to try and govern based on an ideology. Because pretty soon you were going to start trying to make people

fit the ideology rather than ideology to fit the people. And instead, he argued that government could be used as a positive force, not simply as a negative force, the way it had been conceived previously, and that leaders should govern according to what would create stability. So in his day, that meant the aristocracy, that meant the church, that meant, you know, the property systems that kept people having a stake and believing in the enforcement of the law in his country. In our day, what creates stability is different, and one of the things that created stability in the 20th century was the New Deal slash middleway government of FDR and Eisenhower, a Democrat and a Republican. And the people who came in and wanted to destroy all that,

were sort of Enfant Terribes. They were the people who wanted to tear up the things that were creating stability in order to do exactly what Burke cautioned against to impose an ideology on the country and to force people to fit into it. And that is precisely what we're seeing nowadays. They are not conservatives.

They are radical extremists. Yeah, that's a point well taken, especially when you think about Trump and this image of the government not being involved in the economy and you have the Trump administration now taking in the most, you know, of technically, by definition, socialists

as possible, taking stakes in American in companies now, right? Whether it's no beauty or elsewhere. Yeah, it's, so it's conservatism, like there is what, the actual, there's the actual philosophy of it. And then there's just, there's, I guess, radical right.

I guess it's probably the proper way to describe it. Yeah, they use the word conservative as a title. That's why they're called movement conservatives, because it's a political movement that uses the title, rather like the Fox News channel, it calls its signature show Fox News. It's not news. It was never news.

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basis here and put it into larger historical context because it's, you know, a term you hear people like me use and you hear on the news all the time where people just reacting to the craziness of Trump, whether it's Trump 1.0 or Trump 2.0 is unprecedented, right? These things have never happened before because it feels, you know, we obviously have a short-term memory problem in the country right now, but some of this stuff feels impossible to imagine. And your writing helps me understand that not all of this is unprecedented, that this is part of a larger American story. So what's your reaction when you hear people say, this is unprecedented? How do you, like, what are the historical parallels you see to the moment we're in right now here

in the U.S.? Well, you know, it's a trope. to say history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. And there are ways in which we're in an unprecedented time, because by definition all history is unprecedented or all modern affairs are unprecedented. And certainly, the fact that we have sitting in the White House, a president who seems determined to destroy American democracy is unprecedented. That's new. But he comes from a long line of right-wing reactionaries who are eager to instate a situation. in the country where a few wealthy white men rule over everybody else. So in the larger scheme of things, there are certainly continuities in this moment. The thing that always sort of surprises me

is the degree to which Americans look toward Germany for their precedence in this moment. And I am a scholar of America, so I know about as much about Germany as anybody who reads sort of generally, which means not much. But of course, we've had a movement in the United States that looks very much like the movement we're in right now, before. And that was, of course, in the American South from about 1874 to about 1965, the reaction to the expansion of a multiracial democracy after the Civil War led to the very pattern we are seeing today. The argument that if people of color vote, they are going to want a redistribution of wealth from white people to black people to do things like Bill Rhodes and school. and hospitals, which is what I said before, and I will add to that now, fun prosthetics, because after the Civil War, the United States becomes a leader in prosthetics because of

the amputations and the losses of eyes during the war, something not a lot of people know, but I think it's kind of cool. We are again, by the way, because of Iraq and Afghanistan. But they argue at that time in the 1870s and the 1880s that you should not permit men at this point of color to vote because they are essentially going to create a system where poor people are going to run the government, and that's going to destroy the accumulation of property. And from that, you start to get this increasing idea that those people who support black voting, who support the Republican Party in the American South, are anti-American. They are dangerous.

They are polluting the body politic. From that, you get the idea that they should be purged from American society, and that tangles up with our incredibly ugly history of racism to turn into, you know, really high numbers of lynching from about 1888. There was a lull between the 1870s and 1888, between 1889, and into the 1930s, you see this attempt to purge from the United States people who are racial, ethnic, and to some degree religious minorities in order to create a pure America. and, of course, that dovetails beautifully with the rise of the Nazis in the United States, as well as in Germany in the 1920s. And so when people look to Germany and say, oh, we look just like the Nazis, maybe, maybe we do.

