The Jackpod: Everything a president does, teaches
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I'm Meghna Chakrabarty, and this is The Jackpot, where On Point news analyst Jack Beattie helps us connect history, literature, and politics in a way that brings his unique clarity to the world we live in now. Hello there, Jack. Hello, Meghna. So we are at episode 65, your headline.

Everything a president does teaches. Okay. I would agree with that as both the political and I would say moral leader of the United States. But tell us more.

Well, that's an apathum of FDRs. And the central lesson that he taught, that the New Deal taught, as he put it, was security. He said, among our objectives, I place the security of the men, women, and children of the nation first. People, he declared, had a, quote, right to three types of security. Decent homes to live in.

productive work, and, quote, security against the hazards and vicissitudes of life. That was the lesson of the New Deal. His aide, Raymond Moley, wrote from the bottom of his heart,

He wants people to be as happy as he is. He is outraged by hunger and unemployment as though they were personal affronts. In a world he is certain he can make far better, totally other than it has been. Hmm.

Totally other. He wanted to transform the country. Well, if that was the lesson, the message taught by everything the president did in the New Deal, the lesson that Donald Trump is teaching would appear to be cruelty. At any rate, that's the word that recurs everywhere.

In comments from critics, to be sure, about the executive orders issued on his first day in the White House and continuing. Let me just give you some evidence of that. Here is the National Immigration Law Center commenting on his statement.

on his executive orders on immigration. Unconstitutional, illegal, and cruel. Amnesty International, quote, President Trump is calling for criminal prosecution of people crossing irregularly into the United States, a policy that resulted in mass separation of families during his first term. To this day, Amnesty International writes,

There are families, mostly from Central America, who have still not been reunited from this first iteration of this cruel policy.

Touching on transgender rights, President Trump issued this presidential executive order. It was titled Defending Women from General Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government, end quote. The Detroit Free Press writes, of all the executive orders Trump signed on Inauguration Day, the

the one that erases trans people from federal policies is perhaps the cruelest. Cruel again. On the directive since rescinded from the Office of Management and Budget, suspending nearly a trillion dollars in federal funding for a myriad of domestic programs of that order,

Democratic leader Chuck Schumer called it chaotic, careless...

and cruel. Of the executive order suspending the entry of refugees into the United States, the Vermont Afghan Alliance called the order a betrayal of the Afghans who supported the United States military during the Afghan war, branding the order cruel. The Refugee Council USA called the executive order unfathomably cruel.

Of the executive order suspending foreign aid for 90 days, one nonprofit working with access to HIV treatment for patients in Africa said the stop work order is cruel. It's since been rescinded. It will kill people.

Oxfam told NPR, "It is a cruel decision that has life and death consequences for millions of people around the world," pointing to all sorts of hunger relief programs, landmine relief programs, and on and on. All that suspended for 90 days while Trump combs through what we're doing abroad.

Finally, on Trump's decision to end security details for John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, who are under credible death threats, death threats.

from the Iranian government. Nicole Wallace, host of Deadline White House on MSNBC, called this order taking away their security details, quote, cruel. So, Jack, you're right. This is a litany in terms of actual executive orders.

signed by President Trump. But I'm thinking back to your headline, everything a president does teaches. So yes, he's done these things by virtue of the executive orders and signing them. But he himself as a person has said a lot, right? And he himself as a person is teaching every day that he's in office.

Oh, indeed. And these policies are a reflection of the man he is. Liz Cheney, who certainly no friend of his, has said Donald Trump is fundamentally cruel.

We can't fathom his psyche, but that's her judgment of him. And, of course, there's a prologue here, and that goes back to the first term where we saw evidence of cruelty really from day one of that first term. On day one, remember, he's suspended prison.

No one from a Muslim nation could enter the United States. Quoting a scholarly paper on the first term presidency, one writer says, Trump seems to revel...

in the power of the presidency to hurt. And of course, there's a famous and well-celebrated comment, or at least people cite it as a sort of, you know, here's a marker of Trumpism. This is from a voter in Florida, a woman who worked for the federal prison. Anyway, she said, quoted in the Times, I voted for him.

And now he's doing this, meaning she's laid off. I thought he was going to do good things. He's not hurting the people he needs to be hurting. That seemed to be what she wanted him, what she thought he was going to do.

And this vision of cruelty in the first administration, I think historians will go back to an essay in The Atlantic by Adam Serwer in 2018. And the title really and the underline really says it all. Quote, the cruelty is the point. That's the title. And the underline, President Trump and his supporters find community here.

by rejoicing in the suffering of those they hate and fear. And Adam Serwer goes on to show a range of cruel policies that had recently, this is 2018, been announced by Trump.

