The Daily Beast Podcast - Republicans Are Getting Really ‘Sick’ of Trump’s ‘Bitching’

Episode Date: May 31, 2022

Is former President Donald Trump’s hold on his Republican base waning? Vice’s Senior Political Reporter Cameron Joseph thinks so. “Trump is slipping. [He] doesn’t have the grip over the GOP that he once did,” Joseph tells Molly Jong-Fast in this episode of The New Abnormal. Later on this episode, historian Jon Meacham, who is host of the new “Reflections of History” podcast gives Molly a preview of some of the juicy tid-bits from history he covers on his show, like how NATO was an unpopular opinion when it began and that New York Times’ Sunday magazine passed on publishing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s letter from Birmingham jail. Oh, yeah, Meacham also happens to be an unofficial adviser of President Biden and Molly does not let the interview end without pressing him on that. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Molly Zhang Fast, no relationship to Kim Jong-un. I'm a left-wing pundit and a writer at the Atlantic Invo. And I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy and current cable news conscientious objector. And I'm producer Jesse Cannon, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart, conversations with the wisest and funniest and funniest people in science and media and politics that help make what's happening today clearer. Our world has been turned upside down. And on the new abnormal, we'll talk about the people who got us into this mess and how we'll hopefully get ourselves out of it. What an excellent show we have today. Cameron Joseph, who's a senior reporter at Vice News, is going to talk to us all about what's going on with great replacement theory and all the kooky stuff happening in the right right now.

Then we'll talk to his story and John Meacham about his new podcast, reflections of history, as well as some insight on what he tells President Biden as an informal advisor. But first, let's have some fun. Andy. Molly? The town of Yuvalde only spends 40% of its budget on policing. Had it spent 50 or 60% perhaps the police would not have waited 78 minutes to go into the school discuss. Yeah, I mean, it's very clear that 40% of the budget doesn't cut it. military-grade weapons don't cut it. Getting those cool camo uniforms doesn't cut it. We have to do more.

We have to give, they probably need drones. Right, they definitely need drones. I'm sure they have drones. They probably do have drones. Right. I mean, what's amazing to me was every day with this story, this Yuvaldi story, every day it gets worse. So this weekend we learned that it was 78 minutes.

Sunday we learned that one of the kids bled out. We're waiting for the police to do something. It's incredibly heartbreaking. It's so sad. It's such a tragedy. I feel for these parents. I feel for these community members. I feel for the kids who, you know, saw it or live near it or the kids who just have read about it. But I want to point out that this does debunk for once and for all that a good guy with a gun is not the answer. I mean, here were a lot of good, quote unquote, good guy. with guns and they just were scared of the bad guy with the gun. Yeah. I was going to say the worst part of this, but no, the worst part of this is the dead children.

The 19 dead children, yeah. What we're going to see more than likely is there's going to be no accountability from the police. Right. That is just so anger-making. They're already trying to pin it on one guy now, I guess the commander who supposedly ordered them not to go in or didn't order them to go in, which fine, he deserves shit. But you cannot tell me that in that situation, you have a bunch of officers there, trained officers who, as we've learned over the weekend as well, their actual training called for them to do the

literal opposite of what they did. Yeah. It called for them to go in fast and take the guy down fast. And even at risk to their own lives, they did the exact opposite of that. And you cannot tell me that they were just standing there going, well, the commander says, can't go in, so I guess we just stand here. Do you need to be trained to know not to leave the gunmen murdering the children? I mean, you would think that would be, like, as basic training as it gets, but apparently

you would be wrong. It bothers me so much. And, I mean, look, I don't, I'm not part of the blindly loving the troops thing. And even though I'm a veteran or whatever, but it does seem to me, if you're going to take military weapons and you're going to take this military attitude, then act like a fucking military. Right. Like, don't stand around outside a door

because you're afraid you're going to get shot when innocent people are in harm's way. That's not what you do. And, you know, I have absolute, there's no doubt in my mind that this unit, these cops, didn't walk around that town, full of swagger

and thinking they were the shit. And then when it came time to walk the walk, they stood around and talked the talk. Every single one of them should be shit-canned. They should all be fired. I just don't see any way around that. Like, you failed at your job. You're bad at your job.

You should be fired. That's, you know, any job. If you do your job that badly, that job is not for you. Right. Like, that job is not for people who are going to stand around while a child bleeds out

because they weren't given the order to move in or the story changes. Look, I don't even know by time this end, who the hell knows what the story will be. Right. I think what's important, again, the nuances of the story are going to change.

But because there clearly are a lot of people covering their asses. But what I think is important is that Abbott got booed when he came down to Valdi. And then people outside of that church on Sunday were screaming to Biden to do something. Right? This is, you know, rural Texas, right? I mean, look, 19 children just got murdered. but I think this is an important inflection point. Again, American history is filled with moments where children get massacred in schools

and then Americans, the United States of amnesia, moves on. So I think it's important to realize that Democrats have a limited window, but the good news is Democrats have a limited window because the midterms are coming in November. What I think is interesting is that this is not the time to try to get along with Republicans. Okay. Mitch McConnell is a bad faith actor. This time he said he wants to find a bipartisan solution.

