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- [00:01]
Jon Stewart
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- [00:31]
Heather Cox Richardson
K Pop Demon Hunters, Haja Boy's Breakfast Meal and Hunt Tricks Meal have just dropped at McDonald's. They're calling this a battle for the fans. What do you say to that, Rumi? It's not a battle. So glad the Saja boys could take
- [00:42]
Jon Stewart
breakfast and give our meal the rest of the day. It is an honor to share.
- [00:46]
Heather Cox Richardson
No, it's our honor.
- [00:48]
Jon Stewart
It is our larger honor.
- [00:50]
Brittany Mametovic
No, really, stop.
- [00:52]
Heather Cox Richardson
You can really feel the respect in this battle. Pick a meal to pick a side
- [00:57]
Jon Stewart
but and participate in McDonald's while supplies last. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the weekly show podcast. My name is Jon Stewart. It is March 31. We are on the the lamb side of March, moving into April. And other than that, though I would say I am. I'm having a feeling of. I don't know what it's like to be on a bobsled course or on a luge, but that's what it feels like right now in this country. We appear to be careening towards something and you're not quite sure if we are going to stay on the track or fly off and explode in midair. And when I. When I have feelings like this, when the complexities of the world and the velocity of world events seem to be speeding towards a frightening conclusion, I reach to those, as Mr. Rogers would say, I reach for the helpers. I reach for the helpers. Those that can help put this in perspective. And. And our guest today is just one of my favorites who I just. I love her substack. I love everything that she does, but her ability to sort of create frameworks around all these things that are so difficult for all of us to process is what makes her such a. A valuable voice in this current moment. So I'm just gonna. I'm just gonna get on in and bring on our guest, the fabulous Heather Cox Richardson. So, ladies and gentlemen, it is my distinct pleasure and honor to welcome back once again the great Heather Cox Richardson, professor of history at Boston College. Heather, thank you so much for being here.
- [02:42]
Heather Cox Richardson
Always a pleasure, John.
- [02:44]
Jon Stewart
Heather. John, first of all, let me apologize to you that in times of trouble, I hate to treat you like a salve that I reach for in times of need. A bottle of Valium. Your experience and your knowledge of the arc of history and the narratives of history always bring me a comfort in that the things that we're experiencing are not necessarily unprecedented and that there are historical analogues which we don't want to use as a crutch, necessarily. But, Heather, I'm wondering. In this moment, I wanted to reach out to you because it feels there is a toxicity that seems to be building to some kind of volcanic eruption. And I can't shake that feeling of impending catastrophic. So I. I wanted to kind of pick your brain a little bit about how you're processing this, this moment, knowing how well you're able to see the landscapes of the past and lay them into the present.
- [04:06]
Heather Cox Richardson
So let's start with the place it's always important to start, and that's that the future is unwritten. Like, we are writing this story and we are doing it. And one of the reasons that I think people like you and me reach for the people around us is because ultimately, this is an extraordinarily human process. This is. You know, the people in the past did the same thing. Yes. Though I feel as if, like, you seem to feel that we are heading towards some kind of a cataclysm in the next. Soon, you know, and that I think we should maybe unpack a little bit about what's going on there. But again, to reach back into history, we are not the first people who are approaching a catastrophe without really being able to understand what is gonna happen or what it looks like. And I always think of the fact that years ago, I went to write a piece on the great crash of 29, and I thought, you know, everybody's done the. You know, the economics, and everybody's done this and everyone's done that. What am I gonna do? So I went back to a newspaper from the time and read the night before to see what it looked like on the verge of it. And it's really interesting. It was the opening night of the Opera in New York City. And so you had all these stories about the people in their, you know, beautiful coaches and the, you know, the guys with the uniforms and the people wearing diamonds and going in and going to see the. The opera. And there was a really small note about a man who had died by suicide that night because his business had gone under and he was distraught and he couldn't face the fact that he was the only failure in this entire city, country, world right in his mind. And that's always stuck in my mind because I just, you know, I kept saying to the little piece of paper, dude, hang on, hang on 12 more hours. Because if you hang on 12 more hours, there's going to be a whole lot of people who are there with you and who might like to hear your perspective on things. So every time it feels to me like, oh, man, I'm not sure what we're facing in the morning, I think of that poor man who, if he had just managed to hang on for 12 more hours, would have realized that he was not a failure, that the system had failed, and that together they could rebuild it.
- [06:25]
Jon Stewart
That's a beautiful way of putting it. And there's also something within that kind of tableau that seems really appropriate, which is the cataclysm always seems to occur the night before. Cataclysm Eve, if you will, always seems to be draped in finery. You know, you sort of. You almost get that sense of using the Titanic as that, you know, and what's happening. The band is playing in the grand ballroom, and people are draped in there and they're. They're riding in luxury on what appears to be a kind of portend for this glorious and future of riches. And then there's one dude who's like, hey, what's that? What's that shadow of an iceberg that's over there? And it feels that way a little bit here. And I'll. I'll tell you why. This moment, for me is a. Is the world faces those challenges and potential cataclysms and all those things, and navigating these difficult waters. The difference for me now is the captain of our ship seems utterly disinterested in where the icebergs seem to be in when the crash may happen. He just wants to get out. He wants to stand on his plane with a giant poster board of his ballroom. It's the lack of interest in the consequences of his powerful actions is. Is I think, what's got me on such shaky ground. I don't think. I feel like we've never been at the, you know, at the peril of a leader so disinterested in the damage of his own actions.
- [08:12]
Heather Cox Richardson
You're far more charitable than I am. I think the dude is cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. I mean, I was. I was trying to be so, you know, I'm gonna push that further. To me, the elephant not only just in the room, but in the whole house and in the whole mansion, you know, whatever, is that he is not mentally okay. And, you know, we have Captain Ahab in the charge of the ship of state, which, you know, would be a lovely thing to dive into in some other conversation. Yes, but he. No, I think it's more than he doesn't care because certainly we have had presidents in the past who had an ideology in their head and acted according to ideology, even as the country began to burn down around them. I mean, just don't even start me on Benjamin Harrison, but we could get into Calvin Coolidge, for example. But in this case, the man does not know if he's afoot or horseback. And so things are changing every second. And the more destruction he causes, the more he is inclined to lash out and cause more destruction. So watching that and what that has gotten us into, with the destruction of world trade and with the destruction of our security alliances and with the destruction of our allies and with the support. The fact we're supporting oligarchs, especially petro oligarchs around the world. I mean, what he has done is he has really slashed into ribbons the post World War II order that has brought us peace and prosperity for 80 freaking years. So that is entirely new. And certainly there are parallels in the past where the American people have stepped up and said to those individuals who were advancing ideologies, hey, dude, this doesn't work. We gotta try something else. But what that has also done is it has opened a window, I think, into possibilities for moving the world forward in the ways that it will need to in the 21st century to do things like address climate change and to address the migration that's gonna come from climate change, and to address the fact that in that post World War II order, you really had more even than the vestiges, I think, of colonialism, but the kind of colonialist ideas that said that Africa doesn't get a seat at the G20 until President Joe Biden is in office. So one of the things I think about steering that Titanic past the iceberg, or maybe at least guaranteeing that people get in the lifeboats, is people keeping a steady hand on. I'm sorry to really push that metaphor, but the ship of state to try and make sure that it can at least keep afloat long enough that we are there in lifeboats when we get the next way to look at the world.
- [10:58]
Jon Stewart
Right, Right. Yeah. The problem almost seems to be that Trump is Destroying it faster than we can react to it. That the squandering it really is like this 80 year world order that you speak of was designed and maintained by the United States. We created this stable world. That's where our leverage and power is coming from. And to see him piss it away with such velocity, I think it's. Is our system up for being able to grab the wheel? Are we all just still trying to, to gain our bearings?
- [11:44]
Heather Cox Richardson
Well, I think at the beginning we were trying to gain our bearings because things were happening so incredibly quickly. And the idea of pushing back against him through the courts, for example, takes time. That takes time to play out. But one of the things, again, now I'm going to be Pollyanna to you here.
- [12:01]
Jon Stewart
No worries.
