Heather Cox Richardson: Trump Is Mentally Crumbling—But Still Dangerous | The Bulwark Podcast

I don't think the radical republicans would be trying to take away rights to the degree they are if they thought'm your host Tim Miller. Delighted to welcome

back to the show, a professor of history at Boston College where she teaches 19th century American history. That's seemingly relevant. She also writes a newsletter you may have heard of, Letters from an American on Substack. Her books include Democracy Awakening, Notes

on the State of America, published last year. It's Heather Cox Richardson. How you doing? I'm good and it's always a pleasure to be here, Tim. Thanks for having me.

Appreciate you so much and the work you're doing. We've got a bunch to get to and you kind of wrote a newsletter since yesterday on on the abdication of Congress across a bunch of different verticals. The house has been out now for weeks. The house has barely been in over the past few months. Josh Dossey reported in the Wall Street Journal, I guess it was over the weekend, that the Trump administration officials are joking about ruling Congress with an iron fist, that Steve Bannon's compared Congress to Russians' largely ceremonial Duma. It is pretty shocking with just how little they're trying to

exercise their powers down there. I wanted to get your take on that. It is more with just how little they're trying to exercise their powers down there. I wanted to get your take on that.

It is more than just a little shocking. It is truly shocking because the whole concept of the American government as it was laid out in the Constitution was that the people's house was Congress. It was, we talk about the three branches of government,

but the first article of the constitution covers the legislative branch, which is the two houses of Congress, the Senate and the House of Representatives. And that is where the power of the government resides. And that is where legislation is supposed to happen. That's where public spending is supposed to happen

and so on. And the Republicans in Congress, I think that's an important distinction to make between the Republicans and the Democrats, have essentially given up their control over spending, over legislation, over even things like this government shutdown, and I'm referring to Donald Trump. So it's a profound attack on the setup of our government.

It's also really astonishing because the idea behind the Constitution was that the legislators and the different members of the government would be so protective of their own power, they would not kowtow to a different branch and in that case they've given that up. It's also really interesting in this particular moment because Donald Trump is not a strong president. So I think there is a real sense of kicking the can down the road hoping that at the end of the day, when everything falls apart in whatever way it's going to, those people who stood back are going to be able to come back in and pick up the pieces.

And that has never been the case. We do have parallels in our past to times when this has happened. And what emerges is a very different system.

In what way do you think that he's not a strong president? And talk about some of those parallels.

Well, those are two separate things. The way in which he is not a strong president is I think it is hard to disagree with the fact that he is crumbling mentally. You know, and I am not a medical doctor in any stretch of the imagination, but I have watched this man now for decades. And you know, he can't put a sentence

together. He doesn't seem to know if he's a foot or horseback. And as that's happened, the power in the government has devolved to other people. You watch that and you recognize that the reason that he has stayed in the position of power that he has is because he could commandeer the MAGA voters. And a lot of Republicans stayed on board with him because he could deliver these voters.

Now, if something happens to him, where do those voters go? Do they stay committed to the Republican party? You know, you look at the splits in Congress, you look at the splits in MAGA across the country, it's a little hard to imagine that anybody coming

after Trump is gonna be able to deliver those voters. So if that's not the case, what happens? And this is, you know, we don't know what's gonna happen in the future, but I think you can look at somebody like Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and her backing away from her much more strident MAGA positions to positions that are much more in keeping

with what appears to be the interest of the American people right now on, for example, healthcare and think it's not clear that MAGA is going to stick together and if MAGA doesn't stick together what does that mean for those people who kicked the can down the road? Are they able to say oh I never believed that stuff anyway you should come back and vote for me or are they so tarred with that after things for example like the young republicans group chat being

leaked yesterday that their moment is over. And I don't predict the future, I predict the past, but I think it's a really vulnerable moment for the president. And then we could talk about what's happening with his actual policies and so on, but just in the terms of the structure of the government, I always like to think about power as its own bucket, if you will. Who's got power? And the idea that power is inherent in

certain positions in the government is actually not true. Power sloshes around. Who grabs it? Who takes control of it? Who uses it? Who walks away from it? And in this moment, there's a lot of power that is sloshing around, now, seemingly picked up by Russell Vought of the Office of Management and Budget and by Stephen Miller, the Deputy White House Chief of Staff.