I am hopeful we could come up with a bipartisan solution. After the Pulse nightclub shooting, he said, we are open to serious suggestions from the experts as to what we might be doing to be helpful. He's full of shit. What he wants to do is run at the clock until people lose interest and then be like, Democrats can't get, Democrats can't compromise. And so here's a chance for Democrats, they have. 50 votes. They go to Mansion and they and cinema who are terrible, shitty Democrats. They say to them,

look, this is it. This is your moment. And they pass something. I mean, the House has already passed a gun bill. You may not love it. But, you know, pass one thing. Raise the purchase age of long guns to 21. Do that. Or ban AR-15s. Reinstate the assault rifle ban. Maybe the Supreme Court will knock it down, but make them fucking do it. Make those partisan hacks show their partisan hacks. I mean, this is on Chuck Schumer. If he, if Chuck Schumer went into work tomorrow and was like, that's it, we're going to get an assault rifle ban passed with a cutout on the filibuster. He could do it tomorrow. And anyone who says you, who says to you that he couldn't is full of shit. So like, figure out one thing and do it. Deliver for your goddamn base. I mean,

the thing that's so interesting to me is Republicans don't want to pass gun legislation. A, because they don't give a shit about people, and B, because they're worried it will depress excitement with the base. Meanwhile, Democrats are desperately need their base to get excited. Here's this popular thing that they could actually do, that they have the moral imperative to do, and they don't want to do it.

Because they're worried that people will look at them as being too extreme, or they're worried that they will seem like they're... I mean, I don't know what they're worried about, but it's crazy. Well, okay, Molly, but I am told that McConnell is a rational. Republican and that Kornin is as well. And I have been told this by your president, Joseph Robinette Biden, who said that on Monday speaking about gun control negotiations. I understand as a politician, he's, you know, trying to keep them in the negotiations and stuff like that. But also, fuck that. As you said, McConnell is not a rational, he's a rational Republican in the sense that

He generally acts in his own rational self-interest. And Cornyn is just insane. So I don't know where you... I mean, I don't know where he's going with that. I don't know where you get him as being rational from. That's beyond me. But it's time to stop doing this. It's time to stop doing.

It doesn't matter. You can say McConnell is a rational Republican or you can say McConnell is a fascist idiot. He's going to do the same thing. He's not going to sit there and be open to negotiations, no matter how much he says he is, because you called him a rational Republican. And this is what Joe Biden just does not understand. And God bless him, I know he wants desperately for this to be a different time in his mind.

Back when, you know, Republicans and Democrats did, they sat around the smoke-filled rooms and they hammered out agreements. If that time ever even existed, but at least in Biden's head, it did. But that time is long gone. That's our past. That is not the future of America and that is certainly not the president of America. It is time to stop playing their game because they don't play it back. They don't give you any good faith at all.

They sit there and call you a socialist. They call Joe Biden a socialist, and he sits there and goes, well, Mitch McConnell is rational Republican. But you've already lost if you're doing that. Here's the problem, though. I mean, as much as this is a Joe Biden problem, it's also a Chuck Schumer problem. And it's certainly an Nancy Pelosi problem. I mean, Chuck Schumer, you know, has done all these things where he's like, I'm an amazing. Republicans vote against codifying row. Okay, they don't care. That's more money for them from the

Susan B. Anthony list. I mean, that's fine. Like, being radicalized does not make you less appealing to this Republican Party. If anything, it makes you more appealing. You know, the problem is the Democratic leadership, which is, and I know people get mad at me when I say this, but almost entirely in its 70s, except for Diane Feinstein, who's 157. But sharp as a tack, Molly. Yeah. If that tack is a piece of gum, we love our elderly people. We love them.

We love them. We want them to not be leading the Democratic Party at this moment. Things have changed. And this country is in a perilous position. And I don't. And I think it's completely ridiculous to have Biden say, you know, and to have Chuck Schumer. I mean, like, Republicans are doing things. like stealing Supreme Court seats, right?

Like they filled Ruth Bader Ginsburg's seat. Well, people were already voting. If there were three things that we're going to look at after the midterms and be like, it could have helped Democratic turnout in the midterms. It could have saved our democracy. And it could have helped people. It would be the voting rights. Like, codify elections make it so that these Republicans can't go in and change the election.

they don't like the answer. There's things that need to happen there. Voting rights, codify Rome, and this AR-15 assault weapon ban. But, you know, I think that, like, our cheerful leadership

who believe that Republicans are good faith actors, you know, are out-flanked by just complete, I mean, none of these people are such geniuses. It's just that Democrats are so completely unwilling

to see what the reality looks like. Well, they also, like, I think they don't know how to read maps, particularly like electoral maps. Right. Schumer comes out there and says stuff like, you know, it's always on the people to vote. And it's like, you know, he says things like, you know, people need to vote their beliefs on guns. They need to vote more, vote harder.

