Changing America / Mark Green Podcast

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Mark Green: I’m your host, Mark Green, and today we’re doing our twice a month podcast, Changing America. Heather McGhee is the past head of the action-tank, Demos, in New York City, past chair of the board of Color of Change and frequent guest on cable and Sunday shows.

Most significantly, she’s the author of the best-selling, The Sum of Us in 2021 which I read then and thought was in the ranks of books on race by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Isabel Wilkerson. Welcome to Changing America, Heather.

Heather McGhee: Thanks for having me, Mark. It’s good to see you.

Mark: For those who might have slept through the year of 2021, can you remind us what you meant in your book by your powerful frames and metaphors about “drained pools” and the GOP “zero-sum” paradigm on race?

Heather: The Sum of Us is really a book about my journey to figure out why we can’t seem to have nice things in America.

Nice things like clean air and water, free and fair elections, democracy that’s responsive to everyone. You know, great public schools in every neighborhood. a strong middle class that’s growing and thriving and looks like America. That was my career for decades.

I came to the realization that we are being held back from achieving those nice things by zero-sum racial stories, stories that are sold for profit by wealthy and powerful people, and the politicians they pay for, mostly in the right wing but not entirely. And that zero-sum story says that you should fear is the growing presence of people of color, you should fear racial equality because that means that you and your family will be worse off.

When that thinking happens, you end up with lots of self-sabotaging towns and cities across America – not just in the South – which were willing to drain their segregated public swimming pools when threatened with integration.

This metaphor, drained pool politics, for when white Americans instead preferred to go without things that they really need -– healthcare, debt-free college, living wages, environmental regulation, pro-voter policies because of the threat that these are actually going to people of color.

Mark: I have a hard time understanding this entirely. Okay, 400 plus years of racism in the U.S., first formal slavery and then Jim Crow. How do you explain Trump’s continuing racism a mere 165 years after Appomattox and the Civil War Amendments, the same racial divisions, voter suppression and economic discrimination, along the same lines even on the same geographic lines?

Heather: Yeah, if you think about it, it’s not that shocking. We are a very young country. We were founded on this belief in a hierarchy of value along race. That structure was around ensuring that profit center of enslavement and that ideology of racial hierarchy.

And part of the reason we’re fighting that war is that even after the guns were laid down, the South kept fighting [in other ways.] They kept fighting an ideological war, a narrative war, a story war. You know, there are great books about the way that the South actually won the war with their Lost Cause ideology.

I think that drained pool politics helps us understand the ways in which the kind of New Deal era of public goods, the sort of liberal consensus that happened in the first half of the 20th century, really fell apart when wealthy and powerful people were able to use, let’s call it dog whistle politics or this kind of coded racial language to make a story that says that the reason why your family isn’t thriving is because of immigrants.

The reason why your schools aren’t successful and safe is because of Black and brown children or your Black and brown neighbors. That story is still a successful one because it deflects from who’s really responsible.

Mark: Well, you’re referring to right-wing provocateur Lee Atwater, who famously said a few decades ago that Republicans should continue to exploit racial tensions for votes by innuendo rather than simply, you know, using the N word.

It sure seems that the Trump Republicans have adopted and updated Atwater with their relentless campaign and full weight of federal power against DEI – for diversity, equity, and inclusion. How would you advise Democrats to start to deconstruct that slogan and story?

Heather: You know, the folks who are against diversity are against the tide of public opinion. They are against progress. They are against what most Americans know is good for business, is good for our country, is good for democracy, is good for neighborhoods and communities. What we’re seeing right now is not some sort of backlash where the majority of Americans are opposed to the kinds of racial progress that was clamored for by the largest social demonstration movement in American history in the years leading up to and then accelerating after the murder of George Floyd.

This is a sabotage, Mark, by wealthy, powerful people who have always wanted to keep mediocre white men over-represented in the halls of power and keep everybody else under-represented and locked out.

Mark: Hasn’t it been a pretty effective sabotage given that phrase and their implementation of it in their fight against universities, corporations, the Voting Rights Act?

Heather: Yeah, they have been relentless in their desire to use every lever of power that they have to repeal the multiracial progress of the 20th century.

The Supreme Court has repealed affirmative action for everybody except for white men. The federal government has tried to eliminate all forms of equal opportunity and civil rights enforcement through its branches of government, through the DOJ. But you know, at the same time the business community and science say that diversity is good for profitability, it’s good for innovation, it’s good for governance and stability.

You have some sort of financial penalties. It’s shocking what the federal government has done. Yet not every business has gone along, right? Costco said, “We’re sticking with DEI.” JPMorgan Chase said, “We’re sticking with it.” Delta said, “We’re sticking with it.”

And now we’ve seen just recently a new Gallup poll that since the Trump victory in 2024, the majorities of Americans – Independents, Democrats and Republicans – have agreed more and more each year that diversity is good for business.

So they are absolutely out of step, but it’s not gonna last because it doesn’t have the majority support in this country.

Mark: Do you think Democratic presidential aspirants in 2028 will pick up on your analysis and suggestions? Because either you’re on defense or you’re gonna retake offense on this?

Heather: They absolutely have to go on offense because it does not work to ignore the central organizing principle of our society. Racism is the Achilles heel in American politics, not the third rail, as if people don’t touch it.

Democrats need to make a multiracial coalition, right? Democrats can never be in power without a multiracial coalition because white men particularly but white women as well have been so well-organized, the majority of them into the right wing. You need a multiracial coalition, and you need a young coalition. Democrats’ victory is contingent on young voters being engaged.

What do we wanna see? We wanna see authenticity. We wanna see courage. We wanna see people who are willing to take on powerful interests. So powerful interests are the healthcare insurance companies. Powerful interests are Wall Street. Powerful interests are the polluters.

But they’re also the racists. We need to say that racism is bad for everybody, that it costs our economy, that it destroys the kinds of coalitions that can help win change for working-class people.

Nobody knows this better than labor organizers who are trying to create multiracial workforces. Nobody knows this better than grassroots organizers who are trying to unite neighborhoods to take them to the state house to lobby for power.

Mark: Were you able to sit down with the Democratic president-elect in December of 2028, what two or three top changes would you urge them to pursue as president?

Heather: So I think we need to, first of all, recognize that there is a potential political realignment that could happen to whatever party truly takes on the corruption that has infected not just Washington and state houses, but also our economy. It’s completely captured, right? By big tech, by big money, by the most powerful people in our society, and everybody knows that.

Right wing, left wing, center, that is the unifying worldview. Taking on corruption has to be the number one agenda item. That goes from antitrust and price fixing. That goes obviously to money and politics, campaign finance reform, lobbying members of Congress being able to trade stocks.

That goes to the corruption in our big cost centers in society. Whether it’s groceries and the concentration in agriculture and in the handful of grocery companies, or in terms of healthcare. Which remains, and has been for generations, the biggest pain point for Americans in terms of their finances, and is even worse now because of the Republican and Trump attack on affordable healthcare.

So it’s about taking on the big winners from our rigged economy and being willing to have that fight. If you don’t tell Americans that you’re willing to fight somebody powerful on their behalf, they’re never gonna believe you. We’re at the point right now where we need elected officials to be naming names to be going after concentrated money and power.

And then there will be the sense that, okay, maybe we can have some faith in, in the power of democracy again.

Mark: Given the supermajority on the Supreme Court, do we have to wait until we replace two sitting right-wingers to overcome Citizens United, for example?

Heather: I did not mention another source of the corruption is this corporate court, and the American people know it, right?

The Supreme Court has its lowest approval rating in generations because there is a very clear sense that they are trying to take the country backwards, that they are partisan, that they are corrupt, that they side with big corporate interests, that they’re not on the side of the American people.

And so court reform, which includes term limits, ethics reforms, expanding the court, absolutely has to be a first 100-day initiative for any new Democratic governing majority.

Mark: Speaking of the downhill decline of the GOP, I’m of two minds.

Will it take decades to repair, when they’re gone eventually? Or are Trump and Trumpism – like Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Roy Cohn, their historical predecessors – already on a steady path of going from high to low, from toast-of-the-town …to toast, like those three pariahs?

Heather: I think that depends on how much the Democrats have learned about what needs to happen to really bury anti-democratic forces.

I mean, the Democratic Party and its predecessors in history have never been really great at this, right? At holding on to power and making sure that the job is finished?

After January 6th, we didn’t hold Trump fully accountable and make sure that he was unable to ever run again. These are the kinds of lessons we need to learn. So what is it gonna look like for Trump and Trumpism to truly be considered so antithetical to the the flourishing of our democracy that the Democrats actually hold the entire ideology as well as him as a person accountable for the grift and the graft done under his name.

Mark: Well, that’ll turn on your implication that the next election could imitate 1974 and Watergate in terms of a semi-realignment around the issues you’re talking about. I can’t wait for Ketanji Brown Jackson to start writing majority opinions.

Last question: Democratic voters are pumped to hit Team Trump hard. Are their leaders?

Heather: I mean, the level of frustration with the Democratic establishment right now is so profound among young people, among its base. There has to be some accountability and some consequence for how low the Democratic brand is. This should be an easy election. We should have won the last election.

This is not rocket science. The party cannot continue to be the party of the status quo. Period.”

Mark: Well, ending on your “Period” sounds perfect.

