How History Will View Trump’s Return
47:01 Share

I'm Maria Konnikova. And I'm Nate Silver. Our podcast, Risky Business, is a show about making better decisions. Decisions like, should you bet on the election? Maybe. Should you even be able to? Yes. And questions like, have presidential candidates made the most optimal decisions in their campaigns? And how does that translate into the polling? We're talking about it all in the lead up and aftermath of the election. Listen to Risky Business wherever you get your podcasts.

♪ Come to not a yada ♪

We're back on the Nariyara Island Confessions Show. Benny is about to tell us how he found two loves. Go ahead. Yeah, thanks to Metro, I found iPhone 12 and Apple Watch SE. At Metro, get the perfect match of both iPhone 12 with 5G and Apple Watch SE for only $99.99. You heard that right. Both for just $99.99. Holidays with Nariyara only at Metro by T-Mobile. Bring your number and ID, sign up for Metro Flex Plus, and add a watch line. Not available if you're with T-Mobile or been with Metro in the past 180 days. Limit two per account.

Hi, I'm Ravi Agrawal, Foreign Policy's Editor-in-Chief. This is FP Live. Welcome to the show. Wow, what a week. It is now clear that we've achieved the most incredible political thing. Look what happened. Is this crazy? On Wednesday morning, we learned that Donald Trump not only won the electoral vote, he is also on track to win the popular vote.

Winning the popular vote was very nice, very nice, I will tell you. If he does, it would be the first time a Republican has won a majority of votes since George W. Bush in 2004. It also upends several assumptions rooted in demography. For example, the idea that because America is becoming less white, non-white voters would automatically gravitate towards the Democratic Party.

That, and so many other assumptions, busted. Over the coming days and weeks, there will be all kinds of postmortems about what happened in this election and why, and many attempts to parse exit poll data. I felt like it was too soon for us to do that on FP Live right now, and I thought it actually might be helpful to take a step back. I wanted to try and frame this election in terms of history.

No American president has won a non-consecutive term since Grover Cleveland in 1892. But it's not just that. The United States feels more divided, more partisan, more seesawing than it has in a very, very long time.

So how do we place this week's results in historical terms? Are there any lessons or observations from the past that could be helpful in understanding the current moment? I have two great American historians on the show today.

Julian Zalaza will be familiar to readers of Foreign Policy, he writes for us. He's a professor of history at Princeton University, focusing on modern American history, and he's written or edited 26 books, including Fault Lines, A History of the United States Since 1974, and the forthcoming book, In Defense of Partisanship.

and Joanne Freeman is a Yale University professor of history focusing on early American politics. Her most recent book is The Field of Blood, Congressional Violence in Antebellum America. After this episode, we will continue looking at the election results from a range of other angles, including foreign policy, of course. If you would like to see something in particular, write us. We are live at foreignpolicy.com. Let's dive in.

Julian, Joanne, welcome to FP Live. Thanks for having us. So they say that journalists write the first draft of history. We've written our first drafts. I think it's a good time to turn to you both now. Julian, I'll start with you. One big question about Trump's first term was whether it was a blip in the trajectory of America's politics. And now the question has to be asked if Biden's term was the blip.

I think it might have been. I don't think of Trump's presidency as a blip. I didn't think of the first term as a blip. I think it came out of changes that had happened both in Republican politics and American politics more broadly. And I think this election is shaping up to be a little bit like 1984, for example, where a certain vision of politics was legitimated.

President, former President Trump, President-elect Trump has been very transparent about what he believes in, how he'll govern. So I think if we look back, you know, Biden might have been an anomaly in some ways in which that election took place in 2020, or as Ezra Klein's recently argued, it might have been the last gasp of the Obama coalition. We don't know, but I think there's an argument to be made. That's what we're seeing right now. Hmm.

Joanne, you are the scholar on Hamilton. How do you imagine the founding fathers would interpret this week's news? Well, they might say I told you so. You know, their number one fear, if you read the writings, the personal letters, anything that they were writing in the founding era, it's hard to say that the founders agreed on a lot.