But the thing is, if you look at how the Senate is made up, it doesn't matter. There's two senators from every state. And it doesn't matter how many millions and millions of people vote in New York and California. you know, and they get the same representation as Idaho and Wyoming and other states. And it's like the Republicans seem to get this. Like they understand that their base is, it may be fewer people, but it's the same number of senators in each state. So you've got Chuck Schumer out saying people need to vote.

Well, guess what? People in South Dakota and Idaho and Wyoming and Montana, they do vote. And they do vote how they feel on guns. Stop blaming us is what I'm saying. Right. Stop blaming the voters, for sure. Like, get off your ass and do something. But I also think, like, Republicans are obsessed with their base, right?

They don't want to do stuff because they don't want to depress enthusiasm. And Democrats are sort of, like, while the base wants this, so we can't deliver it, obviously. Like, Democrats hate their base. They absolutely hate their base. And it's so ironic because the Democratic base wants to, like, they would like a public option, universal public health care. They would like voting rights. Think about the women in Georgia who made it so that Democrats had the majority. What did they want, right?

Letasha Brown and all of these women who registered voters. What did they want? They wanted Democrats to codify voting rights. They didn't want some completely fascist, weird. They didn't want to have AR-15s on every block. They just wanted Democrats to protect their right to vote, which, by the way, should be bipartisan and has been bipartisan until the last 10 years. and still Democrats were like, well, you know, it's just infuriating. Yeah, no, it's absolutely infuriating.

And it's just, again, Democrats run from their base and Republicans run towards their base. And guess which one is working? So the NRA felt no hesitation, even though 19 children have been murdered two days later, three days later. They had their annual Ruhaha in Texas where they were here. huge, humongous protests, like a sea, I don't know if you saw those photos, a sea of people screaming at them at the top of their lungs. If I had lived in Texas, I would have gone to. And then there's a great photo of a member of the NRA with earplugs walking by an old guy. But you really did see that the public sentiment is not with them. A lot of electeds were, you know, all of a

sudden not free, including John Corrin, who they delivered taped remarks. And maybe they were always not going to go, but they certainly were on the schedule before the shooting. But the two worst people in the world did go. Donald J. Trump, that's his base, and he's worried he's going to lose them because he already is. And lie in Ted. You can't appeal to their shame because they have none. And again, that's why saying things like Mitch McConnell is a rational, it's pointless.

They have no shame. So you can't appeal to them. I honestly think the NRA's power is, I don't think it's anywhere near. what it used to be. No, they're bankrupt. Yeah. I mean, I just, you know, but the fact of the matter is the NRA was always a good boogeyman and for good reasons, but it's the fact that people like Ted Cruz and Donald

Trump will get up there. And Donald Trump, he does a little, he reads off the names of the victims in Evaldi, misses it. And then before he leaves the stage, he does a little dance. That's what we're dealing with here. And Ted Cruz just got to be the most shameless person. in the Senate, I mean, or if not all of Capitol Hill at this point. And he just, you know, he gets up there and he gives his same spiel that he gives.

I think what's interesting about Ted Cruz is not so much his speech, which is his usual bullshit speech, but that later on he was having dinner in a restaurant, an activist came over. You know, by the way, there are some really super interesting activists doing very brave. stuff. An activist came over, started talking to him, and started heckling him, making it very uncomfortable for him and Heidi to have a fancy meal. I know that people are all over the place on this, but I just want to point out that as he was being heckled, he was smiling and waving as a, you know, in a very smug way. Like he would never have a moment to think, like, well, this may be, you know, maybe I'm perhaps on the wrong side of history here. He was doing like a little

Queen Elizabeth wave too, which was just like so pathetic. I sort of of two minds about this stuff in the sense that I don't think I would heckle someone or go up to them in a restaurant. It's just not my personality. But I don't have a problem with people doing it to people like Ted Cruz. I have no problem with people like Ted Cruz not having a moment's peace in public. They're bad people at this point. They're not people with whom you reasonably disagree.

Ted Cruz is just a straight up. He's just a bad person. And bad people should not be allowed to, you know, I'm fine with them not being allowed to enjoy a fancy meal that's being paid for by the lobbyists for guns. So. I have no opinion on this, or at least I'm not willing to die on this hill. But I was in an elevator with Lara, which is Eric's, the simple son's wife. And I didn't heckle her. And I felt that I missed an opportunity there.

It bothers me still to this day, I'll tell you. And, you know, I have another friend who saw Ivanka at the 92nd Street, why, a little old lady friend of mine. She's not old, but she's not young. And she gave Ivanka the middle finger and told her to go fuck herself. And, you know, she's like a very sort of genteel-looking older woman. And, you know, I respect the hell out of that. Oh, there's nothing better than that. We're New Yorkers.

This is what we do, you know. Cameron Joseph is a senior political reporter at Vice News. Welcome to the new abnormal, Cameron Joseph. How you doing? You know, or, you know. So let's talk about Trump's Civil War rhetoric is a growing belief on the far right. How can it grow even more? Well, that's a good question.

