Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener. Later in the show: Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s famous 900 page book, is partly “too dumb to accomplish anything at all” — that’s what Rick Perlstein says. The rest, he says, can be read as a useful catalog of how we should focus our resistance. But first: What could stop Trump. David Cole has some ideas – in a minute.

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Our worst enemy right now is not Trump himself, but fatalism about our ability to stop him. That’s what David Cole says, and we turn to him now for some ideas about how to do that. David Cole recently stepped down as National Legal Director of the ACLU after eight years and  hundreds of lawsuits against the Trump administration. Now, he teaches at Georgetown Law School, he writes for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The New York Review, and is legal affairs correspondent for The Nation. David Cole, welcome back.

David Cole: Thanks for having me, Jon.

JW: We shouldn’t underestimate the threats that Trump poses, but we shouldn’t underestimate the headwinds he’s likely to face if people oppose his initiatives. Remember, autocracy takes time. It’s hard work. Trump is not good at that.
Let’s be realistic about our goal: we can probably limit the damage; we can prepare the ground for future victories. But how much can we limit the damage? Really, nobody knows, and the only way to find out is to try.
We do know the writers of the Constitution did a lot to try to prevent one-man rule–by creating the famous checks and balances, starting with the ability of the House and the Senate to check the president.  But Republicans will control the Senate, 53 to 47, when they reconvene on January 3rd, and they have a four-seat majority in the House, probably 219 to 215. We call that a trifecta, control of all three branches. A trifecta is what every president wants.  But what does this trifecta mean for Trump now?

DC: I think it’s worth recalling that he had a trifecta the last time around, in his first two years in office; he had majorities in both Houses, and he tried repeatedly to deliver on one of his central promises during the campaign, which was to end Obamacare.  And he failed time and time again. And why did he fail? Because people didn’t sit back and say, “Oh my God, he’s got a trifecta. We might as well just sit back and let him take away our health insurance.” They went to their representatives, they demanded town meetings, they spoke up about what it would mean to lose the insurance that Obamacare provides, and at the end of the day, he was unable to pass that law.
In fact, he was unable to pass almost any law in his first two years, except for the tax cut, which was problematic, to be sure, but that was it. And actually, a fairly liberal criminal justice reform bill that reduced sentencing in federal cases through bipartisan support.
But it’s tough to get stuff through Congress, even if you control both houses. There’s a filibuster in the Senate, which means you have to get 60 votes, which means you have to get some folks from the other party if you only have 53. Yes, they can get rid of the filibuster.

JW: But I just want to point out that the new Republican majority leader, John Thune, says they will keep the filibuster. How big is that?

DC: That’s huge. That’s huge. The filibuster is our friend when enemies of civil rights and civil liberties are in power. So that’s huge.
It is also, as the Democrats realized, when they had both houses, you’re basically captive to your most moderate member. So where the Democrats were limited in the Senate to what Joe Manchin would go for, the Republicans will be limited by what the most moderate members of the Senate and the House would be willing to go for, even putting aside the filibuster. So it’s just very hard to pass legislation. Some would argue it’s too hard to pass legislation, but in this context, that’s a good thing.

JW: And in the House, 219 to 215, that means that if two Republicans vote no, you have a tie, and in the House, I just discovered, a tie loses.

DC: Yeah, you need majorities. And the only reason a tie wins in the Senate is because you can bring in the vice president to vote as a tiebreaker.  But in the House, you don’t have that.

JW: We know that some of Trump’s nominees for cabinet positions are unpopular even among Republicans. Trump says he will get around that by making them recess appointments.  But a dozen Republicans say they’re opposed to recess appointments.

DC: If you’ve got 12 Republicans in the Senate who are opposed to it, it would be wasting a lot of chits for the president to try to ram it through regardless. Much easier, honestly, for the Republicans to just hold the hearings. Some of these candidates may well have to pull out or may not get a confirm. Most of them, I think, will get confirmed. So I don’t see that as a substantial check.  But then the question is, Will they be able to succeed in doing the things that he said he wants to do?

JW: Another of the constitutional checks and balances is that the entire House membership is up for election every two years. We will have midterms in 2026. Typically, presidents come into office with majorities in both the Senate and the House, and typically, they lose the House at their first midterm. What happened to Trump at his first midterm in 2018?

