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President Trump has torn down the East Wing of the White House, re-named the Kennedy Center, and proposed an “Independence Arch”. This week, Alex speaks to architect Neil Flanagan about the damage being done to Washington’s historic buildings, as well as the feasibility of his future projects. Then, she’s joined by Heather Cox Richardson, historian and author of the Substack, “Letters from an American” to analyze how the remaking of America’s capitol lines up with the tried and true methods of authoritarian leaders.

TRANSCRIPT

Alex Wagner: Hi, everyone. It has been a bad week for free speech and television and creativity in general. Trump’s winged monkey, a man who has been described as a human pool cue, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, has been back in the headlines again for his crackdown on alleged liberal bias in television. Once again, a late night television host is in the crosshairs of the Trump administration. This time, it’s Stephen Colbert, who was advised by his own network lawyers this week not to air an interview he conducted with Democratic Texas Senate candidate James Talarico.

[clip of Stephen Colbert]: You know who is not one of my guests tonight? That’s Texas State Representative James Talarico. He was supposed to be here, but we were told in no uncertain terms by our network’s lawyers, who called us directly, that we could not have him on the broadcast. [booing] Then, then I was told in some uncertain terms that not only could I not have them on, I could not mention me not having him on. [laughter] And because my network clearly doesn’t want us to talk about this, let’s talk about this.

Alex Wagner: Now, Colbert went ahead and posted the interview with Talarico to YouTube, where it’s gotten nearly six million views as of this recording. And he talked all about all of this on air, ensuring that yes, Colbert’s interview with James Talarico would very much see the light of day, while also utterly humiliating his corporate bosses at the very same time. But the war, Trump’s war on comedy and culture and creativity, ain’t over yet. Trump is intent on either silencing or sledgehammering anything that stands in his way, whether metaphorically or physically. We see this in his battle against comedians like Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel. We see it in Trump’s threats directed at their corporate bosses like NBC and ABC and CBS, in his attacks on musicians like Bad Bunny for performing at the Super Bowl halftime show in Spanish. But we also see it in his attempts to remake and rebuild structures and institutions that tell a story he doesn’t like, or at least ones that don’t tell his story. Trump’s war on the arts, his war against creative expression and independence, extends to all areas of the arts including and especially public spaces and institutional architecture, where we are seeing perhaps the most ridiculous expressions of Trump’s ego gone wild.

[news clip]: In our first gathering of the MABA commission, Make America Beautiful Again commission.

Alex Wagner: Make America beautiful again. There’s also the spinoff executive order, making federal architecture beautiful again. For more on that, here’s the president on NBC last week.

[clip of Donald Trump]: I think we need glamor brought back to our country. We need prestige. We need beauty brought. I mean, in addition to everything else, we need strength. We need all of those things. Like I’m doing an arc, a triumphal, take a look at triumphal arc. 57 cities have arcs. We’re the only major important city. Washington DC should have maybe the first arc. We’re doing one that will be more magnificent and larger than the. Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

Alex Wagner: L’Arc de Trump, a structure which would completely dwarf the nearby Lincoln and Jefferson memorials and potentially imperil DC air traffic. It’s right up there on the list of impossibly terrible ideas, alongside Trump’s $400 million ballroom, his remodeling of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, now known as the Trump Kennedy Center, which Trump is shuttering for two years to renovate. His destruction of the White House Rose Garden, his gold leafing of the Oval Office, his walk of fame in the West Colonnade of the white house, and his plans to put a resurrected statue of Christopher Columbus on the White house South Lawn. This is a full frontal assault on art and on history and on good taste. So where are the safeguards against all this? It will not surprise you to learn that Donald Trump has rigged the system designed to protect against precisely this sort of onslaught by installing loyalists on the boards that approve what can be built in Washington and what cannot. Just this week, Trump put his 26-year-old executive assistant on D.C.’s Commission of Fine Arts. I’m sure that person is highly qualified. But as we’ll discuss today, when it comes to making changes to the country’s most historical structures. Well, it turns out the deference to history and artistry was actually just a gentleman’s agreement this whole time. And Donald Trump is no gentleman. [music plays] I’m Alex Wagner, and this week on Runaway Country, Donald Trump Is Waging a War on the Arts. We see this battle playing out in late night, at halftime shows, but also in Trump’s attempt to change the fundamental physical character of the nation’s capital and to rewrite the story it tells. To put this all in context, we’re gonna get into the rich history of the nations capital and what fascists usually do when they start screwing around with architecture. You know, as a guide. So, we’re talking to the best in the business, the great Heather Cox Richardson.

[clip of Heather Cox Richardson]: The difference between trying to make something out of rock, as opposed to trying to make something in the memory of people, is really in a sense a difference between whether your legacy can be destroyed and whether it will live forever.

Alex Wagner: Heather is an author and historian whose daily Substack, Letters from an American, is essential and required reading, which is why basically the whole country subscribes to it, and you should too. But first, we wanted to talk to someone whose job is designing buildings and understanding the character of a built environment. Neil Flanagan is an architect and a scholar in residence at the Heurich Museum in Washington, D.C. He joined our show to talk about what this all looks like, both literally and figuratively, and why Trump’s actions are more in the vein of Nicholas II than Joseph Stalin. Here’s my conversation with Neil. Neil, thank you for doing this. So let’s start with, I think, the most recent development as it concerns Trump’s attempts to refashion the landscape of the nation’s capital, the Arc de Tri-ump, I guess we’re calling it, something in that vein. What was your gut reaction when you heard about Trump’s plans for the Arc or the Arch as both an architect and as someone who lives in the Capitol?

