Pod Save America - What Does it Mean to Be an American?

Episode Date: May 31, 2026

Jon sits down with our own Ben Rhodes to talk about how American leaders tell the story of who we are — and who they think we should be — through the speeches they give. The two go through the seminal speeches Ben selected for his new book "All We Say," discussing their power for good (Frederic Douglass on human rights) and evil (Alexander Stephenson on the "moral truth" of white supremacy), and their own memories of writing presidential addresses for Barack Obama when the stakes were highest.

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Just visit Simplysafe.com slash cricket. That's half off at Simplysave.com. crooked. There's no safe like simply safe. Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm John Favre. On today's show, my good friend and fellow speechwriter for Barack Obama, Ben Rhodes. America's 250th birthday has been on my mind a lot lately, especially since Donald Trump seems intent on making the country's semi-quincennial all about himself, his parties, his name on everything, his guests, and his version of the American story. But of course, there's another version of our story that resonates with,

at least half of us, likely more. At the very least, Americans have been engaged in an argument about what this country is and who belongs since we declared independence two and a half centuries ago. Ben has written an incredible, timely book about that argument. Truly, it's fantastic. I read the whole thing in about a day. You all know what a big reader I am these days. So that's saying something. The book is called All We Say, a History of the United States in 15 speeches. In it, Ben traces the history of America through some of the nation's most consequential speeches, from a long-forgotten speech from a Native American chief and Lincoln's second inaugural to I Have a Dream, and speeches from Barack Obama and even Donald Trump.

It's a beautiful book about the ways in which, in the words of our old boss, this union may never be perfect, but generation after generation shows it can always be perfected. Ben and I were psyched to have this conversation, both because we got to nerd out as former speechwriters and dig into what the two of us talk about when we're not in front of a mic, how those of us who don't love being governed by Donald Trump can win the argument about what this country is and where it needs to go, about how we close the gap between America's best ideals and our current fairly bleak reality.

It was a great conversation, and we'll get to it in a minute. But before we do, please consider becoming a Cricket Media subscriber, if you haven't already, so that you don't miss out on any of the great content we're putting out for our friends of the pod. subscribers get ad-free episodes of all your favorite podcasts, including this one. You also get our extra new episode of Pod Save America called Pod Save America Only Friends, other subscriber-only shows like Polarcoaster with Dan Pfeiffer, access to all of our excellent substack newsletters like Pod Save America OpenTabs,

and you get to feel good about supporting one of the few independent, proudly pro-democracy media outlets left in Trump's America. So head to Cricket.com slash friends and please subscribe. Let's get to it. Here's Ben Rhodes. What's up, Ben? John, this is the interview I was looking forward to since I finished my book. I have to tell you, honestly. I was going to say, I love when we have an excuse to pod together, especially this time,

because you wrote a book about speeches, which is perfect for the two of us. For people who don't know, I know a lot of you probably do, but Ben and I wrote speeches for six years together, sometimes quite literally together, like side by side with our laptops open until 3 a.m. But this is also a book about American identity and an argument over the American story that's been raging for 250 years, which has also become an obsession of mine as of late. But I want to start with something you wrote about the book, and you wrote that it's the third in a trilogy that started with your memoir, then your book about authoritarianism, and now this, and that finishing this one means you're ready to let go of your past identities as a White House staffer, foreign policy advisor, and speechwriter. Say more about that, why you're letting go. I actually really thought about this, John, because I wrote my memoir, which was a very kind of raw experience, right?

It was like I didn't digest it at all. I wrote that in a year that came out in 2018. Then I very much, my last book was in my kind of foreign policy, global politics, Pod Save the World, if you will, self in terms of traveling around and understanding what had happened in Russia and China and Hungary under Victor Orban. And I was literally, you know, using the experiences, contacts, networks I had from being in that world. And then this one is entirely, I wanted to go back into history because I had a sense that I could find a lot there, that you could understand this argument that we're having now by tracing it back from

the beginning. And frankly, my original conceit was Obama and Trump kind of encapsulate, represent two different opposing stories that we've had throughout our history and competition with each other. And I'm not an historian. And so the vehicle I knew that I would choose is speeches. And I found myself kind of returning to that core identity, that guy who showed up in the Obama campaign office when, you know, you were the chief speechwriter. You're my boss. I remember walking in from my think tank culture in D.C. And wow, my boss is wearing a t-shirt, you know, like this is a different vibe, you know.

He's wearing a t-shirt and he doesn't know shit about foreign policy. Good thing I'm here. Yeah. But I see this actually seriously to you, like, because, you know, you've been through this. You kind of don't want to go through life as like John Favreau or Ben Rhodes, comma, former Obama X, you know? Yeah.

And I kind of feel like I've mined it now. You know, like I've done, this is not a memoir at all, but like it drew deeply on all the things we did in speech writing. And so I felt like, but kind of more fundamentally and existentially too, I think I finally came to terms with how it all ended, you know, in the sense that Trump was this kind of rebuke of the inevitability of progress, right? of the arc of the moral universe bending towards justice, kind of on its own, if you will. And I think reliving all of American history kind of allowed me to situate our experience in a continuum where it's actually not that unusual

that this happened. Reconstruction was followed by segregation. Civil rights movement was followed by backlash. So for all those reasons, I really did internally, like you have to trick as a writer, and you are a writer, you know, you have to kind of tell yourself a story. And my story was, this is the third in a trilogy. It kind of completes both my various Obama identities and kind of, you know, is me coming to terms with how our chapter ended. And yeah, now I can move on. We'll see what

happens next. So I read the book. I started at Sunday night when we got back from Love at's wedding. And then I read I read most of it yesterday and last night. We're recording this on Tuesday. You're listening to it probably on Sunday. First of all, I absolutely fucking loved the book. It is incredible. Everyone should read it. I also, it did give me this sense of hope and also peace.

Like you say, you came to terms with it, sort of peace about the last 10 years and where it fits. Yes. Because you read, when you, it's the speeches you selected were specifically selected because they each tell a story about American identity and this argument over what America is that we've been having since the founding. And when you lay it all out like that,

along with the different characters, you really do get this sense that we have been here before and people in these moments have been able to, you know, speak and march and fight their way out of these moments. And I don't know. I don't think it's, it's not Pollyannish at all, but it's sort of like a hard-earned hope that you get from reading it. But I thought, I thought it's outstanding. You opened the book with, of all people, J.D. Vance and his speech last summer at Claremont about American identity, which listeners to this show and especially offline, know that I can't stop talking about.

