The New Yorker Radio Hour - Jon Meacham on How the Trump Fever Breaks

Episode Date: March 31, 2023

In 2018, at the midpoint of the Trump Presidency, the journalist and historian Jon Meacham wrote a book called “The Soul of America,” warning of the gravity of Trump’s threat to democracy. This was hardly a unique point of view, but Meacham’s particular way of putting things, steeped in a critical reverence for American history, hit home with one reader in particular: Joe Biden. In the years since, Meacham became an informal adviser to Biden, helping him recently with the State of the Union address. Meacham, who has written biographies of Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, George H. W. Bush, John Lewis, and, now, Abraham Lincoln, reflects on the vulnerability of American democracy in the current moment, with an overt autocrat as the leading Republican contender for the next Presidential election. “Having a dictatorial figure is not new either in human experience or American history. What is new is that so many people are willing to suspend their better judgment to support him,” he says. “I am flummoxed to some extent at the durability of partisan feeling.” Plus, the music critic Kelefa Sanneh on a fleet of artists bringing fresh sounds to what has become the least cool genre: mainstream rock. He shares tracks by HARDY, Giovannie & the Hired Guns, AVOID, and Jelly Roll. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Donald Trump's contempt for democracy is a matter of fact. An impulse registered again and again throughout his presidency in its aftermath. As so many, including those in his circle, warned, he would never accept legitimacy of Biden's election. And, of course, he provoked an insurrection attempting to start. stop that election, and he has faced no consequences for it so far. There was some buzzing after the midterm elections that Trump's influence on the GOP

had finally burned out, but the fact is that he's running for president and he leads the Republican field. In 2018, at the midpoint of the Trump presidency, the journalist and historian John Meacham wrote a book called The Soul of America, and it warned of the gravity of Trump's threat to democracy. Now, this was hardly a unique point of view, but Meacham's particular way of putting things, steeped in a kind of critical reverence for American history, hit home with one reader in particular, Joe Biden. And in the years since, Meacham became an informal advisor to Biden,

helping him with the last state of the union address and other speeches. John Meacham's books include biographies of Jefferson, Jackson, George H.W. Bush, John Lewis, and Abraham Lincoln. We spoke last week. John, the press spends a huge amount of time obsessing about the odds, the mood, the events of the day. Let's talk about the stakes. As we witness the renewed and unending tragedy of Donald Trump, his candidacy, his battles with the law from New York to Georgia to D.C., what is at stake now in this latest chapter? What's at stake is whether America now has 40. or 48% of the likely electorate to show up in 2024, who are more likely than not to vote for

an overtly autocratic figure for President of the United States. Someone who has explicitly said that the rule of law should not apply to him. The results of free and fair elections should not be obeyed if he loses them. The district attorney of New York under the auspices and direction of the Department of Injustice in Washington, D.C., was investigating me for something that is not a crime, not a misdemean, not an affair. Having a dictatorial figure is not new, either in human experience or American history. What is new is that so many, many people are willing to suspend their better judgment to support him. Did we make a mistake, did many people not make a mistake thinking that with the results of the last election and then the spectacle of January 6th, that this somehow, this impulse of authoritarianism would begin to recede and maybe even recede fairly rapidly?

Was that not a gigantic illusion? That's a good way to put it. It was a gigantic illusion, and it's a persistent one. I am friends with principled Republicans who have said to me for going on eight years now since 2015 that Trump was going to fade, that it wouldn't work, that his hour. Either A would not come or B would pass. And I now refer to this overly glibly as the Republican brigadoon fantasy, that there is this world where Trump just disappears and that world's going to come back and reassert itself. And the only problem with that fantasy is that it is fact-free. And it is a trope that every election is more important than any other election. But this is not 1976. This isn't 1980.

This isn't a difference of degree, which is what presidential elections tend to be. Partisans don't believe that, but I believe that. It's a difference of kind. But when we're assessing where Donald Trump came from, I think a lot of people would argue that some of the origins come from people that you have studied and have admired, whether it's the Lee Atwater side of the George H.W. Bush campaign or Ronald Reagan speaking for state's rights in Mississippi, that elements of Trumpism have been present in the Republican Party in the establishment. for a very long time. So when you're assessing where Trumpism came from, how do you begin to analyze the roots of it? I am more skeptical of the long-term Republican complicity in Trumpism for this reason. Trumpism was not inevitable unless you go back to an elemental argument about human nature, which is that power is all. And I simply don't believe that the Republican figures that are kind of

corralled up in this particular critique would have acted that way. I don't think Ronald Reagan would have done it. Richard Nixon broke the law, but then he followed the law. Nixon in the end had a sense of shame. And we're not there. Now, John, you're speaking of stakes, your involvement, your personal involvement in the stakes have shifted. You had a long and storied career as a journalism. Story. I like that. I'm story.

