Title: Is This What Democracy Looks Like?: Heather Cox Richardson

Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Coming up later this hour, a call in for a group we've never singled out before for a specific call in. We're going to have one specifically for Canadians. If you are in or originally from Canada, how has the Trump administration so far made you feel about this country or that country? Coming up in about a half hour.

We're very happy to have with us now Boston College historian and these days a very popular newsletter writer, Heather Cox Richardson. Her newsletter is called Letters from an American. She is also the author of many books, including her latest, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America, which came out in paperback just last October. That book traces what Richardson calls Donald Trump's authoritarian experiment back through American history.

In her latest newsletter, Richardson focuses largely on the battle for democracy taking place right now in the courts. One judge, as you probably heard in the news, ordered Trump to stop deporting people based on the 1798 Alien Enemies Act. That's supposed to apply only to times of actual war or actual invasion by another country. Another declared Elon Musk's shutdown of USAID likely unconstitutional, including for Musk's unappointed role in it.

And besides the rulings themselves, she notes Trump's argument that the judge in the deportations case should be removed from the case or even impeached. Now, Chief Justice John Roberts weighed in on that yesterday, very rare, writing, "For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision." So how far is Trump taking us in this authoritarian experiment, as Professor Richardson calls it, if you accept that framing, an experiment where we're waiting to see if he ignores judicial rulings altogether. Right. To hear Trump on FOX last night, he's not going that far.

President Trump: I never did defy a court order.

Laura Ingraham: And you wouldn't in the future.

President Trump: No, you can't do that. However, we have bad judges. We have very bad judges. And these are judges that shouldn't be allowed-- I think at a certain point, you have to start looking at what do you do when you have a rogue judge.

Brian Lehrer: A rogue judge, a judge who rules against Trump. And of course, Trump called the judge a lunatic. In that exchange with Laura Ingraham. How many people have we heard him apply that label to? In other recent newsletters, Richardson compares Chuck Schumer deciding not to risk the effects of a government shutdown to raise the temperature over Trump with something that happened in 1856 and why Edmund Burke supported the American Revolution, but not the French Revolution once upon a time. And how that might be relevant today. Professor Richardson, thanks very much for coming on in this prolonged extraordinary moment. And thanks for your work. Welcome to WNYC today.

Professor Heather Cox Richardson: Well, thank you for having me, Brian. I'm looking forward to it.

Brian Lehrer: Can we start with you a little? For people not familiar with your work, a history professor classically takes a long view and doesn't do that much day to day news analysis. Why did you want to write a multiple times a week newsletter? And what's the public purpose you're hoping that it serves?

Professor Heather Cox Richardson: Well, I never set out to write a newsletter. I simply was answering the questions that people were asking me about what was happening at the time in 2019 with Donald Trump's first impeachment case. So I was answering their questions and it snowballed into a nightly newsletter about how the events of the day fit into history. And it's important that I'm trained as a historian, not as a journalist, because a journalist is working to make sure that people understand what is happening, the news that is breaking, the things that are influencing their day to day lives.

A historian is trained to look at how and why societies change. So we tend to take the long view. And my particular understanding of those changes is that it's changes in ideas and changes in ideologies that affect the way societies evolve. And so those are the kind of things that I highlight. So I tend to look at longer term patterns. So it's a little bit different than what other people do.

Brian Lehrer: And some of your fans are already starting to call in I see. So let me make sure everybody has the phone number. Listeners, your questions or comments about American history as it relates to today or anything you read in Heather Cox Richardson's newsletter, Notes from an American, or anything you read in one of her books or for a select few of you, anything you learned when you took one of her history classes at Boston College, that's okay, too. 212-433-WNYC call or text 212-433-9692.

So let's talk about Chief Justice Roberts. He didn't mention Trump by name, as Trump was quick to point out, but it seemed clear who and what comment by Trump he was referring to. How rare is this historically for a Supreme Court chief justice to speak not just through their rulings and cases, but directly to the public to protect the Constitution?

Professor Heather Cox Richardson: Well, in the 20th and 21st century, it's extraordinarily rare. But let's actually flip that on its head. It's rarer for a president to undertake to undermine the judiciary, and that's a place, I think, where we need to start. But even before that, one of the things that you just played, one of the tapes you just played, and one of the things that I'm paying very close attention to, is that it does not seem to me that Donald Trump is functioning in the way that he used to, even 10 years ago and certainly not 20 years ago. And it's I think a mistake to continue to treat him as if he is operating with a clear goal in mind because he seems to me to be kind of all over the map.

