As we get closer to Trump’s first criminal trial, former Senator Claire McCaskill and former White House Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri sit down for a conversation with NBC News presidential historian Michael Beschloss on how former president Trump has changed long held presidential traditions, and how history will judge this time. The focus then shifts to compare and contrast how former presidents have worked with (or against) the American legal system when they have been accused of crimes or impeached in Congress.
This conversation was recorded on Friday, May 22.
Note: This is a rough transcript — please excuse any typos.
Jennifer Palmieri: Hello. Welcome to “How to Win 2024.” It’s Thursday, March 28th. I’m Jennifer Palmieri, and I’m here with my co-host Claire McCaskill. Hi, Claire.
Claire McCaskill: Hey, Jen. This is kind of a special day. I’m excited about this.
Jennifer Palmieri: So, I’m super excited about this because I like to go a little deeper on history than we’re able to do in the podcast normally or on MSNBC in a short segment. So, we’re going to do a little something different today.
We talk a lot about the future and what democracy will look like in the wake of November’s elections, but sometimes looking to the past can help us better understand the stakes. After all, those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Claire McCaskill: Okay, that was Churchill, but our historian would probably say, Claire, that was originally from the Spanish philosopher George Santayana in 1905. So, I want to get that in there so that I don’t have to be corrected right away by our wonderful guests. We’re —
Michael Beschloss: You would never be corrected by me, Claire. Anything you say, I’m just a bobblehead.
Claire McCaskill: There you go. That’s not true. But we wanted to do some historical context today, not only to what Trump has done to erode our democratic institutions and our trust in the rule of law and the very concept of America, but how history will judge what is going on in our country right now.
And who better to frame that than Michael Beschloss? He’s the author of nine books on presidency, including “Presidential Courage,” “Presidents of War,” and “At the Highest Levels.” And he is NBC’s very own presidential historian. We are thrilled to have you. Welcome, Michael.
Michael Beschloss: Love to be with both of you. Love everything you do. Everyone should listen to the podcast.
Claire McCaskill: Thank you very much. So let’s start out with highlighting some of the ways that Trump has broken the norm. And frankly, we talk about this sometimes on the air, and I think I’ve even talked about it in segments when you and I have both been guests on panels at the same time —
Michael Beschloss: True.
Claire McCaskill: That sometimes the norms are being broken so frequently that we get numb —
Michael Beschloss: Right.
Claire McCaskill: — to how different Donald Trump was as a president of the United States. Can you talk a little bit about the decorum and the use of the White House and some of the things that don’t rise to the level of making a headline like some of his incendiary comments, but just the way he handled the job compared to how presidents through history had handled it?
Michael Beschloss: Well, here’s the problem. I love our founders in most ways. Now, I don’t like everything they did, and I certainly don’t like that they created a system that allowed and promoted slavery. But one thing they did, if we look at the Constitution, it doesn’t say too much about what a president should and should not do.
And there’s a reason for that because when the founders met in Philadelphia, 1787, they knew that George Washington was gonna be the first president of the United States. So rather than having a list of do’s and don’ts, they basically had sort of a sketchy idea, this is what the president has the right to do, and they assumed that George Washington would be the first president and would set the pattern that would apply to everyone who followed if the system worked.
Someone who tells the truth, who is a model for young people, someone who behaves with modesty and restraint befitting the head of a democratic small D republic. And, you know, I hate to put it so simply, but if you want to look at the opposite of George Washington, Donald Trump comes pretty close.
Claire McCaskill: So what about some of the language he has used in terms of how he dwells on the ugly? Is this something that has happened before and I’m just not aware of it? Or does it just feel more real to me because we’re watching it in real time?
Michael Beschloss: No, we’ve had people run for president, but even major party nominees. I mean, you know, you and I and Jen, we were not there at the time, although I feel as if I have been from studying these guys for over 40 years. But think of a major party nominee all the way back to the time that Washington was chosen, 1789, who would have used this kind of language, who would have been so openly racist, would have been so brutally eager to divide the nation.
