Trump vs Democracy: Two Historians’ Perspectives

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Speaker 1 Hi, everyone, from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher.
My guests today are Dr. Lindsay Travinsky and Dr.

Speaker 1 Timothy Naftali, two historians who will help us put the re-election of Donald J.

Speaker 1 Trump into historical context and understand if and how American democracy will stand up to his obvious authoritarian impulses.

Speaker 1 If you're anything like me, you're feeling, look, badly today, and you should. Let yourself feel badly.
It's okay.

Speaker 1 Secondly, get up after you feel badly because there's a lot of work to do. Thirdly, he is a terrible person and half of our country voted for him knowing that.

Speaker 1 But it's also important to step back and take the long view with two historians who will help you see this moment with a little more clarity and perhaps make you feel better.

Speaker 1 Maybe not, but at least we can try. Lindsay is a presidential historian and the executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library.

Speaker 1 And her newest book is Making the Presidency, John Adams and the Precedents That Forge the Republic.

Speaker 1 But she's written extensively about our first president and probably our best one, George Washington.

Speaker 1 Tim is a senior research scholar in the Faculty of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University and the former director of the federal Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum.

Speaker 1 He is the author, co-author, or editor of eight books.

Speaker 1 Our expert question comes from Bill Adair, the creator of PolitiFact and author of Beyond the Big Lie, and a professor of journalism and public policy at Duke. Let's get to it.

Speaker 1 Lindsay and Tim, thank you for being on on.

Speaker 5 Pleasure.

Speaker 4 Thank you so much for having us, a longtime listener, a first-time caller.

Speaker 1 Former President Donald Trump is now President-elect Donald Trump. He won a surprisingly resounding victory.

Speaker 1 His Republican Party won the Senate, and we are still waiting for the results from the House, but the GOP has a good chance of holding it. We'll see.

Speaker 1 We're taping this on Wednesday, November 6th, the morning after the election, and I wanted to start by getting your initial reactions to Trump's victory, Lindsay, and then Tim.

Speaker 4 I'm surprised. I'm really surprised.
I think that I have to completely rethink everything I knew about how elections work and what matters.

Speaker 4 I also think that at this moment, I feel like I need to rethink my general optimism about

Speaker 4 the world and democracy and the American people. But I also recognize that there's a lot we don't know yet in terms of how people actually made decisions and why they made decisions.

Speaker 4 So I'm trying to leave space for learning, but mostly I'm just really, really surprised.

Speaker 1 Okay, just to be clear, it's half the American people. Just so you know, correct

Speaker 4 half

Speaker 4 the people. I guess I'm shocked that

Speaker 4 what blows me away is that, you know, 2016, a lot of people, I think, didn't have a sense of who he was.

Speaker 4 But now more people have voted for the explicit cruelty and veniality. And

Speaker 4 that feels like a very intentional choice.

Speaker 1 Absolutely. Tim?

Speaker 5 I wasn't as surprised

Speaker 5 because I had

Speaker 5 sadly come to the understanding that January 6th didn't matter for half the country.

Speaker 5 And for me, as a historian and citizen, that was the hardest realization that, at the very least, being guilty of dereliction of duty on that day wasn't enough to disqualify someone from national leadership.

Speaker 5 We could have a disagreement as to whether he criminally provoked January 6th, but there's absolutely no doubt, the evidence is overwhelming, that he did nothing.

Speaker 5 And the idea that someone like that could be elevated again to national leadership

Speaker 5 is very, very difficult to swallow.

Speaker 5 And that became clear to me when it was so close. The fact that Donald Trump remained not just a viable candidate,

Speaker 5 but a powerful and successful candidate on the national level

Speaker 5 told us a lot about ourselves. And

Speaker 5 so I'm afraid, as a result, I

Speaker 5 grasped for myself the fact that Donald Trump had been normalized by enough of the country that he could win. And the fact that he was normalized tells us something about ourselves.

Speaker 1 So we're going to bounce back and forth between the founding of the country, the Nixon era, and the present. Washington helped create our democracy.
Nixon certainly damaged it.

Speaker 1 And the question for today is, how will democracy weather a second Trump presidency? Lindsay, you've talked about the parallels between the 1790s and today.

Speaker 1 Back then, they also saw a threat of political violence, contested elections, foreign interference in our elections, just different foreign interferes. The questions over who belonged as a citizen.

Speaker 1 This has been an ongoing... situation in our country forever, pretty much.
Walk us through some of the parallels and the key differences.

Speaker 4 Well, as you said, there are so many parallels. Many of the challenges that we face in this current moment and we have faced in previous iterations of American life existed in the 1790s.

Speaker 4 Weak political parties, really intense partisanship, foreign interference in elections, questions about citizenship and who belongs, xenophobia, legislation that tackles citizenship and freedom of speech, political violence, actual political violence and the threat of political violence, and I think weak institutions.

Speaker 4 There have been times in American life where our institutions have been quite strong.

Speaker 4 In the 1790s, because they were so new and they didn't have the long scope of decades and centuries of sort of building them up, they were quite weak and fragile.

Speaker 4 So all of that sounds similar to us, and I think it should.

Speaker 4 What I see as the key difference is In the 1790s, there was a shared sense by both parties, both the Democratic-Republicans and the Federalists, that one misstep might cause the nation to completely fall apart because it was so new and it was so fragile.

