What A Day - Amending The Constitution For The 21st Century With Heather Cox Richardson

Episode Date: July 17, 2026

President Donald Trump is obsessed with the past. Last night, Trump gave a primetime address about his favorite subject: the 2020 election, which he did not win. But as we have just celebrated America’s 250th birthday, many of us are thinking a lot about the past – and what our history has to do with the future of our country. Heather Cox Richardson is a history professor at Boston College and the author of the Substack “Letters from an American.” We talked about America’s past, what historical moments remind her most of right now, and why – despite everything – she’s hopeful about the future.And in headlines, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin gives a White House briefing doubling down on Trump’s election claims, the US expands its attacks in what feels like the never-ending war against Iran, and federal officials have identified a source of the outbreak of the diarrhea-causing parasite cyclospora.Show Notes: Check out Heather's work – heathercoxrichardson.substack.com Call Congress – 202-224-3121 Subscribe to the What A Day Newsletter – https://tinyurl.com/y4y2e9jy What A Day – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@whatadaypodcast Follow us on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/crookedmedia/ For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail]

The Constitution is a really strong document that is based in tripwires, really. I mean, we call them checks and balances, but the idea is to prevent the rise of somebody like Donald Trump. And I hear people say, we need to throw out the Constitution. And my answer to that is, no, we need to enforce the Constitution. I'm Jane Koston, and this is one today. The show that loves watching Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., faces worst enemy, his own worst. Here he is with CNN's Casey Hunt yesterday. You have gained notoriety for your skepticism about vaccines.

And over the summer in an interview, you said, quote, there's no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective. Do you still believe that? I never said that. So stop me. We have the clip. Please play the clip. I just talked about that the media slanders you by calling you an anti-vaxxer.

And you've said that you're not anti-vaccine. You're pro-safe vaccine. Difficult question. Can you name any vaccines that you think are good? I think some of the live virus vaccines are probably of earning more problems than they're causing. There's no vaccine that is safe and effective. Why would RFK Jr. make RFK Jr. say such things?

On today's show, historian and writer Heather Cox Richardson tells me what she's learned from America's past and why she's still excited for America's future. Before we get into all that, here's what we're following today, Friday, July 17th. This isn't about rehashing the 2020 election. This is just exposing what took place and to make sure it never happens again. President Trump, he hit the highlights and those should be scary for everybody. If you are an illegal or you're voting illegally, we will hunt you down. we will find you

and we will prosecute you. Quick question. What should never happen again? Exactly. Homeland Security Secretary, Mark Wayne Mullen, gave a White House briefing today doubling down on President Donald Trump's election claims. In case you missed it,

the president's Thursday night primetime speech focused on casting doubts about the legitimacy of our elections and appealing for more restrictive voting laws ahead of the midterms. Mullen threatened fines, penalties, or prison time for state election officials who refuse to comply with the administration's election security demands. In the words of Georgia Democratic Senator John Ossoff, isn't it humiliating, quote, to have to indulge the president's delusions? Mullen said states that don't elect to use DHS's recently updated tool for identifying non-citizen voters will become, quote, a priority for investigations.

The U.S. expanded its attacks in what feels like the never-ending war against Iran today. U.S. air strikes hit more bridges and energy sites and collapsed a tower at a key Iranian port. Iran, meanwhile, launched missiles at U.S. allies in the Middle East. In Kuwait, one of the desert nation's water desalination plants was damaged. Efforts to salvage last month's interim ceasefire remain, even as the U.S. and Iran continue to trade attacks back and forth in a battle for control of the Strait of Hormuz. Iranian officials say recent U.S. strikes have killed dozens of people and wounded hundreds, with new casualties reported today. Federal officials have identified a source of the outbreak of the diarrhea-causing parasite cyclospora,

and somehow that's not the worst part of this story. So what's the culprit? Apparently shredded lettuce from Mexico served at Taco Bell locations in Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and West Virginia. The CDC and FDA are now warning people in those states to stay away from the T-Bell lettuce, but did not disclose which company supplies it. However, a federal official told the Associated Press, the supplier is Taylor Farms.

Still, experts say the recent illnesses across the U.S. may not all stem from a single source. Taylor Farms, which has been linked to foodborne outbreaks in the past, did not immediately respond to an AP request for comment. And that's the news. Let's talk about history and Donald Trump. Last night, Trump gave a primetime address about his favorite subject, the 2020 election, which he did not win.