Neil Flanagan: So as, as far as projects that Trump is, is proposing, um, I think it really encapsulates exactly what’s been going on, which is there’s, uh, people think that they can work with him or, or somehow get his ear and get a project going and then he will take it and, and develop it into a massive project. The self aggrandizement has gotten significantly larger. It would be essentially twice the height of the DC’s very famous height limit, um on the approach, uh to, to national airport. And it’s gonna be very heavy. And so as it’s from an architecture standpoint, the foundations alone could be a major technical challenge to say nothing of any of the aesthetic impact.

Alex Wagner: You talk about some of the concerns, independent of the aesthetic ones, that attend this proposal. One of them is there seem to be real potential issues with the arc being in the flight path of planes that are coming in and out of that area, right? We already know there was that tragic deadly crash over the Potomac that’s a very kind of fraught piece of airspace. Is it my understanding that if you’re flying into Washington, D.C., this would not only very visible from a plane, but potentially interrupt. The actual plane path itself, like help me understand what it might practically look like in terms of height.

Neil Flanagan: The flight issue is one that I haven’t seen discussed much. I’ve had buildings in that area where we had to get FAA clearance. So it is something that you generally would go to the FAA, who has, obviously, the real data on this. But I would say it’s very unusual. I mean, 250 feet, I think that might be almost as high as the Amazon project that was proposed in Arlington. So it’s a very, very tall building for the area. And I think that sort of indicates maybe they haven’t. Thought everything through, but I think they’re pretty tippy.

Alex Wagner: Oh, I can’t imagine, I CAN’T imagine.

Neil Flanagan: There’s an attitude that, you know, Trump is either he’s ridiculous or he is, you know, scheming methodical. If the architecture projects is building up his ego and fitting this attitude he has towards being a builder of, of magnificent structures, but the systems that will implement them are, are clearly competent. We see that all over the East Wing in particular, the architects involved are, and the engineers and the contractor are all very competent. So you can sort of laugh at it, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen.

Alex Wagner: Mm hmm. Well, we know from the demolition of the East Wing that even as absurd as it may seem, I mean, Trump’s very serious about these proposals and is acting on them. Just ask the former First Lady’s office. His deadlines for a lot of these bigger proposals are, as you mentioned, the semi-quincentennial, which I was today years old when I realized that that was the word for the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. But that is really soon, that’s July 4th, 2026. I mean, there’s no way an ark of that size could be constructed in that time. And even the east, I mean like none of this stuff seems like it’s actually practically, I mean from an architectural standpoint, that seems an impossibility, right?

Neil Flanagan: I don’t think any of these projects could reasonably be completed for July 4th, 2026. That’s not happening. I think the idea of building this new ballroom within three years is feasible. The arc again is really massive. So even if they wanted to do it out of plaster or whatever, or 3D printing something, which was floated at one point, I think at this point it’s completely unfeasible.

Alex Wagner: Oh my God, if only it was made out of a 3D printer. That would just be like the chef’s kiss on all of this. I mean, all of these begs the question, how is any of this legal? And you wrote a great and enlightening piece in the Atlantic about the construction may be against the people’s will, but it’s not really against the law. Can you talk a little bit more about the honor system that has basically guided previous presidencies as far as… Making additions or changes to structures that have stood the test of history like the White House?

Neil Flanagan: Yeah, so I think it’s actually really, really important to make a distinction between projects that are at the White House itself and everywhere else in D.C. Everywhere else in DC, there is a very, very robust review process. It takes a long time to do anything, and you have to comply particularly with environmental impact statements. Something called Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act requires a certain kind of review. You have to go through this board called the National Capital Planning Commission. We have to go through another board called Commission of Fine Arts. And then there’s a third board, if you’re doing a memorial, called the NICMAC. And this all gets very drawn out. So for the Smithsonian castle, they have had for just for the section 106 process, I think they’ve had 13 meetings and it’s been going on for at least five, six years. So that is the kind of thing that you would expect. However, what really is tricky is that the boards that are created to review these projects, the commission of fine arts and the national capital planning commission, are both full of members who are appointed by the president. The majority of votes on the National Capital Planning Commission are appointed the president, but the Commission of Fine Arts is entirely appointed by president. If you’ve been paying attention, you know that Trump fired all the members that were appointed by Biden and has appointed a new slate of members who are very strict loyalists and don’t particularly have the strongest qualifications. So there’s not really much actually constraining the president except for what I call in this article a gentleman’s agreement. They’ve all basically been following what we call an architecture of party, which is that you have the mansion in the center and you have this low subordinate, uh, expanse, and then two low subordinate wings. Trump has just sort of realized there’s no actual bind. There’s nothing binding about that. Um, and particularly when you look at his ability to control the panels and this, uh certain sort of vagueness about what, whether demolition is an, is actually a work of the, of the government. So he’s just been able to, um, Just as everyone saw, he just demolished the wing. People watched it.

