'Political activist Beto O'Rourke on Trump 2.0: 'This one is on us'

 

    Beto O'Rourke (left), Chet Edwards talk during Waco's "We the People March for Democracy" rally.

Among a parade of prominent speakers including former Waco Congressman Chet Edwards and former state senator Wendy Davis, former Democratic Congressman and seemingly inexhaustible political activist Beto O’Rourke, 52, of El Paso headlined the McLennan County Democratic Party’s April 27 “We the People March for Democracy,” encouraging several hundred citizens gathered in Waco’s Indian Spring Park to demonstrate the sort of resolve that voting rights advocates demonstrated in pressing for the historic Voting Rights Act, signed into law by President Johnson in 1965 after demonstrators championing the cause survived political violence on Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. "The eyes of history, our kids and grandkids, the conscience, the creator to whom we must answer at the end of this life, all are watching us at this time of truth to see whether or not we will be found wanting,” O’Rourke exhorted his listeners. “And so, no pressure, Waco! But this one is on us. And think of it this way: How lucky are we to be alive at this time. The generations between LBJ and I did their part, they were great Americans too, but they did not have the chance that you and I have at this moment.” In an April 28 Q&A, O’Rourke expanded on themes that he and veteran Waco Tribune-Herald journalist Bill Whitaker explored during O’Rourke’s formidable challenge to Republican Sen. Ted Cruz’s 2018 reelection campaign.

Q   When we talked at the Waco Tribune-Herald in October 2018, you brought with you a book you were reading while campaigning – a biography of Julius Caesar. You and I and my newsroom colleagues discussed Julius Caesar briefly and, more specifically, the decline of the Roman republic that continued after his assassination. You said of the Roman republic at the time: "It showed its transition from a republican form of government to an imperial, essentially a dictatorship, under Augustus. And it wasn't him just crossing the Rubicon. It was the chipping away at norms and institutions over 100 years preceding Julius Caesar. And at some point it just gave altogether. So, yeah, when we're no longer a nation of laws, when we instead become a nation of men – and when some people, some men, are above the law because of the position of power they hold – we’re going to lose this." That was nearly two years into President Trump's first term. I would argue we've only moved closer to the Rubicon if we’re not already waist-deep in it, given the willingness of many fellow Americans to forfeit such fundamental protections as due process and rule of law. Am I just a glass-half-empty sort of guy?

Beto O’Rourke   I’m so impressed you brought that up and had that recollection from 2018, given how long ago it was. But I think all that holds true. The lesson taken from the Roman republic was that each of these attacks on representative government became a precedent that the next opportunist was able to exploit. I mean, before Julius Caesar, there’s [Roman general and politician] Sulla, there are others who defy the norms and standards of the republic in order to seize more power for themselves, and that becomes normalized and then others begin to look at ways to do that, including Julius Caesar and Augustus after him. With the president, he has now impounded congressionally authorized and appropriated funds. That might seem an abstract concern to some people, but the importance I see in it is that members of Congress – including the representative from Waco, the representative from El Paso, who serve on our behalf because we elected them – they voted how to spend our tax dollars. Those appropriations literally become the law of the land. And the president under the U.S. Constitution has an obligation and a duty to enact those laws – and instead, unconstitutionally, he’s not doing that. In addition, he’s destroying congressionally mandated agencies like USAID [the U.S. Agency for International Development, a program established by President Kennedy to carry out congressional policies for administering civilian foreign aid and fostering development]. Whatever any of us think about USAID, the point is that people through their representatives in Congress chose to create this and only the people through their representatives in Congress can choose to dismantle it. And the president has bypassed that.

Now add disregard for another co-equal branch of government – the federal judiciary and those court decisions that have attempted to enjoin the president from illegally deporting people from this country who have not had the ability to defend themselves and are not allowed the due process that everyone – and I know you know this but others might not – that everyone in America is guaranteed under the Constitution. The Constitution does not specify citizenship or immigration status for due process. If you’re in the U.S., you’re protected by the Constitution. It’s a really amazing thing. And this defiance of the courts is very much in keeping with Sulla and Caesar and tyrants and would-be tyrants from times past, including Trump’s threats to pursue a third term, which is illegal [under the Twenty-second Amendment], is against the Constitution. It is not an idle threat, either, because we saw what Trump did at the end of his first term when he lawfully and legitimately lost an election – and it wasn’t Democrats who said that, it was the state legislatures of every state in the union where that election was contested, it was his own attorney general, it was his [handpicked director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security] who all said Donald Trump had lost. So he defied the law, the Constitution and chose instead to incite his supporters to try and overturn that election and, as we know now, he really pushed his vice president to illegally discount some votes. [Vice President Mike Pence ultimately refused to do so.]

