Looking back in history, I mean, what types of things in a divided government that you've seen parties sort of be able to get through, regardless of whether what types of things have they been able to actually get done?

Well, in moments of crisis, either an immediate crisis or a broader national security crisis, Cold War, COVID, take your pick, there is often room where neither party wants to be the party of no.

And so I don't know.

We'll see how things with AI unfold.

President Trump has been very firm against regulation, but let's see kind of what's around the corner.

You can imagine something like that, and there's a history of that.

You know, second, it's a transactional kind of approach.

And I just wonder, Julian, if there are some ways that this Congress can restrain the power of the executive.

What are other elections you think about in in history that look like this one?

Well, there's lots, but a few that come to mind.

I was thinking as I watched the results about the 1974 midterms where, you know, Richard Nixon had resigned from office and the Watergate babies, as they were called, people like Henry Waxman and George Miller.

are elected into office, partly on domestic economic issues, partly on the promise of reforming government and strengthening the democracy.

1994 is very consequential.

Newt Gingrich leads a Republican revolution, brings Republicans in power, controlling Congress for the first time since the 1950s.

And even though he will struggle and ultimately have a downfall and President Clinton will remain popular, he puts issues on the agenda and kind of re-energizes Republican politics in ways that will have influence for decades to come, even the style of partisanship.

reflects those states as they actually are, as opposed to the kind of version or vision of them that a lot of people had.

What's the John D. Rockefeller story that people today might not know?

Well, originally he was someone quite revered.

He doesn't come from a lot and he becomes one of the biggest tycoons in the world of business in the late 19th century and famously founded the Standard Oil Company, which at first was kind of the cutting edge of industry, both in terms of how it controlled different elements of business and what it was doing.

But gradually, people become very aware of the high costs of what Standard Oil was doing, from monopolistic practices to just the immense wealth that Rockefeller commanded, which also included influence on politicians.

And you had journalists like Ida Tarbell who started to write about him and portray him in a very different way.

So by the time Congress breaks up his company and he is no longer in favor, I think you can see some of the trajectory of business leaders who don't constrain their own power, don't have a sense of what they're doing and how it affects the public broadly.

Social Security had a previous crisis?

Sure did.

What's the John D. Rockefeller story that people today might not know?

Well, originally he was someone quite revered.

He doesn't come from a lot and he becomes one of the biggest tycoons in the world of business in the late 19th century and famously founded the Standard Oil Company, which at first was kind of the cutting edge of industry, both in terms of how it controlled different elements of business and what it was doing.

But gradually, people become very aware of the high costs of what Standard Oil was doing, from monopolistic practices to just the immense wealth that Rockefeller commanded, which also included influence on politicians.

And you had journalists like Ida Tarbell who started to write about him and portray him in a very different way.

So by the time Congress breaks up his company and he is no longer in favor, I think you can see some of the trajectory of business leaders who don't constrain their own power, don't have a sense of what they're doing and how it affects the public broadly.

Social Security had a previous crisis? Yes.

Sure did.

Remind us what happened to then-candidates Donald Trump and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

A lot of bitter feelings among Democrats about this one.

On October 28th, days before the election, FBI Director James Comey sends a letter to Congress saying that he is reopening an investigation the FBI had conducted into a private email server of Hillary Clinton.

because some new emails had been discovered.

And he, before the election, Comey will announce that there was nothing there and he was closing the investigation.

But that small window, some argue, really hurt Hillary Clinton because it fueled Trump's arguments that she was corrupt and that there was something wrong.

And it also just undermined some enthusiasm in key Democratic states.

Even though we are not in a presidential election year, I wonder if you've seen any events that might be the equivalent of an October surprise or that you're looking for.

What we're witnessing now, is there any previous experience we've had in the past, anything like this?

Look, we're in an era from 1965 passage of the Voting Rights Act to the 2010s.

The goal was to strengthen the ability of Americans to vote, to increase the number of people voting and to make sure that there were no uncertainties about who can cast a ballot.

And I think we've been in an era.

since the 2010s, since the Shelby decision, where all of this is constantly facing uncertainty and where there are political forces that are fighting to really try to curtail voting rather than to expand it.

And so this is a piece of that era.

And in the short term, it's just we are in the midterm election season.

