When Jon Meacham appears on “Morning Joe” from his elegant, bookish basement, in Nashville, he knows that he will be asked to link the latest outrage of the news cycle to a historical event of consequence. This is his role, and he never fails to deliver. Meacham invariably comes through with a choice quotation from Lincoln or Jesus of Nazareth, with an apt reference to, say, Yalta or the Long Telegram, and he always does it with a wry, slightly weary “It’s too damn early in the A.M., isn’t it?” smile.
When he was young, Meacham seemed older; now that he is in his fifties, he seems like a young man playing an older one, as if the hair were powdered, the half-glasses non-prescription. After stints at the Chattanooga Times and Washington Monthly, Meacham went up the ladder at Newsweek, when newsweeklies were still very much a thing. But, at a certain point, he ditched journalism to become a full-time historian. The lack of a doctoral degree has not hindered him. His books are deeply researched and eloquent; they include “Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship,” “Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power,” and “American Lion,” a biography of Andrew Jackson, which won a Pulitzer Prize, in 2009. His most recent book is “And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle.” He has also written about Christianity, patriotism, country music, and impeachment.
In recent years, Meacham has added to his portfolio. He has formed a relationship with Joe Biden, who has read Meacham and agrees with him about the consequential nature of his own Presidency and the current peril facing American democracy. Meacham’s cadences, ideas, and points of reference are evident in a number of Biden’s speeches, including the most recent State of the Union. Recently, Meacham was asked to join the Administration—presumably to play the sort of role that the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., played under John F. Kennedy—but he declined. I spoke with Meacham earlier this week for The New Yorker Radio Hour about his bond with Biden and the potential resurgence of, yes, Donald Trump. Our conversation was edited for clarity and length.
Jon, the press spends a huge amount of time obsessing about the odds, the mood, the events of the day. Let’s talk about the stakes. As we witness the renewed and unending tragedy of Donald Trump—his candidacy, his battles with the law from New York to Georgia to D.C.—what is at stake now, in this latest chapter?
What’s at stake is whether America now has forty-seven or forty-eight per cent of the likely electorate to show up in 2024 who are more likely than not to vote for an overtly autocratic figure for President of the United States. Trump has explicitly said that the rule of law should not apply to him, that the results of free and fair elections should not be obeyed if he loses them. There’s no mystery here. Trump has said that the Constitution should be suspended, that he should be reinstated, that every other actor, pretty much, within the constitutional order, is illegitimate, if that actor is not one-hundred-per-cent supportive of his own appetites and ambitions. Having a dictatorial figure is not new—either in human experience or American history. What is new is that so many people are willing to suspend their better judgment to support him.
Did many people not make a mistake thinking, with the results of the last election, and then the spectacle of January 6th, that this somehow—this impulse of authoritarianism—would begin to recede, and maybe even recede fairly rapidly? Was that not a gigantic illusion?
That’s a good way to put it. It was a gigantic illusion, and it’s a persistent one. I am friends with—you are friends with, I suspect, though you may not be able to admit it, in the offices of The New Yorker—principled Republicans who have said to me, for going on eight years now, since 2015, that Trump was going to fade. That it wouldn’t work. That his hour either (a) would not come or (b) would pass. And I now refer to this, overly glibly, as the Republican “Brigadoon” fantasy: that there is this world where Trump just disappears, and that world’s going to come back and reassert itself. The only problem with that fantasy is that it is fact-free. I don’t doubt that Senator McConnell and other establishment Republicans want the world to be Trump-less. The problem is, there is no factual basis to believe at this hour that the people who spend the currency of their franchise to establish Republican officeholders share that view. There’s just not. And I believe that the 2020 election was a victory for the forces of democracy. I believe the 2022 election was a surprising victory for the forces of democracy, by and large. But the story’s not over. As we are sitting here, in the early spring of 2023, there is a vital reckoning with Trump back on a ballot coming up within a year, in the primaries, and then in November, 2024. It’s a trope that every election is more important than any other election. But this is not 1976. This isn’t 1980. This isn’t a difference of degree, which is what Presidential elections tend to be. (Partisans don’t believe that. But I believe that.) It’s a difference of kind.
