Presidential historian Jon Meacham said on MSNBC's special about Robert Mueller, that if Democrats want to impeach the president, they must come up with a simple way that explains the report to Americans.
Host Ari Melber hosted a one-hour special on the next steps in the Mueller investigation and subsequent report. Meacham noted that it isn't a matter of Democrats seeking nuance and Republicans needing a sound-byte. He explained that in today's Twitter culture, Democrats need to boil-down 400 pages into a tweet.
"I don't want to fall into the trope of 'the left likes nuance,' sort of the old John Kerry line, and the right likes simplicity," Meacham said. "That tends to be true right now. But one of the things we will have to deal with going forward in the country is if everything is reversed politically, will that tendency be reversed? It is an interesting question. I do think that one of the reasons sound bytes work is they capture truths, or at least they capture, as you say, they seem definitive. And the president is a master marketer. And, in fact, I would argue that he wouldn't be president if he didn't understand the vernacular of reality television."
Melber agreed, noting that past lawyers understood this about public trials.
"I mean, forget Politics," Melber said. "Wasn't it Johnny Cochran who said, 'If the glove doesn't fit, you must acquit.' A tweet before Twitter that captured something, not something that proved accurate in the legal sense but something that proved strategic in the courtroom."
Meacham agreed, saying that the criticism of Mueller he thinks is fair is that Mueller brought a knife to a gunfight or a Twitter fight.
"They did not have a Cochran-esque summary of this," Meacham said. "And that can be a problem. I've always thought that one of the things that historically we're going to look back at President Obama, for instance, is he was less given less to pithy remarks -- in large measure because he saw all the complexity of it. You remember, 'tear down this wall' from Ronald Reagan. You remember, 'this will not stand' from George H.W. Bush, so you do need that."
Meachem went on to ask if Mueller failed to serve his cause of justice by not developing a way to explain the report in a way that would resonate with Americans.
Watch the full conversation below:
