Stories Behind the Story with Better Reading

Stories Behind The Story: Nick Bryant on The Complex Interplay Between Politics and Society In The U.S.A.

Nick Bryant talks to Cheryl about the rise of populism, the media's influence on public perception, and the deep-seated culture wars shaping the landscape of the United States. His latest work, The Forever War, is out now.

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Duration:: 43m
Broadcast on:: 20 Oct 2024
Audio Format:: other

This is the Better Reading Podcast platform with stories behind the story, Jane's Be Better podcast, my book chat with Caroline Overington, and more. Looking for a particular podcast? Remember, you can always skip to it. Welcome to the Better Reading Podcast, Stories Behind the Story, brought to you by Belinda Audio. Listen to Belinda audio books, anywhere, everywhere. Hi, this is Cheryl Arkel from the Better Reading Podcast, Stories Behind the Story. We talk to authors about how they came to tell us their story. It's lovely to be here, thanks for having me. Yes. Well, it was a book called When Americans Stop Being Great, a history of the President. It was a 50-year prehistory of Donald Trump, a presidency that should not have taken us by as much surprise as it did. And what I was arguing in that book was that there were technological and political and economic and racial and cultural trends that really favored Trump. And when you throw in the kind of vagaries of the Electoral College, this crazy system where the person who wins the most votes doesn't win the presidency, then, you know, Trump doesn't become historically inevitable, but he almost becomes historically inescapable. And that book came to ensure a kind of unexpected life, actually. You know, it did well in America and oddly, it ended up in the Oval Office. Joe Biden heard me talking about it on Morning Joe, which is his favorite show, that MSNBC show, that's really the kind of crucial must watch for people inside the Beltway, the Beltway's that road that in circles Washington, T.C. Anyway, he heard me talking about it one morning. He mentioned it later on that day. And a few weeks later, somebody noticed that the book was actually on his shelf in the Oval Office. So yeah, an unexpected place to find your book. And I think it's a very interesting place to find your book. I think it's a very interesting place. It's a very interesting place to find your book, but I think it's a very interesting place to find your book. It's a very interesting place to find your book, it's a very interesting place to find your book. And I think it's a very interesting place to find your book. And I know Trump talks about that a lot, but is that the price that you pay for these in your life? Well, what the book argues is that division has always been the default in America. Even before America became a superpower, back in the days when George Washington, America's first president, was warning against foreign entanglements, as he put it. He really didn't want America to have a big role in the world at that stage, but America came to have a huge role, obviously. And the argument of the book is basically this, that America has been divided from the beginning. The price... It was divided. It wasn't United. It was separate states. It was these former colonies coming together. I mean, the war of independence brought that. It brought independence, but it did not bring nationhood. They had to work at that. And it wasn't inevitable that it was going to succeed. It was a close run thing. Even when they managed to decide upon a constitution, when they met in Philadelphia, the founding fathers, it wasn't by no means certain that that would be ratified by the former colonies that became the United States. And in those early days, there was a fear that, you know, there wouldn't be a United States at all. There would be three or four different confederacies based upon regional lines. So it was by no means a given. And then the price of national unity at the outset was slavery, a terrible price to pay. And then after the civil war, when the compromise over slavery broke apart, they came up with a new price of national unity, and that was segregation. You know, the fact that African Americans in the south were denied basic civil rights, you know, the ability to go to the same schools as white people, to eat in the same restaurants, to drink from the same water fences. So America has always been hugely divided. And we're seeing that now. I mean, we hope that the first African American president, Barack Obama, would bring the country together, right? But in many ways, he just brought the divisions to the surface and what you, it brought us Trump. And I, you know, I suspect they probably wouldn't have been a Donald Trump, had it not been for the presidency of Barack Obama. And remember, he made his political name as the untitled leader of the Bertha movement, a movement that denied the very legitimacy of a black president. And I've been doing that for over 20 years now. And the people I know, they are