But, when we’re assessing where Donald Trump came from, I think a lot of people would argue that some of the origins of Trump come from people that you have studied, and have admired, whether it’s the Lee Atwater side of the George H. W. Bush campaign, or Ronald Reagan speaking for states’ rights in Mississippi. Elements of Trumpism have been present in the Republican Party establishment for a very long time. So, when you’re assessing where Trumpism came from, how do you begin to analyze the roots of it?
To me, the roots start with a favorite common topic of ours, in the third chapter of Genesis. It starts before Roger Ailes. This is an elemental struggle. It’s a struggle of power. Trump wants power. He has convinced an extraordinary number of people that, somehow or another, it would be better for him to have the power than someone else. I am more skeptical of the long-term Republican complicity in Trumpism for this reason: I think of the 1933-to-2017 period as a figurative conversation—a figurative debate between Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. And, if you think of that spectrum, you see F.D.R. and Truman and Lyndon Johnson were over on one side of the twenty-yard line. President Reagan, George W. Bush were over on the other twenty. And almost everybody else was in between.
Are there moments, are there habits of heart and mind, in the Republican past that are regrettable? Absolutely. There are moments and habits of heart and mind on the American left that are regrettable. Let me put it this way: Trumpism was not inevitable unless you go back to an elemental argument about human nature, which is that power is all. And I simply don’t believe that the Republican figures that are kind of corralled up in this particular critique would have acted that way. I don’t think Ronald Reagan would’ve done it. Richard Nixon broke the law, but then he followed the law. I actually have an emerging, revisionist view of Nixon, which is: when you think about 1968 and how cataclysmic it was, and then how things tended to settle down, from ’69 until Trump came, you have to try to figure out what happened. Why did the temperature get turned down a bit? I think, to some extent, it had to do with the fact that Nixon largely governed from the center. He created the E.P.A.; he proposed a health-care plan to the left of Obama’s, influenced by Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He was trying to build this kind of majority-centrist party. After he broke the law, he followed the law. Richard Nixon, in the end, had a sense of shame and obeyed the Supreme Court. We are not in that place.
One of the things that I believe is that the broad, media-driven conversation about the stakes of the hour has not been commensurate with the challenge we face. There are still people we know, we love, we admire, who have two different gears in their head. One gear is they will be quite clear about the danger that Trump and Trumpism present. But, on the other hand, they will be conventionally critical of the White House in this era, as if somehow or another it matters whether President Biden had a good week or a bad week. But this is not George Mitchell versus Bob Dole on “Capital Gang.” It’s just not. I’m not saying that therefore we answer blind loyalty on the right with blind loyalty on the center and the left. But I do think a sense of proportion is vital here.
What do you mean by a sense of proportion, in this context?
I remember when, having a conversation with a group of people, many of whom your listeners would clearly recognize, the week after Glenn Youngkin won the governorship in Virginia, and I gave this kind of homily that I just gave you in very short form, which is: it doesn’t matter, given the authoritarian forces abroad in the land; it doesn’t matter whether Joe Biden had a good week or a bad week. This is not “The McLaughlin Group.” That doesn’t work in this context. When the history of the American Republic is written, Glenn Youngkin’s name is probably not going to be in it. But the end of American democracy will be. I said that, and a Washington journalist nodded at me. Then he said, without any bridge language, “Well, that’s true. But, you know, President Biden had a bad week. What is he going to do?” I wanted to put my head in a meat grinder.
Well, let’s talk about the forty-seven per cent of the country that is likely to vote for Donald Trump in a 2024 election. What do those people want? You live in Tennessee, where Trump voters are probably thicker on the ground than where I live.
Yes.
And, when you talk with Trump voters, what is it that they clearly say? What is it that they want? And I don’t mean conventional things like lower taxes or law and order, things that are standard-issue Republican or conservative values.
It’s my Genesis theory. It’s about power.
So you’ve got to be clear about the third chapter of Genesis.
