Morning Joe

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My thesis, Willie, is that Donald Trump is as much a product of American history as John F. Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan or Joe Biden. It's just the history that we tend to forget, misremember or deliberately erase.

What it also argues is that you're in this forever war and an ending conflict because so much of that history is unresolved.

You have an unending conflict about abortion.

You have an unending conflict about guns.

You have an unending conflict about race.

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He's author of the new book, The Light of Battle, Eisenhower, D-Day and the Birth of the American Superpower.

The new book titled The Light of Battle, Eisenhower D-Day and the Birth of the American Superpower, Michelle Parody.

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The book is titled The Fall of Roe, The Rise of a New America.

It explores how the rights most fervent anti abortion activists end up persuading the court to end nearly 50 years of precedent.

And what we did was look at the final decade of what we call the Roe era.

And what we saw in this period is this tightly connected web of conservative anti abortion activists were able to move the levers of power in their favor in ways big and really small.

They get really you know, they jump on that train. It becomes a bullet train for them and they get really lucky. They get those three seats on the Supreme Court and they're dealing with an abortion rights movement that's really ill equipped and unprepared to take on this threat.

And a country that's really has this pervasive sense of denial that this right that's been part of American life for two generations could suddenly disappear.

It was a new Republican Party and the redefinition by political activists in 1979, 1980, which it meant to be an evangelical, what it meant to be a Christian.

The anti-abortion movement, conservative Christians think in generations about change. It's not just a political cycle, but also the people that you mentioned.

It's not just the story of kind of the 80s religious right. There's a modern religious right that is enormously influential.

And it's not just on issues about abortion. It's a vicious issues, all kinds of cultural issues in this whole in this whole realm about rolling back the sexual revolution.

They were talking about trans rights. They were talking about parental rights. They were talking about religion and public squares, things like schools or town meetings, same sex marriage.

Look, I think for this anti abortion movement, The Fall of Roe was not the end. It was the beginning of the end.

The goal here is to eliminate all abortion if they believe it's morally wrong.

They want to eliminate it.

The right was planning in really actually 50 year periods.

They were never going to let up the deluge of laws in state courts, how they were in state state houses, the way they were transforming the courts slowly over time.

These are things that are just like bit by bit by bit.

It makes why so many people and why we wrote this book really were so surprised by why how did this actually happen?

The left just, you know, and Hillary Clinton talked about this to us in our interview with her, the left just doesn't have that same kind of infrastructure at all.

And so this is a big reckoning on on the left for how are we going to or are we going to respond to this? And what's that actually going to take?

You have to build building blocks over time.

And so they were really fighting for public opinion.

And the anti-abortion movement was fighting for the levers of power.

And it turns out power is more powerful than public opinion, certainly when it comes to the courts.

I'm sure you guys have I know you guys have talked a lot about the politics of abortion now.

Like, you just have to look at Donald Trump and how he behaved in 2016 when he eagerly sort of made common cause with this movement and how he's behaving now.

Nobody can see what they do not believe is going to happen.

And now that's just been shattered.

And there's this steady drumbeat of news coming out of these states, you know, the cases of women seeking medical attention or some new ruling or some new law that just keeps this issue again and again in the news and is sort of showing people like how it is butting up directly against public opinion and what a majority of people in the country want.

So I think it's a much harder task for them going forward, for sure.

And we're seeing that play out in the politics.

We'll certainly see it play out in twenty twenty four.

And I think we'll see it play out in several cycles to come.

You heard even Donald Trump himself blame the abortion issue for the losses in the midterms in twenty twenty two.

But from your reporting, what are the activists looking at next?

We saw IVF come up in Alabama, even very conservative Republicans even running from that taking the idea of taking away IVF.

Right after Roe was overturned, we have some reporting about the anti abortion movement asking, you know, talking behind the scenes with different state lawmakers. When could they do that?

You know, how long would that time horizon be?

And they said a few years, but it's actually just happened so much faster.

And so that like especially for their base, like the people who've talked about themselves as pro life voters, especially evangelical millennial moms, this is now reframing how they're thinking about this and kind of wondering, OK, these are there are some bigger questions here that we need to figure out, like how does our how do our our own cultural, moral and religious views fit in with how that has played out and really become this politically powerful, dominating and kind of one track lane?