Heather, thank you so much for your brilliance and time. Anyone who hasn’t read The Sum of Us should grab a copy and get ready because Heather is also working on a sequel book that will be out in… eleven days? I’m kidding! Next Year! Both Laugh

Heather: Thank you Mark, Thank you as always.

We’re also on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Instagram, and YouTube! Make sure to subscribe to follow along with new Changing America episodes and all other updates from The Inflection Zone.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Mark Green : Mark Green here with our podcast version of The Inflection Zone, which we call Changing America so our side starts developing the best new paradigms and programs to be ready after the next two national elections. I’m happy to be talking today with my longtime friend, Katrina vanden Heuvel, who has been a major influencer of political and popular opinion since before the term was invented.

She’s owned and run The Nation magazine since 1995 with the late Victor Navasky, and it has been around since abolitionists founded it in 1865. Welcome, Katrina.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Thank you, Mark. I do feel 161 years old.

Mark Green : You don’t look a day over 106. You’re obviously the publisher of a major independent magazine(w (which I’ve subscribed to since 1966). What, if anything, has the mainstream media learned about how to – or not learned how to – handle Trump? Because he still never stops lying and still seems to get away with just brushing everything off as “fake news.”

Katrina vanden Heuvel: I’ll take The [New York] Times as an example of the kind of Gray Lady mainstream. It’s done a good job exposing Trump’s lies when it comes to the assault on democracy, the rule of law, voting machinations, corruption. I think it’s less powerful in its coverage of the lies he tells about war. I think it’s also less open to the breakdown of the Washington consensus, which is more about policing the economic parameters of what’s possible.

Mark Green: But is it even conceivable that they publish an editorial starting on the front page, maybe even a banner headline saying, “Resign Already” – or be impeached and removed – because the Times is an opinion leader, and who knows if that could shake up things, or is that just inconceivable given the DNA of the paper?

Katrina vanden Heuvel: I don’t think it’s inconceivable, but we live in a fragmented media landscape, so the impact of a New York Times, say, in the ‘70s around Watergate, urging “Resign,” “Impeach,” has been not flattened but modulated. Those times are gone. You have a kind of fractured media landscape, which in some ways doesn’t allow gatekeepers to control the news as it used to so that you do have more sense of Trump lying, but you also have a sense of media malpractice.

The mergers that we’ve seen coming together in these last couple years, the pandering on the part of corporate media to excuse him for his lies is more dangerous. It’s the fact that the corporate chieftains of some of these big companies have business before regulators in Washington, D.C.

Mark Green : Katrina, this may have to wait until the next Democratic president appoints you instead of Brendan Carr as the chair of the FCC.

Katrina, few know Russia and Putin better than you do over your career, or your late husband, Stephen F. Cohen, did. But what does Vladimir Putin think when he sits down and negotiates about Ukraine with son-in-law Jared Kushner, who a New Yorker profile this week described as a cocky heir-head, who the Kremlin can manipulate with ease.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: I don’t think Putin sees Witkoff or Kushner as capable. So he’s, I think, just being kind. Now, the more interesting stories are the bribery of Trump’s son, and the wedding [gift to Junior] from the oligarch.

There’s no question that corruption is real. But I think this war in Ukraine should be the responsibility of a group of nations to find a way to provide security for Ukraine, that it live in some form of peace, secure from Russia. But Mark, you know that 1.5 million Russians have been wounded, maimed, or killed, and Russians are war-weary.

I think Trump is impatient with diplomacy. So you need to have a team, a group of countries that see in resolving this crisis, that there are ways to work together. I think the weakness of Russia has been exposed by the legal strategic blunder Putin made in 2022. It’s beern a disaster for Russia.

Let me just add, when he came to power in 2000, The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal praised him as someone they could do business with. The Nation, however, editorialized that he was instinctively authoritarian. He was selected by Yeltsin’s family to protect their wealth, and he has been there too long.

Mark Green: So as between Zelensky -- who is completely focused on not being devoured by Russia, and Putin, who in his view may be worried about NATO but really just wants to grab Ukraine to restore his country’s former glory, which he thought Khrushchev gave away — who yields? How does this end?

Katrina vanden Heuvel: This ends, one hopes, with the reconstruction and rebuilding of Ukraine. The World Bank estimated last year would be $400 million to one trillion to rebuild a secure Ukraine, and there is an anger, unity of nationalism, rightly, in the context of Russia’s violence.

But to continue fighting to the last Ukrainian is a disservice, and I say this with humility because I’m not Ukrainian. And Russia should pay some of it, reconstruction out of its frozen assets.

Mark Green: Would you favor 100% inheritance tax on Musk, since he’s worth a trillion dollars and could fund the whole thing?

Katrina vanden Heuvel: But you know what they’re gonna do, Mark? They’ll sell off Ukraine - and Ukrainian oligarchs will be part of this - to American oligarchs like Musk, who’s already in there with Palantir.

The fact also is that Ukraine has found a way through asymmetrical warfare via drones to hold Russia back to some extent, though Ukraine has a $27 billion deficit.

Mark Green: Katrina, Changing America is based on the through line that Democrats need to prepare for the worst, yet plan for the best.

Again, if you had dinner in the fall of 2028 with the next Democratic president-elect, what are the two or three issues you’d urge him or her to run on and include in their mandate? You have his or her ear. Go.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: To make America work for working people and what that means in all of its aspects.

To take on the corruption, not just the stables of Trump, but also the entrenched interests, the monopoly power, and then to rebuild a Democratic foreign policy that is about true security. And I think that is a conversation on all fronts, but particularly on foreign policy and international relations where there’s gonna be real openings.

I’d add one thing – we saw child poverty halved, and we saw a care agenda put aside for the infrastructure agenda under Biden. I think that there is a lot of room for real progress on an issue that doesn’t get the highlight headlines – childcare. In New Mexico, you see a state that has passed universal childcare, and you see the popularity of it in New York City.

Mark Green: Were you surprised at the 7-2 Supreme Court ruling a week ago against Trump that states regulate mail-in ballots, not the Postal Service?

Katrina vanden Heuvel: The courts generally – I’m not talking about the Supreme Court – but courts have played a backstop role in often surprising ways, good ways, like with the Postal Service. That should allow people to vote in big ways. The blue wave looks hopeful, but the money [is still a great problem.] You probably saw the other day, the reporting on the billionaires, I mean it’s really an unprecedented money time because so many are giving to Trump.

To me, that’s the court’s great sin. But until we unravel Citizens United and Buckley v. Valeo, it’s going to be very hard. But we should monitor these elections because it may be that organized people do a better job than courts.

Mark Green: Most observers, me included, assume that Trump will make a big move to overturn the midterm elections within the next seven weeks, obviously, with some phony claim of a national emergency, or maybe with Speaker Johnson refusing to seat a dozen or so bona fide Democratic winners on January 3rd. So after this 7-2 mail ballot decision, how confident are you that even this Court would refuse to go along?

Katrina vanden Heuvel: I’m not confident, but I do see that there’s organizing going on among everything from poll monitors to legal challengers, I don’t have a confidence in this court except occasionally Roberts – he still wants to be the institutionalist.

Mark Green: Well, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett voted with Roberts against Trump on mail ballots.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Yeah, it was hopeful ...

Mark Green : …but that doesn’t hold when Trump tries to claim a phony Insurrection II, then we’re the in a territory that we’ve never even come close to other than the Civil War.

I assume there may be actual violence if Trump and the Court overturn the 2026 elections but I don’t want to go down there yet.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: No, the key is that the margins are strong, because that’s the most decisive way.

Mark Green As Mike Waldman said in an earlier Changing America podcast, the best guarantor is not a 1% win with Democrats getting 220 seats, but getting to say a six point win and 235 seats plus 55 seats in the Senate.

Now, while of course we’re not yet in the presidential primary season, allow me to get your appraise of Jon Ossoff, not the front-runner, since he possesses a near Obama-like ability to frame issues and connect with Democratic voters.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: We have a wonderful piece about Ossoff by Joan Walsh in the last issue. He’s a phenomenon. I think the “ideas primary” is important. I hope AOC decides to run for the Senate. Ro Khanna’s running Beshear’s running, Pritzker’s running [ed. note: and probably the uber-experienced Rahm Emanuel.]

Mark Green: Well, Ossoff’s background as a documentary filmmaker and is obviously brilliant deploying language with emotion and accuracy. He’s either gonna be Governor Bruce Babbitt, decades ago, very attractive candidate…but when he got to the national stage, he couldn’t perform.

And then Jerry Brown. In his first term as governor, got close to beating Carter. He caught lightning in a bottle, like Obama did. Well, we’ll see if Ossoff can duplicate not Bruce Babbitt but the early Jerry Brown and Obama.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Listen, Bernie deserves an essay about what losing can mean. Mark. You too changed the nature of much. Bernie has changed the narrative inside this pathway for a part of the Democratic Party.

Mark Green: In 30 years, who will be regarded as having a bigger impact on the United States of America, Bernie Sanders or Ralph Nader?

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Oh, that’s brutal! I am so happy Ralph got his front page story in The New York Times, man. I spoke to him the weekend before that, he shouted at me for an hour.

Mark Green: Oh, that’s all?

Katrina vanden Heuvel: (laughs) I suspect, and this goes to mainstream media, I often hope that Ralph’s obituary begins with consumer safety.

