Trump vs Democracy: Two Historians’ Perspectives

This is an episode we think you’d enjoy of On with Kara Swisher. President-elect Donald J. Trump has won a resounding victory against Vice President Kamala Harris, and now, the man who promised political retribution and said he may use the military to go after “the enemy within” is headed back to the White House. Only this time, there will be no guardrails — only enablers. In order to understand the threat Trump poses to our democracy, Kara talks to two historians who know a lot about the birth of American democracy and the last time we came close to losing it: Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky and Dr. Timothy Naftali. Chervinsky is a presidential historian and the executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library. Her newest book is Making the Presidency, John Adams and the Precedents that Forged the Republic. Naftali 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. Questions? Comments? Email us at [email protected] or find us on Instagram/TikTok as @onwithkaraswisher You can listen to more of this podcast by searching for On with Kara Swisher in your podcast app. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:27Speaker 01

  Hogging seats on a crowded train, not saying, excuse me, watching videos on your phone with no headphones in. Sometimes it feels like we don't know how to act anymore. What we have been seeing increasingly is people breaking rules. Why should I play by the rules if nobody else is going to do that for me? This week on Explain It To Me, How To Mind Your Manners. New episodes Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:57Scott Galloway?

  Welcome to another episode of the Prop G Pod. In place of our regularly scheduled programming, we're sharing an episode of On with Kara Swisher. She's this journalist, nice lady, nice lady. Kara is the co-host of Pivot, and twice a week, Kara interviews power players across industries, including business, tech, media, and politics. Kara does get, Kara has kind of the deepest rolodex in the world, literally. In this episode that we're sharing today, Kara speaks to historians Lindsay Chervinsky and Tim Naftali. Lindsay's the executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library, and Timothy is the former director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. I know that sounds like a fucking snooze fest. It's actually quite interesting. They discuss the birth of American democracy,

• 1:43Scott Galloway?

  the structural weaknesses in our system, Trump's authoritarian tendencies, and whether or not American democracy could survive another Trump presidency. I like Kara's interviews because she knows when to interrupt. She knows when to let them run. She tries to set people up for success, but she's absolutely not scared to push back on them, which I like. I'm often self-conscious whenever we do an interview together because it's just every time I finish an interview with Kara, I think, you know, she's just better at this. And interviewing is a vastly underrated skill. You don't, very rarely do you say, wow, that was a great moderator. That was a great interviewer. It's whether you liked the person being interviewed, and she's very good at it. Anyways, enough of that. Here's the episode.

• 2:35Speaker 03

  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 Trivinsky and Dr. Timothy Naftali, two historians who will help us put the reelection of Donald J. Trump into historical context and understand if and how American democracy will stand up to his obvious authoritarian impulses. If you're anything like me, you're feeling, look, badly today. And you should. Let yourself feel badly. It's OK. 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. But it's also important to step back and take the long view with two historians who

• 3:20Speaker 03

  will help you see this moment with a little more clarity and perhaps make you feel better. Maybe not, but at least we can try. Lindsay is a presidential historian and the executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library. And her newest book is Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents That Forged the Republic. But she's written extensively about our first president and probably our best one, George Washington. 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. He is the author, co-author, or editor of eight books. Our expert question comes from Bill Adair, the creator of PolitiFact and author of Beyond

• 4:05Speaker 03

  the Big Lie, and a professor of journalism and public policy at Duke. Let's get to it.

• 4:22Speaker 03

  Lindsey and Tim, thank you for being on On.

• 4:25Speaker 04

  Pleasure.

• 4:26Speaker 05

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

• 4:29Speaker 03

  Former President Donald Trump is now President-elect Donald Trump. He won a surprisingly resounding victory. 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. We're taping this on Wednesday, November 6, the morning after the election, and I wanted to start by getting your initial reactions to Trump's victory, Lindsey and then Tim.

• 4:50Speaker 05

  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. I also think that at this moment, I feel like I need to rethink my general optimism about 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, so I'm trying to leave space for learning. But mostly, I'm just really, really surprised.

• 5:22Speaker 03

  Okay, just to be clear, it's half the American people.

• 5:24Speaker 05

  Correct, yes.

• 5:26Speaker 03

  About half the American people.

• 5:27Speaker 05

  I guess I'm shocked that... What blows me away is that, you know, 2016, a lot of people, I think, didn't have a sense of who he was. But now, more people have voted for the explicit cruelty and venality, and that feels like a very intentional choice.

• 5:48Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Tim?