America is being confronted with questions from voters to state lawmakers that they never thought they would have to ask.

Like I mean, I'm sure everyone remembers right after Roe fell, there were these debates over kids and whether a 10 year old girl could like terminate her.

Like this is not something that was part of our political discourse now.

And it was an issue that politicians on both sides could skirt.

And now all these politicians have to talk about uteruses, you know, and it's like really not comfortable for them.

So I think it's forcing these really direct confrontations for people and for politicians about like the actual lived reality of what this is beyond sort of the political like talking points and sort of phrases.

You know, the obvious irony of the idea of issue, of course, is that it brings the gift of life to people who otherwise could not have it.

The new book is titled The Fall of Roe, the Rise of a New America on an issue that will hang over this presidential election.

It's on sale now.

Co-authors Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lair.

Thanks for being here.

Congrats on the book.

Thanks.

Thank you.

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The book examines the cultural contributions of those three Americans beyond their music.

The new book is titled The Jazzmen, How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Count Basie Transformed America.

It is excellent. It's available now.

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Look as I write in the book I think we're on a path to conflict here it's not immediate I don't think it's gonna happen this year or next but in the next 48 years I think Xi Jinping is committed to taking Taiwan and I think he's with an actual invasion with an actual invasion because I don't think that a blockade scenario can work because Taiwan has capabilities to break through that blockade and you're gonna end up in a war anyway so we might as well just launch one to take over Taiwan but he wants this to happen under his watch while he's in power in 2032 he'll be 79 may not get another five-year term and their system unlike ours perhaps they don't tend to elect their leaders into their 1980s so that eight next eight years is gonna be really dangerous.

Well you're gonna have a blockade and what they've done just now in this exercise is they completely encircled the island with 19 warships 49 combat aircraft the actual invasion would be several magnitudes more than that of course you're gonna need to bring in hundreds of thousands of troops to occupy this island of 24 million people this is going to be massive invasion and I believe it's gonna start with an airborne assault on key installations in Taiwan the port facilities facing the Taiwan Strait the airfields in Taiwan to try to occupy that and bring in massive amounts of troops onto the island.

Well I think we need to engage in aggressive deterrence across the entire spectrum of our capabilities certainly military we need to expand our ability to deploy missiles and naval mines and drones near the Taiwan Strait to be able to strike the Chinese armada as it's crossing the Strait but we also need to engage in economic deterrence the name of the game for Xi is going to be to try to keep America out of this conflict because he knows that if we're not coming to Taiwan's aid he can defeat Taiwan he can defeat the Taiwanese military so he's gonna try to send us a message that he can ruin our economy by increasing our reliance on semiconductors produced in China critical minerals like rare earths and others that are refined and processed in China that we need to manage our economy.

Well since the 1940s and really through the early 1960s also with John F Kennedy of course we focus on another conflict with the Soviet Union of course with a Cold War the first Cold War as I call it because I think we are in the second Cold War with China and we focus on deterring a Soviet invasion of West Berlin in fact President Kennedy in 1961 went on American television and warned America that we're gonna fight for this outpost surrounded by East Germany that Khrushchev wanted to take in that summer of 1961 and we were even gonna be willing to risk nuclear war to defend freedom in that in that part of the city well I think the same thing is now playing out in Taiwan where we have to make a case to the American public that Taiwan is really important to the US interest not just because it produces so many semiconductors that we rely on in our new digital economy but also because of its vital geopolitical position General Douglas MacArthur in 1950 called for Mosul or Taiwan as Taiwan was called at the time an unsinkable aircraft carrier it is key to the domination of Asia if China takes Taiwan is going to be able to expand its security and economic influence in a really vital part of the world and diminish ours okay there is of course some feeling amongst in Beijing that if the if Europe and America won't defend Ukraine to the hilt why on earth would they defend people out in Asia and the Chinese are watching that by the way for the authors amongst us Richard Haass and Jonathan Lemire that little pin that Dimitri is wearing is not a flag pin as I thought it was it's a book pin we are missing a trick guys in our book sales I've never seen something like that in a wardrobe. We need little book pins.

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AJ Jacobs is the New York Times best-selling author of the book The Year of Living Biblically in which he lived out an entire year adhering to the laws of the Bible.

