Heather Cox Richardson: "This is Americans vs. Dictators"

Summary

The Best People with Nicolle Wallace

Episode: Heather Cox Richardson – "This Is Americans vs. Dictators"

Air Date: January 12, 2026
Guest: Heather Cox Richardson, historian and author
Host: Nicolle Wallace

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Episode Overview

This urgent and in-depth conversation explores America’s perilous political moment, centered on Donald Trump’s controversial foreign policy actions — most notably, his military operation in Venezuela — and the broader implications for U.S. democracy, the international order, and information integrity. Heather Cox Richardson offers historical context, connecting today's events to patterns from past moments of upheaval, and provides a passionate call for civic engagement. The episode moves between diagnosis and potential paths forward, asking what ordinary citizens and responsible leaders can do as America faces a crossroads.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Trump’s Operation in Venezuela and the Move Toward "Putinization"

• Opening Analysis: Richardson compares Trump’s style with Vladimir Putin, arguing Trump’s Venezuela operation isn’t about democracy or regime change but about personal power and intimidation.

  • “What we saw was him extracting a leader almost as a threat to those remaining behind to say, give me a cut or I'm gonna do something even worse… That is a personalized power that looks very much like Vladimir Putin.” — Heather Cox Richardson (00:58, repeated at 11:00)

• Supreme Court Context: Richardson sees a pattern: Trump shifts to foreign adventurism as the Supreme Court constrains his domestic power, exploiting perceived executive leeway in foreign affairs.

  • “I don’t think it’s an accident that Trump then lashed out in the foreign sphere, where the Supreme Court has tended to give him extraordinary leeway.” — HCR (03:29)

2. Trump’s Fitness and the Congressional Abdication

• Mental Decline: Both host and guest highlight Trump’s evident cognitive decline, questioning why mainstream coverage tiptoes around it.

  • “We're not talking about that enough. ...You only need a handful [of Republicans] to say, hey, this is not okay.” — HCR (06:32)
  • “His fitness is this story staring us in the face that we still can't cover.” — Nicolle Wallace (05:48)

• Republican Enablers: Richardson challenges Congressional Republicans’ failure to act, laying responsibility for escalating authoritarianism on their refusal to enforce existing law.

  • “The damage is going to be extra. The damage to the US is already extraordinary. But the damage to the world is gonna be extraordinary. But second of all, we are watching the Republican Party, with its incredibly storied and often noble history, die by suicide.” — HCR (08:40)

3. The Manipulation of Rationale for Foreign Operations

• Venezuela’s Purpose: The panel explores how administration and Republican allies provide shifting, contradictory justifications ("for oil," "law enforcement," etc.), and how this manipulates public reaction.
  • “Rubio's on TV describing it as a law enforcement operation. ...Trump is incapable of hiding the banana. Right. It's for oil.” — Wallace (12:04)
  • “We're trying to untangle the skein of whatever ball of barbed wire is in Donald Trump's head.” — HCR (13:15)
• Personalization of Policy: Trump’s actions represent a shift from U.S. interest or ideals to self-enrichment and threat, signaling a new and dangerous mode of governance.

4. Threats to the Rules-Based International Order

• Explaining "Dismantling the World Order": Richardson lays out how Trump’s moves — particularly threatening NATO and intervening in other countries — risk destroying the post-WWII system built for collective security.
  • “The only option is for countries to go back onto an offensive system, making treaties with each other so that if their other neighbor invades, they'll be able to fight it off. Little wars become big wars, and that is the world in which we lived that gave us World Wars I and II. Except, as I say, now we have nuclear weapons.” — HCR (19:58)

5. Information Wars & the Media Landscape

• Attacks on Information Integrity: The rise of audience-driven media, corporate consolidation, and aggressive disinformation campaigns combine to weaken democracy.
  • “When I look at the place that you change the American story, it is always in the people like you and me... trying to make sure that people see the truth.” — HCR (29:24)
  • “There is a flattening of the information ecosystem that is sort of married with the corporate impulses. … What do you think we're living through in terms of information and news?” — Wallace (33:44)
• Hope in New Media: Richardson notes the demand for trusted analysis and good-faith information, predicting renewal beyond the legacy media’s limitations.
  • “I'm actually really hopeful... People want to hear what matters in their life.” — HCR (34:15)

6. Agency, Fear, and Civic Response

• Individual Responsibility: Both agree that public pressure and withholding approval are necessary to delegitimize authoritarian moves.
  • “In the United States of America, the Constitution rests on the power of we the people... if we withdraw that approval...that delegitimizes that government.” — HCR (41:10)
• Managing Fear: Recognizing legitimate fear, HCR argues that those with privilege must push back and refuse to obey in advance — referencing historian Timothy Snyder.
  • “If you show weakness, they come in harder and harder... If you push back and say, ain't happening, dude, they turn their attention to somebody else.” — HCR (46:02)
• Pressuring Institutions: Trump exploits institutional weakness — notably in law firms and universities — but organized, confident defiance can blunt his power.

7. Hope, Anxiety, and the Future of American Democracy

• Crisis and Opportunity: Despite high concern, Richardson outlines a scenario where the Republican Party could save itself by ejecting its authoritarian wing, realigning American politics, and reclaiming a center-right position.

  • “As the Republican Party falls apart... true Republican believers... have the opportunity to work with the independents and the Democrats to get rid of the part of the party that is currently becoming a Nazi party, to carve them out and to reshape a new Republican Party...” — HCR (49:55)
  • “This is Americans versus dictators. This is not Democrats, Republicans anymore...” — HCR (51:12)

• Redefining Norms: The host and guest agree the old norms are gone and that America has an opportunity to forge fairer and more inclusive new ones.

  • “Over 12 years, the norms are gone.” — Wallace (52:47)
  • “And I'm not sure it's a bad thing. They're gone… There's a lot of things that we can do better.” — HCR (52:50)

• Actionable Takeaways: The laws to protect democracy are already on the books; what’s needed is enforcement and public will.

