Literally every time Donald Trump addresses the coronavirus bad things happen. The stock market craters. Lives are put at risk. Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman examine the last few days of chaos, including the nightmarish press conferences and Republicans profiting off the pandemic. Author and historian Sarah Churchwell stops by to talk about her essential book Behold, America: The Entangled History of 'American First' and 'The American Dream' and how authoritarian rule in America isn't so farfetched.
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And I agree with the doctor when he said, may work, may not work.
I feel good about it.
That's all it is, just a feeling.
You know, I'm a smart guy.
I feel good about it.
What do you say to Americans who are scared, though?
I guess nearly 200 dead, 14,000 who are sick.
Millions, as you witnessed, who are scared right now.
What do you say to Americans who are watching you right now, who are scared?
I say that you're a terrible reporter.
That's what I say.
And it is a fact, it is extremely well established by historians, and quite recently actually, in the last five to ten years, but it's very well established, that Hitler learned from America, not the other way around.
Hey, everybody, welcome to the Muckrake Political Podcast.
I am your co-host, Jared Sexton.
I am here with my loyal and wonderful co-host, Nick Hauselmann.
We got a lot to talk about today.
Just a quick reminder, at the end of this podcast, we actually have an exclusive interview with Sarah Churchwell, who is an expert in American history and authoritarianism and fascism and has some pretty dire stuff that we need to hear, particularly at this point.
She is the author of Behold America, the Entangled History of America First and the American Dream.
So we will be talking to her at the end of this podcast.
In the meantime, Nick, it's been a rough week.
I assume the people listening have had rough weeks as well.
Society has basically gone into hibernation, save for some people on the beaches and out having brunch, I guess.
How are you hanging in there?
How are you adjusting to this new world?
Well, LA just went on, you know, almost lockdown, where Mayor Garcetti went on and finally just sort of said it, like, you guys really can't go anywhere short of very specific places.
And if you work, you cannot go to work unless you do very specific things.
That said, that list is a bit long, you know, so there is things like gardening that you can go out and do if you're a gardener.
Landscaping and stuff, but it is it's it's kind of whacking us in the face like a two by four now We've been you know my family's been pretty much sequestered since last Thursday or last Wednesday pretty much and so it hasn't changed much for us But it's getting eerier and eerier as we you know I see my neighbors if we're walking the dog and we really are honoring that six-foot distance of social distancing and so it's This the only thing I think it's really
Weighing on my mind is the length of time and the unknown length of time this is going to stay with us.
And I think that that anxiety, um, cause I'm, I'm, I'm right there with you.
I mean, um, there've been so many different reports, right?
That there, there's probably another couple of weeks left.
There's a month and a half left.
I mean, the really dire reports are that we're going to have multiple instances of social quarantining, um, or social distancing over the next 18 months.
Um, it would really help in this moment.
I don't know.
Call, call me crazy.
Call me idealistic.
It would really help right now to have a competent president who cared about doing his or her job and providing leadership and information.
But unfortunately, as everyone listening knows, we have a daily appointment right now with President Donald John Trump.
Who convenes inside the White House press room and proceeds to lie.
Proceeds to whine about press coverage.
Proceeds to just spew constant misinformation that puts millions of lives at risk.
And as it happens, this is the best part about modern media.
As he talks, we get to watch the stock market crater in real time.
We actually get to watch the economy shiver and convulse as Donald Trump puts more lives at danger.
I have to say for myself, I would probably feel better and I would probably feel more secure and maybe a little less anxiety and maybe a little less existential terror if we had, again, some type of leader.
Just a halfway competent leader.
Oh, well just to fill you in if you missed the press conference, Peter Alexander of NBC asked what he would say to the people who are really scared, you know, in the country.
Can we recreate that?
For anyone who can't watch these things, and I understand, I've been told on Twitter that there are people who rely on people like me and you to tell them what happens, because they can't watch.
And by the way, I don't blame them.
They shouldn't watch.
These things are public health crises in and of themselves.
Okay, Nick, would you ask me the question?
I'm going to be Donald Trump.
I'm going to give them an almost verbatim Mr. President, what would you like to say to the people of the United States who are really afraid of what's going on with deaths coming out and more people getting this virus?
That you're a terrible reporter.
That is almost verbatim.
Maybe word for word, Nick.
His response to... Lousy reporter.
Lousy reporter.
What is your response to Americans who are afraid right now?
That's his go-to.
That's his instinct.
That's who he is, Nick.
Well, he also asked him, he asked him, don't you think this is a problem that your constant default to being as positive as possible is going to, you know, create confusion and stuff?
And he, at least someone asked him that question to his face and he, word salad, word salad, didn't really, he can't answer that.
I mean, he did.
He said, no, I'm not being positive, not being negative.
You know, he's just he's just saying words and he's trying to fill the air.
It's frightening.
But when he thinks, yeah.
So what he's trying to say is that, you know, you're trying to stir up sensationalism by by pretending that people are scared.
It makes it sound like a soundbite when he's just a reporter.
He's asking a factual question.
There are people who are really afraid out there.
What would you say to reassure them?
And that's what we get.
Now, we haven't even gotten into this whole thing about the malaria drug and how he's Latched on to that.
Yeah.
So again, for people who are hiding their head, and again, I totally understand the impulse.
We watched something really tremendous today.
And before we get into this, I think it's really important to remind people.
I think this should be one of those things.
For a while, every time that we talked, I would be like, it is my duty every episode to say that Donald Trump is a symptom, not the disease.
Well, now it's my daily duty to remind people That Donald Trump is an authoritarian.
Authoritarians make things worse.
They cannot trust experts, because experts are living proof that they don't know every single possible bit of information.
They will sabotage all organizations, and then they will blame other people.
And we'll talk more about that in a little bit.
We watched today Dr. Fauci, who is... Thank God he's there.
You know, and these things are horror shows.
Thank God that this expert is there.
Because today, Trump is asked if a malaria drug that has been rumored to help coronavirus patients, and he's just like, oh, I believe it.
I totally believe that it's gonna help people.
I have all the faith in the world that this thing is gonna help people.
And Fauci comes up to the microphone and says, yeah, there's really no proof of that, and I don't really think that that's where it's going.
And then Trump came up and was like, yeah, but I feel good about it.
I feel it in my gut.
I feel good.
And then Fauci has to come up and be like, oh, well, the president feels a certain way, but facts are another thing.
Like, that had to happen today.
I know!
So Fauci, yes, again, God bless him for having it, and you know he would have quit, you know, weeks ago if he thought anybody would actually mind the ship, had to come in and clean this up.
But yes, he's a scientist and he actually had to explain that he's a scientist.
It's almost like there's this battle between, you know, science and Trump right in front of us, you know, live on TV.
This is some sort of... Every day.
Yeah.
Every day.
Crazy debate.
And again, the quote was that Trump used was, quote, it may work, may not work.
I feel good about it.
It's all it is, just a feeling.
I'm a, you know, smart guy.
So this is what we're talking about, because not only does he not like to have the experts around to sort of prove that he doesn't know what he's talking about, but it also reinforces that he doesn't know everything either.
Because anytime you break that shell, or there's that facade that he has built around him, that's also a problem for him as well.
And so you have to have the guy clean it up.
So that is a serious problem because we have no idea.
This is like, you know, pissing on something that you get, like when you get a bite at the beach from a... That might actually work, doesn't it?
When you get a sting from a...
Jellyfish?
Actually, I think we've just wandered into actual science.