• 5:50Speaker 04

  I wasn't as surprised because I had sadly come to the understanding that January 6 didn't matter for half the country. And for me, as a historian and citizen, that was the hardest realization.

• 6:13Speaker 04

  That at the very least, being guilty of dereliction of duty on that day wasn't enough to disqualify someone from national leadership. We could have a disagreement as to whether he criminally provoked January 6. But there's absolutely no doubt, the evidence is overwhelming, that he did nothing. And the idea that someone like that could be elevated again to national leadership is very, very difficult to swallow. And that became clear to me when it was so close.

• 6:52Speaker 04

  The fact that Donald Trump remained not just a viable candidate, but a powerful and successful candidate on the national level, told us a lot about ourselves.

• 7:06Speaker 03

  Right.

• 7:07Speaker 04

  And so I'm afraid, as a result, I 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.

• 7:27Speaker 03

  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. And the question for today is, how will democracy weather a second Trump presidency? Lindsay, you've talked about the parallels between 1790s and today. Back then, they also saw a threat of political violence, contested elections, foreign interference in our elections, just different foreign interferers. The question's over who belonged as a citizen. This has been an ongoing situation in our country forever, pretty much. Walk us through some of the parallels and the key differences.

• 8:00Speaker 05

  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. 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.

• 8:32Speaker 05

  I think weak institutions, there have been times in American life where our institutions have been quite strong 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. So all of that sounds similar to us, and I think it should. 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.

• 9:07Speaker 03

  And fragile.

• 9:08Speaker 05

  And I think, yeah, and I think the difference is that most of those people had skin in the game. 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. And so they knew how hard it was to build something. They knew what fragile looked like. And I think the election of 1800, they were all sort of chastened by how close it came to being completely blown apart.

• 9:35Speaker 03

  Right.

• 9:36Speaker 05

  And as a result, most people stepped back from the brink and stepped back from some of that violence and attempted to build bridges. I think today, we're complacent because we think, oh, well, the country's been around for 200, however many years.

• 9:50Speaker 03

  Fifty.

• 9:51Speaker 05

  Of course, it will continue, almost. 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.

• 10:04Speaker 03

  They don't. In fact, they never do.

• 10:06Speaker 05

  It's true. And the 300-year mark is usually a pretty good indicator of when things can sometimes start to go sideways. So that is something to keep in mind.

• 10:16Speaker 03

  So Trump has told his voters that he will be their retribution, which is a very unusual word to use. His campaign has promised mass deportation camps. 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. Tim, there are other examples in our history in presidential candidates campaigned as a strong man and won a broad mandate of voters. Has there been anyone else similar?

• 10:41Speaker 04

  I've been thinking a little bit about the election of 1828, simply because Andrew Jackson ran seeking vengeance. He and his supporters believed they had been deprived of the White House in 1824. And 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. He was seeking vengeance largely against one man and those around that one man.

• 11:23Speaker 04

  But he certainly presented himself as a strong man, though he wouldn't have used the term dictatorship. But he intended to make the presidency a much more powerful instrument or institution than it had been. He intended to veto things he did not agree with. He believed himself to be on the same level as the Supreme Court in determining the constitutionality of American laws. But again, there's a big difference. First of all, we're not talking about the national security state of the 21st century. So the presidency, the executive branch is a much weaker, smaller branch, less pervasive

• 12:08Speaker 04

  in our life than now. And Andrew Jackson was not seeking vengeance against whole classes of people. So we've had sort of a vengeful, successful candidate. But I think that the consequences in this era are enormous and much bigger than they were long ago in 1820.

• 12:33Speaker 03

  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.

• 12:41Speaker 04

  He declined. He didn't run for office. This was an approach to people that he had before.

• 12:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:51Speaker 04

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

• 13:00Speaker 04

  Donald Trump has made it clear that 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. He's also made clear that he wants to use the instruments of the federal government to hurt his enemies. 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.

• 13:45Speaker 03

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

• 14:05Speaker 05

  Oh, he had an enormous ability. I mean, one of the real openings for his presidency was that the Constitution is extraordinarily short, especially prior to our amendments. It was only about 4,000 words. And Article 2, which controlled the executive branch, was very, very short. And I think partly that was by design. 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. And they also trusted him to make good decisions, to establish precedents that would be wise and cautious for his successors. And I think they also understood that a certain amount of vagueness and silence was required in order to give flexibility to people

• 14:49Speaker 05

  once they were in office to meet the challenges that could not yet possibly be foreseen. So much of the presidency wasn't defined. 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 a domestic insurrection. All of those things are not really articulated in the Constitution and very little legislation.