But this they did agree on, and that was that the greatest threat to any republic, but particularly a democratic republic, was a demagogue. And by that, what they meant was democracy, you know, the world was monarchies at the time. A democratic republic grounded on public opinion and the public to a greater degree was experimental. What made these largely elitist founder folk nervous was that the public,

would be easily persuaded, warped, led astray by someone who could get their emotions riled up

and that that's the vulnerability of anything democratic, that the people and their emotions can lead them astray. And historically speaking, in deep history, going back to ancient Greece, ancient Rome, when they looked at republics, what they saw was demagogues saying anything that they can possibly say to the public to get their emotions flowing, to woo the public. And then once they got power, doing whatever they wanted and becoming tyrants. They talked about that all the time.

They talked about that throughout the entire founding period when they tried to evaluate politics in the early, let's say, the first decade of the republic. That was what they were looking on. That was what was on their mind. So in a way, this is an easy question to answer because that would be the absolute first thing that they would say. We told you, we told you that demagogic tendencies are the vulnerability. And now here you are.

Julian, I'd like you to riff on that. I mean, there's also the inverse here because Trump routinely invokes U.S. history. There's make America great again, rooted in the past. And then knowingly or unknowingly, you know, I'm struck by the fact that the very first law passed by the very first Congress was the 1789 Tariff Act.

Trump keeps talking about how tariffs are beautiful. It's one of his key campaign pledges. He says he wants to be a dictator. On day one, the founders created a strong executive branch. How does Trump think about his place in history? And what does that mean in terms of what we can expect from him?

Well, I think he has grandiose feelings about himself and he's someone who feels that he has the capacity to test every institution and every norm and he can break them or ignore them and get away with it. I do think that's his disposition. It always has been. He, at some level, is someone with a huge appetite for power.

He's also a showman. All of us who have followed his history understand he believes he can not only sell things, but sell almost anything. And he combines those two elements into who he is. And I think the first term, he was already more serious in many ways about certain goals than people understood before.

But the second term is a whole other ballgame. I think he has a set of issues that he very much wants to pursue to put his imprint on this period in American history. The tariff is won economically. We don't know what exactly that means. He's remarkably ambiguous, even as he keeps saying the same thing over and over. Might be leveraged for certain tariffs, might be some mega tariff. We will see.

I do think going after opponents should be taken seriously. He's been very clear that this will be part of his mark, a purge. You know, you can imagine Senator McCarthy back in the 1950s having presidential power and then trying to put his imprint by going on and against Democrats.

And that will include weakening the walls between the Department of Justice and the Oval Office. I think he's very clear on that. And then on foreign policy, we'll see. We'll see what he wants to do. I assume he will continue to pursue this more nationalist slash isolationist agenda, which he seems committed to. And if he can do that and kind of advance it further,

including in areas such as the Russia-Ukraine war, that would be a big turn against liberal internationalism and the alliances that came out of World War II. And so he has big visions. And now he's surrounded by people who might be more amateur, quote unquote, in terms of governing experience, but are very clear and deliberate in what they want to achieve. And so I would look for these four years ahead.

Those are some of the areas, and there's others that he'll pursue. Obviously, I would add a kind of harsh, even harsher turn against immigration, possibly ramping up deportations, continuing with the border wall, making citizenship even more difficult in the existing rules that we have. Yeah, I want to...

Respond to two of the things you said, sort of opening this question. And they're related, I suppose. One thing you said is that he cites history a lot. And another thing you talked about was the founders creating a powerful executive. And I would say those things are linked because the founders created an anti-Qing.

So, yes, Donald Trump cites history a lot. I will say usually incorrectly, particularly in talking about the founders.

Most people do. I always tell my students that once you take my classes and you listen to any political rhetoric, you will be able to immediately see the many ways in which people cherry pick anything that the founders say to make them say what they want them to say. So that's important to note because I think now in the next four years, we're going to get a lot of, I am following in the path of founders. I am the true American. The founders support me. And going in, I suspect a lot of that is not going to be true. And one thing

particular thing that it's worth noting is the executive. So again, look at the debates and the Constitutional Convention, look at the concerns of that generation of power holders and what they were worried about was executive power. They were worried about power and that's what the Constitution was about, was distributing power, but they were worried about executive power. They had just broken away from what they considered to be a tyrannical executive, I suppose you could say, king.