I could be wrong, but I think that might actually help.
Again, we're not experts and we're not facing a jellyfish public health worldwide pandemic of jellyfish bites.
Thank God.
Maybe right now we're being irresponsible, but we're not putting millions of lives in danger, right?
And I want to give people some background of why Trump is the way that he is.
And, you know, if anybody who's listening has ever read the The biography of Steve Jobs.
There's this really famous biography of Steve Jobs, and everybody that they talk to says that Steve Jobs had this, like, reality-bending field around him.
And whenever you were around him, basically, you had to conform to what Jobs thought, or else you were pushed outside.
Trump is like that, too.
And Trump gets it honest.
And people are all the time, they're like, why do evangelicals follow him?
Blah blah blah.
Trump grew up in the church of a guy named Norman Vincent Peale who is the originator of quote-unquote positive thinking Which is the idea that if you are positive and you are right with God, you'll get whatever you want Trump has spent his entire life with this really inherent understanding of How subjective reality works right and he's gotten caught on this before and he got caught in a testimony a sworn affidavit a while back Where he had to answer questions from a lawyer.
They're like, how much money do you have?
And he was like, well, it depends on how I feel on the day.
It can fluctuate depending upon how I feel and how I feel as a person.
That's the world he lives in.
And we've said this before in the podcast.
That's not how the microscopic world works.
That's not how the coronavirus works.
That's not how illnesses work.
That's in his mind.
And maybe he can abuse people and make them live that way.
But that's not how real life works.
Right, well he's trying to protect himself politically as well.
He's trying to continually paint this positive picture independent of the fact that his... By the way, the world he lives in is called insanity.
That's what it is.
Let's call it what it is.
Now, the other problem he has is that he talks about how the economy is going to come back.
This is like a mission accomplished moment for him.
Where he thinks once this coronavirus thing starts, the curve bends, and we start to get less of the virus, a lot less affected people and less deaths, that all of a sudden, that's why the virus, or that's why the economy is going into the shitter.
It's going to take off like a rocket ship, Nick.
Like a rocket ship.
That's what he said.
A rocket ship!
In his diseased, addled, deteriorating mind, Donald Trump stood in front of the country and imagined a rocket ship taking off.
Right.
And we talked about this before, last time, where I'm worried they're going to manipulate the market in some weird way, but we've already seen the manipulation.
Wait, but here's the thing.
We've got to talk about that today, Nick.
We have to talk about that today.
Right.
Because remember, the market doesn't have to go up to make a lot of money, as we learned with the big short, but here's the thing.
In four weeks of this, and I don't think there's an expert out there who's smarter than I was, it would say this is going to be any shorter than four weeks.
In four weeks, maybe five, the entire industry of restaurants and the whole service industry in the United States will be decimated to the point of no return.
That's a problem.
Think about that.
Most restaurants operate in a very cash poor way where if they can't, you know, make enough money over the course of four, five, six weeks, that is it.
This is sort of like the farmers who, when they can't, they can't stretch this out much more than a few months without enough income coming in.
They just, the farmers goes away and they don't, it's not going to come back.
That's a serious problem for this service industry that I don't know if we're going to be able to recover from.
One of my good friends who's an expert on now analyzing the market thinks this is going to be a great depression.
And we have to talk about a couple things that you just said.
One, there's no way we flattened the curve.
We had a person in charge of this country who wouldn't allow tests and wouldn't get positive information out there and wouldn't get the necessary plans in place.
He had an entire backing of Fox News, which by the way has now pivoted.
And we have to talk about that.
We got to talk about what is happening there and get people prepared because we're heading down a really dangerous path.
We if you told me right now that we flattened the curve and that was a known entity, I would be shocked.
I really would.
I think we're in for I think we're in for some trouble.
I really do.
And I think it's coming in the next couple of days and it's not going to let up for a while.
And I think that's Donald Trump's fault and the Republicans fault, which we got to talk about, too.
The second thing is this.
If he would just shut up.
If he would just not get in front of a microphone every day.
Because it's what's happening.
The market right now is in freefall.
It'll go up all day.
And by the way, nobody right now who invests in the stock market has any interest in the stock market falling apart.
They want it to be better.
They need the engine to continue making money and profit and wealth for them.
They invest in it every single day to try and make it go up.
When he gets in front of the microphone, basically, and I've said this before, the stock market is about confidence, right?
It's how people feel about the economy.
It's how people feel about the state of things.
The moment he opens his mouth, he creates chaos Disinformation and and and a loss of confidence So if he just stayed away from the microphone and quit talking if he just could stop Using every single day as a way to like lift himself up and tap You know this needless end for attention and and praise he needs all these sycophants around him to lick his boots on live television if he could stop and
The economy might actually try and make itself better.
It could at least make a run.
But he sabotages everything because he's an authoritarian, and that's what they do.
Jared, during his press conference, it was trading it around a couple hundred points down.
The Dow was.
Oh God.
And then as soon as it was over and they started to parse his words and realize what he was saying, it tanked another 600 points to close down today, close down almost another thousand points, almost a four and a half percentage points.
That is your proof positive right there.
And here's the thing.
You know Trump is going, is walking out of that press conference, going to sit down and to watch another, you know, 12 hours of TV and see this.
I know it's not going to have an effect, but here's the thing.
Before I forget, because I wanted to ask you this from the beginning, what do we make of this whole notion of him touting this malaria drug that might or might not help?
In theory he's right, right?
In theory this might help and it might be worth trying.
What is happening here that he says these things and yet here and everyone loses complete confidence anyway?
So this is the sphinx's riddle, right, of Donald Trump.
Actually, there are three possible solutions of why he's pushing this malaria drug.
One, he could profit from it.
We have no clue whether or not Trump could profit from this drug being prescribed and sold, right?
And we gotta talk about Republicans and their stock.
We have no clue what Donald Trump profits from and what he doesn't profit from.
I was saying last night, if we somehow or another got a hold of his financial records, There's a real possibility that a lot of the weird shit that he has said and a lot of the weird things that he's just, you know, come out of nowhere and we're all like, oh, is he in trouble?
Is he feeling well?
That might make sense, right?
I almost guarantee that you could look at, like, A to B, connect the dots, why he said certain things.
The second part is he might literally just believe it, right?
Because he wants to think that the hope is there, that there's something that's going to take care of this pandemic, because he believes that he is touched by God and divine and that things are going to work around him.
The third possibility is that he's just batshit insane, Nick.
Something got said to him somewhere.
The other day, he was lying about one group of people making masks.
Then another day, he was talking about how fast the vaccine could possibly get manufactured.
Who knows?
He's an unwell man.
And meanwhile, everyone is watching this happen.
And the people who know, and the people who are aware, it's like Mike Pence sitting there, and you watch him, and it's really... I urge people to do this.
These things happen every day.
If you watch these pressers, watch Mike Pence.
There are moments where Trump will say something presidential.
You know what I mean?
Like, there's a moment where he just accidentally says something presidential.
Today, he said something like, the American people are resilient.
And Pence, the whole time, is just, like, rigid and terrified of what Trump will say next.
And occasionally, he'll say something, quote-unquote, right.
And Pence will hurt his neck from nodding.
He's just like, oh, thank God, here's something.
So those three possibilities, we have no idea.
We don't know if we can trust them.
Well, we know we can't trust this guy.
Yeah.
Yeah, we don't know where he's coming from or what he's doing.
And that's a terrible, terrible thing in a leader.
But he's an authoritarian.
