Jon Meacham

A turning point in history as Donald Trump is voted back into power… this week on Firing Line.

 

TRUMP: This will truly be the golden age of America, that’s what we have to have. [applause]

 

He’s the first convicted felon elected to the nation’s highest office, and will become only the second president to serve two non-consecutive terms. Donald Trump is also the only former president who did not accept defeat…

 

TRUMP JAN 6TH: We will never give up, we will never concede. It doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved.

 

…leading to the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. But Americans delivered Trump a clear victory this week over Vice President Kamala Harris, who then did what Trump refused to do four years ago – concede.

 

HARRIS: We will engage in a peaceful transfer of power. [applause]

 

Jon Meacham is a Pulitzer Prize winning presidential biographer who has voted for candidates from both parties. 

 

MEACHAM: I don’t think history offers us comfort in this hour. I do think it can offer us inspiration. 

 

On election day he wrote, Trump poses “a unique threat to the nation.” What does Jon Meacham say now?

 

‘Firing Line’ with Margaret Hoover is made possible in part by: Robert Granieri, Vanessa

and Henry Cornell, The Fairweather Foundation, and by the following… Corporate funding

is provided by Stephens Inc.

 

INTERVIEW

HOOVER Jon Meacham, welcome back to Firing Line. 

MEACHAM Thank you. 

HOOVER Donald Trump has won back the White House after being voted out of office four years ago. He is the first president since Grover Cleveland to win a second non-consecutive term, the first Republican in 20 years likely to win the popular vote. In the context of the country’s nearly 250 year history, what does Trump’s victory tell you about the state of the nation? 

MEACHAM I don’t think anyone’s ever had as strong a grip on a party, as an unconventional figure, as Donald Trump has on the Republican Party. And now a popular vote victory which, in a polarized age, is a very significant thing. There is an extraordinary concern, self-evidently, about the Democratic Party’s capacity to enable democracy to deliver. And into that situation, onto that stage, steps someone who promises universal solutions and plays bluntly on an enormous amount of grievance politics. But the question we now have to deal with is, are the greatest concerns that people like me have, which is that he is a unique threat to constitutional government, are we going to be proven wrong? And I hope we are. 

HOOVER President Biden borrowed a phrase from you to describe the 2020 election as “the battle for the soul of America.” That phrase we heard again this week in the Rose Garden.

BIDEN The struggle for the soul of America since our very founding has always been an ongoing debate and it’s still vital today. 

HOOVER Jon, as a historian, what do you see was at stake in this election? 

MEACHAM The constitutional order, as you and I grew up understanding it. I believe that a President Harris would have been a sequential chapter in the American story. And I believe that there is a risk that the second Trump term would be a wrench, and something beyond that story. And again, I very much hope that so many of my friends who have told me that that concern is hyperbolic, that I take what Trump says too literally, I hope they’re right. But there’s no mystery about what the country chose. And if you believe in democracy, as I do, then you can’t only respect results that you like. And so I think what’s at stake, what was at stake on Tuesday is still at stake. This we’ve moved from having an option besides President Trump, to counting on guardrails and his own instincts, his own capacity to not follow through on the kinds of things that he says. And that’s very cold comfort for a lot of people. The characteristics that have made him an undeniably entertaining and compulsively watchable political figure are the same characteristics that give people like me an enormous amount of concern. And now we just see what happens. 

HOOVER On Election Day you warned in the New York Times that electing Trump would be a, quote, “open invitation to chaos.” You know, half of the country, essentially, voted against Donald Trump. What hope can you offer them that the constitutional order won’t be undermined, that this really isn’t going to be four years of increased chaos? 

