Well, hello from Washington. I'm Chuck Todd, and this is the Chuck Toddcast. President Trump

officially returned to the Oval Office this week. He's signed a blitz of executive order policy actions all within the first couple of days of his new team, new term, and he issued a sweeping pardon for the January 6th defendants.

Joe Biden made pardons of his own.

On his way out the White House door, he preemptively pardoned many members of his family,

as well as other figures he fears could become the target of Trump's hire.

Of course, the decision to pardon does only create the suspicion that maybe they did something wrong, which may have defeated the very purpose of the pardons themselves.

Tell me, break down the significance of this transfer of power, what it means historically, and joined by one of the great presidential historians out there.

Dr. Douglas Brinkley, he's a professor in humanities at Rice University and, of course, a very

recognizable presidential historian. Before we get started, remember to please stick around until

the end to hear my answer to one of your listener questions. It's a good one today. It's about

party switchers. Very easy to submit yours. Just email the chuck

Toddcast at gmail.com. So before we get to Doug, I want to get it at something that's sort of the larger,

you know, I think there's a lot of what are the, what is the few, the sort of short term future

of political leadership in America in the Trump era.

You know, there's a lot of political fallout from the election of Trump for a second time,

for the Democratic Party, for the Republican Party.

There's certainly we're in the middle of this realignment.

I think that is very real.

I think it's a realignment on class that

Democrats have to fight, fight back on, because if we do realign solely on class, the Democrats

are going to be on the short end of the electoral stick. So how they figure out if they can create a sort of a multi, a socio, a sort of multi-socioeconomic

party is going to be an interesting challenge. But the real question is if you're a pragmatic voter,

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