Mark Green: I thought, while not everybody’s going to read this article, it is going to influence the influencers who write obituaries. And that article did not mention his 2000 race. So it kosherized people writing in future obituaries, that you can write about Ralph Nader and not just be cranky about 2000.

Here’s a final, even harder question: Who in 30 years will be regarded as having a bigger influence on America, Ralph Nader or Gloria Steinem?

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Ralph Nader.

Mark Green: I agree with you, but most women professionals I ask that of say Gloria. She has a narrower constituency but more ardent.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: She was a great person. I loved her.

Mark Green: I urge everybody here to go to thenation.com to follow your publication and any Substacks so that you’re up to date through this election and the next cycle.

Thanks again, Katrina, for your time and insights.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Thank you, Mark!

Hi, I’m Mark Green back to continue our podcast with Michael Waldman, who for 20 years has served as the president and CEO of the prestigious Brennan Center for Legal Justice at NYU, which he attended.

As noted in Part I, Michael worked with me at our Democracy Project and then went on to become President Clinton’s chief of speechwriting; he’s the author of eight public policy books including POTUS Speaks and a more recent volume on the Roberts Court, called Supermajority

In 2008 he was among 60 national progressive leaders in a book that I oversaw for the next President Elect called Changing America, which we gave to Barack Obama and which provided the title for this very podcast. He wrote the chapter on democracy. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Welcome back Michael.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Mark Green: The Cook Report has just concluded that not only the House but the U.S. Senate too would likely have democratic majorities after the upcoming midterm elections.

So if a Democratic House Speaker in 2027 and a Democratic President [in 2029] invites you to propose progressive ideas to enact what would you suggest? Let’s start with ethics.

Michael Waldman: It’s utterly vital that, when given a chance, we focus on ethics, on corruption, on strengthening democracy. Over and over again, people who wanna weaken democracy, as soon as they get a pinky on a lever of power, try to tilt the playing field – they rig the rules.

And Democrats, liberals, when they get into office, say, “Oh, you know, I’m not sure people care about this, it’s not a “kitchen table issue.” This year, it’s quite clear people are angry at government. They think that big money has corrupted the political process, that the government is not working for them, it’s working for a handful of insiders.

So in terms of ethics, for example, we’ve put out a series called Solutions for a Stronger Democracy.

And encouragingly, Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader in the Senate, a few weeks ago introduced legislation that was very similar to what we had put out. He actually in his bill would fold the Federal Election Commission as well as other government ethics agencies into one powerful agency, recognizing that the FEC just doesn’t work.

There needs to be a top-to-bottom accountability. I’m taken with a phrase from the new Hungarian president, Peter Magyar, who beat [Viktor] Orbán, this Trump-like authoritarian who was in office for 16 years. Magyar said Hungary can no longer be a “country without consequences.”

That’s the spirit that we need to really clean house after Trump.

Mark Green: There’s an argument whether conflict laws do apply to a president, the only person we elect nationally. Is there any way to at least bring a case to enforce the Emolument clauses?

Trump is obviously profiting off his presidency, Or is that just off the legal table?

Michael Waldman: We actually think that the current ethics laws don’t apply to the president, and they should. The Constitution is very clear. As you said, the Emoluments Clause prevents presidents from taking domestic or foreign gifts.

In the first Trump term, there was litigation around things like his hotels and the courts basically never ruled on it and sort of threw the cases out, said the people bringing them did not have standing. Well, now in this second Trump term, we see an extraordinary frenzy of corruption, much more open than in the first term.

Trump has increased his net worth, I believe, something like $2 billion in a year and a half based on government decisions, people wanting to curry favor with the government. That was even before he started selling access to his social media posts for insider trading. I understand pretty much nobody has signed up for that because it’s illegal.

Mark Green: You also have proposals on the Supreme Court. You, Michael, were among the few dozen progressive experts, scholars appointed to a Joe Biden commission to look into changes at the Supreme Court given how imbalanced it’s become. What were those proposals? Why did Biden do nothing? And what would you try to do on a new round?

Michael Waldman: The Supreme Court has vast power and minimal accountability. It has become not a co-equal branch of government but a super legislature over the rest of government. It has been captured by a faction of a faction. It now has a very conservative six-vote super majority. Biden, when he was running for president and did not want to do anything about the Supreme Court, said, “Well, I’ll appoint a commission.”

And so when he became president, he did. I was privileged to be one of the members. He literally instructed us not to reach conclusions. But what was very interesting is we had hearings.

We heard from dozens of public witnesses from left and right, there is a broad public consensus for an 18-year term limit for justices of the Supreme Court. It reflects the very basic idea that nobody should have too much power for too long. It’s pretty much what George Washington taught us when he limited himself to two terms.

The most recent Fox News poll showed 79% support for Supreme Court term limits. It can be done, of course, by amending the Constitution. We believe it can be done statutorily by an act of Congress as well, and we’ve been urging Congress to take this step.

In recent days, Hakeem Jeffries has said that what he calls “dramatic Supreme Court reform” has to be at the center of the agenda for the Democrats if they get power.

That would help drain a lot of the partisan poison out of the confirmation process. You know, near the end of his term in office, Joe Biden endorsed term limits. We’re hoping the next president does it on the first day.

Mark Green: A third huge issue from the beginning of your career to now is campaign finance reform.

Remind everybody what you did in writing Bill Clinton’s proposal to the House in ‘93 – when you had a majority for campaign finance reform– why it was delayed, and what you would do now in a new era after Citizens United and Elon Musk.

Michael Waldman: When Clinton came in, one of the first things he did was to propose a reform bill that would have brought public financing of campaigns to congressional campaigns.

What happened is the liberal Democrats killed it. In public, they were demanding action. The door would close, and they would say in effect, “Are you crazy?” They were thinking as incumbents rather than as ideologues or idealists. So the Democrats missed their opportunity.

What has happened since then is Mitch McConnell, who was an ardent, zealous opponent of doing anything on campaign finance, among other things, helped stack the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court has made things much worse. But it’s still possible to take significant action. I do think there ought to be small donor public financing, voluntary, of campaigns at the federal level, like we see in New York City and New York state.

Which means that if you give a small amount to a candidate, that is matched maybe at a multiple level by the public funds, and it really increases the voice of ordinary people in the political system.

We need much stronger enforcement. And I do think we need a constitutional amendment to overturn not just Citizens United, but an earlier case, Buckley v. Valeo, bad Supreme Court rulings that have basically made it impossible to have a working democracy in our country because of the way they treat campaign finance law.

Mark Green: By the way, there’s a huge majority in favor of overturning Citizens United so that if it goes from Congress to the states, it’s not a foregone conclusion that it can’t be enacted.

Let me move on… Should Democrats take the Congress and the presidency, how do you deal with a criminal regime that governed America at least for four years, if not eight? There will likely be a lot of moderate Democrats and Independents who’ll say, “Ah, kumbaya, put everything behind us. Let’s just look ahead.”

Others will say, “Like hell.“ Unless we hold them accountable for their consequences, the next Trump wannabe will say, “Okay, I’m building on what Donald did, and now I’m going further.”

So in my view we’ll need a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” looking at prosecution at the state level or for the non-pardoned and for officially exposing obvious Big Lies – like tariffs affecting only foreign countries. This would be a more holistic attack Post-Trump.

Michael Waldman: I understand the dilemma because you wanna be forward-looking…you don’t wanna look like you’re just waging a vendetta against the previous administration. Having said that, I think it is really important to build support for future change that people understand what has happened before. It’s corrupt thieving by well-connected, wealthy, interested individuals.

But there’s lots of other stuff government could do. It has the ability to claw back money through corrupt or illegal deals with foreign countries, with individuals, with business people. If you look at effective history -- Franklin Roosevelt, yes, he was building the New Deal, but they also went after the swindlers who had a lot to do with the stock market crash.

I think a lot of the people who were part of the Obama administration say, as Rahm Emanuel did, that it was a mistake not to prosecute some of the bankers who were behind the mortgage fraud that helped bring down the economy. They thought, well, gee, things are so fragile, but actually it would’ve helped give the public a different idea of who was benefiting from all the various bailouts.

Ronald Reagan blamed Jimmy Carter for everything that happened for his eight years. Democrats need to not be afraid to do that if they get in office. We need to make sure this doesn’t happen again. It turns out that a lot of the stuff that we assumed were protections were just habits, tradition and not things with the force of law.

We assumed that the Justice Department was functionally independent of the White House, for example. Now clearly there need to be protections written in.

The last time we had that in a meaningful way was in the 1970s, as you know, after Watergate, where there was a serious effort to constrain the illicit power of the imperial presidency. Everything from the War Powers Act, to the Budget Act, to the campaign finance laws. We are well overdue for such a reckoning today.

Mark Green: Michael, thank you for reminding us that the new Hungarian president is an exhilarating model given how Trump has plummeted in popularity.

He’s not running but his ideas are running. And thank you for embracing, in effect, our favorite quote - Norman Cousins in the 1950s wrote, “No one’s smart enough to be a pessimist.” Thanks for the optimism of your Substack, The Briefing with Michael Waldman.

I recommend people go to it. And keep coming back to Changing America where we don’t simply look down to the mud of Trump but look up to the horizon of what’s possible. Thanks, Michael.

Michael Waldman: Thank you, Mark.