• 15:18Speaker 03

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

• 15:22Speaker 05

  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. 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. Instead, I think he was largely shaped by his own experiences and his failures as a younger man, his successes during the revolution. 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. And so, as a result, he surrounded himself with people who had different types of expertise and knowledge, and he listened to them.

• 16:06Speaker 05

  And so, we're talking about people like Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson and Henry Knox and Edmund Randolph, which were his first administration. But he was also close with John Jay, who was the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. And so, he was actively seeking out as much information as possible to try and form this office in a responsible fashion.

• 16:26Speaker 03

  All right, let's fast forward. Richard Nixon believed that JFK and the Democrats had stolen the election from him in 1960. And I just interviewed Chris Wallace, and it looks like he may have. 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. 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? Or are they signs our system wasn't as strong as we think?

• 16:56Speaker 04

  Well, in 1960, John Kennedy was taking a risk. 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. And it was a tough election for him in many ways. The Catholic issue weighed on him. He lost a lot of votes for religious reasons. And yes, we'll never quite know with certainty the shenanigans in Texas and the extent to

• 17:37Speaker 04

  which Democratic efforts in Chicago counterbalanced Republican efforts in the south of the state. But what I think is... Important to understand about sixty is that there was a glass ceiling to break, and it made that election much closer. Nixon's dirty tricks of the seventy-two campaign were prefigured in his dirty tricks against his opponents, starting in nineteen seventy-one, and in many ways were prefigured in the dirty trick that he authored in nineteen sixty-eight to try to undermine the negotiations

• 18:19Speaker 04

  between the Johnson administration and North Vietnam as a way to make the Vietnam War as salient as possible in the election. 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 sixty-eight, because that was his strongest issue against, at that point, his opponent, Vice President Hubert Humphrey. What I wanted to mention about sixty that I think is so important is that even though

• 19:04Speaker 04

  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, 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 this was something that became a huge chip on Richard Nixon's shoulders. Richard Nixon was not only angry because he felt that the Kennedy money and the Kennedy

• 19:45Speaker 04

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

• 19:55Speaker 04

  And a lot of the Nixon administration, a lot of Nixon's own turmoil, inner turmoil, can be explained as this inner debate between himself and the dead John F. Kennedy. He never got over that.

• 20:10Speaker 03

  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. 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. I do blame him, even if you don't. 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. Lindsey and then Tim.

• 20:41Speaker 05

  Well, I think that we have the infrastructure in place to have free and fair elections because we have been having unbelievably free and fair elections. 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 requires the honor system. So, for example, the Insurrection Act gives the president enormous leeway to call up the military to use in a domestic scene. And so we don't know if in four years, he would call up the military under some false pretense, and that could be challenged in court, but that takes a really long time and we don't know how it would go.

• 21:26Speaker 05

  And so our infrastructure is great. It's just this question that so much of our system, especially the presidency-

• 21:32Speaker 03

  What he could do, and he always, he's a violator of norms. He's a violator.

• 21:36Speaker 05

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

• 21:42Speaker 03

  Good faith. Tim, briefly?

• 21:45Speaker 04

  My great concern is that Trump-

• 21:50Speaker 04

  Feels he was not successful at reshaping the presidency in his first term. And that 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. Dwight Eisenhower wanted to make sure that the floors were full of 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 that, that he will define the interests of the United States.

• 22:32Speaker 04

  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 it wasn't just once, it wasn't just the Zelensky call. It was Trump's approach to foreign policy in general, that whatever was good for him and good for the Trump business was by definition, good for America. That is completely unique in our history. And in terms of the threat to our constitution, we have to keep in mind that, that we still

• 23:14Speaker 04

  have institutions and the US military hasn't been tested in this way. But, 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 their, 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. It's not to any president. So that would be severely tested.

• 24:08Scott Galloway?

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• 27:26Speaker 03

  Let's talk about wannabe authoritarians. Let's talk about democratic norms around that. Washington certainly, as we noted, could have been an authoritarian if he wanted to. Trump may become one. This summer, the Supreme Court decided the presidents are essentially immune from prosecution for official acts. Lindsay, you've written about how Washington used the cabinet to strengthen a weak executive branch. How do you think Washington reacts to a SCOTUS ruling and the massive increase in executive power since he was president?

• 27:52Speaker 05

  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, 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. The president, once they leave office, is a citizen just like anyone else. And so while usually I'm sort of loathe 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.

