When American Public Television kicked off its Fall Marketplace conference Nov. 11 in Cleveland, CEO Jim Dunford interviewed Mark Updegrove, presidential historian for ABC News who also hosts the APT series Live From the LBJ Library.
Their conversation dug into questions about President Trump’s resounding political victory in the general election — what it means historically, what it says about the future of American democracy and how public media can provide news and information to people across the political spectrum.
Updegrove, CEO of the LBJ Foundation, is the author of several books on the presidency. He executive-produced the 2022 CNN series on President Lyndon Baines Johnson, LBJ: Triumph and Tragedy. As host of Live From the LBJ Library, he interviews historians, journalists, authors and filmmakers about American democracy and leadership.
This Q&A has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
Jim Dunford, CEO, American Public Television: What does last week’s election result mean for history?
Mark Updegrove, presidential historian and host of Live From the LBJ Library: You’ve already heard that Trump is the first nonconsecutive president since Grover Cleveland, who is the only other nonconsecutive president. But that doesn’t do justice to what happened.
It was the most spectacular political comeback in the history of our country, bar none. There’s nothing even remotely like it. We will know more after the term transpires what this means to history.
Without question, it reflected the divisions in our country and the depths of economic discontent and cultural disconnection. We have never seen two candidates that were more dramatically different than Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. That’s what history will say of this moment.
You can see so much of today in what happened in the 1960s, when there was this gargantuan progressive leap forward. And then there was a major backlash.
We are ostensibly a democracy from our earliest days. But we were a patriarchy, let’s face it. Women did not get to vote until 1920, and it took 72 years for women to ensure they would have suffrage. We have only had people of color voting in this country in great volume since the 1960s. The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act turned us into a full democracy.
It’s only two generations where we see the full flower of our democracy. And you are still seeing a backlash from the major changes we have seen in the last couple of generations.
Dunford: You’ve mentioned parallels to the 1960s. Is there anything to learn from how we went forward from there in this delicate democracy dance?
Updegrove: When you see the comparisons, 1968 really rocked this country. You had the seizure of an American ship off North Korea and 82 sailors were held hostage. I mention this because it gets forgotten when you enumerate all the crises that played out in 1968.
You had the Tet Offensive. You had LBJ stepping aside from the presidency — to the shock of the nation. You had the assassination of Martin Luther King, the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, major civil unrest in cities throughout the country and at the Democratic National Convention. Abroad you had the Soviet Union and Prague Spring. These were amazing things. LBJ called it, rightfully so, the “nightmare year.”
This year, we’ve seen similar tumult. We’ve seen an assassination attempt on a president, and we’ve another president step aside.
Within the 1960s, when we saw this huge progressive leap forward, in 1964 LBJ wins the presidency against Barry Goldwater, this very staunchly conservative candidate, by the biggest landslide at that point in history.
Barry Goldwater lost the presidency, but the joke is that he really won — it just took 16 years. Ronald Reagan eventually took the presidency, and the conservative revolution played out in the 1980s. It was a major pendulum swing back.
Very frequently in society when we would see the pendulum swing dramatically in this way, you’re going to see a dramatic backlash. It’s going to swing right back.
That’s where we are. We had the first African American president — that is a gargantuan swing one way — gay and lesbian rights, transgender rights. These are great big cultural shifts. And now we’re seeing the backlash.
Right or wrong, that seems to be the way it goes in American history.
Dunford: Where do you see the next swing? How do we come out of last week and swing in a direction that moves us?
Updegrove: This is probably a lot like the New Deal of the early 1930s. Franklin Roosevelt took the presidency in 1932 and came into office in 1933. And there were some major changes.
Ironically, the change that we’re going to see in the Trump administration may well roll back the balance of the New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society. I think we expect to see that.
On ABC News recently, David Muir asked me how we should respond. The fact is, it was a free and fair election, and this is democracy. We are Americans and have to accept the will of the people. That’s the bargain that we sign up for when we’re part of a democracy. That’s where we are.