We’re now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Instagram, and YouTube! Make sure to subscribe to follow along with new Changing America episodes and all other updates from The Inflection Zone.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Mark Green: Hi, Mark Green here with our Inflection Zone podcast we call Changing America, which looks at Trump now and post-Trump. Last week we had a good friend of mine, Ralph Nader, as the guest…this week he’s been profiled Tuesday on the front page of The New York Times.

Today joining our podcast is another long-time colleague and friend, Michael Waldman, who is generationally different from Ralph but in the same line of work.

Michael Waldman has for 20 years been president of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School, which he attended. Previously, we co-authored in 1984 the fourth edition of the best-selling Who Runs Congress?, after which he worked on my U.S. Senate campaign in 1986. He then shrewdly ended up with an even more successful politician and went on to join the Clinton White House, ultimately becoming the president’s chief of speech writing, which included overseeing his inaugural address, four States of the Union, and 2,000 speeches in all.

And he’s the author or co-author of eight books, including POTUS Speaks and a major volume on the Supreme Court called Supermajority. Well, here we go again, Michael. Thanks for joining us.

Michael Waldman: Great to be with you, Mark. As you know, I learned a large share of what I’ve been able to do in my whole career from those years working with you.

Mark Green : Michael, because of your rich history and present role, we anticipate breaking this conversation into two separate podcasts as we look back on Trump and to the horizon of a better America. First, after you worked on my Senate campaign, – and I couldn’t have lost without you really – you shrewdly hooked up with Bill Clinton, as mentioned. Looking back, [I’m sure] you learned a million things, but what big lessons did you take away from Clinton’s assets or weaknesses?

Michael Waldman: It’s a great question. The most significant thing I took away from working with Bill Clinton is, yes, charisma matters, yes, retail political skills matter, and of course, he has those in freakishly copious degrees.

But policy matters, ideas matter. He ran in 1992 forging a somewhat new approach to what Democrats ought to do – that combined elements of left and center in the party and, as he said at that time, he was running against the brain-dead policies of both parties.

Mark Green: Michael, I glanced before this conversation at the 2024 American Political Science Association ranking of all the presidents. The top three are Lincoln, FDR, and Washington. Hard to disagree with that. Are you surprised that Obama was Number 7 of all the presidents? JFK Number 10, Clinton Number 12, Reagan Number 16.

Having written the book POTUS Speaks, how would you contrast in that context Clinton and Obama?

Michael Waldman: I think it’s a little early, frankly, for either of them. Obama, on the one hand, was president during some very consequential times. He came in, of course, in the aftermath of the financial collapse, and that was an extraordinary opportunity to do things.

I think in some respects he didn’t actually make the most of that opportunity. Clinton got a lot done, but as he would often bemoan, did not have crises to deal with. And very soon into his presidency, the Democratic control over Congress ended, but he was hamstrung in that way. I think what he would say, and I certainly felt this way, was that he was engaged in a project of reconstruction of liberalism so that it could be something people could run on again.

One time in the residence of the White House, he said to me and a few other people, “you know, FDR saved capitalism from itself.” That’s not an original insight. But [Clinton continued] “Our mission is to save government from its own excesses so people will see it as a progressive force again.” I think without Clinton, you wouldn’t have had Obama.

In a variety of ways, he saw himself as a liberal president governing a conservative country.

Mark Green : Other than perhaps Justice [William J.] Brennan, no one is more a founding father of that institution than you. Going from a budget of about 4 million or so 20 years ago, to nearly 70 million now – a widely quoted, highly regarded, leader of the progressive law movement, what do you attribute that phenomenal growth to?

Michael Waldman: I would say that the issues of democracy of the Constitution, which we have been saying are central and under assault, are more and more evidently the case to more and more people. So we’ve grown to scale with the challenges that we all face.

I think it’s also the case – and Mark, this is something you taught me when we worked together in a think tank called The Democracy Project, which was two people – that ideas matter and that the right wing has been very successful building up institutions like The Heritage Foundation, like AEI, like the Federalist Society. That is what we have tried to do at the Brennan Center.

Mark Green : In that context, looking back, what have been some of your most influential and important accomplishments?

Michael Waldman: I would say we have been the Paul Revere, crying out that there were attempts being made to suppress the vote, going back 10, 15 years, and really connecting the dots in a way that others had not done before.

Now with Donald Trump as president saying it out loud every five minutes, (laughs) it’s a lot easier to make that case. But what I am most proud of in a lot of ways are the affirmative reforms that we worked to develop that have taken hold in states across the country and have become central to the progressive agenda in the United States.

The legislation called the Freedom to Vote Act, which you remember, H.R.1, S.1, came really close to being enacted in the Congress in 2022. It passed the House, had a majority in the Senate, only Senators Sinema and Manchin would not change the filibuster rule so it could pass. Much of that bill was based on proposals we had developed at the Brennan Center.

Small donor public financing as a national reform, like we have in New York City, automatic voter registration and numerous other things. We really are determined to see these things become the law of the land.

Mark Green: Chief Justice Roberts, profiled this week in The New Yorker, famously insisted that he just calls balls and strikes, not politics in his rulings.

In my last Substack, I called BS on that, noting four calamitous decisions that lurched not merely to the far right, but the farthest right. Without going into the weeds, can we get your view on these four amazingly important cases? He wrote the decision in Citizens United [vs. Federal Election Commission] that continued the fiction that campaign money is speech, and it wouldn’t lead - he predicted - to substantial changes in how campaigns are financed.

Michael Waldman: Citizens United was extraordinarily destructive of our democracy. That case – and then lower court rulings implementing it – fully deregulated money in American politics back to where it was in the Gilded Age. Increasingly it is dominated by a few very wealthy billionaires, who give a substantial share of the money.

Yes, there’s more money given by small donors, but they are being outpaced by ideological big donors, and they’re often people who keep their money hidden. And they have had a tremendous impact. Citizens United, you’re right, said “Oh, it’s all okay because this is all gonna be disclosed.” It’s not. “Also, it’s all gonna be independent of the candidates.” Who are you kidding? Those of us who care about campaign finance have to be very self-aware that whatever rules are on the books right now, they really don’t exist, and we need to start over. And part of that is a different approach from the Supreme Court.

Mark Green : Michael, the Shelby County [vs. Holder] case a decade ago dismissed the problem of racially [based voter] suppression and seriously sabotaged, by all accounts, the 1965 Voting Rights Act. And it wouldn’t have happened without Roberts, who’d been lobbying for just such a thing since he was a young lawyer in the Reagan White House. And now here he is 40 years later – Chief Justice! Your analysis to the people about the Shelby County case?

Michael Waldman: For all of [Robert’s] very effective spin of just being a Midwestern Republican calling balls-and-strikes at the country club, he’s been a very active, indeed zealous, judicial activist when it comes to the law of democracy. The last time the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was reauthorized by Congress, it passed the Senate in 2006 by 98 to nothing!

In other words, this was recent and this was a consensus. What Shelby County did was basically said, “Well, that was then, this is now. The South isn’t racist anymore, you know. Black voting turnout and white voting turnout rates are, you know, much closer together.” This was right after Obama had run. “And therefore you don’t need the Voting Rights Act.” And this was a case in which Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg memorably wrote in her dissent, “That’s like standing in a rainstorm holding an umbrella and not getting wet, and deciding therefore that you don’t need an umbrella because you’re not wet.”

Mark Green: That was almost as good a metaphor as [Roberts] just calling “balls-and-strikes.” Both were memorable, but only one is true! (laughs)

Michael Waldman: And within hours of that ruling, [Ginsburg’s] predictions started to come true as states across the country began to pass new voter restriction rules. Some of them, as the federal appeals court in North Carolina put it, “surgically” targeted at Black voters.

Mark Green: Have you ever heard Roberts directly or indirectly admit, “Hmm, my predictions on money not mattering after Citizens United, my predictions on race not mattering after Shelby County didn’t exactly prove out”?

Michael Waldman. No. And we’ve done the math on this. We have a billion voter records at the Brennan Center in a genuine supercomputer here. The racial turnout gap, which was the thing Roberts pointed to in that egregious decision, started growing all over the country after 2013, after the year of the Shelby County decision. But in the states that used to be covered by the strong Voting Rights Act, the part of the Voting Rights Act that was destroyed in that decision, Section Five, in those states the gap grew at twice the rate of the rest of the country.

It’s empirically the case that that ruling has made it harder or impossible for hundreds of thousands of people to vote.

Mark Green: This Court and Congress seem dedicated to erasing 150 years of progressive laws and rulings.

In a third opinion by Robert’s 6-3 decision, he found something that had never been referred to before in the Constitution in 250 years of rulings – “presidential criminal immunity” for whatever a president says or does, if it’s within his “core functions.”

By the way, after his last State of the Union, Trump was seen mouthing to Roberts, who was in front of him, “Thanks so much. Thank you so much. I will never forget that.”

Michael Waldman: That decision, Trump v. US, is one of the worst in American history. I really would put it up there with the Dred Scott ruling and a handful of others.

The Constitution explicitly talks about presidents being able to be prosecuted after they leave office in the discussion of impeachment. There was an outlandish hypothetical that was used in the court, which is if a president ordered Seal Team Six to assassinate his political opponents – would that be an official act?