MEACHAM I don’t think history offers us comfort in this hour. I do think it can offer us inspiration. So bear with me for a second. I’m not going to argue here that somehow or another Donald Trump has changed since Tuesday. That would be a fool’s errand. And by the way, the people who voted for him don’t want him to change. So there’s that. But my hope is based on the fact that in the long view of history– we’ve had 59 presidential elections in this country and only 15 of them have unfolded with the electorate we just had, that we have now, since the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act of the mid 1960s. Women have only voted in this country for 104 years. So we have lived out of compliance with the Declaration of Independence and its implications for a far longer period of time than we have lived in compliance with them. So to me, that’s not despairing, a source of despair. It is a source of inspiration that we can bear witness to the Declaration. We can, as Saint Paul said, be patient in tribulation, because I think this is going to be a very difficult period. I hope it’s not. I hope this is wrong. I just, I think that there is a genuine risk that the country has decided to take. I do not believe the country should have taken that risk. But it has. And in a democracy, we move forward. 

HOOVER You know, you just articulated a risk that the country has taken. How do you understand the 72 million Americans plus that voted for Donald Trump, voted to take the risk, as you characterize it. 

MEACHAM I believe that an extraordinary number of people, a dispositive number of people voted for a change. They did not believe that democracy, as we understand it, was delivering results that they want in their lives, both economically and culturally. Because, again, there’s no mystery here what Donald Trump has said. There’s no mystery about what happened after the 2020 election. And, Margaret, for what it’s worth, I thought for a long time that President Trump was a difference of degree, but not of kind, that he was a populist figure in a recognizable American vernacular. And then the 2020 election and his attempts to overturn it happened. And that’s a difference of kind. Richard Nixon didn’t do that in 1960. Hubert Humphrey didn’t do it in ‘68. Al Gore didn’t do it in 2000. Hillary Clinton didn’t do it in ‘16. That’s just different. What I think happened this week in this election is people weighed– if people put that concern in their calculus, they decided that having someone who, with a certain degree of unconventionality to try to change things in their daily lives, was worth that larger risk. And that also means that they looked at the Democratic Party and they did not see enough that resonated with them to cast that most personal of votes, the presidential vote, the only vote in the whole country, the whole system, where everyone gets to weigh in on a particular choice. The president and the vice president are the only nationally elected people. And so it is at once grand and personal. 

HOOVER In his victory speech, former President Trump, President-elect Trump, vowed to follow through on his campaign promises, which have included political prosecutions, mass deportations, pardons for the January 6th rioters. When– you know, I spoke to General H.R. McMaster last week. And he has frequently referenced this notion that we need to listen to authoritarians when they say what they plan to do. But my question for you as a historian of the American presidency is, how seriously ought we take campaign promises from a newly elected American president? And I think this question gets at how strong are the institutions and how capable is President-elect Trump at following through on some of these promises? 

MEACHAM I don’t think we should sugarcoat this or minimize it. I think this is a genuine risk. And we– I base this on what John Kelly has said, on what General McMaster has said, on what General Milley has said, on what so many people with first hand experience of the empowered Donald Trump said, have said. And at great personal risk in their professional and personal lives came out against the result, the event that just happened. Don’t listen to me. Listen to the people who served him.

HOOVER: Yeah.

MEACHAM: And so is this a real risk? Absolutely, it’s a real risk. Nothing, no concern that people had before this week went away this week. The risk became real as opposed to prospective. 

HOOVER In her statement acknowledging that Donald Trump won the election former Representative Liz Cheney said, quote, “Citizens across this country, our courts, members of the press and those serving in our federal, state and local governments must now be the guardrails of democracy.” The press, Jon, as you well know, took a lot of criticism from both sides throughout this campaign. And frankly, if it’s going to be a guardrail in a next Trump administration, with decreased confidence in the media, how will the media play a role in a second Trump term? 

MEACHAM The issue with the press as a guardrail is the press’s power is persuasive, not actual, not mechanical. Does that make sense? It’s that the press can report, but it can’t take action unless the people want to take action on the information that they are provided. So this is about us. This is about the American people. 

HOOVER Donald Trump also said this week that ‘many people have told me God spared my life for a reason and that reason was to save our country and to restore America to greatness.’ How do you reflect on that statement? 