Of course, he didn't say he won the 2020 election during his 25-minute speech, he simply ranted and raved about potential Chinese influence on election security during the 2020 election, alleging, for example, that China had acquired voter registration files, which are public. And he concluded by saying that Congress has to pass the Save America Act, which would make it harder for Americans to vote in federal elections, and which is also very, very, very unlikely to pass. In short, Trump is still obsessed with the past. But as we have just celebrated America's 250th birthday, many of us are thinking a lot about the past and what our history has to do with the future of our country. Heather Cox Richardson is a history professor at Boston College and the author of the substack letters from an American.

We talked about America's past, what historical moments remind her most of right now, and why. Despite everything, she's hopeful about the future. Heather, welcome to what a day. What a pleasure to be here. Thank you. So we just celebrated America's 250th birthday about two weeks ago. What have you been thinking about as a country celebrated this major milestone? What I'm seeing around me is a real shift in American politics, as Americans recognize once again that they have agency to change the direction of the country.

And so what I've been thinking about are all the people in our past who sort of woke up one morning and didn't say, I know what I'm going to do today. I'm going to change the course of American history, but got up and did something that was important to them and that moved the ball forward and ended up changing the country. So to me, it's a really exciting moment where we're moving into a new phase and people are remembering that they can determine what the future looks like. You're a historian, and I also tend to think through the lens of history. Obviously, the world we are living in now is very different from the world. Our founders were living in 250 years ago, even the people who are living a century ago. We're very far away from Calvin Coolidge. we're very far away from even the world of Ronald Reagan. How can history be useful here?

What can it tell us about where we're going if we've never been there before? What historians do is they study how and why societies change. And no, history does not repeat itself, although people are always going to people, right? So there are some themes in the way we behave. But what historians do is we take a look at what has changed society in the past. And we dig really deep into our sources. We try and figure out what moved the levers of change or didn't for that matter. So what we do as historians when we look at the past is to say, oh, look, here's a situation in which people change the future by doing X or didn't change it by doing Y. So if you think about history that way as a study of how societies change, it's actually

really useful to look at the present and possibly even the future, recognizing that there's never going to be a one-to-one correspondence. but you are able to say, for example, hey, religion was really important in this moment or political movements were really important in this moment that looks a lot like today, or an individual was important, and these are the characteristics of that individual.

It's challenging thinking about a historical comparison to our moment, because we don't know what's going to happen. But are there moments from American history that remind you of what we're facing now? For example, I've been thinking, a lot about the red summer of 1919, where you have these massive race riots taking place and targeting African Americans who are returning from World War I, and you have this real

whipping up of racist and anti-immigrant hysteria that corresponds with the rise of the second Ku Klux Klan, which is a really depressing thing to be thinking about a lot. But what have you been thinking about? Well, see, that's a great example of what history does. You can absolutely make that comparison and going into what the 1920s looked like with the rise of the KKK and the immigration restrictions and the concentration of wealth among a really small group of people. And that, of course, led to the Great Crash and the Great Depression and so on. One of the things that I think about now, though, is actually two periods that jump out to me for different reasons. And the first is the 1850s, because what we saw in the 1850s was the

breakdown of two established political parties in the face of the takeover of what was in the Democratic Party by a small group of elite southern enslavers. And when it was clear that they were running the tables, not only in the Senate and in the presidency and in the Supreme Court, and also in the House of Representatives, people who did not want to lose their democracy to a really small group of people who thought that everybody else should create wealth that would then funnel upward to them came together. And they said to each other, you know, we don't agree about immigration, we don't agree about financing, we don't agree about whether we should have internal improvements or not, we don't agree about education, but by God, we can agree we don't think those people

should control everything. And they came together in a whole bunch of different ways, a whole bunch of new political organizations that eventually became the Republican Party that elected Abraham Lincoln and stood behind the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments. I feel very much like we're in a political moment like that. But in an economic moment, we are looking a lot like the Gilded Age, the first Gilded Age. You can make an argument we're in the second Gilded Age, where money has concentrated, again, among a small group of people. And once again, you saw a whole bunch of individuals coming together in new ways to push back against that. And I like that comparison in many ways, because what we remember from that period is the politics, of course, and the strikes and the labor unrest,

but we also remember the new music and the new art and the new literary. And the new literature. and the people who are participating in American society and American politics, even without having the right to vote, people like women, for example, indigenous Americans, black and brown Americans. And I love that idea that by getting behind the idea of democracy in whatever way is your signature, what you do best, people moved the needle pretty dramatically toward the progressive era. We'll get back to my conversation with Heather Cox Richardson in a moment. If you also feel like we're living in the Gilded Age, but, you know, with fewer corsets, make sure to subscribe.