And then to show instant after instance of Trump talking before audiences or Trump knew or his, you know, his clack on Fox News, talking on the air and laughing, laughing at disabled people, laughing at the women who accused him of sexual harassment and assault, laughing at Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who accused him.

Brett Kavanaugh of deriding and humiliating her as a teenager, laughing. And he says in this really, I think, canonical piece, he goes to the laughter that the audiences pick up. And he says it's not just that the perpetrators of this cruelty enjoy it, it's that they enjoy it with one another.

Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another and to Trump. Their shared laughter at the sufferings of others. That this was a sort of, the cruelty is a binding mechanism that his, that woman in Florida, she said, we want him to be hurting the people who need to be hurt. Yeah.

So, Jack, I have a question for you here, because I remember that piece. And as you said, it very powerfully gelled something which I do see as I agree with you. It's core to what motivates Trump's base voters. Right. That all powerful base motivates many of them.

But I'm thinking about how, you know, a president, whether they behave in this way or not, is president of all of the United States. And there are many people who voted for Donald Trump who, you know, may have done so for reasons other than the overt cruelty, as you say.

They are who are not of his base. Right. Because he got, you know, like he got the popular vote by a tiny, tiny margin. But many of those people are not in the base. And then more importantly, there's the other the other half of the American people who definitely do not support the ambitions of President Trump. And so when it comes to the power of a president to teach or to shape the psyche of an entire nation, right.

Is it possible that we have enough people out there who reject the cruelty that perhaps he won't have as much influence over who we are as a people as maybe FDR did?

Well, that's certainly possible. And you're right to say that the Adam Serwer piece, and he focuses on audiences that the president is speaking to. Those are clearly his key supporters, and they are laughing with him. They are laughing at examples of cruelty. And you can't indict every Trump voter with that. People were voting because of the price of eggs.

But will they be converted? We don't know. And how many people will be converted to this propaganda of cruelty, to this politics of us against them?

to the enemying, to quote a line from Carl Schmitt, a Nazi-era theorist, the enemying of people. How many Americans will find relief from their own internal problems and the problems of their life by projecting their resentments onto others? We don't know. We do know that FDR did something like that. Now here is, let me just quote this. This is

about what a president can do. And this is talking about FDR in 1934 when he started to outline his vision. This is from David M. Kennedy's magnificent book, Freedom from Fear, The American People in Depression and War. FDR gave the nation a presidential civics lesson that defined nothing less than the ideology of modern liberalism.

He breathed new meaning into ideas like liberty and freedom. He bestowed new legitimacy on the idea of government. He introduced new political ideas like social security. He transformed the country's very sense of itself in enduring ways. Before he was finished,

Franklin Roosevelt had changed the nation's political mind and its institutional structure to a degree that few leaders before him had dared to dream, let alone try, and that few leaders thereafter dared to challenge. So...

FDR left an enduring impress on the nation on its idea that security was the central role of government, was to secure people against the hazards and vicissitudes of life. And right up until LBJ's Great Society, that was the watchword of the Democratic Party. Since, alas, if not forgotten, then forgotten.

That lesson has been. So in 2028, Trump will have, supposing he's president then, will have dominated American politics for just as long as FDR, 12 years. Will two terms of Trump...

If 12 years of FDR made security, and certainly programs like Social Security, central to American life, will Trump do that for cruelty? He welcomes the comparison to the New Deal.

In a political earthquake, we won a wave of support from labor unions, including massive numbers of autoworkers, which gave us Michigan as an example. Think of that. We won Michigan easily and we did tremendous with the autoworkers and an overwhelming majority of the rank and file membership of the Teamsters. The Teamsters were great. They showed up in droves and we won them by a lot.

Together, we're forging a new political majority that's shattering and replacing Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal coalition, which dominated American politics for over 100 years. That's what we're doing. Jack, this is very recent, Trump saying this, right? Yes, that was on Monday at his Doral Country Club. Which he got paid for.

Yes, that's right. But he charged the House Republicans for their meeting there. Hand in glove. You know, so let's go back to Raymond Moley. From the bottom of his heart, he wants people, this is FDR, to be as happy as he is.

Now, we don't know about the bottom of Trump's heart, but does he want people to be as cruel as he is? Is that what he wants? Does he want people to be like him? FDR did want people to be like him. Is that what Trump wants? Does he want to, as FDR did, remake the world, make it, quote, totally other, the country totally other than it had been? Will 12 years...

of the politics of cruelty, make Americans forget the politics of security. You know, there's a line of Yeats's I've quoted before, but worth quoting again, we had fed the heart on fantasies.