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Now Jacobs has undertaken a more modern and you could even say patriotic task with his new book The Year of Living Constitutionally one man's humble quest to follow the Constitution's original meaning.

This time for an entire year Jacobs dressed wrote drank and even battled like a citizen of colonial times.

The book is titled The Year of Living Constitutionally one man's humble quest to follow the Constitution's original meaning it is available now New York Times best-selling author AJ Jacobs thank you we appreciate thank you good to be on for noon Joseph

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I learned one day that there was a journal called the Journal of Beatles Studies and I thought it would be improbable and really fun for me to write it for the Journal of Beatles Studies and they tried to write about music but I knew nothing about music so I was awful and this changed to being a paper about Beatlemania and how it started.

There's a bunch of studies saying that the reason people get successful or famous is that they're amazing maybe there was something about determination maybe there was something about persistence maybe there was something about talent and that's not false entirely you've got to be really good usually to be like the Beatles and the Beatles were amazing but you need some breaks and you need some serendipity and you need some champions and you need a network.

The number of people who have a force of will is very large and the percentage of those who do well is very small so force of will might be a necessary condition for spectacular success though I bet you can find a thousand people who did really really well in music or literature who kind of had some well but not particular force of will.

So it's often think of Stan Lee for example the guy behind Marvel Comics did he have fantastic force of will kinda he also had a stroke of luck where at some moment he thought I'm not gonna do these boring comics about people with square jaws who say up up and away I'm gonna do something that has smart Alex and personality that wasn't force of will it was a little like a stroke of creativity combined with an audience that vaulted him to Stan Lee-ness rather than Stanley himself being sufficient.

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Author Ari Berman on his new book, Minority Rule, the right wing attack on the will of the people and the fight to resist it.

If we're going to be at a moment in time when so many people are saying we have to understand the Constitution as it was intended, we have to understand that it was intended to check democracy, not to expand it, and we can't have such a view of the Constitution that says that all of these institutions are so amazing when it's so obvious that they made a lot of mistakes and that a lot of it needs to be corrected.

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And, you know, I was reading Doris Kearns Goodwin's new book about the 60s.

And in the 1960 Nixon Kennedy debate, the whole idea was that Kennedy needed to show people he was a grown up.

The narrative around Kennedy was he was a kid. He was too young, too inexperienced. He couldn't command the stage.

And that's all Kennedy had to do again against low expectations.

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I Will Show You How It Was, the story of wartime Kyiv.

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Out Now titled I Will Show You How It Was, the story of wartime Kyiv.

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The last sentence of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises is, isn't it pretty to think so?

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And they're bragging about it. It's one of the more staggering stories I've ever seen a politician put in a book thinking this would actually make them look strong.

It's sick, but we'll read from the book and let you decide.

The dog who's still a puppy. 14 months old hunting dog.

She actually said his grave offense was being joyful and happy.

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Joining us now Washington bureau chief at USA Today Susan Page she's the author of a new biography entitled The Rule Breaker. The life and times of Barbara Walters and we'll get to that in just a moment.

I can't wait Susan. Congratulations on the book.

The new book is entitled The Rule Breaker The Life and Times of Barbara Walter Susan Page.

Thank you so much for coming on this morning and congratulations on the book.

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We want freedom by any means necessary. We want justice by any means necessary. We want equality by any means necessary.

We don't feel that in 1964 living in a country that is supposedly based upon freedom and supposedly the leader of the free world we don't think that we should have to sit around and wait for some segregationist congressmen and senators and a president from Texas in Washington DC to make up their mind to make up their mind that our people are do now some degree of civil rights. No we want it now or we don't think anybody should have it.

Strong people don't need strong leaders.

Great people come to us to make even greater people possible. They exemplify what we're capable of.

When you when he left the nation he was flailing and failing about he was a wounded witness.

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I will say go back and read Dr. Brzezinski's memoirs about the Camp David Accords. As you know very well, Richard, Dead in the Water was finished and at the last second Bagan and Carter somehow figured out how to save it, how to move forward and make history.

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You know, they're sneaking across the border, although that was Central Americans, but they're sneaking across the border probably with some family or people they know there and they're trying to work and they might go back or they might stay.