And then, just to make sure we all get the message, President Trump on his first day back in power pardoned every single one of the rioters, including those filmed in broad daylight beating police officers so badly they became unconscious and causing so much trauma that several of those officers took their own lives in the days following January 6, 2021. So, Bill, this is not just a real and present threat to America, it’s a threat being fulfilled right now. And I think that’s why you saw so many people come out in Waco yesterday. People see this. Now, for all the smart folks, especially on the coasts, who stress the safeguards of democracy and the Constitution – those elements are admittedly an abstraction to most Americans. They just don’t get that. They only care about their pocketbooks and inflation. Yet the truth is everyday Americans right now are stepping up, whether at the “Hands Off” rally in Denton [on April 5] or the Waco rally yesterday – we had 1,300 people join us [for a town-hall rally] in Denton just Saturday. There’s an understanding that crosses partisan lines and geography and really any other distinction between us that we are at a make-or-break moment for the country. This is the Rubicon right now.

Q   You received much attention in 2018, 2019 and 2020 for your passion for books on history and philosophy. Is there anything in your famous library at your home in El Paso that would help Americans better understand what we witness and experience today from the perspective of U.S. or world history? Maybe some insight by one of the Adamses, John or John Quincy? Alexis de Tocqueville? Thomas Paine? Jefferson? Lincoln? FDR? Ronald Reagan? God forbid, Hannah Arendt?

O’Rourke   Oh, man. I now want to talk to you all day. I won’t do that to you, but that’s the best question in the world. It’s funny, my wife sent me a passage from a speech from President Reagan. You’re probably familiar with it. It’s something like, “You can go live in France but you can never become a Frenchman. You can go to Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you can never become a German or a Turk or Japanese. But anyone from anywhere on the planet can come to America and become an American.” And Reagan basically then goes on to say that the reason we lead the world is because, unique among the nations, we draw our people from everywhere, so we’re constantly renewing the strength and purpose of this nation. And he said something like, “We create the future of America.” I mention that because, in contrast to the very real precipice we are at right now in terms of rule of law and government of, by and for the people, there’s this really inspiring vision of America that Kennedy was able to articulate, Reagan was able to articulate. Some men are great leaders, whatever the party, and are able to remind us of our nation’s strengths. And we’re at a moment when what is precipitating this constitutional crisis, more than anything, is the illegal deportation not just of undocumented immigrants or even documented immigrants who have been denied due process but, we learned just over the weekend, a number of actual U.S. citizen children, including one with Stage 4 cancer, simply deported to other countries. [Legal filings indicate that the U.S. citizen child suffering from a rare form of metastatic cancer was deported without medication or the ability to consult with treating physicians, despite ICE officials being notified in advance of the child’s urgent medical needs.]

Even beyond the legalities and constitutionality in all this, which I think is most important, I look at that speech by Reagan just in terms of who we really are as Americans. And as you and I have discussed in the past, if we’re tempted to labor under the illusion that our form of government will persist indefinitely – then go back to the Athenian empire 2,500 years ago, go back to the Roman republic. Look at Weimar Germany in the years 1932 and 1933, and you’ll see some very common themes. In the case of Germany, not even a hundred years ago, you have someone who is bombastic and at times buffoonish but is incredibly charismatic. There are different centers of power within the Weimar Republic that see Hitler as their useful idiot – the oligarchs of the time, the industrialists, those who wanted to rearm the German military, and it really took only a matter of days once he became chancellor to outlaw the communist party [and other opposition parties]. Whether we like communists or not – and I don’t like communists – but whether we like them or not, they were the bulwark that prevented Adolf Hitler from having an absolute majority in the chamber. He made them illegal [as a party to exist]. So when we hear people say, “We’re going to deport the homegrown ones next” [as President Trump remarked in asking President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador on April 14 to build more mega prisons for American-born criminals], you can basically think about targeting groups that are obstacles to Trump’s continued grab for power in this country. Your question just opens a Pandora’s box because there are so many examples out there from the negatives of the Weimar Republic to the positivism of Ronald Reagan. I just hope we can return to that positive imagery articulated by Reagan which obviously plays within the bounds of the Constitution, which I love. And, of course, Reagan didn’t try to go for a third term!