The closest I can come in recent times, and this is like talking about a finger painter rather than a Picasso of corruption and presidential malfeasance, would be Richard Nixon. One of the reasons that people disliked Nixon and he could have been sent to jail and impeached and convicted for certain crimes was that part of Nixon’s M.O. was, you know, don’t unite the country, instead create divisions that you can exploit, generate hatred against certain groups in society, such as, in that case, anti-war protestors, liberals. He talked about bums who were demonstrating against the war. You didn’t hear Dwight Eisenhower speak about bums, yet he had been the leader, famously, of allied forces on D-Day.
Jennifer Palmieri: And do you think, when you look at, you know, some of the things that Trump said most famously, going down the escalator, talking about that Mexicans coming over the border, some of them were rapists and criminals, the Charlottesville protests, where he talked about there being —
Michael Beschloss: Yeah, both sides.
Jennifer Palmieri: — very fine people on both sides. Is that something that, you know, Nixon was 50 years ago at this point, I guess, is this the 50-year-on equivalent of that, or is this something —
Michael Beschloss: No, this is a hundred times worse than Nixon. But if you’re looking in history for a recent precedent, it would be Nixon.
Jennifer Palmieri: Andrew Jackson, is that maybe one?
Michael Beschloss: Yeah. Andrew Jackson was demagogic, tried to divide the country. And again, you know, to compare this to the 1830s, obviously, we’re talking about two different places in time. So what I would say is, you know, if we’re looking at, let’s say, the last century, Nixon would do it. He tried to divide this country, almost succeeded.
And 1968, particularly, had a very large racial aspect to his campaign, generating black against white, rich versus poor. Feeling if that would work, most other presidents have felt that, like George Washington, their job should be to unite people, not divide them.
Claire McCaskill: What about Jackson? Did Jackson do the same thing? Did he try to divide?
Michael Beschloss: He certainly did. Yeah. To talk about, and Andrew Jackson, as you and I know, was the hero of a great Missouri, and Harry Truman, although I don’t think Harry Truman endorsed everything that Jackson did, including being a slaveholder. But yes, Jackson said, and he was right in saying this part of it, the country is under the control of elitists in the Bank of the United States in Philadelphia.
If you’re a farmer, or if you’re a shopkeeper, or if you’re an engineer, these people in a city in the East are controlling your lives by manipulating interest rates and making decisions that you have nothing to do with. And part of that was a very brutal appeal.
But I would say that at least in the 1830s, Jackson was somewhat restrained by the checks and balances system, which is one reason why he was so much in overdrive. And the other thing, can you imagine Andrew Jackson in 2024 with access to social media —
Jennifer Palmieri: Right.
Michael Beschloss: You know, with that enormous megaphone, instantly to be able to say those things, not in newspapers that got to someone’s house, maybe a week after they were printed, some Gazette, but instead instantly on social media, on somebody’s war room podcast or broadcast, reaching a big audience very fast. That’s a much bigger megaphone.
Jennifer Palmieri: Okay. But Nixon did not praise dictators, correct?
Michael Beschloss: No, he did not.
Jennifer Palmieri: I mean, is there, you know, in terms of praising Putin, Kim Jong-un, you know.
Michael Beschloss: That’s what I’m saying. Nixon never said something like that. Nixon was maybe 8 percent of what Trump has done. Did Nixon ever have secret relationships and praise without condition the leader of the Soviet Union at the time? Absolutely not.
He was anti-communist. Nixon was corrupt at a way that Donald Trump would laugh at, given the level of Trump’s corruption as is being demonstrated right now in the courts.
Claire McCaskill: So, before we close out this segment, I want to ask you a question that I just thought of as we were talking, and that is, as somebody who studies presidents in history. How is history going to treat Trump? And by that, I mean, it feels to me like there are two different versions of Donald Trump in the country, that we have gotten to the point that we all don’t agree on what the facts are.
And I talk to people in Missouri all the time, that with all kinds of conviction and sincere belief, actually think that this is a wonderful man who was a wonderful president, who had the right policies for our country, and that things were wonderful when he was there. And so will this be the first time that there are two starkly different versions of history written? Or will it somehow meld together as time goes on? How will that work, Michael?