Alex Wagner: The horror of that was something that became national news. And I guess my question is, do you think, like with Trump’s other attempts to demolish parts of our government, for example, the federal bureaucracy or environmental regulations, he’s been given a blueprint, if you will, by organizations like the Heritage Foundation. But with this, it seems like… This is Trump, the real estate developer. This is the area, like demolition and rebuilding and renovating, if that’s what you can call it, are actually in his bailiwick. It’s like the one thing he knows about. And because there are no particular safeguards to stop him, this is where it feels like he’s just taking a lifetime’s worth of real estate development lessons and applying them to the White House, right? It’s not like that there was some master plan that he inherited. To renovate the White House that, like, conservatives had been dreaming up for the last 10 to 15 years. This is just really feels like an expression of Trump’s lust for building and demolition.

Neil Flanagan: I completely agree, and I think that that’s really what we’re seeing. It’s a classic New York City developer technique. It’s developer technique everywhere. You want to build something that’s a little bit less fuss, demolish things before even proposing the plan, one-on-one stuff. So I think we definitely see that. I agree that this is really about sort of a personal self-aggrandizement. I was thinking about, you know, people sort of, well, is this, like, is he trying to build his massive, glorious, imperial complex? And I don’t think so. I think his aesthetic seems to draw on these Gilded Age mansions. He likes building things. So the degree to which he’s building, I think, is much closer as it’s sort of fun for him, and that’s why I say it’s like libidinal. It has some kind of psychological value, and he seems to also really enjoy the reactions he gets from posting about these projects, whether or not they actually occur. I think it’s closer to some sort of grand authoritarian scheme so much as just a self-indulgent autocrat in the vein of a 19th century monarch or Nicholas II rather than Stalin you know.

Alex Wagner: That was Neil Flanagan, an architect and public historian in Washington, D.C. Next up, historian Heather Cox Richardson will put this all into context right after these quick messages.

[AD BREAK]

Alex Wagner: So Heather, we began this episode speaking with an architect about the implications of all this building and demolition and Trump’s name. And as someone who was born and raised in Washington DC, I have particular and deep-seated affection for the monuments and this sort of cultural map of Washington DC. But what is, I mean, it’s astounding to me and I think it’s a astounding to people who didn’t even grow up in DC, the way in which he’s trying to reinvent the national. The Nation’s capital and his own image, right? We obviously know about the ballroom. There’s this planned Arc de Tri-ump, I guess we could say, across the river, which is going to be paid for with apparently a corporate slush fund. Also, shout out to Napoleon, who built the Arc de Triomphe and was not exactly a champion of democracy. There is the renaming and rebuilding and the closure of the Kennedy Center. All of it reminds me of Mussolini, but with even less taste. I wonder how you understand this kind of impulse to really brand himself all over the city in the context of history and specifically fascist and dictatorial history.

Heather Cox Richardson: In addition to the things that he is trying to put up with his name on them, which you’ve identified, remember is also taking down a lot of buildings from, uh, from our histories. So there’s a real attempt to rework the DC map for sure. Um, I think it’s interesting in a number of ways. First of all, when we think about it, um, I do think it is important that he as a real estate developer and that he is a man whose brain is clearly deteriorating. And so it often seems to me that the things that he’s trying to do in DC are sort of pushed in front of him by members of his staff who wanna distract him, who wanna calm him, who want to give him space that he is really comfortable in. And you can see him, if you watch him, how much more animated he gets when he talks about tearing down the East Wing of the White House for example.

Alex Wagner: He’s out there with a hard hat. Like, when was the last time Trump gave a shit about anything to go on site and visit it? He falls asleep when he talks about dismantling the EPA, but you get him talking about the East Wing ballroom and he’s all ears.

Heather Cox Richardson: And the East Wing ballroom is again, something a little bit different that’s interesting here, not just about the sort of Mussolini impulse that you’re suggesting. And that is, if you remember the timing of the tearing down of the East wing, it came immediately after, it was on a Monday, after the Saturday on which there was a giant no-kings rally across the country. And it seemed pretty clearly to me anyway that this was sort of narcissistic injury acting out and hurting the American people by literally attacking the people’s house. There were no plans to put something else up yet. They didn’t seem to have any kind of permits, any idea of what to do with any of the materials in that East Wing. They have ended up in the golf courses that he is also trying to take over in the DC area. Some of that material anyway, and they didn’t even seem to have any kind of covering for the openings that they had created. So this just seemed to be a temper tantrum, a child knocking down a block tower, if you will. So there’s also that aspect as well. But then there is the whole idea of creating a monument to oneself as president. And this is something that most presidents don’t do. And for a very specific reason, right? In a democracy, the president is the servant of the people. They are not supposed to call attention to themselves through things like monuments or changing the White House or whatever. So this is a step away from the old idea of a democracy in which the president’s legacy is written in the people, which I’d love to talk about. And instead to a different kind of sort of oligarchical authoritarian model where the president’s legacy is supposed to be written in the physical buildings. And that itself is deeply problematic for a very unpopular president because those statues and monuments will become, if they ever get built, and slush fund is an important word there that we can also talk about, if they ever get built, they will become objects of. Derision and places where people will vent their hatred of the guy by urinating on them or tearing them down or, you know, doing things like that.

Alex Wagner: Those are marching orders, everyone. I’m just kidding. I’m just kidding.

Heather Cox Richardson: I’m trying to be a little bit delicate, but surely you have seen the memes, you know. There’ll be a line. Somebody said there’ll be line to all the way to California to come see, you know, one of these things because that’ll be the line of people waiting to… Decorate it.