  • “He said, Heather, the laws are already on the books. We just have to enforce them. And I was like, oh, my God, he's right.” — HCR (53:31)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “We're trying to untangle the skein of whatever ball of barbed wire is in Donald Trump's head.” — Heather Cox Richardson (13:15)
• “The story of how you fight, that is—maybe I'll rerun that piece I did on the pamphlet about how to recognize fascism and fight back against it… The playbook we need is how you fight it, not what it is.” — Heather Cox Richardson (54:10)
• “If you show weakness, they come in harder and harder... If you push back and say, ain't happening, dude, they turn their attention to somebody else.” — Heather Cox Richardson (46:02)
• “This is Americans versus dictators. This is not Democrats, Republicans anymore, as much as the Republicans would like it to be.” — Heather Cox Richardson (51:12)
• “I think keeping that pressure up and the illustration of that delegitimization pressures those elected officials to say, hey, if I want to get reelected, I need to be able to answer to these constituents who are saying, just a freaking second here. Get out of these international adventures, or whatever your particular issue is.” — Heather Cox Richardson (41:10)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Trump’s "Putinization" of U.S. Policy: 00:58–01:38, 11:00–12:04
• Mental Decline and Congressional Complicity: 05:33–09:31
• Venezuela and Foreign Policy Rationale: 12:04–17:21
• Rules-Based International Order Explained: 17:27–21:16
• Information Wars & Media: 29:24–36:13
• Fear and Agency under Authoritarianism: 43:44–47:02
• Republican Party’s Crisis & The Stakes of the Moment: 49:24–52:02
• Redefining America’s Norms & What Comes Next: 52:47–55:22

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Conclusion

This episode is a clarion call for engagement, vigilance, and honest reckoning with the dangerous direction of U.S. politics. Richardson connects the present to pivotal moments in history, warning against complacency and urging listeners to push for institutional and civic renewal. The focus is on courage, information integrity, and collective action to defend democracy — because, as both speakers conclude, the time to act is now, and the tools for change already exist.

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[End of Summary]

Transcript

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[Heather Cox Richardson]

I think what we are seeing is a real attempt to institute the kind of Putinization of the United States of America, if you will, in that what Trump did in Venezuela was not to overturn a government in order to install a democratically elected leader or an opposition leader. What we saw was him extracting a leader almost as a threat to those remaining behind to say, give me a cut or I'm gonna do something even worse that is actually slightly different than the United States is gonna become a colonial power that is a personalized power that looks very much like Vladimir Putin.

[Podcast Host]

As we wake up as though we are living out the lyrics of Billy Joel's We Didn't Start the Fire, I start my day with Heather Cox Richardson. Since the first time she appeared on the Best People podcast, I've had Ken Burns and other world renowned historians, authors, actors, politicians, government leaders, economists, titans of business tell me they start their day the very same way. So when we woke up to what felt like a new world order, we knew we had to have her back. This week, an encore performance for our own personal democracy. Rock star Heather Cox Richardson is back with us. Thank you so much for saying yes.

[Heather Cox Richardson]

It's such a pleasure to be with you always.

[Podcast Host]

It's so cool that we have had one conversation because now I can forever associate myself with you. When you come up, I can say, oh, I interviewed her for the Best People podcast. You are not just one of the best people that we've had a chance to talk to. You really are this voice that cuts through and you do cut across. Every single kind of person I come in contact with, everyone is listening to you. And so when you have this analysis, like what you've had over the last seven days, I just have to hit pause and lift it up and make sure everyone hears the things you're saying. So I wonder if we can just go through, really, the recent events and the things you've written and try to pull you through the moment we're living in. With Donald Trump's, I don't even know what to call it, operation in Venezuela, the decision to use special forces to remove Maduro and his wife from Venezuela and bring him to New York, it feels like the operation and everything he said since then represents an incredibly perilous moment, not just for our country, but, as you've written, for the world order as we know it.

[Heather Cox Richardson]

I think that's right. And Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo referred to it as Trump's adventure in Venezuela. And I actually don't think that's a bad word. There's a long history, of course, with American adventures in Latin America. But before we even pick a lane, because talk about the present could be anything from the missing Epstein files, through the attacks on Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, through the Republicans in Congress who appear to be awol, to our foreign adventures, the piece that I think we really have to center is that Trump does not appear to have control of his mental faculties, and we're not talking about that enough. Because when people talk about, oh, he shouldn't do this, he can't do this, why is he doing this? And so on, you don't make those arguments about people who don't have any logical reason for anything they're doing, except perhaps I want to feel good about myself and make lots of money. You know, people keep saying to me, isn't this what he's really doing? Isn't this what he's really doing? And that's sort of like saying, you know, what is the internal logic of somebody who does not have the capacity to have internal logic? So let's start with that. The next big piece I think that we are maybe underplaying is that the Supreme Court at the end of 2025 indicated that over the long term, although they made a temporary decision, indicated over the long term that they were not going to back the kinds of intrusion into Democratic run cities that the administration has really relied on to be their main show of force. And I don't think it's an accident that Trump then lashed out in the foreign sphere. Where the Supreme Court has tended to give him extraordinary leeway. By the way, that leeway that he is resting on is deeply contested. Throughout our history, you know, there's been a fight between Congress and the president over who actually has control over foreign affairs, and that's very complicated. But he believes he has real leeway there. So that's another part of what we're seeing here, I think, is just his determination to prove he's a big guy and he's strong like water.

[Podcast Host]

Right. Like they blocked off one path in the maze, so he's flowing down another. I want to start, though, with your first point, because I have to say I've covered the Trump story for, I don't know, what year is it? You know, it'll be 10 years.

[Heather Cox Richardson]

Four million years.

[Podcast Host]

Four million years. And his fitness is this story staring us in the face that we still can't cover. Right. It's like he does something and I listen to him live. I don't take him live very often because he lies so prolifically. We tend to listen to him pull out the news and then share that. But I came up at 4 and he was talking to someone and I thought about taking it live. He wasn't stringing nouns and verbs together in a way that I could even understand. So the reason for reviewing it and playing it back is usually to field the lies. In this instance, it was. I didn't understand anything it was saying. And I wonder why you think it's so difficult for people like us to cover his clear decline.