Speaker 4 And I think, yeah, and I think the difference is that most of those people had skin in the game.

Speaker 4 They had either literally fought in the revolution to found the nation or they had participated in the institutions, whether it be Congress or state legislatures.

Speaker 4 And so they knew how hard it was to build something. They knew what fragile looked like.

Speaker 4 And I think the election of 1800, they were all sort of chastened by how close it came to being completely blown apart.

Speaker 4 And as a result, most people stepped back from the brink and stepped back from some of that violence and attempted to build bridges.

Speaker 4 I think today we're complacent because we think, oh, well, the country's been around for 200, however many years,

Speaker 4 of course, it will continue, almost.

Speaker 4 Of course, it will continue to survive. Of course, it will be fine because that's what it has always been.
But we know from looking at other nations, republics don't always survive. They don't.

Speaker 1 In fact, they never do. Actually, that's true.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 the 300-year mark is usually a pretty good indicator of when things can sometimes start to go sideways. So

Speaker 4 that is something to keep in mind.

Speaker 1 So Trump has told his voters that he will be there retribution, which is a very unusual word to use. His campaign has promised mass deportation camps.

Speaker 1 He said he will prosecute his political rivals, and the voters rewarded him. And he now has possibly the total power over all three branches, by the way.

Speaker 1 Tim, there are other examples in our history in presidential candidates campaigned as a strongman and won a broad mandate of voters. Has there been anyone else similar?

Speaker 5 I've been thinking a little bit about the election of 1828 simply because Andrew Jackson ran

Speaker 5 seeking vengeance.

Speaker 5 He and his supporters believed they had been deprived of the White House in 1824.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 much of his candidacy in the intervening four years was about removing John Quincy Adams. The difference is that Andrew Jackson wasn't seeking vengeance against half the country.

Speaker 5 He was seeking vengeance largely against one man and

Speaker 5 those around that one man.

Speaker 5 But

Speaker 5 he certainly presented himself as a strong man, though he wouldn't have used the term dictatorship, but

Speaker 5 he intended to make the presidency a much more powerful

Speaker 5 instrument or institution than it had been.

Speaker 5 He intended to veto things he did not

Speaker 5 agree with. He believed himself to be on the same level as the Supreme Court in determining the constitutionality of American laws.

Speaker 5 But again, there's a big difference. First of all, we're not talking about the national security state of the 21st century, where so the presidency,

Speaker 5 the executive branch is a much weaker, smaller branch, less pervasive in our life than now.

Speaker 5 And Andrew Jackson was not seeking vengeance against whole classes of people. So

Speaker 5 we've had sort of a vengeful, successful candidate.

Speaker 5 But I think that the consequences in this era are enormous and much bigger than they were

Speaker 5 long ago in 1890.

Speaker 1 He did have vengeance against Native Americans, you know, and wouldn't fulfill laws that the Supreme Court even passed. He just declined to do so.

Speaker 5 He didn't run for office.

Speaker 5 This was an approach to people that he had before.

Speaker 5 No, his particular treatment of Native Americans stands as one of the lots on our nation's history.

Speaker 5 Donald Trump has made it clear that

Speaker 5 he doesn't want any guardrails, that he doesn't intend to have establishment Republicans around him, he doesn't intend to have, and this was not used by him, but by others, any adults in the room to tell him what he cannot do.

Speaker 5 He's also

Speaker 5 made clear that he wants to use the instruments of the federal government to

Speaker 5 hurt his enemies.

Speaker 5 we are going to enter, at least if he does what he says he is going to do, another era of the enemies list, something we have not actually experienced since the 1970s.

Speaker 1 With a mandate of some sort, some kind of mandate.

Speaker 1 So, if we go back to our founding, President George Washington could have easily become a monarch, as everybody knows and hears about, but instead he helped birth the first modern democracy.

Speaker 1 Talk about the opportunities Washington had to consolidate power around himself and how he reacted to them, Lindsay, because he certainly had the ability to do so.

Speaker 4 Oh, he had an enormous ability. I mean, one of the real

Speaker 4 openings for his presidency was that the Constitution is extraordinarily short, especially prior to our amendments. It was only about 4,000 words.

Speaker 4 And Article II, which controlled the executive branch, was very, very short. And I think partly that was by design.

Speaker 4 The delegates at the Constitutional Convention didn't really want to talk about the presidency with Washington in the room. That would have been extremely uncomfortable.

Speaker 4 And they also trusted him to make good decisions, to establish precedents that would be wise and cautious for his successors.

Speaker 4 And I think they also understood that a certain amount of vagueness and silence was required in order to give flexibility to people once they were in office to meet the challenges that could not yet possibly be foreseen.

Speaker 4 So much of the presidency wasn't defined.

Speaker 4 And instead, Washington had to figure out how he interacted with other branches of government, how he interacted with citizens, how he was supposed to govern in a crisis, whether it be a foreign crisis or domestic insurrection.

Speaker 4 All of those things are not really articulated in the Constitution and very little legislation.

Speaker 1 And who were his intellectual and moral forces? What were the thinkers who molded him?

Speaker 4 Well, he was largely self-taught. He had had a little bit of schooling, but he was largely self-taught.
And he did so by buying books throughout his entire life.

Speaker 4 So he read most of the Enlightenment tracts, but I wouldn't necessarily think of him as an Enlightenment man like I would Thomas Jefferson, for example.