The heart's grown brutal from the fair. More substance in our enmities than in our love. Will there be more substance at the end of these 12 years of Trump in our enmities toward one another, toward strangers,

than our feelings of solidarity with one another. It seems to me that's the issue of the future. Can a new politics of security, presumably the Democrats can find it,

which says to the people who voted because the price of eggs was too high, okay, we're going to lower the price of eggs and we're going to give you daycare. We're going to do this. We're going to have the politics of remedy for the hazards and vicissitudes of your life. What do you say? Will you vote for us and give up the anger with Trump? Will that be enough to prevail over the politics of cruelty? Let's stay tuned.

Well, folks, this is a very important question. And Jack, if you don't mind, I'm actually going to steal it in terms of what I'm hoping we hear from jackpot listeners in response to today's episode. Do you think that it's possible that a new politics of security would

From somewhere, advanced by some group, Jack said presumably the Democrats. I don't know if you think there's another place that that could come from. Could prevail in the long run over the Trumpian politics of cruelty. That's what I want to hear from all of you. So you know the deal. Hop on your phones and go to the On Point Vox Pop app if you already have it. If you don't, very easy to find. Go to wherever you get your apps and look for On Point Vox Pop.

And by the way, in just a minute when we come back, we're going to hear from a bunch of new voices out there who sent us thoughts from last week's episode. And if you are a person who's either a first-time listener or a long-time listener but never offered your two cents, I really encourage you to do so because we love our regulars. Don't get me wrong. We love our regulars. But hearing all these new voices this past week,

was truly remarkable. So the more, the merrier, I always say. And with that thought, Jack, we're going to hear those new voices when we come back. Support for On Point comes from Indeed. You just realized that your business needed to hire someone yesterday. How can you find amazing candidates fast? Easy. Just use Indeed. There's no need to wait. You can speed up your hiring with Indeed.

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Okay, Jack, we're back. And I was just laughing at myself because I said, oh, the more the merrier. I always say, obviously I did not make up that. Ha ha!

But it's been a long week. Forgive me. Last week in the pod, you guided us through, Jack, the truly shameful and not well enough known aspect of American history that had to do with two other previous operations in our country's story of mass deportations of immigrants in

And migrants. I'm still stunned about how little I knew about that before you told us about these two other operations. And so we asked folks, jackpotters, what they think the legacy of President Trump's current mass deportation plans will be for the country.

Let's start with Mary Beth. She left a message from Dearborn, Michigan. And it makes it seem almost, Jack, as if she knew what you were going to talk about this week. I am absolutely terrified of Trump's immigration policy because it's just cruel. I'm also terrified everyone keeps talking about the southern border, but he's already stopped the refugee program.

And I'm worried that he's going to start deporting refugees. And we have a lot of refugees in Dearborn. And so I am afraid for my neighbors and friends who live in my neighborhood. So that's Mary Beth in Michigan. We also heard from Justin Skinski in Detroit. He says he's a fourth generation American whose great grandparents came to this country to escape European anti-Semitism.

And he tells us that Trump's immigration policies do not reflect the American identity he believes in. Even the inauguration prayer, it had this weird sort of biblical cast to it where you have the bishop pleading to the tyrant king on behalf of the wretched for mercy. And that's not what this place is about. It's not about mercy of the powerful to the weak. It's about equality. It's about an equality of dignity and an equality of value.

And seeing it turn to this sort of weird feudalism where people are not only permitted to, but expected to abuse every aspect of their power just seems completely foreign. But anyways, much appreciation for the jackpot. I look forward to it every week. I appreciate Jack's historical take and I always appreciate Meghna's take.

relentless American optimism. So thank you. Well, thank you, Justin, because my optimism is a never say die version of it. But I have to say, Jack, I think that Justin used a word here which has been rattling around in my head, feudalism, right? I mean, maybe our economic structure isn't exactly like the feudal era of European history, but it's

His identification that like the people are now expected to beg for mercy from the powerful and the elite. Very interesting. What do you think about that?

Oh, yes, and how offensive it is to our idea of the equality of dignity. That's the phrase Justin used. And by the way, Mary Beth's statement of solidarity with her neighbors, her refugee neighbors, I found that very moving. And that's an example of, you mentioned, you know, what does the future belong? Will Trump convert the future? He won't convert Mary Beth. And her vision seems to me a lot different.

It's a lot warmer and more consonant with the best traditions of American life. But yes, people having to bend the knee to Trump and notice how when they do, he rewards them. I mean, the mayor of New York went down and...