And that's what happens with these guys.
You don't know why they're saying the things they are and what angle they're coming from.
You only know that there is an angle.
I think all three of those things are true.
I think that they're doing all those things.
There is compelling evidence that People have been benefiting from a lot of inside information that Trump has been dropping late in the day at the very end of the market.
Now, my same friend, who's this expert, seems to think that there's not a lot there.
There's always a lot of high volume at the end of the day.
But it just seems a little bit too on the nose with a lot of these different transactions.
And they can't quite identify who this is.
But there is reports in the FEC that all they have to do is just simply investigate it.
And they used to do those things.
And they don't do this anymore because Trump is in power.
But we have to talk a little bit about this because, again, no one knows whether Trump is involved in this kind of stuff, and I'm sure he is.
But what we do know is that, remember, when the Republicans took over in 2016, there was this, like, enlightenment, but in the sense that they were just out in the open of how corrupt they were.
They don't have to lie about it anymore.
Well, they now have two senators who clearly We're front-running on information they had about the coronavirus.
A, not, and then first of all, not telling anybody about it and pooh-poohing the whole hysteria around it early, but then also short-selling stuff on the market and making millions off of this.
And there's not even a call to investigate this at this point.
I try and do this a lot because I think it's a really important thing right now.
We have to understand the mindset of these people, okay?
Like you or me, if we were senators and we were in one of these briefings, right?
And we just heard not only is a deadly pandemic getting ready to happen, but the economy is also going to crater.
My first call wouldn't be to my broker.
You know what I mean?
That wouldn't be my first call.
My first call would be like to my mom or people that I cared about.
And if I had a note that I couldn't talk about this stuff, I would keep it to myself, but I would just, you know, I would boil with that.
This corporate mindset, this profit over everything mindset is what has gotten us in this situation in the first place, right?
This is the thing where a corporation hears that one of their products is causing cancer.
It's one of their products is like causing people to die in wrecks.
And they're like, oh yeah, that is our fault.
Is it more trouble if we talk about it, or if we just sit on it for a while?
And they have people, they have actuaries who sit there, risk management people, who do the math on that, right?
Because profit and money is way more important than human life.
And we keep seeing that, and that's the mindset of this world.
It is disgusting.
And I wrote about this last night, and I sat with it for a minute.
This is pitchforks territory, man.
Like, this is disgusting.
There's a possibility that millions could die from this, and these people... Like, the one who sold her stocks... My senator, by the way.
I love this.
My senator sold her stocks, millions worth of stocks, and then invested in telework stocks.
Like, stocks for people who are going to have to telecommute for work.
Like, at that point, it's not just brazen, it's offensively brazen.
You know what I mean?
It's just like a giant middle finger to everyone else, and that's the mindset these people are coming from.
Yeah, and she reported it, just, you know, put it right on the forum.
So the other question is, maybe some other senators didn't report this.
I certainly would think that there's people in the House that wouldn't have done this, and they would just ignore the requirements to report this kind of stuff.
So they really got to look into that.
But yes, that was terrible.
Here's the thing I got really mad at myself for.
When the report first came out before Loeffler was exposed, it was just Richard Burr had a discussion with a bunch of businessmen in North Carolina about how severe this coronavirus was going to get.
And yet, then they also said, well, look, he never said anything about this for weeks, and he was trying to downplay it.
You mean like a Mar-a-Lago North?
type situation?
Yeah.
Is that what we're talking about?
Oh, so it's a bunch of rich dudes having really nice dinners and telling each other how to invest and continue to become richer and more powerful.
And when he attacked the reporter in the reports, all he did was focus in on this wasn't just a bunch of rich people coming.
Anybody could go.
He didn't even attack the substance of the report, just like the setting, which whatever.
But here's what I was mad at myself for.
I didn't put it together that, wait a minute, he was probably trading on these stocks too.
Like, I really wish I had gotten there before it was revealed just because I would feel like I could, you know, that this is the movie plot that, you know, I could figure out before it happens.
And I didn't do that.
So that's what made it even worse.
And it's really going to be striking, I think, because we're going to find more senators who, if they didn't trade on these stocks ahead of time, They're going to be mad that they didn't, mad at themselves.
But I'm sure there's going to be more of these instances where we discover that they all knew about this.
He wasn't just the only person that knew how severe this was while we had three or four weeks of inaction.
And again, this is the problem.
The entire Republican Party and the people that follow them have now solidified their mindsets around not taking this as seriously as they needed to.
Well, there's also the emerging strategy, which we have to talk about.
Yeah, so on one hand you have a bunch of Republicans who left that meeting and went out and sold stocks.
Then you have a bunch of Republicans who went on Fox News and talked to Sean Hannity.
And talk to Laura Ingraham and that whole cast of just disgusting monsters and profiteers.
While graphics skewed around the screen saying, coronavirus hoax, impeachment hoax.
Yes.
And by the way, just to remind everyone, Nick, what's the demographic of people who are watching Fox News?
Oh, I think it's the same demographic of people who are most likely going to die from coronavirus.
Right.
The people who were most susceptible to the coronavirus.
So what they did was they went on TV And they made a bet.
And the bet was that, yeah, the people who were watching might die.
But it probably wasn't going to be as bad as everyone was saying.
Like, yeah, thousands would probably get it or die.
But, you know, they could probably just go ahead and use this to score political points.
They knew full and well what they were doing.
And these people, and this is something people need to understand.
There is, and by the way, I'm gonna use the corporate word because that's the language of these people.
They are not politicians, okay?
These people are corporations unto themselves.
So let's use a little bit of corporate lingo.
There is a synergy between the Republican Party and the right-wing media.
It comes down from the top, they message each other, and they give each other the messaging.
Almost immediately, like that.
They shifted from saying that it was a hoax to calling it the Chinese virus, the invisible enemy.
And what they do, and I keep telling everyone this and I'm going to scream about this for weeks because people need to hear it.
This is a cycle.
An authoritarian like Donald Trump makes things worse, creates crises, and then when the crisis gets to a point where he can't hide it anymore and his failures can't be hidden, they scapegoat vulnerable populations in conspiracies and they build anger.
And that leads, and by the way, right now in America, it is dangerous to be an Asian American.
Yeah.
Right now.
If people go outside their homes or even inside their homes or in their businesses, they are endangered because of this political strategy.
And all these people know it.
They know that they are endangering lives and that people could get killed.
And racism is on the rise because of this thing.
Well, it's on the rise, period, because of them anyway.
Right, exactly.
And by the way, it'll be immigrants.
Oh, how have we not talked about this?
The other day at one of the pressers, OANN, which is just a real top-notch news source right there, which is, if you watch Fox News and you're like, God, I could use some more propaganda in my diet, Turn over to OANN, okay?
Because they are shooting for the moon right now.
They ask Trump a question every day to get him to talk about a Chinese conspiracy.
The other day, the leading question was, do you think the term Chinese food is racist?
And then immediately said, do you think that the liberal media is siding with the Communist Party against the American people?
And of course Trump's like, yeah, of course I do.
And that's where this thing is going, and people don't understand that.
This thing is going to keep getting worse and worse as more people die and more people suffer.
And this is what an authoritarian does.
It's going to get worse and these attacks are going to get a lot worse.
Well, a few things to talk about.
It's worth noting that Pence actually calls it COVID-19.
Yes, he does.
It's really interesting.
And that always sort of strikes me, you know, is interesting when I see those different things.
I'm listening to it.