But will they continue to hold it, those two unelected officials? Will Congress take it back? Or will the American people finally say, hey, wait a minute, we have this little thing called the Constitution

that we were real fond of for 248 years. Let's take a look at that baby again But it's hard to predict what Donald Trump's mental faculties are gonna be in 2027, etc At this moment, I think there's no doubt that Russell vote and Stephen Miller have taken a lot of power It's pretty noteworthy how little Congress has taken and I think that kind of cuts against this idea that Trump is weak right now I mean like there there are a number of areas where Trump's put forth policies that ostensibly people in Congress would be against either for their own parochial political interests or for their past ideological views, whether that be, you know, Ukraine or tariffs or various issues like that. And you see now between the tariffs, which he's just doing unilaterally, we bombed another boat in Venezuela yesterday, people don't even notice this anymore. We bombed another boat in the Caribbean of Venezuelans.

There's been no declaration of war. So across economics, funding the government, foreign policy, congressional Republicans have just totally abdicated all power to the president, at least for now.

I think that's right. And on those two things especially, it's really glaring because the Constitution gives to Congress and to nobody else the power to regulate tariffs. And this is one of the eight emergencies that, I think it's eight, that the president has declared since taking office in January so that he can work outside the constitutional system. And that's of course really tied to the political theories of Carl Schmitt, the German political theorist who became a Nazi, with the idea that if you operate according to exceptions, that really shows

you who has the sovereignty in a system. And there is, I think, absolutely no doubt that the president is trying to become a dictator. But it would be easier, I think, if he were actually able to control himself, his underlings and power. Now, the thing about the striking of the boats, which really important to remember

that we have no information about those except what the White House says. There has been no information about those at all. So we assume they are Venezuelan boats. But the idea that they are narco-terrorists importing drugs into the United States that are going to kill tens of thousands of people, as the president said, is solely on Trump's

word, which is not how our system is supposed to work. And it overlaps pretty strongly with their idea that undocumented migrants in the United States are members of transnational narco-terrorist gangs, which is what they are talking about. And in both of those cases, really dramatically now in the case of striking those boats,

they are trying to make the case that we are in fact the equivalent of at war. And legal analysts just say that that simply does not fly, but it seems pretty clear that's the analogy they are trying to bring to the United States. Whether or not that's going to work, I think, depends a lot on the pushback in the courts, but also the pushback of the American people doing things like showing up in frog costumes and going, do I look like a narco terrorist, which is actually really effective. I do want to point out with those boats, just to be clear, the United States has always intercepted boats that seem to be up to no good, but they do it in a really simple way.

They shoot the engines. I mean, this is not rocket science. And then they take them to law enforcement officials. These are deliberate strikes that at this point have killed 27 people that people who are observers who understand international law are simply calling mass murder. That really, really matters.

Whether or not these people are drug traffickers or not, at least one of the alleged widows of them has said he was a fisherman but this is... And the Colombian president has

said that one of the victims was Colombian, thought to be Colombian, which I guess it's possible that could have been a Colombian working with the Venezuelan, Trent Darago or whatever, but like to your point we don't know, no evidence has been put forth and there doesn't seem to be any evidence that there was within the White House or the DOD legal review of any of this, that there are lawyers that are okaying it. There has been no

issue of any kind of legal justification for this except this general idea that they are putting out there that we are the equivalent of in a war, which again is not, according to our constitution, something that is supposed to be determined by the president. It is literally supposed to come from the Congress, although that's of course been really wiggled around a lot

since World War II.

I'm just curious, just sort of open-ended on this, like whether the historical precedents or lessons or risks that are associated with this, I mean, I do think it would have been unimaginable. One of maybe the founders' naivete, I was reading through some of the old Federalist

papers for a different project I'm working on the other day. It's like this notion that people wouldn't want power for themselves. Like there was this kind of belief that everybody would be selfish in that sense, and that that would be a check, right? That whoever the speaker of the House is would have their own interests that they would, you know, care about. And the absence

of that, right, ends up being kind of a weakness in the system, it turns out. And I'm wondering what you think about that, if there are any precedents to that, that call to mind.

I actually think what the framers missed was partisanship. Remember, they did not expect there to be political parties in the United States. And when they talk about factions in those early papers in Federalist Number 10, for example, they are talking about partisan politics. And until the 1990s, I think, in the United States, there was always the sense that above all, and not entirely, I mean, you can certainly find exceptions to this.

