Appearing on MSNBC late Monday morning, historian and professional liberal pundit Jon Meacham urged voters to support Joe Biden in November in order to “put the country in an oxygen tent for a couple of years and see if we can stabilize things again” in the wake of President Trump. He went on to define the election as “enlightenment” versus “superstition.”
Anchor Craig Melvin began the segment by touting former National Security Advisor John Bolton’s tell-all book bashing the Trump administration: “...Bolton here, telling ABC News that he hopes President Trump’s going to be a one-term president....here you have yet another...senior official from this administration....they write these books about their former boss and they’re not flattering...”
Turning to Meacham, he wondered: “How significant is this particular book from John Bolton?” In response, Meacham urged voters to make an “evidence-based decision in November” and back Biden:
Well, I think there’s very little mystery at this point about the true nature of the Trump presidency from the inside. The mystery we have to confront is whether enough people on the outside will heed the lessons that are coming from those who have served with the president. And will people make an evidence-based decision in November, in the right number of states, that this was an experiment that has failed? And so I think that insofar as Bolton is significant in the politics of 2020, it’s going to be, can enough people take on board what he’s saying, and say, “You know what, Joe Biden may be a conventional politician, he may be a figure out of the world that we wanted to shake up when we sent Donald Trump, but this didn’t work.”
Continuing to imagine the thinking of voters, Meacham talked about the United States as if it were a COVID patient in need of urgent medical treatment to recover from Trump: “Let’s put the country in an oxygen tent for a couple of years and see if we can stabilize things again.”
Moments later, after Melvin decried Trump’s “rambling two-hour diatribe” during his campaign rally in Oklahoma over the weekend, Meacham warned:
The Enlightenment is on the ballot in November. Are we, as a public, as a voting public, as a politically engaged public, willing to believe the evidence of our own eyes as opposed to the pre-existing views that we might have in our heart or in our gut? That’s what’s on the ballot here.
He then assured viewers: “This is not a partisan point. It’s not a reflexively liberal media point.”
Meacham once again implored: “America was designed for people to make rational decisions about the fundamentally irrational business of politics, and that’s what’s going to be on the ballot here....And we have about 137 or so days here to try to see, will America decide, ‘I want to be with The Enlightenment, I want to be with fact,’ as opposed to, ‘I want to be with superstition’?”
MSNBC desperately wants to people to believe that the only rational choice they can make in November is to vote for Biden, otherwise they’re just giving in to irrational “superstition” and preventing America from healing after Trump.
Here is a transcript of the June 22 discussion:
11:08 AM ET
CRAIG MELVIN: I want to turn now to historian Jon Meacham. Mr. Meacham, of course, an MSNBC contributor. Also the Rogers Distinguished Professor in American Presidency at Vanderbilt University. Good to have you, sir. Thanks for your time, as always.
Let’s start with National Security Advisor John Bolton here, telling ABC News that he hopes President Trump’s going to be a one-term president. You’ve likely heard and read a fair amount of what’s in that book. But here you have yet another senior administrative – senior official from this administration, Jon Meacham – John Kelly, General Kelly, General Mattis – they write these books about their former boss and they’re not flattering, to say the least. How significant is this particular book from John Bolton?
JON MEACHAM: Well, I think there’s very little mystery at this point about the true nature of the Trump presidency from the inside. The mystery we have to confront is whether enough people on the outside will heed the lessons that are coming from those who have served with the president. And will people make an evidence-based decision in November, in the right number of states, that this was an experiment that has failed? And so I think that insofar as Bolton is significant in the politics of 2020, it’s going to be, can enough people take on board what he’s saying, and say, “You know what, Joe Biden may be a conventional politician, he may be a figure out of the world that we wanted to shake up when we sent Donald Trump, but this didn’t work. Let’s put the country in an oxygen tent for a couple of years and see if we can stabilize things again.”
MELVIN: You mention 2020 and the election. The President, of course, holding that rally over the weekend there in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Again, billed as sort of this campaign reboot. And he said a lot of things during sort of this rambling two-hour diatribe, but he said a number of things that raised a lot of eyebrows. And we’re just gonna play just a few of these things and we’ll talk about it on the other side. This is specifically the president talking about coronavirus testing.
DONALD TRUMP: Here’s the bad part, when you do testing to that extent, you’re gonna find more people. You’re gonna find more cases. So I said to my people, slow the testing down, please. They test and they test. We had tests, people don’t know what’s going on.
MELVIN: Roughly 120,000 Americans killed by this virus in the span of four months, and there’s the President of the United States essentially mocking the virus. Jon, I mean, administration officials have called that particular comment tongue in cheek, but the way that the president has handled the pandemic, is that something that is going to be consequential in November or no? Or do the lion share of Americans think that this is something that’s beyond the president’s control?
MEACHAM: No, I don’t think they think that. Look, a hundred years ago, Walter Lippmann, who was the leading columnist of the age, wrote that one of the besetting sins of modernity was going to be that we would define and then see, as opposed to seeing and then defining, which is what the lesson of The Enlightenment is. To some extent, not to be overly grand at this hour, The Enlightenment is on the ballot in November. Are we, as a public, as a voting public, as a politically engaged public, willing to believe the evidence of our own eyes as opposed to the pre-existing views that we might have in our heart or in our gut? That’s what’s on the ballot here. We had an enlightenment, we had a scientific revolution. We had reformations that created the modern world, that was, in fact, they were – some effect of those things was to say we were not simply going to blindly follow someone who happened to win an election or happened to be born to a certain family and, therefore, put on a throne. That’s what America – the American republic, for all its imperfections, was about in the beginning. It’s what it should be about now.
And I was looking at this the other day, trying to figure out, what is a measure of bipartisanship, right? And sometimes you see different congressional votes, those are always very situational, obviously. There are two numbers that are interesting. 10% or so of Democrats crossed the aisle to vote for George W. Bush in 2000. So 10% of self-identified Democrats said, “We’re going to go over the aisle.” In 2008, 13% of Republicans crossed the aisle to vote for Senator Obama. So somewhere – and that number now is way down. It’s 2, 3, 4%, in terms of 2016. The question is – and the election will turn – on how many self-identified Republicans will cross the aisle and not vote for Donald Trump, on the evidence of what they’ve seen. Right?
This is not a partisan point. It’s not a reflexively liberal media point. It’s simply a case. America was designed for people to make rational decisions about the fundamentally irrational business of politics, and that’s what’s going to be on the ballot here. And it’s going to be the COVID response, it’s going to be his basic temperament – that’s the lesson of the Bolton book. What he was saying to Martha [Raddatz] there, was, “We still don’t know how complicated this might be.” We have not – remarkably, we haven’t had a significant foreign crisis that’s gone out of control yet. But history happens every minute. And we have about 137 or so days here to try to see, will America decide, “I want to be with The Enlightenment, I want to be with fact,” as opposed to, “I want to be with superstition”?
(...)