Michael Beschloss: It usually, just as you’re saying, as a president leaves office and historians write about that person, usually there does come to be a consensus 40 or 50 years later. But that’s in a country that is not as divided and angry as ours. And the thing I have to say to introduce a note of reality here, I am not 100 percent certain that historians in universities will be able to write what they think freely if Donald Trump comes to a second term.
I am not sure that publishing houses that publish democratic and progressive-leaning books will not have antitrust or other regulatory actions designed by the government to drive them out of business. The interesting thing is that those are things that Richard Nixon talked about privately when he was president, but that was very early on. He actually met with Roger Ailes, the founder of Fox News, and said, you know, there really should be a conservative TV network in this country to protect a president who’s a conservative. There’s no such thing.
So nowadays, a Donald Trump has a bodyguard of right-wing media that a lot of the people in Missouri and elsewhere listen to and watch that say that Donald Trump is essentially God.
Claire McCaskill: So what you’re worried about is more what kind of freedom there will be to write the truth going forward as it relates to the academicians.
Michael Beschloss: Well, what I’m saying is if you’ve got a president who said he’s going to be a dictator for a day, and we know that no dictator leaves after a day, and he’s already threatened to use the legal action against media organizations and perhaps academic organizations that say and do things that he does not like, problem here is that I love the founders, love the Constitution. My view is they all give a president too much power.
We as Americans are much too dependent on the good luck of electing someone president who has good character and restraint and loves democracy. With Donald Trump, our luck ran out, and it may run out again this November. I sure hope not.
Jennifer Palmieri: Yikes. We’re going to take a quick break, but when we’re back, more with presidential historian Michael Beschloss on what history can teach us about the presidency today. Back in a moment.
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Claire McCaskill: Welcome back. We’re here with renowned presidential historian Michael Beschloss. Now we want to use your expertise, Michael, to look to some historical comparisons to President Joe Biden. And feel free to riff on this however you would like, because I know there’s a number of different ways you could look at this, his age, his experience in the Senate, his foreign policy. Who would you, as you look to the past in presidents, who does Joe Biden remind you of, both good and bad?
Michael Beschloss: If I had to make one comparison, I think I would say Harry Truman. If you look at Harry Truman running in 1948, just to begin with this, you heard Joe Biden’s State of the Union not long ago. And my instant reaction was that this reminded me so much of something I’ve studied in history. Truman spoke at the 1948 convention. As all of you know, from your knowledge of history, Democrats that spring had been looking for another candidate because they thought he was a loser.
Claire McCaskill: Right.
Michael Beschloss: They tried to get Eisenhower to run as a Democrat, for instance. And the convention nominated him but was deeply depressed because they thought he was a sure loser. So Truman, after midnight, steps to the microphones in his white suit in the convention hall in Philadelphia. And the first line of the speech is, referring to his running mate, says, Senator Barclay and I will win this election and make those Republicans like it. Don’t you forget that. We’ll do that because we’re right and they’re wrong. And I’ll prove it to you in just a few minutes.
And he gives a speech that’s just like that. So when I heard Joe Biden giving his State of the Union, I don’t know if someone in the Biden entourage was aware of that speech, but it reminded me of Truman not only in style, but someone, think of what Truman had done in that term. He had wound up World War II. He had prepared to resist Soviet communism in Europe. That very week, he desegregated the armed forces of the United States that had been shamefully divided since the beginning of this country.
These are accomplishments, one of which would have made him probably a great president. Plus, the modesty and the love of democracy and the self-restraint, and I hate to use that word these days, his honesty. This was, even at the time, it was evident that he was a great man, but he was not appreciated because he didn’t look and sound like Franklin Roosevelt. He won the election.
Claire McCaskill: I’ve got to do a little Truman thing here. I think this is important because Truman really only began to be celebrated as a great president after the fact. And, of course, nothing gets on my nerves more than the Republicans trying to own Truman.
Michael Beschloss: Oh, me too.
Claire McCaskill: I mean, the idea that they would try to co-opt Harry Truman, can you imagine what Harry Truman would say about Donald Trump?