- [12:02]
Heather Cox Richardson
One of the things that does seem to be developing is a number of people in other countries who at first had their jaws on their chests watching what was happening in the United States are now sort of standing up and saying, well, well, actually we don't want to go down the route of going back to the 1890s the way Donald Trump wants to, because let's think about what that did. Oh, I know, World wars. So in places like Italy, for example, Italy this morning said that it would not permit US Planes to land in Italy on their way to Iran. Well, what does that say about the importance and the ways in which the Trump administration and the way it's behaving is hurting the far right in Italy? You know, they don't want to be aligned with him. And take a look at what happened to the rising right wing parties in Canada and the emergence of Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada. I mean, he's incredibly smart man anyway. But his reworking of that international order in order to make sure that what he calls the middle countries, the middling countries, are able to maintain some kind of global stability. You know, what's happened to the United States is heart wrenching over the last 40 years, at least, maybe in part because we have been so powerful. It's enabled us to get away with all kinds of crap because we didn't have to pay taxes we could simply borrow. We didn't have to worry about our safety because we were the United States. What we are seeing happen to us and our role in the world is heart wrenching for those of us who remember a period in which we were really a force for good, or at least tried to be. But maybe what we will see coming out of this is a fairer order around the world, thanks to people in other countries. A little hard to be thrown into the backwater yourselves. But, you know, we did it to ourselves.
- [13:49]
Jon Stewart
Right. It's so interesting to think of it that way, as Trump, as almost a vaccination against far right populism, that they, they see how it operates. But maybe that's the difficulty we have in processing him, because we look at it, you know, you mentioned Benjamin Harrison, you mentioned Calvin Coolidge, and we process him through our own system of constitutional republic. Right. But he's kind of thrown our lot in with a different form of government. It's hard to compare him to American presidents. It's almost easier to compare him to strongmen. I mean, I don't know if you saw they unveiled the Trump Library, but it's not a library. It's the Freedom Tower, as if the only tenant was Kim Jong Un. Like, it's twice the size of a height of any building in Miami. And then in it are just gold statues of Donald Trump and his plane. So how do we, how do we process an American president that has so much more in common with the illiberal strongmen of today and the past?
- [15:05]
Heather Cox Richardson
Well, so, first of all, I think it's important to realize that he was not just breaking the law in his first year in office. He was acting, not acting unconstitutionally, although it was that, too, both of those things. He was acting as if there wasn't a Constitution, which is one of the things sort of extra constitutionally, which is one of the things that's made him hard to chase down. Because normally if somebody breaks the law, you say, okay, I'm going to bring in lawyers, I'm going to sue you, and we're going to get to the bottom of. But think about the Department of Government Efficiency, for example. We still don't know who was in charge of the Department of Government Efficiency. Like, how do you sue anybody if you literally do not know who was in charge of it? So there are many ways in which. The way he undertook to undermine the Constitution, in fact puts him in line with those autocrats who operate without any check by the people. So I think it took a long time for people to get their heads around that and to figure out how to fight back against it. And we can talk more about that. But that library, I think, is really interesting, along with the arch and along
- [16:10]
Jon Stewart
with, you know, the Arc de Triumph.
- [16:13]
Heather Cox Richardson
Yeah, yeah.
- [16:14]
Jon Stewart
I mean, and you know, when they build it, they're gonna drop the I and it's just gonna be the Arc de Trump.
- [16:21]
Heather Cox Richardson
But you just said something there.
- [16:23]
Jon Stewart
Yeah.
- [16:23]
Heather Cox Richardson
When they Build it.
- [16:25]
Jon Stewart
Yes.
- [16:25]
Heather Cox Richardson
So one of the things that I find fascinating and would love to hear you talk about this. Cause this is your medium and not mine, is the degree to which what Trump is doing is sort of the idea of virtual technology, that Russian concept of convincing people in the political realm of something that does not exist, that exists only in their minds and in the technology of television and radio and the Internet, to base their lives on that. The degree to which we are looking at, basically, Trump running the country like
- [17:01]
Jon Stewart
a television show, no question, and an adhd. I think what you find now is, and the only thing I can think about it, is I'm trying to, again, be charitable, is if you don't think of him as a dictator, but you think of him as, all right, he believes the United States is really just a subsidiary of the Trump Organization. And so he's running it. If you don't think of it in terms of, you know, Putin, you think of it in terms of a businessman running a company that's not public. So all the decision making that occurs, he is, in essence, it's monarchy, but through a capitalist monarchy. You know, that's would be the charitable definition of it. And I think what you see is he's able to move using those processes much faster than we're able to, to contain it. He. I think his first term struck me as he was testing the limits of our Constitution. Where are the holes? Where are the weaknesses? The second term, he's just exploiting them. And he's doing it at such a pace. I mean, I think the real analog to that is what happened to the East Wing, where I'm going to build a ballroom, but I'm never going to touch the East Wing. And then it's just gone. And rather than face the consequences, he is a. He's not. You know, they always say, like, it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission. The thing about Trump is he doesn't even ask forgiveness. He just moves on. He's a wreck. It's. He is a wrecking ball that operates simultaneously with a sort of reality distortion field. And he convinces his acolytes, like you say, through the power of narrative. He's one of the better narrative storytellers, but it's butting up against actual reality. And that's what's so fascinating about the Iran situation. It's the first time I've seen him not be able to just move on.
- [19:10]
Heather Cox Richardson
Well, so that's really interesting, thinking about the United States of America as a subsidiary of the Trump Oligarchy. Or not even. It's a personalized company and thinking of it as a media subsidiary, basically, the United States as a media subsidiary. That is, you just have to tell a good story. And we know there's a lot of stories coming out of the White House about how White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles is running a daily TV show that Trump has to win at the end of every night. The degree to which he is manipulating reality through his posts on Truth Social and through the things he's saying which change by the hour. But there is, it seems like the way you set that up, it does seem like there has to be a way to think through this that enables people to create their own reality out of things that are actually based in reality. Like you say, like the Iran war. And I, you know, like you, I have said for years that once people woke up and realized what was gonna happen if in fact we put this kind of a presidency in place, that's when we would get our democracy back. And I do think that is happening. But I also think you just identified that it's not happening as quickly as it needs to, as Congress is on break until April 13th and Trump is in the White House contemplating sending our men and women into a ground war in Iran, which is already a disaster. And that when we started out by talking, I was a little uncomfortable using the word cataclysm at first, but, boy, do these next two weeks look like they're gonna be sort of make it or break it weeks for our future.
- [21:10]
Jon Stewart
You know, last time that we talked about this next sponsor, I mentioned an idea that I had, which, by the way, has taken off like. Like a wildfire, like hotcakes, like other things that you say about things that are taking off like a rocket ship. I told you about my invention, the Crumple. The Crumple. It is a topographical blanket for dogs. And have I started this business yet? I have not. And I'm going to tell you why. It's too hard. It's nerve. Right? I don't know how to do this. It's daunting. But, you know, you got Shopify here. Makes it easy for people you can get started with. They got a design studio, hundreds of templates, help you build an online store. It can match your style. Maybe nobody knows your brand yet. You know, they can help you find customers with easy to use email or social media campaigns. They can, you know, all important tasks to do. This one place, inventory, payments, analytics, it's all centralized. This would, I mean, I don't want to say it's a force amplifier for the crumple, but there is no question that with Shopify I can turn the crumple into a reality and dominate. Dominate the dog comfort industry. If that is an industry, which I am not sure that it is, but if it were, I would dominate. It's time to turn those what ifs into with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com TWS go to shopify.com TWS that's shopify.com/TWS. So let's say if we're putting this in terms of fail safes, right? So, like, you know, if you think of it as like a circuit box and what's the first fuse to pop that you would go down and, and reboot? That would be Congress.
- [23:13]
Heather Cox Richardson
I. I'm laughing like you and I, we've do. We've done boats, we've done tv.
- [23:17]
Jon Stewart
We're just. Here's the thing. Reality's too screwy. We have to find analogous situations. Congress is that first, you would think fuse to pop that could reset and rein this in. In your vast expanse of history, can you recall a Congress this feckless or one that didn't appear? I don't even know if they agree with them, but they're so cowardly as to not want to take a chance of even a whiff of resistance.