Austin is nodding his head very knowingly right now. I think you and I had a few conversations about this about the J.D. Vance speech, which, when you were thinking about opening the book with it. What made you finally decide that Vance's speech was the way into a book about 250 years of American identity? So a prologue for a book is a fascinating thing because you kind of have to telegraph your argument. You know, the book starts in real time

with Benjamin Franklin, which we can get to. But I don't want to drop people in there. You know, I wanted to give people a sense of, kind of what the argument of the book is. And I always had in mind when I was literally selecting these speeches, which was an interesting process, and as I was writing chapter after chapter, that if you really distill it down, there are two stories of what American identity is, you know, with obviously their permutations. They're not all exactly the same, but I think you can simplify and say there is one story that is a nationality of inheritance. That, you know,

you can call it originalism, you can call it blood and soil nationalism. But essentially, this was a white Christian nation founded by a particular set of people with a particular set of beliefs. And now I'm, you know, literally quoting J.D. Vance. And it's the inheritor of kind of Western civilization. Sometimes that's West. and supremacy. And sure, other people live here of different races and ethnicities, but they kind of have to subordinate themselves to this original identity. And American exceptionalism is just a given. Like, we are exceptional because we're American. We are the city on a hill. We're in some ways God's chosen people. We can do whatever we want to the people in this country, whether they're Native Americans

or black people or immigrants. And we can do whatever we want to other countries, right? And again, I'm casting it negatively, but I frankly think that at a core, that that is a strain that runs through American history. And then the opposing story is one of progressive nationalism, that we've never lived up to the creed in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal. And that American history is a story of people trying to change the country for the better, trying to make a more perfect union, to use a phrase. And that's how you get the abolitionist movement and the suffrage movement and the, in the, in the, Civil Rights Movement and the labor rights movement and all these things. J.D. Vance comes along and decides to tell the first version of the story for me. Because that speech is literally, I mean, when I knew I was going to use it is when he said,

we are not a nation founded on a creed. And he name checks the Declaration of Independence and the idea that all men are created equal. He says, no, that is not American identity. we are a particular people from a particular place with a particular way of life. And he said the quiet part out loud. Now, he didn't say white, but, you know, what particular people, you know, do we think he's talking about? And he has this kind of logic way where, well, who could argue with us being a particular place and a particular people? Actually, I can argue with it because we were 13 states at the beginning on the northeast coast. We weren't, our geography is wildly different today.

The people in this country today don't look at anything like the people in those 13 states. And the way of life, I mean, walked down the street in my neighborhood in Venice. There's a ton of ways of life there, right? And so I actually think that JD did the service of framing the other story for me. And so I literally opened with it. You mentioned that and that other people have to be subordinate. to sort of this white Christian identity. And I've heard people say, and I've talked to people about this,

that J.D. Vance, when he spouts this, like, anti-immigrant, xenophobic rhetoric, is full of shit and doesn't really believe it and couldn't really believe it because his in-laws are immigrants from India. His wife is a first-generation American. But there is another possible explanation here that you touch on, which is this obsession Vance has, and he does it in the speech, and we've heard him do it, and he's like mocked for it in other times and other places, with the need for everyone to show gratitude,

particularly foreign-born American citizens, immigrants, that if you're here and we let you come here, then you need to show gratitude to the people who've been here the longest or to our ancestors or to like this way of life and this culture. And I do think that's how you reconcile, like, because if you ask J.D. Vancey would say, well, I'm for immigration. I'm for, you know, like a diverse country, that's fine. But his problem is that if you haven't, if you don't have seven generations of ancestors buried in Kentucky,

which he said at the Republican National Convention, then you don't get to complain about this country. I mean, he basically said that about Mamdani, too. Momdani had some like Fourth of July message where he was like, yeah, and then we got to continue to improve this nation and something very mild about perfecting or improving the nation. And J.D. Vance was like, how could he do that? that. We let him in here and blah, blah. It's like really fucking crazy. Yeah, if you believe that, because he said that you have to show gratitude in that speech. And I posed a question in the prolog, gratitude to whom? Yeah, who were we for what? Who were they supposed to? Who was everyone supposed to fake? Who are these people? Yeah. Because actually, immigration was a much bigger theme than I

actually expected it would be in this book. Because you keep bumping into that. And, you know, Benjamin Franklin, his father was an immigrant. He left religious persecution behind as well as seeking economic opportunity. And then you run through the other people in this book. Louis Brandeis was a Jewish immigrant who left anti-Semitism behind in Europe. Mary Lees, a populist, was a poor, came from a poor Irish family that fled, you know, the repression of the British, you know, um, uh, you know, obviously you get up to the 20th century. Interestingly, Dolores Huerta comes from a family, and this is something people don't think about enough, John. A part of her family weren't immigrants that border just got redrawn. Yeah. And brought them into the United States. Right.

There are a lot of brown people in this country that were here before a lot of white people. And we just, you know, expanded and redrew the border around places like, you know, New Mexico, for instance. And fundamentally, it comes down to the question of, do you believe that someone, Zoharamadani, for example, is as American as someone whose family's been here for seven generations? Right. I genuinely do. Yeah. And that's not a virtue signal. That's just a, how can citizenship not be equal?

Like, how can some people be more American than other people? Like, we are supposed to be a nation anchored in laws, the Constitution, and a creed, the Declaration of Independence, which suggests not that we should have open borders, which is how J.D. Vance kind of shorthands it. He says, well, if everybody who believes in the Declaration Independence is American, then we'd have billions of people. Don't we have to admit them all? No, we don't.

That's not what we're- That's not what I would say. We can have a border. We can seal that border at times for, you know, I mean, I don't necessarily agree with that, but we can by a matter of policy. But the people who are American are American and they're equally American. And frankly, the thing we should be grateful for is that we're a nation that is able to have all these different people come here and enrich this country.

I mean, how boring would this country be? was just comprised of people like J.D. Vance. You know, like, like I, I just, I think fundamentally, I felt myself, you know, because you kept encountering, you know, people didn't like the Irish when they came here. People didn't like Chinese people when they came here. Like, some people have never liked black people being here, even though they were brought here mostly against their will. Like, the people didn't like Jewish people when they came here. Like, and guess what? You've rolled the tape forward. Does anybody think that this nation is not better for having Chinese Americans and Jewish Americans and Irish Americans? No, I don't think even J.D. Vance would make that argument. So what are we really talking about here? And it's been said many times by many people, but that is what the core of American exceptionalism is all about, which is we can't, we can go live in Germany and live in Japan. We can't become German or become Japanese, but anyone can come to America and become American. And like, that's.