Michael Beschloss: I can. The two people I’d love to hear, late presidents I’d love to hear speaking about Donald Trump in private. Number two, Harry Truman. Number one, LBJ.
Claire McCaskill: I think it’s important because one of the things we’re trying to do in this podcast, Jen has reminded us of this several times, is we’re trying to keep people from freaking out.
Michael Beschloss: Well, and there are a lot of reasons not to freak out.
Claire McCaskill: There are.
Jennifer Palmieri: Yeah.
Claire McCaskill: And I think Truman, I think it’s important to remember how unpopular he was when he left office.
Michael Beschloss: Yup.
Claire McCaskill: I mean, when you read about how he left Washington.
Michael Beschloss: Well, his public approval rating in Gallup was 23 percent, which was like about 6 percent nowadays because —
Jennifer Palmieri: Yeah.
Michael Beschloss: — unlike the last 25 years, Americans were shy about telling a pollster they hated a president, which is not a problem these days.
Claire McCaskill: Right.
Michael Beschloss: But why was he unpopular? When I was a young historian, I looked into it because I was puzzled. They were impatient with the Korean War. There was petty corruption. An amazing number of them said he doesn’t sound like Franklin Roosevelt, which is our idea of the president.
Claire McCaskill: Yeah.
Michael Beschloss: And the true story is told, Truman was asked what he thought of Richard Nixon, who was running for vice president in ‘52. His reply was, I think Nixon is full of manure. Truman’s aides went to Mrs. Truman and said, couldn’t you get the boss to speak a little bit more elegantly? She said, you have no idea how long it took for me to get him to use the word manure.
Claire McCaskill: I love that.
Michael Beschloss: That’s what seemed important.
Jennifer Palmieri (ph): So, okay, similar to that time, the U.S. is coming out of a period of trauma, right? The four years of Trump were trauma in terms of the impact on democracy and breaking of all these norms.
Michael Beschloss: Sure.
Jennifer Palmieri: And then also, of course, you have COVID. And I was talking to a Biden aide this week who said that they think, you know, that this is something that I’ve seen in Kosovo, for example. I went there shortly after, you know, a year or two after the war with Serbia, that a society’s way of processing trauma is to ignore it immediately.
Michael Beschloss: Yeah.
Jennifer Palmieri: And, you know, when I went to Pristina, I was expecting people to be kind of huddled and very inward. And it was like a dance party, the entire town. You know, it was just like, it was sort of shocking given the genocide that they had been through. But I’m wondering if that is, and Truman had perhaps the same thing, Churchill had the same experience. He saved Europe after World War II and then just kind of got thrown out because people were tired of him or ungrateful or ready to move on or whatever.
Michael Beschloss: Or even George H.W. Bush to the degree that the Cold War was over and people didn’t want to hear anymore.
Jennifer Palmieri: Yeah. Is this sort of reaction to trauma real? And are we experiencing this? So talk about that.
Michael Beschloss: Yeah. I mean, during the pandemic, I think I can speak for all of us and tell me if I’m wrong. But during the pandemic, I thought that this would be something that people would think about for the rest of their lives and it would change all of our lives. And we would never forget what that time in lockdown was like and the people who died and the incompetence of Donald Trump in trying to, you know, run the response to COVID, you know, with million people plus ultimately dying.
But I knew from history, that’s not the way it works. And the way it works is exactly what you just said, Jen, which is, remember the influenza, we don’t remember it personally, but the influenza pandemic of 1918, 1919, 670,000 Americans killed by that. Woodrow Wilson never spoke about it once in public. And the second it was over and it looked very much like the pandemic that we went through, came the Roaring ‘20s, people wanted to forget it as soon as possible. And it was almost never mentioned.
Jennifer Palmieri: And that might be why the Biden accomplishments aren’t breaking through. Why when people seem to have Trump amnesia? I mean, I think high prices are a big reason why Biden’s accomplishments aren’t breaking through.
Michael Beschloss: Also.
Jennifer Palmieri: But do you think that this could also be part of that sort of amnesia?