Alex Wagner: Do their business. And I guess that’s the sort of larger, like, maybe it’s a bit too academic, but I think we should go there. The monuments tell the story of a nation. And I remember in the White House, there are presidential portraits, and I remember once I was there and I got to see Nixon’s portrait is in a back staircase, but it’s still hanging, right? And that’s actually, it’s important that it is, because we need to look that history squarely in the face. And I’m not at all. A booster for the Arc de Triomphe, Triumph, Tri-ump, whatever we’re calling it. But it also is a reminder of the tackiness and the self-absorption and the narcissism and the danger that represents the Trump presidency. And if it is built, I mean, as disgusting as it sounds, maybe it’s important to remind ourselves that that is very much someone this country elected twice and that that impulse lies within us. I don’t know. How do you think about that in the context of history?

Heather Cox Richardson: Well, you just touched on something really important there, and that’s the rewriting of history that’s going on not only through the monuments, but also quite literally in those portraits of presidents and the descriptions of them underneath them that Trump changed, I think it was within the last month, which are plaques that are his version of history that are just completely ridiculous with all of the insults and so on.

Alex Wagner: It’s like a slam book. It’s a high school slam book that they put on the walls of the White House.

Heather Cox Richardson: But we paid for that. That’s one of the things that really infuriates me is our tax dollars pay for that kind of crap to soothe his ego. And so that rewriting of history in literally, not only in the buildings, but also in these plaques is part of this larger project to get rid of America’s multicultural efforts to create a democracy that is just and equal, which is always a work in progress, believe me, and replace it with this idea of white nationalist theocracy or just white nationalism run by a guy like him. I mean, it’s really horrific. But also an interesting attempt to take 250 years of a certain kind of history and impose over it the right-wing reaction to that that has always previously failed in our country.

Alex Wagner: I wonder if you have a theory on, I mean, this is asking you to be an art history professor a little bit, but maybe you’ll take the bait. Why classical architecture? And also why ancient Rome? I mean why do fascists?

Heather Cox Richardson: I was gonna say fascists, this is fascism.

Alex Wagner: Why do fascist love classical architecture so much?

Heather Cox Richardson: This is this is just straight-up fascism. This is the the idea of a government that projects strength. And by the way, this is not new to this administration.

Alex Wagner: No.

Heather Cox Richardson: So the RNC convention, the Republican National Convention in 2020, was over the top fascist reflections, you know, sort of the low shots into the the Ionic columns or were they Doric columns?

Alex Wagner: That’s a great art history question. I’m not gonna—

Heather Cox Richardson: I actually know the difference, but I don’t remember which they were.

Alex Wagner: I used to.

Heather Cox Richardson: In any case, these big columns from below, all the flags, if you remember Trump walking out through this lower shot of him walking out through these doors opening, that is classic attempt of sort of fascistic art to make him look extraordinarily strong and as the leader of a strong state. So there is all that, you know, sort of big blocky stuff. Actually, in that convention, Melania Trump, the First Lady, wore clothing that had been designed by a fascist adjacent designer as well that was designed, he may not remember this, but it looked a bit like a German World War II uniform.

Alex Wagner: Yes, I do, I do.

Heather Cox Richardson: So there’s that, I mean, there is also over that that Trump has put an overlay of that gilded sort of gold everywhere look which is much more sort of like the old French kings and is designed to show opulence.

Alex Wagner: And of course, Louis XIV, that’s a bit Versailles, right? The opulences being an extension of his own richesse and success, I guess.

Heather Cox Richardson: But a lot of it maps anyway directly over polymer ornaments that you can get at a home superstore and spray paint gold. I don’t know if you’ve seen that, but you can literally go and order these things for like, I dunno, 49.99 and spray-paint them. So you too could have a house that looks like, you could have bathroom that looks that.

Alex Wagner: The emperor wears no gold leaf or whatever. I mean, he’s also obsessed with the people thinking that it’s not real gold. I feel like we have either memes or videos of him being like, no, this is the real deal. But of course it’s not. It might as well be a Home Depot thing with fake gold leaf overlay. When you talk about what he is resurrecting and what he’s constructing, there is reporting that he is going to resurrect a statue of Christopher Columbus that was taken down in Baltimore in a wave of kind of protest against, well, in the case of Columbus, genocide of a Native population or an Indigenous population and part of a reconciling or a reckoning with America’s racist past. Trump has, with the assistance of some, I think, supporters of his agenda in Baltimore, taken the pieces, they are taking the pieces of the statue that was taking down Baltimore and they may be resurrecting it. On the White House grounds. What do you make of that?

Heather Cox Richardson: Of course, let’s just start with, it’s such an incredibly ahistorical thing to put Christopher Columbus at the White House, because if you want to go into that, we can. But I do think there’s a difference between the past, the real history, the commemoration of history. So Columbus Day in the United States is a very different thing than Columbus was, because commemoration and history aren’t really the same thing. And present politics, which is a really weird amalgam right now of a president who is mentally failing, who is all about kleptocracy and getting as much money as he possibly can, and who is panting for both domestic and international approval, and the people in his administration who are using him to impose white nationalism or… Theocracy on the United States and those aren’t all the same people. There’s a whole bunch of different groups here plus the tech bros who are trying to destroy American government for their own interests so when you think about resurrecting a statue of Columbus and putting it on the White House again, that doesn’t have a lot to do with the history of the United States of America which is rooted in the declaration of independence in the constitution, although it’s on the same land um that sort of that Columbus sort of I mean, you know, I just can’t even, I can’t really make that calculation because what you’re really looking at is the modern day way of Trump to support his white nationalist base and say, in this moment, I’m gonna give you guys a cookie. And that cookie happens to be a statue of Columbus.

