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Chapter 1: What are Trump's plans for America's 250th celebrations?
Once upon a time, pessimists, optimists and saletists were grilling. And so it happened that the saletist succeeded.
The saletist succeeds! Sale...
Once upon a time there was a pessimist, an optimist and a sadist. The pessimist was always afraid of the worst. The optimist wished for the best and even thought too much. What about the sadist?
Well, the sadist succeeded. The sadist succeeds!
Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Alex Wagner. On today's show, historian Heather Cox Richardson on America at 250. With the administration gearing up for July 4th celebrations and gearing down from celebrations of Trump's 80th, I thought I'd check in with someone who can situate all of the pomp and circumstance in historical context.
You likely know Heather from her insanely popular substack, Letters from an American, where she writes every damn day about the history behind today's increasingly ahistorical politics.
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Chapter 2: How does Heather Cox Richardson contextualize Trump's presidential displays?
Heather has a new series out to celebrate America's 250th. It is aptly named 250 to 250, where she tells the story of the Americans who, over the course of a quarter millennium, worked to make real the founding ideals of this nation, that all people are created equal. We're going to talk about that series and Trump's 4th of July celebrations, as well as so much, much more.
Trump's efforts to make D.C. just as tacky as he is, J.D. Vance's Catholic faith, and how the left can embrace patriotism once again. It was a great conversation with Heather, and we're going to get to it in a minute. But before we do, guys, there's a new episode of Pod Save America Only Friends out now with me and Hysteria's Erin Ryan. Go check it out.
Only Friends is the Friends of the Pod subscriber exclusive show where Pod Save America hosts and contributors dive into even more news stories from the week. In this episode, Aaron and I unpack the Justice Department's latest investigation into Gavin Newsom and his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom. We check in on whatever was going on at the Turning Point Women's Leadership Summit.
No, that is not an oxymoron. And much more.
Chapter 3: What historical parallels can be drawn from Trump's actions?
So hit pause and subscribe to Friends of the Pod at crooked.com slash friends. Also, please, if you would, check out my podcast, Runaway Country, where I this week talked to California Attorney General Rob Bonta about J.D. Vance's war on blue states, the other war that he's tasked with, and then graded the vice's salesmanship efforts this week on the Iran surrender. With the great Sam Seder.
All right, here is Heather Cox Richardson. Heather Cox Richardson, thank you so much for joining us today on Pod Save America. And also, preemptively, thank you for offering wisdom and perspective on this insane American moment.
Alex, it's always so much fun to be with you.
Oh, thank you. We should do it more often. Anytime. Literally, you just say the word. I'm here. Let's start first with the upcoming 250th celebration, the semi-quincentennial. And how the president has chosen to celebrate this momentous occasion.
Chapter 4: How does the concept of patriotism evolve in today's political climate?
Last Sunday, he, of course, hosted a UFC fight on the South Lawn of the White House. And then next week on the 4th, he is going to be hosting the self-proclaimed most spectacular Trump rally of them all on the National Mall. I don't have the same lens on history as you do, but can you recall any sort of parallel to such a monstrous display of presidential ego in the name of patriotic celebration?
Any time in our history as a country?
No, of course not. We're in a really different moment than ever before in American history with an administration that's rejecting the basic principles of our democratic government. So one of the things that's interesting is how that's playing out, not only in celebrations of the 250th, but also in the memorials in Washington, D.C., And but but there's a larger story.
I mean, everybody knows that I'm talking about the the reflecting pool, which might be a really interesting dive, so to speak, for us to go into the Kennedy Center, the you know, the gilded horses behind the Lincoln Memorial, the arch, you know, all the things we could the destruction of the Ben Shahn, the proposed destruction of the Ben Shahn murals, all that stuff.
But what's really interesting as you look over it, when you think about democracy, is that if you think about our great presidents, the ones we remember, people like Lyndon Baines Johnson or Theodore Roosevelt or Eisenhower or, you know, we could go on and on. They're the ones who carved their memory into the American people by making their lives better.
by having social security or healthcare or by trying to eliminate poverty, by suggesting that the way you create a monument to yourself is by changing the lives of the American people for the better. And it's just really interesting when you think about legacies, the fact that Trump somehow thinks that slapping his name on stuff matters, but that doesn't matter at all.
Similarly, if you think about our history, you can write and people do write books celebrating the absolute genius of And I'm going to pull somebody here at random, Benjamin Harrison.
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of J.D. Vance's vision of nationalism?
But it just doesn't stick if, in fact, it's clear that all you're doing is trying to celebrate a certain kind of dominant lifestyle versus something that actually made the American people better. So I would suggest that right now in American history, for example, a lot more people have heard of the Wounded Knee Massacre than have heard of Benjamin Harrison's great successes.
Yeah, I mean, people can talk to the Trail of Tears, but they're not sure what Old Hickory did in terms of interior decorations at the White House. Maga types have pointed to the fact that Teddy Roosevelt, I believe, hosted and fought in a boxing match. At the White House during his presidency?
