Ben Rhodes

What I was kind of referencing there is when the autocrat gets the war bug...

Like, to me, that's the worst case.

Now, it may not lead to, you know, the darkest place that that can lead.

But I don't know.

It'll be interesting whether this war in Iran chastises Trump or whether he's like, I got to try again because this one didn't end up, you know.

I'm one for one.

Venezuela looked good and Iran was bad.

And so now I got to go do Greenland.

And there's a kind of, you know, like an addictive quality to the war.

And that's why there have to be guardrails put around this ability to wage war.

Yeah, I mean, I wrote this book, spent the last four years on it, Tim, because after I finished my last one, I wanted to write about this country and I wanted to write about the argument we've been having.

Because I kind of thought to myself, this is crazy, this timeline we're living in, because in some ways Obama and Trump kind of represent two opposing sides of an argument we've been having since like the beginning of this country, you know?

And so I picked 15 speeches and it's essentially a history of the United States, a history of the argument we've been having since the founding, right?

through those speeches, but not just the speeches, the political movements that led in and out of them, the events, the extraordinary people, you know, from Benjamin Franklin to Abraham Lincoln to Obama and Trump, but also people we haven't heard of, like Maria Stewart, a black woman abolitionist, or Mary Lisa, Kansas populist.

And then when I was done,

I saw that J.D.

Vance speech.

And I made that the beginning of the book because it's such a pure distillation of the argument that I hate the most, right?

Because he's essentially saying, it's pretty extraordinary.

He says, America is not an idea.