Ben Rhodes

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.

We stopped doing that for a lot of reasons.

And I get into that technology, social media polarization.

But actually, part of what's missing in the movement against Trump is what is our unifying story?

What do we think it means to be American?

Like, how do we persuade our fellow citizens that we are going down a very, very dark path?

So to me, I really hope people pick up this book.