So that's one thing.
Another thing is, I think we need to use the correct terminology for the word death because it's what Trump would call the ultimate problem.
And I quoted that too.
He used that as the ultimate problem.
People are dying who have never died before.
Yes, which would be death.
It's almost like, this would be, this is right out of Dr. Strangelove, really, at this point.
This would be a Peter Sellers comedy, dark comedy.
But, interesting to note that he considers that like the ultimate problem.
This isn't anything to be empathetic about.
This isn't like tragedy.
This is the problem that will look bad on him if more people die.
I mean, that's basically how he treats that.
Now, Tucker Carlson, you can go back to Fox News, called for the resignation of Richard Burr.
That's fascinating, right?
How can they possibly break message like this and call out a fellow Republican on Fox News?
Now, I have to tell you, there is something about Burr that Fox News doesn't like.
And as I started to look into it, my brain started to rot within 10 seconds of even looking into it, so I couldn't even figure out what the deal was or why.
Maybe you can enlighten us a little bit, but that was interesting to me, at the very least, to see, you know, one of their anchors calling out one of their own like that.
Tucker Carlson is an island unto himself.
He is, and by the way, he's incredibly smart.
He's a really disgusting human being, but he's incredibly smart and he has an eye for the future the way that other people don't.
He is building a brand right now, which he is on a network that just licks Trump's boots constantly.
That's all they do, right?
That's everybody in Fox News.
Tucker Carlson is the one who will call Trump out when he thinks that he's done something wrong.
And he always messages, he always messages towards the Tea Party crowd.
And this is a group that has been suspicious of the Republican Party for years.
Right?
Going on 10 years now.
And they have always been suspicious of the Republican Party even as they and the Republican Party merged.
And so Tucker Carlson is positioning himself because I think he knows that Fox News, because it became state propaganda for Donald Trump, is going to get replaced by a place like OANN.
Like there's going to be a movement that eventually starts to take over from Fox News.
I think that this is him figuring out His next 5, 6, 7, 8 chess moves.
Okay, that's an interesting take.
We'll have to find that out.
But it does make sense to some degree at some point something might have to happen that will ultimately, yes, they're not going to be craven enough and OANN can fill that void.
It also is a hilarious moment in the middle of this press conference, hilarious being the absolute opposite word but you can follow me, where Trump calls on somebody in the back.
and the guy, some woman starts speaking.
He says, "No, no, no, no, the guy over there." And they turn and start speaking.
And you know who it was?
Sean Spicer. - Sean Spicer. - As if he doesn't know who it is, Oh, that guy back there.
And by the way, credit to Sean Spicer.
He asked a couple good questions.
No.
No, Nick Halseman.
I refuse to have a podcast that tips a cap to Sean Spicer at any moment.
I put my foot down right now on this episode.
Wait, you just called Tucker Carlson a really smart guy.
That's almost enough for me to turn this off.
You can be evil and be smart.
Sean Spicer is not going to get points on this podcast.
I refuse.
Alright, fine.
Listen, I don't want to give him any points either, but he was there and it was just ridiculous that he's like pretending, oh, let's give that guy back there, I don't know who that is, somebody, let's let him ask a question.
It was like, I don't know if you've ever seen this, Nick, or if our listeners have ever seen this, but it's like this, one of my favorite clips in the history of Major League Baseball is this game with the New York Mets where Bobby Valentine, who's like this fiery, mischievous manager, he gets thrown out of the game, and then he shows back up with like sunglasses and a fake mustache.
Like, I don't know how everyone else felt, but when Sean Spicer came onto my screen, I felt like I had detached from reality for a hot minute.
But then, It was like, that's perfect!
That's what this thing is going to be, right?
I mean, Trump said the other day, he said, I'd like to get rid of 70-80% of all of you.
Like, his dream world is literally an audience of Sean Spicer, and Huckabee Sanders, and Sean Hannity, and it's based- and by the way, here's the thing people need to understand.
If Trump had a room full of sycophants like Spicer, Huckabee Sanders, Sean Hannity, all these people, Judge Jeanine, right?
If he had a room of those sycophants, including Donald Trump Jr., his personality, Donald Trump, it wouldn't be enough.
He would actually start thinking that their praising questions weren't rising up to the standard that he wanted from them.
And that's why people need to understand.
People like him, it doesn't stop.
There's no end to it.
And that's why they destroy everything that they touch and why they're incapable of creating organization or responses.
It is who he is inherently.
And that's why we're in such trouble right now.
There is no changing this, man.
It gets worse because we found out in this press conference that states are now officially competing with the federal government to bid on ventilators.
And they try to blame the states saying, oh they don't understand, they just need to call us and then we will just remove our bid and then they'll get the ventilators they want.
When, you know, as if they didn't know what rights they had to be able to do this kind of thing.
Well, meanwhile, how many days it went go on in between this where they can get this sorted out is insane.
And the fact that there isn't a coordinated effort here by the federal government only to get these ventilators and get them to the states is outrageous.
This is going to be what kills people.
And again, it was fascinating to watch how they were like so upset with these states for not, you know, for getting caught in a bidding war on these things.
It's ridiculous.
And again, this is another version of his way he mismanages things, where it's every man for himself.
And it's amazing how quickly he's been able to get everyone else below him in the government to follow suit.
Yeah, I've got something worse about that, too.
He started doing this thing this week especially, and today he really hit it hard.
And I want people to remember, every time that he shows the electoral map, You know what I mean?
The red and blue thing where he's like, this is the real America.
Like, you know, the blue is only in like the urban areas or whatever.
And there's like more red across America.
He started doing a thing today where he started more or less insinuating that only blue states are having this problem.
And that only democratically controlled states are having this problem, which, by the way, is where most people are, right?
It's the exact inverse of the electoral map.
It's where more people are, which is obviously going to be where more of the cases are going to be.
But there's another problem, too, and there's such a deadly lie in this thing that he said today, and this is one of the reasons why they should not broadcast these things.
So I'm from Indiana, right?
He's like, you know, places like Middle America don't have the problems these other states do.
They do.
They absolutely do.
Red states, blue states, all have the problem.
The problem is most of the red states don't have the money or the funds to have all of the tests and all of the people going to get help.
They are swimming in coronavirus right now and they have no idea.
And Donald Trump, the President of the United States of America, told them today that they don't have a problem.
You know what that means?
That they're probably going to go outside and they're going to go be around each other.
The president said we don't have a problem.
What am I worrying about?
This is a blue state city problem.
And it's going to get worse.
And by the way, going back to the thing, Fox News is broadcasting to the people who are going to be affected by coronavirus.
Who's going to die from this thing?
People who don't get help and people who can't afford help.
And by the way, rural areas where the hospitals aren't ready for this thing.
At all.
And he puts lives at risk every time he opens his mouth.
Every single time.
Right.
And so you say something like, if he just would stop talking, if he just would stop tweeting, across the board, the country would just be in a better position from the time he took over.
And that's how frightening this whole situation is, that if he just stopped talking, because we have to respond to what he says.
He's the president.
He's the commander-in-chief.
When he says things, they have to take him seriously.
And the reporters even try to call him out on his complete and utter hostility to some of the reporters in the room.
And they're saying, don't you think this is a problem?
Primarily because so many people think that the news is all fake media and an enemy of the people.
That's why they don't listen to us now in times of crisis.
They don't listen to the media.
And they asked him if that's a problem.
They even asked Mike Pompeo if it was a problem that the president standing right next to him is doing this, calling out reporters and being so belligerent.