I think it's answered by the fact that Trump himself is now highlighting this Civil War claims, which, look, this is the pattern, right? We see things come out of Q&ON circles or telegram channels or far-right bloggers who wind up on Newsmax, who then start mainstreaming rhetoric that all of a sudden Trump himself is adopting. And we've seen that with a bunch of Q&O rhetoric over the years, but, you know, the Civil War thing specifically is one of those risky things that has a chance of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. if a lot of people start buying into it. And that's where the risk lies here.

You know, there's been Republicans for years talking about, yeah, and some of them, I think, are more careful about catching this as a cold civil war, like the folks of the Claremont Institute, this very conservative thing paint that John Eastman, the Coup memo author writes, you know, worked out. Stop for a second. I want to take a minute to talk about the Claremont Institute. There's so much there.

They're like the sort of, Daily wire as a think tank? Yeah, I think that that's, that's relatively fair. And it's, it's one of these places that historically, it's been a think tank for a long time. It's very conservative, but it kind of been very, you know, cerebral and academic and, and had a lot of professors working there. I actually, I went to this tiny school, Claremont McKenna College, where some of the professors who are involved with this think tank also teach, although they're not affiliated, there's some overlap and personnel there. And there's a lot of pretty respected on the right folks, including a guy who founded it, was very close with Barry Goldwater, wrote some of his biggest

speeches. And so, you know, always very conservative, but kind of respected. Right. And over the last five years, the original founder passed away, and it has gone in a much weirder direction. And there's kind of this bifurcation between the old school folks who, you know, I've been there forever and are these aging professors and real, you know, fire breathing hothead types who, a lot of whom wound up in the Trump administration, some of the younger, young Turk types at the organization are, you know, writing even wilder stuff. And it's kind of this place where you get a kind of cleaned up academic version of really far out there bordering on violent borderline racist rhetoric, but framed in a way that it sounds respectable.

And, you know, a lot of folks. John Eastman. Yeah. I mean, John Eastman, who's the guy who wrote that memo trying to push, you know, basically laying out how Mike Pence could intervene and stop the certification of Joe Biden's election on January 6th, which. I think most people think is BS that it wouldn't be constitutionally legal, but testing it would certainly lead to an actual constitutional crisis that I think would have been, you know, Pence had gone

along with would have been significantly scarier and weirder and more dangerous for America than the actual riot that happened when Pence refused. Right. Yeah. And Michael Anton, who was a, you know, top Trump administration official for a while, wrote that. If you remember that essay in 2016, the flight 93 election, where... basically it was the screed that was written. The time was anonymous. It was actually written by Anton. It came out later that Trump winning would be like taking back the plane.

And if Hillary Clinton won the election, it would basically be 9-11. And it was just this incredibly over-the-top kind of fantasy, dark twisted fantasy, as it were. And so that's kind of the tenor and tone that they've taken over there. And so, you know, the guy who's become their biggest funder who is now heading the organization as president also has the super PAC where they're pushing these videos talking about a cold civil war and how you need to, you're already in this war and you need to fight the woke communists. It does seem to me, and this has always sort of been true about former president Donald J. Trump, is that he tends to get his information from like, Obviously, he doesn't get his information from 4chan because he wouldn't know how to do that. But it certainly feels like he gets a lot of his information from pretty sketchy places. Yeah.

And what happens is there's these kind of far right places that then get filtered through and picked up by places like Breitbart, where Steve Bannon was rather important in Trump land. Steve Bannon now is certainly back in that inner circle. and I think his podcast that he's doing, interviewing a lot of these folks, including a lot of Claremont Institute folks and others is something that Trump is keeping a close eye on. Obviously, Tucker Carlson is playing a huge role in this. There's been reporting that Carlson is the reason that Trump ended up endorsing J.D. Vance in Ohio in that Senate race. And Vance has said some pretty out there stuff, especially, you know, we saw the Buffalo shooting that the shooter was adopting great replacement rhetoric.

that was actual white supremacist. J.D. Vance has got a spin on it that has become kind of the GOP talking point of Democrats are trying to import immigrants to replace us en masse as opposed to the full white supremacist version, which is the Jews or global elites are trying to import immigrants to outbreed us. This is more of an out-revote-us type thing, but it boils down to it's the same fundamental theory. It's just a new spin on it that's a little bit sanitized. And then there's a lot of Republican candidates who are spewing this type of rhetoric from Elise Tefanic on down.

You know, what happens is you get like the real far out there crazy eight-kun four-chan folks. And then this starts bleeding into the newsmaxes and the Tucker Carlson rhetoric and the Wright Bart folks. And that's where Trump starts picking up on this. That's where it becomes mainstreamed and mainlined into the broader GOP. And so he doesn't need to be on these message boards because that stuff is getting surfaced by much better known outlets that he is watching. So, and then he repeats that whether he fully understands what it is or not, I think is sometimes open to debate. But it mainstreams a lot of this.

What do you think the end game here is? Like, I understand Trump sees he's diminishing in the party. My guess is he's going to get more and more radical as he sees, if that's even possible, because he's starting. it out pretty radical as he sees his power diminish. But I'm curious for like J.D. Vance, like who theoretically is a smart guy. I mean, why push the Great Replacement Theory? What do you think that this works for the primary and that's why and they want those voters? I think there's a degree of that. I think that you're right that we're seeing that Donald Trump himself doesn't have the vice-like grip over the GOP that he once did. We saw Jody Heise, his

handpicked candidate for Secretary of State just to Brad Raffensberger, the Secretary of State, who, the Republican who actually stood up to Trump in the last election. By a wide margin, we saw the governor's race, you know, Brian Kemp, who is not exactly a squishy moderate. He's a pretty fire-breathing conservative, but he, you know, was a target for Trump because he refused to try and take extra legal action and break Georgia and federal law to violate the sanctity of the elections. He actually signed off on the fact that Trump lost in Georgia. He won resoundingly over former Senator David Purdue that Trump was backing, who it was all about the big lie. So Trump is slipping. And I think a lot of that is, look, a lot of Republicans,

even really hardcore conservative mega-e type folks are sick of his bitching. Oh, interesting. Even if they think that he did kind of get screwed in 2020, like they're worried about inflation. They're worried about critical race theory if they're, if they're, you know, hardcore folks. They're this stuff about trans students playing sports they're freaking out about the right, including some of the far right. Do you think they're really freaking out about trans students doing sports or do they think they just, this is popular for them? The voters or the politicians. Either. Yeah.

I think folks watch Fox and get freaked out about stuff. And there's something fundamentally true about conservative Republicans in this country right now is they feel like the country is being taken away from them, that they are no longer sure they're in the majority. Culture is changing rapidly and they're alarmed by it. And I don't think this is something that's particularly new, but I think it's much more stark now than it has been. And that's where Trump comes from. The thing that powered Trump to power was this, he's going to stand up against all of this change. He's going to. to fight for white, straight, more rural America. That is something that I think animates the GOP base at a very visceral and fundamental level. But Trump isn't the only one who can do that. And we've seen Ronda Santos do this effectively on a couple of different issues. We've seen other Republicans dig their claws into this. And so, yeah, ginning up stuff that may or may not BBS on trans kids and critical race theory and all of these other things is a really good way to

fire up the GOP base and get them to turn out in vote in very large numbers. And that doesn't involve Trump himself. And I think it's weirdly a way that the Republican Party is actually moving on and moving past Trump is by focusing on these latest freakouts. Do you think there's an end to this great replacement theory? Is there a cap on how many people are going to buy this bowl? should or do you think this really is going to be a really growing disease that has a lot of legs for years for them? Well, the problem with this specific conspiracy theory is that it's at some level

plausible, right? We saw Democrats for years talking about why shifting demographics are going to eventually make them the party in power and how the Republicans are a dying party of old white people and, you know, the growing Hispanic and Asian community population, they're going to be voting Democrat. And so this is kind of the bizarre version of that, right? That immigrant communities, younger communities of all stripes are going to take over the country demographically. And then there's this spin on this of, well, Democrats just want to support immigration. They want to bring all these immigrants in so they can vote immediately, which is where you get into the actual conspiracy theory territory because, you know, immigrants can't vote until

their citizens, which takes, you know, if you're doing, you know, a legal immigrant takes at least a decade in most cases. So this is not like a flip-the-switch process. And the irony of this is Trump himself did very well with certain Hispanic communities in 2020 compared to how he performed in 2016, even significantly better than Mitt Romney in 12. We saw Miami-Dade County, which has a lot of Cuban-Americans and other Central and South American voters. Your families originally from those places swing very hard right and was competitive last time. We saw South Texas with a lot of rural Tejano, Mexican-American voters who have been there for generations, swing 40, 50 points in some of these counties towards the GOP and other rural counties around the country in places like Arizona

moved to the GOP that have a lot of Hispanic voters. And so this idea that these folks vote as a monolith and that they're just being they can be imported and controlled is ridiculous because you see that I'm voting for the very party that's claiming that Democrats are importing them to keep them in the minority. And so it's a fundamentally broken concept, but it's something that, look, Democrats are pushing this and it turns out they're wrong. The idea that this is, the demographics is destiny, has been disproven over the last decade. Republicans are digging even further into this as one of the reasons that they think this is changing. And the danger here is that there's kind of the almost semi-plausible political version that we're talking about. And then there's the much more

extreme white supremacist version of this, an active white supremacist version of this, neo-Nazi version of this, where it's, you know, Jews are coming in, want immigrants to come in so they have a reliable population to control, to outbreed us, and eventually take over the country. And that's something that, you know, came out of, you know, the original, the great replacement was, it didn't actually involve Jews, but it was elites and immigrants coming in in France. It's been different versions have been spun up in a lot of white, countries with growing immigrant populations. And it's inspired violence time and time again. I did my first story on this dropped looking at all these Republican Senate candidates. There's a half

dozen of them, including Senator Ron Johnson, who are pushing Great Replacement rhetoric. And that came out four days before the Buffalo shooting. And, you know, it was eerie with the timing, but this is not the first time this has happened. We saw the Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue shooter a couple years ago talking in great replacement theory rhetoric. We saw that the Poway a synagogue shooter outside San Diego a couple years ago using that. We saw the El Paso shooter at that Walmart that killed almost two dozen, mostly Hispanic folks using the same rhetoric. So this has become a talking point of the alt-right and the far right.