Maybe we don't. I don't know. I don't know the much about the Nazis. But we sure as hell look a lot like the former Confederates in the American South after the Civil War. And then when you turn around and you look at the fact that the administration has just ordered the rehanging of a portrait of Robert Lee at West Point and is, you know, know, talking about renaming all the, uh, the military bases back to Confederate names and complaining about the removal of Confederate statues. It seems to me that that's the comparison that has real teeth. You know, it's just, it's so interesting, right? Like these, like these, you know, maga types.

It's like, we're so America first, America first, America first. And what we celebrate are the, the people who waged war against America, right? The ones who lost the war. And it's hard to see that through anything other than a purely racial lens, right? Yes, although I would add that the rise of the concept of the Confederate soldier as being a symbol of the United States of America really takes off in the late 19th century. And that's when you start to see those statues going up. They do not go up immediately after the war. They go up in the 1890s and forward.

And the argument behind that at the time is that it's those men. who were trying to preserve the idea that the government should stay small, it should not get involved in racial issues, it should not become, and they use this word, a socialist government. So it's the entwining of the racism of the Confederacy and the post-war objection to the idea of an active government that defends civil rights and defends economic rights. That's important too.

those really can't be untangled. And that's one of the ways I think that the MAGA movement became possible. And you saw this back in the Nixon administration when they talked a lot about this, that you could hide racism under an economic argument, which is precisely, of course, what the former Confederates did in 1871 when the Department of Justice said, you keep killing off your black neighbors, you're going to go to federal court and you're going to lose and you're going to end up in prison. And they said, oh, no, no, no, we don't have any problem at all with race, which was just ridiculous. I mean, literally the same people before and after the argument changes. But our problem is when you let poor people vote, they vote for a redistribution of wealth. And that we can't put up with. And that's the sort of argument that you have seen take over our political discourse really since Nixon. It sort of feels like this movement, it happens in fits and starts over time, right? It's a reaction movement. It happens in reaction to something. is the, like, you know, to go from a Republican, like Republicans like John McCain and Mitt Romney in 2012, although there were obviously candidates who were errors to the future MAGA movement, like Sarah Palo, or political figures like Sarah Palin in 2008, you know, maybe Rick Santorum or someone else in 2012, is the rise of Trump only possible because of the election of Barack Obama? Like, is that the, is that the triggering event, do you think, or am I oversimplifying it?

And you can say yes, sir, I'm oversimplifying it. No, I don't think you're a result. But I want to answer that. But let me ask you something first, because I think this is a really central and interesting question. What do you think drives political change? Do you think it's people? Do you think it's ideas? Do you think it's money? Do you think it's foreign affairs? What do you think creates the kind of shift that you just identified? I don't think it's foreign affairs. It can be a big international event with huge implications in the United States like 9-11 or a war like Vietnam. I think it is, I think the, there's no simple answer to this, at least I can come up with. I think the economic situation in any one moment can drive change, right? It creates the conditions perhaps where people are looking for change, I think, the economy in 2024 and inflation had a, I don't think, I don't know that Trump gets elected in a different environment, right, where people are feeling so stressed that they're

willing to take risks. And I think individual people can, you know, I'm not like an subscribe to the great man of history, but sometimes you need a figure who can mobilize a movement. And so I think like what happens in 2008 doesn't happen without Barack Obama. What happens in 2016 probably doesn't happen with Donald Trump. And you can say some similar things about, you know, I mean, you know better me, but throughout history. So I think it's probably a little bit of all of the above, I guess. What do you think? So I think ideas change history. I think ideas change society, and all the things you identified are effective only in how they are defined by a society. And that means that the people

who tell the stories, who tell people how they should interpret different things, make all the difference. So if you go back, before I go back to what you asked about with the election of Barack Obama, which is crucially important, let me explain what I mean by comparing, and I'm probably going to make people's heads explode, but comparing Lyndon Baines Johnson to Ted Cruz. I can't wait to hear this. This is interesting. Well, think about who they are, right? They are both, they're both supremely self-centered politicians who care deeply about how they're perceived by other people. They are very strong personalities,