Q   In a lively podcast interview with former Republican strategist Tim Miller of the conservative media group The Bulwark the other day and then during your speech in Waco, you speculated how students in the year 2100 might well marvel upon learning of the American electorate's decision in 2024 to catapult Trump back into power, even after he said he would be a dictator on Day One. I’m old enough to remember when clear-headed American voters would have immediately disqualified from any and all consideration anyone who even hinted at becoming a dictator, even if he or she was running for local dogcatcher, let alone president. Yet such concerns bothered too few voters in 2024. Are we just ignorant of history or the Constitution or civics – or is it something else, something deeper, something more malevolent?

O’Rourke   You know, another great question. I think that’s a recurring temptation in American history. Look at the Confederacy, a government of our fellow Americans who chose to at least try to separate from the United States – and not only to protect the institution of slavery but to have that kind of power and dominion over other human beings, which is very reminiscent of fascism or authoritarianism or different forms of tyranny. And we know about the America First movement of the 1930s, including the massive Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden [organized by the German American Bund and held in 1937 with 20,000 attendees] with a giant portrait of General Washington flanked by swastikas serving as a backdrop. With the benefit of hindsight, we sometimes think of just a straight historical line, but America at times has really had a choice. You have folks like Eugene Debs, a socialist and a communist [an American imprisoned under the congressionally passed Sedition Act of 1918 who nonetheless ran for president from prison in 1920, complete with signs that read "For President: Convict No. 9653"]. You had this America First version of American fascism [led by famed aviator Charles Lindbergh] that was deeply appealing to our fellow Americans. And then, thank God, you had someone like Franklin Delano Roosevelt who as president understood all the underlying motivations – maybe not that Americans really desire fascism or authoritarianism or state control as in the case of communism or socialism but just that they’re hurting, they’re hurting bad, they’re having to sell their homes, they’re losing their farms in Texas and Oklahoma and caravaning to California [as in John Steinbeck’s novel “The Grapes of Wrath”] and this government is just not working for them and they desperately want change. [FDR's New Deal programs between 1933 and 1938 sought to provide relief for Americans impoverished by the Great Depression while stabilizing the economy.] 

And, Bill, my theory is that’s what happened in 2024. This isn’t true for every Trump voter, but there were many Trump voters who may find much of what he stands for and much of what he’s done reprehensible, yet believed he represented the change they needed in their lives in some immediate sense. “I need a job.” “I need to make sure my small business is OK.” “I’m worried about a government not allowing me the freedoms I think I deserve or is overly protective or even onerous in response to the COVID pandemic.” I mean, people really wanted change and, I got to say, my party did not offer it. My party did not recognize it or articulate it or reflect it back or demonstrate it in the campaign. If nothing else, Trump, as you and I have been discussing, he represents change. I mean, the thing he does and says now that would have caused you to balk at electing him dogcatcher 10 or 20 years ago, the things he does and says are so different that, if you’re looking for change – well, I mean, that’s big-time change. And many people, unlike you or me, just don’t have the time or interest to delve deeper into this stuff. They see somebody who says they’re going to do something about inflation or they’re going to do something about immigration. And it’s like, “Well, let’s give this guy a shot.” I mean, these impulses are really a mix of things. It’s not a super-clear picture [of why Trump was reelected over Kamala Harris in 2024], but all those are factors.

Q   A couple of months ago I interviewed globetrotting journalist and de facto anthropologist Carl Hoffman about his rollicking 2020 book "Liar's Circus" in which he spent several months just going from Trump rally to Trump rally across the nation back in 2019 and 2020. Have you ever heard of the book?

O’Rourke   No, but I’m writing it down.