Speaker 4 Instead, I think he was largely shaped by his own experiences and his failures as a younger man, his successes during the revolution.

Speaker 4 And he brought that experience into his presidency with an understanding that he did not have all the answers and that he had real weaknesses and there were things he didn't know.

Speaker 4 And so, as a result, he surrounded himself with people who had different types of expertise and knowledge, and he listened to them.

Speaker 4 And so we're talking about people like Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson and Henry Knox and Edmund Randolph, which were his first administration.

Speaker 4 But he was also close with John Jay, who was the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

Speaker 4 And so he was actively seeking out as much information as possible to try and form this office in a responsible fashion.

Speaker 1 All right, let's fast forward. Richard Nicton believed that JFK and the Democrats had stolen the election from him in 1960.
And I just didn't read Chris Wallace, and it looks like he may have.

Speaker 1 So when he became president, it was time to run for reelection in 1972. He was happy to play dirty tricks in order to win.
And it was his proclivity anyway.

Speaker 1 Talk about those two elections, 1960 and 72. Both were problematic for different reasons.
How do you look at them? And are they speed bumps on the road to democracy?

Speaker 1 Or are they signs our system wasn't as strong as we think?

Speaker 5 Well, in 1960,

Speaker 5 John Kennedy was taking a risk.

Speaker 5 The risk was whether the American people were ready to break that era's glass ceiling, which was to elect a Catholic to the presidency.

Speaker 5 And it was a tough election for him

Speaker 5 in many ways.

Speaker 5 The Catholic issue weighed on him. He lost a lot of votes.

Speaker 5 for religious reasons.

Speaker 5 And yes, we'll never quite know with certainty

Speaker 5 the shenanigans in Texas and the extent to which

Speaker 5 Democratic efforts in Chicago counterbalanced Republican efforts in the south of the state. But what I think is

Speaker 5 important to understand about 60

Speaker 5 is that there was a glass ceiling to break, and it made that election much closer. Nixon's dirty tricks of the 72 campaign

Speaker 5 were prefigured in his dirty tricks against his opponents starting in 1971

Speaker 5 and in many ways were prefigured in the dirty trick that he authored in 1968 to try to undermine the negotiations between the Johnson administration and North Vietnam as a way to make the Vietnam War as salient as possible in the election.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 not exactly the same because it didn't involve covert actions in this case, but the way in which Donald Trump undermined the possibility of some kind of legislation regarding the border, Nixon did not want the Vietnam situation to appear to be on the road to resolution in 68 because that was his strongest issue against, at that point, his opponent, Vice President Hubert Humphrey.

Speaker 5 What I wanted to mention about 60 that I think is so important is that even though Kennedy's victory was narrow and even though Kennedy himself didn't feel he had a mandate, which is one of the reasons why he nominated so many Republicans for his cabinet and for his inner circle,

Speaker 5 a whole generation of young Americans began to see him as the personification of the White House. And John Kennedy would go to shape the way in which people ran for the White House.
And

Speaker 5 this was something that became a huge chip on Richard Nixon's shoulders. Richard Nixon was not only angry because he felt that

Speaker 5 the Kennedy money and the Kennedy

Speaker 5 allies had deprived him of victory, but there was something about the Kennedy charisma that had free space in his brain.

Speaker 5 A lot of the Nixon administration, a lot of Nixon's own turmoil, inner turmoil, turmoil, can be explained as this inner debate between himself and the dead John F. Kennedy.

Speaker 5 He never got over that.

Speaker 1 Right. So getting back to Donald Trump, in 2019, he tried to bully President Zelensky of Ukraine into announcing investigation to his rival Joe Biden.

Speaker 1 After he lost the 2020 election, he did everything he could to steal it, including calling the Secretary of State in Georgia and pressuring him to commit fraud and then sending a mob to attack the Capitol on January 6th.

Speaker 1 I do blame him, even if you don't.

Speaker 1 How difficult is the idea of free and fair elections with Trump in the Oval Office? I think people are worried about that today. Already Lauren Boebert has said, let's do a third term.

Speaker 1 Lindsay and then Tim?

Speaker 4 Well, I think that

Speaker 4 we have the infrastructure in place to have free and fair elections because we have been having unbelievably free and fair elections.

Speaker 4 However, the part of this that we don't know that's unprecedented is that a lot of this stuff just isn't tested. A lot of the things that Trump could potentially do kind of require the honor system.

Speaker 4 So, for example, the Insurrection Act gives the president enormous leeway to call up the military to use in

Speaker 4 a domestic scene. And so, we don't know if in four years he would call up the military under some false pretense.

Speaker 4 And that could be challenged in court, but that takes a really long time and we don't know how it would go. And so, our infrastructure is great.

Speaker 4 It's just this question that so much of our system, especially the president's.

Speaker 1 What he could do. And he always, he's a violator of norms.
He's a violator.

Speaker 4 Absolutely.

Speaker 4 And he's a reminder, I think, how much of it does require someone who's generally acting in good faith.

Speaker 1 Good faith. Tim, briefly?

Speaker 5 My great concern is that Trump feels he was not successful at reshaping the presidency in his first term. And that

Speaker 5 so many of our, most of our presidents, in fact, until Trump, let the office shape them to some degree. Of course, they wanted to stamp it with their imprint.