and they both come from Texas, and one of them used his power, twisted arms, I mean, quite aggressively, to make the United States more responsive to those who had been marginalized or left behind. The other one amassed power by doing the opposite. So what makes the difference between the two of them? Why did one try to garner attention and power by doing good

and the other one by doing the opposite? And the answer to that for me is the way a society defines what is a way to get power? What is a way to get popular? So if you start there with the idea that the intellectual trains that a society lays down, the intellectual ideas that a society lays down, are central to the way that people interpret politics and the way people react to politics. And you take a look at this idea that I laid down early on that from the movement conservative, that individuals should not be hampered in any way by the government. And they should be free to amass money.

They should be able to dominate people of color and to dominate women and should just be able to do whatever they want, which is, by the way, a very gendered look at the way the world should work. You see within the movement conservatives who take over the Republican Party an increasing emphasis on the idea that anybody who disagrees with them should be purged. And by the 1990s, after the Motor Voter Act of 1993, and this is when Newt Gingrich is running around, I mean, he still is running around, but I mean rising in the political part, the political movement. You see the attempt to use language to purge from the political system Democrats. That is, Republicans are asked by a PAC associated with Newt Gingrich to refer to Democrats as traitors, weak, socialist, and to refer to Republicans as strong,

powerful, American, Patriot. After the Vote of Voter Act of 1994, Republicans begin to start talking about the idea that Democrats can only win through voter fraud. That's when you start to see them talking about voter fraud. There is no evidence of voter fraud then or now. There's a lot of evidence of election fraud, which is a different thing. But they begin to attack the legitimacy of Democrats to hold office. And that really takes off with the election of Bill Clinton. whom they go after for being corrupt from the very beginning. Remember, there was a scandal from the very beginning about a travel agency? I don't even remember it was about. There was the travel agency. There was Whitewater. I mean, there was the Vince Foster.

I mean, it was all like sort of right-wing fever dreams for a long time up until obviously the very, very end. Right. And then at the very end, in that next election, in 1998, after a Miami mess of a mayoral election, Florida began to purge the voter rolls, and they purged about 100,000 voters off the voter rolls in Florida before the 2000 election. And we know how the 2000 election went. It came down to a recount in Miami-Dade County that was stopped by the Brooks Brothers riot. Roger Stone was a player in that, in which he later said in an interview, you know, the Democrats thought it was about protecting the constitutional norms. We knew it was a battle. And interestingly enough, black observers of that fight in 2000 saw it as a political struggle that mirrored

the worst of the KKK years. Then that's 2000. And then when you have George W. Bush in office and the Republicans start to think that they really have gotten a lock on the system through voter suppression primarily. But then they also believe through their ideology and through their control of media, which has a long history as well. But then you get in 2008 the election of Barack Obama. And this is complete anathema. This is how you get on the night of his inauguration, Mitch McConnell, joining together with a number of the leaders of the Republican party saying, we don't care if we agree with anything he does. Our only goal is to make sure he's a one-term president. Because the idea is that the Democrats who are now defined within the Republican Party as

being illegitimate in terms of governance, must be perched from power. So that's 2008. He takes office 2009. What do you get in 2010? You get Operation RedMap. You get the redistricting of Democratic-dominated states that has been supported by an enormous amount of Republican money with that explicit goal of taking over the states and making sure that the Democrats cannot control the House of Representatives so they can't legislate about anything. You also get citizens, United that same year, which again was about the use of media in favor of the Republican Party, 2010. And then in 2013, you get the gutting of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County versus Holder. And there you're starting to see the dramatic skewing of the political system in favor of the Republican Party.