Michael Beschloss: No question. And that’s part of Joe Biden’s job to make sure that people remember that —
Jennifer Palmieri: Yeah.
Michael Beschloss: — Trump was already president once and it was a disaster for every American family, our health, our economics and almost everything else. If they have forgotten that, they’d better have that on their mind in November. But at the same time, even as bad as Trump was as president, he is saying and promising things that go way beyond that. Dictator for a day, suspending the constitution, pitting the Pentagon and the Justice Department against his political enemies, going after the media, going after other organizations he does not like. This is Mussolini. This is not anything like anything we’ve seen in American history, if it happens.
Claire McCaskill: Of the precedents that you wrote about in the book, “Presidents of War,” do you see any comparisons? You know, I think we all know that our students of history, the position that FDR took vis-a-vis the war in Europe in the early days of that war —
Michael Beschloss: Sure.
Claire McCaskill: — and the difficulty that he had politically in stepping up in terms of what we needed to do to go against Hitler. I am looking at Biden and Trump, and they’re very, very different in terms of how they see foreign policy. What are the historical comparisons in terms of foreign policy that you see between these two men and what are the implications of that?
Michael Beschloss: Well, take Ukraine as a great example of what you’ve just said. Everyone and every historian knows, and the two of you and I know, that one of the hardest things for any president of American history is to get Americans to, you know, give up their treasure, and I’m saying potentially human treasure, but certainly financial and other resources for a country that few people have ever heard of.
And so when Joe Biden almost single-handedly at one point a couple of years ago was saying to Americans, you may not even know much about Ukraine, but unless we make sure that Putin is resisted there, this may jeopardize not only Western Europe, but NATO and the lives of your children in the United States. He made that point. And one of, I think, the great leadership accomplishments that we’ve seen from him is that he had the foresight to do that and the political ability to get Congress to agree.
Donald Trump is looking at this in terms of someone who would like to break up NATO, would be perfectly cool. And he’s actually said this. I mean, I’m not surprised that he thinks it, but he said this in recent months that, you know, there are circumstances under which he would say to Putin about NATO, go ahead and do whatever the hell you want. Does that sound to you, Claire, like Harry Truman?
Claire McCaskill: No, it does not.
Michael Beschloss: So the point I’m making is that I can talk about history till the cows come home, but we are seeing and hearing things day after day, right now, let alone during Trump’s four years in the White House, that American eyes and ears have never encountered before.
Jennifer Palmieri: We’ll take a quick break, but more with presidential historian Michael Beschloss in a moment.
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Jennifer Palmieri: Welcome back. Presidential historian Michael Beschloss is with us today. Michael, before we let you go, we want to look at instances where past presidents have intersected with the law, albeit through the political means of impeachment, not quite what we’re facing now.
Claire McCaskill: We want to get a sense, if at all, if there’s anything in the past that relate to Trump’s legal woes today, not only through his two impeachments in Congress, but to the unprecedented nature of his indictments. And, you know, Michael, the bottom line is there has never been anything like this.
Michael Beschloss: No. Nope.
Claire McCaskill: It is so far outside the norm. But where is this playing politics with impeachment? Give us some context historically —
Michael Beschloss: Sure.
Claire McCaskill:– because, you know, now they’re impeaching Mayorkas and they’re doing a pretend impeachment of Biden. Have we lost the historical impact of what impeachment is supposed to mean within our Constitution?
Michael Beschloss: Of course. Impeachment is the biggest constraint that Congress has on a president. And how’s that been working for you the last number of years? It doesn’t work. It is used for reasons that don’t have too much to do with the facts at hand, as happened during the Bill Clinton period, for instance. And I would like to begin, you were asking, you know, how Trump fits into history. I put all the other presidents in one category, Donald Trump in the other category.
No president tried to have a coup d’etat and an insurrection, an attack on Congress that almost killed, literally physically killed leaders of Congress and maybe the vice president in order to corruptly hang on to power after losing a presidential election and lying about it. There are a lot of bad things a president can do. That’s just about the worst. Let’s start with that.