- [23:52]
Heather Cox Richardson
Okay, so the cowardice in this Congress is, I think, new in part because of the ways in which the primary system has been jiggered so that the people who are in Congress, the Republicans, not the Democrats, but the Republicans who were in Congress have almost been selected to be weenies when it came to Trump. Right? But this is not the first Congress not to do its job. And we always point to the Congress under Truman that he called the do nothing Congress. But of more interest, I think in this moment is the one in the early 1920s in which the Republicans take over from a period of time in which the Democrats have really dominated the early 20th century under Woodrow Wilson. And they've done all kinds of stuff that a lot of Republicans really hate, like the income tax and progressive legislation and so on, and of course, all the racial stuff, all the, you know, the racist stuff, too. But the Republicans complain a lot less about that. But when they get in control of Congress in the early 1920s, they really can't get their feet under them. They have been an opposition party for so long that they basically don't know how to take the reins and run anything. So they start to squabble amongst themselves, especially between the old guard, the Henry Cabot Lodges, for example, and the younger people, like fighting Bob La Follette out of Wisconsin. They just can't really get their feet under them. So what happens in that case is that the power of the federal government slots into the Cabinet. And the people who really begin to run the government are Andrew Mellon at Treasury and are Herbert Hoover at Commerce,
- [25:27]
Jon Stewart
who is president at this time in 20.
- [25:30]
Heather Cox Richardson
That's 20 to 23, I think it is. It's gonna be Harding 23, right. So they take over, and then Harding dies of a heart attack in California and Calvin Coolidge takes over. But he keeps them in power. And the reason I mention those names is most people, if they haven't heard of them, certainly you've heard of Hoover when he was. If you go and look at buildings in your town from the 1920s, they're gonna have the name of Andrew Mellon on them because he was pretty big about making sure his name was on everything. And what they did is they took the mechanics of the Progressive Era, the things that were supposed to be in place to protect people, the new organizations of the Progressive Era, and they stocked them all with businessmen. And this is when you get the era that. And this is not actually what he said, but the idea that the business of America is business. And they rewrote, write Jesus Christ and the apostles to be, you know, Jesus. To be a businessman who took 10
- [26:28]
Jon Stewart
nobodies and turned, famously, a businessman.
- [26:30]
Heather Cox Richardson
Exactly.
- [26:31]
Jon Stewart
Yeah.
- [26:31]
Heather Cox Richardson
So in that case, you know, one of the things points I think I made actually with you a year or so ago is that power isn't vested anywhere in the United States, really, except among the people. But when it flows into Washington, it sloshes around. And sometimes you get a really powerful president who just scoops it all up. Sometimes you get a really powerful Congress who scoops it all up. Sometimes you get a Supreme Court, sometimes you get the Cabinet. But in a moment, when you have a president who is not able to manage the country in a coherent fashion, and there I'm being delicate, you do have the opportunity to grab that power. And I thought the Republicans in the Senate were gonna do it. I thought that they, at least I hoped they were gonna take their power and use it to stabilize the country. And they did. They punted. The House of Representatives under the Republicans has been laughable. It is so badly organized. The Supreme Court has been grabbing for a ton of power for a while now. So that's out there. But one of the things that I think we are seeing is the American people waking up and saying, well, hey, if you guys aren't gonna be using your power for us, we kind of like it back.
- [27:42]
Jon Stewart
And that's the thing. That's where the opportunity. When you talked about the sort of optimistic vision, because you think of it, you know, what do we always kind of rest on the laurels of the system of checks and balances that were designed in the founding Fathers grand wisdom. They found ways that it was going to be a battle between the executive and the legislative and the judicial, not sort of foreseeing that political parties might abdicate all responsibility of power just to hold on to power, that there'd be no principle behind it. And I wonder if Trump saw the weakness of that system. He saw the cowardice in that system of people not wanting to. Because for so long, our government has displayed a grand cowardice in terms of bold programs designed to address the needs of the American people. I mean, I think, you know, you talked about these last 40 years. I think there's been a real erosion between people's. The connection of people to the problems that they face every day and their connection to a government that seems to be designed in no way that the money that you pay in doesn't come back to you in any way that you feel like has a value you. And he saw that and exploited that weakness. And does that mean there's an opportunity now on the side of the people to seize that and exploit that weakness? And I, I hesitate to even put it out there. But not a strong man, but a powerful leader to wield that on behalf of people's needs as opposed to their
- [29:32]
Heather Cox Richardson
own gratification, to wield that governmental power that hasn't been used, right? Oh, yeah, I think so. And I think you're seeing it. One of the things that's fun is watching the Democratic governors around the country and perhaps even some Republican governors who are very deliberately saying, hey, let's take this government out for a spin and see what we can do for people. Right? And Soren Mamdani in, in New York City, again, same thing. Now, that's not to say you necessarily agree with their policies or whatever, but this idea that the government is designed for the people is very much back on the table. But I'd go back a step and say that this is not just Trump. I actually don't think Trump saw something and exploited it. I think he's a really simple character. He is not a politician. He's a salesman. And he recognized that 40 years of Republican rhetoric had created a population that he could exploit, because that's what he does. He exploits people. And he did that, and he did it very effectively. But it's not just that the government sort of amorphously stopped doing things for people. I actually think that was a deliberate decision on the part of certain Republican politicians who took over the party in the 1990s especially, but certainly were behind Reagan's election in the 80s, in 1980. And they set up the system in such a way that the American people would no longer have a say in it. So things like tax cuts, you know, people said they love tax cuts. What that really did was it managed to create real deficits that made it harder for the government to do things for people. And it divorced people from having a say in their government, having, you know, being behind their government at the same time that we began to do everything based on extraordinary deficits. So the money coming into the government actually didn't have a lot to do with tax dollars. It had to do with how much the government could borrow. Now, the more the American people ended up not liking what was the government was doing, the more that the Republicans in charge of the systems stripped those systems down so that the people had less and less and less to say. So by 1986, you are already hearing from the Republicans under Reagan the idea of ballot integrity, the idea you had to go into the rolls and clean because they were not legitimate. So what do we get? We get Florida does that in 1998, and in the process of cleaning up the voter rolls, knocks about 100,000 people off the voting rolls in Florida in 1999. You know, something happened in Florida in 2000. I can't really remember.
- [32:14]
Jon Stewart
I can't remember what that was.
- [32:15]
Heather Cox Richardson
But then you think all the way through, you get Citizens United States, which is, you know, makes money pour into the system. Well, who does that benefit? People who have a ton of money. You get the gerrymandering, the extraordinary gerrymandering that makes it almost impossible for Democrats to win. So you've got.
- [32:30]
Jon Stewart
In certain states, you get the Chevron decision, which removes agency from agencies.
- [32:36]
Heather Cox Richardson
Right, right. So one of the things that that has done is it skewed the system in a certain direction. But it's also, I think, encouraged Americans to feel like they don't have agency in their government. And one of the things that you have seen since Trump's was elected the second time was people saying, hey, wait, if we turn up at Tesla parking lots, Tesla dealerships, we can actually hurt the Tesla brand. And when Jimmy Kimmel got knocked off the air, you had people saying, okay, then we're not gonna buy your product. And all of a sudden, he's back on the air, and people are learning that they do have agency. And that muscle is strengthening in a way that it did in the 1890s, for example, in a very similar period that led to the progressive era or the 1930s.
- [33:24]
Jon Stewart
Now, what were. How were those muscles developed in. In the 1890s? Because if I was looking for an analogous period to this, and I think you make a great point about that, this is a multifaceted assault on reducing the power of people and the consent of the governed. What it's sort of doing is it's raising the bar of consent so that you almost can't reach it. That consent is really now formulated it at the corporate board level that. That their speech is being far more valued than what the individuals are. Right? So they're designing that system. And it feels more like a gilded age scenario when those titans like Morgan and those guys, the government really did have to go to them and go, hey, man, can you bail us out? And we'll do whatever you want. So how did they regain the power? Or does gaining that power necessarily have to have something catastrophic like the depression? You know, will we only regain our agency in the most dire of circumstances? Or is there a path to that that is less tragic and more productive?
