Well, I heard it! I definitely heard it this morning on Morning Joe! Idiot boy Jon Meacham admitted that it took him too long to recognize that traitor trump is a threat to America’s democracy. Meacham was a guest on Morning Joe to help promote his op-ed in The New York Times, in which he stated, “When Donald Trump began his rise to power in 2015, he struck me as a dangerous but recognizable demagogue. … To me, Mr. Trump was a difference not of kind — we had long contended with illiberalism in America — but of degree. Since the Civil War, no figure with such illiberal views had ever actually won the White House. Then, he proved me wrong.” Of course, he was wrong because he’s a moron and sh*tty historian, so he put his stupidity in writing and advertised it on a morning political news show. Fantastic!
It’s sad, really, because listening to Meacham over the years on Morning Joe has not only been insufferable but has also turned me off to other T.V. historians (except for Ken Burns; he’s a historian’s historian of AV media), who I used to revere for their knowledge and wisdom. I can’t even listen to his contemporaries — Doris Kearns Goodwin, Michael Beschloss, and Douglas Brinkley — without a jaundiced view of their interpretation of history, which is unfair to them because those other historians genuinely do have a better sense of the present moment than moron Meacham. Thanks to him, I lump them all together, and I usually turn the channel when any of them appear on MSNBC or CNN. Today, though, I did not turn the channel and heard his confession of ignorance and naïveté. (You know, precisely those qualities one looks for in a historian worth his or her salt.)
It is this ignorance and naïveté that is so troubling in a historian to me. For what is a historian? In short — and in my own words — a historian is a storyteller. Not just any storyteller but an educated, knowledgable, well-researched, and analytical storyteller. Moreover, historians do not tell stories just for the hell of it. They tell meaningful stories. Relevant stories. Impactful stories. Meaningful, relevant, and impactful to the present and the future, for we cannot understand our future without knowing where we came from in the past. Yet historians have a more important function: They provide the context and analysis of past events, revealing their significance to the present. It is this historical importance to today that is noteworthy and was a bit of wisdom, which I never forgot, imparted to me by my favorite high school history teacher.
So, Meacham completely failed in this singular task of apprehending the importance of history to understand and recognize the present. For all the times he’s been on Morning Joe discussing traitor trump before, during, and after his presidency, he always gave traitor trump the benefit of the doubt. In some instances, he declared traitor trump’s shortcomings as merely being stumbles of someone learning on the job. Oh, yeah! He’s learning alright — all the wrong f***ing things. But I guess that’s not important. He was rarely critical of traitor trump. Meacham was more an appeaser than seeing traitor trump for who he was — a dictator in training. So, the question is this: How can a historian be trusted to tell stories if he is so clueless and blind to the rhymings of the past with today? The guy talks about totalitarianism, yet can’t see the signs in traitor trump because why? The signs aren’t significant enough? Does he think America is so “exceptional” that we can’t slip into fascism? Is he so blind that he can’t see traitor trump is not an anomaly but a symptom of a greater issue in America? History is rife with examples of societies undone by a strongman. Yet he thinks traitor trump means well but can’t shoot straight? Is that Meacham’s take on the guy (before his conversion)? The orange man is not dangerous, just incompetent. In the end, don’t buy Meacham’s f***ing books or trust his storytelling, for I’m sure he’ll spin a yarn about how Hitler was just a misunderstood failed painter who stumbled into the Holocaust. (Eh, don’t worry. It’s not important.)