You know, we can go through Trump’s other trials, but I think what I’m trying to say is this, you were saying at the beginning that Trump uses rhetoric in a way that other presidents have not. “Washington Post,” even before that presidency, it was over-counted 30,000 public lies that he had told. That’s not Abraham Lincoln. That’s not Harry Truman or Dwight Eisenhower. That’s a presidential, a-presidential, if there is such a word.
It’s almost Orwellian. And he gave a very interesting interview to Leslie Stahl on “60 Minutes” CBS right after he was elected in 2016. I’m sure you both have seen and remember. She was asking him about the exaggerations and perhaps the lies. He said, I do that deliberately because this is my language, not his. I want these words to have no meaning so they can’t be used against me. Where did we see that before? We’ve all read George Orwell, 1984, you know, we’re in a dictatorship. They use slogans like war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength. So, you can’t accuse the dictator because the word won’t have any meaning anymore.
What I’m worried about this fall, since, you know, you’re telling us how to win in 2024, is this. When I was growing up in the ‘60s and ‘70s in the Midwest, if someone said, one of the two major candidates for president wants to be a dictator and is going to destroy our democracy, everyone I grew up with would know what that meant, Republican, Democrat, or Independent.
Now, I guarantee you Donald Trump and his bodyguard of right-wing organizations and others, and perhaps even hostile foreign governments, will try to make sure that the word democracy is drained of all meaning by November, or perhaps the word dictatorship is applied to Joe Biden among a lot of those people. All I’m saying is if you look at any dictatorship, one of the first things the aspiring dictator tries to do is take the sting out of words that can be used against.
Jennifer Palmieri: You know, we talked about Nixon earlier in the earlier segment. And if you’re looking at a sort of sliding scale that 50 years ago, some of the ways he was trying to divide people and using race in particular as a means of doing that. But it seems to me the difference is when he was impeached or threatened with impeachment, the Republican Party broke against him.
Michael Beschloss: Yes.
Jennifer Palmieri: And it took a while. Republicans propped him up for a good while.
Michael Beschloss: A year and a half.
Jennifer Palmieri: And then I guess it was the Saturday Night Massacre was the tipping point or —
Michael Beschloss: It was that. And then finally, the release of his tapes. The Supreme Court, as you know, ruled eight to nothing, July of 1974, Nixon must release his tapes, which are evidence that he knew was going to do him in. So he knew hit was gone. And look at that Supreme Court majority. One justice, I don’t want to use this word because it seems not to exist anymore in the Supreme Court, recused himself. William Rehnquist said, I was a member of Nixon’s Justice Department before I came here. I shouldn’t rule on this. So it was eight others, including three Nixon justices.
Like Trump, Nixon thought that they would save him. So when he was called by his chief of staff in California, Nixon, the first thing he said when he heard it had gone against him, he said, is there any error in the decision? In other words, was it maybe five to four or something like that? They said, all right, no, it’s eight to nothing. And Nixon’s reaction was if he had any thought of contesting the decision, which he really didn’t, you can’t go against unanimity.
Claire McCaskill: So what about special prosecutors? We now have the special counsel law. In history, has there ever been a time that there have been special prosecutors? And did that come about through the Justice Department or through presidential power? Is this the first time in history that we’re seeing this kind of, I know we had one obviously during the Clinton years —
Michael Beschloss: True.
Claire McCaskill: — which I believe famously got off track —
Michael Beschloss: Right.
Claire McCaskill: — in terms of what they’re —
Michael Beschloss: And that special prosecutor later on defended a lot of the things in Donald Trump that he had gone after Bill Clinton for supposedly doing.
Claire McCaskill: Exactly. But what about further back in history? Had there been specially anointed prosecutors that were supposed to look into certain specific issues?
Michael Beschloss: The first exact example that we would talk about would be Ulysses Grant, who in 1875 appointed a special prosecutor because there were charges of stolen revenue from federal whiskey taxes. Right or wrong, he thought the investigation was unfair and corrupt, getting too close to his inner circle. So he fired that special prosecutor. Unlike the Nixon times, that’s where it ended.