And so they felt that they were bounding in the executive in a variety of different ways that would prevent this from being too powerful an executive. Interestingly enough, at the convention, one of the things that they considered was having an executive council and not a single man as president, because one man might be too powerful, but a council, you could, you know, sort of power would be distributed. The argument against that

was if you have more than one executive, they'll hide behind each other and there'll be no one who will be there to be ashamed of what he did and be held accountable for it. I'm not going to comment on that. I'm just going to throw that out there. But the fact of the matter is in the founding era and through a huge chunk of the 19th century,

particularly in the 19th century, Congress was at the center of news coverage, journalism, power. You know, I mean, there certainly were executives that were exceptions to that rule. But if you read a newspaper in 1830, 1840, even 1850, I'd say before the Civil War,

the newspapers, most column inches were devoted to Congress. People read the debates. That was where they felt they were and that was where they felt power was. So that's important to note because now that we live in this moment of apparent executive immunity,

You know, I signed on to the amicus brief against executive immunity that was given sent to the Supreme Court. It was it was a bunch of historians of early America who signed on to that and others who actually created it.

And what we all said, not for partisan purposes, but because it's a fact, is that if again, if you could say that there is something that the founding era would have been absolutely against its executive immunity for all of the reasons that I've just said, that there is no way you can look at American history, you can look at the founding period, you can look at the founders, you can look at the Constitution. There is nothing

that justifies an immune national executive. Wow. And if I could just jump in, I mean, I think that's an important point. And in terms of what he wants to do, I do think he has embraced presidential power in the most expansive way possible. This is a debate we've had throughout the 20th century and 21st

In the 1970s, surrounding Nixon, Richard Nixon and his downfall, there were discussions of the imperial presidency. Congress had an entire decade of trying to institute reforms like the War Powers Act, the Budget Reform Act that curbed presidential power. The Independent Council in 1978 was set up for that purposes. And ultimately, the reforms were substantial, but they eroded.

And especially after 9-11, we saw a kind of reinvigoration of presidential power. And I think the fusion of Republican politics, conservative politics, and presidential politics has been a trend line really since certainly the 1980s, accelerating after 2001. And I think...

This is really important to Trump, and it goes against exactly what Johan is talking about. But he made another discovery in some ways that you can get away with a lot. You don't just have to flex the technical rules and you don't have to find loopholes and kind of ways to undercut congressional opponents. You can just do things.

And often the pushback is so much weaker than we would imagine as norms change, as partisan incentives change. That was a lot of what his first term was about. He would go there to places you thought you couldn't go as president, and it was okay. As long as the internal norms that you're guided by don't check you. And I would imagine in the next four years, he's been so explicit about this.

And the Project 2025 is all about executive power, that we are going to see a significant ramping up of an already powerful presidency that tries to really cut the power of Congress further, uh,

undermine the power of the courts and demonstrate that if someone is willing to use this institution in robust fashion, in aggressive fashion, no one's really going to do anything about it. They might criticize it, but the fallout won't be as severe. And look, you know, one last thing. He just was reelected four years after using presidential power to try to overturn an election.

Every historian citizen has to at least understand that's a dramatic thing that just happened. And I think he understands this election as saying all of that was fine and he can overcome any kind of political threat or tension or criticism that's going to come his way.

I want to continue this train of thought, but Joanne, just one sidestep here. We haven't talked about Vice President Harris, and I'd like to spend a beat on her because, you know, historically, her candidacy was unique in so many ways, from the way she entered the race to her position as the first woman of color to run for that office. Her slogan was, we are not going back, but now we quite literally are.

How is history going to remember her candidacy? Well, I mean, you know, with whatever, 24 or 48 hours to have processed this, I think she ran an exceptional campaign. I don't think this moment is about what she did. I don't think this moment is about what she didn't do. I think this moment is about where America is. You started out by asking if the Biden years were a blip.

You know, I would say what we're living in, and it isn't about simply Harris's candidacy, but obviously it's about Obama too. We're living in an era of blowback. We're living in an era where things happened that so supremely upset what a certain constituency believed to be the proper order and their entitlement to a certain kind of power that we are living in a blowback era. Obama set that off, having a black candidate

woman run for president was part of the response to that as part of that same sense of people feeling as though, again, people of a certain ilk feeling as though their entitlement to power, which they have long felt that they have and they are feeling threatened by that. That's where the great replacement theory plugs in, right? That's about we deserve superiority. We deserve power. You are threatening our entitlement to power.