very, very engaged, very much. But it took me the first couple of years to realise that you've never said "I'm not a leader of the state of America." Did you say that for me? Yeah, I mean, the Democratic Party has become a pretty centrist outfit in America, certainly by European standards. And to an extent by Australian standards as well. And where you are, San Francisco, is often sort of seen as this sort of hotbed of sort of 60s radicalism, isn't it? And sort of flower power, radicalism. And really it isn't. I mean, San Francisco and the Bay Area, which is where Kamala Harris comes from, of course, is where she kind of, that was the nursery for her, Oakland and Berkeley. You know, it's produced in really hard-nosed politicians over the years. People who are very pragmatic in their politics, not particularly doctrinaire. I mean, you think of people like Nancy Pelosi. You know, Pelosi, her family, came from Baltimore, which she kind of rose up through the ranks in San Francisco. I mean, her daughter has this wonderful saying, "My mother will chop off your head and you won't even realise you're bleeding." She's a really tough politician. I mean, you know, it was her basically the blasted out Joe Biden, when he was still saying, "I'm going to fight this election even though I had that terrible debate." It was Nancy Pelosi who basically said, "No, Joe, you're not." Oh, if it hadn't have been for Nancy Pelosi. I mean, there was that famous again, the morning Joe effect. She went on morning Joe and she said, "Joe Biden needs to make up his mind whether he's going to run or not." Now, Joe Biden had already made up his mind. He'd already sent a letter to Congress saying, "I'm not going anywhere." Nancy Pelosi, after it was sold, was just a letter. I didn't think it should be taken at face value. And she gave permission for other Democrats to break cover and to come out and say, "It's time, Joe, to pass that torch to the next generation." Yeah, I mean, I think Joe Biden would have lost. I mean, I think he lost within about four minutes of that debate. I mean, even the war cop, when his arms were almost robotic and his face looked like it had almost been embalmed already. Even the war cop, I think, was problematic. But with the minutes that the debate became obvious that he couldn't serve four more years. But it took Nancy Pelosi to blast him out. And I think Kamala Harris showed that she's a pretty tough, hard-nosed politician herself. Because in that moment, she made sure that the torch was passed to her at a time, frankly, when a lot of Democrats thought that she wasn't the best person to carry it. And I wanted you to belose that, though, you know, because you had to be part of the sense that I don't know. I think there was a division within the Biden White House. I think Biden's in a circle were very dismissive of her. For the first two years, it was almost like they set her up to fail. They didn't really defend her when she came under a lot of criticism. Biden gave her the immigration brief to try and stop immigrants coming to America from source, which was this northern triangle. A diplomatic effort tried to stop people coming from countries like El Salvador and Guatemala. And she had some success in doing that. She obviously didn't have operational control over the border, which is what the Republicans are trying to say there, that she was the borders are. She wasn't. But in those early years, she had this disastrous interview with a guy called Lester Holt, who's one of the big anchors in America. He's the anchor for NBC News. He went on her first foreign trip, which was to Guatemala. He interviewed her about the border. She said she'd been there. She hadn't. She got caught in a put in a falsehood. And that really kind of symbolized the kind of rockiness of her first two years. But even though the Biden in a circle wasn't supportive, I think Joe Biden was. He'd had a pretty rocky vice presidency himself. He was maligned by Barack Obama's in a circle. He was always mindful of the fact that in 2016, Barack Obama wanted Hillary Clinton to run for the presidency rather than Joe Biden. He felt that was hugely disrespectful. And that he always wanted to treat his vice president with with greater respect. So when the moment came, when he finally decided to hand over the torch and he had a white knuckle grip on it, didn't he? I mean, it reminded me of Charlton Heston's line at that NRA conference earlier in the century where, you know, from my cold, dead hands and he held a musket above his head. It was almost a grip like that. But very quickly after he announced that he was going to be stepping down, I think it was 27 minutes. He also announced in a follow up statement that he was backing Kamala Harris. And I think in that moment, there were Democrats who thought we probably haven't got the strongest candidate here, but the process to arrive at the stronger candidate would lead to such a schism and such a split within the party that we're going to go for. And I think in that moment also, she showed that she was a