[Heather Cox Richardson]

Well, I don't think it's hard for us to cover it. I think the piece that is worth talking about in this moment is that the Republican Party really owns him at this point. And one of the things that has always protected him was the fact that the Republican Party was unwilling to toss overboard his potential voters. And so they were keeping him on board so that they could get those voters or they were true believers. We do have true MAGA believers in Congress, but in this moment, we have mechanisms for getting rid of the president that are not going to happen, I don't think, under the 25th Amendment, for example. But the role of Congress is to make sure we do not have a madman in the presidency. And they're abdicating that right now. And that is an indictment of the Republicans in Congress as they should have been indicted from the beginning for letting him go on his first impeachment in 2019, 2020 and so on. But right now, when I look at what we're seeing, the Real pressure point for me is those Republicans in Congress. You only need a handful of them to say, hey, this is not okay. You know, maybe we were willing to look the other way when he tore up usaid, or maybe we were willing to look the other way so that we would get the extension of the tax cuts. But when you are looking at somebody who is not only tearing up the post World War II domestic order, but is also tearing up the rules based international order that has been in place since at least World War II, bringing us back to the same kinds of conditions that led not only to World War II, but to World War I, one would think that at least some Republicans would be open to the suggestion that this must stop. And the trick is we have laws on the books that simply have to be enforced. We have mechanisms on the books that simply have to be enforced. So this is not saying he, you gotta go do something radical, you gotta rewrite the Constitution. No, you simply have to do what you took an oath to do. And this moment is now here. Because if he keeps attacking Greenland and our NATO ally, Denmark, all bets are off. And that is a road that we know where that leads, except when it led there before the world did not have nuclear weapons. And the fact that they're playing with this like, oh, we'll wait for the midterms. And Mike Johnson this morning, I don't know if you saw this sort of said, don't try and drag me into this. You're the freaking speaker of the House. Who else are we supposed to drag into this? If they don't step up now, first of all, the damage is going to be extra. The damage to the US Is already extraordinary, but the damage to the world is gonna be extraordinary. But second of all, we are watching the Republican Party with its incredibly storied and often noble history, die by suicide. And the fact that people would do that to their own party, not just to the nation, not just to the world, is just simply mind boggling, really.

[Podcast Host]

Well, and you can see them flirt with a different outcome. Right? You saw it when the September 2nd double strike was first reported by the Washington Post. You had Republicans join Democrats in calling for an investigation and asking if war crimes were committed. And then something happens where they, they try to put the genie back in the bottle, I guess if that's what Trump is to them. You saw it happen over Epstein with Massie and Marjorie Taylor step out of line. But as you, as you said at the very beginning, you know the, the story. If we weren't covering the operation that removed the leader of Venezuela, in Trump's telling, not because he was a brutal dictator, but because we want their oil. The story that we'd be covering 247 is that they're breaking the law. They're breaking a law Trump just signed by refusing to turn over The Epstein documents 100%.

[Heather Cox Richardson]

And, you know, there is something about the. We kind of wandered away from Venezuela and the threats against, at this point, Iran, Colombia, Cuba, Greenland, and Mexico. So he's had a busy couple of days.

[Podcast Host]

Yes.

[Heather Cox Richardson]

What I think we're seeing is a little bit more subtle than the US Wants that oil. I think what we are seeing is a real attempt to institute the kind of Putinization of the United States of America, if you will, in that what Trump did in Venezuela was not to overturn a government in order to install a democratically elected leader or an opposition leader or even really to hurt the party in power, because he left that party in power. What we saw was him extracting a leader almost as a threat to those remaining behind to say, give me a cut or I'm gonna do something even worse. And if you think about it that way, and you think about the threats against Mexico and the threats against Colombia and the threats against Cuba and even the threats against Greenland, it certainly looks as if what he is saying is not just America is gonna be the country controlling the Western Hemisphere, but also the way to get along with the United States is not to spread democracy or public health or all the things that we have tended to emphasize in the past. The way to get along with the United States is to give expletive to the president whatever he wants, give crap to the president, and then he'll back off. And that is. I mean, that is actually slightly different than the United States is gonna become a colonial power. That is a personalized power that looks very much like Vladimir Putin.

[Podcast Host]

Let me drill down on the parts of the Venezuela piece that are even in their telling, even with what you just articulated. Still doesn't add up. Right. So Rubio's on TV describing it as a law enforcement operation. When you use special forces, military to remove someone indicted, I guess, ostensibly for narco terrorism, when three and a half weeks ago, we pardoned someone convicted of those same crimes. So we're now going to put a leader on trial for the things that Trump pardoned another leader for doing a law enforcement operation is how Rubio describes it, as an excuse for why he didn't go to Congress. But the law enforcement mechanism for seizing alleged drug boats is inadequate. So we're using brutal, lethal military force to blow them up and murder them. I mean, they are unashamed. And Trump is incapable of hiding the banana. Right. It's for oil. I went for oil. I mean, noun, verb, and oil is all that Trump has said since Saturday morning. But why do you think there are still people trying to cover up? Trump's rationale, which he has told us over and over again since Saturday morning, is the oil.

[Heather Cox Richardson]

This is a fascinating mix, and I'm annoying when I say that because this is sort of. As a historian, let me suggest that rather than trying to figure out how they are trying to justify as a law enforcement operation, that they then turned around and kept the Senate Judiciary Committee outside of, and that required the mobilization of the U.S. military. I mean, what we are doing when we do that is we're trying to untangle the skein of whatever ball of barbed wire is in Donald Trump's head. And what that means is then we don't react, you know, because we're sitting there trying to think.

[Podcast Host]

We're adapting.