And the court basically said, “Yes!” You know who would be really rolling over in his grave - looking up or down at this - is Richard Nixon. What Richard Nixon was driven from office for doing would have been immune from investigation, let alone prosecution, under this ruling. It’s really bad, and every time you read it, it gets worse.

Mark Green : What Roberts et al. did was, in effect, raise a hypothetical fear, “Oh, presidents could be criminally hounded after they left office” versus the actual reality [of repeated presidential illegality by Trump].

A fourth decision that bothers me almost as much as the immunity decision apparently bothers you was the recent FTC Slaughter [Trump vs. Slaughter] case allowing a president to unilaterally remove commissioners at so-called independent regulatory agencies.

Trump fired a Democratic regulator at the FTC. Couldn’t that lead not so far off to a President Trump firing every Democratic commissioner at every regulatory agency and becoming, in effect, a dictator? The FCC, CPSC, SEC, FTC, et cetera, or am I being alarmist?

Michael Waldman: Well, you know, we haven’t seen all the litigation around all these other agencies, and there are some arguments to be made that they’re different from the FTC.

But as you know, we have a modern, civilized society in part because we built up over more than a century these expert agencies, sometimes insulated by Congress from political pressure in the way they were set up to do things like regulate air safety, auto safety, the markets, policing against white-collar crime and securities fraud.

We already know that some of these agencies can be dominated by a president. We’re looking at the Federal Communications Commission, which keeps doing all these things, absurd and illegal things, on Trump’s behalf. But yes, it’s a vast expansion of personal executive power over these parts of the government.

If presidents can fire the heads of se agencies or commissioners of these agencies “at will,” no matter what the law says – well, the Federal Reserve is an independent agency. And, you know, there’s a lot of people who care from a conservative and business-oriented perspective about the economy who think it’s pretty good to have an independent central bank.

So what the FED [and the Court] said was, “Well, then there’s the Federal Reserve. Some people note that’s also an independent agency. Well, it’s just different. It just is. Why Alexander Hamilton, he once had a bank and he was a founder…and so it’s different.” I’m not parodying that. That is basically what it said. So what’s the difference between the FTC and the FED? Well, the Chamber of Commerce loves the FED and hates the FTC.

Mark Green: Look, all, all these, in a sense, are the result of conservative doctrines from Scalia to Alito called Originalism and Unified Government, which cleverly require the High Court to lock its rulings into the mores, the rules, the laws of the 18th century.

That’s pretty clever if you’re a conservative wanting to go back to then. Is this gonna be an intellectual straitjacket for years to come, or are we gonna get over this eventually?

Michael Waldman: They apply originalism, the idea that the only legitimate way to interpret the Constitution is to ask what it meant at the time it was ratified, which in most cases is 1787. But there’s no other country that says the only way to decide what kind of society we have right now is to look back at what the social mores and values of 1787, of property-owning white men in 1787 was. You know, in Great Britain, when someone has an idea for a policy, they don’t say, “Oh, you know, that’s a pretty interesting idea, but the really important question we have to ask is, what did King George III think about it?” But we say, “Well, what, what unpublished notes from James Madison would illuminate what, what we should be ruling on now?”

I think you can’t beat something with nothing, and so one of the things we at the Brennan Center are doing is working with other lawyers, other scholars, people in advocacy groups and elsewhere to develop some arguments about the Constitution as a pro-democracy document that isn’t just saying, “No, no, no, we don’t like Originalism,” but this is actually the way you should look at the Constitution.”

Mark Green: Michael, that was great, but now we’ll pause our conversation to prepare a Part Two, which will be our Substack in about a couple of weeks.

In that spirit, we hope to develop a practical, progressive vision over the next 30 months of this administration that would both help erase Trumpian pathologies and erect a stronger democracy - however long that takes.

Please suggest to friends and allies to follow us at our occasional Changing America podcasts from the distortion field we call Trump’s Inflection Zone.

We’re now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Instagram, and YouTube! Make sure to subscribe to follow along with new Changing America episodes and all other updates from The Inflection Zone.

See you soon for Part II!

Episode Transcript

Mark Green: Mark Green here, and welcome to the second of our new podcast, Changing America. This offshoot of The Inflection Zone will be about still exposing and deposing Trump but with a focus on proposing the best new suggestions, for America post-Trump. It’s based on the observation of Norman Cousins who sagely wrote that “No one’s smart enough to be a pessimist.”

With the possible exception of MLK, I've regarded our guest today as the most important private citizen since Benjamin Franklin.

His biggest selling novel Unsafe at Any Speed was one of the 100 most significant books published in America in the past century, concluded Time Magazine. He ranks among the 100 Most Influential People in American history, according to The Atlantic. In a public life so far spanning 64 years, he’s written 2,000 articles and comments, spoken at over 2,000 universities, written or sponsored 75 books, and enacted two dozen consumer and environmental laws.

But that’s just dry data. At the human level, after he persuaded the House and Senate to unanimously pass his Auto Safety Act and Agency, 4.2 million Americans have not died because of that safety agency and rules based on data of deaths per-mile driven.

Maybe YOU are one of them.

Archival Footage from 1966 Congressional Testimony

Ralph Nader: …I don't want to have a climate in this country where one has to have an ascetic existence and steely determinations in order to speak truthfully and candidly and critically of American industry.

General Motors President James Roche:  I want to apologize here and now to the members of this subcommittee and Mr. Nader. I sincerely hope that these apologies will be accepted.

Mark Green: And we’ve worked on-and-off together for a mere 58 years. Phew, even saying it gets me tired. Ralph, welcome.

Ralph Nader : Thank you, Mark.

Mark Green: Oh, I left out something. In 1977, you were a host of Saturday Night Live on a program with a new comedian named Bill Murray.

On the subject of new ideas for a post-Trump America, you’ve consistently suggested transforming Labor Day so it’s not just an anachronism but an active part of the labor and political worlds.

How would that work?

Ralph Nader : Well, Labor Day is supposed to highlight workers – instead, it highlights commercial sales of cars and furniture. We want to bring it back to engaging workers. The idea is to have events focusing on something as simple as a “Compact” for American workers to integrate higher minimum wages, universal health care, cracking down on corporate crime and tax reform…not just clambakes but civic events where organizers also engage like-minded citizen groups to invite candidates, local, state, and national, running for office.

Mark Green: What kind of response have you gotten, if any, from individual unions or the AFL?

Ralph Nader : Two years ago we got Liz Shuler, head of the AFL-CIO, very excited. Everything was in place. Rolling it out to the national unions, like the flight attendants, postal workers and the United Auto Workers, and then down to the local level. But what I didn’t know was the AFL-CIO ran these proposals by the Democratic National Committee, and they nixed it.

They turned it down. And so we’re trying again, for this coming Labor Day. We’re not involving the AFL.

Mark Green: Even though Labor, of course, has shrunk as a percentage of the organizable workforce, it’s still among the two or three cornerstones of the Democratic Party.

Speaking of which, you yourself are not a registered Democrat – indeed you ran four times for president as an Independent… and, pending recounts, were not yet elected. You’ve been very critical of House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries for not doing more to hold a malicious president accountable for his crimes and damage.

Ralph, since he has to keep the House caucus together – from Henry Cuellar to AOC – what do you suggest he can or should also be doing?

Ralph Nader: One thing is leading the fight to impeach Trump in the House and send it to the Senate, regardless of the prospects of the vote. It would be an important organizing tool all over the country.

Almost 90% of the Democratic voters want Trump out of there. “You’re fired,” to use one of his favorite expressions. Jeffries doesn’t agree with that.

Mark Green: Might that be his position right now, probably waiting until he is in the majority before proposing something that he then has the power to act on. Do you think that’s likely or enough?

Ralph Nader : I don’t think it’s likely at all. I think if he becomes Speaker he’ll say, “We’re not looking back, we’re looking forward.”

You have a massively criminal president surrounded by massively criminal sycophants heading cabinet positions and agency positions, and every day people out there are suffering. Some are dying, some are getting sick, some can’t get Medicaid, some can’t get food stamps. We’re talking tens of millions of people.

They’re wrecking Head Start. They’re wrecking AmeriCorps -- they’ve frozen the health and safety regulatory agencies that save lives and advance health – EPA, OSHA, NHTSA. He’s not listening to his Democratic voters. He said to a reporter who asked him about impeachment in April, “I’m not I’m not gonna get ahead of that discussion.”

What? Get ahead of the discussion of almost 90% of your voters? We’ve had two symposiums on impeachment. At one of them was Celinda Lake, who showed us all the polls saying that organizing an impeachment drive is good politics. It gets people excited, it answers the question – what does the Democratic Party stand for? – and it helps get out the vote.

Mark Green: If someone says to you, “Oh, come on, it’s unlikely to impossible he’d ever reach the 67 votes necessary to convict and expel in the Senate.” What’s your counter-argument argument – “if you don’t swing, you don’t hit”?

Ralph Nader: Well said. Two responses. One is they said all that about Nixon – you have to take him out of the White House feet first; he’ll never leave. Well, he won 49 out of 50 states in 1972, got over 60% and within a year or two he was out. Why? Because Republicans saw themselves sinking in the ‘74 election, and he was the reason they were sinking.

