MSNBC’s Morning Joe’s favorite presidential historian, Jon Meacham, joined another H-less Jon on Thursday when he appeared on Comedy Central’s The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart podcast. Meacham told Stewart that the fact that Donald Trump will be president again shows that America is still having problems with complying with the Declaration of Independence.
Stewart began by asking, “What is your sense of what this moment is saying about us?”
Meacham replied, “Well, not to get too lost in the metaphor, but, that's what I do, so we might as well, to mold, you have to amass power, and in that way, you tend to mirror, right?”
At this point, Meacham stopped to go on a digression about how conservative media has allegedly been treating President Biden, “So President Trump, and I just want to say something: I'm going to call him President Trump because one of the things that drove me crazy in the last 48 months was this snarky tone on the right, which was there was this creature who was in power called ‘Biden.’”
Stewart jumped in to add, “So they didn't call him “President 'Biden,' they just said 'Biden'?”
Meacham continued, “No, no, I swear to God, you watch Fox all day long, and it's just, and it—”
While Meacham literally shuddered at the thought of conservative media not referring to Biden as “President Biden,” his concern is rather silly. Sometimes people refer to the president by just his name, sometimes they add the title in front. It is a quite common journalistic practice to refer to someone by their name and title the first time they are mentioned in a story and by just their last name in all subsequent references. He’s also just wrong; Meacham could go to any conservative website, including this one, and see plenty of references to “President Joe Biden.”
Digression over, Meacham declared, “President Trump is a mirror of, I think, our most basic instincts. I think that he has deepened and exacerbated many of our worst characteristics. And one of the arguments that we have, and I have this with, you know, people who are in power at the moment and will be for at least, you know, 48 more hours, people will say, ‘This isn't who we are.’ Well, of course it's who we are.
“Who we are,” according to Meacham, are a people who have “lived out of compliance with the Declaration of Independence far more often than we've lived in compliance with it.”
Meacham would go on to talk about the history of racism in America, but if he wants to tie that to Trump’s America in 2025, he’s going to need to explain why Trump did better among minority voters than he did in 2020.
Here is a transcript for the January 16 show:
Comedy Central The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
1/16/2025
JON STEWART: What is your sense of what this moment is saying about us?
JON MEACHAM: Well, not to get too lost in the metaphor, but, that's what I do, so we might as well, to mold, you have to amass power, and in that way, you tend to mirror, right? So President Trump, and I just want to say something: I'm going to call him President Trump because one of the things that drove me crazy in the last 48 months was this snarky tone on the right, which was there was this creature who was in power called “Biden.”
STEWART: So they didn't call him “President Biden,” they just said Biden?
MEACHAM: No, no, I swear to God, you watch Fox all day long, and it's just, and it [shudders]. President Trump is a mirror of, I think, our most basic instincts. I think that he has deepened and exacerbated many of our worst characteristics. And one of the arguments that we have, and I have this with, you know, people who are in power at the moment and will be for at least, you know, 48 more hours, people will say, “This isn't who we are.”
Well, of course it's who we are.
STEWART: Right.
MEACHAM: We've lived out of compliance with the Declaration of Independence far more often than we've lived in compliance with it. That's not to say. “Oh, therefore, it's all gonna work out,” or “let's not do anything about that.”