[Heather Cox Richardson]

Yeah, yeah. So where's the law that says, you know, but if instead of thinking about taking their words at face value and trying to make sense of them, you turn it around and you say, let's look at the facts on the ground. What does this say? The United States under Donald Trump went after the leader of Venezuela and his wife and extracted them. Not everybody, by the way, who was in that indictment, but extracted them to put pressure on the Venezuelan government. At the same time, they pardoned a convicted drug dealer from Honduras. What does that do? That makes that man's party, which then went on to win election beholden the Donald Trump again, what you're seeing is a personalization of a foreign policy that looks much like a dictator like Vladimir Putin or somebody who is trying to personalize what the world looks like in his neighborhood. And Donald Trump has behind him the United States military to make all this happen. And honestly, that galls me more than almost anything else. That is our tax dollars and our daughters and sons that are being used to put money and power into Donald Trump's pocket. And I don't think any mag has voted for that. The question that you raised, though, is a really interesting one. So if you are a Republican in elected office right now, you're caught between your voters who are deeply unhappy with the healthcare cuts that are taking away rural hospitals, with the economy where prices continue to go up with the cutting of public services, they are deeply unhappy. They don't like the deportations Trump is underwater on every single issue, including the strikes against those small boats that he insists are narco terrorists. So this is a presidency that is in historically low favor with the American people. So you're an elected Republican, you're in the middle between those two things. And right now they are continuing to try, I think, and cover for Trump at the same time recognizing that they're losing their base. And so there is pressure building up in that party. Some people are going full Nazi. And you're seeing a big split in MAGA with those who are following Stephen Miller and JD Vance and Curtis Yarvin and those people into the essentially white nationalist neo Nazi angle. But that's enormously unpopular among the American people at large. So then there are other people who are saying, well, let's just stop the voting. Let's just take away the votes from the most people that we can. And yet there are still some Republicans who are saying, I'd kind of like to be elected fairly and I can't do it on any of the policies that you're talking about. And I think you're seeing in the Republican Party kind of a mishmash of people choosing among those things. And you're starting to see some elected saying, hey, maybe we should at least nod to this. So why are they doing it? Why are they going along with him? Many of them owe their election to him. Many of them are afraid of their constituents. Many of them don't know what else to do. The Republican Party does not have a message right now that is saleable to anybody at all, except essentially neo Nazis. So I think we're in a real period of ferment. We've seen this before, of course, but which way the people in that party jump is going to have a huge impact in this moment on the world, simply because of the fact that Trump is now trying to dismantle the rules based international order. So if they're gonna make a choice, I wish they'd hurry up and get to it.

[Podcast Host]

What does it mean that he's gonna dismantle the world order? I mean, that sounds like out of a Marvel movie.

[Heather Cox Richardson]

So, you know, a lot of the world in which we live in the United States seems to us always to have been here because it has kept us so safe and so prosperous for so long. And, you know, if you think about, I keep throwing out the term rules based international order.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Heather Cox Richardson]

And think about power. Like if you are a nation, your first job from the beginning is to keep your people safe. Aside from anything else, you Want to make sure that the army from next door doesn't march in, you know, back on its horses and in its suits of armor. You want to keep your people safe. Now, that's the theory, right? Of course, there's going to be lots of loopholes in there. But the idea that you stay safe by having a big army and threatening to invade your neighbors and maybe making friends with some of your neighbors, and then you can pick on other people says that you use power aggressively. The point of power is to use it to hurt other people. But what happened after World War II, and there was an attempt after World War I, but after World War II, with this extraordinary destruction, this extraordinary destruction that some people are trying now to downplay, but it was truly horrific. I mean, countries ruined, millions dead. Anyway, at the end of that, the allies from World War II and their partners, there were some people who were not actually allied, but who come on board for this, decided decides something really cool, and that's that they're gonna use their power not as offense, but as defense, right?

[Podcast Host]

To turn.

[Heather Cox Richardson]

They're gonna say, we're gonna make an agreement, a peacetime agreement. It's not gonna be that this is only gonna happen during wartime. We're gonna agree to make treaties for peace, and in those peacetime agreements, we're gonna agree to cooperate in trade, for example, and we're gonna maintain freedom of the Seas, which we don't talk enough about. Freedom of the seas is what has given us our extraordinary world trade. You don't have to worry about pirates coming after you, except on rare occasions, for example, off the case of Somalia for a while. And now, of course, this is something the United States is doing. But there was freedom of the seas. There was an international financial cooperative system. There's all these different kind of organizations. But key to that was the United nations, in which its signatories agreed they would not challenge the sovereignty of another country. Some of those same people put together the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or NATO. And what NATO did, it was really the key to all this. They said, hey, listen, anybody who attacks one of us attacks all of us. So rather than using their power for, hey, we're gonna run and get your oil or we're gonna get your rubber, or we're going to absorb your people in your territory and grab them into our armies, the way Putin is doing right now in Ukraine. Rather than doing that, we're going to band together so that we are a defensive organization. And what Trump is doing by going into Venezuela, for example, by threatening all these other countries is. He is disregarding that entire system, which has been the goal for a long time, as I say of Vladimir Putin, because he doesn't want it. He wants to be able to go into Ukraine and to go into the Baltics and perhaps into Finland and into Scandinavia. And us abandoning NATO, threatening a NATO ally in Greenland, slash Denmark, undermines that entire defensive system. And once you've done that, once you've torn that apart, the only option is for countries to go back onto an offensive system, making treaties with each other so that if their other neighbor invades, they'll be able to fight it off. Little wars become big wars, and that is the world in which we lived that gave US World Wars I and 2. Except, as I say, now we have nuclear weapons, which is one of the key reasons that the Allies put together NATO in the first place.

[Podcast Host]

We're going to take a quick break here. When we're back, much more with one of our favorite people, historian and history professor Heather Cox Richardson. Stay with us.

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[Podcast Host]

Before we launch to NATO, because I think destroying NATO, it's chicken and egg to try to figure out if it was Putin's idea or Trump's instinct. I just want to ask you one more question about Venezuela. I mean, the exercise is futile to figure out why they're there and why they're giving us a million different reasons for being there. But one of the things that I think is important going back to the Republicans and what they're stuck between is that one of their reflexive defenses for using the military to remove another country's leader was that Maduro is bad, Maduro is awful. But they left Maduro's regime in power. I mean, they can't even pretend that removing someone awful and autocratic and brutal and of the election denier, who you know is horrible to his own people, was the reason they kidnapped him, because they left his number two. How do you sort of lance the boil? That is the Republican bullshit about why removing Maduro, who is truly a terrible person, was the reason they did it.