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of activists. As we approach Occupy's 15th anniversary of the September, this series offers a reminder that collective action can reshape what seems possible. To listen, search for future hindsight wherever you get your podcasts. Let's get back to my conversation with Heather Cox Richardson. So we hear all the time that America has never been more divided. And I've always disagreed with that because, one, the Civil War happened. But also, I feel as if the nation has always been really divided, we just couldn't hear the other people we disagreed with. We now know more about other people's opinions than ever before in human history. And with all of these voices and influencers and government leaders and your average citizen fighting to be heard online,

how can we have a productive discourse about the things that matter? The whole idea that we are divided, bitterly divided right now more so than they were in the past, I think is really problematic because if you think about things like the idea of universal health care, Americans are behind that to the tune of like 80% of us, which is huge numbers. Similarly, the people, the people who want to see common sense gun safety regulation, over 70%. You know, many of the things that the traditional media is reporting as being progressive or far left is in fact squarely in the center of where Americans are right now, and by the way, where they were in the 1950s in terms of things like economic power and so on.

So I don't think we are especially divided right now. I think it benefits a certain group of politicians to keep us divided. And one of the things that we're seeing right now is a number of. of people backing away from this false image and saying, well, wait a minute here, you know, actually, I do like the idea of a rules-based international order if it means that we're not going to be trying to take over Greenland and going to be able to support world trade. So I think that this idea we're divided is a product of the last 40 years of American politics, more than it's a product of where people really are. Now, in terms of people's voices being heard, you know, one of the

things about history is that you forget how much of it is lost to us. So it might sound like people didn't have voices in the past, but a lot of that is because those voices weren't handed forward. They weren't preserved for many reasons. And so I think when you say we're hearing all kinds of voices now that we wouldn't have heard in the past, I'm not entirely sure that's the case. And I would make the argument that if you believe in the Enlightenment, you believe in the idea of people marshalling arguments based in reality, based in facts, based in things that we can actually prove that more voices is better. I kind of think of it as being crowdsourcing because you hear things you wouldn't necessarily do otherwise. So I'm actually really keen on the idea of hearing

the voices of, you know, a kid in an African country who maybe wouldn't have been heard in the past and now can say, wait a minute, I think if we handled energy this way, it might be more efficient. And you can take that idea into a bigger realm where people can say, yeah, that seems like a pretty good idea. We're in a weird moment where we simultaneously have a leader who wants to be an authoritarian, who wants to control every facet of American life and government. But we also have people who are growing increasingly cynical about what government could do or be. Looking at history as you have, do you think Americans can still turn it around?

So it's funny you say people are cynical now. I would have said people were really cynical over the past 30 years, really. You know, if you are under 55, I think, and that's a bit of an arbitrary cutoff, I think you don't remember a time when American democracy worked. That's never to say it was perfect. It has never been perfect, which is part of the whole idea of it, is always a work in progress. But what I see in this moment is a bunch of people waking up and thinking, hey, government really can work. And so you get somebody like Zoran Mamdani, the mayor of New York City, who's doing really simple stuff that makes people's lives better in a hurry. And one of the things that I think you saw in the Biden administration was the attempt to do that, but people didn't know it was going on because they didn't communicate it terribly well. Now when you see Mamdani picking up something like the idea that you should be able to unsubscribe from something as quickly as you subscribe to it, like how is that not working for us? That is great. And I think the idea of our government representing what we really wanted to do seems much more within reach when you can see that happening around you. The fact that we got this. housing bill, now the housing law through Congress, was sort of a miracle, really, and it was on a strong

bipartisan basis. Again, the president refused to sign it. It became law anyway. But I feel like I'm seeing more people have faith that, in fact, the government can do things that we want it to do. And here's a newsflash. It needs to. We are stuck, you know, in a country that in many ways moved backward after the 1970s rather than forward. And if we're going to face the challenges of the 21st century, we need to think of some new things in a hurry and make them happen in order for the United States to function, really, not only to be part, a responsible part of the world community. Do you think overall then that kind of the bleakness, the division, the cynicism is something that isn't really coming from everyday people, but it's kind of coming from media and people who

want to keep us divided? I think we are in a period of transition, and there has been a real move, in America to focus on the leaders in the federal government and what they are or are not doing. And one of the things that jumped out to me about the curriculum that was being developed in places like Florida and Oklahoma over the last several years is we talked a lot about the individuals or the events that were stripped out of it. And they were pretty astonishing, I have to say. But if you read that curriculum, what really was clear is that what was stripped out of it was human agency. You know, Rosa Parks in the curriculum that was being advanced, she just sat down on a bus one day. Well, you know, Rosa Parks was a leader of the NAACP. She'd done all kinds of work