That's what we say in sports, the storied fullback. And you more fully shifted to being a historian. You've written some remarkable and best-selling biographies, presidential biographies. The most recent is, and there was light about Lincoln. And yet you also are getting more and more involved. or have been involved, particularly with Joe Biden as a kind of outside advisor, particularly on speeches. And I think it would be good to know what your association with Joe Biden is, how it began, and where it got to how far it goes or how far it doesn't go. 15 years ago, I wrote a book called American Gospel.

and Joe Biden was making at that point his second run for president. It lasted, I think, about 30 minutes. But he read that book. And after he was done with the campaign or toward the end of his campaign, he actually took me aside at an event and showed me some laminated cards he had in his pocket that had quotations from the book. Now, as you know, when writers are shown their own words, we tend to approve of the taste and wisdom of the person who found those words. You were flattered. Absolutely, of course. So, 2017, Vice President Biden, former Vice President Biden, had written the book about the loss of his son, Bo.

And we did a book event here in Nashville. I interviewed him for a crowd. And so we became friendly. But my view of engagement, I spoke to the Democratic Convention at his request, and I have helped with the drafting of speeches, which I hate talking about, because if you're going to serve in that way, you shouldn't talk about it, But again, did any of this make you feel uncomfortable? Because for journalists, you could be for somebody or against somebody editorially in the obvious way. But to be writing speeches, to be speaking at political convention, et cetera, that's another matter, no? Did you feel?

It is a matter. It is another matter. No, but I'm not a journalist anymore. I'm a biographer. I'm a professor. And I believe firmly that to whom much is given, much is expected. I don't want to profit from this. I see this as an act of citizenship. And I believe that Trumpism is a fundamental threat to the things that we have long held dear. And so I want, if I can be of help, and articulating a vision of the country that puts the declaration, that puts the pursuit of justice, that puts the best of the country front and center, then I want to do that. Many books are written about Abraham Lincoln, many, many, many biographies. In sec, there are so many books written about Lincoln that I believe every year there's a,

award given to the best book about Abraham Lincoln. Your book is at once a biography, but I also think it resonates very, very deliberately, if not overtly, with the present moment. Was that the impetus for the book and how does it resonate to you? In many ways it was. So I thought that our current moment was like 1933 or 1968, where there were proto-fascist forces. There was a sense that democracy had run out its string and that enough conscientious effort went into keeping democracy alive. I am increasingly concerned, however, having made that argument, that this is the 1850s, that in fact there are competing visions of reality itself. Stop the steel. Against the tyrannical Republicans who do deals with them. If you underestimate this movement again.

It was not settled by a congressional debate. it was not settled by a Brooking seminar. It was not settled through the ordinary protocols of politics. It was settled by the sword, by the Civil War, by the death of what demographers now believe might have been 750,000 Americans. And what I wanted to explore, and Lincoln rests at the center of this question, is why did Abraham Lincoln, why did he do what he did? Because he was a politician. Abraham Lincoln, for all of his failings, fundamentally believed that slavery was wrong and could not be expanded. And so why? Why did he think that? He thought it and acted on it because his conscience told him so. Lincoln put the moral convictions of anti-slavery,

at the center of his undertaking. And he didn't have to. I think what you're saying by inference is that in no small measure that the burden on Joe Biden and Joe Biden's candidacy, presumably for re-election, is of that historical weight. And if he does not succeed,

then we don't know what the consequences could be. People were mocking about the recent book by Barbara Walter about the possibility of civil war in this country, but you seem to be inviting that potential comparison. So that's one thing. The other thing is, is Joe Biden up to it? Abraham Lincoln's capacities, his eloquence, was extraordinary by any measure.

Joe Biden is an older, guy whose eloquence is not Lincolnesque. And he also has a lot of other things on his plate, including a land war in Europe and any number of other issues impinging on him to say nothing about the fate of the planet itself. Is Joe Biden up to defeating Donald Trump again and at the same time writing this country? The question, I believe is as much are we up to it as President Biden. President Biden is not, no American president is Zeus-like. And so I think it's up to 51% of us or more to recognize what a path we should take and take it.