[Heather Cox Richardson]

I think people who are paying attention know the issue is to reach the people who not paying attention. And I think there is a reflection in what Trump did, in the reality that often when a country goes to war, it strengthens the leader at home. And that's kind of a truism we talk about when we talk about the history of foreign policy. When one country goes after another, the first place to look is not at that other country. It's at what's happening internally in the first country, the aggressor country. And I think that's really true here. Like you say, when is the last time you heard about the fact that the Trump administration has deliberately broken the Epstein Files Transparency act by releasing less than 1% of the documents that were supposed to be released by December 19, even though Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed that the review was done last July. So that has helped a lot. But the trick is to make sure. You know, one of the things that I've been watching really carefully is the American people do not like this adventure in Venezuela at all. But the MAGA Republicans are coming along behind it and starting to say, oh, this is America first, because we're grabbing other people's resources, or, oh, I love my strong president. And you could actually see it in real time on social media. Immediately after the attack, a number of MAGA influences were like, what are you doing? And then within 12 hours, they're like, this is great. And this is, I think, where people like you and me come in, is to reiterate the reality of what is happening. And so we're actually not talking about you and me, about Venice, Venezuela, except to say that the regime is in place and they are instituting extraordinary crackdowns on the Venezuelan people that do suggest it is at least possible that Trump really got played here because an unpopular regime is now being able to solidify its popularity. But what we are talking about is the need for the American people to have access to the actual facts, as opposed to what we're seeing coming out of the White House, which is, rah, rah, this is great. You know, we have always been at war with East Asia. A reference, of course, to 1984, George Orwell's 1984. But this, I think, is the battle going forward into American elections in the future, is making sure that people who are not necessarily paying close attention have access to what is really happening. Because if you look at what is really happening, what you're seeing is our military being used in service of a wannabe dictator who's consolidating power by grabbing, at least in this case, the leader of a country against the law in the United States, against international law, in order to bring more power and money to himself. And, you know, there are not a lot of people in the United States of America who think that's a great idea. And most of them probably share his DNA, if that.

[Podcast Host]

I mean, Trump wins the Republican nomination three times by really sewing up isolationism. I think this is a line of George W. Bush's actually in private speeches and maybe public ones, that he took the isms, you know, nativism, isolationism, and that's how he won the Republican nomination. And I guess I just wonder how, like, Marco Rubio knows better. And so to watch Marco Rubio dancing on the edge of a knife with George Stephanopoulos and saying, why are you guys all fixated on who's running Venezuela? Because eight years ago, you would have been. And Maduro's bad. Yes, Maduro's bad, but so is Putin, and we're not even going to help our ally defeat him. So I guess I still struggle with how brazenly they're spooning bullshit about the things that they're doing which are really consequential and put us on this path, as you said, to unwind NATO.

[Heather Cox Richardson]

You know, I was watching 2016 Marco Rubio speech last night, as one does on a Tuesday night, right? And it was really interesting because he was animated, he was alive. He seemed to have principles and I contrasted that in my mind with his interview last Sunday with George Stephanopoulos and thought, what happened? And I don't mean like, oh, what happened? But as in, it's almost like somebody has drained the life out of that man. It's really striking when you watch it, which, you know, people have said that, and I was like, yeah, whatever. I read people mostly rather than watching them, but it was really striking.

[Podcast Host]

I've actually watched the Rubio Trump debate performance a bunch of times because of all the obsession about hand size and ego. And I'm more fascinated than I should be with how J.D. vance describes Trump as America's Hitler and now go like something that no one has ever before. That said on my show, and I certainly have a lot of Trump critics there, I mean, J.D. vance has had the harshest indictment of Donald Trump, among the harshest that I've ever heard. He's now his subservient number two. Marco Rubio articulated a foreign policy more consistent with Ronald Reagan, John McCain, Mitt Romney, and now he is carrying out. And again, he may have evolved. You know, I've evolved, but that doesn't seem like it to your point. They now seem like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, carrying out something that maybe in deep recesses of their brain, they know is not just wrong, but dangerous.

[Heather Cox Richardson]

You know, I'm not gonna disagree with you, but I'm gonna come back to who knows? And we can't untangle that skein of barbed wire. So the other question though is can you switch this essentially cult like behavior from being anti American intervention to pro American intervention? And that really comes down, I think, to the way that you see the world. And you and I are engaged in the enterprise of trying to make sure people have accurate information. Because unless you have accurate information, you cannot make good decisions about your life. I find it fascinating that the American radical right, because that's what they are, consistently simply lie to their viewers. I find it interesting that people are willing to be lied to. That itself, I think, is investigation of human nature. But in the larger societal sense, when I look at the place that you change the American story, it is always in the people like you and me, but many of us who are trying to hold onto the truth, trying to make sure that people see the truth. Because the whole premise of American democracy is that if people do have access to good information, most of them will make good decisions, never all of them. Most of them will make good decisions. That's why we have a postal service. That's why that's in the Constitution is because people were supposed to have access to. To newspapers and to speeches from their congress critters so they would be able to understand what was happening in the government. You know, I look around us now and I look at, yes, people fall for this. There's increasing crap on social media, but how do we make sure people have access to what's really happening? And you can see that that war is being played out right now with the new attempt to control CNN with the purchase that has not gone through, but with the attacks on cbs, with the Fox News channel, with social media, which is being flooded again with bots and trolls. You know, you watch this, and we really do seem to be at war for democracy. But this war is one that is being waged intellectually, if you will. And that one is proving less bloody than when people shot at each other with artillery. But it is no less a war for control of the world, I think. Wow.

[Podcast Host]

I mean, that's another one that. I mean, more people come to you for their news and information and facts than any human being who publishes on substack. And some of it is the timidity with which the rest of us cover what's happening in our own industry. And I wonder if you can just say a little bit more about what's happening in the news industry.