And Pompeo was right there with Trump.
Oh, they always get it wrong.
And I've had to tell them.
And then they even try to follow up with that.
Well, what have we got wrong?
What are you talking about?
Is it because you couldn't identify Afghanistan on a map, and that you said didn't happen when it did?
Like, this is the problem, and it's almost impressive with the way he's been able to surround himself with the people that are willing to actually back him up on this kind of stuff.
Yeah, we've never needed it more.
We've never needed a competent, honest, trustworthy president more.
And we have the worst possible human being in charge during this thing.
political it's for times like this when we need information the correct information and and he's just continued to wage war yeah we've never needed it more we've never needed a competent honest trustworthy president more and we have the worst possible human being in charge during this thing pompeo by the way um i i fear his putridness is going to get lost in history yeah
Yeah, because he has just I mean you want to talk about Disgusting human being I mean Mike Pompeo is you know, if he had more charisma, he would be Donald Trump I mean those guys deserve each other.
They're incredible together today Donald Trump called the State Department the deep State Department which Try and wrap your head around that for a second, what that means.
It means he's had three years to take the quote-unquote infection out of the State Department.
And by the way, the Deep State, he just brought that up.
He's also, oh we gotta talk about this real fast, he is signaling to evangelicals that That this is an in-time situation.
He's signaling to the paranoids out there that this is a New World Order, World Battle type situation.
That there's a conspiracy.
And Mike Pompeo is just sitting there smiling and nodding.
And basically every time he nods it says, yeah he's right there is a conspiracy in the State Department and I'm, you know, I'm doing the best that I can.
Like it's disgusting.
Rewatch that part when he goes the deep state.
He's trying to be funny because Trump thinks he's like a stand-up comedian.
But you watch Fauci in the background and he basically like covers his eyes.
He can't believe that he's trying to joke about anything in this situation.
I think that's what he's getting at.
And also the fact that like there is no deep state.
And so and by the way the stupid thing about that whole thing is that this is how stream of consciousness Trump is.
The Deep State is about the FBI and the CIA.
It's not necessarily about the State Department.
In fact, there is no Deep State in the State Department because they've gutted it so much from day one that there is no worry about that being an issue.
He doesn't even know how to properly reference Deep State.
It's insane.
Well, it doesn't matter, right?
Because what's gonna happen tonight... And actually, you know what?
It's probably already happened.
It's probably happened by the time that we're taping this right now.
On the Reddit threads, and the 4chan, and the 8chan, there's probably been a QAnon thing that's already been done with every press conference.
Right?
And it all comes together.
And in a way, it's almost like the editors who had to go into, like, the old Apprentice tapes and, like, make everything that Trump rambled on about make sense, you know?
And it doesn't matter.
All that matters is that he can scapegoat a conspiracy.
And we're going to go here in a second over to the Sarah Churchwell interview.
But before we do, I want to leave listeners with something.
This authoritarian cycle that I keep talking about, it's important that you start looking for it.
And I understand that people are genuinely afraid right now.
They don't want to have to think about this stuff.
They are moving really quickly.
Like most of the time, this authoritarian stuff takes time.
You know, there are crises that accelerate it.
They're moving real fast right now.
And things are about to get really bad over the next few days.
And they're already scapegoating Chinese people.
They're already saying the invisible enemy, the Chinese virus, all of this stuff.
Liberals are engaged in a conspiracy.
You need to be ready because It's going to up itself in a hurry, and I talked to Sarah Churchwell about that, and I'll let her interview speak for itself, but I just think our listeners really need to be careful and really take this time to educate themselves and be prepared.
Right.
Yeah.
It doesn't even have to be like doomsday, oh my god, this is going to turn into an authoritarian regime, but we need to just at least start to look at these signs and be aware, even just being aware of it tends to be enough of a battle.
It won't be like that.
Like, that's what the movies tell us something like that'll be like.
Like, we'll look up one day and all of a sudden there'll be tanks going through the streets, even though we've had tanks in the streets.
That's not what we're talking about here.
We're not talking about smoky rooms where these plans are being laid out.
Like, we talked about it in the last episode.
They're already talking about cancelling and postponing elections.
That's already being floated out there.
And there will be a time where even people who listen to this podcast and who support us and dislike Trump will be like, yeah, maybe that's the right decision.
Maybe that's the right thing.
I trust that it'll come back.
It won't be with a bang.
It'll be with a whimper.
And you'll wake up one day, and everything will be different.
And everything will have changed.
And that's happening right now, and people just need to be prepared.
We are so lucky to be here with Sarah Churchwell, the author of Behold America, The Entangled History of America First, and The American Dream.
I just want to start this by letting everyone know how much I value Sarah's work.
Actually, the research that I've been doing recently on my own book, American Rule, How a Nation Conquered the World but Failed Its People, is a result of being exposed to Sarah's work.
I think it would be I think I would be really remiss if I didn't go ahead and say just how important this book was in making clear to me how much of American history has been distorted and has been perverted and that we really need to reckon with that past.
And I just think this is absolutely essential reading for anyone who wants to understand Who we are and where we're from and where we're going, because we have to learn from this.
And I think Sarah's work is just absolutely vital in that.
So we just want to say thank you to Sarah for being here.
Thanks for having me.
Um, so I wanted to go ahead and start this up.
We're taping this on March 18th in the middle of the worldwide coronavirus pandemic.
I think a lot of Americans are sort of having a rude awakening that the system that they have been living in is not necessarily the bill of goods that they've been sold.
We're starting to see, particularly in the last couple of days, President Donald Trump and right-wing media starting to scapegoat everyone from Chinese people to people of Asian descent to immigrants.
And I think a lot of people are afraid and confused.
And I was wondering if you could start just by speaking a little bit about what your research uncovered and what might be relevant to people right now who are really afraid and really confused.
Yeah, so it's kind of a tall order, and I don't mean that as an objection to the question, but obviously what we're all trying to do is to wrap our heads around these enormous seismic changes in our society over the last three years.
Now, some Americans have embraced them and have said that it's business as usual, but for a lot of Americans, it doesn't feel like business as usual.
It doesn't look that way.
And increasingly, with this particular crisis, there's the feeling that the props are being pulled away.
I think that for those of us who have been looking at the history of the movements that helped Trump come to power, the history of
The kinds of feelings and animuses and resentments and hatred and rage that has been expressed on the political scene over the last four to five years, I'm including now his campaign in that assessment, that came as a shock to a lot of Americans, myself included to a certain extent, even though I had spent a fair amount of time studying the period that we're going to start talking about.
But, you know, we kind of thought that was past history, and it's clear now that that isn't in the past.
And I suppose when you stop and think about it, you realize it isn't, because feelings don't ever get put in the past, and crises don't ever get put in the past.
So you don't move beyond that.
And the fact is that humans do scapegoat.
They do look for people to blame in a crisis, or external circumstances to blame in a crisis.
They look for easy answers, easy outs, and easy hopes.
But the fact is, is that now I think it's all kind of coming to a head.
And what we're looking at is a long strain of particularly anti-immigrant, xenophobic, and what broadly we would describe as nativist sentiment in the United States now.
I think you and I are, I mean, I'm older than you are, but I think we're roughly of the same generation.
And grew up in a kind of liberal post-war order where we were told that that kind of xenophobia was something that happened outside of America.
And we had our problems.
Some people might have noticed that we had an ongoing problem with racism, for example, and certain pockets of anti-Semitism in American history.