Q   Hoffman offered this observation about Make American Great Again followers in the interview he and I did in March 2025: "The reality is 75 million people did not vote for Trump but 77 million people in 2024 did. There are two kinds of people [in the Trump camp]. There are smart, affluent people who know better but just are greedy and want lower taxes. But tens of millions of other people really do live in a world which is an upside-down world. I can’t emphasize this enough. Seventy million people don’t read a newspaper, probably don’t watch a network news show – I mean, NBC, ABC, CBS, something you think of as more or less neutral or factual. For many people it’s either Fox News or they get all of their news, all of their information, from social media. They literally don’t believe Trump did anything wrong, they literally don’t know the details of, say, the indictment behind his keeping [classified] documents – and the crazy thing is that’s an open-and-shut case. They don’t understand these things. They just think it was a witch hunt to go after him." OK, that’s Hoffman's observation, drawn from the months he spent with Trump rallygoers. In my previous interviews with you, you have been unusually generous about your interactions with Trump supporters, particularly those in remote, decidedly rural stretches of Texas who, so far as I can tell, regularly and mysteriously vote against their own interests, judging from everything from the closure of rural hospitals across Texas, to punishing tariff wars that close off global markets for farmers’ beef and soybeans, to, finally, school vouchers which threaten rural schools and the farming communities that pivot on them. Given your discussions with voters of all stripes across Texas then and since – including your actually visiting all 254 Texas counties in the 2018 Senate campaign – can you offer a psychological profile of the typical MAGA follower who thinks Trump did nothing wrong, dismisses concerns about things like due process and constitutional checks and balances and separation of powers and believes that Trump’s election justifies his doing whatever the hell he pleases? I mean, after January 6, I simply can’t understand anyone ever again voting this guy back into power.

O’Rourke   I think the formulation of your question gets at it. I think Hoffman is correct as well. I’m actually kind of struck by the conversation you and I are having right now. The conversation we’re having would have been typical 20 or certainly 50 years ago. Now, I’m out there in the public realm, have been for the last seven years or so, and this is incredibly rare today. You know people [in daily journalism] want this quick, two-line nugget, “Let me just get the money quote from this guy, I’m just trying to get this thing done.” If there’s even a newspaper involved anymore – it’s just so rare as I travel the state as they consolidate or close or operate with these so-called “ghost” newspaper staffs. The joy and pleasure I get in talking with you is because I grew up in another world where I was reading about this kind of stuff and watching Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather and their successors where we all as Americans were operating from the same set of facts. And, of course, we drew different conclusions based on all that, had different opinions, but no one could deny, if they were to be taken seriously, the reality of the matter. And that’s just not the case anymore. I’ve got college students, because I spend so much time on campuses registering students to vote, who will ask me – and this is like verbatim – “Beto, how do you know what the truth is?” It’s such a crazy question. What do you mean? “Well, I’ve heard there’s this Project 2025, but is that real?” And then I step back and realize that a young person, unlike me at that age, their folks probably don’t subscribe to the newspaper, they themselves certainly aren’t doing so, they’re definitely not watching TV (news) and their source of news is not going to be nytimes.com or even cnn.com, it’s what incidentally comes through their feed on Tiktok or Instagram.

You know, that whole idea that politics is downstream of culture? That has never been more true than today. The information that people gather is cultural. So I think we’ve got – not that you would – but others have to suspend judgment on folks who voted for Trump who just didn’t know all the facts as they were presented to them. Today’s culture, our society, does not place a premium on news, on facts, on truth. It places a premium on entertainment, on distraction, on making these social media platforms rich through algorithms that cause us to watch the videos we see. And if the video is engaging but untruthful, it really doesn’t matter to the platform, just so long as the person is engaging. So that young student who says, “Hey, Beto, how do you know what the truth is?” – I really feel for that person. That’s the canary in the American democracy coal mine right now. That person is indicating, “I don’t know what is actually happening, I don’t know how to make a choice.” And can we then be surprised when millions in this demographic, 18 to 29 year olds, don’t cast a ballot? I think that also speaks to the Trump voters whose rationale ranges from “I wanted lower prices” to “I thought what he did at that rally was really funny” to “Other politicians sound like robots but this guy sounds like my grandfather or my uncle or a real human being.” And they’re making this decision based on a very quick and, frankly, very shallow impression.