DC: Well, I think it was a referendum on his first two years, and 41 seats shifted to Democrats, and the Democrats took control of the House. So if he tries to do a lot of the things that he said he will already try to do, I think we’ll see that again. There will be a referendum at the midterms.
But again, these things don’t happen automatically. They happen only if people stand up, speak out, engage with their civil society groups in fighting back.  If we sit back and think, “Oh my God, he got re-elected. This time, he almost got a majority of the vote. He got more votes than Harris did. It’s not just the Electoral College. He’s got the trifecta. There’s nothing we can do. Let’s do the Times crossword puzzle and stay home,” then yeah, he’ll get to do a whole lot of harm.  But if we push back and step up, there are lots of checks and balances, and members of Congress who might otherwise not have backbone, will have backbone if they see that the consequence may be that they lose their seat or they lose their majority.

JW: Okay, that’s the House and the Senate as possible checks on the presidents. The Founding Fathers also thought the courts would provide a check.  But more than a quarter of all federal judges that we have now were appointed by Trump during his first term. Most of our friends think this Supreme Court will not stop Trump. Since 2020, of course, they eliminated the right to abortion and undermined the government’s power to protect us from climate change, corporate greed and gun violence.  And, of course, this court has given Trump absolute immunity from criminal prosecution. You were National Legal Director of the ACLU for eight years. You know all about this. What did that experience teach you about the courts?

DC: Well, I think last time around, the courts were an incredibly important checking force. We stopped him from imposing the first Muslim ban.  We stopped him from imposing the second Muslim ban.  We stopped him from imposing the third Muslim ban until it got to the Supreme Court, where they upheld it by one vote, but it was a much less expansive and sweeping ban by that time. We ended family separation and got thousands of families reunited through a court victory before a Republican judge. We enjoined most of his anti-asylum policies. We protected the rights of undocumented teen women who were in federal custody to obtain abortions when they needed them.  We stopped him from putting a citizenship question on the census, which was designed to dampen down immigrant responses, and therefore reduce ultimately electoral power to Democrats.  And the court stopped him from taking away protections for Dreamers, the DACA protection for Dreamers.
So last time around, the courts were critical, and yes, he’s appointed a bunch of judges in the meantime, but so has Joe Biden, and so did President Obama, so that at this point, about 65% of the federal judiciary are appointed by Presidents Obama and Biden.

JW: I have a question about that: is it true that federal judges have life terms?

DC: [Laughing]  It’s absolutely true. That means, by the way, that a president’s most lasting legacy is often who he appoints to the court, because they stay long after the president is gone, and Trump will get a bunch more appointments. I don’t know if he’ll get as many as last time around, because I don’t think there’s as many vacancies. If judges voted by party, and they don’t, in most cases, but if they did, you still have a two-thirds shot of getting a Democrat in the lower courts. A lot of court cases never get to the Supreme Court.

JW: Most cases, the overwhelming majority never get to the Supreme Court.

DC: Yeah. And this Supreme Court, look, it’s a six-to-three court, but it is not a Trump court, in the sense of it doesn’t do Trump’s bidding. It ruled against him on his claims to immunity from subpoenas when he sought to refuse to turn over his tax records to New York Grand Jury and to a congressional investigation. Trump had the worst won-loss record of any president in the Supreme Court, and I don’t think it’s going to be much better this time around if he tries to push for some of the more extreme measures that he has pushed for, trying to take away birthright citizenship, for example. That is a constitutional right. You can’t take that away, and I think we would prevail on that.
And I think generally, courts are fairly establishmentarian in their outlook. That makes them not always the best place to push progressive causes, but they’re also not a good place to push reactionary causes. They tend to be more mainstream. And even though this court is way more conservative than it has been in a long time, there’s not five members who are reactionary, sort of radical conservatives. There might be three, but there’s not more than three who fit that bill, and so I think you’ll see significant pushback from the Supreme Court if he tries to upset norms in the ways that he did before. And right now, it seems like he’ll go even further.

JW: So that’s the House, the Senate, and the Courts, as checks on the president.  And then there’s federalism. Let’s call it “states’ rights.” States have a lot of power under the constitution, over criminal justice, over education. How will this work in the Trump years?