- [34:44]
Heather Cox Richardson
Well, once again, future is unwritten. We can make whatever decisions we want going forward. I think it's a multifaceted answer that I'm gonna give you. One is that even in the darkest periods, one of the things that carries us through is art and music and the communities that those things create. So we tend to forget that in that period of the robber barons in the 1880s and the 1890s, it's also a period of 18 extraordinary innovation in terms of technology, for example, but also in terms of art and music. And you think about the new kinds of literature and the new kinds of music coming out of the American south and so on in that period and the artwork in that period. So those kinds of nurturing of the human spirit really matter. And that's one of the things I don't think we necessarily pay enough attention to. But one of the ways that political change happens is, you know, and I thought a lot about this is, you know, if everything's going fine, basically no one's paying much attention to politics. And then there are a few people who are complaining, but their kind of voice is crying in the wilderness, and you're like, yeah, whatever, you know, have a Cheeto, you know. But then as people get more and more upset, more and more people are like, hey, hey, did you hear what that person has to say? And they start to make a community of people who are upset about one thing or another. And once again, those are people who are not necessarily in power yet. So where the thing that had me thinking for a long time is where is the relationship, literally the relationship between people on the ground and leadership that is, you know, there's a lot of people who think leaders just tell people at the bottom who to think, and there's people who think that it's the other way around. But where, for me, was the connection? And where I came to think the connection lies is in the more people recognize that there's a problem with their government, the more they start to formulate a way to think about that. And if you are trying to get elected, either are elected or trying to get elected as a leader, you need to be able to speak to those people. So the connection between those two things are the storytellers, the ones who take that inchoate frustration and say, this is not our society. Storytellers like Abraham Lincoln, for example, who say, this is not the way our society should be. But now there's another piece to that, I think, and that is obviously somebody like Lincoln, but we could pick on many other people as well, is able to articulate what the frustrated Americans would like their society to look like. But one of the things that they have to do is have to be able to reach a lot of people. And in Lincoln's era, you got the rise of a new kind of newspaper. People forget this, but the New York Daily Tribune, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, Tribune, the Philadelphia Inquirer was actually older, but it switches its orientation. In this period, you start to see a new media amplifying that sort of story. And so if you jump ahead to the 1890s once again, you're seeing people like Theodore Roosevelt articulating a new kind of way to contextualize and imagine a new government. But crucial to him is the rise of the new newspapers. In the populist period, for example, most of which don't exist anymore, all the copies were destroyed, but they grew up across the American plains and in the American south like mushrooms after the rain. And the idea of being able to make sure more people get access to that narrative becomes incredibly important. So if you flash forward to this moment, one of the huge Changes that you have seen really since, I mean, it was before there, too, but really since Trump was elected the second time is this proliferation of podcasts and new local newspapers and, you know, write in campaigns that look like the committees of correspondence from the American Revolution. You are seeing the population of our intellectual space in this country with a new old narrative that says the government should work for us. It should not be beholden to kings, for example. And we need to take that back. So that was a really long answer to say there's a lot of different things that happen. These things are all crucial. And in each of the periods that we have identified, there was in fact, a major economic crash that made people say, okay, I can't identify with J.D. rockefeller any longer because I am literally having to walk from South Dakota to Missouri to find work. And when that, that was after the panic of 1893, from 1893 to about 1897. So when that final thing happens where people say, I can't live this way any longer, more and more people jump on that narrative and we rewrite the country.
- [39:57]
Jon Stewart
And when you see those moments, Heather and I love the way you paint that, because what it does is it gives a framework to each of these periods that a kind of governmental or world cataclysm or failure combined with a new way of storytelling, combined with a storyteller who is able to harness those and push us into what will be the next iteration. And I think in our minds, the person that is always the hero in that story is the progressive. Teddy Roosevelt jumps in in those moments of the robber barons, and he decides, speak softly, Carry big stick and trust bust. And, and we're not going to have monopolies anymore, and we're going to do that. And then you talk about the 20s and the degradation of the power of people's voices, and then FDR seizes that moment and he brings in social programs that ease the pain and the lives of. Of all these different people. And as you were telling it, it. What was. What was coming up in my head was 2008 financial crisis and the Iraq war and social media. And these are the three ingredients. But the progressive hero didn't seize that moment. And I want to ask about this, and this is a hard one. Trump is the one who ends up seizing that form of communication, mastering the attention economy. But before that was Obama. And, and are we in a situation where, where Obama, was it a. Was it a slightly missed opportunity to seize upon those conditions that could have really created that modern progressive revolution that ended up Maybe dissipating because it wasn't bold enough. Is that possible?
- [41:59]
Heather Cox Richardson
It's certainly possible, sure. But again, one of the things you need to see, there is enough people unhappy enough that they would not, for example, embrace the reaction to Obama that powered the Tea Party movement and all the sort of reframing of our country to be against somebody like Obama. And that, by the way, looks a great deal more like the long term rise of something like the elite Southern enslavers who managed to get a whole bunch of people to stay behind them even though that economic system was grinding them into the ground, grinding poor white farmers into the ground. So yes, it's possible and certainly there were many people who were frustrated by the fact Obama was not as aggressive as he could have been about embracing sort of those old traditional let's take on big money and so on. But, but I'm not entirely sure that one is productive to look back to that. But two, one of the things about Lincoln and about Theodore Roosevelt and about FDR is that the people really created them. In each one of those cases, those were people who met the moment not because they were somehow specially anointed by God. They were certainly very bright people, but the American people were ready for them. And I think in some ways maybe you could say the American people were ready for Donald Trump because he was embracing and articulating what a lot of people on the radical right had been conditioned to believe for 40 years.
- [43:40]
Jon Stewart
Hey, look, longer. I mean, he's singing an old song, Heather. I mean, the song he's singing about there is a real America and a real American and they're the ones being screwed by like that's a pretty old song that even goes back to what you were talking about in the South.
- [43:56]
Heather Cox Richardson
So yes, it is. I mean, it goes all the way back to our founding, but so does the other song. And I guess that's the point that I'm always trying to make, is that when we sing that other song, a number of things happen. One, the economy is better. And when the economy is better, people, I mean, I mean, this is a connection few people recognize. When the economy is better, race and gender relations get better. Those two things do go hand in hand. But when we think about our heroes that we look to in our country, we don't look to the neo Nazis, we don't look to the Confederates, we look to Fannie Lou Hamer and the people that really have shown to expand the, the principles of the Declaration of Independence to include more people with every
- [44:45]
Jon Stewart
iteration and an expansion of rights and an expansion of fairness and an expansion of justice.
- [44:52]
Heather Cox Richardson
So what I would love to see is first of all, the embracing of those liberal principles, but also one of the other patterns we have in the United States that kind of makes historians bonkers is that, that, you know, I assume I can say the shit hits the fan on this podcast.
- [45:12]
Jon Stewart
You know, Heather, it's, it might be the, the nicest thing anybody said on this podcast.
- [45:17]
Heather Cox Richardson
You know, we turn everything over to the rich guys. The shit hits the fan. Everybody steps up and says, oh, gee, we really need some regulation. We put the regulations around it, everything stabilizes. And then somebody goes, I'm not making enough money. And so all of a sudden we turn it back over to the rich guys. The shit hits the fan. And, and our example of that in American history is the cattle industry, believe it or not, which is this boom and bust industry. And every time things go really bad, the cattle ranchers say, hey, we really need some regulation over here. And the federal government steps in and then everything stabilizes and they go, hey, I'm Cliven Bundy. Get out of my life. Right? So if we could figure out how to stop that constant swing back and forth. Cause every time we do that swing, it hurts people a lot and it hurts the environment a lot. When I think about the 21st century, I wanna get back to a country that does expand the rights of the Declaration of Independence. And that puts us on the same plane that we've been in our better moments. But I would also really love for us to find some way to create those guardrails so that people can't say, oh, wow, we have the strongest economy in the world. You know, what let's do, let's screw with it, you know, or we have the safest world we've ever lived in. I've got a great idea.
- [46:32]
Jon Stewart
Let's turn it over.
- [46:33]
Heather Cox Richardson
Let's go to war against Iran.