That, of course, hurts the Democrats, but it also badly hurts the Republicans, because in those gerrymandered districts, where a lot of people cannot vote unless they are Republicans, what Republicans become afraid of is not losing a general election, but rather being primary to the right. And that's when you start to see that that Republican right really turn hard right. So from that, of course, you get the rise of the MAGA movement in which Trump is pretty clearly adhering to the rhetoric of women and minorities shouldn't have rights, but also quite visibly demonstrating his dominance of them through mocking the disabled reporter, through his words about sexual assault on women, through his very thinly veiled promises to appoint only the best people. Well, you know who the

best people were. Right. So, you know, was his election inevitable because Barack Obama was elected suggests that there's simply a racist backlash against Obama's election? But I actually think it's less that than the fact that Obama's election indicated to Republican leaders and to their followers who had been raised at that point on at least 20 years of a red meat right-wing media diet that they must find a way to keep Democrats out of power. And they skewed the system very badly, sending it further to the right. At the same time that in order to keep people behind them, they really doubled down on the race. and sexism, and that then gave us Trump 2016. And just as a reminder, in 2016, Trump was the most economically moderate Republican running. I mean, that all got jettisoned very quickly, but people tend to forget that now. He really was the logical outcome of those 40 years

of Republican rhetoric, the skewing of the mechanics of the system. And then in August 2017, with the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, he tossed over the traditional Republicans or the movement conservatives in the Republican Party and started to create an authoritarian movement. So there you go. Yeah, it is. I mean, it's very helpful, I think, to understand that the history here.

I mean, obviously, it's always helpful to understand history. But there is, like, there is, I think we are sort of past this now, but so much in like the 2017 to 20, until basically January 5th, 2021, there was still this idea among a lot of people, that Trump was this anomaly, that he was just like this guy who hijacked the party briefly and then he was going to be here for a little bit and we could survive him, he would go away and we would get back to the Romneys and the McCain's and the Bushes after that as opposed to seeing Trump as a lot as a, as a sort of the end result of a long process within the Republican

Party. So I think that's just a very helpful thing for a say. I'm not sure people are still now they see the, now the Republican Party is entirely in his thrall, although I do still think there are some Democrats on Capitol Hill who just think if we can just survive this next four years, all my Republican friends in the Senate will come back. I think that's a deeply naive view. I think there may be fewer of them every day, but it continues. I think it's very helpful. So one of the things that really interested me about Trump when he rose in 2016 was, you know, and you got me talking about history, so this is all on you. You know, this is what this is why I wanted you, yes. One of the things that I think is enormously slippery in American history, but in anybody who talks

about this is what populism is. Because some people like populism, some people hate populism, sometimes about economics, sometimes about race. And it's like, it's really slippery. And one of the things that I really thought was interesting about Trump's rise is it occurred to me for the first time that at least in the United States, which is all I'm qualified to speak about, Trump seemed to me not to be a politician, but to be a salesman, in that he was reflecting the American people at a certain moment, as if he was holding up a mirror to that. them to a certain group of people who, a lot of observers called populists. And it's the first time it ever occurred to me that maybe, and this is how I now think of it, populism is less about a

movement and less about principles than it is about the moment when a group of people recognizes that they have been lied to. So on the one hand, Trump really echoed the rhetoric that they've been hearing for a long time. And at the same time, he said, but it didn't work for you, so I'm going to make your economic situation better. So it felt kind of to me like the moment when the tide was shifting, that rather than populism being a longer, some movement that we could fit into conservatism or whatever, that it was more a moment in a population when the rhetoric no longer match the reality, and people were mad. What they were going to do about it was unclear.

But that's why I thought he was interesting in 2016, and of course, now that that ship has completely sailed. More of my conversation with Heather Cox Richardson in a moment. But first, do you love watching Crooked's podcast on video but hate ads? Well, we've got great news. You can now stream ad-free video with a paid subscription to Crooked. Enjoy shows like Pod Save America, Pod Save the World, Love Her to Leave It, and Offline with John Favro.