And the 1850s is it's a glaring exception, but that was less about partisanship so much as partisanship being a reflection of financial interest. But until the 1990s, there was always the sense that you were certainly willing to use your party

to turn out voters at the polls and to articulate your vision of the country, but the country still mattered, that America came first, that country came before party. And I think with the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, there was a really concerted effort on the part of that faction of Republicans who wanted to roll back the New Deal back to the 1920s, people who were represented by individuals like House Speaker Newt Gingrich from Georgia,

they began to insist that partisanship mattered more than country and then began to believe, I think, in those years since then, that those who stood against them in politics stood against the United States. So we've gotten to the point where a legitimate election in 2020, a legitimate presidential election seemed to be considered by the president's supporters

as illegitimate simply because their guy had lost. And that understanding that the way you get ahead in American politics is by adhering to political extremism or a position of partisanship, rather than by advancing the interests of the nation, I think we're seeing right now really in a very pointed way when you have the president saying, I'm going to cut Democrat, as he says, programs and keep Republican programs.

Well, of course, they're not partisan programs. And in fact, it's red states that are being hit hardest by cuts to education For example cuts to research cuts to universities But this idea that somehow they're gonna keep the good Republicans on board and push away the bad Democrats really reflects as I say that kind of political philosophy of people like Carl Schmitt we're friends and enemies and

One of the things that people like me are trying to make the case for that, in fact, in a moment like this, we are we the people against a would-be autocrat. And that's simply a different reordering of society. But the framers, I think, would be much more on my side, the idea that we're supposed to be protecting a system from a dictator rather than saying, I'm a monkey party as opposed to your kitty cat party.

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you know being deployed into blue states and cities. I had Governor Pritzker on yesterday. I'm kind of interested in how you see what is happening there, because on the one hand, obviously there's some people out there stoking, you know, this is Civil War type discourse, and obviously it's very serious. Like on the other hand, Pritzker was on yesterday talking about how they've been fighting and winning in the courts, you know, at this point. The National Guard from the other states have been limited to federal buildings in the state.

We'll kind of see how that shakes out over the coming weeks. So I'm wondering kind of how you see what's happening now and any past parallels we could

learn from.

Can I just start by saying to people, it's this stuff is really complicated. And I get when people are like, I can't even tell what's happening. Because there are so many layers, and so many different events that, you know, I'm overwhelmed. And I sit here doing this, you know, 24 sevens. So I get it if people are like, oh, just make it all go away. And the reason I prefaced this, what I'm gonna say with that, is because I think there are many layers to what is going on with the deployment of National Guard troops in the various places that they have been deployed in this moment.

Let's start with Pritzker and what Pritzker is doing, because there's a number of layers to Pritzker as well, but it is important to remember, first of all, that deploying the National Guard is unbelievably expensive. There is no more expensive way to make things happen than to deploy the National Guard. Governors don't like to deploy the National Guard if they can possibly avoid it, unless they can get the feds to pay for it. That's a really important caveat. So if you look, for example,

at operation Lone Star in Texas, which has been underway for years now, I don't remember when, but it has been caused a huge problem among the Texas national guard because they're like, you have ripped us away from our families for absolutely nothing. It does not appear to have had the effects that the governor, Greg Abbott, says it has. But I believe the price tag on that baby so far

is $12 billion. And the Texas government is hoping that the federal government is gonna pay for that.

Yeah, that's the, just for folks, that's the sending of the National Guard to the border in Texas. That was 2021. That's what it's early Biden, which makes sense.

Right, so that's 2021. That's what it's early Biden, which makes sense. Right. So that's right. So, so, you know, that's, that's a pretty hefty price tag. So that's one of the things going on is the cost of this and who is going to bear the cost of this. And then another thing that's going on that I think Pritzker is playing on quite heavily and maybe not getting a lot of press for is he is pointing out that states don't want to do this. They don't want their National Guard to go to

other states unless the other governor has asked them. Why not? Because they want those guards to be available when they need them. And different National Guards specialize in different things. And so it's not like you can say, well, if I can't get this state, I'll get another state. I mean, you want the state that is really good on, let's say, medical care if you have a medical emergency. So beyond all of the politics of this, there is simply logistics of, you don't want to do this if you can possibly avoid it. And that includes a number of Republican states as well. So one of the things that both Governor Gavin

Newsom in California and Governor Pritzker in Illinois have done is they went to the National Governors Association. Now to the National Governors Association. Now the National Governors Association depends on payment from the states that belong to it to continue to function and they've and they're both very wealthy states and they've said you have to come out against this or we're gonna leave the National Governors Association and then good luck to you. That's an organization that's been around since 1908 and is designed to be outside of politics.