Speaker 5 Dwight Eisenhower wanted to make sure the floors were full of

Speaker 5 cleat marks from his golf shoes, but they didn't ignore the norms of the office. They learned them.
And Trump ignored them. And he is making clear, has made clear to us,

Speaker 5 that he will define the interests of the United States and that the office will be a means by which to achieve those personal interests. And, you know, John Bolton in his memoirs makes clear that

Speaker 5 it wasn't just once, it wasn't just the Zelinsky call,

Speaker 5 it was Trump's approach to foreign policy in general that

Speaker 5 whatever was good for him and good for the Trump business was, by definition, good for America. That

Speaker 5 is completely unique in our history. And in terms of the threat to our Constitution,

Speaker 5 we have to keep in mind that

Speaker 5 we still have institutions and the U.S. military

Speaker 5 hasn't been tested in this way.

Speaker 5 But we have to keep in mind that there are many people with decades of training in the military, and it would be very hard for Trump to remove all of them. And

Speaker 5 their lessons, what they have learned, is that the military does not play a domestic police role and that the military respects the Constitution because their oath is to the Constitution.

Speaker 5 It's not to any president. So that would be severely tested.

Speaker 1 We'll be back in a minute.

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Speaker 1 Let's talk about want to be authoritarians. Let's talk about democratic norms around that.

Speaker 1 Washington certainly, as we noted, could have been an authoritarian if he wanted to. Trump may become one.

Speaker 1 This summer, the Supreme Court decided the presidents are essentially immune from prosecution for official acts.

Speaker 1 Lindsay, you've written about how Washington used the cabinet to strengthen a weak executive branch.

Speaker 1 How do you think Washington reacts to a SCOTUS ruling and the massive increase in executive power since he was president?

Speaker 4 Well, I think generally, if someone says to you, the founders thought that, that is a red flag that whatever they're going to say next is full of crock because the founders rarely agreed on anything, with perhaps one exception.

Speaker 4 And that was we were not to have a king. There is not supposed to be a king.
The president is supposed to be accountable to the law.

Speaker 4 The president, once they leave office, is a citizen just like anyone else.

Speaker 4 And so while usually I'm sort of loath to predict what they would think, I can be pretty confident that they would be horrified at the notion that a president would not be held accountable for their actions or would retain some sort of immune status once they stepped down.

Speaker 1 Okay, so authoritians, by definition, try to consolidate power, the military, the media, et cetera.

Speaker 1 Nixon repeatedly abused the executive office for his own personal gain, by the way, sometimes for unbelievably petty reasons.

Speaker 1 Tim, walk us through some of his more egregious abuses of power and why he was able to get away with them.

Speaker 1 And after Watergate, there were a number of reforms passed to place guardrails on the executive branch. What were the consequential ones and are they still effective today?

Speaker 5 Well, Richard Nixon wanted to do much more damage

Speaker 5 than he was able to get away with. Let me give you some examples.

Speaker 5 Richard Nixon

Speaker 5 had an intense fear of Jewish Americans and believed that that there was a conspiracy of Jewish Americans in the federal government.

Speaker 5 And he ordered the removal of Jewish Americans from any position of great sensitivity in the U.S. government.
It's on tape. It didn't happen.

Speaker 5 And he was surrounded by some anti-Semites, but there was a limit to what they were willing to do to

Speaker 5 basically undermine the U.S. government.
And so they

Speaker 5 satisfied him by

Speaker 5 moving around some Jewish Americans in an obscure part of the labor department, but it was a part of the labor department that is still, by the way, it's not the same people, of course, but still the source of our monthly unemployment figures, which are politically sensitive.

Speaker 5 They were then, they are now.

Speaker 5 Nixon wanted to do more, but then he moved on. One of the things about Nixon is that

Speaker 5 he would vent

Speaker 5 and sometimes it would go away and he would not follow up and want something done again. And in other cases, he would keep pushing.

Speaker 5 And there was a team around him that understood they could not implement everything that he ordered. On the tax issue,

Speaker 5 he vented and wanted to go after prominent Democrats and prominent opponents of the war. And fortunately for the country, the Republicans in the Treasury Department, in the IRS, wouldn't do it.

Speaker 5 But they had to stand up to Nixon, and they were able to do it because the Secretary of the Treasury, George Schultz, wouldn't let

Speaker 5 his people audit the 300 or 400 names that were given to them by the White House.

Speaker 5 Nixon got upset, but in the end, he decided it was too much of a problem for him to fire George Schultz, and then he got absorbed by

Speaker 5 Watergate.

Speaker 1 So we're relying in that regard on the kindness of these people. We'll see.

Speaker 5 More than the kindness, we're relying on the fact that they were actually American patriots and following the law.

Speaker 1 Aaron Trevor Barrett, right. So Trump will have a team of sycophants who will be ready to execute his whims every time.

Speaker 5 That's my concern. My great concern is that we not only have a president who's promised us that he will build

Speaker 5 that kind of system,

Speaker 5 but he now has a Supreme Court that has just recognized the fact that there's presumptive immunity for official acts.

Speaker 5 And asking the IRS to look into somebody's taxes could be viewed

Speaker 5 as an official act. The president could say, well, I just thought they might be cheating on their taxes.
There might be no evidence of it.