The fall of humankind. There were rules. And humankind chose to put their own ambition above what the rule was. The rule was: don’t eat the fruit, and everything’s going to be great. And yet they ate the fruit. And here we are.
So sooner or later we’re all going to be like Noah on an ark—or the lucky ones will be like Noah on an ark—riding out the apocalypse?
I never thought I would say that the fate of American democracy depends on a particular partisan vote. And yet I believe—I believed in 2020, I believed in 2022, and I believe in 2024—that the fate of the constitutional order itself depends on electing Democrats. And I say that as someone who is not a partisan. I am somebody who believes in the journey toward a more perfect union. I believe that the Constitution has terrible flaws. But, as Churchill said, it is the worst form of government we have except for all the others. And so in that sense I guess that’s a kind of Burkean conservative view. This is the world we have; let’s make the best of it. And there are particularly left-wing critics who would strongly disagree with that, and think of me as a slightly different kind of enabler.
How so?
Well, that if you defend a Constitution that you know to be flawed, you are part of the problem. This is the argument against William Lloyd Garrison, in the eighteen-fifties. Garrison was the leader of part of the abolitionist movement that called the Constitution a “covenant with death” and an “agreement with Hell.” And, at one of the great public events of all time, in Massachusetts, on the Fourth of July, in the eighteen-fifties, here’s who was on the program: Sojourner Truth, Henry David Thoreau, and William Lloyd Garrison. So there’s a New Yorker Festival for you.
A good lineup!
[Laughs.] Garrison gets up and burns the Constitution. (Wendell Phillips [had put out] a book [called “The Constitution a Pro-Slavery Compact”]. That was the argument.) So there is a left-wing critique that these institutions that people like me defend are inherently corrupt and arguably irredeemable, and that, by propping up a constitutional order with a process-oriented candidate or party, we are avoiding the hard truth—that the system itself should be uprooted.
Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln disagreed. Douglass is the one who said the Constitution is, in fact, a “glorious liberty document.” It did not recognize property in man, and therefore it could be amended and reformed. And that’s where I fall in this.
Let me answer your Tennessee question, because this is something that surprised me not long ago. If you’re a Trump supporter and you’re talking to me, you’re probably not going to be as elemental in your explanation as you might otherwise be. So what I hear is: Yeah, Trump is terrible, but I like his policies. And then, when I point out that he didn’t have any policies, but certain policies took root, that doesn’t compute, right? That hits some plexiglass. I sometimes call it intellectual Kevlar. They don’t want to hear that. It bounces off. The other very important argument out there that is going to get more and more relevant, as we head into 2024, is that President Biden is, in fact, not in charge, that there is a cabal of left-wingers who are using him as the means to advance a radical-left agenda. Now, I defy anyone to go talk to Joe Biden and come away thinking he’s a radical anything. But, again, the facts don’t matter. They have made up their minds. There’s even a theory—I heard this the other day—that President Obama, in fact, is really calling all the shots.
Obama, who was never particularly radical in the first place! The most radical thing about him was that he was the first Black President. He was a fairly conventional, just-left-of-center Democrat.
I would say—perhaps this is an overly glib way of putting it—that President Obama is biographically fascinating but historically conventional, in terms of how he governed.
The theory of the case on the right—at least the quasi-respectable right—is: Yeah, Trump is terrible, but Biden will lead us, or allow us to be led, to crazy socialism. And it’s diabolical. President Biden is, in fact, a left-of-center Democrat, in classic post-New Deal terms. His really remarkable legislative achievements do involve public-sector spending, which people are against unless they benefit from it. The infrastructure bill is a bipartisan, decades-in-the-making achievement. So it’s not a fact-based argument that you can win. In a country that is this narrowly divided, you are talking about reaching a vanishingly small number of people, in five or six states, who can in fact put the good of the whole ahead of their own good. Now, that is at once terrifying and thrilling. It’s terrifying because it means there are so few people who hold the fate of the Republic in their hands. But what’s kind of thrilling about it is, well, there aren’t that many people to reach.
