Legendary presidential historian Jon Meacham spoke with MSNBC's Stephanie Ruhle on Friday evening about 2023 in retrospective — and the significance of former President Donald Trump's continued hold over the Republican Party.
"If you were to write a book about this year, what would you include?" said Ruhle.
"Oh my god," said Meacham. "You're right. It's against — maybe I just say Oh My God, that might be a good title."
"Oh My God 2023," Ruhle echoed.
"It's against my usual standard to say something is unprecedented," said Meacham. "As you were saying, so much of this was. And to stand on that for ceremony's sake isn't wise at all. You have to follow the evidence, and the evidence leads us to a former President of the United States under serial criminal indictment, an unfolding crisis in trust in democratic institutions, lowercase d. And that former president using rhetoric that comes straight from the Third Reich as he mounts a campaign to be re-elected. Most polls show him to be firmly in control of one of the two major parties in the United States."
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"So, you sit back at that point and I think one of the things that we should be honest about is that our conventional vernacular, the way we talk about these things, who's up, who's down, whereas the approval rating, what's the agenda, the ordinary vocabulary of our politics doesn't appear to me to be sufficient to the gravity of the questions that we are facing," Meacham continued. "I think it's a real problem for a lot of us, it's a problem for citizens who are in many ways overwhelmed by the amount of, the scope of the news you're talking about. I know I am."
"I think we're in a real stress test for citizenship," he added. "One of the things you and I have talked about before, I don't think President Biden is on trial here, I think we are. I think the question is, what do we as American people, what are the choices that we want, and if Donald Trump is renominated by the Republican Party, that tells us pretty much everything we need to know about those Republican voters, seems to me."
Watch the video below or at the link here.
Jon Meacham on Trump's potential re-nominationwww.youtube.com