- [46:34]
Jon Stewart
You know, know, Heather, is, is part of it, because it, it strikes me this is a, a, a great discussion to have about. It's how you convince people. Because I think the cattle rancher thing is a great historical precedent. And you can look at it today with the farmers. What I find is if the government does something that for someone that you yourself don't need, well, that's an entitlement and you resent it. But if the government does something, something that you need, well, that's just, and that's just them giving you back your money, you know, and they always make this case, by the way. Like, why are we putting tariffs on. Well, because certain policies that were put into place hurt the Rust Belt and hurt manufacturing and made it so those people's lives would be lives more of despair. And we must. We must repair the damage that's been done by those policies. Policies. But if you say the same thing about redlining or racially exclusive policies, we need to create ways to repair that damage. What, that's an entitlement. They're free riders. They don't view it as investment. How do you convince people like, the immigration situation right now in this country is a great. It's. It's resource guard. How do you reshape the narrative so that we're able to invest once again in our. In our people and not have those investments be so resented by anybody that might not need it? How do you broaden people's perspective in that way?
- [48:22]
Heather Cox Richardson
Well, what you just identified there was missing one big word, and that's race. You know, literally. That language literally comes out of the 1870s. And the idea that the federal government was going to try to level the economic especially, but also the. I won't say social. Cause they weren't really into that. They were trying to make sure that black Americans weren't killed by their white neighbors, which seems like not a very high bar. Right, right. That's when you get the language in 1871 saying, hey, hey, we don't have a problem with RA. Problem with poor people voting, so you've
- [48:56]
Jon Stewart
gotta pay $10 to go to the polls and you've gotta do that.
- [48:59]
Heather Cox Richardson
Right. All of that stuff that comes straight out of the 1870s. And again, we could spend a long time on that. But crucially, we know what language works to get rid of that. And that is the language of community. And that is the idea that we are all working together to achieve something as a country. And again, one of the things the radical right did really brilliantly, brilliantly after 1960, there's a famous article that comes out in 1960 addressed to politicians saying, stop talking about democracy and stop talking about the values of community and making sure everybody's got a shot at the American dream and all that, because we all agree about that. Republicans and Democrats agree about that. So stop with that. It's a waste of your time and money. Instead, work at putting together coalitions. So basically, the traditional Republicans and the traditional Democrats listened to that and started to just try to nail together coalitions. We'll give you a bridge and we'll give you, I don't know, a new hospital or whatever.
- [49:59]
Jon Stewart
Pure transaction.
- [50:00]
Heather Cox Richardson
Transactional. Yes. It was the radical right who said, we are going to defend individuals to make them able to take on the empire, able to, you know, tying into all those tropes of literature and sort of mythology that said, you're gonna matter to us. Your vote matters for something way bigger than you are, something that is the United States of America. Sometimes something that is God, you matter. And one of the things that I try and do and that I think we all should be trying to do more, is recognizing that the values of humanity, the idea of self determination and the idea that you get to create a government that allows you to have the freedom. And by freedom, I don't mean a lack of government so much as government protections to enable you to get an education and have healthcare and so on, so you can become whoever you want. Want is actually a profoundly moral and a profoundly principled thing to do. And you think about all around the world where people are in the streets fighting for their right to vote, for example, or the right to have a say in their government. And then in the United States, people saying, I'm not gonna bother, we need to get more of that. This matters not just because I want a new want the potholes outside my house filled. This matters because the human effort for self determination and a government that reflects that, not only in my own government, but around the world matter morally and for society. That kind of language is what gave us the attempts in the 1950s to level the playing field for people of color, for example, and in the 1970s, including women, as, as well. Well, that language really works, but we have to stop thinking, oh, it's a done deal, we don't have to worry about it any longer.
- [52:01]
Jon Stewart
Right? Well, they always say the arc of, you know, the moral universe bends towards justice, but they don't explain like, yeah, but not by itself. And, and there's a bunch of people on the other side trying to bend it back the other way. And I wonder, when we talk about the moral argument, do we have to connect it to more earthly values for people? Because it feels like that's the backlash that we're facing, that if, if the right was going to draw a line, like what you and I might do is draw a line at the Depression, right? And we might draw a line at FDR coming in and creating a government that is more designed for the benefit of the people it purports to represent present. They would draw a line at 1964 and 1965. They would draw a line at the Civil Rights act, and they would draw a line at the Immigration act, which led in people from countries that they didn't quite have, ignoring the fact that they hated the Irish and they hated the Italian and they hated the Jews back when they came. But now you're bringing in people. And so their perspective on that is now our country is being. Being given away to people who don't have. They even use the phrase the heritage Americans are more important than the other Americans. That there are somehow. The Scotch Irish that were here in the 1850s were somehow better Americans than the ones that came in in the 60s and 70s. So in some ways, what's happened over that time is the backlash. Right. They've all been convinced that their country's been given away to those that don't deserve it. Do we need to make the argument for them? Will they ever be convinced on the morality of it, or do they have to also be convinced that it's actually a more prosperous union, that it makes it a safer and more prosperous place?
- [54:03]
Heather Cox Richardson
Oh, I think those two have to go hand in hand. But they do. They do go hand in hand. So it's a really easy sell in the 1950s, because people had watched what happened under fascism in Europe. And not just the horrors that we tend to think about when we think about those regimes, but also the fact that when the Europeans and the Allies and the Americans came in, they were feeding those people because they literally couldn't eat. Or if you look at what happened in the Soviet Union and in China when there was an attempt to impose an ideology over them, the agricultural systems, you had these horrific periods when tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and even millions of people died. But one of the key things that you are identifying, I think, is, first of all, yes, I mean, I think we need to talk a lot more about the American dream, and that is not having a car in your garage or whatever. It means that you are able to work hard and rise, whatever that looks like for you, so that your kids are going to have a better life than you. You did. Again, whatever that looks like for you. I do think we need to keep that as part of our language and the reality of it. But there's also something key to what you said, and that I think is something that is fascinating, that when you listen to people nowadays talking about their desire to shut the door for other immigrants because their country is being stolen or whatever. And again, I'm not putting aside, I'm not gonna talk here at all about the reality that to the degree our country is being taken. Being taken over by corporations, including foreign corporations. Right. So this idea that some family from Ecuador is taking something from me is just a pure fantasy. But that world that they are describing is a world where there are limited resources, that there's only. The pie is only this big, and by God, you gotta get your piece. But in fact, the United States, the
- [55:57]
Jon Stewart
elites are stealing it from you.
- [55:59]
Heather Cox Richardson
Well, but the reality of the way that. That people like me think about the world is that, in fact, the pie is expanding. And I, again, don't necessarily just mean the economic pie, although certainly if you look at the last 80 years around the world, more than a billion people have been raised out of poverty, which is a good thing. They're not dying of starvation and lack of clean water and so on. Others still are. We could address that if we chose to. But. But the idea of keeping the pie small so that I can get my half or whatever basically says that we are trying to limit the ability of individuals to grow and improve this world, because only by keeping it small can we monopolize it. Whereas if you say, hey, as Abraham Lincoln did, sorry, but also Theodore Roosevelt. Whereas if you say, hey, we want you here because we want your ideas and we want your labor and we want your view of the world, what you are saying is we don't have limits. And again, I'm not saying we don't have economic limits. I'm very concerned about climate change. But there are ways to address that. If we have those new ideas and those new people, and that idea of looking at the world as a world of possibilities rather than limitations seems to me to be what the United States of America has always done particularly well. And these people are saying, no, no, no, no, no. Forget our past. We just have to hang on to what we had in the 1920s, because that was the best. And, you know, that was a cramped world that excluded most of us. So let's not go back to the 1920s. And that's that angle of, are we looking for an expansive economy, an expansive world, an expansive intellectual understanding of the 21st century, or are we gonna go back to the. If Trump William McKinley, my head's going to explode. Because it wasn't a great time.
- [58:00]
Jon Stewart
You know, we were the richest we ever were. We were the richest country.
- [58:04]
Heather Cox Richardson
Well, McKinley and his people were. But, you know, talk to the little girls who were working in the.