Jon, your personal involvement in the stakes has shifted. You had a long and storied career in journalism. You shifted to being a historian. You’ve written some remarkable and best-selling biographies—Presidential biographies. The most recent is “And There Was Light,” about Lincoln. And yet you also are getting more and more involved, particularly with Joe Biden, as a kind of outside adviser, particularly on speeches. I think it would be good to know what your association with Joe Biden is, how it began, and how far it goes.
Sure. I’m not going to say I’m happy to talk about it. [Laughs.] But I will because I understand the world in which we live.
Well, it’s a legitimate question, I think.
It’s absolutely legitimate. Of course it is. I wrote a book called “American Gospel,” which was about religious liberty. It was an attempt, in the era of Terri Schiavo and a kind of more militant secularism, to say that in fact religion has shaped us without strangling us. It was kind of a Jeffersonian argument, in that many, many Americans are religious. It is a calculation they make. It may not be the dispositive one, but it is a force. So to try to legislate it out of existence, or to tend toward theocracy—both extremes are wrong. Here’s a middle course. And I thought the Founding Fathers actually did a pretty good job of charting that, of disestablishing religion but recognizing that it was a real force. John Lewis and Martin Luther King were examples of the power of religious impulses to achieve great reform. So I published it in, I think, ’06. And Joe Biden was making, at that point, his second run for President. It lasted, I think, about thirty minutes. But he read that book. And after he was done with the campaign, or toward the end of his campaign, he actually took me aside at an event, and showed me some laminated cards he had in his pocket that had quotations from the book. As you know, when writers are shown their own words, we tend to approve of the taste and wisdom of the person who found those words.
You were flattered.
Absolutely. Of course. In 2017, former Vice-President Biden had written a book about the loss of his son Beau, and we did a book event here in Nashville where I interviewed him for a crowd. We had a long conversation afterward, several hours. At that point, I was writing a book called “The Soul of America,” which was an argument that crisis is the rule, not the exception, in our life. That what Abraham Lincoln called our political religion—where the Declaration of Independence was our sacred text (we had apostles and martyrs and prophets with the Founders), and that it gave us a guide, a goal to seek, a maxim to try to realize—was a useful story to tell against the narrative of power at all costs, which Trump embodied. The former Vice-President read the book. We then did an event at the University of Delaware, I want to say, early ’19. After that he would occasionally call with historical questions. (Jon Stewart once referred to me as a “dork Wikipedia.” I took it as a compliment; I don’t think Jon meant it that way.) And so we became friendly. In early 2020, I wrote a piece for the Washington Post endorsing him for President. (I’m sure that really made the difference!) I spoke to the Democratic Convention, at his request, and I have helped with the drafting of speeches, which I hate talking about, because if you’re going to serve in that way you shouldn’t talk about it. But again—
It’s against the code of the speechwriter to ever speak of it, isn’t it?
It is. And I wish I didn’t have to, but here we are.
Did any of this make you feel uncomfortable? Because, as a journalist, you could be for somebody or against somebody, editorially, in the obvious way. But to be writing speeches, to be speaking at a political convention, et cetera—that’s another matter, no?
I’m not a journalist anymore. I’m a biographer. I’m a professor. And I believe firmly that to whom much is given, much is expected.
That’s fair. Now, you were asked to be in the Administration just recently. You decided not to do that. Why?
I believe that what President Biden is doing is vital for the present and the future of American democracy. I believe he is defending principles that I see as essential to continuing the life of a country that I am thankful—every hour of every day—I was born in. And I think that I will help him in the best way I can. And my judgment is that the current relationship optimizes that role.
In other words, you didn’t want to play an Arthur Schlesinger-like role?
No, not especially. And I don’t ever want to profit from this at all. I don’t want to write a book about it.
You would never write a book about the Biden Administration?
I don’t want to profit from this. I see this as an act of citizenship, which sounds overly grand and all that. But you’ve asked, and I believe that there are moments in the life of a citizen that are decisive. I was born, after the height of the civil-rights movement, as a white Southerner. I like to think that I would’ve been on the right side of that, but I don’t know. And if everybody who’s a white Southerner born after that had, in fact, had someone who had been on the right side of it, it wouldn’t have been so terrible. So I don’t know what would’ve happened. I don’t want to look back on this moment and say I got it wrong. I believe that Trumpism is a fundamental threat to the things that we have long held dear. And so, if I can be of help in articulating a vision of the country that puts the Declaration, that puts the pursuit of justice, that puts the best of the country, front and center, then I want to do that.