And you saw on the back of that, Governor Stitt from Oklahoma, Kevin Stitt from Oklahoma, who is quite a far right Republican saying, I disagree with these deployments. All right, so there's all that mechanical stuff going on,

but there is also the larger story here, which is Donald Trump, the president of the United States, trying to use military people to enact his will in democratic cities, especially. And that is, I mean, we can pull that apart. It's important to remember, ICE and Border Patrol

and the troops from Homeland Security are not the same thing as the National Guard, which is controlled by the states unless it is federalized by the president. And they are not the same as US troops. And all of those are reacting very differently to what's going on in the cities. The other piece of that that we may or may not want to go into is, is why are they doing

this in addition to simply wanting to enforce Trump's will. Pritzker has said, and I think this is not wrong, that they want Americans to get used to having troops in the street because they are looking to the 2026 election. And that is, you know, the end game right there. They want to go ahead and control politics, control the government. And again, to go yet maybe above 30,000 feet, why do you want to go ahead and control politics, control the government. And again, to go yet maybe above 30,000 feet, why do you want to control the government? Because if you

can control the United States of America, you're the biggest dog in the fight. And there is one heck of a lot of money riding on all this stuff at an international level. And you can see that

sloshing around too. Yeah. Pritzker made that point about troops in the street yesterday and getting folks used to it. I think that's right. And I think another thing worth talking about because a lot of I'm sure you see this in your comments and your on sub stack. There are some people kind of will push back on me and say, why are you even talking about this? Like there's going to be normal elections in 2026. Like, why are you gaming this stuff out? Like we're already in this fight against an authoritarian that's not going to ensure we don't have free and fair elections. And like just because this stuff is complicated and nuanced,

I just think it's important to point out like that's not quite right. Like they're trying a bunch of stuff, right? Like they're, you know, it's like the velociraptor and the doors. Like they're trying to open all the different doors and figure it out. And so on the one hand, the redistricting fight is part of this. That is premised on the fact that maybe they think they can just win the election, right?

I can keep the House and Senate if they game the system well enough, right? So that's cheating in a sense, but it's not like stopping the election. It's not not having free elections. It's just they think that if they game the system well

enough, they could win. The troops in the streets are like, well, we'll see what the reaction is to this, right? And you've seen Trump in various ways, dip his toe in the water and then pull back. And I think that is why it's important to talk about this in the context of, like, we are still in a system where public opinion matters, public action matters, pushback matters, right? Like all of this stuff is in early stages, you know, as compared to what you see in other places.

And living in that gray is complicated. But I wonder how you kind of see all that.

Well, for once, I'm gonna be the pessimist here. I would say that we don't have free and fair elections. That in 1986, when the Reagan officials recognized that the second round of tax cuts could very easily be overturned with the election of a democratic Congress and a democratic president, they started to do two things. One was to pack the courts with right-wing operatives who would, as Edwin Meese, Reagan's attorney general said,

make certain that the Reagan revolution was going to stay in place no matter what the voters did. And they also began to say that they needed to protect ballot integrity is what they said at the time. And they started spreading the idea that Democrats were winning only by fraud.

We could walk through the whole history of how this exploded after the Motor Voter Act of 1993, when you start to get the idea that illegal immigrants are the ones who are voting for Democrats, always a myth. And going on through 2010, when you got Operation Red Map and the extraordinary gerrymandering

and then Citizens United and then 2013, when you get the gutting of the Voting Rights Act under Shelby versus Holder, we are already looking at a system that is heavily skewed toward the Republicans. And then you add under that the Electoral College system,

which was perverted in, well, beginning in 1800 by Thomas Jefferson and then in 1929 by the capping of the House of Representatives and so on. So we are already along the lines where if in fact we didn't have partisan gerrymandering in a number of Republican dominated states, we would have a Democratic House of Representatives. You know, we are already in a place where the Senate is reacting, not to the majority of American voters,

but to the minority that are in place because of the way the Senate works. So it's not like everything is hunky-dory right now. And every time I hear somebody saying, why don't black people turn out to vote? Look at how the numbers dropped after Shelby versus Holder.

And in fact, in our last election, what was it, 64.1% of eligible voters turned out to vote. And people always say, oh, they're apathetic. A lot of those people tried to vote and they couldn't because of the lines or they couldn't because the drop boxes were gone and so on.

But that being said, I don't think the radical Republicans would be trying to take away rights to the degree they are if they thought they could win. And the fact that they are throwing all the spaghetti at the wall says they know how deeply unpopular they are. And what you just said about public opinion really matters. Not because it's going to change the people in office necessarily, although as I say, I think Marjorie Taylor Greene

is a really interesting bellwether right now, but because it's gonna change the people who are coming into the system. If they wanna get elected, they want to encourage these new voices and they will push back on the ways in which the system is suppressing those voices.