Alex Wagner: Well, I think it, you know, in layman’s terms, it’s his way of owning the libs too, right? Like.

Heather Cox Richardson: Totally.

Alex Wagner: You guys with your people’s history of the United States, fuck off. This is like, this guy did good things. He brought the, he gave, he, you know, flying under European flag, claimed the Americas for Spain. And what followed was a decimation of the people who were here first, who happened to be brown. I mean, I Think Trump loves that part of the Columbus story too, right, and championing that. Triumph of of of white genocide on brown people is also part of it and and knowing that it’s so appalling and also terrorizing for people of color who remain in this country right.

Heather Cox Richardson: Do you think it was his idea though? I mean, that feels to me like it’s got Stephen Miller written all over it.

Alex Wagner: Totally. But I’m sure Trump loved it. I mean, I think, you know, as a New Yorker, and look, there’s a separate strain of this, like in terms of Italian American history, there is a real movement to celebrate the legacy of Columbus, which I think exists separate and apart from what Trump’s trying to do. But I think the sort of the broad strokes of what this Columbus statue represents, yeah, is like really something that Trump enjoys. And in I want to talk about the Confederacy because you know, Trump has done a very concerted effort to rename federal army bases that were named after Confederate heroes and thinking Fort Bragg, Fort Hood, Fort Benning. There’s a whole bunch of them that were renamed to, you know, just because maybe our predominantly Black and brown foot soldiers in the army don’t want to be fighting at a base named for a Confederate soldier. And maybe we should revisit the ways in which we celebrate the legacy of the old south on a national level.

Heather Cox Richardson: Boy, that was mildly put. We should revisit the way we celebrate it. I mean, they lost. And they lost because they were trying to create a world in which some people were better than others and had the right to enslave those other people.

Alex Wagner: Exactly.

Heather Cox Richardson: So the fact that their names were on any federal site is mind-boggling.

Alex Wagner: It is. And I think there’s another part of that history that is less discussed. I’m wondering if you could weigh in on it, because I know that 20th century dictators, the Nazis, were very interested in post-reconstruction segregation policies here in the United States, right? They were interested in Jim Crow. They were interest in late, you know, the sort of nascent eugenics movement in the Unites States, and indeed thought, oh, well, but what they’re doing to Black people is interesting, but we need something a little bit more extreme for the Jewish population, which is wealthier and more powerful in our Western European societies, but nonetheless looked to the policies of the racist United States as inspiration. And I wonder if you think the same might have held true for architecture, that the Confederate statues were an object and that the Confederacy writ large was inspirational to white nationalists abroad and elsewhere.

Heather Cox Richardson: So I can’t speak for other countries at all. I’m an Americanist through and through. And anything that touches on America, I can do. How other people chose their architecture, I can begin, or their statuary, I can’t begin to guess, except in the really large forms, like when you see statues come down, you’re looking at regime change, which is one of the reasons that pulling down of the Confederate statues in the United States always seemed to me to be an even bigger deal than people identified. But I just want to add to what you said there about the Nazi lawyers who constructed their own system of racial and ethnic hierarchies in Nazi Germany. Because they did look to Jim Crow, but they also overwhelmingly looked to the American Indian reservations, the places in which the United States government had corralled indigenous Americans. Because they recognized that those places were places of extraordinary disease. Of lack of opportunity, and where you could really isolate people in such a way that you could push them toward an eventual extermination. And they were very, the Nazis were very very into the American West. They spent a lot of time thinking about that. As well as about, you know, Hitler was very fond of a book by a guy named Madison Grant that was published in 1916 in the U.S. that was essentially what the great replacement people are thinking about now or talking about now, even though the great-replacement theory of the present comes from France largely and some thinkers in France. But Hitler looked to this book by Madison Grant called The Passing of the Great Race, in which he talked about how the really great races were the Nordic races, and they had settled other white countries like England and so on, and those were being hurt by lesser white races. He wasn’t yet worried overwhelmingly about Asians or Africans. He worried about Italians and Polish people and so on. And that idea and that book, Hitler actually referred to as his Bible.

Alex Wagner: Wow. More from Heather Cox Richardson right after the break.

[AD BREAK]

Heather Cox Richardson: Can I ask you a question?

Alex Wagner: Sure, of course.

Heather Cox Richardson: You said you grew up in D.C. What were your favorite monuments and why?

Alex Wagner: Oh, the Lincoln Memorial, like forever and always the Lincoln Memorial. I mean, we would go, I mean we were really nerds. We would go to the Lincoln memorial at night and just, it’s so beautiful. And of course Lincoln, I think growing up in Washington, DC, the city with Northern hospitality and Southern efficiency, as we say. [laughter] You know, south of Mason Dixon. DC, especially when I was growing up, was a very Black city. You would feel the southern influence of DC, but of course it was the seat of the federal government and so that has this northern quality as well. And so the Civil War, I think, given the history of in and around Washington, DC, but also its tug between North and South, I think was particularly resonant. And that monument is so beautiful. I remember every year, I think maybe this was unique to DC. We had to construct a monument in social studies class. We had to make one out of cardboard. None of us did a very good job, but I think every year for three years I picked the Lincoln Memorial. And then when we were in high school, it was just something about the glow and the size of the statue and the words carved inside the building and the fact that it was open all the time, which was so beautiful. It was really, it felt really special to grow up in Washington D.C. And to have those monuments be part of our lived experience, right? Not just something that you would see when you came to visit with your family, but that it would be a Thursday night and we’d roll down there at 10 o’clock at night. That part of growing up in D. C. was extraordinary. And I think the monuments were such a huge part of it. Like we never went to the National Gallery of Art in our free time, but on summer nights or even in the winter, there was something really special about being on the mall at night and just having. Feeling like it was our playground as people who lived in the district. So yeah, I mean, so when you hear about all the stuff that Trump is trying to do, it’s nauseating thinking about living with those monuments on a sort of quotidian level and how special that was and how he’s trying to desecrate those memories and the specialness of that.