[Heather Cox Richardson]

I can. Just to be clear, I am not a journalist. And that matters, I think, because I'm trying to hold the United States to account to history, which is, you know, in many ways, U.S. grant is as real to me as Joe Biden, you know, because I interact with both of them in very similar ways. And they don't really come to me for their news. They come for somebody who reads a lot and is trained to say this matters, this doesn't, and why this matters and doesn't. I could never do what I do without people like, you know, I mean, we're doing this together. And I think that's an important caveat. I think, though, that what we have seen in the period, really since the 1980s, for a number of reasons, is a number of previously independent news media sources becoming essentially pieces of corporations. And that's different than being a news organization. What you have started to see, though, and I was sort of in the early wave, but I was not one of the people beginning it was. Was the same thing we saw in the 1850s or the 1890s, for example, new technologies that permitted people like me to start reacting to the news with zero startup funds. I literally opened my laptop one day and Started typing. And what that has done is it has allowed the rise of extraordinary new media. And that gives them a freedom that you don't have if you're CBS and you're being backed by David Ellison. Right?

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. And there is a flattening of the information ecosystem that is sort of married with the corporate impulses. And I wonder if you think we're sort of living through the end of what we've known and the rising of really audience driven information sources like yourself, or if it's just this volatility, what do you think we're living through in terms of information and news?

[Heather Cox Richardson]

Well, first of all, I'm a prophet of the past, not the future. So I hate to say where we're going.

[Podcast Host]

I know, I know, but.

[Heather Cox Richardson]

But one of the things I think is interesting is the number of people who say there is no market for the kind of stuff I do, because I think that the people who read me have proven otherwise. I've never advertised, I've never accepted advertising. And yet, as you say, a lot of people have built this community to find out what's really happening. And I think again, at the end of the day, it comes down to how you see the people. You know, what do people want? And I think what people really want is they want to be able to make good decisions about their lives. You know, they want to feed their kids, they want a roof over their head, they want electricity. Some of us would love to have Internet access. Just saying. But basically, people don't want to be lied to. They want the information, but they also don't want politics to absorb every minute of their lives. Unless there's somebody who treats it like baseball and really loves this stuff. Most of us are not like that. So when you think about what the future looks like for news, I'm actually really hopeful from it. That is, people want to hear what matters in their life. And, you know, that's actually really interesting. Like, think of all the things you've had to learn this last year that you never thought you would have to learn in the past. We created new media and we're doing it all over again. And how much longer are you gonna be able to keep the Fox News Channel going as people age out?

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. I mean, it's depth and connection, which is a conversation much deeper than the media. Right. The thing that holds us all together is a hunger for connection. And that only comes through depth and authenticity. And to the degree that media on the right or the left lacks depth, authenticity, and the ability to connect us it's ultimately going to lose its grip. It is painful though, to watch the process play out. I mean, you saw with January 6, whitewashing and revising seem too gentle to describe what the Trump White House and the right wing media did with the five year anniversary of January 6th.

[Heather Cox Richardson]

I'm not gonna argue with that. I will say I think that they have gone so far that it has become a caricature. And of course, that's what White House spokesperson Stephen Chung has been saying. Oh, we're just trolling you because, you know, when Trump puts those plaques up underneath the former presidents that are, you know, even with his misspellings and capitalizations, those are our freaking tax dollars. Yeah. You know, when you think about the way that this administration is spending money, our money, on things like those stupid plaques, or, you know, changing the name of the Defense Department to the Department of War, which is not legal until Congress does it, you know, which is supposed to be up to $2 billion. Yeah. I look at that and I think, I feel like in an era in which, as you know, our deficit and our debt have gone through the roof under Trump for all this talk about saving money, he is spending money like a drunken sailor. And you think about that attempt to use our money instead of spending it on our healthcare, using it for crap like that, those plaques. I'm a little surprised we haven't put more muscle into saying, hey, wait just a second here. But again, it almost feels in many ways like Trump has taken everything to caricature.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Heather Cox Richardson]

And you think about this, the destruction of the Cohen building and the murals in it that are priceless. Or you think about the destruction of our education Department, or you think about.

[Podcast Host]

The destruction of or usaid.

[Heather Cox Richardson]

I was just gonna say US Agency for International Development or the rules based International Order. And it's not so freaking funny anymore. And that's the piece that I really hope we hammer forward. You know, I've been saying we're gonna have an answer about which way this country's gonna jump by, say, may cause I do not think that they're gon continue to nail together Trump's mental faculties in such a way that he can continue to stand in front of a podium, but we don't have that kind of time if he's gonna threaten NATO. We really are at the crisis point of the foreseeable future. And so, you know, we're in the middle of it right now.

[Podcast Host]

My conversation with Heather Cox Richardson continues right after a quick break. We'll be right back.

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[Podcast Host]

Well, you said something like that, that the next three months will sort of determine the way this thing goes. And this thing is our country. What does that call for from us as citizens?

[Heather Cox Richardson]

So a lot of people are really frustrated for a number of reasons, some good, some bad. That is, the Democrats are some of them are speaking up very forcefully, others are not. And they are not doing so because of course they're looking at the polls and the things to which future voters are going to be responding. And they're not wrong. If you look at the polls, you will see that what people are really concerned about is rising costs, for example, especially in healthcare, housing and groceries. Things that we sort of need, right? So people are frustrated by that. But at the same time you do have a number of Democrats speaking out and speaking out forcefully about the future of American democracy. So I know people are frustrated and there is certainly pressure to be held over Democrats. But it's also gonna be important to call out Republicans. This is ultimately on them. They are in control of the White House, the Supreme Court, and the Congress, and they're the ones at whose doorstep this rests. And a lot of people say, well, what good does it do to, you know, they don't do anything. It does a lot of good to call. It does a lot of good to put pressure on people at the national level, the state level, and the local level, where there are a lot of major changes going on. But the reason that it's important to demonstrate not just your dislike of the current regime, but your desires for the future is because, quite literally, in the United States of America, the Constitution rests on the power of we the people. Not a religion, not a nation, not the dirt it relies on. We the people, we give our power to our elected officers in order to enable them to make laws under which we are governed. And if we withdraw that approval, if we say, no, no, no, you do not represent us, that delegitimizes that government. And this is one of the reasons, as we started out saying, that Trump is turning to foreign affairs because he has been so delegitimized in the United States of America and keeping that pressure up. And the illustration of that delegitimization pressures those elected officials to say, hey, if I want to get reelected, I need to be able to answer to these constituents who are saying, just a freaking second here. Get out of these international adventures, or whatever your particular issue is. Because at the end of the day, that's where the leverage in a democracy sits. One of the things that really, really bothers me in where we are right now are the number of people who sort of say, oh, it's all over. Lol. America never had a democracy. Why are you even trying? And then you turn around and you look at the way we react to events in, say, Iran right now or in Syria when they got rid of Assad, and you look at the extraordinary support we give to people who are trying to reclaim their voice in their government. And. And I'm like, how about cheering on those people in the United States who are trying to stop the loss of our democracy, to not lose it, Right?