That is a unique, exceptional quality of America, and that is the experiment. I think we're also different because we were founded by people who immigrated here. We were founded not by the indigenous people here. And I think that does kind of create an additional legitimacy for the idea that if this is not a nation of indigenous Americans, then it is by definition. a nation of people who have chosen an identity. Yeah. And set up a government that could be, you know, flexible enough to absorb different people. You know, a lot of the speeches that spoke about the virtue of immigration, Frederick

Douglas, Louis Brandeis, they talked about the fact that the decision to come to America is, like, the first step in becoming American. Like, that's a strive. And, and again, there's an inherent. striving in that. You know, I want a better life. I want to be a part of something different. I want to be a part of this project. I want to sign up for this creed. And yeah, you have to go through the process. Again, not the JD-Vansing, we have to let everybody in. But that idea of striving self-improvement type people is kind of ingrained in American identity and is something to defend at a time when

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When you go to smalls.com slash crooked, that's 60% off your first order, plus free shipping and free treats for life when you hit to smalls.com slash crooked. You mentioned Benjamin Franklin, the first speech you opened the book with, of all the founders, you pick Franklin. and the speech is his closing argument for the Constitution. And then you bookend at the end of the book, Trump's second inaugural with Franklin's warning about despotism. What made Franklin sort of unlock the book for you

and why him among the founders? Yeah, so Franklin, and unlock is exactly the right word because I went through a really interesting process where I must have read, I don't know, couple hundred speeches. And how do you tell the story? And as you know, as a speechwriter, if you know the beginning of the story and have some idea at the end of the story, you're going to, it's going to make a lot easier to fit the pieces in. And I came across this Franklin speech that I had not really read before. It's a closing argument at the Constitutional

Convention. Franklin has chosen because he's the, old wise man. He's also the most famous American in the world. Yeah. And he's kind of the de facto host of the convention in Philadelphia. And he gives a speech that does not say a word about the Constitution itself. It's pretty remarkable. Like he doesn't talk about anything in it. The entire speech is about the virtue of compromise itself. And he essentially says when you get a bunch of people together to benefit from all of their wisdom, you're also assembling all of their different interests, all of their selfish interests, all their prejudices. You're getting the good and bad.

And out of that kind of assembly, you can't have some kind of perfect agreement. We have to compromise if we want a union. And to me, that, and he doesn't, he has rhetorical tricks, John, that are really interesting because he basically takes on infallibility and dogma, or the kind of antagonist in the speech. And he says, you know, and this is actually why we're not found. on a religion. Each religion thinks it's got the answers. And if we had that same mindset, then this place will never be a home for people that might not agree with exactly that version of things. And so inherent in the Constitution is compromise and imperfection.

Now, that compromise allowed the union to be made, but it also set in motion all of the conflict and competition that followed because we compromised about really big things. We essentially compromised about identity. There was still slavery. There were uncertain questions about immigration, you know, different states had different immigration policies. Obviously, women did not have rights of citizenship at that time. And so we kind of pushed those issues out. Franklin, very interestingly, the last public act he did, which is one of the first things he did after the Constitution because he didn't live very long, was petition Congress to abolish slavery. So he was living his own theory of the case, which is compromise, set up the union, and then work within the system to change it. Now, he also had this warning that I found very chilling, which is he said, this new government can only end in despotism as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government being incapable of any other. And that landed like a two by four today.

And I filed that away and I said, I think I might end the book with that line. And I do. And now, it helped that Trump got elected. That kind of, and that doesn't mean I think that that's happened fully. It's a moral warning that if we don't arrest this direction, that's where we could end up. Yeah, I mean, that Franklin speech basically shows that the conflict and the argument that we've been having for the last 250 years was like a function of the design of the government. Like it was it was it was preordained because of course if you're going to have a country where people of such different backgrounds come from different places to try to make a home and want to live in freedom. from, you know, what they escaped from in Europe, then you're going to have, the only government that's going to make that work is one where different people have a voice, different people with different opinions

who are going to be at war with each other or at least not, or be an argument with each other, right? Fight with each other. And it can't be any different than that, right? And so then you look through the whole 250 years, you're like, well, yeah, slavery, the civil war, everything. Like, of course we were going to have these arguments because that was the,

that was sort of the idea behind the government that they created? It was. And so the pieces fit in just to take the first, I broke the book into thirds. Each has five speeches for a certain period of American history. And so the first five are, okay, we set up this constitution. Then I have red jacket saying, wait a second, we're not in your constitution. Leave us alone. Then I have a woman named Maria Stewart, who's an abolitionist, a remarkable kind of penniless

woman who came out of nowhere and became a superstar speaker on the circuit in Boston, who says, wait a second, like black people deserve equal rights. She's an abolitionist and a feminist. Women need to be empowered. We need to be teaching black people and women the same way we teach white people and we need to claim our rights. Then I have Alexander Stevens, the vice president of Confederacy, saying, wait a second, no, no, this equality thing. We don't believe in that. White supremacy is the cornerstone of the Confederate Party. Federacy. He said that. I'm not projecting leftism onto him. That's what he said. And then Lincoln resolves it all in the second inaugural and says, you know, we are, we are an abolitionist nation. Like,

we fought this war to right the wrong in our constitution. And in the most radical sense ever spoken by an American president says essentially, if every drop of blood drawn by the lash must be paid for by a drop of blood drawn by the sword, essentially so let it be done. A president of United States saying, if we all have to die to atone for slavery, that'd be okay. I mean, imagine saying that today. So that's just in those five speeches, you see the tug of war, and then Lincoln tries to resolve it, and then it starts all over again. Right.

And, you know, and we've gone through the cycle of reconstruction to segregation to FDR, starts all over again. Civil rights movement to backlash to civil rights movement, to Obama, to Trump. And so we're just living different versions of the same argument. And I would argue in this book, speeches are actually the place where we have most prominently done that. Yes. You know, standing up in front of somebody as an activist or a politician and making your argument is different than writing a book or an op-ed or something. Because that's inherent in persuading people about who we are. I want to sort of dive into some of that

that you just mentioned. Alexander Stevens, right? So he's this, who I hadn't heard of, by the way, before this book, Vice President of the Confederacy. Fascinating character. He's a... Really interesting character.

Georgia politician who goes from wanting to avoid secession to then standing up in Savannah, Georgia in 1861, and delivering this speech, which like you said is just literally a case for white supremacy, that the superiority of whites over blacks is a, he says physical, philosophical, and moral truth. What I found fascinating about that is this is in 1861, even at the time slavery defenders were already learning to publicly talk in code states rights, economic way of life, northern

aggression. He just says the quiet part out loud. what did you make of that as a rhetorical and political strategy in the context of that time? So I found the speech and I was like, I got to do this because he says the quiet part out loud. And I think those are the best speeches. So the most interesting ones. And for each chapter, and I think you'll appreciate this as a speech writer, I kept in mind, what makes a speech unique and consequential? One, we had to understand the person who gave it. What is their whole life story that allowed them to get the speech? And then what is the the cause or movement that they're speaking to. Now, Alexander Stevens was against secession precisely because he believed, rightly, that slavery was going to be more easy to protect inside the union than outside of it. Right. So it wasn't a virtuous anti-scessionism. But after, you know, Georgia, his home state secedes, he just signs up. He says, okay, I'm going along with this. And he becomes a co-author of the Confederate Constitution, which is kind of a cut

pace of the American one, except it makes very clear that despite all the talk about state's rights, no state shall abolish slavery. So so much for states rights. And what's so interesting about that speech is, you know, he gave the kind of normal stuff about we're going to get rid of these tariffs and these things we don't like that the North imposes on us. but then he gets to slavery and white supremacy. And he doesn't defend it as a necessary evil. He doesn't say, well, we have to have this for our economy to work or, you know, we're going to have, we'll keep this for a period of time.