And those are all things that we need to factor in in this extraordinary moment in which you have an executive branch that is working to undo the judicial branch.

Brian Lehrer: Just last year, Roberts helped grant Trump immunity from prosecution for official acts as president that would otherwise be crimes. You know, the presidential immunity ruling. You're a historian, not a lawyer, but do you have any take on how much yesterday's public statement by Roberts suggests where the line might be for this court on what you call Trump's authoritarian experiment and the historically very unusual steps that Trump is taking that you just laid out?

Professor Heather Cox Richardson: Well, I will not predict the future. I'm a prophet of the past, not of the future. But that decision that you're referring to, which is Donald Trump versus United States, which John Roberts actually wrote the majority opinion for, that came down on July 1st, 2024, explicitly said that a president could not be prosecuted for crimes committed as part of his official acts, which are under Article 2 of the Constitution and should have presumed immunity for other official acts as well. But the court went on to say, because this had never been decided in this fashion before, the court itself would have to decide what was an official act and what was not.

Now, obviously, Trump has been running the cord of this out as far as he possibly can. And this seemed to me to be a sort of a shot across the bow from John Roberts to Trump saying, hang on just a minute here, dude. We're not going to let you do absolutely everything. But again, it's important to recognize, if you remember when that decision was handed down last July, people like me said it was one of the most important events, if not the most important event in American history, because it undermined the very concept that we are all responsible equally to the law, and it exempted one individual, the president of the United States, from that.

Brian Lehrer: On Trump calling for the judge in the deportations case to be impeached. Politically, we should probably say it's highly unlikely because that takes a 3/4 majority vote in the Senate, not 60 votes as most things do. So even today's Senate with the Republican majority makes that very unlikely. Do you know how often in historical terms that's even happened? The impeachment of a judge, federal judge, and for what kind of cause?

Professor Heather Cox Richardson: Yeah, the last time it happened was in the early Republic and when in fact it was an attempt of an administration to get rid of a judge whose decisions they didn't like. They got rid of one judge who was kind of a loose cannon and it was not hard to get rid of him. But the next one they tried to get rid of got shut down. And that was decidedly the last time that a judge was impeached for political reasons. And that's what Roberts was referring to.

But I think that one of the things to be very clear about in this moment is what the rule of law actually is. And this is a much larger statement about what this administration is trying to do. So if you think about the way that our government is set up, we are designed to be a nation of laws. And the way that works is if you think of our Constitution, it's based in we the people, we are the sovereigns of the United States of America. But obviously it'd be difficult to have all 340 million of us in a room together trying to make decisions about what laws should be. So we elect representatives, and those representatives in Congress write our laws under the Constitution.

And that's the body of law under which we are all designed to live or what the country is designed to enable us to live under, the government that we approve of and that we elect. So when you have an administration that is openly flouting that law, you know, oopsie, too late. When the judge said our laws say you cannot deport people under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, and you cannot deport people without due process of law. When they're saying that they're not simply going, ha ha, I'm getting around a judge I don't like, that's actually an assault on the sovereignty of the American people. And it will only happen at a time when you have an administration that recognizes that it does not have the support of the American people.

And so what you're seeing here is not just I'm going to ignore the courts and something that seems like it's sort of puddle deep. This is actually an assault on the concept that the American people have the sovereignty over this country. And it's a really really dangerous moment in American history.

Brian Lehrer: Heather Cox Richardson, Boston College History professor, our guest, if you're just tuning in and she writes the very popular newsletter Letters from an American. 212-433-WNYC. If you want to ask her a question. 212-433-9692 Here's a question from a listener via text, a version of something that often comes up. Listener writes, Please compare Trump's efforts to dismantle the U.S. constitution, silence the press and control academia to steps taken when Hitler came to power.

And I want to further frame that for our listeners in the context of your book. Tell me if this is an accurate description. In your book Democracy Awakening, you describe how the United States avoided the temptations of fascist majority rule in the 20th century while Germany and Italy and other countries were succumbing. So do you have a take on that that relates to the much shorter question that the listener asked just to compare what Trump is doing to Hitler?