We saw that in Charlottesville. Jews will not replace us was specifically about this. And it's just going to keep inspiring more violence. And that is the risk, is that this is becoming a, more mainstream theory, which makes the even further out there extremist version seem more reasonable and plausible, and it's kind of an entry point for that, a gateway drug of crazy, if you will. And it can inspire violence. The Buffalo shooter was inspired by the actual extremists daily stormer neo-Nazi websites. This wasn't coming from Fox News, and he made that clear in his

manifesto or Screed. It might be the better way to describe it. But it's something that the more bleeds into mainstream culture, and this is related to the civil war comment that Trump made, and this is related to the big lie because the idea that immigrants are stealing the election from you while they're claiming that, you know, in 16, Trump claimed that millions of, you know, undocumented immigrants voted, and that's why he lost the popular vote and held on to that until they came up with kind of a new, otherwise, you know, weird but semi-related theory for how 2020 was stolen from him. Some of the folks in the grand old party are coming up with this grand unified conspiracy theory. And it's leading to deepening divisions and occasional political

violence in this country. And it's really dangerous for democracy. Yikes. It's nice because it's so upsetting. Yeah, I'm really good at scaring folks up. Thank you so much, Cam. Thanks for having me. John Meacham is a historian and the host of the new podcast, Reflections of History. Welcome to New Abnormal, John Meacham. I love the new abnormal. That's a It's a formidable title. It's true, and it's become more and more true as we've been working on this. So we're having you on today to talk about a podcast series you're doing, and I have many questions for you.

It's called Reflections of History, and your first episode talks about something that Vladimir Putin has made very popular as of late NATO. Talk to me about the newfound sexiness of NATO. Well, you know, it just says a lot about you that it's newfound. maybe we need to turn that question around. Everything is uninteresting until it's interesting. One of the remarkable things I think about the past is how resonant it is, which somebody like me would say, so it's not a particularly profound insight. But almost anything in human experience has some anteced.

Does it mean it's predictive? doesn't mean that history is a GPS where you can type in coordinates and get the same result. It's not that. But it is, as Arthur Slazinger used to say, a kind of diagnostic guide, right? There are certain symptoms that recur that have been treatable by certain methods. And you build a kind of experiential interpretive code out of that. And that's the way I view the past. I find it somewhat comforting that we've almost always been here before.

I find it somewhat depressing that we have always been here before. So to me, the notion of the podcast, the notion really of all the work I do, is what can we learn from the flawed, fallen, fallible people of the past? Because they weren't perfect. You know, history is not an episode of the super friends. It's a story of people riven by the same things. We're riven by appetite, ambition, and greed and occasional flashes of kindness and progress. And I think history becomes more accessible when we look at it in the eye and don't glamorize it, don't romanticize it, but also don't dismiss it as hopelessly bleak. So at NATO, just talk to us a little bit about it's such an interesting place to start. Why did you decide to start with NATO?

And I want to talk to you about a lot of the themes of these episodes are pretty interesting and seem to be very different. NATO was the creation of the Truman administration in conjunction with our wartime allies with the very large and important exception of the Soviet Union. And I think what makes it, there are two things in my mind that make it fascinating. One is it was not a popular thing to do. Averill Harriman, the diplomat, said, who was the ambassador in the Soviet Union in the last part of the war, said that all Americans wanted to do after World War II was come home, go to the movies, and drink Coke. FDR worried in the middle of the war that isolationism would return.

The great phrase we have about Henry Luce's American Century was an FDR worried. editorial in life that he wrote warning against isolationism. And if you have any doubts about the capacity and the relevance of isolationism to dominate American politics, I refer you to the last five years. And so to start there was to say 75 years ago, I guess, we were dealing with a lot of the forces we're dealing with now. We decided to project force to invest, to spend our money, our time, our treasure on defending the European continent from Soviet tyranny. It's one of those nice stories because it worked. The Berlin Wall did come down. More people, despite the devastation and the extraordinary struggle in Ukraine, more people are living in freedom today than were then. And that's not

least because we were willing to invest in the world and look beyond our borders. Another one that I'm very interested in, Shakespeare's McBath staging at the globe. I am married to a Shakespeare scholar. So he is no longer a scholar. He's now a venture capitalist. As this happens. Yeah, to be rich or not to be rich, that is the question. Or even just to survive.

But I'm curious about the staging of the globe because this is the old globe, right? The one that before it burned down. So can you talk to us a little bit about the historical significance of the Globe and Shakespeare and why this made your group of podcasts? Well, I think one of the reasons it made it was, I don't know about you, but it hadn't really occurred to me in a while that at some point Shakespeare was introducing products like Top Gun Maverick. Right. Right. Right. You know, it didn't come to us as in the folio.

