Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Jon Meacham stopped by “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” Thursday night to explain why he believes President Trump‘s second administration has ushered America into a “moral crisis.”
Meacham, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography in 2009 for his book “American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House,” appeared on “The Late Show” to promote his newest book, “American Struggle: Democracy, Dissent and The Pursuit Of A More Perfect Union.” During their conversation, though, Colbert asked Meacham what he makes of the current national moment.
“Not much,” Meacham bluntly responded. “The founders anticipated that we would have seasons of fear. We’d have seasons in which we would not obey the rule of law. That our appetites and our ambitions would overcome what Lincoln called our better angels. I don’t know if they quite had this in mind.”
“The first three words are the animating words of the Constitution. ‘We the people.’ The document is only as good as the people doing the voting, the people we vote into office,” Meacham explained. “I think we are in a moral crisis. I think that too many of us have decided to put our own interests ahead of a constitutional order that is based on a rule of law.”
You can watch Meacham’s full “Late Show” appearance yourself below.
“If you ever wanted an example of why the character of the person you send to the Presidency of the United States matters, I refer you to the last 361 days, however long it’s been,” Meacham later said, in response to a joke from Colbert about Trump’s growing interest in taking over Greenland. The presidential biographer subsequently urged Americans watching at home to remember that the United States does not exist because of “geography.”
“This is a country founded on an idea,” Meacham noted. “Patriotism is loyalty to an idea, to a creed.” The historian pointed specifically to Thomas Jefferson’s assertion in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal.”
“One thing we have to remember, all of us, is that there is nothing guaranteed about America making it to tomorrow. This is a fragile experiment,” Meacham observed. “What I want everybody to try to do at this point is think about: What do you want the future to say about us? We are at risk of being a generation that loses the ethos that sent men to Omaha Beach, that sent people into Gettysburg, who sent people to Selma, Alabama, to broaden the definition and understanding of what the country can be.”
“It’s not easy,” the Pulitzer Prize winner concluded. “But it also vitally was never supposed to be about the whims and the ego of a single person.”