So in a system that is predicated on the very idea that we the people, as our constitution says, have given our power on a temporary basis to those leaders we elected to create our laws. If we say we don't support this anymore, you know, we are taking our power back,

that government in fact loses legitimacy.

Well, and this is the last word that I agree with. And I think sometimes some folks get a mixed message, and this is why I just want to just sit on this for one more second, because taking our power back means that people have to believe that they have the ability to take their power back, right? And if they believe that we're already in a place where

we don't have free and fair elections, it's akin to one of these authoritarian foreign countries like Turkey or something, or worse, Russia. Then what's the point, right? Like why not just be apathetic? Why engage in this at all? Why get involved? Because the game is already rigged. So some of what you're saying, like I think the way that the map is you know, benefited towards the Republicans is surely true, right? Like particularly the Electoral College and the Senate, at least for now. But like the house popular vote in 2024 was, I pulled it up here. The Republicans won by 2%. They have a whatever seven seat majority in the house.

Like that, I mean, the house was basically representative. I mean, there, there, there are gerrymandered states in both parties. Like there's some really bad Republican gerrymanders in North Carolina, Utah, Tennessee, some other places, but like it is it was winnable like that last election was winnable to the Democrats and I don't want this just a complacency to set in because people can feel like well fuck it, it's rigged so you know there's no reason to get involved and and we deserved it. Like

that's not really true the Democrats lost last time in part because they

weren't speaking to a part of the electorate that they needed to speak to. What do you think about that? So I agree with you that the game is not over at all and yes it's incredibly important to turn out because the longer we wait the harder it will be to turn things around and that's never to say that people don't have opportunities to overturn a system that is increasingly unrepresentative. Look what happened in Syria just this last year. So absolutely that is true.

God willing we don't get to Syria.

Yeah.

We don't get to the Syria problem.

No, no, no, no. But that's a pretty extreme example, right? But just to go back to the idea that the Republicans won in 24, I do think you have to look at what happens when you have a severely gerrymandered state. That's exactly what happens.

People get apathetic and they say there's no point in me turning out. So in North Carolina last year, Kate Barr ran for her district in which her tagline for her campaign was literally, Kate Barr can't win because it was so badly gerrymandered. She just wanted people to get involved in the system. So that gerrymandering badly suppresses votes, but so too do the voter suppression measures that have gone into place pretty dramatically, first since 2013, immediately after Shelby

v. Holder, but then again-

We had more people turn out in 24 and 20 than in any election ever.

I'm just saying, you could have had more. And that I'm not saying that people shouldn't do it, but I think it is a real mistake to look at the American population and say, oh yeah, I mean, I guess we're saying the same thing from a different angle. I don't think the American people want what is happening right now. And my support for that comes from the vast number of polls that say, in fact, we want common sense gun safety legislation. We want health care. We want, you know, we don't want these tariff wars. We don't want our neighbors being taken

off the streets. You know, I think people want a different government than they have gotten. And the answer to why they have gotten this government is in part because of misinformation or disinformation, is in part from apathy, but it is also in part because we have not adequately fought back against a system that is increasingly putting its finger on the scale

for an extremist faction of our country. And this is the moment to step up and say, crap, I wasn't paying attention to gerrymandering. I care a lot about that. In fact, we know Republicans and Democrats both don't like partisan gerrymandering. We're saying, hey, wait a minute, what's going on here with healthcare? I think this is a really bad idea. Now is the time to do that.

I agree with that. The fighting back social support part. I also think that that's, we're getting way late for what I wanted to talk about, but I just, this is an important topic because like one thing that also has changed since like 08 versus now, from the Obama era and even the really the Bush era when I was coming up in politics is the people least likely to turn out are actually kind of the best for Trump, like the least engaged and the most apathetic, he did the best with, right? So like, figuring out a way to engage those people is like absolutely critical for fixing this. And you know, that's that's a little bit of a change in how

politics has happened.

Well, Hannah Arendt talks about this in her book on totalitarianism, and she makes the point that this is precisely how you get the arrival of an autocrat. There's a number of different flavors she's talking about. But by turning out those people who were not previously engaged and who believe that this is their opportunity to be heroes, that they will save the country

from this horrible fate that the dictator has portrayed will happen if he doesn't end up in power. But what she says is that they don't stay engaged in politics, they go back to being unengaged when that moment passes. And that's the real question, right?