Q   Oh, it’s definitely not just the young folks. I know you have lots of interaction with them through campus voter registration drives. I was talking a couple of days ago with a 74-year-old Vietnam War veteran who is a neighbor of mine. Nice guy. He was in a wheelchair. He was telling me that he had received my subscription copy of The Atlantic magazine. And I said, “Well, you know, we got a new mailman and he’s been putting the wrong mail in the wrong mail boxes a lot and I’m having to take other people’s mail to them after it winds up in my mailbox.” And then I said, “Maybe the postal service is going through some changes or personnel cutbacks.” [In fact, the USPS is in the thick of cutbacks, including a plan to cut 10,000 positions.] And my neighbor made a reference to the big veterans hospital we have in Waco – as you well know from your days in Congress focusing heavily on veterans issues – and he complained the Trump administration was making all these cutbacks in Veterans Administration programs and personnel. He was upset about that. And I said, kind of nonchalantly, “Well, this is what we all voted for.” And he stiffened up in his wheelchair in the middle of the street and said, “Not me! I didn’t vote!” He then went on to tell me he had only voted once in his life and that in any case he couldn’t vote now because of the wheelchair. And I said, kind of chuckling good-naturedly, “Well, so far as voting goes, John, you have no one to blame but yourself. You know, you could have voted by mail.” And he just stared at me, jaw on the ground, and said: “You’re kidding. Really?” This is what I find among more and more Americans. I mean, mail-in voting has been around in Texas quite a while now for anyone who is age 65 or over or is medically incapacitated. It's the law. This guy also told me that, out of principle, he hadn’t read a newspaper since 1972 because of some newspaper report back then that Agent Orange wasn’t really dangerous to Vietnam veterans. And I said, “Well, John, those reporters didn’t just sit around in a newsroom and decide one day, ‘Hey, let’s invent a story about Agent Orange being harmless.’ Rather, some presidential administration official said it, the newspapers simply reported it, and only years later after further research did we all learn otherwise." You know, maybe I shouldn’t have encouraged him to vote! And, by the way, when I finally got my copy of The Atlantic, there were no dog-eared pages! No one had read the magazine in that household!

O’Rourke   [Laughter] Absolutely. It’s not just young people. But I think your example with your neighbor does make the same point in that he’s disconnected from shared realities, shared truths, shared facts. Maybe he doesn’t connect the dots between 83,000 proposed job cuts at the VA, many of them veterans, and the quality of care he possibly couldn’t get, and his ability to make a change in who was making those decisions. I obviously don’t know him, but I think it’s part of the same challenge, I really do.

Q   Did the January 6 insurrection or riot or protest or however you want to label it surprise you, given all the time you’ve spent across Texas interacting with people I suspect would count as MAGA?

O’Rourke   Unfortunately, it does not surprise me. It also did not surprise me that – and correct me if I’m wrong, because I suspect you know – but I think Texas supplied more insurrectionists than any other state.

Q   I believe Texas was in the top three states with Florida and Pennsylvania.

O’Rourke   Yeah, and I know from going to different events [about the threat of violence]. I was at an event in Junction, Texas, two years ago and there were probably 60 or 70 people who came to hear me in the Junction Library Annex and probably a hundred who were outside – and not just outside to protest but outside to protest while carrying AR-15s and AK-47s and all sorts of guns. And, on one hand, there’s nothing wrong with that because it’s your right under the First and Second amendments – free speech and to have this firearm and, in Texas, to carry it openly. But the two priorities, when combined, send the message: “I’m here to intimidate you. And I’m here even though you have come peacefully, non-violently, while pursuing a position in our democracy by trying to win people over through rhetoric, answering questions and showing respect.” And there’s this implied threat that “we have our guns here and if we don’t like the way things are going, there’s going to be some kind of a consequence.” And certainly we saw that play out on January 6. And certainly we saw that play out here in El Paso when another Texan with an AK-47 killed 23 people in 2019. [Patrick Crusius, 26, who characterized himself as a white nationalist in his political manifesto, this month pleaded guilty to capital murder and 22 counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon in his deadly 2019 hunt for Hispanics in El Paso; he acknowledged being motivated to kill Hispanics because they were immigrating to the United States. Prosecutors said Crusius’ mission was to “dissuade Mexican and other Hispanic immigrants from coming to the United States." He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.]

