Ben Rhodes

and about how the only way we can start this country is if we agree to disagree about important things.

Well, that worked, but it didn't work because the things that we didn't agree about were things like slavery or who gets to be American or, you know, what is the basis of how power works in this country.

And then I kind of follow those threads and there's,

Each chapter is not just about a speech.

It's about the political movement and conditions that could produce that speech.

And we have the kind of strain that most of us identify with, like the abolitionist strain, extraordinary people like Mariah Stewart and Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, but also then how they interacted with presidents like Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt and ultimately our former boss, Barack Obama.

That's one side of this argument.

He, I know what you're thinking.

He doesn't have a, well, anyway, no PhD there.

But on the other side- Pretty hard delivery.

I have the Confederate, you know, I've got the white supremacist arguments.

I've got, you know, up through some of the kind of xenophobic nature of American populism, up through Ronald Reagan.

And unfortunately-

The book ends with Donald Trump, but the story doesn't end with Donald Trump.

And that's actually kind of the important part here is that we are living in the latest iteration of a competition that we've had since the beginning.

And Trump makes a lot of sense if you read him in the context of American history, but so does the possibility that if people stand up and make a case and build a movement and persuade people that we can take this in a different direction.

And that's part of what I took away from this, Tommy.

It's like,

Obviously, speeches are kind of the purest form of persuasion.

You stand in front of an audience, you try to convince them of something.