Professor Heather Cox Richardson: In a nutshell [inaudible 00:11:52] asked me to compare Trump to Hitler. And that is that I am an Americanist. I cannot do [inaudible 00:12:05] kind of. So I'm not [inaudible 00:12:09] and talk about Hitler. I could make a lot of [inaudible 00:12:13] to what happened when Viktor Orbán [inaudible 00:12:16] destroyed democracy Hungary in order to put himself in charge of that country. And you can see a lot of the parallels between that moment and what's happening in America, right down to the fact that a number of the laws that were put into in Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis [inaudible 00:12:31] were [inaudible 00:12:32] that Viktor Orbán's party had put [inaudible 00:12:38] law. And you know, the degree [inaudible 00:12:40] the people that running the right wing--

Brian Lehrer: You know what, I'm gonna have to jump in here for just a second. And listeners, there's nothing wrong with your radios or your live stream. There's a problem with the phone connection to Professor Richardson. So we're going to try to fix that. In the meantime, I will tell you that it's very interesting in her book Democracy Awakening, where the first part of it is largely about the United States avoiding the temptations of fascist majority rule in the 20th century. Remember, Hitler did have early support in his country. He was elected at first and then started to do all those things that the listener who sent the text was writing about.

That's a lot of the first part of Heather Cox Richardson's book Democracy Awakening. And then a lot of the second part of the book is about what she calls Trump's authoritarian experiment. And the book originally came out in 2023. So we didn't even have Trump 2 yet, she was writing a lot about Trump 1 and the things that he was leaning into as president and through January 6th, 2021, and what he might do in a second term if reelected. And here we are. So that's some of the context of Professor Richardson's work, as I understand it. I think we have you back now on a secure line. Do you want to start answering that question again? Go all the way back to where you started to say you're an Americanist.

Professor Heather Cox Richardson: Yes. So the question was the parallels between Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler. And I was saying that I can't do that because I'm an Americanist. And I try and stay in my lane. What I can do is talk about the ways in which modern day American life parallels that. For example, of what Viktor Orbán has done in Hungary and his destruction of democracy there, and the degree to which a number of the laws that his party passed there have been adopted in the United States. For example, some of the laws that Florida has passed under Governor Ron DeSantis, the don't say gay law, for example, came directly from Hungary.

And the ties between the American right wing and the Danube Institute, for example, in Hungary that is very closely tied to Orbán's government are very well established. And this is where we get projects like Project 2025. But the other thing that you asked about why America did not succumb either to fascism or Communism in the 1930s, I think is a really important one for this moment.

So around us, as we know, a number of countries have started to slide toward authoritarianism away from democracy. And Certainly in the 1920s, there was every reason to think the United States of America would join other countries that did that. We had a Nazi movement, a powerful Nazi movement in the United States. We had the KKK rising again in the 1920s. We had a reactionary right wing movement that was operative in the streets, you know, breaking heads in the streets.

And the question of why-- historians have always wondered why America didn't succumb to that. And I think in this moment, it is definitely worth remembering that our traditions really matter. So FDR, the president after 1933 in the United States, really talked a lot about the values of America, about the idea of being treated equally before the law, about having a right to a say in your government, about having equal access to resources, about making sure that the very wealthy didn't walk away with everything and his ability to redefine America to its traditional values the same way Abraham Lincoln did or the same way Teddy Roosevelt did I think was enormously powerful in making sure in that moment that we rejected the right wing authoritarianism that people like Charles Lindbergh were trying to advance.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call. Here is Stephen in Merrick. You're on WNYC. Hello, Stephen.

Stephen: Thank you. Yes, one to mention that a long time ago in the first administration, the president, the current president, was defying court orders that were subpoenas which he was completely ignoring. They were asking for information and showing up that. I just want to point out that he's just continuing the lie that he wouldn't do that or doesn't do that. He's been doing it all along.

Brian Lehrer: In the clip that we played from last night where he said he doesn't defy court orders. And you know, Stephen makes an interesting point. I don't know if this is exactly in your lane, Professor Richardson, but we could go back to the Russia investigation, the Mueller report, even though it kind of got shrugged off by the attorney general at the time, Trump's Attorney General Barr, there were a lot of instances of attempts at obstruction of justice by Trump in that report. So when Stephen says go back nine years to the beginning of Trump won, there is a lot of history.

Professor Heather Cox Richardson: Stephen, that's an excellent point. And one of the things that I'm watching right now and that I think is important is that if you think about trying to figure out what's happening in the administration, a lot of it is really, really opaque. You know, we don't really know what's happening when. And there's a lot of delay and there's a lot of, you know, well, this is the person in charge of the Department of Government Efficiency. No, this is, oh, oopsie, poopsie, we're going to pull back this declaration and put another one forward.