Many books are written about Abraham Lincoln. Many, many, many biographies. In fact, there are so many books written about Lincoln that, I believe, every year there’s an award given to the best book about Abraham Lincoln. Your book is a biography, but I also think it resonates, very deliberately, if not overtly, with the present moment. Was that the impetus for the book? And how does it resonate to you?
In many ways, it was. I wanted—imagine saying this sentence—I thought that our current moment was like 1933 or 1968 [in America], where there were proto-fascist forces around; there was a sense that democracy had run out its string, that dictatorship was the wave of the future, as Anne Morrow Lindbergh put it, in the middle of the twentieth century. And that enough conscientious effort went into keeping democracy alive. I am increasingly concerned, however, having made that argument, that this is the eighteen-fifties—that, in fact, there are competing visions of reality itself. In the eighteen-fifties, you had, explicitly, people who defined humanity and liberty and rights and responsibilities differently. It was not a matter of “We are in this together, so let’s argue about the means forward.” It was an argument instead about who could be included in the polity itself, and it had to be settled. It was not settled by a congressional debate. It was not settled by a Brookings seminar. It was not settled. It was not settled through the ordinary protocols of politics. It was settled by the sword.
By the Civil War.
By the Civil War. By the death of what demographers now believe might have been seven hundred and fifty thousand Americans. So it turns out that, in the American story—at the heart of the American story—people from my part of the country would rather have seen that level of bloodshed than surrender the power of enslaving other people. So we don’t do ourselves any favors by pretending that, somehow or another, we have merrily trotted along on this inevitable ladder toward what Churchill once called the “broad sunlit uplands.” Our history is dark. It is difficult. It is full of near-misses. And what I wanted to explore—and Lincoln rests at the center of this question—is why did Abraham Lincoln believe and do what he did? Not how, but why? Because he was a politician. And politicians can always find a reason not to do X or to not do Y.
Abraham Lincoln, for all of his failings, fundamentally believed that slavery was wrong and could not be expanded. He understood that people from my part of the world believed that slavery was right and should be not only protected but perpetuated and expanded. Why? Why did he think that? He thought it, and acted on it, because his conscience told him so. I’m not trying to re-baptize him. I’m not trying to make him into a Christian. He was not. But it is, I believe, inescapable that he, acting in kind of a Frederick Douglass-articulated tradition—Douglass said “the conscience of the nation must be roused”—put the moral convictions of anti-slavery at the center of his undertaking. And he didn’t have to.
If I can interrupt, I think what you were saying, by inference, is that, in no small measure, the burden on Joe Biden, and Joe Biden’s candidacy, presumably, for reëlection, is of that historical weight. And, if he does not succeed, then we don’t know what the consequences could be. People were mocking, sometimes, when Barbara Walter wrote a book recently about the possibility of civil war in this country. But you seem to be inviting that potential comparison.
So that’s one thing. The other thing is, is Joe Biden up to it? Abraham Lincoln’s capacities, his eloquence, were extraordinary, by any measure. Joe Biden is an older guy whose eloquence is not Lincolnesque, and he also has a lot of other things on his plate, including a land war in Europe and any number of other issues impinging on him, to say nothing about the fate of the planet itself. Is Joe Biden up to defeating Donald Trump again, and at the same time righting this country?
The question, I believe, is as much “Are we up to it?” as it is about President Biden. No American President is Zeus-like. What Lincoln was able to do was to manage martial abolitionist opinion. He was able to negotiate the most complicated, bloodiest hour in American history. But it wasn’t as if he was doing so from Olympus. And so I think it’s up to fifty-one per cent of us, or more, to recognize what path we should take, and take it. I wouldn’t put the whole onus on any single person, including Lincoln. The Union Army had a lot to do with this. Black Americans had a lot to do with this—Black Americans fleeing to Union lines, eager to take up arms and defend the Union, a Union that, until five minutes before, had enslaved them. I wish that history and reality moved in a kind of elegant, Netflix-limited-series way, where you have one person making all of these decisions. I think the person at the top matters enormously, obviously. But this is up to all of us.