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That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com slash crooked. For free shipping and 365-day returns, quince.com slash crooked. One of things I was hoping you could put into political context for us was President Trump deploying troops first to L.A. then to D.C. and now to maybe Chicago or Norlands in the coming days. What are the historical parallels for what we're seeing right now? One of the interesting parallels between the past and the present is the use of federal troops against American citizens. And the whole concept of the Posse Cometatis Act that you're reading about in all kinds of places is an important reflection

of that attempt to consolidate power among a really small group of Americans. who are running the government. So a lot of people get the posse comitatis story a little bit wrong. And that's that the reason we get the Posse Cometatis Act is actually a deeply political story. So what happens is in 1876, there is, if you will, a hung election. It's not clear who was won the presidential election of that year. It comes down to the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, who appears to have lost the popular vote to the Democrat, Samuel Tilden, a reformer New York. And in the attempt to figure out who had actually won the four states that were in question, ones in the West, we all forget about that, but there are three states in the American

South. It's not at all clear whether the Democrats won those states or the Republicans won those states because the elections are a mess. And in the three southern states, the states send back competing slates of electors. What happens then is that a number of people working for Rutherford B. Hayes, go to those southern states and say to the people running the states, listen, if you will just back off and let Rutherford B. Hayes become president, we will make sure that you get stuff, like a cabinet appointment for patronage positions and money for railroads. And the reason that that's important is because the guy who makes the most promises and is one of the most effective in getting the southern leaders to drop their support for Tilden is a guy named Tom Scott,

Thomas A. Scott, and he is one of the major railroad leaders in the country. So it looks over the winter of 1877 as if the United States is going to go back into a civil war. In fact, the southern states throw their support to Hayes, and Hayes is inaugurated in March of 1877. That date's important because in July of 1877, America has its first national strike, and it's a strike. on the railroads that starts in Tom Scott's biggest railroad. When that happens, Rutherford behaves puts down the strike by calling out the army. So if you are a Democrat who has just watched the Republicans essentially steal an election, and then you're watching the president call out the army to support the positions of his biggest supporter against his workers, you feel.

feel like you have watched the destruction of American democracy truly once and for all with the help of the Army. So in 1878, when the Democrats take control of Congress, they push through the Pasi Kamatadas Act, which says that the federal army cannot be used against citizens for domestic law enforcement. And that concept that the military can't be used against American citizens, holds for every group of the U.S. military except the military under the Department of Homeland Security, which is a brand new under George W. Bush, Department of the Government. And because within it is the U.S. Coast Guard, and the coasties, in fact, are charged with protecting domestic law enforcement. So that, watching troops back in the streets in a

parent violation of the Posse Cometatus Act, as a judge in California has said, really conjures up that moment, again, during Reconstruction, when the president was using the military power of the United States against the American people to concentrate power among himself and his cronies. And I think that aspect of the Posse Cometatis Act is important enough that it shouldn't keep getting blown over as they're not supposed to do this. The reason they're not supposed to do this, the reason they're not supposed to do this is if you put the disposal of the military into the hands of a president who uses it to protect his cronies, you've lost our democracy. You know, you, so much of your writing, the book you wrote is about democracy, the struggle for democracy to struggle to have

our democracy represent the ideals we wanted to represent. You know, as we sit here today, we have troops the American streets. We have massed ice agents disappearing people to torture prisons. You have the president of the United States on the official White House Twitter account declaring that he wants to revoke the citizenship of an American citizen like Rosie O'Donnell, you have the president totally ignoring with essentially with the assent of Republicans and Congress, any sort of spending passed by Congress, just doing sort of closing agencies as he wants, he decided to rename the Department of Defense, even though that was named by statute the other day. It kind of feels like democracy is losing right now. And what I think is so alarming to so many

people about it, particularly to me, is that it feels like so many people are okay with that, right? You know, you have a plurality of the country who is with Trump throughout all of this. You have, you know, just thinking about this last night as Trump is, you know, we're finding out about this bombing on this boat, this, you know, extrajudicial butt killing. The, you know, the Rosie O'Donnell stuff is happening as all of the tech CEOs are gathered at the White House for a celebratory dinner with Trump. You know, just the Republican Party is with him. It feels like a lot of people are kind of okay with democracy, democracy fading away.