DC: Federalism–sometimes it’s called “our federalism.” It’s often been associated with kind of right-wing opposition to integration, associated with the South and the like; but in fact, “states rights” means that each state has a tremendous amount of authority over its citizenry and over the laws that govern its citizenry. In fact, most of the laws that govern our daily lives, most of the interactions we have with government officials in our daily lives are with state officials, state laws, not federal officials, and federal laws.
And so, for example, on education: education is a state prerogative. It is provided by the states.  School districts are local in nature. The federal government can’t impose a curriculum on the nation. That is up to each state and each school board to choose what its curriculum is. So Trump talks about pushing “critical race studies” out of the curriculum and the like, but he doesn’t have the authority to do that.
Same thing with criminal law.He talks about cracking down on crime, but about 90% of criminal law enforcement is done by state officials, state courts, state prosecutors, and it’s a matter of state policy.
And the federal government is barred by the constitution from compelling state government officials to do the federal government’s work for it. So, for example, he wants to do mass deportations. He may not have the resources to do that. He’d love to have state local police help him with that. They can just say no, and he cannot require them to enforce immigration law.

JW: I want to look at the mass deportation proposals a little more closely. Of course, Trump has promised this is part of the dictatorship on day one. Now, obviously, he’s not going to be able to deport 10 million people, he can’t even deport one million people, but he says he will start trying on January 20th. So what does it take to deport someone who is in the United States illegally? I know that illegal entry is a misdemeanor, and presence in the United States without proper authorization is a civil violation, and that means the Department of Homeland Security can place a person in deportation proceedings. What happens then?

DC: The most important thing is that you have a right to due process.

JW: Even if you’re not a citizen.

DC: Even if you’re not a citizen, even if you’re alleged to be illegally here. If you are present in the United States, the Supreme Court has held for more than 100 years that people who are facing deportation are facing a serious loss, taking away their home essentially at this moment, and therefore, they have to have a meaningful opportunity to be heard, to present evidence, to respond. There are appeals both within the immigration process and to the courts thereafter, and that all takes time, and it takes resources.
And right now, the immigration courts are so overwhelmed that we have backlogs of five, six years even to get a hearing before an immigration judge. So if Trump is going to actually increase the numbers of people who are deported, he’s going to have to increase the number of immigration judges.  In the past, he’s been opposed to hiring more immigration judges, but you just can’t do it if you don’t have more immigration judges. Then you have to train them up, find places for them to operate, and the like. So it’s just not that easy to do.

JW: He says he can do this by invoking the Alien Enemies Act.

DC: Yeah. Well, that’s another one, where I think he will very quickly learn that the Constitution and the laws don’t support him.  Because the Alien Enemies Act is a law passed in the early years of our country, and what it does is it authorizes the government in a declared war to detain those who are nationals of the country with which we are at war. So it was used during World War II to lock up Italians, Germans, and, of course, Japanese nationals. There hasn’t been a declared war since World War II. We’re not in a declared war at this point, and so the Alien Enemies Act, it may sound good to President Trump because he’s never found an immigrant that he doesn’t consider an alien enemy, but it’s a term of art, and it applies only to those who are nationals of countries with which we are at war.

JW: And he also says he will use the military, if places like Los Angeles do as they have promised and the police refuse to cooperate in a mass deportation scheme. What will it take for Trump to use the military in mass deportation?

DC: So there too, we have a long history against the use of the military for domestic purposes. There’s a statute called the Posse Comitatus Act, which generally prohibits that sort of thing. We can use them, and we have used them to respond to emergencies, to provide aid and the like. It’s not an absolute prohibition, but it’s not easy to invoke, and I think there’s a strong sort of cultural norm against using the military to enforce laws. If they’re standing around, protecting us at an airport or a subway station, even that, a lot of people feel nervous about, but that’s one thing.
It’s another thing if they started conducting raids on people’s homes or on workplaces and the like.  And so I think there’ll be a real cultural backlash if he were to seek to do that and if he were able to override the ban in the Posse Comitatus Act.

JW: My friends who are constitutional historians reminded me that Madison called the constitutional barriers that Trump will face “Parchment barriers.” You kind of agree with that. You say the ultimate check on Trump is not the Constitution. What is it?