• 28:30Speaker 03

  Okay, so authorities by definition try to consolidate power, the military, the media, etc. Nixon completely abused the executive office for his own personal gain, by the way, sometimes for unbelievably petty reasons. Tim, walk us through some of his more egregious abuses of power and why he was able to get away with them. 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?

• 28:55Speaker 04

  Well, Richard Nixon wanted to do much more damage than he was able to get away with. Let me give you some examples. Richard Nixon had an intense fear of Jewish Americans and believed that there was a conspiracy of Jewish Americans in the federal government. And he ordered the removal of Jewish Americans from any position of great sensitivity in the US government. It's on tape. It didn't happen, and he was surrounded by some antisemites, but there was a limit to what they were willing to do to, you know, basically undermine the US government.

• 29:38Speaker 04

  And so they satisfied him by 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, they were then, they are now. Nixon wanted to do more, but then he moved on. One of the things about Nixon is that he would vent, 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.

• 30:22Speaker 04

  And there was a team around him that understood they could not implement everything that he ordered. On the tax issue, 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. But they had to stand up to Nixon, and they were able to do it because the Secretary of the Treasury, George Shultz, wouldn't let his people audit the 300 or 400 names that were given to them by the White House. Nixon got upset, but in the end, he decided it was too much of a problem for him to fire

• 31:06Speaker 04

  George Shultz, and then he got absorbed by Watergate.

• 31:10Speaker 03

  So we're relying, in that regard, on the kindness of these people.

• 31:14Speaker 04

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

• 31:21Speaker 03

  Right, so Trump will have a team of sycophants who will be ready to execute his whims every time he's done.

• 31:25Speaker 04

  That's my concern, and my great concern is that we not only have a president who's promised us that he will build that kind of system, but he now has a Supreme Court that has just recognized the fact that there's presumptive immunity for official acts. And asking the IRS to look into somebody's taxes could be viewed 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." But my great concern in this next Trump administration will be these abuses of power that Nixon did, wanted to do on a grand scale, but didn't.

• 32:09Speaker 04

  Did it on a small scale because of guardrails. And without those guardrails, the president has enormous power to do damage.

• 32:18Speaker 03

  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. 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.

• 32:37Speaker 07

  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 big... And it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by national god, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can't let that happen.

• 32:56Speaker 03

  Lindsey, put Trump's calls for turning the military against American citizens into a historical context 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. How does that compare to what we saw in 2020?

• 33:12Speaker 05

  So there are attacks... 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. A house was burned down that belonged to a federal tax collector, and shots were exchanged. 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. They were never around when anything interesting happened. And it took a really long time to get them back into session. So if there was an emergency, the president could submit evidence that immediate action was required to a Supreme Court justice for approval. Now, Washington did try a number of peaceful methods to get this violent protest to disperse.

• 33:57Speaker 05

  That didn't work. He then called up the militia and sent it out. 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. Those that were convicted, he pardoned, because it wasn't actually about the punishment. It was about proving that

• 34:18Speaker 03

  He had the will.

• 34:18Speaker 05

  the government had the right, yeah, to actually pass a tax. You know, I think what's really important is, 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 uprising. So it's not like we have a perfect history here. We don't. However, what strikes me about Trump's language in that particular instance is not necessarily the military part, although that is quite... Important, it's the enemy within. It's drawing the 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

• 35:01Speaker 05

  that is a language that authoritarians use as part of their playbook.

• 35:04Speaker 03

  Right. So authoritarian is oftentimes willing to use violence to maintain a grip on power. In 1971 Nixon was battling a growing anti-war sentiment and in May of that year, he responded to a huge protest with 10,000 federal troops and the largest mass arrests in US history. 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. Tim, what was Nixon's stance on using state force against Americans? Did he ever seriously consider turning the military against fellow citizens?

• 35:34Speaker 04

  Yes, he did. In fact, on the tapes, he ordered the use of violence against the Native Americans at Wounded Knee. Again, it was yet another Nixon order that was not followed through by his people. At one point, the Secretary of Defense was ordered to attack these planes that were full of hostages in Jordan to end a standoff with the People's Liberation Front for Palestine, the PFLP, and the Secretary of Defense just didn't do it. I want to mention that Nixon's frustration with the guardrails around him were one of

• 36:19Speaker 04

  the reasons why he created an investigative unit, the Plumbers, in the White House. But he also okayed the payment to the Teamsters to go out and break the bones of American anti-war demonstrators. They didn't use the US 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, smaller scale, but it showed his capacity to do that. But one thing about Nixon that isn't true about Trump, Nixon had shame.