MEACHAM You know, President Reagan thought the same thing after the assassination attempt in 1981. He talked about it. I, blessedly, have never been shot at. I don’t want to cast any stones in terms of how people have reacted to and how they interpret that terrible, unacceptable crime of assaulting the former president. I will say that there is an enormous amount of peril in any one of us believing that we have a special monopoly on truth or destiny. 

HOOVER After Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory in 1984, where he won 49 states, Buckley dedicated an entire episode of Firing Line to discussing the fallout for Democrats. 

BUCKLEY The failure of the Democratic Party in the national election is generally considered to have told us something about the collapse of liberalism as we have known it during the past half century. There are those who, a, insist the pieces can be picked up and reassembled, b,  those who feel we should be grown up about the collapse of liberalism and move to the realism of conservative policies, and, c, those who believe we should push out to the left. 

HOOVER What do you expect the post mortem for the Democratic Party will be? 

MEACHAM One of the results of the 1984 election was Bill Clinton and other Democratic, younger Democratic leaders recognizing that there was some truth in what Buckley said there. And they founded the Democratic Leadership Council. They attempted to move the party from a New Deal liberalism that Vice President Mondale embodied – he was a Hubert Humphrey, Minnesota liberal – to move the party to a more market based, closer to the center. And that did produce a national victory within eight years. I am very wary of anyone who reads a single election as the obituary of, or the perennial rebirth of any one party. The favorite example of this is after the 1964 election when Lyndon Johnson did so powerfully well against Barry Goldwater, James Reston wrote in The New York Times that the Republican Party would be out of power for a generation. Within 48 months, I think, the Republicans won 60 seats in the House and Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California. So there is a push and a pull in American politics. And that’s fine, right? That’s what I want, is I want, I believe in that push and pull. I believe in having an arena of disagreement and dissent. To have that arena requires an infrastructure of a common understanding that there are rules that must be obeyed. And that is the question that confronts the nation at this hour and will for the next 48 months, is, will the incumbent president not do what he has said he wants to do? Again, this is not perspective. I am simply quoting what the incumbent president, what the President-elect, has said. 

HOOVER The only other president to win non-consecutive terms is Grover Cleveland. And his second term in office proved to be far less popular and less successful than his first term. He returned to office as a lame duck president with less power and less ability to pursue a long term agenda. How do those challenges apply to this current context? 

MEACHAM It’s a fascinating question. And will this set off an instant race among a next generation of Republican and MAGA leaders for the succession. That is, will the drama– The question you’re asking, which is a great one, is, have we just have we just entered, have we just inaugurated a new season of Succession, and will that be an enveloping drama of the Trump presidency? I don’t see how it isn’t. And I think it’ll absolutely affect governance. And the future of the Republican Party is now pretty clearly whatever the Trump or Trump-adjacent people want it to be. 

HOOVER Yes.

MEACHAM And so the notion that there is an established… that’s just gone, right? That is, the notion that there is this Bush/Cheney/Reagan core and that this is a passing storm, no. This is Donald Trump’s party. 

HOOVER Many Republicans argued through the course of this election, on the other side of your argument, and they argued that the institutions will hold. The institutions checked Donald Trump’s worst instincts in his first term, and they will do so again. 

MEACHAM The institutions are human. And the institutions have to be manifest in a person. Mike Pence helped save the republic in January of 2021. Bill Barr on several occasions, it’s been reported, stopped the worst instincts. So it wasn’t some Olympian, clinical institution that did it. It was the people who represented those institutions. So who are those people going to be this time? That’s the question. There’s not a mythical check and balance. Checks and balances are human. It’s about judges. It’s about cabinet members. It’s about generals. I think we have to be very clear eyed and sober minded about this. And I, I can’t underscore enough how I would like us in four years to look back at our conversation here and say I was proved wrong. 