He turns white supremacy into like a progressive enlightenment discovery, philosophical, moral truth, as you quoted. he compares the discovery of the supremacy of the white race. He literally compares that to enlightenment discoveries of, you know, free markets and, you know, the way that the astronomy works, you know. And it seems bizarre to read now. But you see, he's trying to tell people, you're actually ennobled by believing that you're superior to black people. he's speaking to an audience that includes a lot of poor white people who don't own slaves who are probably going to have to go fight for slave power.

And he has to give them something to fight for. And so what he's giving them is not just that they can feel better than somebody else. That's a huge thing that he's giving them. But also that they're good. They're doing what's right. And he actually framed this is good for black people too. like they need to learn from us, you know. And I found it so interesting because we progressives sometimes can forget that what can

appear to be the most reactionary, ugly ideas, those people actually think that they're in their own way, quote unquote, progressive ideas and not in the terms of left, but in terms of like this is evolution in a positive sense. He even says in that speech that this discovery will spread around the world, that other countries are going to come to see the necessity of white supremacy. And I found that so interesting because the same technique that I admire in, like, FDR, pivoting to four freedoms to give the nation a bigger purpose. Alexander Stevens could do this for white supremacy.

Now, of course, after they got their ass kicked in the war, he repackaged it as states' rights and lost cause and all the rest of it and was rehabilitated. And it works. re-elected to Congress. And it worked, you know, so yeah. I know. That was the other thing I thought about from that speech is, and reading, you close the book with Trump's second inaugural. And I had forgotten he did this probably because I was like half blacked out when Trump was giving it because I couldn't believe we were going through it again. But Trump was like, and today's Martin Luther King Day. And I have a dream too. And like this ability and tendency for reactionary,

politicians and reactionary forces to use rhetoric to repackage really unpleasant, unpopular ideas into ideas that are more broadly popular and acceptable to the rest of the country and that sort of use American symbolism and American culture and and the founding documents and principles to kind of repackage and hide their really. odious ideas. And that has been, you know, that you can draw a through line right from Alexander Stevens right through to Donald Trump. And somehow that works. Yeah, it was interesting that Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King are both in this book. And both of them have been completely kind of appropriated by conservatives in this country. Frederick Douglass did talk a lot

in language that we might, and by the way, Barack Obama did too. Yeah. Frederick Douglass did talk a lot about taking responsibility and the need for black people to kind of self-empower. Now, he also talked a lot about the need to have a government that allows them to do that, that they cannot do that if they are kept down systems of segregation or systems where they can't own property or they can't get an education. That part is left out. You know, King did talk about the fact that we want to live in a nation where you're not just. judged by the color of your skin, by the content of your character. But in order to get to that kind of nation, you need a government that keeps its promissory note, as he said in the I of

dream speech, that we're going to treat black people equally. We're going to allow them to be in a nation where they're judged by the content of their character. Obama got criticized sometimes for practicing quote-of-quote responsibility politics, too, when he talked about, you know, the need for the black community to value education. But it was always coupled with having a government that provided opportunity equally to people. And so it shows you how the two stories that talked about are in competition, they draw from each other.

So the more reactionary story needs to take the heroes of the progressive story and kind of pull them into their narrative. Reagan loved to cite King and the content of your character, not the color of your skin, while leaving out those parts.

And I think that you have to keep an eye on that because if you go back and actually experience these people in their times, they were radicals. Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King were absolutely radical figures, like fringe figures at times, who have now been kind of repackaged as people that were like welcomed at the time. And that was not the case. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Life is a lot sometimes. regardless of what's keeping you up at night or leaving you overwhelmed, it's easy to feel like you have to figure it out on your own. But you don't have to face these challenges alone.

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Sign up and get 10% off at BetterHelp.com slash PSA. That's betterhelp.com slash PSA. But also, the flip side of what Stevens did, the activist. do in a way as well. And that like one theme that comes through in the rhetoric from all the activists in the book is, and you know, and you write that Frederick Douglass, instead of rejecting American rhetoric, claimed it as his own. So they don't reject the language and symbolism of the dominant culture that's oppressing them. They embrace it as a way to highlight the gap between ideals and reality. And, you know, this is different. from what you hear from some activist today

about America being inherently racist or imperialist. And I think we both experienced this with Obama did that all the time. But it was happening with Frederick Douglass and King with the promissory note, right? Is that I didn't, I came here to cash because this is what the American Declaration says and we need to live up to that.

And I worship the American Declaration. and Frederick Douglass was like that too. And so they are sort of radical figures in their beliefs, but their rhetoric is very much targeted to a much broader population than just activists. That's right. We progressives do the same thing that I just said the reactionaries do. We claim parts of the other story as well. Douglas had a big falling out with William Lloyd Garrison,

the famous abolitionist who helped propel Douglas' career because Garrison rejected the Constitution because he said that was written by a bunch of slave owners. He was kind of a post-2020, like let's just, you know, tear the whole thing down. And Douglas said, no, no, no. When I look at the Constitution, I see a document that rejects slavery. That's the part of the Constitution I'm looking at. And I can make that work for me. I want to stay inside of this system and I want to make the Constitution my own. You know, King, the promissory note was on the Declaration of Independence. You said all men are created equal, and you've never lived up to that. And actually, frankly, almost every activist in this book,

and in fact, everyone uses the Declaration of Independence to make their case that they want to close the gap between the reality in that document. Which, by the way, is why it has fallen out of favor with J.D. Vance and some of the National Conservatives today, because the Declaration is a fucking problem for them. It's a big problem. And now, what if those activists had said, that document was written by a white slave owner. Right. You know? Right.