So as far as Harris goes, I'm not going to say, oh, she did X, Y, and Z wrong. I am going to say that she is part of a larger moment in which Americans are reeling away. Now, let me come back to that. Not all Americans. Some Americans are reeling away, staggering back from what felt like the possibility of change. And she certainly represented that moment.

not necessarily in a policy means, but in a social means, in a sort of national vision means. And so what I see now, and who knows what's going to happen, and who knows if there'll be a blowback to the next four years, I don't know. But that's how I interpret what's going on now. I don't think it's a question of Harris. I think she did, given the amazingly difficult circumstances she had, and even without them, I think she did really well. And I think being a

black woman running right now, we just watched what that means. Context is a word she always uses and it takes on new meaning here. Julian I want to build on that with you. There are going to be so many different post-mortems on this election, you know exit poll data is not very authoritative but even so I think it's fair to say that the vote was not in fact clearly divided by gender or race

And the Democratic Party, one reading of it could be that it seems to be becoming the party of the educated elite or dominating elite institutions of all types. And the Republican Party seems to be the opposite. So grievances about feeling left out.

And if you follow that chain through, then one narrative from this election is that it is a repudiation of the system itself. The system, the economy, it might work for the elites, but it's not working for too many other people. And Donald Trump, for all of his obvious flaws, he's an agent of chaos and Americans seem to want that chaos.

Well, there's different parts of that. I think I would add the word it's the parties are perceived to be that way. I'm not sure that always lines up with what the parties are. I mean,

Trump was surrounded by some very wealthy elitist advisors and a Yale educated vice president. No offense, Joanne, head of his transition team is a very wealthy, you know, Wall Street type investor type. And the party as a whole, that's part of the coalition, too.

meaning money, business. And similarly with Democrats. It's true that, and it's significant, that Republicans increase their vote with Black and Latino males. But if you look at the Black vote, it still overwhelmingly goes down

to the Democrats, still a lot of working in middle-class Americans voted in this election. The sum is a lot, tens of millions of people still preferred Harris and preferred the promise of democratic politics. So part of this is a perception issue. I'm not discounting the real changes, but I do think that's sometimes born out of rhetoric.

effective rhetoric from the Republican Party. That said, I do think, look, it's clear the Republicans have made deep inroads into parts of working America that are rebelling not only against democratic policies, but with this narrative against the institutions with which we live. And I do think, and we need to seriously think about

why these populations, and I think working Black and Latino men were part of the shift, at least from the initial kind of data. So it's the same population kind of

Why are they feeling this way? And what are the conditions that they have been facing for decades? And it's not about inflation since 2021. I think that's a mistake. It's about structural costs that are becoming impossible for many families to deal with. You

Housing costs and education costs are not simply about the effects of the American Rescue Plan. This has been discussed now for decades as growing burdens on workers who have less secure jobs. I do think all of that is at play in this new MAGA Republican-Trump coalition. That, combined with all the traditional elements of the Republican coalition, are making it really powerful.

And one notable part of the map is even in these states where Harris won, and I agree with Joanne, I think she ran a very good campaign. I don't really think this is about her other than a kind of sexist, racial part of a backlash to the candidacy. But even in the states she won, Republicans did a lot better in New York, New Jersey, California. And those numbers should kind of open some eyes because if those keep growing,

then this coalition can be very formidable, the Republican coalition, for decades if they start to flip just a few of those states in coming years. And I think Democrats are quite worried about the numbers in the places they won, not just in the states they lost. I want to...

comment on that because I've had a couple of really interesting conversations in the last, let's say, two days. And this is anecdotal and it's, you know, responding to a conversation with two people, but it really got me thinking. So, you know, we, many of us have long been saying, oh yeah, right. It's the economy, right? It's the economy and that there's so many other things at play here.

I think people have been particularly, again, the people who voted for Trump have heard and responded to an economic slash

racist or pretending that there isn't racism, but one way or another, that there's a different way they heard that economic message that is tied in with grievance. And let me explain what I mean, because I don't think they've been hearing the political messages, particularly that the left has been sending out. So these two people I talked to, one of them is a handyman in New York. One of them was my Uber driver. The handyman is an Eastern European. He told me he voted for Trump.

And I, since I know him, I said, why? And he said, because I don't like the system. Ravi, you already mentioned the system. I don't like the system. She represents more of the same. We need change. I'm worried about like my life and the economy, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And when I said, what do you think about the fact that the thing I'm worried about is that I understand you want change. What I'm worried about is that he's going to be a dictator.