Well, my guess is that we will see when this moment is on the other side, what we saw with somebody like Berlusconi, so many people saying, oh, I had nothing to do with that man. Well, you know, he had a solid 25% every time he was elected and now you can't find anybody who voted for him. And I suspect we

will see a lot of people simply saying, I don't do politics, that, you know, it got away from me. And you see it to some degree now with podcast bros who are saying, oh, I wish I'd never gotten involved in politics. I didn't know this is what Trump was going

to do. Yeah, I want to get into a couple of history things with you, but just one other politics thing we're talking about since you're in Maine. Obviously, there's a lot of interest in the Maine Senate race, going to be one of the most important ones next year. There's a little controversy about the DSCC seems to be, which is the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, seems to be Janet Mills, the sitting governor, and giving her preferential treatment in various ways. That's made some people upset on the internet. Folks are excited about Graham Platner, who is the oyster farmer.

There's some other candidates. You're there on the ground. I'm wondering what you're seeing with regards to that race. And there's also a ballot initiative, I think, in the state that you were talking about recently,

folks should probably hear about.

Right. Let me start with the ballot initiative. It's an attempt to get rid of absentee voting in Maine. Maine is a very old state demographically and about 40% of Maine voters vote by absentee ballot. And this is a method being pushed by the Republicans, especially a group of radical people on the far right

saying that this is making the Maine vote insecure. And there's just, again again no evidence for that and that's a great example of trying to shrink the voting population so that you can keep a small group of people in power. But it is worth pointing out that when you get these moments where an electorate shrinks because people are taking away the right to vote, when they go too far and the people they're trying to suppress get into power,

they open up the vote. And then those people who took away the vote, pay for it for a political generation. And I think that's an important piece to have here in the mix.

Yeah, this is question one. This is on this year's ballot, actually in May. Question one is the one that's seeking new restrictions on absentee voting. So we have main listeners, we have main viewers, want to make sure that they're on the right side of that one. So I'm in this state, but I'm not. I'm more, I just am more curious, like you're around, you got neighbors and stuff. I'm just curious what you're hearing.

Well, so that's really interesting because, you know, I'm married to a lobster fisherman, you know, I hear a lot of stuff in a lot of different places. And I think my take may be different than a lot of people's. Graham Platner came into the race a bit ago, exciting guy, speaks incredibly well. And let me tell you what the lay of the land is then when I think about it. Janet Mills has been in the state

sort of as a groundbreaking figure now for a long time. First female attorney general, first female governor, and has been really, really effective at getting school meals, expanding Medicaid, overturning a lot of what her predecessor, who was sort of a Trump Republican, had done, and has actually done great things for the state finances and all that. But there were two other people leading in the race.

There were four people at the top. One was the guy who had started or been instrumental in starting the Maine Beer Company, which is very popular. Yeah, Dan Kramer. Yeah, Dan. And then another one, Jordan Wood, who is sort of a political operative, mostly based

outside the state, but he's actually from the state. All right. So what happened was the question is, would Mills get in? Because here's the thing about Maine. It's hard, really hard in Maine to win a statewide election

because you have the very wealthy coastline and the very liberal coastline. And then you have all the way up to what, District Two, up to Arista County. and they tend to be very far right. And so you've got this weird, I can make it in District 1, but I can't make it in District 2 thing going on.

And what's interesting about Plattner is the way he talks, I wonder if he can make it in District 2, but that's because he talks about taking on the establishment and nobody's paying attention to you and so on but neither platen or nor wood has ever held an elected office except platen i believe it's been harbor master which is not a small thing but it's not really the same. Master harbormaster is the person who quite literally takes care of issues relating to the use of the harbor in the area around it. So moorings and lost boats and injured boats and people being jerks and all that kind of

thing.

I was trying to nudge you into the race when we last talked in December. So you're familiar with the moorings thing.

I'm familiar with the moorings but I don't have the personality to deal with the moorings because that's a lot of like interpersonal stuff. But, um, but that's really kind of a problem. If you have never run in an election, um, you haven't been vetted, first of all, and that really matters because you don't know what's going to come later on. And you don't know if you can make it really anywhere. Now that works sometimes, you know, certainly it works sometimes but that I think is probably why there's a push for Mills because last time around everybody thought

Sara Gideon stood a good shot and she had, she was actually had been a very, very active in the legislature, couldn't win district two. So that's what's going on here. I will say this. I think new voices in American politics right now, especially younger voices are unbelievably important. That's how you change the political system. But I also believe people who know how to move

the levers of power are important as well. And this is a moment of transition where I think if you wanna take a look at where the Democratic Party has made a huge error over the last 20 years is they walked away from the lesson of machine politics or the lesson of somebody

like Harry Reid in Nevada. They should have been bringing along younger people from within the system. And we should have somebody here in Maine who has the ideas and the language of Plattner who has been vetted, but who knows how to win an election and how to govern when she or he does it. So now Maine voters have to choose.