So Senators Howard Baker and Senator Barry Goldwater went to the White House and basically said, “Mr. President, your time is up.” And he resigned, saying he lost his base in Congress. You’re not gonna get two-thirds next year if you don’t start this year laying the basis and making the Republicans realize that Trump is a tremendous handicap come November

Mark Green: Ralph, you’ve been operational for one-fourth of America’s entire history. You’ve dealt with an awful lot of members over that time. Looking back, who were among the two or three greatest senators, house members, that you worked with and why?

Ralph Nader: Well, Senator Warren Magnuson was a power in the Senate. He was originally known as the go-to person for big business, and then he hired a couple great chiefs of staff – like Mike Pertschuk – who educated him…and he became the greatest consumer champion of legislation in Senate history. Senator Gaylord Nelson, tremendous progressive from Wisconsin, authored the Tire Safety Act and many other measures [such as launching the very first Earth Day in 1970.]

In the House, the towering figure was John Moss, the father of the Freedom of Information Act of 1966 and the critical amendments of 1974.

Mark Green: You remember when we two met personally with a 92-year-old Jeannette Rankin in 1972. She was the first woman ever elected to the House of Representatives back in 1916 but was then defeated in the next election due to her vote against our entry into World War I.

Ralph Nader : I sure do. She’s the greatest woman in politics in American history in my book.

She wasn’t just for women’s rights. She was for labor rights. She was for peace. She put her life on the line for Montana. That’s why Montanans have picked her to represent them in the Hall of Statues in the Congress, Jeannette Rankin.

Well, I get a call from her in the middle of a hot summer when we had hundreds of student volunteers doing profiles of nearly every Member of Congress. I said, “What a pleasure.” And she said, “I’m gonna fly in because I want to talk to you and your people about ‘single member districts,’ which I’ve been advocating for decades.” The one thing I remember she conveyed to the students was, “You gotta have stamina, patience, and long-term determination.”

That was a great scene. I wish it had been videotaped.

Mark Green: Talking about stamina, after she was voted out in 1918 as a pacifist against WWI, 22 years later she ran for her old seat, won, in time to be the only member to vote against our entry into World War II, for which – surprise! – she was then again voted out of office.

When I asked her, “How the hell did you continue to have this drive and idealism after losing political power and then coming back…to lose again?” She replied, “You can’t lose if you never give up. You can’t lose if you never give up.”

Ralph Nader : Great phrase.

Mark Green: Ralph, you had another seminal moment last year on the 60th anniversary of Unsafe, when you published a response to a major critique written by Lewis Powell, who later of course became a Supreme Court justice.

What was his critique, and how did your lengthy response anticipate the Slaughter decision earlier this year which overturned a century of precedent to allow a president to fire all commissioners of the other party so he becomes a dictator over so-called “independent” regulatory agencies?

Ralph Nader : Lewis Powell’s complaint against the consumer, environmental and labor movements sound quaint now.

He wrote how the universities were alive with protests against corporate power, which influenced Congress. They passed bills to regulate the auto industry, to regulate polluters, to hold these companies accountable. So Powell urged big corporations to wake up – they need to expand their core of lobbyists in Washington and their influence over universities and over the media. He wrote this extensive memorandum for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and they sort of followed his script.

At the time, I said, “What’s the big deal? All, all these groups, they just want corporations to stop stealing, to stop cheating, to stop polluting, to start obeying the laws. Now how radical is that?” Well, he named me as the leading antagonist of American business. I tried to ignore it. But 54 years later, I figured I’d use it as a yardstick to show how massively more powerful corporations have become in every sphere of life.

I explained that political action committees are staggeringly bigger. They secretly buy and rent politicians, as you’ve written about so much.

Mark Green: And now?

Ralph Nader: The net result is the citizenry is not organized in proportion to the crushing attack on them.

Instead, we have Trump, who to use the title of our book is Wrecking America. So he is teaching us a lot about the weakness of both our democratic institutions and our own role as citizens.

I don’t think most people understand the extent of the damage he’s inflicting. Because when you’re willing to lie yourself through the day, he’s a chronic liar, a fantasist, a broken-promise leader with his base — and you’re willing to violate all the laws and the Constitution day after day — you can create a spectacular amount of damage to our country.

We’re not prepared for pandemics, we’re not prepared for climate violence, we’re not prepared to deal with the wildfires since wants to cut the budget for FEMA. He’s put big business in charge. He’s eliminating all kinds of criminal prosecutions that he inherited from the Biden administration and the Justice Department and the Securities Exchange Commission.

He’s corrupted himself and his family to such staggering levels that even experts describe it all. The great thing about Trump is that he boasts about his impeachable offenses without saying “impeachable offenses.” He boasts about violating the laws and doing whatever he wants, destroying whatever he wants.

Mark Green: I’m not unbiased about this. Lewis Powell’s the extremist here. What you’re now and doing now is reflective of what Abraham Lincoln famously said in 1854, even before he became president, which, to paraphrase, is the purpose of government is so we all can do together what we know needs to be done, but we cannot in our individual capacities do them.

Ralph, on a personal note, I recall when a new president invited you to his home to play softball – that’s a tip-off – and to talk policy. Of course, I’m referring to Jimmy Carter in 1977. If the 48th president asked you to dinner (forget the softball) what are the two or three most significant policy suggestions you’d implore him or her to pursue, assuming that the Congress goes Democratic?

Ralph Nader : Well, one is pretty far off the screen here.

It’s to generate civic education in all our schools – civic education, civic experience, civic skills – instead of just having students stare at their screens and become computer programmers. We’re feeling the penalties of generations of youngsters going through elementary school and high school with no civic understanding whatsoever. That’s the kind of constituency that elects Trump, who then manipulates them and finds scapegoats.

Second is campaign finance reform. Get big get money out of politics, as you’ve written so frequently, and have public campaigns funded with public money, just the way public parks, public forests, public drinking water systems are funded with public money. The third is immediate universal healthcare insurance and quality healthcare as well as significant tax reform so taxes are equitably collected and the money goes back to where the people live, work, and raise their family.

That’s why there’s been so little tax revolt over the decades in Western Europe. A lot of it went back to the people, in the form of universal health insurance, great pensions and mass transit and many, many other important social benefits like paid family care, childcare, maternal care, all the things the richest country in the world has denied its population because its governments have been for sale or rent.

Mark Green: During Trump’s first term- I was walking my dog here in Manhattan and passed a woman walking her dog. We got to talking. She was an Australian woman, and I asked her, “What do your fellow citizens think of Donald Trump?” She immediately shot back, “We cannot understand how the greatest country in the world has chosen the worst person in the world to be its leader.”

If I had to explain to her Aussie pals and to my own grandchildren when they grow up – what’s your best answer to her question?

Ralph Nader: Well, two layers. One is it all comes back to the citizenry. If they’re passive, uninformed, can’t be bothered with politics, you get very bad politics. That’s the lesson of history.

And the second is the Democratic Party, which was severely criticized by John Kenneth Galbraith, basically a very loyal Democrat professor at Harvard who co-founded the ADA in 1948 [Americans for Democratic Action] in Harper’s Magazine, in 1970 or so. He warned the Democrats they were straying from their mission and spending too much time coddling corporations.

Add Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor, to that school of analysis. He wrote an op-ed in The Post a couple decades ago saying the Democratic Party’s big problem was that they wrote off half the country. They’re the creators of the red-blue divide. They stopped competing completely in states like Texas and the mountain states -- and Mississippi and Alabama. We shouldn’t be surprised that reactionaries now control Florida.

Then look at the constituencies sitting on the sidelines.

Four ex-presidents are largely silent as Trump dumps on them all the time with little response. There’s also the retired military who hate Trump and Hegseth…national security advisors like generals Mattis and Kelly. And then how about our profession, the legal profession? Other than the Bar of the City of New York, which came out with two white papers denouncing Trump’s executive violations urging “his immediate impeachment.” Nor have I heard from the medical profession or the political science profession, demanding accountability for Trump.

There’s the contented classes. That’s my favorite. They haven’t been harmed very much so far by Trump because they’ve got their tax breaks, they’ve got deregulation, and they don’t have mortgages to worry about. They enjoy health insurance, they own their own homes, and they’re sitting on the sidelines.

Mark Green: Well, at the risk of sounding like a Pollyanna, I and most of our viewers and readers agree with all that. But on the other hand – as we were trained to say at our law school – the most recent off-year elections have shown an average swing against the GOP of 10 to 12 points because of the backlash to Trump.

Of course, his polling went from 49% of the actual vote on election day in November, 2024 to 32 to 34% in the most recent major polls, an historic fall.

Ralph Nader: It’ll be interesting to see how contagious recent bread-and-butter progressive winners – like Mamdani and El-Sayed – will prove to be…not only in their superior messaging but also their deployment of an armada of volunteers who spread the word even if major media don’t, helped by social media communication.

Such stalwarts – like those who march on No Kings Days – show the strength of numbers of average people who keep up to date, are powered by passion and focus on the decisional arena to accomplish big change. If only one percent of the adult public made Congress their hobby – that’s 2 ½ million people – it would test my theory how the impossible could become the inevitable. Neither AIPAC nor big corporations could stop the momentum of change for good in a self-governing democracy.

We regulated the auto industry, saving many millions of lives, with no more than a thousand people around the country.

Mark Green. Thanks Ralph for your time, wisdom and, as always, your example. And listeners and viewers who want to read his column free electronically every week, they can go to nader.org to become more informed, agitated and activated.