But by and large, the way I was taught American history was that that kind of stuff was, you know, behind us and we'd had these bad moments, but we were all moving toward progress.
And the great Martin Luther King Jr.
statement, you know, that the moral arc of history bends toward progress.
And we were kind of raised to think we were bending that way and it was all going to keep moving in the right direction and we had a ways to go.
But it was moving towards progress.
When you look back at American history and you don't assume that kind of tendentious outcome, you don't assume that we're moving in the direction of progress, but you just look at the zigzags and the steps forward and the steps back, it starts to look a little bit different.
And you see these long strains of, you know, the degree to which white supremacism in America is obviously goes back to the founding of the United States, to the settler colonialism, to the genocides of the Native peoples, but the way then it got embedded in our society, the way it got embedded in our politics, our legal system, our judicial system, and then it just took all kinds of different forms.
So when in America, in American history, we have tended to talk about white supremacism in the past, I think, which we didn't like to do, and we didn't do very often, I'm not suggesting we did it a lot, but when we did it, we did it almost exclusively in the context of slavery and anti-black racism, and we tended, I think, not to notice enough xenophobia.
There are so many Americans who aren't even aware of the anti-Asian immigration that was passed, for example, just to give one example, right?
The swathes of anti-Asian immigration laws that were passed at the end of the 19th century and in the turn of the 20th century, so that Chinese immigrants were banned altogether from the United States, to give just one example.
So the degree to which the, when the, you know, now we have a political conversation where people talk as if when the Irish or the Germans or the Italians came, they were kind of, you know, welcomed with open arms and nothing could be further from the truth.
But there have just been waves of immigration, waves of xenophobia and, And that gave rise to this idea that, that, you know, and it was coined in America, that word nativism.
Um, coined in the 1840s and 1850s to describe Americans who resented those, specifically those groups I just mentioned, um, the Irish and the German Americans in particular, that was when the word nativism began.
So there are these, and that's against, you know, other, um, so-called, you know, white Northern European immigrants.
Um, it's not always a racially inflected, as we would understand race anyway, it's not always a racially inflected, um, It always comes down to power and to control and to, you know, who gets the rights in society.
And when you come to a state of crisis, as we're in right now, where everybody's scrambling, everybody is terrified for very good reason.
this becomes a very dangerous time because this is exactly when certain groups will exploit a crisis to seize power.
That was a very long answer to your question.
But they said it was a big question.
It is a necessarily long answer because I think one of the things that your book made evident, and I think this was something before I started doing the research on my book that I had always had sort of a suspicion about But, you know, we were talking about this history that we're sort of taught, right?
And it's not just a history that we're taught in like public schools, from elementary school where we're learning that, you know, George Washington couldn't tell a lie, and then, you know, America, by the time we graduate high school, America is the hero of the World War II situation.
Like, you end up in a place where even in, like, college courses and even some of these things, like, the American story is flattened out, right?
And all of these necessary moments sort of get lost.
So the thing that I kept coming back around to in your work that I thought was Incredibly important.
is that there are these layers of nativism and prejudice and racism that are always in an undercurrent in America.
But in particular, you know, they can stay hidden, particularly in places of prosperity or peace or moments where things aren't necessarily under as much pressure as they are at other times.
But during these crises, times like, you know, world wars, which is another thing, you know, I grew up being told That World War II was evil versus good, and that was all that there was to it, and fascism was a purely European phenomenon that took place at an exact moment.
But people don't understand that there have always been fascist movements in America, and particularly moving into World War II, when we have a thing like Nazism and Adolf Hitler and fascism.
America didn't just flirt with fascism, there were full-blown obvious movements of it, and so in times of crises, these hidden prejudices or these hidden, like you were talking about, these movements of trying to find power for tribal units and these, you know, prejudiced people, it comes up through the groundwork, and of course there are people who use it to their advantage.
One person in here, and I think it's A good thing that we're talking now as Plot Against America is currently being unrolled on HBO.
You know, we see this America First movement with Charles Lindbergh and these fascist elements inside of America.
And Americans have been taught that we're immune to fascism somehow or another and that we are home of liberty and freedom and equal chances all across the board.
But every time we have one of these crises, these things rear their heads.
So I guess As somebody who's done the research into this and somebody who's done the focus on when these things come out of the cracks, how are you feeling right now as we're having not just a societal panic, but the looming presence of possible societal collapse?
Well, yeah, I mean, the looming presence of possible societal collapse, I think, is terrifying everybody, and with good reason, because it is a real possibility.
I mean, this is an unprecedented Situation.
Nobody knows what to do.
Everybody's scrambling on a day-by-day basis or an hourly basis.
We're watching the situation evolve and change drastically before our eyes.
And, you know, you and I are doing this over the phone because there's an ocean between us.
But the fact of the matter is, is we were in the same city, we'd still be doing it digitally because everybody's quarantined.
I mean, it's a really, really unprecedented situation.
But the fact is, is that The severity and the specificity of it, the fact that this is caused by pandemic, is unprecedented.
But there are always still parallels.
And people like to say, I think rightly, that history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
And we need to learn from the mistakes we've made in the past because we can't learn from anything else.
That's not to say that everything is preordained or that what is happening now is identical to what was happening in the 20s and 30s.
It is absolutely not.
There are all kinds of ways in which it is, you know, massively different and we can all see those differences.
But those differences can also sometimes blind us to the deep similarities.
communities.
And one of the ways in which I think our history blinds us to this question about a homegrown fascism in America that you were talking about, which I think is such an important issue, is, as you say, this idea that fascism was something that happened in foreign lands, and that America was somehow inoculated against it, and that democracy would always prevail.
And in fact, even at the time, there were ways in which The American fascist movements that you're talking about, and it should be said, we're not describing them as fascist.
They described themselves as fascist.
Proudly.
That was their, they were the American fascistee, the fascists, and then we had a ton of shirts, right?
We know about the brown shirts and the black shirts.
American history does not teach us about the white shirts and the khaki shirts and the silver shirts.
Yeah, but these were all very real, and historians argue over how powerful they were, but this is the real question, right?
Sinclair Lewis wrote this novel in 1935 called It Can't Happen Here, which was mocking.
and mocking is probably too light a word for it, He was, you know, lambasting the idea that America was safe.
It's a satirical title, right?
A sarcastic title.
He was saying, of course it can happen here.
And it's a novel about what fascism in America might look like.
But what happens is then retrospect becomes, you know, teleology, it becomes tendentious.
We assume that because it didn't happen, it couldn't have happened.
But what made it not happen in America is arguably a series of very contingent sets of facts that could have turned out differently.
So, you know, if you look at just simple things that did happen, scientific racism, eugenics, the Ku Klux Klan, the rise of anti-Semitism in the 20s and 30s, those are all fascistic strains.
That means that fascism did happen in some sense.
It just means that fascism didn't take hold.
It just means it didn't grab the government.
And one of the things that people talked about a lot at the time, which I find particularly frightening right now, is that what they said was that what fascism in America was waiting for was what they called the man on horseback, the cultish leader.
They said, we're waiting for the strong man who will come along like Mussolini and unite all of these coalitions, instead of which they had all of these guys who were trying to gain that kind of power and celebrity, but they didn't.
And they were up against FDR, who was a charismatic politician with a great deal of political nous and who was able, and also because he made good economic choices, it turned out, who was able to stimulate the economy to get America, to get the economy moving again, to put Americans who was able to stimulate the economy to get America, to get the So there were a series of forces in American society at the time that were arrayed against fascism taking control, but that doesn't mean that it couldn't have.