politician with communication skills. She had been underestimated. And I think that's something that's happened throughout her political career. She has been underestimated. She does have this talent for bringing down kind of white old man has been a kind of something that she's done repeatedly throughout her political career. And let's see if she can do it this time. >> I think if she would have really, that is going to, I think, come during the institutions page to be beaten by a woman and a doctor. >> Well, he won't. Well, he'll deal with it by pretending he's won. I mean, that's he'll he'll come up with some sort of, well, in his mind, he'll say there's been a fraud committed, you know, I mean, a lot of Republicans still believe the big light, even though there's absolutely zero evidence to support it. So, you know, Trump would try and spin the second big light in the event that he lost. And it does look like it will be a very close election, a photo finish election. So, you know, it will come down to a few thousand votes, probably. Look, I mean, as we speak today, she's got a small lead in the nationwide polling average, about two or three percent. She's got a very small lead in some of the states that she needs to win, most notably the three Rust Belt states that are so important. It was constant Michigan and the big, big one of all, which is Pennsylvania. But it is going to be a photo finish, I think, and it's anybody who tells you with any certainty what's going to happen. I don't think it's worth listening to it. I mean, to be honest. 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[BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] >> Yeah, no, I certainly do think that the conventional politicians are held to a higher standard, the traditional standard than these populists who are emerging. And that's deeply problematic. I think we just demand a higher standard of people who play by our traditional rules and that people who don't play by the rules and disregard the rules and flaunt the rules so brazenly the same rules end up not applying to them. And I think that is, it's a journalistic failure to a certain extent. I think that I remember the 2016 campaign. I mean, the terrible example of this was the way that Hillary Clinton's pseudo scandal, the email scandal, you remember, just got massive prominence in the press. And it was partly because we were spending a lot of time covering Trump's multitude of scandals, right? So every now and then we thought, we better show our balance. So we'll say something negative about Hillary. So the email scandal got this kind of laser effect and Trump's multitude of scandals got this strobe effect, right? And actually, when they did the sums at the end of the campaign, you know, journalistic monitoring organizations, they realized that the Hillary email scandal, which is, okay, again, it was a pseudo scandal. It wasn't a real big deal. Got more coverage than all of Trump's scandals put together in it. That showed a real journalistic failure. Well, we've been talking ugly lessons around the world. You know, Trump won the first time with a kind of post truth candidacy. He almost won a second term in the White House with a post truth presidency. And you get people aping the same style. I mean, you know, Boris Johnson did it to an extent in Britain. And I mean, one thing that populist politicians do brazenly is to reduce the most complicated issues into the kind of most sort of simple slogans. You know, I mean, Britain, during Brexit, it was take-back control, you know, here. It's been stopped the boats, you know, America. It was make America great again. And, you know, these slogans resonate. And, you know, in 2016, I saw it for myself. You know, if you, when you went into these Rust Belt communities, the biggest echo chambers for make America great again were the empty factories and the derelict steel mill. Yeah, the West Coast is really interesting, isn't it? Because LA and San Francisco have become real kind of hubs of homelessness now. And places that I always associated with the great abundance of America are actually becoming associated now with the sort of the poverty problem in America. You know, I went to Los Angeles, first of all, on the eve of the LA Olympics in '84. I mean, you know, wow, it was just the summertime of American resurgence, you know, they've had this terrible time, this long national nightmare of Vietnam and Watergate and the Iranian hostage crisis. And suddenly they staged the Olympics and they're winning every gold medal, Ronald Reagan's gets reelected that year with the slogan, "It's morning again in America." You know, when I was staying in this home of a guy, my dad's best friend who immigrated to America in the 60s who lived in a house in a beautiful suburb. He had a three car garage, he had a pool in the background in a pool in the backyard. I mean, it was a standard of living that I've never ever seen anywhere. And that's what I've always associated California with, that sense of possibility, that American dream. But