DC: Yeah–it’s us, really. We have 200 years of that Constitution being enforced, and we have a robust civil society. And to me, ultimately, that’s where the checks lie, in civil society, by which I mean, all the institutions and groups and associations that people join in, that are not part of the government, and that therefore, are a source of opposition to and checks on the government. That includes the press, very obviously, it includes the nonprofit sector, it includes the academy, it includes professional associations, it includes religious groups. These are all places where people come together.
They have norms and values that they are committed to, and they provide institutional resources for people to push back when somebody is seeking to violate those norms and values. And again, when autocrats come to power in other countries, what they often first do is target precisely those institutions, the press, the nonprofit sector, the academy, religious institutions to the extent they’re opposed. Very hard to do that here in this country. We have a very robust civil society.
But again, it depends. It depends on whether we stand up, whether we fight, whether we engage with those civil society institutions and fight back.  Because if we sit back and say, “Oh my gosh, there’s nothing we can do,” that has its own kind of self-fulfilling feature to it as well.  So it depends on civil society. And what that means is it ultimately depends on us.  But I think what we know is we’ve had a robust civil society. I think we still do. We have a robust constitution. It was designed to check overweening executive power, and I think it can if we fight back.

JW: I just want to remind our listeners here; this does not mean we can prevent Trump from doing a lot of damage. We are based here in LA. The LA Times today had a piece about the tens of thousands of public-school students whose parents are undocumented, and it’s going to be very rough year for those kids. So there’s going to be a lot of pain and suffering–that we would like to help with.

DC: Without question. I mean, I do not want to minimize how much of a threat Trump is. All the more reason that folks who are listening should step up to the plate. And really, what the last Trump administration showed us is that if you do step up to the plate, you can make a huge difference. He left office in shame, and yes, he turned around and succeeded four years later, but that also just shows you how quickly things can change if you fight.

JW: One more thing– I just want to underline this: We are not alone here. Some Republicans say we should do whatever Trump wants, but most Americans do not want that. The issue right now is Trump’s cabinet nominees. Three quarters of Americans disagree with Trump’s claim that he should be able to appoint leaders of government agencies without Senate hearings or approval.
Even a majority of Republicans say the Senate should hold hearings and vote on whether to confirm his nominees. What does that tell us?

DC: Well, I think that shows that people may have liked him for some aspects, they may have been unhappy about the price of food, and housing, and inflation, and the like. They may have been underwhelmed by Biden and Harris.  But I don’t think there’s anything like a majority that’s asking for a fundamental revamping of our government.  And to the extent that Trump tries that, there are a lot of forces that can be invoked to push back. So we’ve got to try.

JW: It’s up to us–David Cole.  Je wrote about what could stop Trump at The New York Review. David, thanks for talking with us today.

DC: Always a pleasure, Jon.
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Jon Wiener: Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s famous 900-page book about “the conservative promise” for the Trump presidency, is partly “too dumb to accomplish anything at all.” That’s what Rick Perlstein says. The rest, he says, can be read as a useful catalog of how we should focus our resistance.
Rick Perlstein, of course, is the award-winning author of that four-volume series on the history of America’s political and cultural divisions from the fifties to the election of Reagan, including the unforgettable books, Nixonland and Reaganland. He’s written for Mother Jones, Slate, The New York Times, and The Nation. Now, he writes regularly for The American Prospect. We reached him today at home in Chicago. Rick, welcome back.

Rick Perlstein: Hi, Jon. Good to see you.

JW: First let’s talk about the dumb parts of the Project 2025 book. Where should we start?

RP: I plowed through, I skimmed parts. Honestly, it’s very boring, bureaucratic language, which is why I use the metaphor of needles in the haystack. But I sent it out to some people who are experts. There’s a section on every federal institution, pretty much. And so I sent the part about FEMA to a neighbor of mine who does disaster relief consulting. And she immediately pointed out that one part of it directly contradicted another part of it, in the space of two pages.
When I started writing about it, I thought it’d be really a good service to our side. And one of the things, immediate things I realized was that it shows a lot of complexity and division on the right. And I started writing about all the complexity of it. But then, the Democrats were having such a good time depicting it as this evil thing that was just going to cast spells and destroy democracy, I kind of felt guilty. So I kind of moved away from that.
But one really good example is, yes, there’s a chapter saying free trade is great, and then another chapter that is written by another guy that said free trade sucks. So what you call these in the parlance of political strategy are wedge issues. Basically, what that means is the Republican coalition is vulnerable at that particular joint when it comes to trade. So that’s what I mean when I say it’s a useful compendium. Same thing with the import export bank. There are two chapters, one for, one against. Now, which will the Trump administration do? Well, he’s going to have to choose, and he’s going to have to leave at least part of his coalition by the wayside. And as you know, politics is about uniting your friends and dividing your enemies.