Heather Cox Richardson: Well, so I just got back from Washington last night, and like you, every time I am there, I go see Father Abraham. And I agree with you. It is worth pointing out that that monument is where it is because, of course, it is down the hill from Arlington National Cemetery, which was deliberately put on Robert E. Lee’s plantation. So they put dead bodies right up to his house to say, you did this. Arc de Triumphe, which is what Trump has been calling it, which is this weird amalgam of the French and the English, would completely overshadow Lincoln. And one of the things I think is interesting about this whole push toward the monuments is I’ve thought a lot about this and legacy because usually presidents care a lot about their legacy. And they don’t start building buildings, and many of them, I think, don’t even like the idea of these libraries, because I don’t know if people know this, but they have to raise their own money for those libraries.

Alex Wagner: Yeah, it’s endless.

Heather Cox Richardson: And the last thing you want to do as a retired president is hit people up for library money. But what they do do, and what the greats have done, like Lincoln, like LBJ, the people we remember, the FDR, Teddy Roosevelt, the name, as opposed to Chester Arthur or.

Alex Wagner: Garfield.

Heather Cox Richardson: Well, Garfield was assassinated, so you can’t hold out on him. Although he probably would have been a good president, but they worked to build a monument in the American people. They worked to make their legacy be that people would think back on them as people who had elevated and put more guardrails around American democracy to protect the people. And the difference between trying to make something out of rock as opposed to trying to make something in the memory of people is really in a sense a difference between whether your legacy can be destroyed and whether it will live forever.

Alex Wagner: Mm-hmm.

Heather Cox Richardson: And I think the difference there between like rock and myth matters in memory.

Alex Wagner: That’s a beautiful comparison.

Heather Cox Richardson: So you may not know this, I did not. I went to Washington with my husband, we were doing some stuff down there, and he is really, really good at being a tour guide. Like this is his thing.

Alex Wagner: I’m not surprised somehow, Heather.

Heather Cox Richardson: Well, you know what he does? I mean, he knows the areas anyway, because he loves history, but he goes on Instagram and looks at the local hashtags to see like where the locals hang out, or things that other people wouldn’t necessarily know. You can still see in Washington, DC, Mary Surratt’s boarding house where they plotted to assassinate Abraham Lincoln and it looks just the freaking same.

Alex Wagner: Really?

Heather Cox Richardson: The whole block.

Alex Wagner: Where is it? Do you remember?

Heather Cox Richardson: I do remember exactly where it is. It’s very close to what used to be the Patent Office near Capitol One Arena is what people would know. But you should go to the art museum while you’re there too. It’s now a Chinese restaurant. It’s right you know, when you go and there’s that big Chinese arch?

Alex Wagner: Yep, for Chinatown.

Heather Cox Richardson: For Chinatown. It’s on that street. It may be a three-minute walk from that. And if you walk through it, it’s on the right-hand side and it’s white in a block of buildings. And as I say, it is a Chinese restaurant now. But if you look at old pictures, they have basically not changed it except to put a Chinese neon sign on it.

Alex Wagner: Isn’t that the story of America? Like, isn’t that it? And like, some people look at that and they’re like, God, that’s great. Like, we live and breathe, right? We continue to change, we continue to evolve. There are new waves of immigrants who come in here and change things, and that’s the story of America, right, and then other people will look at that, and be like, what a desecration of history like this should be.

Heather Cox Richardson: No, history’s alive, and you know what? She had a boarding house full of immigrants. Like this was, and guys who had jobs in the town. They were a little bit, obviously had too much time on their hands on April 14th, 1865, but I kinda like that. But it’s cool to see, because you’re right down there, and if you just go around the corner, it’s not that far at all, it’s Ford’s Theater, because that was the area where all the boarding houses were, and that’s where the theater was, and one thing led to another.

Alex Wagner: Yeah one thing certainly did lead to another. I want to like just zoom out a little bit from the, you know, the specific focus on, you know the physical way in which Trump bears all the hallmarks of a classic authoritarian and just get your thoughts on this particular moment and we’re at a really interesting week slash set of weeks where it feels like, I don’t know, the frisson of change a bit. I don’t know. I’m thinking, like, on one hand, right, we have had the attorney general of the United States testifying on the Hill and attacking members of Congress verbally, right? And it seems like carrying evidence that the Department of Justice was spying on members of Congress as they were in secure facilities reading unredacted copies of the Epstein files. We have the DOJ being repeatedly trying to seek. Criminal indictments against perceived enemies and being sort of rejected by grand juries who infamously will indict a ham sandwich. There’s the seizure of ballots in Fulton County and a lawsuit attending that. There’s this super dear leader-y behavior of Trump falling asleep like all the time. Every time I see coverage of him, it just reminds me so much of like late stage Castro. But then, you know, we have Operation Metro Surge which is probably the biggest sort of like jack booted federal thugs operation that we’ve been treated to publicly and that has promoted the greatest outreach that’s coming to an end the that’s being withdrawn, right?