Speaker 5 But my great concern in this next Trump administration will be these abuses of power that Nixon did,

Speaker 5 wanted to do on a grand scale, but didn't, did it on a small scale because of guardrails. And without those guardrails, the president has enormous power to do damage.

Speaker 1 So in 2020, Trump told General Mark Milley, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to just shoot anti-racism protesters and to crack their skulls and beat the fuck out of them.

Speaker 1 Luckily for the country, Milley did not comply. In October, Trump said this terrible thing during an interview with Maria Bartiroma, who is perfectly awful herself.
Let's hear it.

Speaker 9 I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within. We have some very bad people.
We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And I think they're the best.

Speaker 9 And it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military,

Speaker 9 because they can't let that happen.

Speaker 1 Lindsay, put Trump's calls for turning the military against American citizens into historical context.

Speaker 1 For us, Washington dealt with a whiskey rebellion in the 1790s when he mobilized American troops against Americans to smother an insurgency, and Hamilton was quite involved with that.

Speaker 1 How does that compare to what we saw in 2020?

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 4 Congress had passed a whiskey excise tax a couple of years previous, and there had been a number of protests, and then they became violent.

Speaker 4 A house was burned down that belonged to a federal tax collector, and shots were exchanged.

Speaker 4 There was an act that was passed in 1792, which gave the president the right to call up local militias if Congress was out of session, because Congress was out of session most of the year.

Speaker 4 They were never around when anything interesting happened, and it took a really long time to get them back into session.

Speaker 4 So if there was an emergency, the president could submit evidence that immediate action was required to a Supreme Court justice for approval.

Speaker 4 Now, Washington did try a number of peaceful methods to get this violent protest to disperse. That didn't work.
He then called up the militia and sent it out.

Speaker 4 He actually turned around, which was really important because he didn't want to be seen as arresting his own citizens. Most of the protesters, the cases against them were dismissed.

Speaker 4 Those that were convicted, he pardoned because it wasn't actually about the punishment. It was about proving that the government had the right to actually pass attacks.

Speaker 4 You know, I think what's really important is

Speaker 4 over the course of American history, the military has at times been used in ways we would be uncomfortable with, especially in the South to enforce slave codes, especially in the wake of slave uprisings.

Speaker 4 So it's not like we have a perfect history here. We don't.

Speaker 4 However, what strikes me about Trump's language in that particular instance is not necessarily the the military part, although that is quite important. It's the enemy within.

Speaker 4 It's drawing a distinction of American people who deserve to be punished by the military. And that is language that I know a lot of the other historians you've had on have demonstrated.

Speaker 4 That is language that authoritarians use as part of their playbook.

Speaker 1 Right. So authoritarians are oftentimes willing to use violence to maintain a grip on power.
In 1971, Nixon was battling a growing anti-war seminar.

Speaker 1 And in May of that year, he responded to a huge protest with 10,000 federal troops and the largest mass arrest in U.S. history.

Speaker 1 A fake bomb was found under a bridge, and Nixon mused he wished it would have been real because it would have allowed him to respond even more forcefully.

Speaker 1 Tim, what was Nixon's stance on using state force against Americans? Did he ever seriously consider turning the military against fellow citizens?

Speaker 5 Yes,

Speaker 5 he did. In fact,

Speaker 5 on the tapes, he ordered

Speaker 5 the use of violence against the Native Americans at Wounded Knee. Again, it was yet another

Speaker 5 Nixon order that was not followed through by his people.

Speaker 5 At one point, the Secretary of Defense was ordered to

Speaker 5 attack these planes that were full of hostages in Jordan to end a standoff with the People's Liberation Front for Palestine, the PFLP,

Speaker 5 and the Secretary of Defense just didn't do it.

Speaker 5 I want to mention that

Speaker 5 Nixon's frustration with

Speaker 5 the guardrails around him were one of the reasons why he created an investigative unit, the plumbers,

Speaker 5 in the White House. But he also okayed the payment to the Teamsters.

Speaker 5 to go out and break the bones of American anti-war demonstrators.

Speaker 5 They didn't use the U.S. military.
They found another way of using violence. So Nixon certainly not only conceived of the use of violence as appropriate, but in some cases used it.

Speaker 5 Smaller scale, but it showed his capacity to do that. But one thing about Nixon that isn't true about

Speaker 5 Trump, Nixon had shame. Nixon wanted to be remembered as a great president.
Nixon did not want to be remembered as someone who had violated presidential norms. He cared about them.

Speaker 5 He just wanted to do it secretly. It had to be done covertly.
With Donald Trump, we have someone who has no shame

Speaker 5 and doesn't care about presidential norms.

Speaker 5 First of all, he doesn't know the history of the office, despite the fact having occupied it, he doesn't care, which means that's a major problem because there are no self-restraints.

Speaker 5 Nixon, for all of his egregious behavior, his criminal acts, his abuse of power, still had a sense that there were red lines, at least that he didn't wish to cross overtly.

Speaker 5 Donald Trump knows no such red lines.

Speaker 1 Right. So Lindsay, one of our greatest national myths is the story of George Washington and his cherry treed and supposed inability to lie, which of course is a myth.

Speaker 1 But were American politicians generally more truthful during his era and around that time? Or is it an increasing level of dishonesty?