Ralph Nader: Thank you Mark for your Substack, new podcast and life of advocacy.

NOTE TO READERS:

In our maiden episode of Changing America, a podcast all about how America can survive and thrive after Trump’s exit - if not exile - historian Jonathan Alter looks ahead to discuss Iran, ICE, a Wealth Tax, constitutional amendments on campaign finance and pardons...plus comparisons between Trump and Caesar since Jonathan is finishing a biography of the Roman dictator in 2027.

Let’s look up to the horizon of hope and not merely wrestle in the mud with MAGA.

Episode Transcript:

Mark Green: I’m Mark Green, pleased to announce today a new recurring element of our Inflection Zone Substack

It’s a podcast called Changing America, named after two large citizen transition books written by progressive experts, agency by agency, that I organized for the presidents-elect, first in 1992 and then again in 2008. Of course, Clinton and then Obama. Now, in 2026, I’ll be interviewing leading public advocates about how to further expose Trump and MAGAism with a special focus on how the next administration can end his corrupt despotism and establish an even better democracy.

I’m happy to inaugurate this positive podcast with my longtime friend, and among the leading journalists and biographers in the country, Jonathan Alter. His books on FDR and Carter, and others, plus deeply informed columns and many cable appearances, have helped educate Americans for decades. He’s now completing a biography of Julius Caesar.

Welcome, Jonathan.

Jonathan Alter: Thanks, Mark. Glad to be here. Thanks for the kind words.

Mark Green: Speaking of Caesar, I’ve been fascinated with him because of a shared date. He, of course, was famously assassinated, March 15th, 44 BC. I, less famously, was born on March 15th, 1945, separated by a mere 2090 years.

So beyond that small coincidence, why Caesar?

Jonathan Alter: Caesar was involved, not solely responsible, but involved in the demise of the Roman Republic. He didn’t live during the Roman Empire. He came at the end of more than 450 years of a republic in Rome. So I think you can understand why the collapse of the Roman Republic is of real interest right now, and it’s a complicated, rich, and I found fascinating story, and Julius Caesar was an utterly fascinating and brilliant individual.

Mark Green: So your comment invites this question – I glibly referred to Trump as an American Caesar in 2017 when he first came on the scene presidentially. Was I just being quick, or is that a useful comparison in your view?

Jonathan Alter: I think it’s useful to the extent that the word Caesar, after his death, 11 emperors had Caesar as part of their name, and then Kaiser is Caesar in German, and Tsar is Caesar in Russian.

And so he came to represent autocracy in the world of the last 2,000 years. So to that extent, I think it’s a valid comparison. But the two individuals had a few things in common, but not a lot, and basically Trump is not worthy of holding Julius Caesar’s toga. I like to say, some of you might remember the beverage that was made of orange juice and milk and can still be consumed in a different form at Dairy Queen called an Orange Julius.

And I would just say that Donald Trump is no Orange Julius.

Mark Green: (laughs) You lucked out on that one! A couple of Substacks ago, I wrote that Trump’s legacy is largely set in stone because millions of us separately cannot unlearn all his lies, distortions, arrogance, ignorance and crimes.

Of course, he has (presumably) 18 months to go. But do you think, however much he may talk about his legacy, it’s pretty fixed by this point?

Jonathan Alter: Oh yeah, it’s fixed. I mean he will be seen as the worst president in American history, and it’s not a close contest. And, you know, historians during and after his first term considered him the worst president in American history, and that judgment has been confirmed.

But, unfortunately, he’s not gonna be that easy to expunge. You know, I had thought when I wrote a book – called American Reckoning that came out in 2024 – I had some lines from Ozymandias in that book ‘cause I thought there was a chance that there would be nothing left of him. That he wouldn’t be remembered at all if Kamala Harris won the election, that he would just be this really unfortunate blip – you know, he’d quickly enter Millard Fillmore territory.

But that is not gonna be the case now. He will be remembered. This era will be, for better and much more often for worse, known as the Trump era. It’s not gonna be the Trump-Biden era. It’s gonna be the Trump era with everything that comes with that. A lot of what he did will be taken down.

But some of it can’t be taken down. So if he manages to get an arch built, it’s gonna be kind of hard to take that down. I think he’s a hugely memorable president. In terms of him being a hugely consequential president…now that we’re getting into some irreversible things going on with Iran, he may well be seen as an enormously consequential president.

In that sense, he can be like more odious, more menacing Nixon. So Gerald Ford becomes president and he brings in a new attorney general, former University of Chicago president named Edward Levi, and it takes Levi about 18 months to restore the integrity and credibility of the Department of Justice with the help of some new laws, and we will need some new laws.

We’ll need to not just reverse these executive orders, but actually codify [changes]. The way he becomes an enormously consequential president, Mark, is if J.D. Vance or even Marco Rubio gets elected in 2028. Then we’re truly living in a different country because a lot of this terrible stuff that he’s done will become entrenched and very hard to reverse

Mark Green: You just mentioned Iran. The President and Pentagon are right now deciding between two very unenviable options from his point of view - and for America. Either we’ll massively bomb, which he loves threatening to do, or TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) again, again, again, saying, “Oh, we’re gonna have a ceasefire ‘cause they wanna negotiate.” What do you think he’ll do and why?

Jonathan Alter: Well, I think that he will do what he always does, which is one thing on Monday, another thing on Tuesday, a third thing on Wednesday, and you’ll just see this intermittent bombing and then, “No, now we’re gonna negotiate.” Maybe they’ll come back to the table, sign another ceasefire, then they’ll have another bombing and, you know, somebody’ll violate the ceasefire and it’ll just be this for a long time.

So it’s already, according to Paul Krugman, close to or already too late for him to get gas prices down before the midterms. The whole world now rightly believes that the Iranians are holding him hostage the way they arguably held Jimmy Carter hostage, as I wrote about in my biography of Carter and that they basically won this war.

They’re much more clever negotiators and they have a lot of leverage.

Mark Green: I have a question internationally - especially after he humiliated himself after the World Cup. Do you think the world or our allies will ever again trust an American president or America, given how often Trump has been contemptuous of truth and [existing treaties]

Jonathan Alter: I don’t believe in that word “ever.” I’ve been around long enough to know. So you get a new American president and a new generation of European leaders, and they develop new relationships. And the other thing to understand is that international relations are not built on trust.

Trust is very helpful to coming to agreement. But basically, international relations are more along the line of what Reagan said about dealing with Russia, “Trust but verify,” right? So will you have more skepticism? Yes, but what are they motivated by? Are they motivated by trust, or are they motivated by their interests? If it’s in their interest to deal with the United States, to sign a deal with them on this or that, they will do so, Trump notwithstanding.

If it’s not in their interest, they won’t.

Mark Green: Let me move on looking ahead, if I can optimistically. This is called Changing America. How can America change? For example, the likely Maine Democratic Senate nominee, after Plattner withdrew, is proposing that we abolish ICE because it’s become almost a personal Gestapo for Trump.

[Give it] maybe a new name, slash it three-fourths, with the savings going to a childcare tax credit. Is this a good idea for a candidate to propose and a good idea for the next president to accept?

Jonathan Alter: I think it’s a good idea if you’re running in the Democratic primary, but it’s not a great general election issue ‘cause it’s too easily twisted into a variation on “Defund the Police.”

Well, border security is very popular, and to say, “in the future, we’ll create a new border agency” is not very smart. So I think it’s much better to say, “We are going to dramatically overhaul ICE. We’re gonna ban the use of masks. We are going to cut its budget because it’s way, way overfunded, and use some of those savings, and we are going to improve eligibility standards.”

Mark Green: But as a leading idea, for the next president?

Jonathan Alter: Yeah, I think if after he’s elected, [it would be good] to say, “You know, the name ICE has so many negative connotations that I’m gonna do what many presidents have done,” starting with Franklin Roosevelt, who was always opening and then shutting and reopening agencies with different names.

And there will be a real opportunity for a new Democratic president to have very aggressive ethics legislation. Some of it should include building support for a constitutional amendment on campaign finance, since the Supreme Court’s not gonna help. But campaign finance, it’s, it’s actually pretty popular.

Mark Green: Okay. In that spirit, how about an amendment on not making the pardon power unaccountable and unlimited, which I assume, like campaign finance abuse, is very popular.

Jonathan Alter: Yes. I think it should be like the post-Civil War era where they put in three constitutional amendments. And I’m not sure exactly what the three should be, but I think three or even four [can] pass quickly, they just require a majority vote in the Congress; then send them to the states and start the process of selling it in state capitals

And a lot of these are not, they’re not partisan. I mean, limiting the pardoning power is something that a lot of Republicans could get behind if it, especially if there’s a Democratic president. I also think some of it should be just very rough hard-ass politics that can be done on a straight party vote that don’t require a constitutional amendment.

One of those is statehood for the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, and they should just push it through because we now have a very unrepresentative Senate. Look at the Dakotas. By the way, the Republicans did this in the 19th century. I think they created five new states.

Mark Green: Do you have any economic proposals? Economic populism is across the board pretty popular.

Jonathan Alter: So personally, I favor a wealth tax, and I think it’s doable for a variety of reasons. Elizabeth Warren’s [proposal] is a good one. The problem is this Court would unquestionably declare it unconstitutional.

