our country so you re saying our country i think what happened was so we thought we were okay as a democracy. and this is pre-trump. we had our ills and pains and aches and we had certain things, but we thought we were okay. what donald trump, his election and the aftermath and january 6th and i believe also covid and how we how it s been politicized has shown our democracy is not healthy. it was not healthy when it led to trump. it has not been healthy through trump. and i my fear is all of the prescriptions are like giving people tylenol or advil to relieve their headache or relieve their fever and we are not dealing with the fundamental problem, and the fundamental problem which led us to here and in my view endangers our democracy is, in my view, threefold. first, there is a huge segment of the population that has been lied to and now is propagandized
through cable networks and radio and all of that. we have a segment of the population that no longer shares a common set of facts with us. a democracy can t survive with that. the second part of that is that now we have people that are on cable and people that are exacerbating people s fear and hate and grievance. that then leads to this, one, a rise of white nationalism or a seeding of what already existed here. it stunt allow us to get to the common good if we no longer shares value with our neighbor or care for our neighbor. we don t have a common set of facts. the gray grievances have been done gave rise to a lack of the common good which we arrive at donald trump. to me donald trump isn t the singular cause of this. donald trump is a reflection of the sickness of our democracy. and until we, you know, excise the tumors or understand there are some fundamental problems in our democracy that need to be fixed, we are going to keep repeating this and repeating this and repeating this.
congress, state republicans are remaining hard at work rewriting voting laws to that very point. house speaker nancy pelosi has this warning for all americans. what the republicans are doing across the country is really a legislative continuation of what they did on january 6th, which is to undermine our democracy, to undermine the integrity of our elections, to undermine the voting power, which is the essence of a democracy. so we have to do that. there is no more important bill. welcome back to the program. michael steele, former mayor chan of the republican national committee, former lieutenant governor of maryland and host of the michael steele podcast. matthew dowd, former george w. bush strategist. michael, here s what s scary. what republicans are doing is unjust and it s un-american.
but i don t think anyone should hold their breath for that and declare it a failure if that s not the outcome. the white house has a legislative agenda ahead of them. voting rights is the whole ball of wax and then there is this january 6th investigation. how much focus are they putting on that? on january 6th as you saw on the anniversary, president biden for the first time really leaning in and talking about january 6th, talking about his predecessor without saying his name, painting him as dangerous for democracy. something that aides talked about, how do we how much does president biden lean in, because for months you have seen democrats, progressives, activists, historians wanting the president to do so, really call out what happened on january 6th and more specifically tie that to president trump and then tie that to voting rights. so that is what the white house knows that it can do, right. use the bully pulpit to raise awareness, to talk about these things as they see it,
georgia matter, or should he be camped out in joe manchin s driveway and outside kyrsten sinema s apartment? well, you have mixed attitudes on this, right. you have some activists in georgia and elsewhere who are saying they are frustrated with the president and saying they are deliberately not going to go to this speech. they say at this point, a year in, someone who ran on democracy, someone who made promises about voting rights, we need to see more than a speech. unless you are going to tell us exactly how these two pieces of legislation get through congress, we don t want to hear it. the time for talking is over. the flip side is eugene was saying, there is a lot of activists who think simply going to a state where people voting for incredibly important for biden and then democrats going to a state that then has some very restrictive voting laws, you know, going even