And one of the things I think that we are seeing and that Trump has always been an absolute master of is delaying until events change things on the ground so thoroughly that the outcome of the legal fight doesn't really matter so much. So, in fact, if you think about what the Department of Justice ultimately did with regard to Trump was that it did in fact, indict him on a number of criminal charges. But by then he had so delayed and he had so played the courts that he managed to get reelected. And of course, then those cases went away.

And that's, I think what we are seeing in this moment, that's at least what I'm seeing, is an attempt to be able to say, well, I'm not really breaking the law, but I'm obfuscating it enough that facts are going to change on the ground. So I get my way anyway. And I think we see that really clearly with what's happened with USAID. When a judge yesterday said, you cannot do what you just did, it has to be restored. What Elon Musk has done is unconstitutional, as he said, in any number of ways. And yet what is there left to restore when USAID has at this point, essentially been decimated?

And I think that that's exactly what we're seeing, is this, "Well, I'm really not breaking the law," but of course he's breaking the spirit of the law and changing events on the ground so that at the end it doesn't appear that it's going to matter. And that's one of the things I think we absolutely must speak up about and demand that people recognize that what's really at stake is whether get to rule ourselves or whether we are ruled by somebody who's ignoring our will.

Brian Lehrer: Alan in Manhattan, you're on WNYC with Boston College historian Heather Cox Richardson. Hi, Alan.

Alan: Hi. You know, it's funny when I turn this on, you guys are talking about Elon. So my question may not be directly appropriate for the historian on the air, but I just wanted to mention with Musk, I think there's been a lot of talk about what to do about what he's doing. And as a Kamala voter who actually owns a Tesla, I just see these things on the news about people's Teslas being vandalized and the dealerships being firebombed and all that. And I just want to say I think it's a horrible approach and I'd love to see the Dem leadership speak up and say this is only going to hurt our party. We're now perceived as terrorists, we're now perceived as violence, and we need every voter we can get and we don't need any more Dem voters in orange jumpsuits. And I just wanted to say that. Thank you so much.

Brian Lehrer: Alan, thank you very much. And there have been some instances that I've seen reported in the news of vandalism at Tesla dealerships and I guess against individuals, as Alan brings up with Teslas as well. I don't know if you've seen that, Professor Richardson, but considering everything else that we know about Trump and what he tried to do during the George Floyd protests, there is a risk. Well, besides which, you know, firebombing dealerships or vandalizing things in any way is wrong, that there's a risk of Trump declaring martial law if there's too much of that.

Professor Heather Cox Richardson: Yes. But I want to take a broader view here. Alan is absolutely right that at least in the United States, anytime protests turn violent, public opinion turns against them. So one of the things that people like me talk about about a lot when we talk about mass protests is how crucially important it is that they are non violent, that they actually make a point without violence. But in this moment, what's interesting to me about what you're seeing at the Tesla dealerships. And we don't know yet much about those people who are committing vandalism. There are certainly a lot of peaceful protest, which is entirely legal and entirely appropriate.

But when you look at the extraordinary anger in this moment at Elon Musk and at other billionaires, this is something that has been interesting to me now for decades because the United States really stopped talking about class issues in the 1960s, maybe the early 1970s, and started to focus largely on race issues or issues of gender. And it's always been interesting to me because while that was happening, of course, more than $50 trillion was transferred from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%. And I've been sitting here as somebody who studies the intersection of class and race and gender, I've been sitting here wondering when we were going to hear about that, because it was just bizarre that we weren't hearing more of it to my mind.

Now, all of a sudden, after the shooting of the United Healthcare CEO earlier this year, I think it was earlier this year, it might have been the end of last year, all of a sudden, there was this extraordinary outburst of fury at the very wealthy people who seem to be running the United States. So when you look at the violence against Tesla in this moment and against the dealerships and all of a sudden this sort of simmering volcano of fury at what seems to be an oligarchy taking over the United States, one of the things I'm looking at going forward is how that is going to play out and how that is going to affect, for example, the way the Democrats approach pulling together their supporters going forward.

So I think while Alan was speaking out of frustration, and I have-- my heart goes out to Tesla owners who bought those cars because they thought they were doing the right thing and now are finding themselves being attacked as being supportive of something that they are likely not supportive of. I think there's a lot going on with those that is less than just I'm mad and more about the idea of popular protest and what the kind of popular, violent protest you're seeing at the Tesla dealership says about our future politics, even in the short term as well as the long term.