- [58:09]
Jon Stewart
In the factories, but that's what they've gone back to. What's so interesting to me, Heather, is everything that you lay out is so factually evident through the prism of history. And what they've done is say no. What we need to do is close our doors and go back to a more imperialistic, exploitative model of, of economics, which is we don't build our own strength up to make ourselves through education and science and innovation and all these other things inevitable. What we do is we close our borders and we use our military might to extract the resources that we need, need at the most exploitative manner of price that we can. Colonialism, which works so well for everybody. It's a stunning display of self immolation. Hey, folks, look, you know, I come on here and we do a podcast, we talk about world events, but I, you know, I don't like to, I don't like to brag, I don't like to toot my own horn. I am influential in a variety of spheres and one of the spheres that I think gets short shrift is obviously fashion. Am I Anna Wintour? Do I drive the trends? Am I Ferragamo? Is that a person that does this? I don't really know. I don't know. But the point is people look terrible. Me for wardrobe choices, not just color, but like if their pants should fit. And especially this time of year as the seasons are changing, you have got to refresh. Quint is what's going to help you refresh your wardrobe and bring out the spring in your personality. They've got all the essentials. And by the way, we're talking about 100% Europe, European linen. This is high quality, premium material stuff, built to last. The prices are like 50 to 60% less than similar brands. And I'm going to tell you how they work directly with ethical factories. They cut out the middleman. You're paying for quality, not just brand markup. Refresh your wardrobe with quints. Go to quints.com TWS for free shipping and 365 day returns. It's now available in Canada. Table, go to Q U I n c e.comTWs for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.comTWs.
- [60:55]
Heather Cox Richardson
I was talking with another historian the other day and we were mutually expressing extraordinary frustration because, you know, in fact, one of the things that's cool about history is that, that you can't look at tomorrow and know what's gonna happen. You can kind of read the tea leaves and we know a lot about what has happened, but not about the future. But one of the things that we can all say with great clarity is we Know exactly how this turns out. When a group of people try to monopolize resources, close the expansion of their societies, and turn everybody else into their society vassals. You know, we don't know if it's gonna happen tomorrow or in five years or in 10 years or in 40 years, but it always, always, always ends up the same way. And to sit there and watch us playing this out step by step by step, you know, a lot of us are like, can we just go to that last scene? Because we all know what that last scene's gonna be. Now, if we do the other thing where we empower individual to innovate and to move and to do the things that they do best, we don't know how that's gonna turn out. We know it's gonna create a world that you and I can't even imagine. And given those two options, man, why on earth would you choose? You know, sorry, but the pitchforks and piano wire.
- [62:22]
Jon Stewart
And the crazy part is that the ultimate paradox or contradiction, fiction is exactly. What you're describing is the story of America's founding. That it was a rejection of that particular system, that an exploitative system where the voices of the government were ignored because of the resources that they could extract out of the population. And that's why we began. That's what birthed us. That fight was our fight. And so to see us become the very thing that we rejected is so hard to process. Especially when you think about how that movement, Trump's movement, wraps themselves in the iconography of our founding. How many buses have you seen? There were the we the People and Don't Tread on Me and all those sorts of the totems of our revolution, while creating a system that's antithetical to the entirety of the purpose of that revolution. And I don't. I don't know if they. I certainly don't think that they in any way see that contradiction.
- [63:38]
Heather Cox Richardson
No, but, you know, that's one of the things that makes the United States so cool, is that in many ways, we act out humanity. You know, you're always going to have those people who want to control others. You just are. Because humans are going to hear human.
- [63:52]
Jon Stewart
But that's gotta be a bumper sticker, Heather.
- [63:55]
Heather Cox Richardson
There you go. It's my next career.
- [63:56]
Jon Stewart
Humans are gonna human.
- [63:57]
Heather Cox Richardson
Yeah, but you also have human beings trying to do what is right, not just for other people, but also for themselves. And when you think about this moment and its parallels to the American founding or to the other periods in which there have been those trying to literally get rid of human equality. In the case of the elite enslavers who put together the Confederacy or the, the robber barons in the 1890s, or those looking to create an international business system in the 1920s that created large pools of labor. When you think about that, and you think about Americans kind of looking at each other and going, hey, I disagree with you about finances or immigration or internal improvements or whatever, but I can agree with you that we need to control our own destinies in the past. That has always won and consciousness out stronger for these moments. So for as frustrating as this moment is in so many ways, and as depressing as it is in so many ways, one of the things that you can take to the bank is the idea that it might make us stronger again and renew our faith in those American principles that led those colonists to throw off the greatest empire at the time in the world, a seemingly impossible task that they did. And then to sit down, young men all, by the way, we talk about them as the founding fathers. They were barely old enough to be fathers, to write a system that worked and has worked for almost 250 years. Kind of cool to be part of that whole history and that trajectory through our past. So that at least is a way to look forward to these next really rough weeks and the next rough years and think, you know, maybe we're given the opportunity to do our own part.
- [65:54]
Jon Stewart
But I love what you're saying with that, Heather. And it reminds me, you know, to wrap it around, you know, you said sort of early on, one thing that I think has to be a top of mind, which is you don't know the future. It hasn't been written. And as we watch these sorts of almost slow motion car crash happening, the fact of the matter is we can in our frustration overturn those injustices and we can in our frustration regain and have a more. We can reaffirm our desire to create the society that we think is fair and to do that in a way, way that isn't necessarily over an epoch, but it can happen in a moment. It really can. You know, and I, again now I'm the Pollyanna, but I do think that in the way that we've been caught off guard by these last 10, 12 years, or maybe even the slow erosion of it through the last 40, there exists great opportunity. And I guess I want to ask you, so sort of as we, we wrap it up, do you see that opportunity? Do you think of it in terms of, well, we can overturn Citizens United, we can do these things, or do you think it's going to be a bolder form of change that's going to come through now that the executive has been supercharged? Use. Use that to our benefit. Which way would you like to see it go, knowing that we can't? No.
- [67:36]
Heather Cox Richardson
Oh, I think it's gotta be big.
- [67:38]
Jon Stewart
Yeah.
- [67:38]
Heather Cox Richardson
And, you know, I certainly would agree with overturning Citizens United and all the pieces that you are talking about, but those are only mechanics for a reworking of a government and a country, really, that has been dramatically degraded since the 1970s, in part because of that myth that the radical race. Right. Promulgated that you and I talked about before. You look at where the United States of America is in the 21st century compared to other countries, and it's frankly embarrassing a number of the ways in which we are not keeping pace with the rest of the world in this era. One of the things that you and I are dancing around in the need to deal with our political system is the fact that climate change is very real and must simply, must be addressed.
- [68:35]
Jon Stewart
And you know who's doing it? The Chinese, our greatest rival, has already electrified their grid.
- [68:40]
Heather Cox Richardson
Well, which is again, another question. Why is Trump deliberately, you know, deliberately and desperately trying to get us back to 19th century technology? I mean, which is. That's a whole nother conversation.
- [68:52]
Jon Stewart
Right.
- [68:53]
Heather Cox Richardson
But this is not, I guess, if you think of it in terms of health and the health of the body politic. We have let a disease run rampant for a long time and it's coming very close to killing us. And you can't just say, okay, okay, I really am now going to maybe clean out the wound. At this point, we have to rethink the way democracy interfaces with a global economy, a global world, and where everybody has instantaneous ability to communicate with each other and to support each other or tear each other down. What that looks like, I don't know. I know I'm watching Mark Carney very closely in Canada because I think he's coming up with a lot of new ideas. But this is not gonna be a case of saying, hey, maybe we can pick up a few voters over here. This is a case of saying, we need to rethink this. And, you know, in the. Again, you look at Lincoln, you look at fdr, you look at Theodore Roosevelt. These things worked at the time. But crucial to it is gonna have to be the voices and the support of the American people. We do not want a dictator, even one who comes in and says, hey, I'm gonna do everything Right. We need to have somebody who is actually reflecting the real will of the people expressed through free and fair elections, getting rid of the partisan gerrymanning, the money in elections and so on. So, yeah, I think it's time for a bold vision and I think crucially as well, to go back to what we were saying before. We are creating that. We are telling politicians who want to be elected that this is what we want and that's how we will create somebody who can rise to meet the moment.