about sexual assault against black women in the American South. She was a, you know, a strategist. She was an incredibly powerful woman. All that's gone. She's just somebody who doesn't stand up. And that idea that we actually can control the future is one that I think you are seeing more and more as people push back against the Trump administration, you know, the Tesla takedowns where people managed to visibly see their effect on the profits of Tesla, that mattered. And when you see the administration backing off of things like, remember, it was going to pull those weather stations out of the Pacific and the Atlantic oceans, which are so critical not only for understanding climate change and weather, but also are critical for people whose living depends on the ocean,

they backed off of that because there was such an outcry. And I think you are watching Americans become empowered. Now, mind you, that's going to have a lot of shaky moments. People are going to throw up legislators at the local and the state level, who maybe are not people you actually think you would like to have represent you. But again, the same thing happened in the 1850s. And when that happened, increasingly, when we saw new voices, new ideas, new people, increasingly voters and the American government coalesced around people that we now remember as being

extraordinary American figures, you know, real leaders. We created those people. We chose those people. They were not handed to us. And that idea that we can control our future, that we can retake power in our democracy, that's what I see right now. And I also see at the same time terror on the part of those leaders who have depended on a complacent population to stay in power and their determination to make sure that voters will not be able to turn them out in the future. And that, I think, is where the rubber is meeting the road on the moves of the Trump administration toward an authoritarian takeover of our election system. On that note, there's obviously been a lot of conversation recently about the Constitution and what it was intended to be and what it was intended to be in the future. And it continues to be tested.

Do you think the Constitution is a strong enough foundation to steer Americans forward no matter who's in power? A hundred percent. But what we've been celebrating in the last 250 years is the Declaration of Independence, which is not a body of laws, but it's important because it sets out unalienable rights. It sets out the idea that there are natural laws that give human beings, at the time, of course, a very limited set of human beings, but the principle that we have these rights and they cannot be taken away from us. And among those rights that is enumerated, not the only ones, they say these are only some of them, but that's enumerated in the declaration, is the right to have say in our government, the right to consent to the government that we have put in power. The Constitution is a really strong document that is based in tripwires, really. I mean, we call them checks and balances, but the idea is to prevent the rise of somebody like Donald Trump. And I hear people say, we need to throw out the Constitution. And my answer to that is, no, we need to enforce the Constitution.

You know, the emoluments clause, the idea that you shouldn't be able to accept anything from a foreign government. You look at the extraordinary corruption of the Trump White House, which is, you know, as economist Paul Krugman says, what they are doing in the White House is the equivalent of teapot dome every day. We need to enforce the laws that we have, which, by the way, is what Momdani is doing in New York City. I asked him once, you know, how are you going to get all this stuff through? And he said, I don't have to get anything through. I have to enforce the laws that are on the books. And I think that's a really important lesson to take nationally.

We have to enforce the laws that are on the books. Now, that being said, we also now know that there are weaknesses in the Constitution that they need to be fixed. We need to expand certain parts of it. We need to change certain parts of it. But that's something that the framers put in it so we could do that. And generally, the United States has had periods when they amend the Constitution pretty dramatically over a period of years. And then there's a resting period. We are way overdue for that period of amending the Constitution and making it possible for American democracy to fit the 21st century. Heather, thank you so much for taking the time to join me. It's been a pleasure. That was my conversation with Heather Cox Richardson,

professor of history at Boston College. We'll link to her substack in the show notes. Before we go, on Hysteria's latest episode of This Fucking Guy, Aaron Ryan and Alyssa Master Monaco dive into the past of a man they're calling the Jelly Bean Jackass, Ronald Reagan. He is one of the most infamous and consequential conservatives in American history. They'll cover how someone goes from B-list Hollywood acting to mucking up foreign affairs for decades to come. watch hysteria now on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. That's all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review,

enjoy an exciting episode of CSI Revolutionary War and tell your friends to listen. And if you're into reading, and not just about how by using DNA and genetic genealogy, scientists successfully identified a soldier who died at the Battle of Camden 246 years ago, like me, what a day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at cricket.com. slash subscribe. I'm Jane Koston, and the soldier's name was Private John Pumfrey. Rest in peace. What a day is a production of Crooked Media. Our show is produced by Caitlin Plummer, Emily 4, Erica

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