From WNYC, I'm Brian Laird. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Monday, June 8th.

Joining us now is Ben Rhodes. You may know him as a former deputy national security advisor and speechwriter for President Barack Obama.

He wrote a lot of Obama's most well-known speeches or co-host, a pod save the world,

or as a New York Times bestselling author and a New York Times contributor.

He is out with a new book, All We Say, The Battle for American Identity, A History in 15 Speeches, which traces

the 250-year argument over what it means to be American through 15 pivotal speeches. It starts

with Benjamin Franklin at the Constitutional Convention and goes all the way to President Donald

Trump's second inaugural address last year.

And with these speeches, he argues that there are actually two competing stories of American exceptionalism.

And they have always coexisted, but in tension with each other.

One story is rooted in a particular identity, maybe call it white, Christian, native-born, and the other

is rooted in a universal idea of equality drawn from the Declaration of Independence. So Ben Roach

joins us now. Hey, thanks for coming on. Congratulations on the book. Welcome back to WNYC.

Thanks, Brian. It's so good to talk to you. You wanted to say briefly first,

since you're best known probably as a foreign policy expert, why a book of speeches from history

about American identity? Well, my last book was about the rise of authoritarianism. And I looked

at Putin. I looked at Trump, I looked at

Viktor Orban in Hungary, Xi Jinping. And what I found in trying to understand what had happened

to global politics today is how central history was to those types of leaders. Because essentially,

what a strongman does is make all of history a prequel to their assent, their leadership.

And I also kind of felt that Trump and Obama, in addition to kind of being on opposite sides

of the current political spectrum, embodied these two different stories.

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