And he's even used that word. And when this man, again, Eastern European, heard me use the word dictator, he just froze. It had not crossed his mind. And he understood immediately what I was saying. And he actually then said, you're changing my mind. I have to go and left. Yesterday, and I realize this is ridiculous. So people out there watching this, just humor me. My Uber driver was a trans woman who voted for Trump.

And she said, I'm a small business owner. I think he would be better for the economy. I'm going to lose my hormones and I'm going to sacrifice that for this. And when I said to her, you know, what I'm worried about is that he's going to be a dictator. She actually said, really?

Like he never used that word, did he? Like how would that happen? These are two people and they're random two people. That political message that the left has been saying, that I have been saying for years, democracy is in danger, we're threatened by dictatorship, that message did not get through.

Or at least that's my suspicion. Joanne, if I may, there's a flip side to this because, you know, when Trump says Harris is a communist, that resonates with, for example, people who have left, you know, communist countries, you know, Cuban immigrants in the United States, for example, that does cut through.

It does, but at this point, you know, the isms, communism, socialism, fascism, they don't have a meaning anymore. People are using them as buzzwords and don't even necessarily know what they mean. And so they're being used in any variety of different ways. So on the one hand, yes, that does cut through. But at this point, that's a buzzword.

People don't know what you lose when you lose democracy. And I'm not just talking about politics. I'm talking about your everyday life. That that, in some fundamental ways, was not as dire or urgent a message as I thought it was going on here. But the disconnect between people's sense of their lives and society and the realities of politics and how those things actually interconnect and people not seeing that connection, I'm still processing that.

And you are listening to Foreign Policy Live. Remember, you can catch these conversations live and on video on foreignpolicy.com. Subscribers get to send us questions in advance, in addition to a range of other benefits, including the magazine. So sign up.

This episode is brought to you by LifeLock. The holidays mean more travel, more shopping, more time online, and more personal info in places that could expose you to identity theft. That's why LifeLock monitors millions of data points every second. If your identity is stolen, their U.S.-based restoration specialist will fix it, guaranteed, or your money back. Get more holiday fun and less holiday worry with LifeLock. Save up to 40% in your first year. Visit LifeLock.com slash podcast. Terms apply.

Julian, just to build on that, is there any historical precedent of that kind of disconnect that Joanne is talking about and the us and them that it builds, you know, again, with people who think the system works for them, people who feel like structurally it is broken. And again, I put this in the context of the last 40, 50 years of

you know, capitalism, urbanization, globalization, which, you know, we now know worked well for some, didn't work so well for everyone else. What does history tell us about how moments of flux, moments of great divide like that get resolved?

Well, there's two different issues. I mean, moments of tension and intense division in the late 1960s are the classic example, and we talked a lot about that with 1968, where there is a ferocity of the division that is different than the normal division.

kinds of tensions. In 1968, a question like Vietnam was a fundamental fault line within families, within neighbors. Friendships could be broken over where you stood on the war. There's no model or pattern of how they get resolved. Sometimes the issue itself might fade, meaning Vietnam came to an end and over a generation or so, it just was less pertinent.

Sometimes other issues can kind of distract attention from what was the original dividing question. In the 1970s, you have economic stagnation and you have unemployment all become so big that some of those questions from the 70s are not quite as intense. But the other division you're talking about and that Joanne is talking about

I think it's a product of what we've been living with since Vietnam and Watergate, meaning distrust in institutions continues to grow. It started with those two crises. It has become more intense because of all sorts of problems like campaign finance and people hearing stories about money flooding into politics, distrust of media institutions, all of this.

has been a multi-decade story. And every poll will show you, other than a few exceptional moments, distrust of the president, distrust of Congress, now distrust of the Supreme Court and the media are extraordinarily high. So you have a population that is ready to be told, don't listen to what you're hearing, ignore what you're hearing, or tune it out because it's probably just

more of a broken system, more of a system that isn't actually working for you. And I think Trump capitalizes on this. I mean, he's fundamentally ahistorical in what he says, but at the same time, he often has a very good sense of where we are in history

I've always believed this. And he taps into some of these things. And that distrust, that foundation of distrust born of the 1960s and 70s has been essential to him escaping some of the warnings such as being an autocrat or being a dictator or abusing presidential power. I think a lot of people...