- [70:36]
Jon Stewart
And when you see that the enthusiasm and almost the joy of the populace is self evident and I don't know that I can recall a moment in my life and that's all, you know, speaking through Watergate in Vietnam and the oil shocks and all the different sorts of, you know, difficult spikes and ebbs and things that we've all lived through where the people feel more ready for that vision to be laid out coherent and, and not, I mean, honestly, like, I think somebody who ran on sane policy, you know, competently executed, could win 60%. Like, I don't think we're as divided as the, the social media would in monetarily incentivize us to be. And I do think and, and you know, power abhors a vacuum. Right? Like there is a moment right now for exactly what you're saying, dying to. It's. You feel it bubbling throughout the country and you just know that it's, it's going to be harnessed. You just feel it because that's it. You know, you can feel us creeping towards an iceberg, maybe, but you also feel something else. There's also another vibration that exists that feels optimistic and hopeful and man and people are so much thirstier for it than, than the antithesis of it.
- [72:09]
Heather Cox Richardson
We're going to make you a historian, John.
- [72:13]
Jon Stewart
I wish. I love it. Heather Cox Richardson, I got to tell you, I could talk to you forever. Just. It's so wonderful to hear your perspective on things and it so helps me to, you know, what it is. And I, and I, I don't mean to put this on you, but you help me organize my anxiety, if that makes sense. Like you give me a framework. And once I have a framework, framework, I feel like I can work through it. It doesn't change what may happen, as you said, or give me the answer, but boy, does it give me some organizing principles by which to, you know, to place things on. I can't thank you enough for being on.
- [72:51]
Heather Cox Richardson
Well, I'm glad to hear that. And you know, all we're trying to do is make sure we're standing on solid ground. And that's all I do. I help to show people where the ground is.
- [73:00]
Jon Stewart
You do it better than anyone. Heather Cox Richardson, a wonderful professor of history at Boston College and an author. Her and you know, just check out everything that she does. She's a one man band. That just is fantastic. So thank you once again for being with us.
- [73:14]
Heather Cox Richardson
Always a pleasure.
- [73:20]
Jon Stewart
Man. She's so good. She's so good, so smart. And I feel terrible because it really, like, you do feel a little bit like, because she's also so prolific and is like, hey, could you just take like a couple hours out of your day of like making all this great stuff to give me some organizing principles by which I can somehow hang my anxiety buckets onto a little bit of historical perspective?
- [73:45]
Brittany Mametovic
Can you carve out a few hours to be my therapist? Yes, exactly.
- [73:49]
Jillian Spear
All of her substack posts. Take all of the disparate news of the day and give it order. It's very helpful and I think in the same way this podcast was helpful for you of just organizing, as you said, your anxieties. So you know how to process it instead of being overwhelmed by it, I guess.
- [74:06]
Jon Stewart
And she synthesizes it, she brings it. You know, I think that's. It's a gift. You know, a lot of people can under, you know, they understand facts, but they don't necessarily know how to synthesize it through different eras and bring it forward to hear. And I, I still think the most powerful thing she kept saying was, we don't know what is next.
- [74:32]
Brittany Mametovic
Yeah.
- [74:32]
Jon Stewart
But we know that we can have a role in shaping it.
- [74:36]
Jillian Spear
I feel like Doris as well has said something like that too. And it is really nice to be reminded of that by people who know our world best.
- [74:46]
Jon Stewart
Right. Who see it.
- [74:47]
Heather Cox Richardson
Yeah.
- [74:48]
Brittany Mametovic
Yeah. You could wake up tomorrow to a good New York Times alert. If there's ever been such a thing.
- [74:53]
Jon Stewart
A good New York Times alert.
- [74:55]
Jillian Spear
Anything's possible.
- [74:56]
Brittany Mametovic
I don't remember the last time. I know it's anachronistic. It almost doesn't make sense off the top, young.
- [75:00]
Jon Stewart
But did you see. So the New York Times wrote an article about, you know, they, they examined some of Trump's architectural plans for the ballroom. And so they wrote an article saying, like, hey, there's a couple of things you might want to look at. Like, there's no doors or these, these stairs don't go anywhere.
- [75:18]
Jillian Spear
Or these views blocked by endless columns.
- [75:21]
Brittany Mametovic
It's a trap house.
- [75:22]
Jon Stewart
Like, I'm, I think you might need a toilet. Like, just little, like. And the idea that he is more aggressive defending his plan for the ballroom than for the war in Iran, or that he is. He presented a more thorough case with visual aids about that ballroom than he has in the entirety of this war.
- [75:49]
Brittany Mametovic
The man has priorities.
- [75:51]
Jon Stewart
Yes.
- [75:52]
Brittany Mametovic
And it is throwing a party. Like, it's starting to feel like sort of next level senile. It really. I feel like we've, like, it's different than Trump won for sure.
- [76:03]
Jillian Spear
I'm not sure. I've been watching. I mean, I don't know if he. What's going on with that man's health, obviously. But something I have been picking up on is, okay, we've seen all these think pieces about the Iran war, breaking up the MAGA sphere. Fine, whatever. But you also see people really going to bat for him and writing the narrative for him. Him.
- [76:22]
Jon Stewart
Right. It's not his fault.
- [76:24]
Jillian Spear
And you're like, can you imagine them saying that about Biden? Oh, Biden just got convinced. And we really need to blame the people who convinced him.
- [76:31]
Jon Stewart
Of course, the man who has the greatest agency that has ever been promoted from the Oval Office suddenly is at a whim of. The thing that I get most frustrated with is I think that what is happening with Trump right now, like, we're all pointing to, well, he got convinced. Or maybe his mental acuity. This is who he's been from the get go. Like, when people say, like, well, you know, I'm upset with him now and I regret my vote because he lied. He lied the minute he came down the escalator, you know, through, like, oh, it's the largest inauguration that's ever been seen through history. Like, there is nothing fundamentally different about his decision making process or about the manner in which his ADD pushes him from lurching from one endeavor to another. It's like, like when we said he's a movie trailer president, he doesn't have the stamina to sit through the whole movie. He's just the trailers. And right now, the Iran war, hey, the trailer's done. Now what do I do? So now I just got to leave. Like, it's so. It so frustrates me that all these people on the right are like, oh, this boy, this really pushed me over the edge. And like, this is the same thing we've been dealing with for 12 years. Or like, yeah, 80, a hundred. He's always, yeah.
- [77:49]
Jillian Spear
I was just thinking about how Iran now speaks to him too. In trailers. Like, everyone kind of sees it. They make these fake lego Propaganda videos to get his attention.
- [77:59]
Jon Stewart
Yeah. It is so weird that, like, he'll say to them through Truth Social, like, I will bomb you if you don't do this. And you're like, why are you telling us? Tell them you're. If you're like, what is the point of posting? And apparently they create trailers that they show to him of, like, bombs going off. Intercut with like the guys from Top Gun playing volleyball. Yes.
- [78:25]
Brittany Mametovic
Ship go boom.
- [78:26]
Jillian Spear
Two minute highlights and that's it. Yeah. Heather brought this up in one of her recent substacks that people are starting to get concerned because he doesn't know a lot lot and about the war that he's perpetrating. And if his briefings are two minute blowup sequences, like makes, there's only so
- [78:44]
Brittany Mametovic
much you can learn.
- [78:45]
Jon Stewart
You know what, that's. That, that's a good point. And. But anytime you get the sense that somebody is sparks, noting their way through a war, like, that's the part that, you know, we've all been asked to sacrifice for his vision of America's greatness, whether it's through his inflationary tax tariffs or whether it's through higher gas prices or whether it's through a removal of some of our civil rights protections. But we keep being told, like, you've just got to be, you know, this guy's got a vision and you. But he doesn't have to ever change anything. He can still, in the middle of a war, do five minutes on Sharpie pens. And we're all supposed to just be like, hey, Trump's gonna. Trump. Like, when is he the one who is going to have to own up and take accountability and responsibility? Why is it on us or our allies?
- [79:39]
Brittany Mametovic
I was coming off of the Heather conversation. Very grounded in this conversation.
- [79:43]
Jon Stewart
All right, all right.
- [79:44]
Jillian Spear
You undid all the good work.
- [79:45]
Jon Stewart
Get Heather back on the line. All right, Brittany, what do we got from the people?
- [79:50]
Brittany Mametovic
Okay, first up, John, do you think all of the government buildings Trump renamed after himself will revert back. Back to their original names once he leaves office?
