That's

one part of it. Sleepless in New York. No, this is an incredibly nerve-wracking time. We, as anybody who listens to the podcast knows, we go back and forth arguing with each other to go over the cliff or come back above the cliff. There's some hope, maybe. I'm hoping women come through on this particular election. But I think, and the other thing that's worrying me as someone who's written a number of books with the word dark in the title, is that win or lose, what does it say about this country? Susan? Well, first of all, thank you,

Evan. And we're really delighted to see everybody here. I have to say, podcasting is one of those super anonymous sports where you sit in a studio with just three people and have no idea where it goes. So it's really amazing to see actual people. And we're incredibly grateful for that. Because I think this is an incredibly scary time. What we all need right now is to a certain extent, some community, right? What were we talking about backstage while we were talking about our memories of election night on 2016? You

know, too soon, Susan. It's too soon. I'm

just saying you asked, you know, where we're at. That is what we were talking about backstage.

Where were you that night? What were you doing? I

was at Politico's newsroom, and I was the editor of Politico, but we were supposed to be moving to Jerusalem to be foreign correspondents again, and my husband and my son were already there. And I texted Peter, who's here somewhere in Jerusalem. And I said, number one, Trump is going to win. And number two, they're going to want us to come back. So yeah, I was a foreign correspondent for three weeks after the election. And then for four years in my hometown of Washington. Jane, how did you

make sense of it? This is a really embarrassing admission, but I remember on my way from Washington to New York on election day, I was putting the finishing touches on a New Yorker piece about Trump's loss. So clairvoyance may not be my specialty. You know, look,

I think everybody on that night was trying to make sense of not just what it meant about the future, but what it meant about the past. There is a moment that I just, somebody told me about recently that when President Obama in the days afterwards was absorbing what had happened, absorbing the result, he said to some of his aides, what if we were wrong? What if we were wrong, in effect, about the appetite that this country has or the readiness that it has for a multi-ethnic democracy? And Ben Rhodes, who was one of his aides who heard that from him, said to me recently, you know, what's hanging in the balance with this election is that if Kamala Harris wins, then it will be that Donald Trump is, as Ben put it, the strange parenthesis in American history rather than Barack Obama. You

know, Evan, that is, I think it's a really amazing point because I've actually been spending a lot of time thinking not so much about the trauma of election night 2016, but this very interesting question maybe we can talk about with Michael, like, what would you have wanted to tell your October 2016 self? History is played in hindsight, in rewind, right? So we know now all the stuff that we didn't know at the time. I'm not sure that foreign knowledge would have made it all that better.

A question. Just in the last few days, guys, we have seen in extraordinary ways that people who have been saying things in private for the last few years, like John Kelly, coming forward and now saying affirmatively, as clearly as possible, Donald Trump is a fascist. We're contending with a moment that history has never really reckoned with in this country. Do you think that it has any impact ultimately on the result? You

know, Evan, I've thought a lot about this. You know, we did the reporting in our book that first reported about Kelly's concerns, hearing Donald Trump say to him in the Oval Office of the United States, you effing generals, meaning America's generals, you should be more like the German generals. What generals? The German generals. Hitler's generals? Hitler's generals. And, you know, I find that we've become inured to this. I remember first doing that reporting and thinking this is the most unbelievable thing I've ever heard, that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff thinks that the biggest national security threat to this country is the president of the United States. And yet, over time, even that becomes something familiar. And so my great fear is that even Trump's fiercest enemies can somehow get used to the unthinkable. I really

think a of what we're dealing with is the environment in which this information is appearing. Part of the problem is that at least half the country is siloed off from the news about Millie saying things like this. I mean, we really are in a different ecosystem with social media, with Twitter, with Fox. It's not the same world that it was when I became a reporter in the beginning, where it used to be, it felt like if you had a good story, you could just see it ricocheting across the entire country. It was on the evening news and the entire country heard it. It's just not like that anymore. So I'm not sure that people are so much inured to hearing that Trump admires Hitler as that they're not even hearing it from half the news organizations.