Speaker 4 No, I mean, they got up to all sorts of no-good, and they would print just outrageous lies in the newspaper. In fact, you know, what I think is different about our news media ecosystem today is

Speaker 4 at the time, they had very intensely partisan newspapers. There were the Democratic-Republican papers and the Federalist papers.
The difference is that people understood that.

Speaker 4 They understood that they were reading a partisan production.

Speaker 4 They didn't have this idea that people on their television or people that are printing things online were acting with the same sort of incentives as a Walter Cronkite.

Speaker 4 So it's actually like a media literacy problem that I think we have today that compares to the 1790s because they were happy to just print garbage in the newspapers.

Speaker 4 But I want to pick up on that shame piece that Tim mentioned, because I think that that is actually a really important shift. It's not just that the president has to have shame.

Speaker 4 It's that our society has to have sort of an embrace of shame and a certain standard of decorum, norms, and precedents that we all buy into, because otherwise elections don't work as an accountability mechanism if we are not willing to enforce those things.

Speaker 4 And so certainly the norms and expectations about social behavior were different in the 1790s, but there was still an agreed upon set of social behavior and that has evolved over time.

Speaker 4 What's different now is we seem to have lost the ability to enforce it.

Speaker 1 To enforce it. Can I add?

Speaker 1 I'm going to ask you a specific question, actually. Authoritarians create an alternative reality to their followers.

Speaker 1 In Trump's case, it's part of a strategy called Gish Gallup, or Steve Banning calls it, flood the zone with shit. Trump also has an Elon Musk helping him spread propaganda widely and lies on X.

Speaker 1 The social media platforms have abandoned content moderation, so they're just willing enablers and not so active as Musk, but it's easier never to spread conspiracy theories.

Speaker 1 Nixon was an infamous liar. Give us some historical context for this seemingly unending stream of untruths.

Speaker 5 Well, the interesting thing about

Speaker 5 the two eras of lying is that Nixon's lying was tethered to some kind of reality.

Speaker 5 Nixon did not attempt to create a completely alternative reality.

Speaker 5 Trump is inventing

Speaker 5 complete

Speaker 5 history and reality. I mean, for example, I'll give you a famous one, not as important as some of the other examples,

Speaker 5 but when he talked about inflation, saying that inflation under Biden was the worst inflation we had ever had.

Speaker 5 That is, of course, utter nonsense. And when we had the inflation, inflation, the huge, much worse inflation of the 70s.

Speaker 5 When he talked about Afghanistan, the pullout of Afghanistan, which I think was a debacle for the Punk Biden administration, but he described it as the most embarrassing event for America in its history.

Speaker 5 Well, that's utter nonsense. Both Lindsay and I, and you too, Kara, could come up with many more examples of much more embarrassing moments.

Speaker 5 So, this is something that Nixon had too much self-respect as a debater and as a policy intellectual to ever do.

Speaker 5 What he would do is Nixon's deceit was calculated to protect himself

Speaker 5 so the public didn't know him.

Speaker 5 Trump's deceit is part of how the public knows him. And as Lindsay said, we are in an era now where the public doesn't mind embracing someone.
I'm talking about half the public, but enough.

Speaker 5 Bracing someone they know is lying. And the one thing

Speaker 5 I just wanted to add quickly was the shame issue isn't just important in elections, it's important in impeachments.

Speaker 5 And the assumption was

Speaker 5 that members, first of all, there wouldn't be political parties. Lindsay knows this way better than I do, but the founders didn't, or framers didn't expect that.

Speaker 5 But more importantly, they thought that each member of Congress would feel shame if they didn't defend the the Constitution.

Speaker 5 And we live in an era now where the shame is if you don't defend the president of your party. Right.
And that vitiates, neutralizes completely the sanction of impeachment or removal.

Speaker 1 We'll be back in a minute.

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Speaker 1 All right, so every episode we have a question from an outside expert.

Speaker 1 Let's hear the one for you guys.

Speaker 12 Hi, it's Bill Adair. I'm the author of Beyond the Big Lie, a new book about lying in politics.
I'm also a professor of journalism at Duke University.

Speaker 12 Given each of your backgrounds, I'm curious if George Washington and Richard Nixon were to meet for a beer today, what would each of them say about the state of lying in politics?

Speaker 1 Go ahead. First you, Lindsay, and then Tim.

Speaker 4 I think George Washington specifically would be horrified by it because while his supporters often engaged in lies on his behalf, he really actually tried to stay above that partisan fray.

Speaker 4 And so he would feel that it was a significant decline in our political culture.

Speaker 5 I think Richard Nixon would consider Donald Trump an unintelligent man, but a very clever man, and would be envious of the media ecosystem in which Trump lives.

Speaker 5 Richard Nixon felt that it was way too difficult for him to spin his reality, and he felt that that the media, that there was no Fox News.

Speaker 5 And he desperately wanted when, in fact, some of his followers ultimately created the alternative media. environment in which Donald Trump has been so successful.

Speaker 1 Authoritarians also try to encourage a cult of personality around them. And Trump inspires the most, almost religious devotion among his devotees.
What does he do to create that reaction?

Speaker 1 Are there other American presidents who are able to provoke such rabid loyalty among their followers?

Speaker 4 Well, there certainly have been presidents who have been enormously popular. You know, FDR was enormously popular.
Reagan was enormously popular.

Speaker 4 And Washington, to a certain extent, I wouldn't necessarily call it a cult, but he was seen as the father of the nation and sort of put on this pedestal that was separate.

