Meacham: The Founders Designed the Constitution for Demagogues Like Trump

CHUCK TODD: Jon, you have a new book out. And I actually wanted Blankenship because I think it connects to all this. The point of your book, I think, as sold in America, is I think to make some of us feel better. To say, "We've been through this before. We'll get through this." And you highlight five periods of our time where this fear mongering was working.

JON MEACHAM: Sure.

CHUCK TODD: And in the moment, it looked like it was working. But let me ask you this. You're sort of implying we hit bottom. Right now. Do you think we really have?

JON MEACHAM: We're awfully close. There are four or five forces that have saved the republic at various points. The presidency, the Congress, the press, the courts, the people. In this case--

CHUCK TODD: Discredited. Discredited. Discredited. Discredited. I mean--

JON MEACHAM: Down to the courts and the people and some parts of the press. Exactly. If we had been having this panel in 1866, and you looked good then, we would have been saying, "Oh my God, Andrew Johnson is opposing the 14th and 15th Amendments. Woodrow Wilson's cracking down 400 newspapers. Joe McCarthy is leading the Red Hunting charge." In my native region, 50 years ago, we had functional apartheid in the South. We do get better. But it requires the protests. It requires the resistance. It requires these conversations.

ROBERT COSTA: His book is infused with optimism. I think that comes through in the book. That America has been through so much. But when I'm out there as a reporter, and you're meeting people, people are going about their days. They're not fighting with each other every moment. This country moves forward.

CHUCK TODD: Right. We're going to get through it. You know, one of things that your book struck me on is like, "Are we moving fast or slow in our evolution?"

DANIELLE PLETKA: We're moving much faster. I mean, I think, you know, information technology has transformed the speed. But I do think the one thing that you say which is so resonant and true, first of all, America does have a soul. And second of all, the American people are not distracted in the same way by the things that we would talk about every Sunday.

KIMBERLY ATKINS: And we have to remember we will get through it. But there will be damage. I mean, if you look at our history, there's still the vestiges of racism, the vestiges of other things from the fights that we fought. It's how bad the damage will be once we get past it.

CHUCK TODD: I have to say, Jon, every moment in here is infused with race, actually.

JON MEACHAM: Absolutely.

CHUCK TODD: Every moment, every rough moment we've had, and in some ways--

JON MEACHAM: Unquestionable.

CHUCK TODD: --it's some version of race.

JON MEACHAM: Unquestionably. Because it's our original set. The Constitution itself, which is otherwise the document that has sort of saved us, because it's a human document. It recognizes that appetite and ambition. The Founders would have been stunned that it took this long to get a president like this. They designed this document for demagogues. If you said 2016, they would have thought, "Hey, pretty good." Doesn't mean that it's easy. But I think the most important--

CHUCK TODD: Someone might have thought Andrew Jackson had qualified for that, but that's okay.

JON MEACHAM: Well, that's a different story for a different Sunday. But remember, what the document says is that we are on a journey to a more perfect Union, not a perfect one.

CHUCK TODD: Before we go, we heard from somebody we haven't heard from in a long time, meaning John McCain. Heard his voice. And we're hearing from him via his book. First, I want to just play the excerpt that they released from the audio of his new book.

MCCAIN: I don't know how much longer I'll be here. Maybe I'll have another five years. Maybe with the advances in oncology, they'll find new treatments for my cancer. They'll extend my life. Maybe I'll be gone before you hear this. I'd like to see us recover our sense that we are more alike than different. We're citizens of a republic made of shared ideals, forged in a new world to replace the tribal enmities that tormented the old one. Even in times of political turmoil such as these, we share that awesome heritage and the responsibility to embrace it.

CHUCK TODD: Felt like it was a nice optimistic tone that John McCain's trying to strike.

DANIELLE PLETKA: Well, the nicest thing is that it is an expression that's gotten overused in this era. But John McCain really is a great American.

ROBERT COSTA: I started reporting on Capitol Hill in 2009, right after he lost the 2008 presidential campaign. And watching him up close, you see this spirit. And he doesn't quit. The guy does not quit. It's inspiring.

CHUCK TODD: Kimberly, it's interesting. We're learning in the book. He's not settling scores. But he is trying to appease those critics about Sarah Palin. And he says, "In my gut, I wish I would have picked Joe Lieberman.” He doesn't trash Sarah Palin at all in it.

KIMBERLY ATKINS: Right.

CHUCK TODD: But now for the first time, he's saying, "I wish I would have picked somebody else."

KIMBERLY ATKINS: And doesn't say that he thinks that would have made him win. But if he was going to lose, he wish he had done it on his own terms.

CHUCK TODD: That's right.

KIMBERLY ATKINS: Rather than someone else's.

ROBERT COSTA: Here's something about John McCain. The night he lost the presidency, he alluded to Booker T. Washington being invited to the White House by T.R., which was this incredibly important symbolic moment in race relations. Senator McCain has a sense of history. And he made history.