And there is the amnesia effect. They somehow seem to be able to repress the reality of what they already know about us, which brings us to the matter of history. And we've got the perfect guest for it. In just a second, you're going to hear from Michael Beschloss. He is the author of 10 books on presidential history, including the New York Times bestsellers, Presidents of War, Presidential Courage, and The Conquerors. He's written on Lyndon Johnson's secret tapes and on Jacqueline and John Kennedy's life together. He's the NBC News presidential historian and a PBS NewsHour contributor. He's received an Emmy Award and six honorary degrees. Please join me in welcoming Michael Beschloss to this stage. Thank you.

I couldn't hear much of what you were saying, but I think I can probably guess. We

should warn you that Michael is the official, like, uber friend of the pod, and he's our actual friend as well as friend of the pod.

These are three of my favorite people on earth, so it's going to be hard for me to keep myself from just being quiet and listening to them.

Michael, tomorrow, October 27th, Donald Trump will hold a rally here in New York City at Madison Square Garden. This is a place of historical significance, but of particular political significance. Shortly after the announcement, you tweeted out a link to a terrific documentary film about an event in Madison Square Garden in 1939. I think we have a clip that we can play now and then we'll discuss it. Can we bring that clip up? Filmed

by Marshall Curry. By

Marshall Curry.

We, with American ideals, demand that our government shall be returned to the American people who founded it. If you ask what we are actively fighting for under our charter, first, a social just white

Gentile who ruled the United States. Second, Gentile-controlled labor union, free from Jewish

Moscow-directed domination. That

is from A Night at the Garden by Marshall Curry, an extraordinary film. You can see the rest of it on YouTube. Michael, what does it make you think? Well,

first of all, that is just as you were saying, where Donald Trump is about to speak and have a rally. That one got 22,000 people. It was packed. And I think he has said that he wants to have upwards of 20,000. So we're talking about the same ballpark. Why was this held? Moscow directed domination. in February of 1939? It was obviously two years before Pearl Harbor, a few months before the beginning of World War II, we want to have this in Madison Square Garden in the capital of the domination of Christian America by non-Gentiles. That's why they were having it there. And you saw the language. You heard him say, we want to return America to the time that it was not dominated by people who were not like those who founded America. A briefer way of saying it nowadays would be just in case someone happens to say, make America great again. There are people around Donald Trump who know this history. I guarantee you this venue was not chosen by accident. He began his campaign last year in Waco, Texas, with references to David Koresh and the Branch Davidians, a standoff that ended in death after 50 days. And to them, that was a shrine to the dangers of federal domination of Americans beyond the Mississippi. That's why they had it there. In 1980, as Jane has written about, Ronald Reagan, on the 3rd of August, began his campaign, his fall campaign, where? Neshoba County, Mississippi. Only a little bit more than feet away from where Schwerner, Cheney, and Goodman were murdered while trying to bring voting rights to Mississippi in 1964. I don't think that was by accident. So all I'm saying is not a great overwhelming number of Americans know about the rally of 1939, but I do not think it's being held in the new Madison Square Garden by accident.

Michael, can I ask you, this has been a week where arguably we've kind of shattered one of the remaining taboos in American politics by the explicit use of the F word, not that F word, but the label of fascist by one of our two party candidates about the other candidate. We're talking about this rally. Help us to you know, to what extent you think this is a justifiable comparison. Not surprisingly, what you hear from Republicans is that this is hysterical. Donald Trump was not a Hitler-like dictator in his first term, and therefore we have no right to be saying this. Help us to understand how you approach this as a a historian.