And so I wouldn't put the whole onus on any single person, including Lincoln. The Union Army had a lot to do with this. Black Americans had a lot to do with this. I think the person at the top matters enormously, obviously. But this is up to all of us. Do you think Ronda Santis represents Trumpism or some other kind of republicanism? I'm not an early investor in the Ron DeSantis conventional wisdom. I think that I think the Trump grip on that base of folks is so strong that it's just going to be, it's very hard for me to see how he doesn't win the nomination.

And I know, again, what role will indictment, legal indictment play in that? It could help. That's the world we're in, right? is that his In Georgia, indictment in Washington, indictment in New York, any of them could help, you're saying. I think so. I mean, I don't see, we're in genuine,

we're in uncharted territory, but to have an indicted former president seeking re-election with a huge chunk of a formally functional opposition political party in the United States is, yes, is, is, is, is, is, is unprecedented. What is not unprecedented is the case that has to be made to defeat him. And that is a case for a constitutional order informed by a journey toward recognizing the promise of human equality that was articulated, if not

realized at the beginning of the adventure. And the great question for my Republican friends is, do you have the ability, do you have the capacity to vote for the other party in order to preserve the experiment? I don't have a partisan enough brain to even think that's a hard call. I have voted for Republican presidential candidates. I am flummoxed to some extent at the durability of partisan feeling. Your colleague Susan Glasser and Peter Baker have reported that James Addison Baker the third voted for Donald Trump twice. I mean, isn't that outrageous to your ear?

Yes. And I don't understand it. A man who gave a huge chunk of his life to a constitutional experiment to preserving America's role in the world, voted for the nominee of his party, no matter who the nominee was. And I just don't understand it. But then what gives you the notion that somehow this fever will break? The fever only breaks if they lose. Let's be very clear here. The only way that Trumpism recedes from its power. And you're never getting rid of it, right? But it can be contained. My view is it is only contained if they keep losing. And that means that democracy, American democracy is on the edge at all times and that we didn't recognize it. Of course it's on the edge at all times.

Of course it's fundamentally a human enterprise. We can't outsource this. I'm not talking about this is important to me, David. I'm not arguing that there is a mythical moment, that there is a moment, a moment, at Gettysburg on the farm with Eisenhower where if we could just beam ourselves back there, everything was great and everything will be great again. It is a perennial struggle. It is a perennial battle, I have argued, between our worst instincts and the better angels of our nature, to use Lincoln's phrase. And the remarkable thing about the American

American experiment is that after much blood, much strife, much chaos, those better angels have just managed to eke out a provisional victory. And I think that's the struggle we're in now. John Meacham, thanks so much. Thank you. John Meacham is a recovering journalist and a presidential historian. He's also a winner of the Pulitzer Prize. His book about Abraham Lincoln from last year is called, and there was light. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour with more to come. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

We're going to close the show today with the New Yorker's Kelifah Sane. Kellefah writes about politics, sports, music. He is absolutely passionate about music. His book, Major Labels, is a history of popular music, genre by genre. And in The New Yorker, he wrote recently about an artist

I wasn't familiar with who goes by the name Hardy. Hardy. Hardy, Hardy. In this case, Michael Hardy, who's kind of made his name as a country singer and songwriter. And he has a new song on his new album called Radio Song that I wanted to play for you. All right. Here we go. So his radio song is about, is a country song that can't be played on country radio. And it's part of his shift. His new album is half country music and half rock music. What's his story? He's a guy who grew up in Philadelphia, Mississippi. So he grew up culturally country, but that wasn't really what he listened to.

He was listening to, you know, I think it started with Pearl Jam, and it went into, like, Lincoln Park, system of a down. Oh, you can hear the Lincoln Park roaring through it. New metal, listening to the music that is sometimes referred to as butt rock. Okay, all right. What is that? It's, as far as we know, the phrase butt rock comes from... How are we spelling it? Spelled with two T's.

There we go. But it comes from the rock radio stations that promise to play nothing... But rock. Exactly right. Oh my God. So he, and it's funny, like, it's such an old-fashioned tradition now. You turn on these stations and they're playing, they're still playing Metallica and they're playing, you know, old songs. And they're playing like Papa Roach and disturbed, like new albums by these bands.