[Podcast Host]

Well, I think people are also afraid. And I think you watch what ICE is doing and how they're operating with impunity. And you watch. They seem to be banking on the shock of their tactics wearing off, but they seem to have sort of come in with force and brutality in Minnesota. And I wonder what you say about the Fear response.

[Heather Cox Richardson]

I think it's perfectly legitimate to be afraid, but that's the place where people like me need to step into the breach. The resistance to Trump has been, for a resistance movement, unusually old and white. And that, I think, is actually a very good thing because it provides cover for especially our brown neighbors now, but certainly for black Americans who are wisely staying out of the public eye on this because they refuse to give the president justification for cracking down on them. But the thing I would say is that this is not gonna get better unless we make it better. And an awful lot of what the Trump administration is doing and has accomplished is solely on television. Like, they are working really hard to show that they have this extraordinary strength, that they're doing these terrible things and they're making these videos and they're marching people out in handcuffs and so on and so forth. But at the end of the day, they're actually not being able to accomplish the shock and awe that they intended to. So I would say, as Timothy Snyder, the scholar of authoritarianism, says, don't obey in advance. If you are in a position like someone like me is to be safe compared to some of our neighbors, don't say, I won't do this because of what might happen. And you will see there, I pretty deliberately called out people with the idea that I'm not gonna police my language because I have the right not to in the United States of America until they take that away from me. Doing that, I think, is a deliberate way to say, I'm not scared of you.

[Podcast Host]

Well, and at a pragmatic level, Trump smells people's fear and organization's fear and institutions fear. And when he went after the law firms and they went down there and sniveled and cowered before him, it didn't placate him. He went steamrolling through the entire big law universe. And same with the universities. Do you think the circumstances or the politics of capitulation have become worse for institutions like Harvard?

[Heather Cox Richardson]

Oh, yeah, for sure. But you know what interests me in this moment is the degree to which women especially, and especially women of color and black women understood Trump from the very beginning.

[Podcast Host]

For sure.

[Heather Cox Richardson]

This is an abuser. And it was really interesting the way that a Republican actually today said that the United States is a predator nation. What a word, right? And Trump keeps talking about how the United States is hot. I mean, when do you hear that kind of language? Right? But it's really interesting because if you have ever dealt with somebody like that, you know that that's exactly Right. That if you show weakness, they come in harder and harder.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Heather Cox Richardson]

If you push back and say, ain't happening, dude, they turn their attention to somebody else.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Heather Cox Richardson]

But I thought it was fascinating that the law firms seemed to think they were gonna be able to appease him. And I thought this is probably a reflection of the fact that so many of the decision makers are white men who have never had to negotiate around this kind of a predator before.

[Podcast Host]

Right. From the position of such profound weakness that they put themselves in. I guess that's it. What do we do to maintain our agency and not put ourselves in those positions of weakness?

[Heather Cox Richardson]

I will answer that, but I feel like you haven't answered anything yet. And we're almost at the end here. What do you see?

[Podcast Host]

Oh, I see. I ended the year so optimistic, and I guess I'm starting the year so anxious. And I ended the year feeling like from the Kimmel benching and then the public saying, you know, what the fuck? Give me my Jimmy Kimmel back or I'll decide, you know, that millions of people canceled their Hulu and Disney is, to me, amazing. And that gave me so much hope. And then you corrected me in saying that the elections weren't about Democrats running the tables, they were about the American people running the tables. And I felt great about that. And I do feel like people woke up in September, October, November of last year, and I think that Trump's physical decline. I played the clip of him saying, I could shoot people on Fifth Avenue and my supporters wouldn't care. And it was a reprehensible thing to say, but he was a different human being when he said that than he is right now. And whether you love him or detest him or just think he's a terrible idea for America, you cannot deny that truth. I am anxious about the response from Republicans to both the double strike in the Caribbean. And I find it unnerving that so many Republicans are willing to accept. I think there are six public rationales on the table for the military operation which Marco Rubio is somehow inexplicably branding. A law enforcement operation carried out by the military. I am disoriented and unnerved by the Republican acquiescence on those two issues. That that isn't over aligned for them is something that has unnerved me in the new year.

[Heather Cox Richardson]

So where do you think the pressure is lying in the next three months?

[Podcast Host]

I mean, I agree with you. I believe we will have midterm elections. I think he might want to cancel them. I think the incompetence is still this undercovered part of the Trump story. I don't think that they will be capable of canceling the midterms, to your point. I don't know that we have that long. I'm worried about all the damage he does between now and next November. And I see this story as moving in one direct decidedly, which is Trump's political weakening and a very slow waking up of enough of the country to pressure Republicans. I'm not sure pressure can still change their behavior.

[Heather Cox Richardson]

Yeah, I mean, I'm with you. This is the one place that I was surprised. I thought that the Senate Republicans would defend the prerogatives of the Senate when Trump took his second term, including Mitch McConnell, who made noises that way early on. But here's the piece that I think is worth. And by the way, I am very concerned. I mean, off the charts concern. People always say I'm calm and cool, and I promise you it's gonna be okay. And I won't promise it's gonna be okay.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, you don't do that. Yeah, but you are calm.