So, like, I can't use that rhetoric, you know? And I think there's a lesson in that for today, you know, which is if you want to persuade people and if you want to advance rights in this country, you actually have to embrace the whole story. Like, even the parts we don't like. Maybe I'm not saying you embrace Alexander Stevens' worldview, but you're embracing the fact that this country was. founded by flawed people that did, in some cases, terrible things, certainly to black people

and to Native Americans, but they left enough of a foundation that we can work with. You know, like, and I mean, the title of the book is taken from Martin Luther King's speech the night before he died. All we say to America is be true to what you said on paper. Like, that's like almost his last words, you know. Yeah. And I think that's important. Obama would always do that too. and we should talk about the race speech, but it's about just like individual people contain

complexity, so does America. Nobody's perfect. How do you draw out the better and build a message and a story and a speech from that? Lincoln has a line that you quote in that chapter on the second inaugural. And the line is, if we were situated as they are, we should act and feel as they do. And if they were situated as we are, they should act and feel as we do. and we never ought to lose sight of this fact. And Obama does something similar in the race speech,

clearly calls out structural systemic racism, but then shows an understanding of and even an empathy towards the white resentment and backlash. And there is this pattern of the speakers you chose in the book, both activists and politicians, probably especially the politicians, of working especially hard to show that they understand and maybe empathize with their opponents because their larger project is to preserve this union and this country, which is much harder. It's much harder work than just being able to either secede from the country or or, you know, try to, you know, subjugate some other group, like trying to

keep everyone together, even when the people that you're trying to win support from, don't believe you should have the rights that you have? That's fucking hard. I was stunned to find myself coming away from this admiring Lincoln even more. Yeah, me too. But because he goes through this torturous process, trying to figure out the meaning of it all. And he goes through a torturous process with slavery. You know, first, you know, he wants to restrict its spread. Then he wants to preserve the union without messing with it. Then he kind of, out of wartime necessity, turns to abolition. And it's only later in the war that he kind of fully embraces abolition as the cause of the war, not just the preservation of the union. He's moving in the direction of Douglas, the activist and abolitionists.

Douglas was becoming more pragmatic, though. He was saying he used to castigate Lincoln. Then he was like, wait a second, I think Lincoln's moving in the right direction. I'm going to kind of meet him there. And so he starts to talk to Lincoln. He starts to work with Lincoln. He gets up and Lincoln gives that second inaugural address. He's about to win the war. He does not talk about that. He doesn't say, like, we've won these great battlefield victories. He does not talk down the South.

But he does give an absolutely unapologetic and almost religious case for abolition as the second founding of the United States. But the way he says. saying it. The way he frames it is that is going to be good for the South and the North. This is redemption, you know, that we're finding. We have this opportunity to start over having cleansed ourselves of this sin. And there's this kind of insane moment. Blames the North as well as the South, right? Like a real like we were, I know that we're fighting you right now and you're going to lose, didn't say it, but we are all complicit in what has happened over the last however many years. He calls it repeatedly American slavery, right? Not southern slavery. Because it's like North profited off

of it, too, you know? Yeah. And there's this great scene where that night he's at the White House and he's greeting a receiving line and Douglas tries to get the receiving line to see him and gets booted out. And someone tells Lincoln, Lincoln says, well, let Douglas in. And Douglas comes in. He stands in this line and he reaches the front and he shakes Abraham Lincoln's hand. And Lincoln says, what did you think of the speech? And Douglas says, I'll write you a letter is like a thousand people here. And he said, no, no, no, no. I'm more interested in what you think of this speech than anybody else. And Douglas just looks at him and says, it was a sacred effort. And I read that and I was like, all right, whatever you think about this country, that happened. A former slave

A former slave meets with the president. In the White House, meets with Abraham Lincoln and has that conversation because they both evolved. They both changed. You know, Douglas became more pragmatic. Lincoln became more radical. And Lincoln could only do that because he was able to inhabit. He could look at the world through Douglas's eyes and through a Southerner's eyes. And that was Obama.

I mean, we should talk about the race speech. I'll tell you, I originally ended the book with the Selma speech. Yeah, let's get into that. Obama's favorite, which is a good triumphalist, you know, peroration. And after Trump is elected, you know, me and my editor were talking, we're like, well, that's probably not the right note to end on. And so I just like, I got to end with Trump. And actually, I went back to read the race speech again, and it was more relevant today

than it was even in 2008 when he gave it. Yeah. Because he is able to, he's saying, well, you know, he's doing what you're talking about, which is inhabiting through his grandmother and Reverend Wright and through the diagnoses of the white working class and the black working class, he's saying we all encompass these complexities. And until we can look at the world through each other's eyes,

we're never going to move forward. And that's the same thing Lincoln was saying. Yep. It's funny because I was reading that chapter and just reading the whole book, sort of having flashbacks to the night when I first talked to Obama about the race speech and what he wanted to say in that. And he laid out a lot of the thesis of your book, which is that these competing arguments that we've been having in this country since the founding.

And at the very beginning was slavery and race that we've been having to grapple with. And you know, you write in the book how, you know, I ended up doing a draft and have the have the beginning in the end, and then Obama basically just does track changes and writes like an entire speech in the middle of the speech and sends it back. Because I think he had had that in his mind for a very long time. Like he was able to, you know, analyze and talk about the Reverend Wright controversy. But if you had lifted the Reverend Wright controversy out, all of the other themes and things that he says in that speech were definitely running through his mind for a very long time because they were themes throughout history.

That's exactly right. And as you should know, you were the speechwriter on it. And by the way, I don't short trip. I mean, that beginning and end got him to that middle, right? Sometimes that's the speechwriter's job to get the principle to where he can have that outpouring of track changes. But I think what I understood better today, both because of what's happened and from writing the book, is, first of all, Reverend Wright was a more interesting character to me today. In 2008, he was just like a pain in the ass. Like, why is this guy saying these crazy shit that's going to mess up our campaign? But actually, having written this book and then having lived the post-Obama experience, Reverend Wright emerges out of the black church tradition of the

Jeremiah, which is a speech that is intended to call out a nation's sins. So what he was doing is the same thing that Frederick Douglass and Maria Stewart and all the people in that tradition did in this book, King did it often too. And by the way, some of what Reverend Wright said, ages pretty well given some of the things Trump's done. Now, that said, Obama fused the activist and politician in himself. And then when I look at the two key parts of that speech

that he wrote in the middle, one is the famous part where he's like, I can no more disown Reverend Wright than I can disown my white grandmother, a woman who raised me, you know, who do anything for me, but I heard her say horrible things. I'm not saying it as elegantly seated. What he's saying there on an individual level is, hey, we all, everybody in our families is like this. Like, you know, you can love somebody and think they're good person and not cancel them because, you know, they said something you disagree with, whether it's Reverend Wright or your grandmother who's white. And then he goes into the racial stalemate, as he calls it,

and he describes black structural inequality in ways I don't think I'd ever heard. I mean, maybe Jesse Jackson, but unflinchingly. Unsparingly. You know, redlining, education gap, income gap. But then he talks like about the white working class more effectively than J.D. Vance or Donald Trump. The line where he says, they don't feel particularly. privileged by their race is an incredibly powerful line, that these are people whose jobs have been shipped overseas, that these are people who had to bust their kids, which is a hassle across town

because of some civil rights requirement, which, again, I think is worth doing, but it's their obligation. These are people who are told that they're worried about crime, they're racist, you know. These are his white grandmother, you know, and that ability to say, like, none of this is going to work. American identity, American politics, unless we can have that ability to look at the world through each other's eyes. I mean, that to me was the magic of that, the alchemy of that speech. Pod Save America is brought to by Chime. Chime is changing the way people bank. They offer high rewarding, fee-free banking built for you. They're not like traditional old banks that charge you overdraft and monthly fees. They have thousands of fee-free ATMs, because why would you pay to get your