Political violence in this country should not come as a surprise, especially when you have a president who incites this – and not just in his first term, but you saw the tweet on Feb. 15 where he posted: “He who saves his country does not violate any law.” And what I found to be so ominous about that is it wasn’t just Trump reflecting his belief that the president is immune from any consequence of his actions, no matter how wrong, no matter how violent, but I really believe – and he’s done this several times – that this was a signal to his followers: “You are absolved ahead of time. You can do this with impunity.” And you remember during the 2020 presidential debate when he told the [far-right, neo-fascist militant organization] Proud Boys, “stand back and stand by,” and his remark as president in 2017 after the racial violence and death in Charlottesville when he said there were “very fine people on both sides.” He certainly sends these signals and I don’t think it’s a matter of “if” we will see more political violence as a result of all this, I think it’s a matter of “when.” And so we go back to your first question about the Rubicon!

Q   Well, again, I don’t know whether we’re waist-deep in the Rubicon or stepping out on the far side. Everyone has his or her own understanding of why Democrats failed in 2024. I argue that Trump demonstrated a certain amount of resolve and gusto that seemed lacking in Biden and even his vice president, whom some argue was chained to an anemic-seeming president’s policies and confounded by the severely limited time schedule allotted her to campaign – just 107 days. Democrats have been faulted ever since for not showing much counterpoint to what the Trump administration has been doing. This may be why the traveling ticket of independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, 83, of Vermont and firebrand Democratic Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, 35, of New York is drawing huge crowds throughout the Midwest, which is strongly Republican and heavily white. In your speech in Waco, you mentioned 1965 as another pivotal year with at least some parallels to 2025. The year 1965 gave us the Voting Rights Act, which the Supreme Court has unfortunately pretty well dismantled by now. [Appointees of President Trump reportedly reassigned Department of Justice managers of the voting rights section to other branches and have directed all attorneys to dismiss active voting rights cases.] Yet in 1965 the White House was still inhabited by LBJ – very much an “FDR Democrat” – and Congress included Republicans such as Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, who certainly had a strong grasp of American history and a respectful understanding the Constitution. I would argue there's no such parallel today, given that Republicans hold the White House, both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court. What should Democrats be doing, given that they have been exiled into the wilderness till at least the year 2027?

O’Rourke   Yes, well, I have a more recent example, and I think you’re right about the imperfect analogy. In 2018 we relearned about a program President Trump was running in his first term called “Zero Tolerance,” colloquially known as “family separation,” whereby any migrant apprehended at the border with a young child would be immediately separated from that child and the immigrant immediately deported and the child placed ultimately in foster care here in America. [Reports indicate thousands of children, including infants, were separated from their parents.] In the succeeding administration there were attempts to unify these families. I don’t know the number but there are still a number of families who have not been reunited. When we as a country learned about that, there was an extraordinary level of protests, spontaneous and planned. In El Paso County, in a little town called Tornillo, the Trump administration had constructed a tent city and detention camp for these separated children. And so these kids who didn’t speak the language, strangers in a strange land, whose moms in most cases had been deported, we put out word with maybe two or three days to the world: Come to Tornillo, this is ground zero, this is where things are happening, let’s protest to make sure our fellow Americans know what’s going on. And with short notice we had more than a thousand people come out. And we know Tornillo is not an easy place to get to, but they came from Texas, they came from Massachusetts, we had one woman who came from Alaska, believe it or not, and it and other protests garnered a lot of attention from the people you and I were talking about earlier, people who are kind of buffered from the news, but this broke through. It broke on social media, it broke on traditional news such as newspapers. That was on the 18th of June and on the 20th of June, Trump or at least his administration announced that they were going to rescind the Zero Tolerance family separation policy.

Now, it’s not a direct comparison with the way it was with civil rights crusader John Lewis [marching for voting rights in Selma, Alabama] in 1965, and it wasn’t just the Tornillo protest, though I think it was the largest, but it was protests like that across the country [that exerted pressure on the Trump administration to change tactics]. You and I love to talk history. Well, my favorite line – I guess I have a million of them from Lincoln – is “Public sentiment is everything.” He said it in 1858. [“Public sentiment is everything,” Lincoln told Stephen Douglas in their famous public debates. "Whoever can change public opinion can change the government.”] He said, “Look, our country is deeply divided, we’re worried about who’s in the White House, who’s in control of Congress and the judiciary and the Supreme Court, but more powerful than all that is public sentiment. With it, everything is possible. Without it nothing can be done.” And so we saw in 2018, well before any kind of election, how public sentiment could force a president to change course, much the same way as public sentiment in 1965 helped LBJ on the course he had set but didn’t think he had the power [and political capital] to see through. I think your assessment is absolutely spot on, and Democrats and pro-Constitution, pro-rule-of-law, pro-democracy Americans have not risen up in the numbers we may have expected and that we saw following the 2016 election, but it’s starting to happen. More than a thousand people along the Brazos in Waco and 1,300 in Denton, just a day apart from each other, and the millions who came out in the “Hands Off” rallies – there’s definitely something happening right now and I do think – I do think – that it has the power to shape the decisions that Donald Trump makes.