Right. It didn't come to us as a cultural landmark. It started as an initial production. And I think that's always fun to try to figure out. What are the first moments of, let's switch the metaphor from the temporal to the physical. What are the first building blocks of cultural infrastructure? And Macbeth is surely, surely that. You know, Shakespeare was, as you know, from your spousal connection,

He was very much of the moment. Elizabeth in England was a complicated place dealing with power and religion and struggles over the nature of identity and who belonged and who didn't. Macbeth, of course, is the great play about human ambition and accountability. I just thought, isn't it fascinating that there was this moment where nobody knew what Macbeth was. And so when did it start? Another super interesting podcast topic, which I just want your hot take on this. And I'm curious is the Titanic. I feel like there's much more meaning in the sinking of the Titanic. Can you sort of give us a little background on why you pick that? It's a much, much discussed and mind story. I think in many ways, it was really the first global 24-7 news event.

It was glamorous. These were rich people. these were famous people. There was the heartbreaking rate of death among the poorer steerage passengers. It was about hubris. It had been advertised as unsinkable. And here was this institution that had failed, which is always appealing to the human imagination. And you had in those days, both the tabloid press and the print press, really covering this wall to wall.

And it was an emblem of. a kind of Edwardian ambition, humankind had decided that it could tame the elements, right? We would not sink. Gravity would not win. And guess what? On its maiden voyage, the world said not so fast. Right. And I think that's part of the perennial pull of the story, even without Kate and Leo.

That's right. We've written a lot of historical work. Your professor, did you learn anything? thing that sort of surprised you from this project? Absolutely. And that's the great thing about doing this. And I keep waiting for, you know, people to come in and tell me I have to stop. You know, Phil Graham wonderfully said that journalism is the first rough draft of history. My only amendment to that would be that history is the first rough draft of history. We're always revisiting things. We're always learning new things. Our angle of vision shifts.

But sure, I didn't, you know, I was poking around. Part of the, part of the, it's kind of a, this whole podcast project is kind of a gateway drug for dorks, right? And so if it's temporally based, to use a Bidenism, literally everything that happened is a candidate. Because if it unfolded in time and space, it can be discussed. And so instead of doing, say, the history of theater or the history of disasters or political history or so forth, right, instead of limited the aperture to those things, it's everything. And so absolutely. I've learned something with almost each one of these. I didn't know. Here's one from May. I had not, if I'd known I'd forgotten, which in middle age is becoming a more and more repeated sentence, that Dr. King's letter from

Birmingham jail had been commissioned by the New York Times Sunday magazine, and they killed it. Oh, wow. There's an editorial call. you don't want in your obed. Yeah. It's like passing on to kill a mockingbird, right? Yeah, really. Like, whoops. As one of his friends once said about Winston Churchill, when Winston was right, he was right,

but when he was wrong, my God. So this is a my God one. And the New York Post picked it up and ran excerpts from it. And then it ran in the Atlantic and other places. I just didn't know that and encountered it in the research for this through an obituary. The obituary in the New York Times of the editor who had commissioned it. And then his higher-ups killed it. Yeah, every day is a new day in Eden for this.

You are an advisor to President Biden. I'm an informal advisor to President Biden. Informal advisor to President Biden. And believe me, that's what you want. As an American, you want me as an informal advice. I just want you have to give me something about what that exists as. He's my friend. I believe in the significance of his administration's success.

I am not a Democrat. I'm not a Republican. I have voted for candidates of both parties. I'm George Bush's biographer and advise President Biden from time to time. So you figure it out. But I believe that this is a moment where the ordinary conventions of reflexive bipartisanship or trying to affect that somehow if you're a writer, I'm not a beat reporter. I'm not. So I'm in a different place than a lot of people. But I think we are in the midst of the gravest unfolding crisis of constitutional democracy since 1861. And I don't really think that's much of an argument. Actually, I don't think it's debatable. So providentially, coincidentally, however you want to put it, he has generously reached out to me and on occasion. And when I can help him, I do. Is there something that history could inform and how Biden right now? Yes. I think there are two moments, and I'll be quick. The crises he faces are similar in type to what Lincoln faced and what President Roosevelt faced in the 1930s. And that's not, and this is actually, I'm glad you asked this, because it kicks around in some parts of the right wing internet that Biden came into office.

fancying himself another FDR. What they take from that is that he was going to be this huge big government guy and he had these delusions of grandeur. I swear to you before God and my country, that is not what President Biden thought. What he did think and he was right to was that when Franklin Roosevelt became president in March of 1933, there was an extraordinary erosion of trust in the basic capacity of the state and of the market.

place to deliver safety, security, and prosperity. Remember what the world looked like in the first quarter of 2021. An insurrection, a pandemic, a potential economic collapse. And it fell to him, to go back to Shakespeare, to be a kind of Fortinbross figure. To try to bring some order to the chaos all around us. And I think he's been very successful in that. I think there's a lot of work to be done. There's not enough money on the planet to make me be president of the United States. Fortunately, that's not a problem for anybody or a possibility. But this is an incredibly difficult moment with structural challenges, a kind of, again, unfolding crisis of what I think of as a, it's a crisis of neighborliness. We don't see each other as neighbors anymore. We see each other