- [80:01]
Jon Stewart
Here's my hope. Here's what I think happens. I think RFK Jr gets elected president and then he renames it the Kennedy Trump Kennedy Center.
- [80:12]
Brittany Mametovic
I was going to say, luckily, his name's already on.
- [80:15]
Jon Stewart
Yes. So what we do is whoever gets elected next, I think we just use Trump as our maiden name. So we leave it in there.
- [80:22]
Jillian Spear
Just hyping in.
- [80:23]
Jon Stewart
Yeah, that's right. From now on, we'll just hyphenate everything according to the new president and Then by the end of whatever, how long this country gets to go, we just have these super long. Attenuate the Trump.
- [80:36]
Brittany Mametovic
Everybody's name up there.
- [80:38]
Jon Stewart
Dulles.
- [80:39]
Brittany Mametovic
Why not?
- [80:40]
Jon Stewart
Yeah, why? Did you see, by the way, did you see the rendering of his library?
- [80:46]
Brittany Mametovic
Yes.
- [80:46]
Heather Cox Richardson
I don't. Was it a rendering or was it
- [80:48]
Brittany Mametovic
just like an AI?
- [80:49]
Jon Stewart
That's what it was.
- [80:50]
Brittany Mametovic
Yeah. Yeah. And Eric Trump was like, I've been working so hard on this. This.
- [80:55]
Jon Stewart
I'm so proud of it. And you're like, really? Because it, it looks like you could just plug in, like, make a skyscraper in Miami look like Vegas, and then the interior of it is literally just gold statues of Trump. And I'm like, what?
- [81:13]
Brittany Mametovic
Wait, I think somebody actually said that the flag had like 54 stars or something. Like, it literally was just. It was so AI.
- [81:19]
Jon Stewart
Well, that's including Canada, Greenland, Venezuela, Iran.
- [81:23]
Brittany Mametovic
Are we taking Iran?
- [81:24]
Heather Cox Richardson
That's right.
- [81:24]
Jillian Spear
It's an aspirational flag.
- [81:26]
Jon Stewart
It's the future.
- [81:27]
Jillian Spear
Just in like, a practical sense, though, it is going to get confusing if too many things are named Trump. Like, I'm going from Trump Station to Trump Station.
- [81:37]
Jon Stewart
You know, it's like in Washington, D.C. where you have four 8th streets, but they don't intersect.
- [81:43]
Jillian Spear
Or like Penn Station, New York, Penn Station, Newark, like, there are. It does get confusing. So, yes, just putting that, you know, what it's to.
- [81:50]
Jon Stewart
Going to be. It's going to be like when you live in with the Smurfs, where everything is just smurf that the language is. It's trumpety. Trump, Trump, Trump. You know, all right, what else? What, what, what? What else they want to know?
- [82:03]
Brittany Mametovic
John, do you ever miss the simpler days of QAnon?
- [82:08]
Jon Stewart
Oh, they're still. They're still there. They're just trying to figure out, look, they've. I think they've had a rough ride because imagine if, like, your hero, the guy who was going to bring the storm. Storm. Turns out to be the guy who's like, storm? What storm? What do you. There's no storm here. When they're like, no, I think we have the storm. I think it's right there. If you could just bring it out here. Like, I don't know what you're talking about. You know, they. They cast someone as a hero who not only turned out not to be the hero, turned out to maybe be working in league with the villain.
- [82:42]
Brittany Mametovic
Yeah, I think they're having difficulty coming to terms with that, to be honest.
- [82:47]
Jon Stewart
Is that now, I assume it lost some steam. Wasn't that was more first Semester Trump, wasn't it?
- [82:55]
Brittany Mametovic
Yeah.
- [82:56]
Jon Stewart
And then when the storm never came, it felt like that movement sort of dissipated, I don't think. I think their interest in. And to give the movement credit, beyond the conspiracy theories of it, the idea of protecting children from sex trafficking is a pretty good one.
- [83:12]
Brittany Mametovic
Sure. Sure can support that.
- [83:14]
Heather Cox Richardson
Yeah.
- [83:14]
Jillian Spear
Where are they now?
- [83:15]
Jon Stewart
Yeah, I. I honestly now, if it. If it wasn't, if it didn't fit into their sort of more partisan mindset, maybe they dropped it. I honestly don't know. It felt like the Epstein case was at least a good tent post that they could work off of, but it feels like it's dissipated.
- [83:38]
Jillian Spear
Yeah. Their main bad guy is not even really around.
- [83:41]
Jon Stewart
Like, was Biden there? Was. Was Biden their bad guy?
- [83:45]
Brittany Mametovic
I guess. Yeah. But I'll be honest. Like, Brandon is still all over Long Island. Oh, yeah. Like, the signs are there. It's on the back of trucks. Like, oh, yeah.
- [83:54]
Jillian Spear
What do they think he's up to now?
- [83:56]
Jon Stewart
They just don't take the bumper stickers off. I see.
- [83:58]
Brittany Mametovic
I mean, it's like they have old cars. It's hard to get bumper stickers off, you guys. Like, you have to get the vinegar. You got to get the nail polish remover.
- [84:07]
Jon Stewart
You have no idea how many Biden cars I drive behind.
- [84:11]
Brittany Mametovic
Yeah.
- [84:12]
Jon Stewart
And I always just think, like, is, like, is the emotion still there? Like, are you still fiery or you literally just don't have a scraper? Like, I just don't. I. It's hard to even understand it, but a lot of the accoutrement. The, The. The. The Festivus Trump decorations are still. Still up.
- [84:35]
Brittany Mametovic
I can't wait for the summer to see if the flags are still on the water.
- [84:39]
Jon Stewart
Oh, that'll be interesting. Because Trump, no matter what you think of his popularity, he does rule the sea for sure.
- [84:48]
Brittany Mametovic
Yeah. All right, last one. John, is your wife as funny as you?
- [84:54]
Jon Stewart
She's funnier than I am and nicer than I am and sweeter than I am and better looking than I. I am. And I'm. I'm actually, as I'm getting older, I think she might even be taller than I am. It's so. That was not. That was not our relationship when I first met her. But there are certain times I'll be standing in the kitchen, be like, are you. Are you wearing. You're not even in heels. What's. What's going on? I think, you know, as they say with cereal, contents may have settled during shipping. I have a feeling that I'm slowly fully compacting. But no, that's, everybody thinks that she's, oh, just the funniest. And, and her laugh is like, like sunshine. It's just a little, it's a little ridiculous. She's just one of those people that lights it up.
- [85:43]
Heather Cox Richardson
That's so sweet.
- [85:44]
Brittany Mametovic
Very sweet.
- [85:45]
Jon Stewart
Yeah, she's all right, that chick. She's all right, but very cool. Brittany how can they, how can they keep in touch with, with us?
- [85:53]
Brittany Mametovic
Twitter. We are weekly show pod. Instagram threads. Tik Tok, Blue sky. We are weekly show podcast. And you can, like, subscribe and comment on our YouTube channel, the weekly show with Jon Stewart.
- [86:02]
Jon Stewart
Sweet. And we're off next week back April 15th. And I don't know what we're going to be talking about because, you know, the world is static. So we'll probably, you know, we'll plan something out for those, for those two weeks. Oh, what are we doing?
- [86:16]
Brittany Mametovic
Ben McKenzie.
- [86:17]
Jon Stewart
Oh, is that he's coming on for the crypto. Crypto book.
- [86:19]
Brittany Mametovic
Yes, he is.
- [86:20]
Jon Stewart
Oh, what a perfect. That'll be a perfect tax day lollapalooza there. Ben McKenzie and his, and his crypto book about corruption and all those things. And as always, I hope you guys have a great week off and thank you once again for Boy, this, this episode is just one of my favorites. Just put together so nicely by everybody. Lead producer Lauren Walker, producer Brittany Mametovic, producer Jillian Spear. Video editor and engineer Rob Tola, Audio editor and engineer Nicole Bernard. Boys. And our executive producers, Chris McShane and Katie Gray. Thank you guys so much. We'll see you next time. Bye, boy. The Weekly show with Jon Stewart is a Comedy Central podcast. It's produced by Paramount Audio and Busboy Productions.
- [87:19]
Heather Cox Richardson
Paramount podcasts.