JW: Big picture here: is Project 2025 a new thing for conservatives and Republicans?

RP: Us boring old historians know that the Heritage Foundation has been coming out with these, what they call “mandates,” since 1980. Every year, when there’s a new Republican president, they come out with these big books saying what the Republican president should do.
And if you look at the first one that came out in 1980 for Ronald Reagan, a lot of it is pretty much the same stuff.  Which suggests, by the way, because as we know, the infernal triangle vexing us is authoritarian Republicans, terrible media, and feckless Democrats, well, they could have been going after a lot of this stuff, hammer and tongs, in 1980, 1984, 1988, when the slogan of the presidential candidate Michael Dukakis was, “this election is not about ideology, it’s about competence.” Well, maybe they should have foregrounded the ideology that made people so angry when the Harris-Walz campaign began to point out all the terrible things that were in the 2024 version.

JW: Elon Musk has been given the job of cutting the civil service, he has taken – volunteered to take the job of cutting the civil service. But I understand this is a Republican project that goes back a few years.

RP: Let’s say a hundred, maybe. In Tom Frank’s book, The Wrecking Crew, he has a great quote from the Chamber of Commerce’s Journal. I don’t know, you probably have it in front of you, that “a competent civil service is worse than a house pet.”

JW: And what year was that written?

RP: It was like 1924, I think.
Richard Nixon had a terrible aide named Frederick Malek who did an entire 100-page manual about how to sabotage the civil service. It was called the Malek Manual. And it had all kinds of things like you can get around the rules that you have to have due process in order to discipline someone by sending them to the provinces. Little tricks like that.
A lot of people were criticizing me when I came out with this piece saying, “Oh no, you got to understand how terrible Project 2024 is. You’re just minimizing it.” I said, “No, I’m maximizing it.” They’ve been knocking on this door for a very long time and now they finally have a chance to pull it off.

JW: So what do you make of the fact that conservatives have been trying so hard for so long to eliminate an independent and expert civil service–and that they’ve never succeeded?

RP: Well, it just shows how important unions are, because one of the reasons they haven’t been able to do it is because AFGE, the federal workers union, is protecting those jobs. Another is simply that a modern, successful, prosperous and free society requires independent civil service that doesn’t serve at the pleasure of a political party or a president.
The best example, and by the way, Donald Trump tried this during his first term, was privatizing the National Weather Service. Free, accurate information about the weather is basically what allows the entire agricultural economy to flourish. And he wants to replace that with a guy who wants to outsource it. So it’s just a terrible idea is one reason; unions are another.
And the second is the valor of people both in the Republican party and the Democratic party who were whispering in the ear of semi-sane Republican presidents that this was going to be the Waterloo of America as a prosperous society. And now we don’t have a semi-sane Republican president, we have an insane Republican president, surrounding himself with insane people. And lo and behold.

JW: Well, one of those insane people, of course, is RFK, Jr., his nominee for Health and Human Services. Liberals are a little, kind of, of two minds about this. They point out that RFK, Jr. is against Big Pharma and Big Ag. And that seems like a good thing, a liberal thing, a democratic with a small D thing–doesn’t it?

RP: Well, it’s kind of a tricky paradox of small D democracy that sometimes we do in fact have to defer to experts and we can’t all have all the information in our head that we need to have in order to have a strong society, really. And Big Pharma includes the kind of rip offs that are achieved when they profiteer off the cost of insulin. But it also is the polio vaccine. As you may know, public health professors often take their classes on field trips to cemeteries to show them how many babies used to die before vaccination became a common practice. RFK will take us back. It’s a real kind of baby with the bath water kind of situation.
Sam Rayburn, the great Speaker of the House in the 1950s, said, “Anyone can knock down a barn, any jackass can knock down a barn, but it takes a carpenter to build one.” So they’re going to be knocking down all the barns–and in the process, getting rid of lots of things we need in order for people not to die of dread diseases that we thought we conquered. It’s a pretty open and shut case to me.

JW: RFK, Jr., in many ways, seems like a one-off, a unique figure, but you show that the idea of making the public healthy by decimating existing institutions of public health is all over Project 2025.

