H.W. Brands

speaker

313 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 12 May

H.W. Brands’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci · NYT Bestselling Historian: Why George Washington Was the Greatest Leader Who Ever Lived — H. W. Brands · 12 May 2026 podcast

He was letting them both think they're going to be the next president.

Ronald Reagan, in some ways...

as was to the modern Republican Party what George Washington was to the American Republic.

Because Ronald Reagan was this figure when he was president during the 1980s and for 10 or 15 years after there, that this was the guy who represents the best of what the Republicans can put in the presidency.

And for a long time, you know, Ronald Reagan was the touchstone of politics.

American Republican politics.

Things have changed now.

So the Republican Party has moved on past Reagan.

And in some ways, I mean, of course, American politics moved past George Washington.

So we still pay lip service to George Washington, although we don't do things the way Washington did.

And Republicans and other Americans today still pay lip service to Reagan, but do things very differently.

Benjamin Franklin was one of the two, George Washington being the other indispensable men of the American Revolution.

Washington handled the military front.

He was commanding general of the Continental Army.

Franklin handled the diplomatic front.

He was the one who got the all-important alliance with France that made Washington's work a whole lot easier than it would have been without it.

They spent very little time together.

They ran into each other only officially.

So they didn't have a friendship, but they had a great deal of respect.

And the correspondence that I get between Franklin in Paris and Washington in the battlefield, when Franklin is sending people who want to volunteer to join Washington's army, and Washington is sometimes saying, thanks for these good people you're sending over, sometimes saying, wait, you're sending over too many.

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