Q    You may be right. President Trump's Department of Homeland Security issued an order three weeks ago that the legal status of thousands of college and university students here on U.S.-issued visas were to be terminated. This included three Baylor University students in Waco who found their legal status terminated and found themselves under orders to self-deport. The feds only reinstated all of these the other day in federal court because, after more than 100 lawsuits were filed over three weeks, these suits prompted judges to issue some 50 restraining orders. And these came in at least 23 states from federal judges appointed by several presidents, including Donald Trump. And so that policy at least temporarily has been rescinded.

O’Rourke   I think that’s a great example. Big and small, no presidency – even an imperial presidency or a tyrannical presidency – is immune from public sentiment. Lincoln understood it and Trump, regardless of what he says, he absolutely watches and follows the polls. We saw another example of it where the people weren’t necessarily speaking out but their money sure was when the bond market reacted adversely to the tariffs that he had set globally. He changed course. So for those who think this guy is bigger than all of us and is some sort of unstoppable force of nature, someone who has all this power – well, that was the message I was trying to get across on Sunday: This is not the case. Yes, it’s impressive and, yes, we have our work cut out for us, and there’s no way this one is going to be easy. The outcome is uncertain. We just don’t know. It could go either way at this point. But we absolutely have the power to do this. It’s more a matter of recognizing that and using it and not being deterred at every step because he is so good at flooding the zone, of raining down these bizarre orders and comments and distractions. We just have to stay focused as Americans have in all difficult periods of our history.

Q    What would you regard as the most outrageous act of the first hundred days of Trump 2.0? The pardoning of J6ers? The snatching up of people with tattoos or foreign-sounding names off city streets, often by masked law enforcement officers dressed in plain clothes? Defiance of federal courts, including an arguably impotent and outmaneuvered Supreme Court of the United States? Destruction of the global markets on which the retirement plans and business prospects of many Americans depend? Weaponizing government to go after personal enemies such as Christopher Krebs and various law firms? Or something else?     

O’Rourke   In the same way as 1776, during the crafting of the Declaration of Independence, they couldn’t isolate just one thing King George had done. But of all the things you’ve mentioned, the fact that on Day One, in one of his very first acts as president, he pardons his January 6 insurrectionists. The reason that stands out in a very crowded field is that not only did he pardon people who beat these police officers and clearly committed crimes and are shown on videotape doing that – bad enough in itself – but it sent a signal. And that’s what makes this third term threat of his something we should take very, very seriously. The signal is that if you commit violence in service of Donald Trump and that violence includes trying to stop the transition of power in this country, if that violence includes pursuing the political enemies of Donald Trump, if that violence includes possibly changing the very form of government under which we exist, then that is permissible and allowable and can done with impunity in Trump’s America. Now some may hear me say that and say, “Well, Beto, that’s just hysterical.” But I guarantee you, the perpetrators of January 6 and their fellow travelers read that message clear as day. And, really, shame on all of us if after January 6, 2021, and after the pardoning of everyone who was implicated in January 6, 2021, we don’t expect this to happen again. Again, I don’t think it’s a matter of “if” but a matter of “when.” The other question is whether we will be prepared to meet that challenge once it arises. I think most of us hope that challenge is met democratically, peacefully and non-violently at the ballot box in 2026. Before that, it is done through peaceful protest such as we saw in Waco. But we should labor under no illusions that this is the threat that looms largest for our democracy at this time. It is not an electoral threat, although we have to take that one seriously, but it is the threat of political violence. And it’s not just January 6, we have to connect the dots to August 2019 in El Paso and many other incidents or attempts at political violence connected to Donald Trump.