Well, I think Donald Trump meets most of the parts of the definition of the word fascist. You go through all of American history. You cannot find another major party nominee who was promised to be dictator for a day, which we all know will not be only for a day if that happens, who has promised to use, suspend the rule of law, possibly terminate the Constitution, pit the Justice Department, and maybe the U.S. Army in military tribunals and worse against domestic political enemies. You know, we've had a lot of bad people in American life, and some fascists who were not nominated for president in the 1930s, which I'd be glad to mention briefly, but we have never had anything like this. So anyone who tries to normalize this election and say this is like Carter versus Gerald Ford or, you know, anything of the kind, this is an election of a kind we have never seen before in American history. A month from now, we will know which way this went. But this is as much a turning point, in my view, as the elections of 1860 before the Civil War, 1940. You saw the atmosphere of the 1940 election. This country was deciding not only whether we should fight fascists in Europe, it was deciding whether we should adopt fascism at home. Father Coughlin, Huey Long, who was assassinated in 1935, these are voices who said, you know, democracy is outmoded. Charles Lindbergh's wife, Anne, wrote a book called The Wave of the Future, and she meant that the wave of the future is fascism. Democracy, she said, does not work anymore. But the point I'm making is that neither of those was a major party presidential nominee who 10 days from now might win.

So, Michael, when you talk about these incredibly important hinge elections, 1860, 1940, from I think probably the standpoint of all of us in this room, the good guys won. I guess I'm wondering, has something changed, do you think, that might make it possible that democracy won't triumph this time? And if so, what is it? What is going on out

there? Well, let me just see a show of hands. Is anyone here nervous about election night and beyond? I think for those who are not watching but listening almost unanimous. I

know we should interview who didn't raise their hand.

Right, anyone here, we'd be glad to hear what you have to say. It might be calming. But democracy works, but you can't do it when you vandalize our political process. Now, I would say it's not by accident that we have not had people running for president as a candidate major party, and their campaign promise is, elect me because I'll be a dictator. They didn't do it because it probably wouldn't be very popular. That was true for most of American history. American citizens and children understood how hard we had fought for our freedom from a tyrannical British king, that the essence of America is that we don't have dictators. I mean, the way I put it is, in America, not only do we not have dictators or kings, we should always remember that we do not work for a president, a president should work for us. And we're on the precipice of a moment where that may no longer be true. So the question is, like those hinge elections, why are we in such danger now? One is we have disabled civics and history education in the early grades in this country. So people go to really good schools and very intelligent kids. They don't know what democracy is. They don't know how important this is. They don't know what it means when you lose it. Barack Obama said four years ago, when you have a democracy and it's gone, people start getting hurt. And that is even more true in 2024. I think a lot of Americans don't understand that. And the other thing is that our political system works as long as it's allowed to be intact. One metaphor for this I often think of is in 1948, after Harry Truman was reelected, he moved out of the White House because the White House interior was about to fall down. The floors were caving in, the leg of a piano from upstairs appeared through the ceiling of the downstairs room. Truman sort of joked, if we don't get out of here and renovate this building, there's going to be some violin concert in the East Room, and I'm going to be in my bathtub above, and I will fall through the floor, and I'll make a surprise appearance by the president. And, you know, the White House as it was built was sound. But over the years, you know, a president would come in or a president's family and say, we want to renovate. So they do it quickly because they didn't want the first family to be out of the White House for too long. So they'd quickly saw off some trusses or, you know with some supporting deans, and this happened and this happened, so that by the time Truman comes in, the whole place is about to cave in, and under his direction, for the next four years, the White House was scooped out to the outside four walls. It was gutted, and so if you go into the White House nowadays, it's basically a 1952 building that was built inside the four original walls of the White House. So what I'm saying here is that if the Supreme Court does something called, anyone heard of something called Citizens United? Or a presidential immunity ruling that says that if you're a president, you can get your White House counsel to bless anything you do, including the killing of your opponents or all sorts of things that earlier in American history a president had to worry about being prosecuted for, at least when he left office. That's no longer true. I'm just saying when you take the system and you keep on vandalizing it and you break off an arm and you break off a leg, we should not be surprised that an aspiring fascist dictator is at the gates of our country.