As we study what the Supreme Court has just said today, you're historical view of the moment we're witnessing just down just a matter of blocks away from the supreme court where these decisions are being made

he's not going to just spend his life studying halakha he's going to be involved in the world shaves and moves forward so take us a little bit from warsaw to berlin and maybe we'll pause at cincinnati for a minute so we can figure out heber union college

no no so he grows up in in a very traditional uh area of warsaw warsaw is a very a huge jewish population um Not quite 50%, but a big percentage of the city is Jewish.

And that is a city not just with Hasidic Jews, where he grows up, but also labor, radical labor leaders, early Zionists, poets and playwrights who were often quite radical in what they were doing.

And he grows up in a world where he's ensconced in the traditional part, but he always is watching and a little bit interacting with this other world as well.

His family is a family of very distinguished Hasidic rabbis.

So they're kind of elevated in the community.

And he's very bright from a young age, able to learn texts very young.

So this is

How do we get across how monumental 9/11 was to the next generation?

I try to do this every year when I teach my undergraduates, and now, uh, they have moved from barely remembering it to having been born, uh, after it.

And I think we really need to convey the stories of, uh, the families, uh, who suffered through it, the political leaders who wrestled with what to do, and, uh, the political leaders who made mistakes, uh, in the response, and of course, the stories of the first responders who were there on the ground.

I think this is where oral histories and history really matters to keeping all the lessons from this tragic moment alive for new generations.

How has our view of terrorism changed as a nation?

Well, I think we have become much more cognizant on many levels of domestic threats, not just threats from overseas that now exist here, uh, but from people who live here and organizations who live here.

Uh, we've also just become aware of how extreme division can sometimes lead to violence.

We've seen it happen firsthand, and I think we're just more concerned, many of us as a nation, about what is happening here, uh, than the kinds of threats that manifested themselves on 9/11.

So hindsight is 2020 of course, but from your perspective as a historian, what went wrong?

Look, some of it is the fact that government institutions are often slow to change.

They're big, they're large, they're rooted in history, and it often takes time to adjust to new realities.

Added to that is the gridlock of Washington, which makes progress very difficult.

Some of it was a bias of, of not taking the threats from the region as seriously as they had other areas like the Soviets during the Cold War.

And finally, there were reforms in the '70s which intentionally separated the FBI and the CIA, uh, in response to revelations of how government officials had abused the power.

So there was a resistance to going all in on centralization given the history and the record of the US government abusing that authority.

Do you think the government has learned the lessons of September 11th, 25 years later?

So now, today in twenty twenty-six, do you think, Julian, that Biden's party, the Democratic Party, has learned lessons that it will take going into the midterms?

Well, I think they've, uh, learned some, and they might be missing some.

Meaning, what they have learned is the importance of communication and, and using that to build a durable political coalition.

If you don't have that, you can put all the laws on the books that you want, but they ultimately will disappear.

I, I do think that Democrats could also take a look at some of what Biden did accomplish on the domestic front because one thing becomes clear in retrospect, that on many of the issues people care about today, education costs and Prices and investing in new forms of manufacturing.

Biden had actually made a lot of progress in those four years.

So part of the tragedy for Democrats is not just that their candidate lost, but that an entire policy agenda essentially is going out the window.

Why not?

What does this say about where we are and who we are as a nation that Donald Trump is doing this and we elected him and put him in a place to do this?

Well, I think the values are antithetical to what the founders imagined.

This was a country created in rebellion.

against monarchy, against centralized power, against grandiose displays of authority.

And I think the way he's envisioning how this renovation takes place, putting aside the national security arguments that have now popped up, is to embrace exactly what Washington didn't want, what I think many presidents have avoided, even if they have decorated it, even if they have made it more grandiose, It's not meant to be a palace.

It's meant to represent the idea that this is a representative democracy where ultimately the power rests in the people, not in the president.

So I think it says something about the country to accept it.

Julian, how does another president come in and deal with all this?

He, he had other problems.

Although it was part, it was certainly part of the problem.

But Carter, yes.

I mean, Carter in 1979, it's in the summer of '79, is really reeling from what Americans experience, and it's not simply gas prices.

It's waiting in line for gas.

It's hearing that you could only buy gas on certain days.

It's reading stories about people stealing gas and violent clashes occurring-

Yeah.

He had other problems.

Although it was part, it was certainly part of the problem, but Carter, yes.

I mean, Carter in 1979, it's in the summer of '79, is really reeling from what Americans experience, and it's not simply gas prices.

It's waiting in line for gas.

It's hearing that you could only buy gas on certain days.

It's reading stories about people stealing gas and violent clashes occurring-

Yeah.

Uh, it's a war without the kind of clarity, uh, even that many people felt after 9/11 with Afghanistan and Iraq for a while.

Princeton's Julian Zelizer is a presidential historian, and he tells Scott Tong that history has two powerful examples of presidents who overcame deep divisions in their parties to govern decisively: Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the thirties, and Ronald Reagan in the eighties.

It was a deeply divided party in the 1930s.

You had conservative Southern Democrats who were the powerhouses in Congress, who were very conservative on race relations, on unionization, and on many government issues.

And then you had a growing cohort of Northern Democrats, such as Senator Wagner of New York, who were very liberal and wanted to expand government and were really the architects of programs like Social Security and the National Labor Relations Act.

And so this was a big tension, bigger than in many ways the party faces today-

What issues did Reagan confront and, I guess as you argue, confront well?

Yeah, I mean, his coalition was also just a total mess in 1980.

There were so many different factions.

Is that just a hunch, or is that backed up through stats or effectiveness or anything else historically?

I don't know if there's a statistical study of that or how you would actually gauge it.

Look, I've met many legislators today and policymakers in both parties who are very smart and certainly would stand up with people of yesteryear.

And I've studied many people from yesteryear who are not particularly smart or they're unethical or they would fall under the categorization you're talking today.

I do think there's challenges the current political ecosystem causes that doesn't always bring out the smart in smart people i do think i'm one who thinks social media has really degraded uh our our public discourse and our common space in politics and so you you have incentives for uh elected officials today to speak in ways that are provocative sensational attention yet that doesn't mean they're not smart But it leads them to a style of political debate that I don't think elevates who we are as a democracy and diminishes it.

I do think one other part to connect to the last question is because majorities on Capitol Hill are so narrow, my colleague Francis Lee wrote about this, and they shift so much in contrast to that earlier period, both parties, as smart as you might be, have an incentive to really kind of play to the worst elements of partisanship because you want to hold on to power.

You don't want to give your opponent a single thing because that might mean next Congress, you're out of power.

Can the legislative branch ever claw back power from the executive branch once it's handed over? And has that happened before?

And then the next time I really remember reading and seeing more of Newt was when, as you described, when Trump brought him back.

That's right.

And the 2012 campaign, by the way, not only did he When he was doing well, not only was he running a campaign very similar to Trump's message, almost the draining the swamp anti-media message, Kellyanne Conway was one of his top advisors.

So there's a connection that's really remarkable.

But yes, then he comes back, even though he doesn't get the vice presidential pick, he's been one of President Trump's most vocal supporters.

You often hear him or watch him on Fox.

television.

Okay, go ahead.

Would it have been possible without Social Security Act to have had the Medicare, Medicaid, the war on poverty during the LBJ administration?

No, I mean, broadly, I do think Social Security by the 50s is an extremely popular program.

By then, it's what it is today.

It's expanded.

People in Republican and Democratic areas are depending on it.

So I think by the time you hit the 60s, which is when LBJ is president, Americans are accustomed to federal provision.

I mean, obviously, Social Security is one thing among many, but it was an important one.

You mentioned Ronald Reagan, and for our younger listeners who don't remember the early 1980s or weren't around, what prompted him to... move with this rolling back the welfare state agenda and why was it popular and how successful was he? I

But what if this time he really is having some sort of change of heart and he really means it, that this, what people are calling a slush fund that would pay insurrectionists, is appalling?

Well, I, I think if you're bothered, as many people are, by January 6th, it's, it's better to have a, a former Republican leader, uh, and still a prominent Republican, standing against the slush fund and standing against this kind of payment, and that vote matters.

But still, more broadly, you want some sense of reckoning from the party about what's happened, what they've done, and the implications of continuing to this day, uh, to protect a president from their own party when he does things that destabilize the democracy.

So unless he does that, unless you see more people in the party do that, this is obviously a good step, uh, but it doesn't leave the bigger issue-

... destroyed the job he once held, the, you know, the majority leader.

I think that's right.

I mean, I think there's two things that have happened.

One is President Trump has expanded his reach as a party leader.

What, what am I ranking, making reference to? This is Katherine Cramer Brownell's work.