Speaker 4 What I think Trump does is that he has convinced a lot of people that whatever they're seeing isn't happening. What he says is what is happening.

Speaker 4 And so, and it starts to become a fulfilling prophecy because if they reject the things that they previously believed, then that is a very uncomfortable feeling.

Speaker 4 And so it's almost like a sunk costs fallacy where you can't acknowledge you were wrong and you have to continue to lean all in to this process.

Speaker 1 So Nixon was also an insecure man, but he wasn't loved by the public, but he retained support about one in four Americans, even after all the Watergate revelations came out.

Speaker 1 And he was very uncharismatic, but how did he hold on to so many supporters? And what does that tell us about Trump's grip on his supporters' psyches?

Speaker 5 Well, Nixon would love to have Trump's grip on his supporters. Two quick things.
One,

Speaker 5 Nixon didn't have coattails. There were very few members of the Republican Party who owed their position to him.
And so he did not have followers in the Washington elite to the extent that Trump does.

Speaker 5 Because let's keep in mind, the Washington Elite is partly created by Trump.

Speaker 5 The second thing is that Americans, while there were many that revered Nixon, he was not beloved even by his own supporters. They respected him.

Speaker 5 And what happened was that respect depended on his ability to govern well, too. They didn't love him as a man.

Speaker 5 And so once he began to lie to Americans,

Speaker 5 he undermined some of his own appeal to his base. So his base shrank.
Trump's base never shrank to the extent that Nixon's did after Watergate.

Speaker 5 One of the reasons why we had such a corrective moment is that not only did the Washington elite reject Nixon, including of course Republicans, but the American people sought

Speaker 5 a better government. And

Speaker 5 both Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter had public support for the new guardrails that Congress created because of Nixon. So there wasn't that emotional attachment to Nixon that Trump has engendered.

Speaker 5 And for that reason, the country, I would think, did not have the corrective moment, with the exception of one law regarding electoral counting, did not have the corrective moment after the first Trump term that we saw in the 70s after

Speaker 5 both Watergate and Vietnam led to this effort to try to restrain the imperial presidency.

Speaker 1 And so right now, just for, and there was also forgiveness after Andrew Johnson lost his re-election bid to Ulysses S.

Speaker 1 Grant, Grant, he pardoned the Confederate leaders and generals who were meant to stand trial for treason. After Nixon resigned, President Gerald Ford pardoned him, much to his detriment.

Speaker 1 Trump is going to essentially pardon himself when he fires Jack Smith. He's pledged to go after political opponents.

Speaker 1 A lot of people think he's bluffing, but we'll have to wait and see. I don't think he's bluffing.

Speaker 1 Is there any other example of this, of a president using his powers of office to go after rivals? Nixon, obviously, tried it, a relative failure in that regard, but not a total failure.

Speaker 1 Is there anyone else you can think of who's done this?

Speaker 4 To a very small extent. I mean, you know, Jefferson, when he was president, he hated Aaron Burr because Aaron Burr had not stepped aside once the election was tied in 1800.

Speaker 4 He really didn't like some of the Federalist Supreme Court justices, so he sort of encouraged an impeachment and then sort of encouraged people to pursue charges against Burr for his conspiracy out West.

Speaker 1 Also Hamilton, famous.

Speaker 4 Exactly. But he wasn't,

Speaker 4 it wasn't an explicit, you need to put this person in jail because they're my enemy. It was they had done something that was appeared to be wrong, and he encouraged the prosecution of it.

Speaker 4 But notably, he failed. He failed in both cases because the institutions and the other people around him felt that the rule of law was more important than this vendetta.

Speaker 1 Two questions for both of you.

Speaker 1 In his farewell address, Washington said that, quote, sooner or later, the chief of some prevailing faction would manipulate the public's emotions and their partisan lawyers to, quote, the purposes of his own elevation on the ruins of public liberty.

Speaker 1 It's almost as if Trump or someone like him was inevitable, and Washington knew that the political system he helped create had vulnerabilities that could be exploited by a leader, really a grifter who puts himself above the interests of the country.

Speaker 1 Is it capable of handling the stresses it now faces under Trump, first Lindsay and then Tim?

Speaker 4 I don't think we know. I mean, it was the first time, but I think the best way to to think of guardrails is like a car.
If you get into an accident and your airbags deploy, then they've saved you.

Speaker 4 You might be bruised and battered, but then the car is totaled and you have to have it fixed and it's not going to be able to save you in the same way.

Speaker 4 And I think our guardrails have been bruised and battered or the airbags have been deployed. And so I'm not sure.

Speaker 4 I mean, what's notable after the Nixon moment is that Congress did take action and did implement reforms. And we have seen very few of them in the last four years.

Speaker 4 And I fear that we are going to come to regret that.

Speaker 1 Tim?

Speaker 5 I agree with Lindsay. I mean,

Speaker 5 one of the great concerns I have is what a generation of young Americans is learning about

Speaker 5 power and responsibility. And

Speaker 5 the fact that Trump could come back after January 6th and his other abuses in the first term is signaling to many that that is

Speaker 5 not only a useful and effective approach to leadership, but it's a good approach to leadership because

Speaker 5 it's now been sort of embraced by enough of the country. To my mind, those are the norms that I worry most about.
John F. Kennedy created, with all his flaws,

Speaker 5 an ideal of how one should run for office and how one should act in office. Again, they didn't know fully what he was up to in office.