Do you want the significantly older person who's accomplished stuff, or do you want somebody who doesn't have any track record at all? So you're a little nervous about what that might look like.

Maybe it's a Fetterman situation or whatever. I don't want to accuse Platner of that, but like that's just the type of thing that you would be looking for, right? You get a fatter man who's an outsider, and then all of a sudden it's like, oh, well, we didn't really get

what we thought we were getting here. And that's not Platner at all. I think there's one other wrinkle. Yes, I think that's right, but I think there a national level. We look at her as a real problem at the national level.

If you're looking at the state of Maine and Janet Mills said something recently that she got jumped all over for by saying, she said something nice about Susan Collins and they were like, oh, she's terrible. Remember Janet Mills stood up in,

I think it was February, to Donald Trump in the White House, in his own place, and pissed him off so badly, he pulled all kinds of federal support from Maine. Maine's a really poor state, right? And Angus King in the Senate, an independent,

has been out there since the beginning saying that Donald Trump is breaking all the rules and he's breaking the constitution and so on. And Jared Golden, who's a representative and Shelley Pingree, you know, they just don't have a lot of pull.

The only person who's been really running interference for the state of Maine in all this is Susan Collins. So that is also, I think, a factor. If people are thinking that Donald Trump might stay in power, I can see them saying, you know, crap, we don't like her. But we can't get rid of Bath Iron Works, because that's where you know,

that's like a major anchor for our economy. We got to keep this woman in place, because she at least can play nice with Donald Trump. And I think that's going to be a factor as well, for people in the state. You know, again, that's not going to fly for people in Illinois looking at Maine going, why the hell are you keeping Susan Collins in there? But that does matter here because a lot of jobs depend on funding for the Coast Guard and for our buoys and for the military installations and things like that.

So I think Maine's complicated, but I'm all for a primary. These people saying Mills should drop out, I'm like, because you think Platner can't do it? If he can do it, he should.

And she's saying,

they should.

A lot of time ahead. Cool, that's interesting. I'm glad I asked about that. All right, two quick history things, and I'll let you go. is these newsletters that go a little deep on a random thing that is happening in the government that hasn't gotten much attention in a kind of historical perspective. One of those was from earlier this week about the

Triumphal Arch. I had missed this except for you mentioning in your newsletter. I guess Trump had showed Canadian officials a plan for an arch that would sit on the Potomac opposite the Lincoln Memorial. The idea would be that it would commemorate the 250th anniversary. There's a lot of historical references though to the triumphal arch. I'll just kind of let you cook on that because

I was interested. Well, a triumphal arch comes from from ancient Rome, of course, and it's the idea that you build these. They're very distinctive actually. They're an arch that has sort of a flat top and you can put engravings on it or statues on it or whatever. And they tended to commemorate military victories or later on important public events. And the idea of this plan, and by the way, the whole idea that the Trump administration

is so profoundly changing the landscape of Washington DC, I think is something we really should be engaging with because I think to some degree his handlers are encouraging him to do it because he likes to develop properties and it keeps him happy. He's talked about changing the Kennedy Center. Of course, he's already at work on getting rid of the East Wing of the White House to replace it with a ballroom.

And this now, this arch would sit between the Lincoln Memorial and the Arlington House, which is the former home of General Robert E. Lee. And the reason that those two are connected is because the Arlington National Cemetery was deliberately placed by the Civil War era Republicans on the plantation home of Robert E. Lee,

so that the dead from the Union's armies were literally on his plantation. And then of course, Lincoln was set where he was because he's the person who, you know, oversaw the successful United States victory in that war. So there is that going on.

But the reason I wrote that piece, I mean, I thought the arch was, you know, I think it's just a boondoggle aside from anything else. I think it's a crazy idea, But the juxtaposition of that with tearing down the original social security building was, I thought, incredibly powerful

because one is, in a sense, a triumph, historically a triumph to a dictator. The other was this building that was built, finished in 1940, to house the Social Security Administration. That's not what it was called then.

It was called the Social Security Board. But the idea with Social Security changed the nature of the American government to make it responsive to everybody in a community. And for the administration to be tearing that down, and crucially, in that building are these murals from the era, these social realist murals from a number of really prominent artists that we paid for in the 1930s and 1940s that are on the chopping block now just seem to me so on the nose for what

this administration is doing. And I'm just heartbroken over these murals and I hope they find some way to save them and perhaps the building simply because, you know that is absolutely our heritage. And what at the time people thought was a change in the nature of the American government

that would serve the American people forever. And that we are in a moment where we are seeing it dismantled. Again, I think most Americans would not want to see that dismantled, but here we are.