You have to give Trump credit. Not only did he win the Electoral College, which he won in 2016, he also won the popular vote. Since 1988, Republicans have only won the popular vote twice. In 2004, when George W. Bush beat John Kerry, it was because of Ohio, which was the swing state in that election. By just a whisker, Bush won the popular vote.
Now we’ve seen Donald Trump win the popular vote by a substantial sum. We have to respect that. That’s what the American people want.
We should anticipate some dramatic changes, and I think we have to figure out a way to come together.
I teach a class for liberal arts honors students at the University of Texas. After the 2016 election, the students wanted to hear from somebody about what it all meant, what they could do in that moment and how they could accept it. The thing that I came up with was to be kind to one another and listen to one another.
There are a lot of folks that we’ve cast aside because we don’t agree with their political outlook. But we’re not going to come together unless we start listening to one another. And we’re certainly not going to come together in this moment unless we accept the verdict of the American people on our leadership going forward. The American people have decided that Donald Trump is the right leader going forward. We have to make the very best of it.
Dunford: For those of us in public media, there’s a role for us in doing that by bringing communities together and having that discourse, listening to both sides. That’s one of the reasons why, when we started conversations about Live From the LBJ Library, it felt like the right project for the right time. As you were thinking about the vision for it, what were you hoping to achieve?
Updegrove: LBJ said — and I love this quote — “Any jackass can kick down the barn door, but it takes a darn fine carpenter to build one.” This country has seen a lot of destruction and hate. We have to figure out how we can work together to build something bigger, not knock things down. That’s the key.
I’d been talking with someone about how to bring the wonderful conversations that we’ve hosted in the library to a larger audience. Because LBJ is the father of public broadcasting, it really made sense that public broadcasting would be our partner in this enterprise.
I wanted to have long-form conversations. We don’t have a lot of that in TV. Long-form conversations can draw a lot out of someone. That’s what we’re trying to aim for in this, something that takes you in depth on a particular subject or somebody’s life experience.
Dunford: Your premiere episode was with Heather Cox Richardson, a historian at Boston College. She used this phrase about our delicate relationship with democracy. That actually permeates through a lot of the conversations you had in season one, as well as this leadership question — what makes a leader, what leadership needs to look like and things like that. What lessons have you learned there that are relevant for the public media audience?
Updegrove: At the core of this of this series is, what do we think about America now? We want different perspectives on where we are in this country and where we should be going.
Heather Cox Richardson speaks so eloquently on this. She said that we’ve always had a very capricious relationship with democracy. It is not a given in this country; it is not an inalienable right — these are just ideas. It’s up to every generation to preserve democracy and make it stronger for the next generation. That’s our charge.
There have been so many instances over the course of our history when we’ve come this close to losing it.
The Civil War is an obvious example. But before we got into World War II, there was an isolationist movement in this country. Before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, 90% of Americans believed that we had no business being involved in World War II. When there’s an attack on the homeland, we go in full throttle on the war and really make democracy safe for the world. There are so many examples like that in history.
Another thing that Heather said is that she has faith in the American people, as do I. There is a wisdom collectively in the American people. And that’s why, as much as I may disagree with it for a variety of reasons, I respect the choice that Americans made collectively last week.
Dunford: What do you think we need to understand about leadership at this moment?
Updegrove: I’ve been doing a speech called “Lessons I’ve Learned from Seven Presidents.” I’ve interviewed seven presidents and gotten to know them pretty well, from Gerald Ford through Barack Obama and also Joe Biden. I haven’t interviewed Donald Trump.
Every one of them has a character trait that permeates their legacies. As an example, Gerald Ford, that is “doing what’s right.” Ford is the only Eagle Scout who has ever occupied the Oval Office. He came in accidentally, under the provisions of the 25th Amendment to the Constitution, after Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned in the face of bribery charges dating back to his days as the governor of Maryland. Then, when Richard Nixon resigned nine months later, Ford becomes president.