This is actually great. So if you want to talk about this, I would love to do this. Yeah. Because what happens in the Theodore Roosevelt presidency is this is coming. First of all, Teddy Roosevelt really jumps into some sort of American prominence in 1884, which is an important year. politically, because that's really when the younger Republicans are coming of age.
And they're looking at the corruption of the Republican Party and saying, we can't be Democrats because of the Civil War, but we also can't be that kind of Republican. So one of the things that they are trying to do is figure out how to return America to its democratic, small d, democratic principles. And this is happening in a time of industrialization.
And during that time of industrialization, the industrialists are essentially arranging the systems in the United States to create an undereducated, underpaid, underclass that will continue.
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Chapter 6: How does Heather's series '250 to 250' redefine American history?
Yeah. Does it sound familiar? Sounds kind of familiar. Yeah. But so one of the things that is driving Theodore Roosevelt is he's very concerned about the terrible conditions in the urban areas, especially in the East. Remember, he loses both his mother and his wife on the same day to diseases that have come out of that sort of urban soup before we really understood germ theory.
And he wants to clean up the cities, but he also wants to return the country to a place where we can actually create good citizens. Right. And so he's going to support cleaning up the cities. He's going to support education and he's going to support the wide open spaces that he's going to try and protect through conservation.
But he is also going to try to reclaim a kind of American masculinity that says, you know, we're not just cogs in a machine of a larger system. And that speaks to his own sort of rediscovering his ability, his physical abilities from his youthful asthma through boxing. Right. So this is when you get – and he also protects football.
Football – somebody had actually died playing a college football game.
Chapter 7: What role do marginalized voices play in shaping American democracy?
It was such a rough sport. So he actually manages to recover there. This is also the same period when we get indigenous names attached to sports teams because the idea was that you wanted men to be savage – and I'm going to put that in air quotes – but only on the football field, for example.
Right.
So but but you think about what Teddy Roosevelt was trying to do and a lot of people look down on it because, you know, of all the bare knuckle fighting and all that. And there's all this is sort of an era of cockfighting and prize fighting and so on in the cities. It was not considered higher level fighting. entertainment.
But there's some really big differences, I think, between, and maybe at the time people would not have said so, there's one really major difference between Teddy Roosevelt and boxing and his exhibition boxing, which was not the same bloody stuff that was going on in Five Points in New York, and what happened at the White House.
And the really big difference, two really big differences, is one, taxpayer money didn't go into Teddy Roosevelt's fighting. And it was not a branding opportunity. And for sure, it was not the corruption opportunity that the UFC fight in the White House has been. So even though it both involved flying fists, the systems that they are either accepting or critiquing were virtually opposite.
A very important distinction. There was no cryptocurrency sponsorship and Paramount Plus requirement to see the match.
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Chapter 8: What moments in American history should be celebrated beyond the Declaration of Independence?
You could just be a human being there on the way. Do you have any idea how many people attended that White House match that Roosevelt fought in?
Oh, oh, there wouldn't have been. I don't have any idea, but it would not have been huge. Because remember, what makes things huge is the ability to get places quickly and to know that they're happening, neither of which would have happened. It would have been written up in the newspapers afterward. And I'm sorry to have gone on so long about that, but literally nobody has ever asked me
No, I love this. And just so you know, Lincoln was also a fighter, which, again, nobody's ever asked me about. Like a boxing fighter? Oh, no, worse. Lincoln, I mean, worse if you're not into kind of sports. Krav Maga? He was, remember, he was from the frontier, and he was quite a big man, and he had quite long arms and legs. And that made him a really good guy in a fight.
And in those days, and there's an argument about how deeply he went into this, this was the era of eye gouging and ear biting and so on. And there's big fights about whether or not he did that. Lots of people want to say, oh, he would never have done that. Maybe, maybe not.
But remember, he gets his political start in Illinois, and he is backed in a bipartisan basis because there's a gang who supports him. And they're actually from the opposite party. He's a Whig and they're Democrats. And they support him because he's such a great fighter. He has fought with them before. Did he bite ears? Do we know if he bit ears? We don't know. We don't know the answer to that.
And people who listen to this podcast now are going to write you and me probably hate mail from both sides saying, of course he did or no, he didn't. But he came up through that era because you had to, to survive on the frontier. And it turned out in his case to be a springboard into politics.
Well, I mean, yeah, Trump was a public, was a fight promoter, basically, through much of his career in the 80s. So here we are. And he's promoting fights to enrich himself and line the pockets of his allies on the White House grounds with taxpayer money. You mentioned Lincoln, and I'm kind of interested in asking you whether this moment, there's a lot that's reminiscent.
History tells us the future as much as it is a detail of the past.
But he Trump has other plans to celebrate the 250th anniversary, including the indie drag race around the streets of Washington, D.C., and the Great American State Fair, which several states we already know, Heather, are skipping at least eight states, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Maine, Oregon, Washington and Pennsylvania.
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