They just it's not just that they don't listen. Some don't hear it. I think some are just so disbelieving. It's not a concern to them or it's not going to be at the top of their list. And they come back to the other issues. How much does my burger cost at fast food chain X? Because that's very real to them. That's something they can understand and believe in because they see the numbers.

Geron, just to change topics a little bit, you've written a lot about violence in electoral transitions. History shows that it's not uncommon. With Harris conceding as quickly as she has, does that forestall a violent reaction or are you still worried about political violence in the coming weeks and months?

Well, I mean, certainly when you have moments like this that are very palpably moments of flux, change, trauma and drama where people can tell that there's something fundamental about the direction of the United States that's at play.

Those are moments that tend to be more violent, not surprisingly. You know, no one thinks about the 1790s. The 1790s, when people were talking about democracy and how democratic a nation should we be, the late 1790s became violent. John Adams actually used the word terrorism thinking about France, but still for the late 1790s. The 1850s are another moment. Obviously, the civil rights era, the 1960s are another. We're in another now. But what's distinctive about this moment is

is, and I'll go back to my last book in which I was writing about the U.S. Congress in the 1830s, 40s, and 50s. And you had Southerners, slaveholding Southerners, nationally, but particularly in Congress, who were used to the South having

more power than they should have had representationally, but having national power, having state power, really being in control to a degree that they, again, took for granted. And when things in the particularly 1840s, 1850s began to feel as though they were shifting and slaveholding Southerners felt,

that anti-slavery attempts, anti-slavery energy was rising, what these people, these men did in Congress was they turned to violence.

They basically assumed they did not have the demographics, they did not have the power to do what they wanted. So they resorted to threats and intimidation and sometimes physical violence to maintain control. That's what the book is about, is about slaveholding Southerners using threats and violence to maintain control.

Right. And so we have been watching that in recent years, more than recent years. And certainly it's worth saying American history is, you know, a political history, but history is violent and violence comes into our politics. So it's not an exception. I'm not going to say, oh, it's shocking. There's violence because in American history there is. But some of the violence that we saw, the rhetoric and actually the actions that we saw coming from the right in recent, not just months, but years, significantly

Some of that was from people who felt that the best way to maintain or get power was the systems not working for them. Democracy might not work for them. They don't or we didn't think and they didn't think necessarily that they had a numerical advantage. So threats and intimidation, violence are a way of getting and keeping power. Now, what that says about this moment is so now they have power.

And so one would think, OK, so now they could step back from that if they want. But what we just saw, and particularly in this campaign, but generally speaking among the manga folk, is people who, and Trump specifically, endorsed and glorified and justified focusing on violence.

took away, sort of stamped on the idea that we should not be talking about violence, we should not be violent. And a denial on the part of Trump that rhetoric along those lines matters, particularly coming from a person with extreme power, it does matter. So we're now in a moment when

to some degree, there has been the glorification of violence and threats in the lead up to this moment. And now we have a population of people who feel unleashed. Now, I don't know what that means. I'm a historian. I'm not going to predict what that means. But it does mean that I'm not I don't think, you know, oh, well, you know, it's been violent and now he's in power. So it won't be. I honestly don't know.

But what people are experiencing now who were MAGA folk who liked Trump and who followed along with that rhetoric and the message he sent, and now they have power. I don't know what that means, but I...

There's a pretty wide spectrum of how I think that could play out. - I'll just point out that of course, Trump has been the subject of two assassination attempts. So there has been violence inflicted on him as well. Julian, the entrenched polarization that we've sort of been riffing on today, it kind of means that small changes in the electorate's mood are all that's required to swing an election, swing Congress, the presidency.

And I'm curious if this swinginess, you know, now with three essentially one-term presidents in a row, is this swinginess new in historical terms? Or is it something that is better explained in more global terms? How do you think about swinginess?

Well, I mean, the map that has become very rigid and contests that are essentially still taking place in a handful of states, you know, since 1984, with the exception of 2008, although it's still not the same, we just don't have...

huge landslide election. So in addition to power swinging back and forth, we've been in a multi-decade era of razor thin margins and only a handful of states at play. So people become very intense over a handful of votes, which is a recipe for increasing the tensions because you can't afford to make a mistake.