Speaker 5 I believe that it is possible that Donald Trump will become that ideal for an entire generation of young Americans who are striving for power.

Speaker 5 And that, to me, is what could undermine our institutions because it takes more than just eight years to destroy institutions, but a generation can destroy institutions.

Speaker 1 Absolutely. So that brings me to my last question.

Speaker 1 Ever since Trump won in 2016, people have debated whether he's a symptom or a cause of the fear, division, anger, racism, and xenophobia we see almost every day during his campaign.

Speaker 1 It was a dark vision of America, which

Speaker 1 it's been in our veins forever. Let's be clear.

Speaker 1 He's not a new thing. Where do you come down, Lindsay? And then Tim, finish up.

Speaker 4 I think that he let it come out of the shadows. He made it permissible to speak a lot of these things out loud, and that has therefore accelerated the growth and the expanse of this wildfire of hate.

Speaker 5 Tim? I think of Lady Bracknell in the importance of being earnest.

Speaker 5 And in this case, I'm paraphrasing.

Speaker 1 Oscar Wilde. Yes, Oscar Wilde.

Speaker 5 But in this case,

Speaker 5 much persecuted, yes. To elect Trump once

Speaker 5 is misfortune. To re-elect Trump is carelessness.
I think that this is on the American people. And I believe the world is looking at this now.
The times that they said, oh, that's Trump being Trump.

Speaker 5 I think a lot of the world and a lot of many Americans are saying, no, that's America being America.

Speaker 5 I think we need to come to terms with things in the next little while that we haven't come to terms with.

Speaker 5 One, the effect of inequality on this country, which has produced a populism that is both on the right and the left. Two, the real deep effects of the pandemic.
And three,

Speaker 5 the very fact of the consequences of technological change on feeling of hope and despair in rural areas,

Speaker 5 plus those deep, dark impulses of race, racism, xenophobia, and bigotry that have been in our country from the beginning, and we've been wrestling with them

Speaker 5 from the beginning. And they have occasionally won out against our better angels.

Speaker 5 This is not a good moment for our better angels, but just like those dark impulses have always existed, so too have our better angels. And so that is the struggle in front of us right now.

Speaker 1 I will end on one last thing and the hopeful thing because I think I'm just going to do that today because this is my podcast.

Speaker 1 Each of you, what should opponents of all of this do in a sentence or two, each of you, Tim and then Lindsay?

Speaker 5 One of the most effective ways that authoritarians take power is by scaring people.

Speaker 5 Authoritarians, even the worst of them, don't necessarily like to outlaw action. What they want to do is make you so afraid of consequences that you outlaw it yourself.
We saw a little of that already

Speaker 5 with, for example, a little small example of the Gerald Ford Foundation not giving Liz Cheney an award for fear that they might lose in a Trump administration their 501c3 exemption.

Speaker 5 And Jeff Bezos at Washington Post. It's self-restraint.

Speaker 5 I would argue that remember your civil rights, exercise your civil rights, be who you wanted to be, who you want to be now, who you wanted to be before Trump.

Speaker 5 Don't let Trump stand in your way of enjoying the full benefits of the Constitution. If enough people do that and don't lose hope, it gets harder for the authoritarian.
And I believe Trump is lazy.

Speaker 5 I believe that Trump actually at times would rather not take risks. So if people make it hard for him to abuse power,

Speaker 5 it would lessen the effect of his vengeance.

Speaker 1 That word you're looking for is no.

Speaker 1 Yes. No, you may not.
Lindsay, last word.

Speaker 4 Well, I agree with so much of what Tim said.

Speaker 4 I think also there are still ways that even if Trump can't always be held accountable, the people around him can be, whether it is through the rule of law, through our court system, through public accountability.

Speaker 4 And we have to continue to try and use every mechanism of accountability possible, which is, I think, the legal side or the public side of the don't obey in advance.

Speaker 4 But the best and most long-lasting way to combat authoritarianism is through accountability. And so we just have to keep trying because the most pernicious thing will be if we do give up hope.

Speaker 4 So we cannot give up and we have to keep trying to hold people to account.

Speaker 1 That's perfect. And the word you're looking for is, oh, no, you didn't.

Speaker 1 Something like that. Anyway, thank you so much.
You're exactly the people I want to talk to on a day like today.

Speaker 1 We have had a long history and we've gone through some difficult times over the many, many centuries we've been around. So

Speaker 1 let's have some hope. Thank you so much.

Speaker 5 Thank you, Kara.

Speaker 4 Thank you.

Speaker 1 On with Kara Swisher is produced by Christian Castro-Rousselle, Kateri Yoakum, Jolie Myers, Megan Burney, and Kaylin Lynch. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of audio.

Speaker 1 Special thanks to Kate Gallagher and Claire Hyman. Our engineers are Rick Kwan and Fernando Aruda, and our theme music is by Trackademics.

Speaker 1 If you're already following the show, I'll tell you, I just saw the movie Wicked, and it comes out on November 22nd. I urge you all to see it, and it's time to try defying gravity.

Speaker 1 And don't let them bring you down. If not, yep, we're the Wicked Witch, but we look fantastic in green.

Speaker 1 Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Monday with more.