[Heather Cox Richardson]

But I will say that Trump is weak, the Republican Party is falling apart. And to go back to the piece that you picked up on that I said before, that I think really matters, and my pattern for this, by the way, is not, not yesterday. It's the 1930s, the 1890s, and the 1850s slash 1860s. And that is that as the Republican Party falls apart, and in these other eras, it was different parties, but as that party falls apart, true Republican believers who believe in the ideology, the real ideology of the Republican Party, those people that became known as Republicans in name only in the 1990s and so on, who really are center right, have the opportunity to work with the independents and the Democrats to get rid of the part of the party that is currently becoming a Nazi party, to carve them out and to reshape a new Republican Party, that is what it should be, which is center right, which would enable the Democrats to slide to center left, where they are not right now. They are basically to the right of Eisenhower, and that would enable the country to rebalance itself. And one of the things that I keep hammering on is, as you say, this is Americans versus dictators.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Heather Cox Richardson]

This is not Democrats, Republicans anymore, as much as the Republicans would like it to be. And if we can get those Republicans to say, yeah, okay, we're done, we're done with Mitch McConnell, we're done with, you know, all those people who supported Trump, then we have the potential, not just for reclaiming America, but also for reclaiming the Republican Party. And there's a lot of Americans who would like that party back, and they would be able to pick up a lot of independents as well, who are currently siding overwhelmingly with the Democrats. So there is political opportunity for people in the Republican Party if they will only grab it. And that's the piece that I'm really pushing for people to recognize, because they better do it soon, or there's not gonna be either a Republican Party or a nation for them to govern any longer.

[Podcast Host]

And I guess that'll have to be our next conversation. Like, then what happens?

[Heather Cox Richardson]

Well, that would be a fun conversation, because one of the things we're not focusing on enough is Trump takes all the light, is what do we want from this country? Right. And that's actually a fun conversation.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. Well. And I think that knits together all these. You know, I worry about all the things we're not paying attention to. I think the freneticism and the coverage didn't help anybody. It was imposs to track it all. So we tried to learn from folks like yourself and go deep on a couple of stories a day. I like that you are so focused on the moment we're in. I do find some of the analysis is still stuck in this, you know, holding their breath, waiting to snap back to the norms. I think over 12 years, the norms are gone.

[Heather Cox Richardson]

They're gone.

[Podcast Host]

And we need to have a conversation about new norms.

[Heather Cox Richardson]

And I'm not sure it's a bad thing. They're gone.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Heather Cox Richardson]

I mean, the country had not served an awful lot of people for 40 years.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Heather Cox Richardson]

And there's a lot of things that we can do better. And I think that people want us to do better and that we have the tools to do better if we are able to get past this moment and rework American democracy. And another conversation. But I'm fascinated by the fact that Mamdani in New York, when I asked him, how are you gonna do all this stuff you're talking about? He said something that, to me was like the little light bulb went off in a cartoon. He said, heather, the laws are already on the books. We just have to enforce the. And I was like, oh, my God, he's right.

[Podcast Host]

Well, the thing about Mamdani that's so fascinating is Donald Trump just lifted the political cloud over him. I don't know how the right comes after him on all of the racist smears when Trump fell in love with him on live TV. I mean, it is like the mirror of J6 it happened on live TV. You can't deny it. You know, Trump in 2017 tells his supporters, don't believe what you see, don't believe what you hear, only believe me. And I was on live TV when it happened. I played it, and I was like, what? Like, I don't think he's a planner, but he obviously knew he wanted to operate sort of off book and that he didn't want his supporters to believe anything they saw with their eyes or heard with their own ears.

[Heather Cox Richardson]

Well, and, you know, the playbook that he keeps replaying is just the strongman playbook. And people keep saying, oh, he reads Adolf Hitler or whatever. I'm like, no, he doesn't. This is the way every strong man has operated forever. And it's really quite boring, you know, in terms of. Of playbook. We know exactly what's gonna happen, but the playbook that we need to be following is how to break that cycle. And, you know, part of it is speaking up, as you say, challenging him on every front, going after the people around him. Why is Stephen Miller so powerful? Why is Russell Votes so powerful? You know, we didn't elect them. Nobody thought we were gonna get what they handed out, despite the fact that we knew about Project 2025. But, you know, when Trump said he had nothing to do with it, the legacy media went with that and said, oh, people like complaining about it are overreacting and tying him to something he says he's not connected with. Why are we letting these people get away with that? In terms of looking forward and rebuilding American democracy, the story of how you fight, that is. Maybe I'll rerun that piece I did on the pamphlet about how to recognize fascism and fight back against it.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Heather Cox Richardson]

The playbook we need is how you fight it, not what it is.

[Podcast Host]

Right. The diagnosis is over. And those are the people trapped in the moment of coming on TV and telling me what the norms are like. I know, but to your point, people voted for Trump twice. Like, the norms, either they didn't sell them or they didn't serve them. And so it's figuring out what comes next. As you can tell, I could talk to you forever and ever. Go right. Go somewhere warm. We love this so much. Thank you so much.

[Heather Cox Richardson]

It's always a pleasure.

[Podcast Host]

Thank you so much for listening to the best people. You can continue to subscribe to our premium service on Apple Podcasts to get this another msnow podcast ad, free. You'll also get early access and exclusive bonus content. All episodes of this podcast are also available on YouTube. Visit MSNow the best people to Watch the Best People is produced by Vicki Vergelina. Our associate producer is Rana Shahbazi, with additional support from Alison Stewart. Our audio engineers are Greg Devens II and Hazik Bin Ahmad. For Red, Katie Luck is our Senior Manager of audio production, Pat Berkey is the senior Executive Producer of Deadline White House Brad Gold is the Executive producer of Content Strategy, Aisha Turner is the Executive Producer of audio and Madeline Herringer is Senior Vice President in charge of audio, digital and long Form. Search for the Best People wherever you get your podcasts and be sure to follow the series.

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