Heather Cox Richardson

We might disagree with each other about immigration and about finances and so on, but we can agree that we care deeply about our country and we must start there with people who are trying to build our country rather than tear it down.

And that really hit a chord for me because that is precisely what the Republicans did when they formed in the 1850s.

It's precisely what the

populists and the Democrats did in the 1890s when they organized against the robber barons and then included the progressive Republicans.

It's certainly what we saw in the 1920s and the 1930s, what we saw in the 1950s, and I think what we're seeing in the United States again today.

So Trump is very clearly the outcome of at least 40 years of right-wing rhetoric that has been adopted by the Republican Party that laid the groundwork for a man to come in and essentially get rid of the dog whistles and call to the sexists and racists who had ended up sliding into the Republican Party really after 1965 and the Voting Rights Act.

To basically create sort of a libertarian, small government elite in the Republican Party that depended on the votes of those racists and sexists to stay in power.

But what he did was he sort of flipped the script.

He nodded to the establishment Republicans who wanted the tax cuts, but he empowered the racists and the sexists and the American firsters and so on.

And so he is very much a product of that.

Mm-hmm.

You know, that moment.

But he is also something different because by empowering them, what he did is he turned a democracy in not just to an autocracy, but to a personalist autocracy.

It's sort of, in a way, a step beyond fascism that we can talk about.

Yes.

So the idea that he wants all the power, but he also wants the power not for his party and not for even his cronies, but for himself.

But he's certainly a product of that 40 years.

Now, there's a bigger question, as I say, embedded in what you said, and that is, is the United States of America's system so deeply flawed to begin with that we were waiting for a Trump?

And to that, I would say no.

I would say that we, many of us, dropped the ball after, really after the 1960s and the 1970s and the idea that we had finally managed to create a new kind of American government that was premised on reality rather than on the previous images of American life.