Brian Lehrer: In our remaining minutes, I want to touch on a couple of your other recent newsletters that I mentioned in the intro. This one might even relate to the answer you just gave about how to protest Tesla, et cetera. There was the one comparing Chuck Schumer deciding not to risk the effects of a government shutdown to raise the temperature over Trump with something that happened in 1856 that you wrote about. Want to tell us a little of that 1856 story and why you brought it up?

Professor Heather Cox Richardson: Yes, although it's sort of adjacent to what I just said about Tesla and not the same story, and that's that there are times in American history in which we need different kinds of leaders. Sometimes we need negotiators, sometimes we need fire eaters. Sometimes we need people to lower the temperature. We need different people at different times. And in this moment, when Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York decided not to have a showdown in that particular moment with the Republicans in Congress, he ignited a lot of fury.

And I think you can make arguments for why his action may or may not have been a good idea. But what was really interesting in that moment to me was how much the Democrats for so long have tried to go back to a politics of normalcy, have tried to negotiate with the Republicans, have tried to say, wait, wait, wait, wait, here are the guardrails. Let's pay attention to the guardrails. Only to have the radicals in the Republican Party steamroll over those guardrails, and to continue to bully and to bluster and to get their way simply by screaming loudest.

And that looks very much like the United states in the 1840s and especially the 1850s, when the elite Southern enslavers did the exact same thing. Until finally, in 1856, a representative from South Carolina beat a senator from Massachusetts, Charles Sumner, almost to death on the floor of the Senate. And cut his head to the skull in three places. There's blood everywhere. You can imagine what those head wounds looked like. And all these Southern senators stood around while the guy was doing it. He came up behind Sumner, who was wedged under his-- his legs were wedged under his desk. He was a big man, but he couldn't fight back because he couldn't get up.

And they watched this happen. And somebody later said, why didn't you do something? And they said, well, we didn't think it was our fight. Well, Northerners had been putting up with a lot for a very long time. And in this moment, what were they going to do when a senator who was speaking for his constituents was almost killed on the floor of the Senate for doing that? And about a month later, a new representative from Massachusetts, a guy named Anson Burlingame, stood up. And again, as a brand new representative, stood up and gave a speech in which he finally said, listen, people from Massachusetts, by extension the north, have a very long history of being fighters and of being some of the country's best soldiers. And just so you know, if you keep pulling this crap, and I paraphrase, that's not exactly what he said, but if you keep doing this, we will fight.

And that declaration that enough was a freak enough was enough to make Anson Burlingame like this huge figure of inspiration across the North. That speech became known in its era and until the 20th century as one of the most important in American history. Because finally people said, this is not the America under which we want to live, and we are willing to fight you for it. It. And so in that moment, when people are turning so strongly against Schumer, what I am hearing is a number of people saying, we want a fighter here and not somebody who is simply going to try to maintain those guardrails.

Brian Lehrer: And finally, briefly, to your newsletter entry on why Edmund Burke supported the American Revolution but not the French Revolution way back when those were new and how that might be relevant today. Where would you start on that?

Professor Heather Cox Richardson: I would start by saying that the reason I talk about Edmund Burke in that context, who was the father of conservatism, is because many of today's radicals in what is now the Republican Party, not the traditional Republican Party, but the MAGA Republican Party, try and claim that they are conservatives. But what Burke talked about was his support for the American Revolution because it was essentially codifying what was already true on the ground that the people in the United States were fighting-- the colonies were trying to cement what was actually already their traditionalism, whereas the French were trying to get rid of the government they had in order to impose an ideology. They had a vision of the way the world should work, and they were trying to fit people into it.

And what Burke says is if you try to make people fit into an ideology, pretty soon you're going to have to start cutting off heads and you're going to have to try and force people to fit your ideology rather than the other way around. And what real conservatism is, is trying to make a government be stable and the best for as many people as you possibly can. So in this moment, when I think about conservatism, I end up where Abraham Lincoln was when he talked about conservatism and he said the country's best conservatives or real conservatives, were the ones who honored the Declaration of Independence.

The idea that we all have a right to be treated equally before the law, we have a right to have a say in our government, and we have a right to have equal access to resources, which is absolutely contrary to what today's MAGA Republicans are talking about. So they are no conservatives. They are radical extremists.

Brian Lehrer: And that's going to be the last word. I want to tell you our listeners, via a lot of text messages and more calls that we could have taken if we had more time, have so appreciated this appearance. Heather Cox Richardson, Boston College historian, writer of the popular newsletter Letters from an American, and author of many books, including her latest, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America. Thank you very, very much.

Professor Heather Cox Richardson: Thank you, Brian.

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