Heather Cox Richardson: Allegedly.

Alex Wagner: Allegedly right fair enough. Um, there’s a withdrawal of national troops from LA and Portland and Chicago. There is congress pushing back on Trump in his signature tariffs. There’s the slightly older Element of Jay Powell telling Trump to fuck off and trying to oust him as fed chair. How do you see this moment? Like, is change afoot? Is something different in this moment, like on one hand it feels like it’s very, very dire, but on the other it feels like the resistance is, I don’t know, potentially more effective than it has been in previous years.

Heather Cox Richardson: I do think the resistance has found its footing, in part because of what happened in Minneapolis and the reality there that what effectively dismantled a fascist takeover was just people being good to their neighbors, which feels very much within reach to a lot of people in a way that, you know, marching on the Capitol might not. I do think we are in a moment that does look like there’s going to be extraordinary change. On the one hand, there is, I think, a very strong movement in the U.S. Government and in a number of places around the world to create a world in which a very few elites monopolize resources by leveraging the power of their governments. Sort of make their own club that rules the rest of us. And part of that is things like the Epstein files, the fact that so many of them have the goods on each other that they can’t turn on each. And that is very real and they have a lot of money and they a lot a power. So you’re already seeing money pour into the US 2026 elections. You’re seeing the attempt to push through the SAVE Act, which would throw people are estimating more than 20 million Americans off the voting rolls. You’re seeing the use of the military in new and very frightening ways. I am beside myself over the concentration camps around the country where we are only now starting to see a window into what’s happening there. Not only is that horrible for the people that are incarcerated, but also when you build a system which is extraordinarily valuable. I was actually looking yesterday at the. Projected profits for 2026 from some of the big corporations that have it president come private prisons and they’re they’re expecting to make billions to profit billions of dollars that’s not net. That’s profit. That is very real and could become our future for not just us but for the world. But what we have seen in this second of Trump’s term, but also I think reaching back to 2020 at least you’re seeing the American people recognizing that they have agency. Because I really think since World War II, or at least since the 1970s, people have tended to sort of say, oh, I’m not interested in the government. I know basically it’s always going to do the same stuff. Everybody’s corrupt, or everybody’s not corrupt, whatever, whatever your take is. But people have felt divorced from the actual direction of our democracy. And what you’re saying now is people saying, wait a minute, this is my government. And when they do that, the elected officials who still want to be reelected as opposed to simply dictating that they should remain in power, you see their behavior changing. So for example, the very idea of continuing appropriations for the Department of Homeland Security, you know, that really wasn’t questioned. This was simply going to go through until the American people said, NFW, you are not going to give any more money to ICE. And that realization on the part of Americans. Is a step towards stopping what I just outlined. But I’m gonna push that a little further since we’re talking about memorials. One of the things that I think we’re starting to see, although not perhaps as much as we need, and certainly not as much that we need. Maybe perhaps not as as much as I would like to see right now, is that it’s one thing to talk about what we don’t like about what the administration is doing. It’s quite another thing to talk about, what country we want. And I would love to see more people stepping up and saying, hey, America is great because of immigrants, because of all the marginalized people, Black Americans, women, poor white men, because of the people who have said, I have a voice, I’m doing my best here, I should be treated equally before the law, I should have a right to an education and to healthcare. I think that we need to put more voices behind the triumph of what really made America great. And that goes back to, again, how do you get remembered? How does a nation get remembered, does it get remembered because it’s got the biggest statues and you think of all the statues that, you know, authoritarians have erected to themselves over the years, right back to Ozymandias, right? You think of that versus a country where people can say, you know I led a good life. You know, I had my health. I had joy. I had children. I had, you know, whatever it is that makes you tick. And I would love for this movement not simply to stand against the rise of authoritarianism, but to reassert the extraordinary power of democracy, which is, of course, the way in which the Allies won World War II.

Alex Wagner: You’re so right about making the positive case. I mean, I think that that was one of the huge mistakes post-2024 is Democrats let the Republican attacks on migrants and immigrants go completely unchallenged. And it was like, where is the positive case for the fabric of the United States? Is anyone home here? Do we not know what happens when you get rid of all the people of color in a society, when you basically hollow out the American economy and whitewash us culturally and socially? We’re not the same country.

Heather Cox Richardson: No.

Alex Wagner: But we’ve never been that country. We’ve just never been that country, and when we have tried to do that it is always redounded to our disadvantage. More of my conversation with Heather in just a minute.

[AD BREAK]

Adam Kinzinger brought up this point that I think is so important. Pam Bondi was on the Hill last week and she was just yelling at members of Congress, not answering their questions and effectively giving them a rhetorical middle finger. And Adam Kinzinger made the point that when she was doing that, she’s not just giving Jamie Raskin the middle finger, she is giving the 700,000 people in the state of Maryland that he represents the middle fingers. These are the people’s elected representatives to Congress. And as much as people say, I don’t like Congress, whatever, these people are designated with representing the American public. And you cannot just tell them the country to fuck off. We’ve seen this in a sort of immediate reaction to her testimony. We have seen a real discomfort on the part of some real conservative people with how she behaved. And not just because it was a tantrum, but it’s like. This is anti-democratic. This is not the way it works. You are a representative of the executive branch and you are accountable and will be held accountable to the American public. I don’t know, maybe I’m putting too much weight on that moment, but I thought it was so, it encapsulated the sense of impunity that this administration and its stooges operate with, but also the way in which I believe and think even now the American Public is gonna reject that. It’s not how we do things here.