Or that it absolutely was never going to.
And I think it's also important that we understand, in thinking about fascism in Europe vis-a-vis these kinds of strains of scientific racist thought in America, or eugenicist thought, or white supremacist thought in America, there are not enough Americans who are aware, in my view, of the fact, and it is a fact, it is extremely well established by historians, and quite recently actually, in the last five to ten years, but it's very well established
That Hitler learned from America, not the other way around.
And this is incredibly important.
He was reading a eugenicist called Madison Grant, whose book, 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race, was a book that actually popularized the phrase master race, that comes from America, not from Hitler.
And that Hitler called that book his Bible.
And he wrote Madison Grant a fan letter saying that he learned everything he needed to know.
And the Nuremberg race laws, That, you know, as any reasonably educated American should know, are the laws that stripped German Jews of their citizenship rights, and Jews in the Third Reich, of citizenship rights.
Those were based on the one-drop rule, on the miscegenation laws of America, on the anti-black laws of America, the Jim Crow laws.
And in fact, the Nazis considered the one-drop rule so extreme That they modified it in the Nuremberg Laws to say that you had to have three Jewish grandparents because even the Nazis thought that one drop was taking scientific racism a little bit far.
So when Americans, you know, when we applaud ourselves for our progressivism and our, you know, our inherent intrinsic democracy, that is that is not just inaccurate or, you know, or I mean, I tend to use the word whitewashing because I think it carries a lot of important connotations there.
It is a whitewashed history, but it is a deliberately mythicized version of our own history that is incredibly dangerous.
And I think we're seeing right now exactly why it's so dangerous, because it means you're complacent when you look at a real risk, because you really think it can't happen here.
But it can.
And the idea that the Germans were somehow more susceptible to Nazism is disproven, I think, personally, by exactly the way that German democracy rose from the ashes of fascism.
They learned They learned how to fix their democracy by figuring out what they did wrong, admitting what they did wrong.
And as anybody who knows the German educational system today knows, the one thing that they absolutely do is make sure that they teach every German citizen as accurately as they can, without whitewashing, without mythologizing the truths about the rise of Nazism.
And they look very askance.
In fact, I think in many ways it's outlawed.
expressions of nationalism and jingoism as we would, as Americans are very comfortable with, because, and certainly Germans are very uncomfortable with them if they're not outright outlawed and people who are, you know, more familiar with the actual law than I am, will correct me. more familiar with the actual law than I am, will
But the point is, it is a society that absolutely, you know, discourages and pushes against those kinds of expressions of nationalism, because they know how dangerous they are.
So the idea that it's intrinsic to Germany, you know, has been disproven.
If that were true, the Germans would still be constantly trying to create fascist states.
It happened there because of a set of contingent circumstances.
It could have happened in France.
And a lot of people think that, again, it didn't happen in France because there was no one leader, one cult, you know, cult of personality who was able to consolidate that power.
In America, some people thought it might have been Huey Long, the senator from Louisiana, and people still debate whether he was a fascist or just corrupt.
But he was assassinated in 1935 before history could bear that out.
And then the other people who were the sort of local fascist leaders, they had nothing like his charisma and nothing like his pull, so they were never able to get that kind of popularity.
But the ideas were popular.
And the messages that they were sending, the thing we have to remember about fascism, and we can use other words, right?
I mean, we're talking about dictatorship and totalitarianism of people.
You know, what I don't want is for people to respond to this by getting all semantic about whether it's fascism or not fascism.
That's, you know, in one sense, it's important.
It's incredibly important.
But in another sense, you know, we can say we can put that aside for the moment.
What we're talking about is the seizure of power and the overthrowing of Democratic norms and processes in order to ensure that one group, and in some cases one person, maintains power for life.
And, you know, we are seeing all kinds of indications that this administration and the Republicans who uphold it are prepared to go that far.
We are seeing all kinds of indications that they might, that they would be willing to, the ways in which they have, that they have Lied brazenly, you know, saying black is white and, you know, night is day and their willingness to cover up corruption, criminality, to vote to acquit, obviously, in the all too recent impeachment.
It feels like that was a long time ago, doesn't it?
But, you know, they are willing.
It seems that they are willing to do anything to hang on to power.
And I think that we have to be incredibly alert to the fact That a health emergency of the scale that we are confronting with the coronavirus pandemic is exactly the kind of pretext that people who want to seize power use.
And, you know, you do.
It may sound paranoid, but the fact is, is that when people are trying to seize power, you have to keep an eye on them because they tend to try to do it when you're distracted by other things.
And it's not paranoid to to pay attention to The patterns of behavior that this administration has over and over and over again exhibited, their complete unwillingness to ever admit that they are wrong, their complete unwillingness to talk about relinquishing power, their complete unwillingness to talk about the next election as something that they might lose.
I mean, how about that?
You know, people, we've got, we've gone to such an extreme that we forget that I think even the little things like that, like, you know, remember when presidents would admit that they might lose an election?
That's just gone.
they wouldn't just instantly start talking about the fact that it would have to be cheating or that it would have to be corrupt or it would have to be the Democrats were after them.
It is.
But they would go, yeah, you know what?
I might not win next year, but here's why I want to win.
And here's why I think you should vote for me.
Remember when we used to do it like that?
That's just gone.
It is.
Yeah, it's just gone.
And I think what you said about whether we call it fascism or totalitarianism or authoritarianism is important because a big chunk of this is how much narrative and myth plays into all of this.
All of it.
You know, I was very glad that you brought up the exchange of ideas from America to Nazi Germany.
I mean, that cycle even began with the idea of American exceptionalism and the Romantic movement, you know, in the 19th century.
And they're all coming from this idea of tribalist states and, you know, Aryan racism, Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism.
And I mean, that's one of the reasons we carried out the genocide of the Native Americans, which is One of the things that Hitler learned from, I mean, when Hitler was looking at how to construct the Third Reich, he looked to colonial societies.
And that's something that I think we lose because one of the reasons why I think that this moment is particularly dangerous Is because this idea of American exceptionalism is the basis of the Make America Great Again movement.
And I think it's all based on the idea of we have to stop apologizing for being great, we are a chosen country, and there's an old white supremacist order that we don't like to talk about, but it's inherent in what we're saying and what we're doing.
And that is inherently, whatever you want to call it, whether you want to call it fascist, you want to call it authoritarian, whatever you want to go with it, And there's a real denial of truth there, and I think what you said is very important, because the truth doesn't actually matter in these cases and with these people.
It's about symbols.
And symbols are, it's a really problematic thing.
So right now I'm actually looking at the cover of your book, Behold America, and on the cover that I have, we have the American flag flying next to the Nazi swastika.
And these things are very easily interchangeable, because they are simply symbols of something else.
And, you know, you talk about it in the book, and I think it's been documented a lot lately, but, you know, while these American Nazis were holding rallies, they had portraits of George Washington next to swastikas.
And that is something that's inherently American.
I mean, the Confederacy used George Washington all over everything, next to all of its, you know, iconography and all of its symbols.
And I think that here we have that strain that has come through, and particularly in a moment of crisis.
And you'll always notice in history that authoritarians or despots or whatever you want to call them, they always cause crises because they're incompetent.
And because of their insecurity, like you were saying, there's no ability whatsoever to be humble or talk about possible defeat or possible failures.
And that inevitably leads to scapegoating, vilification, and eventually the seizing of power.