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only takes a few minutes to sign up. Chime is a fintech, not a bank banking services for my pay and chime card provided by Chim's bank partners. Optional products and services may have fees or charges, stated annual percentage yield and cash back for Chime Prime only. No minimum balance required checking accounts ranking based on a JD Power survey published October 20th, 2020. For more information on APY rates, my pay, spot me, and travel perks, go to chime.com slash disclosures. People look back now, and whenever Obama comes up in the discourse, and they're like, well, he's, you know, he was progressive on, you know, the left liked him because he was opposed to the war

in Iraq, but he was much more moderate on other policies. But the race speech to me shows the core of what he, you. was always about, and it is the thread that runs through a lot of these politicians and activists in your book, which is like he was very, he was more radical in his diagnosis of the problem, right, in saying, in talking about structural inequality and racism and in history, how history has led us here and the fact that, I mean, he does a speech about his pastor that said controversial things, and he opens it by talking about slavery and the Constitution, right? Like, it goes pretty deep.

But to the extent that he's perceived as moderate, it's exactly what he did about white resentment, which is like, yeah, there's structural racism and inequality where black people in this country have been subjugated since its founding. And yet, that doesn't mean that resentment that white people have is unfounded, wrong, bad, evil. I still want to correct the structural inequality and correct the racism. But also if I want to actually fix that, I have to earn the support of the people who have that resentment as opposed to just telling them they are bad. Yeah, because you don't want to become a mirror image of J.D. Vance, right? Like, we don't like it when J.D. Vance shows up and says, you can't have your way of life. You have to live the way I say. showing up and telling someone, your identity is bad, you know, because you come from this heritage or, you know, because sometimes you might have had certain thoughts, you know, like, you have to bring those people along. I mean, you and I've talked about this a lot of the years. What Obama would say to people is, come out with your hands up and acknowledge, you know, your racism. He would say, this country is so great that we've been able to change over time. And we've been able

to write wrongs and extend rights and advance opportunities. And actually, the thing that's holding us back now is the way in which powerful forces, and here's where he's like Trump, they're these elites that divide us against each other. They don't want, you know, working class solidarity among black and white people because then we might actually fix the economy and have universal health care and things that actually make people's lives better. They're the ones, you know, kind of creating these divisions. But, you know, he tried to channel that towards progress.

It was inherently incremental. You know, there's no one you can waive that can redress every inequality. You have to tackle it problem by problem. But if you're changing, and this is why I think speeches are relevant and matter and need to kind of come back, if you are telling that story and building that coalition and kind of speaking it into action, that. That's how you keep moving in the right direction. And we kind of get derailed when we lose, I mean, I'm using the story metaphor a lot here, when we kind of lose the plot, you know? And our politics on the left or center left becomes about either how bad they are,

or it becomes kind of small ball, like, well, we need these ACA subsidies or we need, you know, more affordable housing, important things that I agree with. But what's the story? Like what is it, what do we, who are we? You know, what is it American? and how can we build a big enough coalition that we can overcome these things that are in our way? And by the way, when he condemns Reverend Wright in that speech,

he doesn't condemn the anger that Wright expresses over what he and other black Americans have been through. What he condemns is Wright's inability to see that we have the possibility to change. And like that's actually what we're, bothers him most about what Reverend Wright said, not the actual analysis of the situation or the incendiary language or any of that. It's just the fundamental belief that, or what he expressed was that like somehow America can't change. And I think that is notable. It also made me think, as you were just talking, that I always get annoyed with the, like these days, it's like very easy

for Democratic politicians to pick on the Michelle Obama, when they go low, we go high line, because they think it's Michelle Obama saying, Republicans can kick the shit out of us, and we have to just be nice, and that's not what it ever, that's not what it meant. And what it meant is what you were just saying about, like, we can't be like J.D. Vance and Alexander Stevens

and these reactionaries who say that one group is better and the other group. One group is good. One group is bad. It's a contest between good and evil, because that's not the vision of America that the founders had in mind. And it's a harder, this work is harder, right, to like take a country of 330 million people of like all different backgrounds and all different biases and warring factions all through the years and say, all right, let's somehow, like, hold it all together because that's the whole, like, that is a tougher project than the other project, which is to just tear it down and try to subjugate people. Yeah. I mean, if you're a reactionary rooted in grievance and nostalgia,

you're inherently going to win the go low fight. Yes. Right? Because what we're trying to do is play for something bigger. Douglas and King, the Douglas speech, I love this speech. He gave it during Reconstruction, and it's a speech that's really about multiracial democracy, but it's a speech in defense of Chinese immigrants. like probably the probably polled you know if we had a polar coaster episode in 1867 uh the advice would be like please do not go there um it was wildly unpopular but essentially these chinese

immigrants were being incredibly mistreated uh they were kind of the new slaves you know even though they weren't total servitude and douglas is saying if i believe in multiracial democracy i have to stand up for the rights of these people too um and he gives a beautiful going high speech about that now you could say, well, Douglas failed. There's a Chinese exclusion act that was passed shortly after banning Chinese people from coming in this country for decades. Did he fail? Because look around California today. How many Chinese Americans and Asian Americans do you see? Maybe because he went high and he went big. Maybe he won in the end. You know, King, same thing. Like, King gives a speech and it was interesting reliving the story of that speech. It's a pretty good speech. He did promissory note. He's got a lot

a good rhetoric. He did not have the dream in there. He ad libbed the whole dream sequence. Well, this was just like a speechwriter nerding out thing, but I had never heard that King's staff, someone on his staff who was helping with the speech was like, don't say, don't talk about your dream, whatever you do, because it's too cliche. And then King just gives the speech and does it. So first of all, I'm so glad we're talking about this because it was such a speechwriter thing. They had not really worked on the speech as much as they should have because they were super busy. Everybody thinks, you know, if you have big speech, you work on it forever. Yeah.

They were huddled in the Willard Hotel, like the night before the March. And they're literally writing the speech. And this guy's like, whatever you do, Martin, like, just don't tell him about that dream. It's cliche, you know. So they leave it out. He stays up. They finish the draft of speech. It's done.

