Tom Nichols

People used to sell their children.

They knew that the child on that auction block was theirs, that they were selling.

They owned people who they treated as chattel and they raped them.

They would have babies and then that would become profits.

The darkness that we're capable of in this country, how do you square that, right?

It's a kind of monstrosity, a kind of brokenness that's at the heart of an economic system that propelled the country into its greatness in some ways.

But there's also the fact that we live by lies in this country.

You know, it's like we all sit in the room and we know there's a dead body in the closet, but nobody talks about the dead body in the closet.

And because this is James Baldwin's analogy, because everyone knows that body's in the closet, everyone has to lie to each other.

We can't be honest because we can't talk about it.

And so I think, you know, there's a dishonesty about who we are.

That is at the heart of the moral rot, the moral poverty that Tom referenced earlier.

And then I want to say this just really quickly.

Sometimes we exceptionalize MAGA and Trump and say that something's wrong with them.

But I keep thinking about a lineage.

How many of these folk are the children of the children of Nixon?

Right.

The way in which they think of the imperial presidency.

And now it's on steroids.

What's the soil that gave birth to this stuff?