• 37:06Speaker 04

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

• 37:20Speaker 03

  Explicit.

• 37:21Speaker 04

  And doesn't care about presidential norms. 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. 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. Donald Trump knows none of such red lines.

• 37:49Speaker 03

  Right. So Lindsay, one of our greatest national myths is the story of George Washington and his cherry-treating, supposed inability to lie, which of course is a myth. But were American politicians generally more truthful during his era and around that time? Or is it an increasing level of dishonesty?

• 38:06Speaker 05

  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, 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. They understood that they were reading a partisan production. 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. So it's actually like a media literacy problem that I think that we have today that compares to the 1790s because they were happy to just print garbage in the newspapers.

• 38:48Speaker 05

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

• 39:31Speaker 04

  Can I add?

• 39:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm going to ask you a specific question, actually. Authoritarians create an alternative reality to their followers. In Trump's case, it's part of a strategy called Gish Gallup, or as Steve Bannon calls it, flood the zone with shit. Trump also has an Elon Musk, helping him spread propaganda widely and lies on X. The social media platforms have abandoned content moderation, so they're just willing enablers and not so active as Musk, but it's easier than ever to spread conspiracy theories. Nixon was an infamous liar. Give us some historical context for this seemingly unending stream of untruths.

• 40:03Speaker 04

  Well, the interesting thing about the two eras of lying is that Nixon's lying was tethered to some kind of reality. Nixon did not attempt to create a completely alternative reality. Trump is inventing complete history and, I mean, for example, to give a famous one, not as important as some of the other examples, but when he talked about inflation, saying that inflation under Biden was the worst inflation we had ever had. That is, of course, utter nonsense, since when we had the huge, much worse inflation of the

• 40:47Speaker 04

  70s. When he talked about Afghanistan, the pullout of Afghanistan, which I think was a debacle for the Biden administration, but he described it as the most embarrassing event for America in its history. Well, that's utter nonsense. Both Lindsay and I and you two, Kirk, could come up with many more examples of much more embarrassing moments. So, this is something that Nixon had too much self-respect as a debater and as a policy intellectual to ever do.

• 41:16Speaker 03

  Right.

• 41:17Speaker 04

  What he would do is Nixon's deceit was calculated to protect himself so the public didn't know him.

• 41:29Speaker 04

  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. Embracing someone they know is lying. And the one, the one thing I would, I just wanted to add quickly was the shame issue isn't just important in elections, it's important in impeachments. And the assumption was that, 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. But more importantly, they thought that each member of Congress would feel shame if they

• 42:13Speaker 04

  didn't defend the Constitution. 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.

• 42:31Speaker 03

  We'll be back in a minute.

• 42:44Speaker 00

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• 44:18Speaker 03

  All right. So every episode, we have a question from an outside expert. Let's hear the one for you guys.

• 44:24Speaker 08

  Hi, it's Bill O'Dea. 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. 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?

• 44:49Speaker 03

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

• 44:52Speaker 05

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

• 45:08Speaker 04

  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. Richard Nixon felt that it was way too difficult for him to spin his reality. And he felt that the media, that there was no Fox News, and he desperately wanted one. In fact, some of his followers ultimately created the alternative media environment in which Donald Trump has been so successful.

• 45:39Speaker 03

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

• 45:53Speaker 05

  Well, there certainly have been presidents who have been enormously popular. You know, FDR was enormously popular. Reagan was enormously popular. 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. 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. 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. And so, it's almost like a sunk cost fallacy where you can't acknowledge you were wrong and you have to continue to lean all in to this process.

• 46:35Speaker 03

  So Nixon was also an insecure man, but he wasn't loved by the public. But he retained support about 1 in 4 Americans even after all the Watergate revelations came out. 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?

• 46:54Speaker 04

  Well, Nixon would love to have Trump's grip on his supporters. Two quick things. One, 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. Because let's keep in mind, the Washington elite is partly created by Trump. 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. And what happened was that respect depended on his ability to govern well, too. They didn't love him as a man.

• 47:39Speaker 04

  And so, once he began to lie to Americans...

• 47:44Speaker 04

  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. 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 a better government. And, and 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.

• 48:29Speaker 04

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

• 48:49Speaker 03

  And so, right now, just, and there was also forgiveness. After Andrew Johnson lost his reelection bid to Lucy Zesgran, 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. Trump is going to essentially pardon himself when he fires Jack Smith. He's pledged to go after political opponents. A lot of people think he's bluffing, but we'll have to wait and see. I don't think he's bluffing. Is there any other example of this, of a president using his powers of to go after rivals? Nixon obviously tried it, and relative failure in that regard, but not a total failure. Is there anyone else you can think of who's done this?

