Welcome back to the Lincoln Project. I'm your host, Reed Galen. Today, I'm joined by

Stuart Stevens, Senior Advisor to the Lincoln Project and author of It Was All Alive.

Stuart, welcome back. Great to be here Reed, nice for asking me to

the party. So Stuart, it's hard to believe but this Friday, December 17th will be the

two-year anniversary of the founding of the Lincoln Project and it feels like much

longer than that. They probably feels much longer than that for everybody, given

where we were two years ago. So I want to talk about a little bit about like where

we were when all this got going, what we've seen and where we're headed. So just

to think about this, on December 17th, 2019, the general public at least the

United States had never heard the words coronavirus or COVID-19. And Donald

Trump had not yet had his first impeachment trial. If you think about that, that

wouldn't come until, you know, the following month in the first month of 2020.

And all of the things that have happened in this two years, politically,

economically, socially, it's hard to believe that we've jam-packed that much into

just 24 months. As you've seen it, you know, going back as much as you can to

sort of those gauzy days pre-COVID, like what's your sense of the arc of how

we've gotten to where we are? Well, look, I think that we're living in

days that are going to be looked back upon in the same way we look back on say,

you know, 1860 or the guns of August days before World War I. I for one believed

that the parallels between where we are and where Germany was in 1930s are

painfully accurate. I think what the Lincoln Project did, and I can say this

without any false modesty because I wasn't involved with it when you got started it,

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