now you go to LA and you go to San Francisco, it's a very, very different story, isn't it? And they've become these kind of, these, as I say, these hubs of homelessness. And I do tend to keep them for a lot different countries here. I don't know what their populations are, but it's just the way they... Well, there's not such a good safety net. I mean, that's a crucial thing to point out. You know, the social welfare systems just aren't as developed, and again, it comes back to this idea of American exceptionalism. You know, America doesn't import good ideas from other countries as often as it should. So it doesn't have the kind of European style or Australian style, social welfare net. It's always sort of prided itself on self-sufficiency and the American way. And, you know, it's refusal to believe that kind of lefty policies from countries like France or Scandinavia or Britain would work in America because they're un-America. But, you know, what we found out is in COVID, when they didn't have a really good public health system, the kind of weakness of the negative side of American exceptionalism. But those issues tend to lead up forever. Like, you know, the health is one of them, you know. I can't say the most about getting socialized health care, abortion. You know, and now that those things just keep coming, you know, they'll never get resolved through that. Yeah, they don't. I mean, there's a lot of vested interests, obviously. You know, a lot of doctors in America have always liked having, you know, fancy new cars and earning a lot of money and, you know, good luck to them. But that's always been a lobby against sort of public, a more public-based system. But again, it goes back to this sort of American ideology in the sense that we do things better than everybody else. I mean, if you get great American health care, and I was lucky enough to have it, it's amazing. It's extraordinary. But if you can pay for it, if you've got good enough insurance, but so many people are having, and, you know, you can be bankrupted by just getting a broken leg or being involved with a car accident or having an extended stay in hospital. I mean, the fees are just ridiculous when you see them. Yeah, no, exactly. And there's all the problem of preexisting conditions. And again, it's this idea that we use an Americanism to reject a Europeanism. So we say it's socialized medicine when it's good medicine. And, you know, it's that downside of American exceptionalism, that refusal to believe that other countries can do things better. Now, I've got a little checklist here that I'm going to cover that are not necessarily related, but there seems that I wouldn't want to run it. So you can say you're seeing more. I'm really quite interested in this conversation, but I'm going to run it around it. And there's kind of a lady who's looking unreliable. Election is here, all right? I'm having trouble getting my head around that at the moment, because I look at how easy I am, and how I'm getting out of it, is really loving something. And I wonder what the difference is between that and what something is here. Often we speak about October surprises, events that happen in October, just a few weeks before the election that can really massively impact the outcome. I think the October surprise in the 2024 election happened in 2023. And it was Hammers' awful attack on Israel and Israel's response. And the way that that has actually impacted the US political scene. I mean, you see it at the micro level. I mean, in states like Michigan, for instance, there are a lot of Arab Americans who are really upset with the Biden administration's failure to sort of moderate Netanyahu's response. Yeah, I mean, that for them is a red line. And we've already seen in this election year that a lot of those people were refusing to vote for Joe Biden. In the primaries, they were sitting on their hands. It wasn't like they were voting for Trump. They couldn't in a primary situation. They could only signal their displeasure by not voting, and that's what happened. And you get the feeling that that could happen in this election in the presidency. And although Kamala Harris has tried to show more empathy for the plight of the Palestinian people, I mean, she's still supporting the same, effectively supporting the same policies as Joe Biden. So, I mean, that is a problem for them. I mean, the Muslim-American vote is a very, very strongly Democratic vote. And in an election where, you know, a shift of a few thousand votes and a few different states could affect the outcome, you know, that's going to have a profound effect. And, you know, Joe Biden went into this election year hoping that the events of January the 6th would be in the forefront of the voter's minds. But for many American voters, the events of October the 7th and the Israeli response towards over the 7th is in the forefront of their minds. So, yeah, that's having a big impact on U.S. domestic politics. But my question is more about interference. What are these elections here? You know, what's the meaning