as adversaries. And I know that sounds like Mr. Rogers. One of my favorite tweets of all time, by the way, and I don't know who sent it, but somebody sent something saying that if Doris Goodwin and Mr. Rogers had had a one-night stand, I would have been the result. And I insist on taking that as a compliment. Doris was a little less certain. She said, couldn't we have at least fallen in love? I said, no, no, no. He picked you up in the C-SPAN bar. That's what happened. But you don't have to love your neighbor. You just have to respect the neighbor. If you respect other people, they are more likely to respect you. And that's the covenant of democracy that we have to attend to with immense care. But there's no like secret sauce. There's nothing that Lincoln did that really,

like there's no sort of thing you could point to Biden to say like, you should do this the way Lincoln did or you should do this the way Roosevelt did. This is my own edification. There's absolutely an ethosophobic. There's absolutely an ethos. of how do you lead a democracy in a deeply disputatious time? Yeah. So one lesson from both those figures, actually, would be that the noble, seeming, trumpet-sounding, exertion, assertion of a president's will, no matter what the politics are or what people think that they think this is right and by God they're going to do it no matter what, that doesn't work. And if you doubt me, go study Lincoln and emancipation.

Lincoln did not come into office in March of 1861 and because he thought it was the right thing to do, emancipate the enslaved. He wanted to do it eventually. He was morally committed to doing it, but he waited. He didn't wait because he thought slavery was a good thing. He waited because he was the leader of a democracy and had to create and let circumstances create a climate of opinion, where a move like that would not be Pyrrhic, but would be both principled and lasting. And so FDR said this once, is that, you know, you can't simply stand on the rooftops and shout and make the world the way you want it to be, right?

You and I can do that because that's what we do. Yeah. We aren't charged with the responsibility of leading the most complicated kind of democratic experiment over 330 across 330 million lives in a continental nation. Right. That's Joe Biden's job. And is it any wonder that it's so hard? Yeah.

Thank you so much. This was super fascinating. I hope you'll come back. I appreciate it. Thank you. Good luck with the venture capitals. Andy. Molly.

Who is your fuck that guy? Okay. So it's a young man named Merrick of Garland. And he is the Attorney General. of the United States. And he gave a speech at a Harvard commencement over the weekend, said that democracy is under threat. And he urged the students and to go into public service and to defend democracy, all of which, great, if pretty much anyone else did that, good for them.

This guy, though, this fucking guy. over here is the Attorney General of the United States. He has done absolutely nothing so far with regard to January 6th. He has done absolutely nothing with regard to pretty much anything illegal that was done by the Trump administration. And I am tired of waiting, Molly. I am tired of waiting for Merrick. I would love to take him off my fuck-that-guy list if he actually did something.

but up until he does, he should not be going out and giving speeches, urging people to defend democracy when he is sitting in a position of, you know, pretty decent power, the Attorney General of the United States. I'm told that's a fairly powerful position from the reading I've done. He needs to take his own advice and start defending democracy. And until he does, Merrick Garland, you're my fuck that guy. Do you want to know who my fuck that guy is? Yeah. So my fuck that guy is a Senate candidate from the great state of Alabama.

His name is Mo Brooks, and he really sucks. Now, he was in Congress. He spoke at Stop the Steel. He was very excited to kick ass. He was endorsed by Trump. He was unendorsed by Trump. He coveted unendorsement. And he has now is in a runoff.

for the other candidate, yeah, the female candidate, who seems less evil, though again, this is all relative. So Mo Brooks, you know, this was an interesting segment from Fox News Sunday. I actually watched it. It's rare that the blonde people on Fox are allowed to, like, say serious stuff. But the question sounded like something you might hear on a real news channel. You know, she said the public support for stricter gun control and background checks. I mean, it was like a real question, and Mo Brooks wasn't having it because real questions don't belong on Fox News.

So Brooks said that as long as we enjoy uninfringed Second Amendment rights, then we don't really have to worry that much about the government ever becoming dictatorial. Tell that to Donald Trump. But the moment that we take from our citizens, our ability to take our government back is the moment that the ability of dictatorial forces, to the point, you really do see how breathtakingly stupid these people are, to the point where perhaps they will try to implement a dictatorial government at the federal level. So I want to protect the Second Amendment right to bear arms. They didn't have AR-15s back in the Constitution. But anyway, so basically there's no waiting period.

And, you know, Mo Brooks went on to say that he loves the NRA. Also, he took a shotgun to school. Ergo, it's fine. I mean, he's not even amazing that he won't even pretend like Mitch McConnell to care. I mean, I don't know. Is that better? I don't know which is better. They're both pretty horrendous.

He's just dumber than Mitch McConnell. Yeah. Right. I mean, he literally, on that show, he was pushing Dinesh DeSuzza's movie, 2000 Mules, which has been, and to her credit again, Sandra Smith, who was hosting Fox News Sunday said that that movie has been thoroughly debunked. And good for her for saying that. Probably the fact that Fox got sued over the election stuff has made them at least a little,

you know, leery of promoting stuff like Dinesh D'Souza's little fantasy film. But Dinesh is not taking it lying down. He's pretty mad. Yeah, big mad. Yes. He's got more Brooks to go on and pimp him out. Yeah, so that's hard. A heartwarming story of some of the worst people in the world doing terrible things.

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