This last time we could do a whole podcast on it, maybe we should in six months. So I'm not, I don't want to keep you another hour, but maybe just one little nugget. And that's this conversation I've been having over and over with Democrats on the pod is, let's just be optimistic for a second and think that this gets beaten eventually, that MAGA gets beaten. How should the Democrats talk about that? And like with some lessons from your area of expertise, the reconstruction era, right? And like lessons learned from looking back on that. And there's some Democrats who you talk to who say,

we should be saying right now that we are going to back in charge, and when we are, we're gonna be coming for you. The law is gonna be coming for you if you broke the law right now, and so you should be scared to follow Trump. There are others who say, well, we want somebody who's gonna be messaging

about how we can bring peace and calmity to our times and bring people back together. I'm just wondering if there are any kind of nuggets from

that post-Civil War era of history you could leave us with as we kind of think about how to talk about that right now. Well the post-Civil War era was the era in which we backed away from those kind of commitments, which was a terrible error. And you know one of the things that we talk about a lot is how there were no executions after the Civil War, with the exception of the people who were involved either in Andersonville prison camp or in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. But in fact, there were thousands of executions

after the Civil War. They were just of the people who had sided with the United States. And that's really, really important to remember. They were extra legal, of course. This is the Ku Klux Klan, for example.

But it's important to remember that this idea that there's peace and happiness so long as you exhibit forgiveness is simply wrong. Now that with being the backdrop, because you asked about the post-Civil War years, I think it's more interesting to look at the periods

before the victory is won. And one of the things that Lincoln did, and I pay attention to all the time, but you also see it with people like Theodore Roosevelt in the late 1890s and early 19 aughts. You also see it with people like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and with people like Dwight Eisenhower. Now I've just given you a Republican, a Republican, a Democrat and a Republican, is a reliance on American values. That is the idea of equal justice before the law. That doesn't say we're coming for you. That says we believe that whether you are the President of the United States or an undocumented immigrant who arrived a minute and a half ago, we are going to exercise the law according to how you interface with this

government. The reliance on the law and exercising law and standing on the principles of the United States, the idea of equality before the law, the idea that you have a right to have a say in your government, the idea that you have a right to have a say in your government, the idea that you have a right to equal access to resources, including things like health care and education, the idea that we care about hard work and rising through hard work and we care about education. Those sorts of returns to our fundamental principles that have stood us in good stead since the beginning, even when they did not apply

to everybody in our country, but they gave everybody a touchstone to look at when they thought about creating a future. That's how I talk about it. It's not about you need to behave because we're coming for you.

It's we will restore the rule of law to this country. And that I think is really important. I thought when Gavin Newsom, governor of California the other day said to universities, hey, you kowtow to Trump, you're losing all your funding here in California. That was an important moment because I think Biden, President Joe Biden very carefully tried to say, you know, we're all in this together, we're going to, you know, we're going to treat everybody equally. And what that did was it said to a number of people that they had to behave for Trump, but they didn't have to behave for Biden.

And so what you got was almost this abusive kind of relationship where everybody did what the bad dad insisted on while assuming the mom was always going to be there loving them. And what that ended up with was a second Trump administration. So, you know, my thing is always in a moment like this, as Lincoln did, Teddy Roosevelt and so on, is to go back to our classics. What do we stand for? And that has a touchstone moment, I think, for all Americans to say, hey, yeah, I know who Lincoln is.

And I think Lincoln was a good guy. And he believed that you should be treated equally before the law, whether you were Simon Cameron, his first, one of his first cabinet secretaries who was corrupt as the day was long, or whether you were one of the soldiers

who fell asleep on duty. You know, those things actually matter to the preservation of American democracy, and I stand for that.

Yeah, it's interesting you say that. Let me just think about the universal principles. I just got a text yesterday from a friend who was talking about the principles that Ohio was founded on. Thinking about what's happening in Ohio,

that state constitution in 1803, it was religious freedom, public education, and prohibition of slavery. Those are the three original pillars in Ohio, right? And like going back to those kind of original principles does feel maybe the path forward.

Heather Cox Richardson, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Everybody check out your sub stack as always, and we appreciate everything you've been up to. And I'm sure we'll be talking to you again soon.

Back at you. Thanks for having me.

All right, everybody else will be back here for another edition of the Bulwark podcast tomorrow. See y'all then, peace.

Peace. Peace. Peace. Peace.