RP: Oh, it is. If you just do a search on the PDF for the word “COVID,” almost every time it shows up, it’s something claiming that Anthony Fauci really just wanted to control the American public. My favorite crazy example is the guy who wrote the Pentagon chapter, not the Pentagon chapter, the Department of Homeland security chapter, said, “All the people who were kicked out of the Coast Guard for not getting vaccinated should get reinstated with back pay.” And then he says, “The reason is to make it easier to recruit people to the Coast Guard.” Which shows how siloed off they are in this crazy information bubble. Who wouldn’t want to join the Coast Guard with a bunch of people who haven’t taken the COVID vaccine during a COVID epidemic and be stuck on a ship with them for weeks at a time?
Basically, it continues the party line that Donald Trump established in 2020, that quack cures, that vaccines were something to be scoffing at, that masks were just an attempt to turn us all into vassals of the state. It’s the craziest stuff you’ve heard, and it’s right there in the book. Like Kamala Harris said, “Can you believe they wrote this stuff down?”

JW: You write, “Everything that Kennedy says about health presumes the existence of two kinds of human beings.” Explain that.

RP: Well, there’s something almost Nazi-like about this kind of right-wing purity culture. It takes the entire edifice of peer-reviewed science, which is kind one of the great glories of small D democratic society in that any idea has to contend in the marketplace of ideas and peers judge each other based on results, not on who you are, not on who you work for, institution you work for. And obviously, these are ideals and they’re often honored in the breach. But if you kind of descend into the actual world of right-wing, woo-woo food supplements, quack diets, exercise regime culture, there really are two kinds of people: the guys who are in the know taking the proverbial red pill, and then the rest of us, the sheeple who trust this peer-reviewed science. And it’s a real dominance language. The scary thing about it, the part, really, where the Nazism comes in is this idea of your body is purer than the people who take vaccines.

JW: And you want to keep those impure people away from you–with walls.

RP: Right, exactly. So it really separates the population into the superior and the inferior. You can’t really look at this stuff too far without seeing that. I guess it would be symbolized by RFK, Jr. doing push-ups on camera.

JW: You report that the chapter of Project 2025 on HHS says, “We must shut and lock the revolving door between government and Big Pharma.” Isn’t that pretty much what Bernie Sanders says? Don’t we agree?

RP: Yeah, it totally is, right. But it is just very weird. And then when you get down to the cases of why this is bad, the only example they give is that people who worked on the COVID vaccine were able to make money from it. Sure, I don’t know, maybe that’s a good policy. Maybe that’s a bad policy. Maybe the Bayh-Dole Act of the 1980s that let universities patent medicines and make money off it is good policy or bad policy. But this is such a classic kind of throwing out the baby with the bath water situation. They want to take out these pharma companies just on the basis of this claim that, well, to take it in its most extreme case, because RFK has actually endorsed this view that the pandemic was invented by elites in order to control us.

JW: My favorite part of that is that the COVID virus was engineered to exempt Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people. That is RFK, Jr.

RP: That was RFK, Jr. Yeah, right, exactly.

JW: That was RFK, Jr.

RP: Right. And so if you have to tear down an industry that also, I don’t know, manufactures aspirin or penicillin, well, so be it. There’s going to be a lot of collateral damage in anything that involves this kind of wholesale craziness. And yes, the revolving door; great if they can manage to do that, but they’ll probably figure out some way to do another revolving door, and we’ll probably all be taking the drugs that these guys in the new revolving door have a financial interest in. It really is a question of, ultimately, who do you trust?

JW: We started out by saying that we can read the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 to find the points at which we can focus our resistance. So how should we focus our resistance to the nomination of RFK, Jr.?

RP: Well, I think that this will be a real test of our Democrats in the Senate. I think they really need to consult with the experts who can explain what pandemics were like before the era of penicillin. You read about the Black Death, and you read about half of a city being decimated. And we could return to a world that’s almost inconceivable to us. We can return to a world where children have to go back into iron lungs as they did when polio was a going concern.

JW: Let me inject, it’s not just Democrats who can make this argument. Mitch McConnell had polio as a young person.

RP: So yes, I guess maybe shaming the Republicans and saying, ‘Look, guys, if you wave this guy through, you’re going to be the people in history books, the documentaries on the Hitler channel and the B-roll who are cheering the Anschluss. You’re going to look really, really bad, and your grandchildren will be deeply, deeply ashamed of you.’

JW: And Susan Collins, you’re up for re-election in two years.

RP: Two years, and one epidemic later. Who knows what’ll happen, Susan Collins.

JW: Rick Perlstein – read him at prospect.org. Thank you, Rick.

RP: Thanks, Jon.