Is there a historical parallel for that where just Americans may be willing to, some percent of Americans are either too afraid, too self-interested, too disinterested to care about democracy going away? Like, is there, have we been at this moment before? 100%. So more than once, yeah. I mean, 1850s, 1890s, 1930s, all of those times looked like they do today or worse. And that's one of the things that I think gives me great hope. But let me explain to you what I mean, at least in the 1850s, because I think that's the most dramatic. During the 1840s, especially, with the trail of tears that forced indigenous Americans out of the southeast and the opening up of the very rich cotton lands in the American Southeast, in the 1840s,

especially 1840s and 1850s, you get a huge boom in cotton and in the value of land in the American South. And you also get the rise of a very small group of elite planters. who depend on a system that permits them to continue enslaving human beings, even though the vast majority of Americans who live in the North don't think this is a very good system. But they manage to take over the Democratic Party and then they manage through the Democratic Party to take over the American government.

And by 1853, if you are a northerner, you're probably not paying much attention. Or if you're many Southerners who aren't benefiting from the system, You're maybe not paying as much attention. Certainly in the north, you're not. It's there, but you're probably not thinking about it. You're moving to the cities. You're trying all this new technology that is coming out.

You're moving to the Midwest. You're doing new stuff. You're cutting down trees. You're doing all the things that were contributing to what was a boom-and-bust economy. So, you know, the government, you just weren't paying that much attention to it. So if you were paying attention, you looked at the fact that the elite southerners had gotten control the White House. They'd gotten control the Senate, and they'd got in control the Supreme Court, but by God, you had the House of Representatives and always would, because there were so many more

Northerners, so nobody cared, right? And then in 1854, the Southern elite enslavers pushed through Congress with the help of the President, the Kansas-Nabrasca Act. And the Kansas-Nebraska Act says that the land in the American West that was acquired under the Louisiana Purchase would no longer be held aside for free labor, for non-slaveholding settlements. But in fact, enslavers could spread slavery into that part of the country. And what that would mean is that with new slaveholding states in the American West, the American West and the American South would overall the American North, and the entire country would be a slave-owning country. People forget that this happened because you think Kansas Nebraska Act, who cares? It's that act that wakes Abraham Lincoln up. He paces all night. He's a corporate

lawyer. He paces all night and he says, we're in real trouble now. So the North begins to wake up to the fact that the system has been taken over by essentially an oligarchy. That word goes around a lot. They don't know what they stand for yet. They just know that they don't agree about what is happening to the American government. And the day after the Kansas Nebraska Act passes the House of Representatives, a number of representatives gets together in Washington. And they actually meet in the rooms of Edward Dickinson from Massachusetts, whose daughter, Emily, you might have heard of. She wasn't a recluse at that point. She would actually visit him there. And they come together in that room, and they say, it's actually in the boarding house that is the best food in Washington.

And they say, listen, we don't agree with each other about immigration or internal improvements or finances or any of this stuff. But by God, we can agree that we need to protect democracy. And they spread out across the north. And they start to talk about the issue. that matter. And in the elections that year and in the elections the next year, those people who are anti-Nabrasca, they call themselves, dominate the elections. They force out the northern Democrats in huge numbers and take over the elections in 55 and 56. But it's not a cakewalk. By 56, you've got not only a civil war starting over whether or not Kansas is going to be a slaveholding state or not. You've actually got a southern enslaver beating almost to death a northern senator on the

floor of the Senate. There's blood everywhere. And all these senators are standing around. And somebody later says, why didn't you step in? And they said out, we didn't think it was our fight. So increasingly, it looks like this oligarchy is going to take over the system. And by 1858, you've got Abraham Lincoln starting to talk about what it means to be in America. with the idea that he is the true conservative by standing and protecting the Declaration of Independence against those elite enslavers who want to make the country a slave country, you know, everywhere. So by 58, you've got Lincoln beginning to articulate this position, and then in 59, he articulates a new vision of the American government, the idea that the government should not simply protect the property of the slave owners,

but rather should work for ordinary Americans, making sure they have equal access to resources and that they are not going to have to work for these elite enslavers in the future who are going to be taking over these states and concentrating wealth and power. 1860, Northerners elect him to the presidency. By 1863, he has signed the Emancipation Proclamation, ending the system of human enslavement. And by November of 1863, he has given the Gettys' address in which he calls for a new birth of freedom and the idea that Americans come together to protect the idea that government of the people, by the people, and for the people

