It's Notes from America, I'm Kai Wright.

If you're like me, you probably still have a real emotional memory of those weird unsettling

months in which Joe Biden had won the 2020 election, and Donald Trump insisted he was not

going to leave office.

This was before the insurrection, but when it was clear, there was something really bad

coming.

I mean, there were administration officials, people like the Secretary of State and the

press secretary, publicly insisting that they were preparing for a second term.

And you just, you couldn't see a good end to this or end it all.

I had a conversation at the time with historian David Blight, who's done so much to develop

our modern understanding of the Confederacy and the years after the Civil War.

And the way in which the losers none the less won the war of the story of the history.

I was asking him about the parallels between the Confederacy and the Maga movement, and

he said this.

I really do believe the Trump presidency with all of its horrors and all of its lying and

all of its misadventures with policy has been essentially a TV show.

It's still a TV show, and when his press secretary gets up and says what she said, I mean,

we can't help laughing at that.

On the other hand, the test here is going to be, if there is a Trump loss cause, and there's

already one being fashioned in narrative and in stories and in conspiracy theories and

right wing media sources, but if there is to be a Trump loss cause, it has to be sustained

for what it already was, and that is essentially a television show, or maybe it'll be a radio

...