Ladies and gentlemen, can I please have your attention.

Can you digger?

Meetings your listeners.

This is Jonah Goldberg, host of the Remnant podcast, brought to you by the dispatch and dispatch media.

Another flagrant example of our counter programming here, although we are going to talk about

politics just politics from a very long time ago. We have Lindsay Trevinsky, whose new book

Making the Presidency, John Adams, and the precedents that forged the Republic is out. I have lots and lots of friends who love this book.

Lindsay is a presidential historian and the executive director of the George Washington

Presidential Library, which I hear Washington raised an enormous amount of money to put up.

She's the author of the award-winning books, The Cabinet, George Washington,

and the creation of an American institution, and making the presidency, this book that we're going to be talking about now, and all sorts of other stuff, because she's one of those people, one of those overachievers.

Lindsay, Trevinsky, Professor Trevinsky, welcome to The Remnant.

Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

So as tradition holds, first question for you is,

what's your book about? The book is about two things. The first thing is what does it take for the presidency

to survive after Washington? And that was a major question at the time because he was of such

unparalleled status and stature that his decisions were compared to any

other president largely unchecked or there was a lack of pushback. And so there were real

questions about whether or not the powers, and they were considered enormous powers at the time

could be entrusted to anyone else, whether the office would work with anyone else, and whether the precedents he established would continue. And so John Adams,

knowing that whoever came next was going to have a terrible time because they were going to

fail spectacularly to live up to those sort of lofty expectations and ideals of Washington,

...