They distribute it to the press and everything. And King's sitting there on the dais. And he's, and you can kind of see him in the footage. He's kind of still fiddling with his speech. And then he gets up there. and he gives the speech and it's good. And he gets this moment and he kind of stops, kind of like Obama did before he's saying Amazing Grace.

He kind of stops and pauses. And if I had to guess, he's sitting there, he's thinking, I'm never going to speak to a crowd this big again. The whole country's watching on TV. Most white people have never seen a black person deliver a whole speech before. These people watching, some of them go back to the South and get their ass beat in,

I need to give them something more. I need to give them something else. Now, the dream sequence he'd used before, by the way, was not nearly as good. It was okay. It was good, but it was not the evocative language that he ended up using.

And he goes so high, right? Like every image that he uses is black and white coming together, black children and white children and a nation where you're judged not by the color of your skin and the content of your character. He's giving the nation a sense of purpose, right?

And he's, you know, he's doing that because he's trying to affect John F. Kennedy to have a more ambitious civil rights bill. But also intangibly, in the same way that maybe Douglas changed America over time, it's kind of hard to argue with King's dream. You know, he went so big that even today, Donald Trump has to be like, yeah, I have a dream too. You know, like, and I think we, let's not lose that. Like, it's not about just going high. It's not about going big, like a big vision for this country.

Well, I was thinking about that. And one thing that connects all these speeches that go big or how. high or whatever you want to say is this like deeply moral language that I as I was reading the book realized like fuck we don't have that anymore like we don't hear that anymore right it's not like they are trying to win arguments through logic and reason alone that a lot of these speakers from king to Douglas to Dolores Swerta to everyone you have in the book that is not a reactionary and actually a lot of the reactionaries too they use a moral language that is both

it's embedded in the founding documents, but even deeper than that, there's a lot of religious language and in a way that I hadn't expected, not in the way that the Christian right uses religion today, because a lot of the people on the progressive side who use this religious language

aren't even religious themselves. You mentioned that Abraham Lincoln wasn't a big fan of organized religion, but again, you know, Frederick Dr. Douglas calls his second inaugural sacred, and he reaches for this sort of religious imagery, and it happens all the way through King and all the way through all of these figures in the book. And I wonder what you thought about that. I know you're not like a deeply religious person. I'm not a deeply like organized religious person, but it was hard to not notice that each of these speeches, especially from a left that has become fairly secular,

even some of the most radical activists and abolitionists and progressive presidents throughout history have sort of like tried to ground their argument in something in this higher power. Yeah, I mean, and there's like, look, there's some interesting particularities like, you know, churches and faiths were often party to movements, right? Right, right. But also just the language is religious, but it's also just moral. You know, Dolores Swerta, her speech, she marches from Delano, California, all the way to Sacramento with the farm workers and Cesar Chavez, who, you know, is obviously a problematic figure. Good thing you went with Dolores, Werta.

I went with Dolores, yeah. You didn't know at the time, but that was a... Yeah, yeah, I'd, yeah. Ostensibly, she's there to advocate for farm worker union rights, you know, like we wanted to have the right to collective bargaining and we want, you know, longer breaks and we want health care and all these things. But the speech is like, we are here. We embody our needs for you. You know, like it's a very visceral activist language that felt very contemporary. It was basically all lives matter kind of language, like our lives matter. Like we are here. You have to see us, you know. And I think that some of it is, yes, religion is kind of in some ways the simplest way. And I heard, you know, Reverend Warnock on recently, and he talks a bit about this. Like religion, is obviously, and James Tala Rico is doing this now, religion is a quick way into morality. But I also think there are things you can draw from religious traditions. Like Obama used to, Obama would always say, you know, a core of his message at the beginning was, I am my brother's keeper,

I am my sister's keeper. That's a religious idea, but it's also a secular idea. Yes. Right. Well, that's what's most interesting is the religious language that a lot of these speakers use has, has, has, it could be very secular. Like, you don't need to believe in any specific faith to, to, to, has, absolutely, has secular meaning. And I think that's the language. You used to have this joke, you know, I think I can tell it about kind of democratic consultant speech, you know, we want to put the middle class at the middle of our priorities.

Right. And the horrifying thing about living to the last decade is actually that we want to build an economy from the bottom up and the middle out, you know, there's no morality in that. Nope. There's no purpose in that. Nope. There's no sense that I want to care for my neighbor. or that I have a stake in this country and its success,

or that I want my life to have a meaning bigger than even what I do every day. I belong to a whole that matters, you know, the Kennedy language about ripples of hope, right? Or I'm not free unless everybody's free. You know, like, I think that what's been missing in democratic politics since Obama, and this isn't just like flacking for Obama, It's, I think, is, you know, we haven't had necessarily great speakers or we've gotten consultant speak or, frankly, social media is kind of disincentivized this kind of speaking. But I think people are ready for it now.

I think, like, life is pretty fucked in this country right now. Yeah. Rampant inequality, wars. AI's coming for jobs. Like, your kids are on screens and friends with chat bots or something. Like, they want someone to come along and say, there's something bigger that we need to be about, that we need to care for our neighbor. concepts of fairness and dignity, you know, that are, dignity is a very religious concept,

that there's value in human life, which is why what ICE is doing is wrong, you know. I think that kind of language, whoever can harness that and capture that, I think that would be very useful in a 2028 presidential candidacy. And I'm not saying that, like, ideology isn't important here and policy isn't important, But like, when you say, even when you say Medicare for all or abolish ICE, even if you believe those things, talking about them in that way is not the most powerful way to talk about them. Like slogans about slogans to signal that you exist on a certain area of the political spectrum is fine for, you know, signaling to certain in-groups and other people paying close attention

to politics, that that's where you're. you are fine. I'm not saying that's bad. I'm just saying it is not sufficient anymore. And it is evidence that we are missing that that bigger moral story about who we are and where we need to go that you see throughout American history that you've chronicled in this book. And I just don't, I have not heard anyone tell that story or even attempt to, which is why I'm still like. There was an interesting moment. Do you remember Bernie in, I think, his last campaign, he used to do this thing at rallies.

He started to do where he'd say, I want you to look at the person next to you. Yes. And what this campaign is about is I want you to care about that person as much as you care about yourself. Yep. And Medicare for All flows from that. Of course. Yeah, absolutely. So what a good politician does is absolutely the policy and ideology matters.

So this is not just about giving airy, fairy speeches, but if you ground it in something, you anchor in a kind of moral language and a story about America and what American identity means. It should follow naturally. Well, if you care about the person next to you as much as care about yourself, you want them to have health care too, you know? Yeah. And that's, I think, the piece that's been missing to some extent. So you end the book with Trump's second inaugural.

