Hi everyone, it's Evanosnos. Susan and Jane and I are nearing the end of a summer break,

and we wanted to bring back an episode of ours from earlier this year that feels especially relevant now.

This spring, Jeffrey Rosen from the National Constitution Center stopped by to talk to us about the

steps that the nation's founders took to try to make our constitutional system tyrant proof,

or as close as they could get to it. Given everything that's happened recently in the past few

weeks, with the National Guard being deployed here in Washington, D.C., and President

Trump's rhetoric targeting judges and lawyers and the law itself, we thought it would be an

important moment to revisit this episode. The Washington Roundtable will return with a new episode

on September 5th, and in the meantime, you can listen to some excellent conversations from our colleagues

Tyler Foggett and David Remnick on Mondays and Wednesdays. And we'll see you after Labor Day.

Welcome to the political scene, a weekly discussion about the big questions in American politics.

I'm Susan Glasser and I'm joined by my colleagues Jane Mayer and Evan Osnus.

Hey, Susan.

Good morning to you both.

All right, great to be with you.

Just another fun week in Washington.

There's been a sort of parlor game of sorts, right, that we've been playing.

What period in disruptive history does this most resemble in the early days of Trump 1.0?

We were reading about America in the 1930s and early 1940s

and the original America First Movement. Then I remember around the 2020 election in January 6th,

we were all frantically looking at the comparisons to the run-up of the Civil War. Will we know it when it happens?

What about Reconstruction? This time, I've been asking and asking and wondering, what was it like

...