Claire McCaskill: And what was the basis? Was it controversial at the time when he fired the special prosecutor? Was this the talk of the country or was this —
Michael Beschloss: No.
Claire McCaskill: No? No big deal?
Michael Beschloss: It was not that publicized. It was in newspapers, but for instance, I was a college student when Nixon fired Archibald Cox in October of 1973 and I was in Williams College in Massachusetts. We had one TV. So like 50 of us would watch TV together, the nightly news. And so they had the news later that evening that Nixon had fired Cox and there was an intake of breath in the room and people were shocked. And it created, as you well know, such a backlash that Nixon had to hire a new prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, who finally pursued this case to the end.
Claire McCaskill: Yeah. You and I must be the same age because I remember —
Michael Beschloss: We are.
Claire McCaskill: — I remember gathering around the TV in our sorority house at the University of Missouri and watching. Now, I must admit that some of my fellow sorority sisters were not as interested as I was.
Michael Beschloss: Well, that goes without saying, it is.
Claire McCaskill: My collective breath was taken away at that point in time because I understood how brazen it was to do that. And then you look at Trump.
Michael Beschloss: And also, by the way, as you remember, he ordered the special prosecutor’s offices locked and the files impounded.
Claire McCaskill: Yeah.
Michael Beschloss: This had elements of dictatorship, but compared to nowadays, you know, this was peanuts.
Claire McCaskill: Yeah. So, it’s interesting. Do you think that Trump, I mean, when he was trying to fire Barr there at the end and trying to put in, I forget, what was that guy’s name? Jeffrey Clark?
Jennifer Palmieri: Yeah. Jeffrey Clark. Yeah, that’s his name.
Michael Beschloss: As attorney general.
Claire McCaskill: Yeah. The environmental lawyer, he was going to put in as attorney general. When he was doing that, do you think that there was talk in the White House about what Nixon had done and the impact it had on his presidency when everyone kind of bowled up and said, if you do that, everyone’s resigning?
Michael Beschloss: There may have been, and some of those people were something of a profile in courage. Mark Esper, Bill Barr, who I thought I would never say anything nice about till the end of my life.
Jennifer Palmieri: Yeah, I know.
Michael Beschloss: Resigned rather than having to go through with this. And I hate to say I saw it in real time, but I really did because in December of 2020, in the beginning of 2021, there’d be announcements that the president had made appointments of these obscure figures in the Pentagon and the —
Jennifer Palmieri: I remember this.
Michael Beschloss: — Justice Department, for instance. And I said to my wife, you know, Trump doesn’t know what these jobs are. The only way he would be doing this is if he’s going to try something on the 6th of January. He had already said, come to Washington. It will be wild in that famous tweet. And he wants people in those departments who will make sure that they do not interfere with a coup attempt where, you know, sometimes I have too dark an imagination, but it was not too dark that time.
Jennifer Palmieri: No, no. Just based on history. Okay, I have what’s going to sound like a dumb question, which is how much the internet is contributing to all of this? Because I think 50 years ago, we had three networks, watched three news stations. There was an agreement on what was true. There was an agreement on —
Michael Beschloss: Totally.
Jennifer Palmieri: — what was, you know, the Republicans understood and Congress understood what was happening and that what Nixon was doing was unprecedented and really bad. But they just decided to go along with it until they decided that they couldn’t withstand the pressure anymore. And now it’s a very different thing. Now there’s just two versions of reality and you can choose —
Michael Beschloss: True.
Jennifer Palmieri: — to live in your own version of reality and really believe that by supporting Trump, you are supporting democracy.
Michael Beschloss: No question.
Jennifer Palmieri: So we’ve gone through big revolutions of communication before television, radio, the printing press. They cause big disruptions in the world. How do you think about the internet?
Michael Beschloss: Well, it’s a Faustian bargain that we made and we didn’t have too much choice about it when the internet, which as you know, had been a not known U.S. Defense Department way of communicating since it was invented in 1969. And in the wake of the Cold War in the early 1990s, they decided to make it available to everyone on earth. As you well know, an administration that you serve, Bill Clinton’s, the day he took the oath, I think this is right, there were something like 50 websites on the internet. That shows how different things are.
