I'm Ben Sawyer and this is the road to now. Today on the show, Bob talks to

UNC History Department professor Molly Worthen about her new book, Spellbound, how charisma-shaped

American history from the Puritans to Donald Trump, which just dropped from Penguin

Random House

Press. Hope you enjoy it. And as always, thanks to the patrons, you guys keep us going. Enjoy the show.

Molly Worth and welcome to The Road to Now. Thanks for having me. We've been excited to have you

about your new book since you are our guest at a live

Roads Now recording in Carborough, North Carolina in early 2020, I believe it was just

months before the pandemic. We had you, Doug High and Rufus Edmondston. We were talking

about political charisma. That's right. That was one ofston. We were talking about political charisma.

That's right.

That was one of my first try at talking about this stuff.

And here we are five years later.

And Spellbound, how charisma shaped American history from the Puritans to Donald Trump.

Your new book has just come out.

We're excited to talk about it. Okay, so your last book was about evangelicals. How do we go from evangelicals to the history of American charisma? How do we get there?

Yeah, I was looking for a project that would help me get into the ways in which religion and politics are intertwined.

And I was responding, I think, to two problems.

One more immediate, one kind of big picture.

The immediate problem was, this is 2015, 2016, and I guess like everybody, I was looking at the American political landscape

and was really struck by the incredibly polarized reactions that Donald Trump provoked.

That there's this huge swath of the country for whom he was this incredibly compelling figure and, of course, remains very compelling. And of course, for a huge

...