of, firstly, and Israel lobbying for Trump to get in? Is it the same as Russian? Well, I think there is this suspicion that, you know, Netanyahu obviously would prefer Trump to win. I mean, Trump did things for Israel that no other U.S. president has done before. I mean, you know, recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, you know, no U.S. president had done that before. Right. You know, moving the embassy to Jerusalem. A lot of presidents have paid lip service to that. Trump actually actually did it. And I think there is this strong suspicion that, you know, Netanyahu's motivated by a lot of things in this conflict, not lose his own survival. And extending a war in a way that delays his day of reckoning, you know, for the security failures that led to October the 7th. I mean, there's an element of that, for sure. But I think there's also a suspicion in the Biden White House that, you know, Netanyahu is also mindful of how this plays with the U.S. election. And I mean, it's just not what's happening in Gaza and in Lebanon. I mean, you know, if Israel was to strike, for instance, Iranian oil facilities, then, you know, China's Iran's biggest customer of all, but it would have a big impact on global oil prices. You know, even Biden entertaining that possibility of strikes on Iranian oil facilities that led to a spike in oil. And in an election where there's a cost of living crisis, and that is impacting a lot of people. And the paramount issue, frankly, for most voters, you know, that's going to have a big impact. I don't think it's election interference in the same way as the Russian interference. I mean, I think that was very deliberate. I mean, they were literally in 2016, trying to orchestrate and manipulate events in America. I mean, for instance, they would set up these kind of rival demonstrations in order to kind of supercharge the polarization that already existed. So they were literally online. Saying, you know, meet here if you kind of want to defund the police, meet here if you want to defend the police. And they're literally orchestrated in these demonstrations. I mean, Israel's not doing that. Do you think thing, you know, like, the cost of being a superpower, I mean, I think you have to break it down into different areas. I mean, militarily, America clearly still is a superpower. It can do things militarily that other countries just cannot to, you know, project its power around the world in a way that at the moment, China count. I mean, China's catching up for sure because it's investing so heavily in its navy. America has an alliance system that China just doesn't have. Again, a legacy of the post World War II world. I mean, that has been the basis of its preeminence for the last 70 years. China hasn't got anything like that. America's sort of network and military basis. Again, China hasn't got anything like it. It's trying to get more ports. It's trying to get build islands in the South China Sea, all that kind of stuff. But it just hasn't got that physical infrastructure that America has and can rely on, which makes America a superpower. I also think, you know, America remains a cultural superpower, you know, the fact that we're having this conversation, the facts that we are so fixated by what happens in the American election underscores America's sort of cultural way. It just seems that you think you're up for a second. That is so true. I was at the rally on Sunday. I went to the rally and said, "That's why I'm talking about it." I was walking back and I had my Vietnamese flag around me. And his man's got me on his way, but he made me his girlfriend. And he said, "You know, I'm in a righteous country." And I said, "Oh, okay. I said, "You're an American." That was so interesting. Well, Thomas Payne, who is the English radical whose writings inspired a lot of kind of revolutionary thought. I mean, he was, you said, "The cause of America is the cause of mankind." So it's almost as if we've all got to vest it. Right. Well, that's interesting. But it shows the kind of level of interest and it shows that many people feel they're stakeholders, right? And I think that in a sort of paradoxically, the sort of craziness of America at the moment, the kind of polarized state of America, the racial discourse in America, the culture wars of America. Well, it's internal, but what I was going to say was it's internal, but it spills over. We have the equivalent of, you know, the Me Too movement became a global phenomenon. It started in America. You know, the Black Lives Matter, the George Floyd, you know, English Premier League footballers took the knee for a while. It wasn't any statues in America that were being hauled down and defaced. It was statues in Australia that were being vandalized and questioned. So this kind of weird, it's almost like there's a toxic exceptionalism that maintains America's preeminence, even at moments of crisis and even at moments of American craziness. It kind of reaffirms their sense that, you know, you're the country that everybody's watching. We're not paying