Doris Kearns Goodwin: Trump Supporters ‘Lost the Sense of a Collective Identity of Who We Are as a People’

BRZEZINSKI: “Joining us now, Pulitzer Prize winning author and presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. Doris, you have covered a number of presidents, you have written books about presidents, entire books. Have you ever seen anything like this? What do you liken it to your thoughts this morning, Doris?”
KEARNS GOODWIN: “You know, I think what strikes me, Mika, is, of course, it’s a historical moment. And we’ve never seen this before. It’s a moment when the rule of law is on trial. When no man can be above the law. It’s the truth that will be coming out. But what saddens me as an historian is, I love to time travel back to other historic moments that moved us forward in time. I’d much rather be there on January 1 of 1863, when the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, or be there when the troops were going in on June 6 1944, to liberate France from the Nazi rule, or to be there in August of 1965, when the Voting Rights Act was passed. Ever since the time when this election was not agreed to be lost by former President Trump, we’ve been in defensive stature and we’ve been moving backward in time, and we have so many fights we have to fight, and so much of it is now connected with his legal problems.”
LEMIRE: “So Doris, what does it also speak — say to you about who we are as a country right now? Because as you sat down, we were talking about how this is — Donald Trump is now a criminal defendant, first of potentially more times. And yet he stands a one in two chance to be president. He has a real chance to win. And for some of this country, what he’s going through is almost thrilling to them, and they believe every word he says. What does that say to you about who we are?”
KEARNS GOODWIN: “I mean, I think it says that we’ve lost a sense of a collective identity of who we are as a people. What values are we promoting? What values do we care about? Think about the people we want as our leaders, and just look at that as — as sort of a template for President Trump. Humility, people will acknowledge errors and learn from their mistake. Empathy, people who understand other people’s points of view. Resilience to come through adversity. Accountability, kindness, compassion, and ambition for something larger than themselves not for themselves. Those are the leaders that have led us. And that means the citizens respect those kinds of leaders. Only in the 1850s did we find a situation really, where there was such polarization that truth was not — truth was in question. You read only a partisan paper, everything fact was different if you were in the south or in the north. Your heroes in the south were different from the north, and look where that led us. So we’ve got to figure out a way to come back together again, to understand what truth is, to understand what law is, to understand the kind of leaders we want that — that represent our values. It’s character above all that we need right now in public life.”