In September 2019, Boston College historian Heather Cox Richardson wrote a short essay on her Facebook page after news broke that Donald Trump’s acting director of National Intelligence had withheld an urgent whistleblower complaint. It was the first domino to fall in what would later become a full-fledged impeachment probe into the former president’s now infamous call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The country was entering unprecedented political territory. And Cox Richardson’s observations left readers hungry for more.
What grew out of her pithy essay was “Letters From an American,” Cox Richardson’s daily newsletter on politics and US history that made her one of the most widely read commentary writers in the country. Now boasting over a million subscribers on Substack, Cox Richardson was named one of USA Today’s Women of the Year, and last year, was even invited to interview President Joe Biden in the White House.
But while her public persona has changed, Cox Richardson’s intellectual goals have not. She aims to historicize America’s political absurdities with a fundamental question: Whether, as she wrote recently, “the rule of law on which the United States of America was founded will survive.” This question lies at the heart of her latest tome, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America, which bookends the Trump years with two sweeping, methodical accounts of US history: While one traces attempts to undermine democracy, the other chronicles attempts to protect and expand it. “Once again, we are at a time of testing,” she writes. “How it comes out rests, as it always has, in our own hands.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Vanity Fair: The middle third of your book offers a blow-by-blow account of the Trump years. Reading it, I realized how many specific episodes or scandals I’d already forgotten. Are there any events or moments from Trump’s time in office that you wish were more widely remembered than they are?
Heather Cox Richardson: The piece that I think shocked me most was how quickly in 2020, after the pandemic really began to sink its claws into society, Trump assumed the language of a strong man, of a dictatorship, and how quickly that escalated until the day he walked across Lafayette Square with the Bible in his hand. If you remember those few days, things were coming at us really quickly. There was that picture of the law enforcement officers at the Lincoln Memorial with their badges covered, and it took us a while to figure out who they even were. All that happened really, really quickly.
What really jumped out to me was how crucially important it was that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley came out afterward and said it was a real mistake for him to be there at Lafayette Square, and that the military does not stand with a person; it stands with the Constitution. And then there was a whole cascade of military leaders reaffirming that. That was incredibly important. It’s important that we know how close we came. It’s important that we know that the military—all the branches of it, really—stepped forward and said they were not going to be part of this.
What’s so important about that moment?
People now tend to forget that after that moment, a number of figures in right-wing media—certainly people like Tucker Carlson—really started going after Mark Milley and trying to destroy him. I think that echoes in the present when you look at Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville’s refusal to allow military promotions. The unwillingness of the military to back Trump is very much in the minds of those who would like to overturn our democracy even today.
In a similar vein, the last few years have seen many attempts to mine American and even world history for moments that can help us understand both Trump’s presidency and the small-D democratic resistance to it. Are there any historical moments you returned to for the book that you feel are underappreciated as guides to the present?
The answer is an emphatic yes, and that is the creation and the tactics of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). What really jumped out at me in this book is no matter where I was digging after 1909, which is when the NAACP officially organizes, I found the NAACP.
What was fascinating about the NAACP is that they were multifaith, multiracial, and multipolitical, if you will, from the very beginning. And while they certainly challenged segregation through the law, they also recognized very early on that in order to change the law, you had to change public opinion. It’s no accident that W.E.B. Du Bois, who can do anything he wants with the NAACP—what does he decide to do? He decides to run The Crisis, which is the NAACP magazine. They insisted on educating ordinary people, making clear what was really happening.
Jack McCordick
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