The fate of Richard Nixon hangs over the nation like a dark cloud. And Gerald Ford decides, to his political peril, to pardon him. Ford did so because he didn’t believe we could move forward as a nation and face the major problems of that time, which included stagflation and the lingering war in Vietnam, without resolving the legal fate of Richard Nixon. And so he pardons him.
It was massively unpopular. Only a third of the American population agreed with the pardon. But when Ford dies, two-thirds of the American people believe in the wisdom that it took to pardon Nixon and move on to more pressing issues.
Did that set a precedent for Donald Trump? I don’t think so. I think every president has to measure whether decisions are appropriate and right for his time.
For George H.W. Bush, for instance, the character trait is humility. It took humility not to beat his chest when we won the Cold War. He knew that if we did so, if we were grandiose about the triumph of American democracy over totalitarianism, it would compromise his relationship with Mikhail Gorbachev at a time when the Soviet Union was crumbling. There was possibility for fledgling democracies throughout Eastern Europe. It was the right decision. That humility underlies his legacy.
Dunford: When we were debating which episode in season one should go first, there was some discussion about going with your conversation with former Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Given everything that we’ve talked about, where does media fit into leadership and democracy?
Updegrove: I’m asked this a lot: What is the greatest threat to democracy? The long-term answer is the fragmentation of media. There’s no doubt in my mind that is the biggest problem that we face today.
Eight percent of Americans get their news from social media, which engages users by enraging them. Content is more and more extreme based on your preferences and behavioral patterns as a user.
Social media platforms aren’t bound to the same rules and regulations as traditional media outlets. The New York Times, ABC News and PBS News Hour are bound to different laws that relate to libel, among other things.
I think reform is desperately needed. Purveyors of social media should be accountable for the misinformation and disinformation they’re serving up to their users.
Public media plays a major, vital role. You are the most trusted news source in the country, second to the Weather Channel. You have a major responsibility to serve up content that is consumable by people from all different sides of the political spectrum. Most media outlets can’t do that. You have a unique opportunity to do so.
As for leadership, one thing that we need to do collectively as a society is figure out how to reform the media landscape. Because I don’t see our divisions being repaired. I don’t see misinformation and disinformation being curtailed until there is major reform in the news space.
Dunford: I’m going to speak on behalf of our colleagues and say, “Challenge accepted.”
We talked about your interest in presidential character. Will that be the subject of your new book?
Updegrove: Yes. It’s called Make Your Mark: Lessons in Character From Seven Presidents. And it’s Gerald Ford through Barack Obama and the character traits that imbue their legacies.
It is character that makes the difference in the presidency, which Franklin Roosevelt called preeminently a place of moral leadership. We can only hope that, given the great mandate that Donald Trump has received, he will exhibit character that leads us in the right direction. But we can all help, too.
The character of our leaders makes a profound difference, but the thing that guides us as a nation is the people. If you look at great progressive moments that moved us forward, it was because of social movements.
This country was founded on a social movement, right? It’s a bunch of guys standing together saying, “We need a new way forward. We should establish our own nation based on different principles than the tyrannical leadership we were receiving from England.” I talked about women’s suffrage, which took 72 years to come to fruition. The abolition movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the movement for gay and lesbian rights. Who would have thought that we would have gotten gay marriage 10 years ago, and now we would be talking about transgender rights, which wasn’t even on the radar?
The election of Donald Trump is largely around the MAGA movement by people who felt alienated and that they weren’t being heard. Now they have been heard. We have seen what that movement can do. If we believe our country isn’t going in the right direction, the thing that will change it is us, waging a social movement that politicians and lawmakers pay attention to and guide our country in a different direction.
We have that power, and it’s up to us to determine how we use it.
Presented on APT by Austin PBS, the first season of Live From the LBJ Library is carried by public TV stations reaching 84% of television households, according to Jennifer Fisher, APT director of marketing. A second season is planned for national release in mid-2025.