Heather Cox Richardson: I think that’s exactly what she was doing it and and also totally sucking up to Trump It was it was an authoritarian moment for sure. But but there is something else buried in her performance that I thought was really interesting. And that’s that by refusing to answer any questions and by just screaming out lies and talking points and all that with her Burn Book there, you know what? She wasn’t doing she wasn’t committing perjury.

Alex Wagner: Yeah.

Heather Cox Richardson: And I thought that was really interest in being and when when I believe it was Ted Lieu, Representative Ted Lieu of California said, I do believe you just committed perjury and we have it on videotape. She kind of lost it.

Alex Wagner: Yeah, she did.

Heather Cox Richardson: And I think that there is an increasing realization on the part of a number of people in the administration that if accountability ever comes, they’re in real trouble. And if I were Pam Bondi, I would expect to be the first one under bussed. That is, you can see that she is, her neck is way out. In terms of breaking the law. And one of the things she just mentioned there that I think is really important is this administration has tried to use the Department of Justice to place criminal charges on members of Congress, which, I mean, that’s just never been done. And that attempt to undermine the legislative branch with criminal charges. Is authoritarianism 101. I mean, this is like a huge red flag for people. So you can see we’re sort of on this knife edge. Is it gonna be those people who represent us by reiterating what the law was in that video who end up having to face criminal charges? Or is it gonna to be Pam Bondi who has, aside from anything else, quite openly flouted the Epstein-Files Transparency Act?

Alex Wagner: Against the overwhelming bipartisan in support of Congress.

Heather Cox Richardson: Yeah, can you imagine being the one guy who voted against that? Oops. [laughter]

Alex Wagner: Mistakes are being made.

Heather Cox Richardson: That’s right. Every day.

Alex Wagner: Heather, we could talk for 18 hours, but you are probably the most, I don’t even want to say prolific, because prolific just means the quality of analysis that you are putting out there is such a service to the American public. I’m so grateful that I could get you for a couple of minutes or a lot of minutes to talk about this stuff, but I want to ask you before we go. You know, as we think about the positive argument for democracy and inclusion and equity and all the values that we thought were sort of foundational to this country, if you could build a monument, If you could build a sort of architectural expression of hope and positivity to help guide us into the next generation, do you have a thought of what that would be? Or who it would be for?

Heather Cox Richardson: Well, it’s hard for me to think in concrete terms like that, because when I think of monuments, I think memory and history. So when I of a monument to democracy and to this moment, I think what we are building today as Americans, as everyday Americans, and I include myself in that, rewriting the history of this country to be one that… We can that we have dreamed of in the past that really does treat people equally before the law which it’s never done before and it really does give people equal access to resources which it has never done before and which really does give everyone a say in their government which we’ve come close to after the 1965 Voting Rights Act but that of course has fallen way behind us now. So I think about creating a monument in our national memory that says this was our great moment of trial and we came through it and created a better nation. Now, if you were gonna try and render that in actual physical shape, for me, it would be faceless people, ordinary people, but clearly from every gender, every race, every background, whatever.

Alex Wagner: Well, maybe it would just be a place of convention and not a place of. It wouldn’t be a phallic monument to a single person.

Heather Cox Richardson: I’d make it a community and I’d make it river. I’d make it bunch of people standing around a river so that there’s always the passage of time and always being part of that larger human river that changes constantly but that is not characterized by one great person but rather with what we can all do if we do it together.

Alex Wagner: I love it. A river. Did you hear that? Monuments Commission?

Heather Cox Richardson: Well, how do you build a river? I mean, you let me fantasize, I’m not a sculptor.

Alex Wagner: You can just carve another one, I don’t know, that’s probably bad for some species. But you could, I dunno, there are ways that you can build monuments in nature without destroying things. Someone quick tell Trump.

Heather Cox Richardson: Andy Goldsworthy. Let’s grab him quick.

Alex Wagner: Exactly, land art. She moonlights as an art history and architecture professor. The great Heather Cox Richardson, it’s such a pleasure. I’m so grateful. Thank you for spending a little time with me today. It’s really been such a pressure.

Heather Cox Richardson: Thanks. It’s been fun.

Alex Wagner: That’s our show for this week. As always, if you’ve been impacted directly by the Trump administration or its policies, send us an email or a one minute voice note at runawaycountry@crooked.com and we may be in touch to feature your story. A massive thank you to everyone who has written in already. We hear you, we see you, we appreciate you. Last but not least, please, please don’t forget to check out the show and our rapid response videos on our YouTube channel, Runaway Country with Alex Wagner. Runaway Country is a Crooked Media production. Our senior producer is Alyona Minkovski. Our producer is Emma Illick-Frank. Production support from Megan Larson and Lacy Roberts. The show is mixed and edited by Charlotte Landes. Ben Hethcoat is our video producer and Matt DeGroot is our head of production. Audio support comes from Kyle Seglin. Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Adriene Hill is our Head of News and Politics. Katie Long is our Executive Producer of Development. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writer’s Guild of America East.