And so I think you said originally it was probably going to be what Pat Buchanan's 1992 speech and then Obama's Selma speech and then instead you did Obama race and then end with Trump's second inaugural. And, you know, we've talked about how in the sweep of history, you start realizing that the transition from Obama to Trump is more natural than it may have seemed at the time because we've always had these backlashes. And that is true. I will say, after reading your whole book and then getting to Trump, his second inaugural and his presidency feel like even more of a departure, even more un-American than even Stephen's white supremacy speech or you have Mary Reese's sort of xenophobic populism or even Pat Buchanan who you talk about.

And I think it's the, because it's not just the xenophobia. It's not just like the issues of race that we're dealing with Trump again. It is the dictatorial quality of Trump's rhetoric and the actions really stand out even from all the other reactionaries in the book. And I don't know if that struck you too, but I was like, I read it and I was more like, oh, we are fucked.

That is absolutely 100% on point in what I would say because look, there's some things that make a lot of sense if you look at history, the kind of populist grievance. of the white working class, kind of paranoid America first isolationism, periodic spasms of xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment. There's a lot of currents of running to Trump. Where he is a departure, Alexander Stevens, that was a speech. They had just had a process. Now, obviously, Lincoln thought it was illegal, but they voted to secede. They wrote a constitution,

and he's giving a speech defending the legal framework for what they did. You know, I mean, I, So weirdly, like the Confederacy, like, tried to have a veneer of process. Trump in that speech says, I think the most chilling line, right, is I was saved by God to make America great again. And everything is I. Everything is like, like, Reagan would never have said that, you know. And I think the extremity, the departure. No leader in American history has said that, not even the George Wallace's, not like none of them. Nope, nope.

And he basically says, like, your job is done. You voted for me. Story's over. I won. And I'm taking custody of this country and its story. And you're right. The extremity is not just the, it's not the racism and the xenophobia and the, you know, unleashed capitalized, all these things.

It's the dictatorial. It's the idea that I'm not playing by Franklin's rulebook, you know? I don't need to follow the law. I can do whatever I want. That's the departure. And that is a departure. Like that's the radicalism of Trump is not in the underlying xenophobia or populism. It's in the putting that in service of someone who believes not in the constitutional framework within which we have this competitionist stories.

Like I welcome a world, a future in which J.D. Vance plays by the rules and gives versions of his Claremont speeches and we debate him. Yep. Like that's healthy. That's good. Yep. Like, and I welcome other people. disagreeing with me and agreeing with J.D. Vance. I don't have all the answers. Shit. I'm not even close. What I do insist on is that we're still dealing within the compromise

that Franklin and his buddies outlined. And that in his rhetoric and in his actions, Trump has departed from that. And I think that's why this is an actual emergency. Yes, it's a backlash, just like there was a backlash to reconstruction, just like there was a backlash of the rights movement. But this is someone saying, like, even the segregationists. you know, we're processed people, you know, states' rights and these laws and we'll, you know, we're going to try to get people on the Supreme Court and do this. Like Trump is just saying none of this applies to me. And that's the message in his rhetoric. Yeah. And we can leave it here. Maybe you can react to this. And then I don't bring it up because I actually do think that we're

fucked. But I think that if we are trying to tell a story about where we go from here and, continue having this argument in a way where we actually win the argument. Like, that's what we have. We have to figure out that, what Trump represents and what he's telling people. And I don't say that to be like to refight the 2024 battle about like, oh, Kamala should call him a fascist and we should talk more about democracy. And because obviously, like, the words have all been wrong, not just from Kamala, but from everyone. Like, we have not been, like, just saying that Trump is a dangerous fascist clearly has not worked. but what is it about him and what he's doing and this departure from the rest of American history

that is still appealing to a big part of the country and what is the argument to that part of the country to say that like this is like Lincoln did for to the south like this is bad for all of us it's bad for you it's bad for us it's bad for the whole project and we have to find a way out of this together. I think you see Aosov doing this a bit in the sense where it's not just about corruption. What he's saying is if someone like Trump and his cronies, and actually I start

the section on the speech on Trump with the tableau of all those oligarchs at stage for a reason, if there are a small number of people that are just exempted entirely from the rules, you're going to get screwed. Like not only is that fundamentally wrong and

an American, it also leads to outcomes where you're fucked because they're not going to look at, they're going to loot this country. They're not going to do anything for the common good. They're not going to do anything to care for the neighbor. They're not going to care about the person next to them. And so I think that that, we have to not have the separation of the democracy message

and the kind of economic message because they're connected. Because if some guy says, I was saved by God to save this country and the laws don't apply to me, well, he's probably going to build a ballroom and steal a bunch of money. and set up a slush fund for his friends and leverage American farm policy to make billions in crypto and launched crazy wars and people are making money off of insider trading while you pay higher prices. So I think the people that can tell a story that draws those connections between the radicalism

of Trump and the outcomes in people's lives, I think that's probably, you know, I don't claim to have the exact formulation, but that's the space. And you see Aasov circling it, you see Warnock circling it, Chris Murphy's circling it. AOC is definitely circling it. I think the notably younger Democrats, by the way, are figuring this out. Yeah. Ben, I could talk to you for another couple hours about all this book. I have all these other questions. We don't have to make a big exchange. Just curious, like, you read them, what was your favorite speech? Oh, wow. I mean, it sounds, it's like an answer that so many people have given in the

past, but I think like you, I came to appreciate Lincoln's second inaugural. Totally agree. In like a way that I just had never. Like I remember when people said that, I would always be like, yeah, it's a pretty good speech, but I didn't really get why everyone loved it so much. And your chapter on it and the story behind it has brought me around to how both radical and hopeful and and with so much humility, he delivers that speech at that time. So, yeah.

Yeah, totally agree. And pretty crazy, right, that the most radical speech ever was in 1865. It just goes to show, you know. History moves in different directions. Sure does. Everyone go by the book, seriously. I know I know we say this when we have people on who buy books and Ben's a crooked co-host, but it is, this book will stay with me for a long time, and I will go back to it many times.

And it was like such a bomb from reading the news because it really is why I wrote it. It's just a real, like, if you care about the country and you care about politics and you're paying attention to politics, but you want to feel something deeper and more hopeful than you see every day, go read, always say. It's a fantastic book. Thanks, John. All right. Take care, buddy. Podsave America is a crooked media production. Our show is produced by Austin Fisher, Saul Rubin, McKenna Roberts, and Ferris Safari with Reed Juerlin, Elijah Cohn, and Adrian Hill. Our team includes Matt DeGroote, Ben Heffcote, Jordan Cantor, Charlotte Landis, Carol Pellevieve, David Tolls, Mia Kellman, Ryan Young, and Naomi Single. Our staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.