And so in this context, Hardy is kind of a breath of fresh air. He has a song on rock radio right now called Jack. It's so crazy. So it starts out country. and by the time you, you know, three lines later, you're in Lincoln Parkland. Yeah, and so the whole second half of his album is rock. And, you know, I have a theory that, you know,

there was a time not that long ago when country music was, like, considered the most uncool music in the country, right? Like, and people, you know, coastal elites love to sneer at country music. I think maybe it has now been overtaken by rock. I think that kind of like loud, mainstream rock, new metal sort of post-grunge

is now kind of, the most unfashionable music in America. I think so. Among coastal... Yeah, and I think... I think by comparison, that's why someone like Hardy, who arrives from the country world,

is able to sort of bring some fresh energy to it. So Hardy outlined what makes a song, a radio hit in the first track that we played. What makes this song good for rock radio? Well, it's a, you know, it's a specific tradition, right? It's this thing that happened since Grunge, where it was a lot of minor keys,

and then in the late 90s, in the early 2000s, you get the heaviness, you get the breaks. Hardy, I talked to Hardy, he told me, you know, there was a point in high school where he just wanted to hear something that was heavy. And if it was, you know, these kind of hardcore and metalcore bands, punk bands,

like a day to remember or August Burns Red, he just wanted like a heavy mosh part. So at the Super Bowl and then at the Grammys again, you've seen hip-hop celebrated and venerated as almost a historical genre. Is rock and roll, so dead that's beneath consideration? It sometimes feels that way.

I think one of the things that happens is that rock and roll is just more traditional. It's not that it's about chasing the latest trends, it's that different styles kind of get resurrected. You know, there's a band on rock radio right now called Giovanni and the Hired Guns. They are self-described Tejano punk boys from Texas.

Right. And, you know, so they're drawing from, you know, a lot of bands like Weezer, Blink 182, but also the Norteno music that they grew up on. This is a song they have called Overrated, and you can kind of hear those traditions colliding. So please note the tuba. Listen to the lead singer's voice, though.

Who does that remind you up? Who does it remind you up? Kurt Cobain. Well, yes, the shadow of Kurt Cobain, you know, is a long shadow. And it's amazing how there's a sense in which rock and roll has never really recovered from the shock of nirvana, at least that kind of rock. How do you mean?

Well, I mean, he, you think about the hair metal era. Right. Lasts, what, four or five years, right? From 85, 86, and then it ends in maybe 91. Whereas the grunge and the post-grunge era feels like it never really goes away. It's incredible. Now, this music also seems influenced by,

let's bring the personal into this. You were in bands when you were young, kind of punk bands. playing bass it's a little bit of that power in there too yes I mean that's the idea that like there's some kids out there that want to scream at the top of their lungs that's a very

that's a very common and popular idea and it's also the fact that these cycles they keep going I mean you know we remember when the strokes 20 years ago were you know borrowing an old Tom Petty riff from the 1970s and reusing it so now we have

bands like there's this band avoid I think a very entertaining young band from Seattle, and they're dusting off the long-ago sounds of the 2000s. I kind of I remember this stuff. Like, I was at those concerts, not as a kid, but as a music critic. And so I know, I think, a

little bit how you must feel, David, which is extremely, extremely old. Let's hear this. Here's a void. There's some familiar moves in there. I was going to say, if you listen closely, you can hear that little riff that you might recall. I know as the editor of this magazine,

you spend your days attending to weighty matters. Like that. But we can learn important lessons from a band like this. What I've learned from that song is that, as a great man once said, the arc of the rock universe is long,

but it bends toward the red hot chili peppers. These bands you were playing, they remain outliers for the moment, or do you see them becoming mainstream? Well, one thing that happened with rock and roll is that it's splintered, right? So you have indie rock over here, and then even on the radio,

you have classic rock stations, you have alternative stations that are playing rock bands, but they're also playing Billy Elish. And then you have, like, mainstream rock and active rock. Who's listening to the radio? Radio is still more popular

than you would think. It still drives discovery, right? People are discovering new music on the radio. Mainly in the car? Often in the car, but also people don't want to think too hard, right? Like, you log on to Spotify, and it gives you all these options.

A lot of people just want to push a button and have something come out and have someone maybe local talk a little bit about the weather and the traffic and play some songs that they're going to like. There's a lesson in there for Netflix, too, isn't it? Okay, it's a huge pleasure. Thanks, as always. Thank you.

You get to pick one more track. What should we go out on? So there's this guy, jelly roll, tattooed former rapper from Tennessee who managed a pretty amazing feat. He went number one on both the country and the rock chart in the last year with different songs.

This is his number one rock hit, Dead Man Walking. The New Yorker's Kelliface. You can read his writing on Hardy and 10,000 other subjects at New Yorker.com. I'm David Remnick, and thanks for listening. I hope you'll join us next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbess of Tune Arts with additional music by Alexis Quadrato and Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Walton, Breda Green, Adam Howard, Pallalia, Avery Keatley, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, and Gophon and Putabwele, with guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Harrison Keithline, Michael May, David Gable, and Meher Batia. Special assistance this week from Mike Dodge-W of KCRW. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.