the same attention to China. Yeah, right. I mean, that's the classic thing, isn't it? You know, ask anybody to name 10 Chinese celebrities. It's a bit like asking somebody to name 10 famous Canadians. I mean, people would probably have a better chance of the Canadians than the Chinese, right? I mean, there just isn't that level of cultural assertiveness or cultural attractiveness. America still still has that and can trade off it. Well, you know, the title of my book is the forever war America's ending complete with itself. You know, if Kamala Harris wins, right? I mean, I think we're back in the kind of the bombing years when, you know, you'd like to think this is a moment of healing. You'd like to think this is a moment when Red and Blue America sort of set aside their differences and come together as the United States of America. But you know, the problem is we've had 250 years of history that suggests that's just not going to happen, right? And so you're in this cycle again. And I mean, this is one of the arguments of the book, but America can't really escape its history at the moment because so much of that history is unresolved. You know, the gun debate is an argument really about history, the meaning of the Second Amendment. This ludicrous idea that Second Amendment is supposed to enshrine individual gun rights. It was never meant to. It was all about militias. It was all about enshrining the power of states to raise a militia if ever the federal government became overbearing and tyrannical, right? It wasn't about individual guns. I mean, it was just assumed that people would have guns. Of course they would. Most people did back then. You know, things like abortion. I mean, you know, I think that that placard that is often carried by older women that abortion rallies, you know, I can't believe I'm still protesting this shit. Speaks of the unending conflict, right? So you've literally turned the clock back 50 years on reproductive rights in America and the argument begins again. And of course, you know, for the Republicans, many of the angelica, right, this is this is only a partial victory. You know, they want a nationwide abortion ban and then they want to go after things like contraception and IVF, you know. Well, because it's contested in a way that it's not contested in most other advanced countries, right? I mean, which other country in the world has a really serious abortion debate anymore? It's even settling in, you know, heavily Catholic countries like Ireland now and Italy. And, you know, I went to know, I was the first journalist actually who went to Nauru. I kind of got in behind the wire. I was the first person to do that. And so I've seen up close the, you know, the Pacific solution as it was called in action, right? And I've seen how it's impacted British policies as well. You know, the Rwanda solution is very much a Pacific solution applied in Britain. And it's complicated. But yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, these issues become emblematic, I guess, isn't it? And for Australia, you know, border security is such a big deal. And, you know, immigration is such a big deal America because of the sanctity borders and all kind of stuff. And abortion is slightly different because it involves the sanctity of life. And these issues become emblematic and they get blown up and they become the big, big thing. Oh, yeah. And I mean, you know, I mean, there's so many memes around this, aren't there? I know. Well, you know, some states are banning books at the moment. So they, they literally regard a book as more dangerous than an A R 15, you know, which is just nuts. And it's, but that's what you're writing about. Well, I mean, that's my argument. It doesn't stop because it's, it's been the through line of American history. And I think that's the thing. I mean, what I do in the book, the forever war is just to show this has always been going on. And they found mechanisms to sort of cope with the division for a lot of the time. But as I said at the beginning, I mean, the price of unity has been so high and so immoral, you know, slavery was the price of unity began with segregation became the price of unity afterwards. And I don't see how the country comes together. And what you were saying earlier about this, there's no longer a sort of shared truth anymore. You know, we're in this kind of situation where Americans can't even agree on a baseline of facts. Now, when you enter that kind of territory, I think it becomes really hard. And if you look at the last sort of 25 years of American history, there would be moments in that, well, maybe this brings the country together 9/11 fleetingly. There was a sense of national unity, but it broke apart as America and the Bush administration prosecuted the 9/11 wars. You know, you think COVID, well, you know, maybe a pandemic that's killing hundreds of thousands of people. Maybe that'll bring the country and it drives it further apart, right? You think a farmer, maybe he'll bring the country again and he drives it again. You know, it just