shall not perish from the earth. So in nine years, you go from the elite and slavers get it all to we're going to have a new birth of freedom that creates a government that works for everybody. And at the time, the only people who could vote were white men. So if you look at that comparison to where we are today when we have modern media so people understand what's going on, much faster communication, more voices involved, more voters involved, it does not look as helpless and as hopeless to me as it does to many people. So as you look at that, whether it's the 1850s, you said the 1890s or the 1930s. What are the lessons or ingredients you think are necessary to push back against this and save democracy? What are the lessons you would take

for that that we should be applying today? In every one of those periods, what made the difference was that individuals made sure that their neighbors understood what was going on. That's why the media is so important. That's why meetings are so important. That's why protests are so important. because what you just said when we started that part of our conversation was that a lot of Americans seem not to care. In fact, they care very, very deeply. They just are not aware of what is happening. When people know what is happening, they are against it in huge numbers. You look, for example, at Project 2025, when people knew it was in Project 2025, a whopping 4% of Americans wanted it to be put into place. Now it's being put into place around us. People just aren't, As many people who need to be are not aware of what is happening. And the way you make them aware is just to make sure that everybody is talking about it, which I think is what people like you and I do. And in that case, we need leaders also who can meet that moment, right? Like, there is, like, we obviously, we need our version of Abraham Lincoln as well. We need someone

who can speak to the moment. You know, I think it's, it's not just be, you know, obviously you need smart people. You need brave people. We also need people, particularly in this media environment, who can communicate to solve that problem you're talking about, right? Like, that is, like, when you look, I guess I would say it this way, if you look back in the 2024 election, without getting into, like, tactics of political strategy or anything like that, one of the reasons that Trump was able to prevail is that he was able to dominate the information space, right, so that people did not know that what necessarily Democrats, what Kamala Harris wanted to do, or maybe did know what we thought Donald Trump wanted

to do because we couldn't get that out there. So, you know, I think, so we have seen, we need to inform people. We need leaders who can help us inform people, right? Yeah, I'm less worried about the leader thing as well than a lot of people are. You know, in 1857, very few people had heard of Abraham Lincoln. You know, he came out of nowhere, not because he was waiting in the wings so much as the people created him. He listened to what people were saying, and he put that. into an ideology that became one of the driving ideologies of American history and of the American psyche. There's somebody out there doing the same thing right now. It may be a name we know. It may not be a name we know. But that person is going to arrive or those people are going to arrive. And it worries me, the only thing it worries me a little bit is when people are right now saying, you know, X is my guy, is my person. That's who we're going to elect. Because we just don't know

who is going to come out of the woodwork and be the voice of the future. And one of the things that happened in the 50s, 1850s, 1890s, and the 1930s that is happening again now is a dramatic generational change, especially in the 1890s, that's from the 1880s into the 19 aughts. There's a generational change. And the new leaders in that era were people like Henry Cabot Lodge and Theodore Roosevelt or fighting Bob La Follett from Wisconsin or Albert Beveridge from Indiana,

there, they were people who, you know, weren't really on people's radar screens. They were watching, they were listening, but they really vault into importance when that generational shift happens. And you saw the same thing in the 1850s, like I say, and I think we're seeing the same thing now. We're seeing new voices,

and I don't necessarily mean young voices, although young usually goes along with that. And they're going to bring new ideas. Some are going to be good. Some of them are going to suck. That's just the way it's going to be. From that, we're going to get a whole new crop of leaders, and they will embrace a new America, which we need to have.

We need to change an awful lot of what we have lived with with the past 40 years for this country adequately to answer the 21st century. And it's extraordinary crises of things like climate change. So I'm actually optimistic about finding those leaders because the more we speak up, as individuals who are not involved in the political sphere, the more we'll create them. I think that it is a perfect place to end it. So many of the conversations we've had, particularly since January of this year, have felt on this podcast and elsewhere, it felt very dark.

This is one that was both illuminating and hopeful, and I'm very grateful for that. I know our audience will be very grateful for it. So thank you so much for joining us. This was fascinating. Thanks for having me. It was a pleasure. That's our show for today. today. Thanks to Heather Cox Richardson for joining, and John, John, and Tommy will be backing

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