The question is, is it worth the effort? And I’ve been convinced recently that it’s not worth the effort because it’d just get struck down. So we should go for a very sharp increase in the income tax. We should get rid of the 25% capital gains tax. Mark, you’ve written wonderful stuff on this. It shifted from being based on labor to finance.

We gotta shift that back so all of your income is taxable at the same top rate, 65%. They definitely have to lift the cap on Social Security to fund Social Security.

Mark Green: Let’s agree about – a wealth tax, let’s put that in the next president’s quiver. So if and when there’s Supreme Court reform, and/or a very conservative justice retires or leaves, there’s a change in the Court when a wealth tax might be smart to propose.

Jonathan Alter, are you allowed to tell me when you might publish Julius Caesar?

Jonathan Alter: Well, I was hoping it would come out on the Ides of March next year, but it’s gonna be later than that, sometime probably in the second half of next year.

Mark Green: Alright, well come back, as they love to say on MS NOW, Please come back!”

I wanna thank Jonathan for his time and deep expertise, though not as a campaign consultant, Frankly. the country is better off that you went all-in on writing and not pontificating

Jonathan Alter: (laughs)

Mark Green: Well, if you found our maiden podcast useful, if not informative, remember to check out Jonathan’s forthcoming biography next year called The Dictator. And before then, check out his Old Goats Substack, a tongue-in-cheeky title that I think refers to chats with people of my vintage.

To all Inflection Zone followers, please watch for future Substacks and Changing America podcasts where we aim to look up to the horizon of hope and not merely down in the mud with MAGA and Trump.

Also, of course, let your friends and family know how to subscribe and follow us. This is Mark Green. Thank you.

For novelists, magical thinking is a must. Not so, however, when it comes to modern wars or crises, when being high on your own supply is a recipe for calamity.

Chamberlain thought he had convinced Hitler to a peace agreement in 1938...the Chancellor four years later believed he would overrun Stalin in weeks... when Chernobyl exploded in 1986, Russia underplayed the dangers which misled Germany into sending the wrong robots to clean it up…so the acute radiation only spread.

More recently, TeamBush43 thought the invasion of Iraq would be a “cakewalk.”

No, no, no, and no. Yet now comes another wartime fabulist – after pretending to have ended eight wars in one year – that he can dictate reality because he needs to perfume the odor of Epstein and plunging polls. When informed by his own Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and a confidential Pentagon intelligence report that there was no evidence Iran posed an imminent threat or would collapse if massively attacked, Trump blithely upped the ante: he had a hunch would attack first and then collapse.

So he demanded their unconditional surrender so that he can choose the country’s next leader…as he had previously done so well in both beauty pageants and senior golf tournaments. But as

Holly Dagress, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute, said, “Bending the knee to Trump would go against everything they stand for.”

Nor can wishful thinking and rhetorical bravado erase Iran’s size, drones, missiles, army and vengeance even after Trump’s 21st Century Pearl Harbor killed so many of its leaders. And his team of Witkoff, Kushner, Hegseth, and Leavitt are not confused for Metternich…but are more like Matthew Broderick playing videos early in the film War Games.

Here are three headlines from just one publication this past weekend: “Trump’s Iran Endgame Shifts”…another: “The War is colliding with Trump’s Economic Priorities”…another: “There’s Reason to Worry About the Iran War.” Were they in The Nation Magazine? Nope, Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal.

As a result, writes Peter Baker in the New York Times, we are in the first war America has fought without clear public support at its start …and with an administration that 1. neglected to warn American troops and civilians marooned in bases in the Gulf 2. failed to refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve with low-priced oil or 3. failed to prepare local police departments against actual retaliatory domestic terrorism.

The Trump hunch will not be able to Maduro his way out of the corner he has painted America into. Instead, we are tragically reminded again of the axiom that in war, truth is the first casualty.

So will an uneducable Republican party steer us into new quagmires like Vietnam and Iraq?

Could be. Peace advocates can implausibly dream that Trump’s skin rashes spread so he retires claiming “Mission Accomplished.” Seems unlikely. Or they can pray for an intervention by a very politically vulnerable GOP… by a fact-based media tired of being bullied…or by a SCOTUS concluding he had acted in an “arbitrary and capricious” manner. Perhaps some serendipitous event will yet derail his presidency, such as a photograph with Epstein in flagrante or a Melania bomb (not including her biopic)?

This time, we won’t have Matthew Broderick magically saving the day.

The #1 news story in America now is not Iran, not Inflation, not ICE. It, however. is the answer to a question that’s never been asked: WAS the American President a member of a Pedophile Ring systematically raping children?

Now that this issue has gone from being covered only by MSNOW and NPR to include such mainstream platforms as the NYTimes, WSJ, and others, the Trump/Bondi/Blanche coverup is OVER. Like a huge boulder tumbling down a mountain, there’s now a momentum that’ll won’t stop until we get the answer.

This is a before & after moment: before & after Joseph Welch questioned Joe McCarthy, before & after Alex Butterfield revealed Nixon’s tapes about Watergate. Due to patriots like Ro Kanna, Tom Massie, Reps Garcia & Raskin, commentators like Lawrence O’Donnell, David Frum, and Molly-fast Jung, not even a more likely small bombing run in Iran to change the subject, will Trump be able to throw a monkey wrench at the legal and political process.

There are a few small canaries to watch in the coal mine: will even CBS and FOX cover the biggest scandal in American history? will a few GOP leaders ditch this anchor around their necks in an election year? Will Bondi or Blanche decide to avoid disbarment and prosecution to defend a child abuser?

Nixon was obviously peddling BS when he confidently announced that “Your president is not a crook!” And when Karoline Leavitt declares a version of “Your president is not a pervert,” the reaction will be the same: no serious public person or voter can believe what TeamTrump claims about a President with a long rap sheet of illegality and immorality.

We now begin a countdown to a fair legal process* and political election to clarify what’s real or false in The Inflection Zone. Now, as it should be, it’ll be up to a jury of citizens and then a jury of voters.

*fyi, not even Clarence Thomas will claim that child rape is an immune “core function” of a President. Right?

Elvis and Lincoln? Two very different icons came to mind as I endured Trump’s eternal, infernal State of the Union address.

Donald Trump is now in Elvis’s Catskills Phase, reduced to playing golden oldies with diminishing returns. There was the same ‘ol barely disguised racism of always doing the white-thing whenever possible, though last night had a slight update: “Somali Pirates” was creative but came off as a glib lie about fraud from the only president criminally convicted of it.

The template of his talk was identical to all earlier SOTUs and rallies: distort the past, smear all Democrats as inhuman, and brag about an unverifiable future, hoping that listeners will confuse predictions for facts. Most in MAGA will…but any rational actor will be able to compare, say, Trump’s assertions about $1.99 a gallon gas with what they’re actually paying at the pump today.

Then there was the level of “Stolen Valor” that broke records even for him. .His milking of the U.S. Men’s Hockey Gold medal came within an inch of implying that HE was on the ice, not to mention the truth that it was Biden not him, who brought inflation down to 3 percent before #47 even began his term. Also, “Trump Baby Bonds” was originally a Hillary Clinton policy idea.

And repeatedly trying to take credit for the misery of the victims of crimes by immigrants pretends there were no crimes by non-immigrants. As Trump nemesis @RickWilson smartly observed, “No matter how many heroes you trot out, Donald, you’re not one of them.”

Added together, his words bring to mind Lincoln’s enduring axiom that “you can fool some of the people all the time, and all the people some of the time, but not all of the people all the time.”

Overnight instant polls favored Trump since a disproportionate Republican audience tuned in to hear a triumphal Republican president. But even the first quickie measured only a “strongly positive” 38 percent, the lowest of his five SOTU addresses. And regular surveys reveal a president that most people no longer believe when he speaks. Why should they given his track record?

His fabulous rant was surely an emotional reprieve from press bloodhounds and leaks about pedophilia. But not even a brief bombing run or two over Iran would hold back the tides of opprobrium crashing down on him. News will now return to reporting a GDP slumping to barely one percent by the end of 2025, and job growth sharply falling as well. More Epstein disclosures will tighten the noose, assuming the major media will not continue to ignore the girl telling the FBI 4x that Trump sexually assaulted and then struck her, as NPR reported yesterday.

Talk will now as well return to his grotesque billionaire’s ballroom and Mussolini-like maneuver of naming buildings after himself or draping banners with his image over them. (This habit will backfire once critics start calling ICE prisons “Trump Concentration Camps” – or “Trumpvilles” in honor of the so-called “Hoovervilles” that housed poor WWI pensioners protesting on the Washington Mall in the Twenties. Nor will his soaring self-enrichment, documented to be in the billions in recent New Yorker and Atlantic articles, help his polling plunge.

As for his future prospects, it presumably won him no votes in crucial, future Supreme Court decisions after he berated Roberts, Coney Barrett, and Gorsuch for “disgracing their families.” Being smart conservatives, they can now see even more clearly the Frankenstein that their gift of immunity created.

Speaking of families, Trump bizarrely buried his first wife, Ivana, on his Bedminster golf course, but cannot bury bad news that will sprout through sidewalks during the run-up to the Fall midterms. For he can neither run nor hide from what he has done to America as he strains to seize credit for 250 years of a constitutional democracy that he daily demeans.

Sadly, as the film title puts it, “Reality Bites.”