keeps on and the problem with the culture wars, which are at the heart of so many of these divisions, is there always been new things to argue about, right? I mean, who'd have thought 25 years ago we'd be arguing about transgender bathrooms? Who would have thought we'd be arguing about, you know, books? What books are bad? You know, it's... Exactly. And now, you know, history has become a battlecrank. You know, there's a constant argument over history now. And I mean, one of the arguments to the book is, is there America is facing this burden right now. It's a kind of, a burden of historical overlap. They're, they cannot move forward because so much of their history is unresolved, whether it's on guns, whether it's on abortion, whether it's on literally the rules of democracy. They are still arguing over the rules of democracy. They are still arguing over how power should be a portion between the presidency, Congress, the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court was never meant to be supreme, by the way, the Fanning Fathers have really thought the judiciary was going to be the kind of third partner in the Congress and the presidency. We're going to be the power centers. The judiciary was never supposed to exercise this matter of power. You know, they're still arguing over all the stuff. Abraham Lincoln once said, "We cannot escape our history." And we are just seeing that constantly. They are so much unresolved history that they can't move beyond it. Okay. We almost had a time, but I do want to ask you, you talked about what it's been on the side of the state tomorrow. How is this going to look like a conflict? I really worry about that. I think Trump, the first time around, there were a lot of grown-ups in important rooms that crucial talks who were trying to moderate his behaviour. Sometimes it weren't even sort of actually following through on his presidential orders. They were just kind of ignoring him and hopefully wouldn't notice that a lot of the time they didn't. So I really worry about that. I do think he has really strong authoritarian tendencies. I mean, in the book, I argue that, you know, a lot of previous presidents have had authoritarian tendencies as well. I mean, that's the central thesis of the book really, that, you know, Trump's as much a product for American history. Is Abraham Lincoln or Barack Obama or Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or JFK or Ronald Reagan? It's just the history that tends to be forgotten, the history that we don't want to talk about, the history that tends to get deliberately buried and concealed. You know, there have always been demagogues in the American story. A lot of American presidents have acted in an authoritarian way, including heroes like Abraham Lincoln and FDR. Conspiratorialism has always been part of the American story. Political violence has been the through line. I mean, the first speaker of the House of Representatives survived an assassination attempt. Donald Trump's great presidential hero, a guy called Andrew Jackson. Again, he survived a presidential assassination attempt. You know, Trump shouldn't surprise us because we've seen his light before. Perhaps not as extreme in terms of ordering a mob to overturn an election result by storm in the U.S. Capitol. But, you know, stuff that gets close. And what worries me about the second time around is, is there won't be the figures around him to restrain him. Yeah. And certainly the White House and in the Republican Party, you know, there are still safeguards. There are still checks and balances. I mean, to get people into positions like the Secretary of State, America's chief diplomat or the Secretary of Treasury, they're going to still have to have congressional approval. But there's a strong chance that, you know, the Republican is going to be in control of both the Senate and the House. And they won't have a filibuster-proof majority, which is what you need in the Senate to really get things done. But they have a majority maybe. It's not a good map for the Democrats in the Senate elections this year. So you wouldn't have the restraining influences. And what really worries me, Charles, is the Supreme Court at the moment. I mean, you've seen their rulings in recent times. I mean, that ruling on presidential immunity was really, really frightening. And, you know, figures on the Supreme Court, like Samuel Alito, like Clarence Thomas, even John Roberts, I mean, he's got a terrible background of voter suppression from his earlier years as a young lawyer. You know, these, these people are going to have a mighty impact if Trump wins the presidency again. And I really fear how they exercise that power. But, Brian, thank you for your time today. I would like to call the floor of the year. Really enjoy that conversation. Me too. Love to be here. Thanks very much. If you'd like more information about better reading, follow us on Facebook or visit betterreading.com.au. This podcast is proudly sponsored by Belinda Audio. 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