Instead of participating in Martin Luther King Day ceremonies in New York, he went to Florida and bent the knee in front of the president. And the president now is entertaining, pardoning him for the criminal charges he's facing, indictment he's facing from the Justice Department. He bent the knee. He's going to get...

Trump wants – he sees himself as a monarch. And I saw a presentation made by one of these theorists that J.D. Vance has cited. This guy, his name is Curtis –

Curtis Yarvin. And in fact, we did a whole show about Curtis Yarvin on the main hour. So I'm just going to plug that, Jack, for a second. I remember that. I just forgot the last name. That's okay. Well, here he was in this excerpt talking about we have to get rid of democracy and get back to a kind of –

feudal structure, essentially. A king, a sort of techno king, a super bro, and that's how we get what we want in this silly idea of democracy. Equality of dignity, as Justin said, that's out the window. I was chilled by that because then I saw a clip of J.D. Vance, our vice president, citing this idea

crazy man about, you know, monarchy. And I thought, oh my God. Yeah. Yeah. You know, Yarvin argues that he believes democracies are just broken and cannot efficiently achieve the goals that those democracies themselves say they wish for. And he just finds monarchy is a more efficient means of governance, which is

Chilling, as you said, I do have to just add one thing about this. We do not have a king. Right. Like, I'm shocked and stunned that we have arrived at a point in America, in American history where those sentences still they need to be said out loud. There's no monarch in the Constitution. But if.

Donald Trump behaves like one. He's probably already always behaved like one for his whole life. That behavior has only been reified by the Republican Party who treat him like a king. Right. And now we're seeing, OK, powerful executive is one thing. But now we're seeing an executive branch who in its first White House press briefing after the inauguration, his press secretary stood up there in front of the U.S. media and said, OK,

Oh, no, this federal funding pause is simply being put into place so that we can be sure the money is being spent in alignment with the president's priorities. And that is...

That is monarchy, right? Power of the purse belongs to Congress. That money was appropriated. Those are, you know. Exactly. The power of the purse belongs to Congress. Money was appropriated well before his administration. There is no tradition in American history for funding to be stopped to be sure it politically aligns with whoever's in the White House. I just...

Fear about I mean, I am still an optimist always, but I do have a fear about the normalization of this kind of messaging and people forgetting that this is not how our democracy is supposed to operate. But OK, with that panicked thought, I would like to move on to hear more of our jackpotters. This is Molly Popchok in Marshall, Washington.

She happens to be one of the listeners who's been listening to you, Jack, since episode one of the Jackpot. Thank you so much, Molly. And here's what she had to say about last week's episode.

I grew up and am a granddaughter of an agricultural town in the heart of the Columbia Basin here in Washington State. Your telling of two shameful periods in our country have fallout still in many communities. And thank you for sharing their history so that, yes, we can try to reflect, then learn in hopes of battling with and coping with what is happening now.

Our communities cannot survive without migrant labor as they do their tremendous part in feeding this world. The fallout this time will be horrific and harmful to all of us. So that's Mali and Washington State. Here's Peter Rolnick in Iowa City, Iowa. And he believes Americans will look back in shame on this period of our collective history. But he also says, Jack, that we missed an important issue in last week's episode.

You implied that having people in this country who do certain jobs for lower pay and worse working conditions than what a, quote, real U.S. citizen would stand for is simply part and parcel for how we do things. You said that one of the problems with Trump's policies is that we would no longer have those people to do that work, and so our eggs would cost more.

You said nothing about how wrong, yet how deeply embedded in our society is the assumption that someone, somewhere, is expected to endure unacceptable working conditions so that we, Democrats and Republicans alike, can make sure the things we buy are cheap. So that's Peter in Iowa. Jack, I know you're going to want to respond to that, but we do have one more comment that came to us in a similar vein. Caetano Araujo in Wisconsin told us that she hopes that Americans take action...

to control or influence what this legacy of the period will be, including advocating for migrant laborers who work

as Peter said, in conditions that American citizens won't accept. That is part of the legacy that we're addressing right now. That is allowing hundreds of thousands of immigrants into this country is because there's a push from these industries to have as many people as possible to keep the wages down. So we need to demand more

human rights and working rights for people who aren't citizens. It's irresponsible to look at the problems right now and say, what are we going to do about it? And then address only the quote unquote crisis of immigration instead of looking at where we got here and who's benefiting. Jack, your thoughts?