You don't have huge coalitions like Reagan did, like Nixon did, like Roosevelt did, where you can afford to lose some voters or you can afford to take a risk and might be unpopular, but your coalition will still be intact and endure for decades. That's what we were talking about. We don't have that anymore.

So you combine narrow margin swing state elections with power shifting back and forth. I mean, we did have in the '60s and '70s, and I'll just go back to that period, incredible instability in presidential power.

Kennedy is assassinated. Yes, Johnson wins in 64, but he doesn't run in 68. Nixon steps down after getting reelected. Ford barely is in office before he has to pack up and leave. Carter's a one-term president. So you go through a whole period where things are unstable until kind of Reagan comes along and entrenches this new coalition, which will shape electoral politics for decades to come. So we've had that, but I think the absence of

kind of big landslide elections is pretty notable. Even this one, I mean, I think Trump might have a realignment taking place, but it's still within the swing state framework, meaning he's not going to win massive electoral college victory as we've had in the past. And back to Joanne's some comment, you have huge portions of the population which still did not support him and supported the Democratic ticket vote.

But all of this is to say, I think the swinginess, the rigidity and calcification of the electorate heightens the partisan tensions because too much is at stake with every word you say, with every decision you make. And so it certainly makes it harder to build any kind of trust across the aisle or across red-blue divides. John, I want to go back to

Part of where we began, where you said that the founding fathers would have said, I told you so about this week. What advice would they have to navigate polarization, to navigate divides, to navigate a demagogic leader? What can history give us in terms of advice and lessons? Believe it or not, Thomas Jefferson kind of addressed this. And he addressed it because of a fraught

almost violent presidential election in 1800. So the 1800 election ended up being a tie between the two Jeffersonian Republican candidates, Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, and it was thrown into the House.

and the Federalists who had been supporting John Adams for president, this was their worst nightmare come true, that one of those two people would become president. And so Federalists in Congress began talking about how to overturn that election.

They tried to figure out how to stop it, how to prevent anyone from being given the presidency and figure out what to do next, how to appoint a president pro tem so that neither of those two men would take power. They began to talk in an extreme kind of a way. In Pennsylvania and Virginia, governors began stockpiling arms because they didn't know if they were going to have to take the government for Jefferson.

And thousands of people came to Washington and surrounded the Capitol to see what would happen, and I assume to act if they didn't like what happened. So there did not end up being violence, but that's most people, you know, in the normal world don't know that. And that's in some ways the similarities to this moment are shocking. But here's the striking thing about it. And this is the message. After it was all done, someone wrote to Jefferson and said, what would you have done?

If it had gone violent, you know, it's a bad paraphrase, but essentially, what would you have done if some of those things had happened? How do you respond to that? And he basically said the political process, because he said, what would have happened? I tell you what would have happened. We would have had a convention of some kind. We would have fixed up the Constitution. And then we would keep going forward because the process, the Constitution, that's

what holds us together. That's who we are. The people who were working on the Constitution, created the Constitution, who felt its need, it's a framework, it's about a process. And what they felt more than anything else, above and beyond the nature of the process, was that getting a process down on paper that was going to be a pact that Americans signed onto, that was always going to be there, was the process we could use and rely on

That was vitally, vitally important. There are three fundamental props of American democracy that you just lay them out there and it'll tell you where we are. Right. One of them is accountability. The people who we give political power to are supposed to be accountable to us for how they use that power. One of them is the rule of law doesn't work perfectly in the United States, but it's there and it's a standard. And the other one is free and fair elections.

Those are like three pillars of democracy. Accountability, the rule of law, and free and fair elections. And I think all of those things should be in people's minds and people should be thinking about ways to reinforce them. Well, processes, if you can keep them. You're both historians, but thank you for looking to the future today. Julian Zalazar, Joanne Freeman, thanks so much for joining us.

And that was my conversation with the historians Julian Zelizer and Joanne Freeman. Lots more coming up on FP Live next week. Ian Bremmer on the geopolitical risks facing the second Trump White House and also the world. If you have guest suggestions, feedback or ideas, we love hearing from you. Contact us at live at foreignpolicy.com.

FP Live, the podcast, is produced by Rosie Julin and the executive producer of the show is Dana Schoen. I'm Ravi Agrawal. I'll see you next time.

And some quirky non-political stories you probably missed. Vilnius, the G-spot of Europe. Nobody knows where it is, but once you find it, it's amazing. The Europeans. New episodes every Thursday.