• 49:29Speaker 05

  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. 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.

• 49:50Speaker 03

  But also Hamilton, famous.

• 49:52Speaker 05

  Exactly. But he wasn't, 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. 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.

• 50:16Speaker 03

  Two questions for both of you. 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, these to quote, 'the purposes of his own elevation on the ruins of public liberty.'" 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. Is it capable of handling the stresses it now faces under Trump? First, Lindsey, and then Tim.

• 50:51Speaker 05

  I don't think we know. I mean, it was the first time, but you know, I think the best way to think of guardrails is like a car. If you get into an accident and your airbags deploy, then they've saved you. 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. And I think our guardrails have been bruised and battered or the airbags have been deployed. And so I'm not sure. 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. And I fear that we are going to come to regret that.

• 51:28Speaker 03

  Tim?

• 51:29Speaker 04

  I agree. I agree with Lindsey. I mean, we, one of the great concerns I have is what a generation of young Americans is learning about power and responsibility. And the fact that Trump could come back after January 6 and his other abuses in the first term is signaling to many that that is a, not only a useful and effective approach to leadership, but it's a good approach to leadership because it's been, 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,

• 52:14Speaker 04

  a, 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. 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. 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.

• 52:43Speaker 03

  Absolutely. So that brings me to my last question. 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. It was a dark vision of America, which is in our, it's been in our veins forever. Let's be clear. Let's not, he's not a new thing. Where do you come down, Lindsay, and then Tim, finish up?

• 53:06Speaker 05

  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.

• 53:23Speaker 03

  Tim?

• 53:24Speaker 04

  I think of Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest. And in this case, I'm paraphrasing.

• 53:31Speaker 03

  Oscar Wilde.

• 53:32Speaker 04

  Yes, Oscar Wilde. But in this.

• 53:33Speaker 03

  Much persecuted.

• 53:35Speaker 04

  To, much persecuted, yes. To elect Trump once is misfortune. To reelect 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. I think a lot of the world and a lot of many Americans are saying, no, that's America being America. I think we need to come to terms with things in the next little while that we haven't come to terms with. 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, the very fact of the consequences

• 54:19Speaker 04

  of technological change on feeling of hope and despair in rural areas.

• 54:26Speaker 04

  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 from the beginning, and they have occasionally won out against our better angels. 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.

• 54:55Speaker 03

  I will end on one last thing, and a hopeful thing, because I think I'm just going to do that, because this is my podcast. Each of you, what should opponents of all of this do, in a sentence or two, each of you, Tim, and then Lindsay?

• 55:08Speaker 04

  One of the most effective ways that authoritarians take power is by scaring people. 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 with, for example, a little small example, the Gerald Ford Foundation not giving Liz Cheney an award for fear that they might lose in a Trump administration, their 501(c)(3) exemption, and Jeff Bezos at Washington Post. It's self-restraint. I would argue that remember your civil rights, exercise your civil rights, be who you want it to be, who you want to be now, who you wanted to be before Trump.

• 55:53Speaker 04

  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. I believe that Trump actually, at times, would rather not take risks. So if people make it hard for him to abuse power, it would lessen the effect of his vengeance.

• 56:21Speaker 03

  The word you're looking for is "no."

• 56:23Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 56:23Speaker 03

  No, you may not. Lindsay, last word.

• 56:28Speaker 05

  Well, I agree with so much of what Tim said. 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. 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, you know, obey in advance. 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. So we cannot give up and we have to keep trying to hold people to account.

• 57:08Speaker 03

  That's perfect. And the word you're looking for is, oh, no, you didn't. Something like that. Anyway, thank you so much. You're exactly the people I want to talk to on a day like today. We have had a long history and we've gone through some difficult times over the many, many centuries we've been around. So let's have some hope. Thank you so much.

• 57:29Speaker 04

  Thank you, Kara.

• 57:30Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 57:36Speaker 03

  On with Kara Swisher is produced by Christian Castro-Russell, Kateri Yokum, Jolie Myers, Megan Burney, and Kalen Lynch. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of audio. Special thanks to Kate Gallagher and Claire Hyman. Our engineers are Rick Kwan and Fernando Aruda, and our theme music is by Trackademics. 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. And don't let them bring you down. If not, yep, we're the Wicked Witch, but we look fantastic in green. 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.