Oh, well, Molly's sympathy and reminding us of how much we owe the people who do this work is very well taken. Jesse Jackson, I quoted it before, but he said in 1988 about his supporters, they take the early bus, the people who go to work early.

in hospitals and fields who really uphold the world. And Peter makes a stinging point about the rights of labor and the way we shamefully depend upon the exploitation of people whose expectations of life

are not ours. I mean, there are differences. Someone born in Mexico, their life chances, their vision of what life offers is grimly at variance with the American dream. And such people are willing to accept, it seems to me, or at least accede to, because they have to, doing very, very punishing labor. And some people think

that the fact that 10 million or whatever the number of undocumented people, whatever that number really is, that that represents an exploited workforce that simply has no rights in America. And people that want to regularize, you know, the immigration reform proposals, there were two votes, one under Bush, one under Obama, both failed because of

nativist reactions against them from the Republicans, they would have conferred citizenship

on this exploited, much of this exploited workforce and given people over time the rights of American citizens, the rights to organize, the right to have safety on the job, all the things that Americans take for granted. Effectively, it would say you are Americans

And let's just make that official and the right to vote as well. And, of course, the Republican Party exists to prevent that from happening. But that's the vision that Peter calls us to see, a vision of, to quote Justin, equality of dignity for the farm laborer and the hotel worker, too. Mm-hmm.

Well, we have one more pair here. They actually come from a listener in Honolulu, Hawaii. This is Nandita Sharma. She's a regular jackpot listener. But, you know, we've got we've got I actually really appreciate we've got a lot of comments this past week from people who took issue with things we said. And I think it's wonderful. The pushback and civil discourse. I love it. She says she felt disappointed by the way you and I discussed immigration policy.

I understand that it's typical to talk about immigration controls as natural, inevitable, or even necessary for the continued existence of nation states. But I expect more than a repeat of what counts as normal from the jackpot. How about we question the legitimacy of sorting people into state categories like citizen and migrant and deciding that those classified as migrants have fundamentally fewer rights than citizens?

In my eyes, this is discrimination, pure and simple. And it's a form of discrimination that needs more examination precisely because it has been so normalized. And then Nandita went further and said that discrimination of non-citizens allows migrants to be scapegoated by those in power. And she identifies this tactic as one most dangerously used tactic.

in fascism. Now, ending the legal discrimination against migrants might seem like a pipe dream or even the end of the nation states as we know it. But would that be so bad? I'd love the jackpot to look deeper into immigration beyond debating policies that maintain this discrimination.

Interesting. Jack, before I turn it over to you, Nandita, I loved this comment. It really got me thinking about a lot of things, but I'm going to ask you a question in return, and I would love your response. When you ask...

It might lead to the end of nation states as we know it. Would that be so bad? I'd love to hear what your response is to that. What would the world look like if this massive different way of looking at people came to be and the whole purpose of nation states was shifted or ended? Nandita, let me know what you think about that. Now, Jack, let me hand it back over to you. Your thoughts. Thanks.

Oh, Nandita's idealism there, that's the vision really of the 18th century enlightenment, citizens of the world, the unity of humanity. It was a vision that was very much in sync with what was happening in the 1940s, the United Nations. You can't read Eleanor Roosevelt's comments about human rights declaration as other than a kind of statement that all humanity deserves the same rights.

And that is the vision of humanity before we fell into the nation state, as it were. It's a kind of fall. I mean, Arnold Toynbee had this vision in his study of history. He said, you know, France and Heinrich don't hate each other.

Frenchmen and Germans do. Let's get beyond that. Let's get beyond the linguistic nationalism, the tribalism. Let's look at the unity of mankind. And that's a vision that is so far beyond the shallow notions that we entertain about possibility. That's on the far shore of possibility.

But surely it's a vision that's consonant with the best in our philosophy, whether of the Enlightenment or of the Greeks or of our religion. All religions teach essentially the unity, the oneness of mankind under God.

to hear that vision enunciated so eloquently here. I agree. Although here's where my American optimism meets my historical realism. And even if we did end the concept of the nation state, there would be another organizing principle that will emerge. Because I cannot pinpoint a single time in the entirety of humanity's existence on planet Earth where some kind of

organizing principle that put borders between groups of people did not exist. Now, that's separate from, I think, the deeper point that Nandita's making is, why do we confer different sets of rights on citizens versus migrants? That's a very worthy debate, which I'd love to hear. But I'm a little pragmatic in my belief that humanity is compelled to find ways to...

to lack of a better term, sort ourselves between groups. But with that thought, and Jack Potters, you might totally reject what I just said. Bring it on. I want to hear it. But with that, that thought is always Jack. Thank you so very much. Thank you. I'm Meghna Chakrabarty, and this is The Jackpot from On Point.