And before that happened, just as you’re saying, when John Kennedy gave his speech on the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962, there were three main networks, had 90 percent of those watching television. There was a roadblock. And so if you didn’t want to hear his speech, you didn’t have too much luck. Mainstream magazines, “Time’ and “Newsweek,” newspapers that tried to be, quote, unquote, “fair minded” with varying degrees of success.
Now, here we are in 2024. If you want, I’ll bet there’s a Nazi channel and it’s probably growing. And there are other websites and channels and social media that can tell you just what you want to hear, and then some. Think if we were in 1931 in Weimar, Germany, and Adolf Hitler were doing a reprint of Mein Kampf, which came out in the 20s, his notorious book, and he put it on the internet.
Jennifer Palmieri: Yeah.
Michael Beschloss: You know, as it was, it went to sort of a group of fairly well-read Germans, even repulsive ones who were aspiring Nazis. But nowadays that would be available to billions of people who would have a much greater impact and do it much more quickly.
Claire McCaskill: So I guess the way to look at this is the power to stop this lies with the American people. The power to stop this is through the ballot box.
Michael Beschloss: Yup.
Claire McCaskill: And the more we make people aware, the better off we’re going to be. And everyone needs to pay close attention.
Michael Beschloss: Totally agree.
Claire McCaskill: I do think everyone’s worried. And I do think that is a good thing. I don’t think it’s a bad thing that people are worried because you’re more vigilant when you’re worried and it’s going to take vigilance.
Michael Beschloss: We’ve got to be on guard and be ready to deal with them. We who love democracy. But I’d like to end at least my part of this on a happy note. Is that okay?
Claire McCaskill: Please, absolutely.
Michael Beschloss: As long as we’ve got an electoral process, and I think we do, where votes will be counted correctly, where Americans will see that to choose one candidate, Donald Trump, means dictatorship, giving up the rights that Americans on the battlefield and civil rights marches, and women’s marches have worked so hard to win for all of us, those would all be out the window.
As long as people understand that that’s the basic choice in this election in November, I have enough faith in the American people and our beloved process of democracy that a serious majority of those people voting will say, we want democracy. We want to say you cannot take away our rights.
Claire McCaskill: Let’s hope. Let’s hope.
Jennifer Palmieri: I feel it. I feel it too. And thank you, Michael, because this helps. I mean, actually putting in a historical perspective and seeing ourselves in that arc of history, I think it’s inspiring too. You know, it makes us feel like we’ve been through challenging times before, and it’s on those of us that are here now to protect this democracy and —
Michael Beschloss: No, you have to be an optimist because —
Jennifer Palmieri: Yeah.
Michael Beschloss: — you know, how else has America gotten through over two centuries of some of the biggest problems that you can imagine? And still here we are. And basically, I hope people understand what democracy is and why we have to preserve and protect it.
Claire McCaskill: We were lucky to have you today, and we are going to be optimistic and vigilant. Michael Beschloss, NBC’s own presidential historian and prolific author on presidential history. Thank you for taking the time today to be with us.
Michael Beschloss: Glad to hear. Love being with you both (inaudible).
Jennifer Palmieri: Thank you.
Claire McCaskill: Thank you so much.
Jennifer Palmieri: Thank you. Thanks so much for listening. As always, if you have a question for us, you can send it to howtowinquestions@nbcuni.com, or you can leave us a voicemail at 646-974-4194, and we might answer it on the pod.
And remember to subscribe to MSNBC’s “How to Win” newsletter to get weekly insight on this year’s key races sent straight to your inbox. You can visit the link in our show notes to sign up.
Claire McCaskill: This show is produced by Vicki Vergolina. Janmaris Perez is our associate producer. Catherine Anderson and Bob Mallory are our audio engineers. Our head of audio production is Bryson Barnes. Aisha Turner is the executive producer for MSNBC Audio. And Rebecca Kutler is the senior vice president for content strategy at MSNBC.
Jennifer Palmieri: Search for “How to Win 2024” wherever you get your podcasts and follow the series.