It's a very interesting essay, and it really looks at this new landscape that we live in, including, uh, what we are on currently, but of podcasting, of social media, really where these older institutions of media that President Biden grew up, uh, learning and using politically, television, print, newspapers, even cable television in some ways, by his presidency, were all really becoming, uh, pretty outdated.

And there was a new world which was not only about new places where you had to sell your message, but different ways on those platforms in which a politician has to communicate.

And we see through her essay, as well as in the essays on different policies, that he was just never very comfortable or nor did he have an understanding of, of how these worked, and it hurt him.

It hurt his ability to explain what he was doing to voters.

It hurt his ability to counteract the attacks that start to come, both from then former President Trump and Republicans, and it ultimately kind of left him in a terrible position before the famous debate ever happened.

President Trump is for you.'" One of the most memorable c- if not the most memorable spot of that cycle.

Yeah, I...

Yeah.

And then Disney caves in fires, Jimmy Kimmel...

Um, I mean, this, this was one of the fl- you know, flexes of government power that Donald Trump clearly has been pushing for.

It's clearly a requirement of Brendan Carr's em- employment.

But, the, well, just give me your sense of that before we get...

We'll get to the, the blowback from that in, in a moment.

You know, whatever you think of Jimmy Kimmel, whether you like Jimmy Kimmel, whether you think he's funny, whether you think he's a jerk, whatever, is the FCC in the business of enforcing certain ideological standards? Should they...

I know.

He wants his version of reality.

No, it's absolutely true.

We talk a lot about the separation of powers and how the Constitution sets up a system with competing branches of government.

But independent knowledge is also extremely important to a healthy democracy.

We need some grounding in facts that is not produced by the person in power.

And what's apparent in the second term, we move from him saying things that are not true in the first term and just... kind of constantly going against reality and facts to now systematically going against institutions that produce the knowledge.

And so, yes, government statistics are something that are being eroded.

No,

Epstein files.

... and we should assume he'll go very far.

I mean, it's the ongoing lesson of January 6th, is, he will go very far to protect himself and to protect his power.

Uh, and on this particular issue, he feels and looks desperate.

Uh, and when he accused Obama of that, it was...

I- it should be stunning.

Uh, and- and it's a problem if more of us are not kind of shocked by that, but it's also dangerous.

France did.

Um, because there was a debate during the Constitutional Convention, there were people saying this would be abused, and I think it was James Madison who reassured everybody, "No, don't worry about it." You know, um, the, the, there would be impeachment processes, but they never envisioned that it would become this out of control, did they?

No, I mean, look, it, it, it depended on the mechanisms of, um, the balance of power working.

It depended on some level of leaders accepting limitations to how they would use the power.

There is a history.

It's, it's always been a problematic area.

There's famous pardons, um, certainly President Clinton pardoning Marc Rich was very controversial, a donor.

Uh, President, uh, uh, Ford's pardon of Nixon historically has been one of the most controversial.

He does.

Julian, how serious is this moment, is the threat to our constitutional rights?

It's a very serious threat.

Uh, the Constitution is the framework for our government, and we have an administration that is testing its strength every given day.

And here, uh, you hear Stephen Miller saying out loud, uh, what we know is coming, based on an invasion that, uh, people don't see happening.

And so, uh, this is a test for the country, I think.

I think many judges are stepping up in trying to stop it, but they have limited power of enforcement.

So often, Julian, I am asked by voters, people who I'm talking to in the course of my reporting and travels about, "Well, when will the media let us know that the line has really been crossed this time, that we're in truly strange territory?" How do you advise (laughs) people on that? How do you, how do you talk to people without sounding hyperbolic about what we're seeing, but also addressing the reality of what's in front of us?

I- it's not hyperbolic.

Wh- what do you see here on the biggest topic that the administration can't just spin, or argue, or tell me about fine print? Which, which is something people are feeling as we set up, uh, in our report tonight from, from toy sales, uh, to, to rising prices.

Look, the evidence is overwhelming and Navarro stands alone.

Uh, and the problem is, usually presidents come into office and they deal with the crisis if there is one, and they deal with it well sometimes, like many would argue FDR or Obama, some do it poorly.

Uh, this is a crisis created, uh, by the president and so it's very hard for the administration not only to kind of craft a set of facts that contradicts what a lot of economists are saying, but also to explain it away as something that doesn't come from the administration itself.

So it's a big political problem, not just for the president but for the GOP, which also owns what's happening.

Yep.

...

the tape recordings.