And I'm really glad that you're addressing that and talking about the fact that this isn't about paranoia, it's not about conspiracy theories, it's about looking at history, seeing signals, seeing how these things come together, and, you know, starting to wrap your mind around possibilities and where these things could go.
And I guess my question for you, and this will be one of the I would love to know, in your preparation for this book, and the research that you did, and obviously you started from a place of knowledge and then supplemented that knowledge, what did this do to change your perception, not just of the modern moment, but about American history in general?
And where do you think that's put you in terms of how you perceive things playing out on a daily basis now?
I mean, it really, the research for that book really changed my sense of what it means to be an American.
And, you know, it won't surprise you as an American who lives abroad that I get, you know, a certain amount of grief.
And I could put the term more strongly, you know, sometimes on social media, if I criticize America for people telling me that I'm not a real American because I, you know, live abroad and that kind of thing.
And it is and it is a strange, I have another American friend who lives here in London who calls it the stereo view that we get, you know, that inside and outside view where you start to see how other people view your country and then you also know what it feels like as an insider.
But I am somebody who, I mean, I profoundly identify as American.
Being American matters to me as an individual, as a citizen, tremendously.
I'm not one of those people who could relinquish my citizenship.
Because to me, that would be like relinquishing any other part of my identity, my family.
It's who I am.
And yet, as I did this research, I realized that I didn't understand who I was.
And I thought I did, and I had done a lot of the history.
And as you say, I knew a fair amount of it when I went into it, but not the depths of it, not the detail, and not the extent of it.
So that I really came to understand that what I had been taught were kind of blips.
I now no longer look at as blips.
I see American history now as two interweaving paths or peaks and troughs or some metaphor like that.
And I see American nativism as this—and sometimes I'm tempted to call it a sleeping giant, But then I remember that any, I am quite confident, any single African American hearing me as a white girl from the suburbs of Chicago calling white supremacism a sleeping giant would just look at me and be like, excuse me?
When was that giant asleep, baby?
You know?
I mean, it takes a white girl to say something that stupid, right?
And that's the point, is that we were all raised to be able to say things that were that stupid of like, oh, white supremacism, well, you know, sometimes it comes to the fore, but sometimes it's suppressed.
And African Americans would be like, when was it ever suppressed?
And they would be absolutely right.
And so, as we're saying, I mean, we're using them as the most, you know, as the most pertinent example of, you know, institutionalized slavery, but so of course would With indigenous people.
And so, of course, with Asian-Americans, you know, talking about the history we were just speaking of, and, you know, and Jews whose family fled from, you know, Hitler, and, you know, and who are now seeing, you know, anti-Semitism on the rise.
That white supremacism is bred in the bone of American history, and we deny it.
We deny it assiduously, and we deny it to our peril.
But it is in our legal documents.
It is in the foundations of what we do.
I just wrote a review.
This may sound like a non-sequitur, but it's not.
James Shapiro, the Shakespearean scholar, has a new book out called Shakespeare in a Divided America, where he's looking at the way that Shakespeare provides a kind of lightning rod for understanding these moments of crisis that you and I have been talking about, and that people have turned to Shakespeare as a way to understand that.
And as I was writing about it, I was reminded of the fact that I've talked before about The way in which the very name the United States, the more you think about it, the more you realize that we're kind of protesting too much when we call ourselves the United States, you know?
And that the more we say it, the less convinced I become.
And that it's more like this kind of, you know, rhetorical act of trying to make it so.
But that actually what we are is a country trying to cobble itself together.
Out of these histories of, you know, settler colonialism and institutionalized slavery and puritan theocracy.
And then somehow liberal democracy is supposed to come in and make all of that coherent and go away.
And you know, it just doesn't.
And so, you know, if we're actually going to achieve the liberal democracy part of it, we have to tell the truth about the rest of it.
And I think we have to recognize the very real danger that we face.
Right now, and I know it will sound like I'm being alarmist to a lot of people, but that's the risk of being a Cassandra, right?
I mean, in my book, I talk about the great journalist Dorothy Thompson, who warned against the rise of fascism in the 30s and 40s in America, and they called her Cassandra.
And she pointed out that the thing about Cassandra was that she was right.
Exactly.
So, you know, what I'm saying is that this pandemic could provide the Trump administration with its Reichstag moment, you know, with, you know, as everybody knows, right.
The moment when Hitler seized power was when the Reichstag burned and he declared a state of emergency and he and he and he arrogated emergency powers.
And from that point on, he became a dictator.
And he became, I think, you know, chancellor by decree or president by decree or whatever the official title was, rather than by vote.
Up until that point he had been voted in and it's worth remembering as well in our current political situation, Hitler was voted in by a minority.
He did, he did not, he did not come to power by a coup.
He came to power by vote, but he was voted in by a minority and then a coalition kept him in power until the Reichstag burning gave him That he needed three years in to seize power.
And it's not to say that this will play out in exactly the same way, but we need to recognize the danger signs that are all around us and to recognize that our fellow citizens and compatriots have been calling this stuff out for years.
The parallels that you were talking about between Fascism and colonialism.
I mean, you know, that that point was made by the by the great West Indian philosopher, historian Aimé César, in The Treatise on Postcolonialism, or The Treatise on Colonialism, rather, in 1950.
So these are these are ideas that are out there and circulating.
And the problem is that American culture and American society is deeply invested In making sure that it's only a handful of people who take those ideas seriously and that we don't tell the truth about, you know, or even, you know, the history of lynching.
We only just managed to put up a lynching museum.
I talked to British friends who go to museums of slavery in the South and they are absolutely, you know, shocked to see that lynching isn't mentioned.
The degree to which we suppress those parts of our history that Many Americans right now are only learning about the riots in Tulsa in 1921 for the first time because of the HBO series, The Watchmen.
People just didn't know about it.
And that, I think, is why the loss of any historical understanding presents such a grave danger, because that is what makes you think that it can't happen here, because you think it didn't, but actually it did.
Yeah.
And I, you know, when I started doing the research, I never thought that what I was going to find was that the most dangerous weapon ever made was the American story.
It's, it's so bizarre.
Um, and, and, and again, I just want to stress to everybody listening, uh, behold America, the entangled history of America first and the American dream by Sarah Churchwell.
It is absolutely necessary reading right now and, uh, forever in the future.
Hopefully, um, you know, we, we can keep learning from this stuff.
I want to thank you so much for joining us, Sarah Churchwell.
This has just been wonderful.
Thank you very much.
So a great interview and something that everyone needs to take to heart and really just process the information that was presented because it's really important and really just a great podcast overall.
Jared, we didn't even talk about what they want to do to expel undocumented people from this country using the coronavirus as a excuse, but we'll have to address that in the next one.
Well, I mean, unfortunately, there's no shortage of things to talk about in this moment.
We're going to be back on.
We're going to tape on Monday, come out on Tuesday with a regular schedule, of course, in a time of quarantine and emergency.
We're trying to do two podcasts a week, you know, depending upon what what circumstances require.
We thank you.
The support recently has been It's meant a lot to us.
We do this thing, and we want to make a difference, and we want this podcast to mean something, and the people have been reaching out and showing that support.
It has just been really, really appreciated.
In the meantime, please keep listening.
Keep telling people.
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Let people know what we're doing.
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We need to educate ourselves and prepare ourselves.
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We really appreciate those.
We always do.
And yeah, until next time, this is Nick Haussmann at Can You Hear Me?