HOOVER President-elect Trump has promised to shut down his federal prosecutions, and his election could protect him from any accountability in his state criminal cases. There are conservatives who have called for President Biden to simply pardon him, citing the precedent of Gerald Ford pardoning Richard Nixon. As you look back now, did the Nixon pardon help heal the country? Or did it just reinforce the notion that presidents are above the law? 

MEACHAM It did both. 

HOOVER How? 

MEACHAM It’s an Anglican answer for you. It did both. It ended the Watergate drama and it underscored the fact that presidents would not have to face prosecution for their acts. I don’t know what I would say about pardoning President Trump. I will say that I would be flabbergasted if it happened. 

HOOVER But would pardoning Trump heal the nation in any way? 

MEACHAM I don’t think– Perhaps. Perhaps. I mean, I don’t see– I think you would have half the country– as decisive as this victory was, right? 

HOOVER Yeah. 

MEACHAM Still, half the country would say this is proving that we are trending toward a monarchical system as opposed to a democratic one. 

HOOVER How so? 

MEACHAM Well, if you’re saying– a pardon would suggest that there is, someone is above the law, and that all the attempts to hold President Trump accountable in these sundry cases, that there was a different standard of justice. 

HOOVER Yeah, I think the thinking, I think the thinking of the argument, right, is that if the American people have returned him to power with such a clear mandate, would a pardon offer a degree of grace that could help the country heal and move forward? 

MEACHAM That’s an interesting argument. I have not contemplated it deeply. I am, I’m skeptical of it, at first blush. 

HOOVER All right. As Democrats conduct their post-mortem and determine what the future of the party will look like and what happened, the finger pointing has already started; that President Biden and the Democratic Party ought to have demanded that he be that transitional, one-term president from the beginning that could have healed the country post-Trump and left the Democratic Party in better shape to have a primary and to renew itself. Based on what you experienced with President Biden and your observations, do you think that that argument deserves real scrutiny as Democrats move forward and think about what happened. 

MEACHAM Yeah. President Biden is my friend, and because of the personal nature of the relationship, I don’t want to comment on the finger pointing. I will say that it is an entirely legitimate question, and it’s one that I think will be asked for a very long time. 

HOOVER Final question. President Biden has already invited Trump to the White House. He’s committed to attending the inauguration, two norms that Trump rejected in 2020. And he also said in his Rose Garden speech this week, he spoke to Trump on the phone and assured him that he had directed the entire administration to work with his team to ensure a peaceful and orderly transition. Kamala Harris, by the way, also conceded publicly and called Donald Trump to concede the election. Are you hopeful that Trump’s flouting of democratic norms and civility will prove to be an aberration in our politics? 

MEACHAM I hope very much it’s an aberration. I fear it is not. And the question now is, does a re-elected Donald Trump act differently? The country and the world have been like Lucy and the football in Peanuts for a long time. You know, every time you think that there’s a kind of gravitational correction, President Trump ends up changing that. The concern I have, Margaret, is, as Lincoln said, all men act on incentive. And I just ask people to think, if you’re Donald Trump and you have been reelected after everything that’s happened, what is your incentive to change your behavior? Because the behavior you’ve undertaken has, as you pointed out, led to only the second time in American history where someone has been returned to power. And so we find ourselves dependent in many ways on whether he will obey the letter and spirit of the law and of custom. And that is the open question. 

HOOVER Is there anything you can leave us with? 

MEACHAM That it’s a miracle that American democracy has lasted this long. I think the founders would be pleasantly startled by it. Lincoln, in his first public speech, talked about how if there was ever to be a fall of the American republic, it would not come from abroad but would come from home. And I think that we have always known that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. And this is an hour for citizenship. If I were a Trump voter, I would not gloat. And as a Harris voter, I believe that one should not despair. 

HOOVER Jon Meacham, for those words of inspiration, thank you for returning to Firing Line. 

MEACHAM Thanks, Margaret.