Do you think Ron DeSantis represents a return to what you were calling, earlier, “establishment” Republicans? Does Ron DeSantis represent Trumpism or some other kind of Republicanism?
I think we’re in a world where George W. Bush could not be nominated by the Republican Party. I personally—again, I have very little data for this, but—I’m not an early investor in the Ron DeSantis conventional wisdom. I think the Trump grip on that base of folks is so strong that it’s just going to be very hard for me to see how he doesn’t win the nomination.
What role will legal indictment play in that?
It could help. That’s the world we’re in.
Indictment in Georgia, indictment in Washington, indictment in New York—any of them could help Trump, you’re saying?
I think so. We’re in uncharted territory.
For once.
To have an indicted former President seeking reëlection with a huge chunk of a formally functional opposition political party in the United States is, yes, unprecedented. What is not unprecedented is the case that has to be made to defeat him. That’s a case for a constitutional order informed by a journey toward recognizing the promise of human equality that was articulated, if not realized, at the beginning of the adventure. And so I’m very worried. I think a lot of people, including me, over the last eight years, have thought, O.K., here it comes. Pick your cliché. It’s the silver bullet. It’s the stake through the heart.
But what Trump has done—and this is a factual thing—is he has suspended the ordinary rules of political gravity, and the fact that we are here talking about it, I think, is yet another example of that. When this period is reconstructed, one of the great missed opportunities to insure that democratic conventions— lowercase “D”—would endure was after the insurrection, after the January 6th failure to invoke the Fourteenth Amendment. There is a provision of the Fourteenth Amendment that those who engage in insurrection against the United States can be denied the right to hold an office of honor or trust under the United States. Eric Foner wrote about this. If I had been king of the world and had a magic wand and all that, that’s what I would’ve done, rather than a second impeachment. And the Republicans flinched, as they have done again and again and again. And so the great question, for my Republican friends, is: Do you have the ability, do you have the capacity, to vote for the other party in order to preserve the American experiment? I don’t have a partisan enough brain to even think that’s a hard call. I have voted for Republican Presidential candidates. I am flummoxed, to some extent, at the durability of partisan feeling. Your colleague Susan Glasser, my friend, and Peter Baker have reported that James Addison Baker III voted for Donald Trump twice. Not once. Twice.
Isn’t that outrageous?
Yes, and I don’t understand it. A man who gave a huge chunk of his life to a constitutional experiment, to preserving America’s role in the world, voted for the nominee of his party no matter who the nominee was. And I just don’t understand it. But it’s real.
But then what gives you the notion that somehow this fever will break?
The fever only breaks if they lose. Let’s be very clear here. You’re never getting rid of Trumpism, right? On the Genesis principle. But it can be contained. My view is it is only contained if they keep losing.
And that means that American democracy is on the edge at all times.
Of course it is. Of course it’s on the edge at all times. It is fundamentally a human enterprise. We can’t outsource this. We live in a country where Andrew Johnson, from Tennessee, managed to repeal the implications of the verdict of the Civil War for a century. You and I have both written about and admired John Robert Lewis, who walked among us until thirty-two months ago, who was a New Testament martyr, essentially, in our lifetimes—who was beaten, who shed blood, simply for the recognition that the Fifteenth Amendment should be applied. And a lot of people—in the Zip Code where I’m sitting, and a lot of other Zip Codes—talked themselves into complicity in that order. So I’m not arguing that there is a mythical moment where, if we could just beam ourselves back there, everything was great and everything would be great again. It is a perennial struggle. It is a perennial battle between our worst instincts and the better angels of our nature, to use Lincoln’s phrase. And the remarkable thing about the American experiment is that, after much blood, much strife, much chaos, those better angels have just managed to eke out a provisional victory. I think that’s the struggle we’re in now. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
