Ben Rhodes

An American Reckoning | Ben Rhodes Robert McNamara’s failure to reckon with the exceptionalism that led the United States into the Vietnam War contributed to fifty years of foreign policy failures. It can help us understand the crisis ...

On McNamara, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Gaza, and finally Trump. "Once you allow yourself to play by a set of rules that’s different from everyone else’s, the rules themselves are made brittle and ultimately break." www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

On the Epstein Files and Power Consider the picture of a smiling man next to a girl with her face blacked out, or the dashed off email with poor punctuation referencing a victim of human trafficking with a life in front of her like...

"MAGA die-hards have deceived themselves for so long that Trump was somehow one of them when he has always been more comfortable with the likes of Jeffrey Epstein than the vast majority of his own voters." benrhodes1.substack.com/p/on-the-eps...

On the Epstein Files and Power Consider the picture of a smiling man next to a girl with her face blacked out, or the dashed off email with poor punctuation referencing a victim of human trafficking with a life in front of her like...

"I was struck by how much the Epstein files resemble an autopsy for what’s gone wrong in the 21st century." open.substack.com/pub/benrhode...

Why Trump is getting more comfortable with war Why is Donald Trump getting more comfortable with war?

"For Trump, there is just a group of people – some in uniform – who stand when he enters the Situation Room, and a different group of sycophants who will tell him in the Oval Office that whatever decision he made was the right one" substack.com/home/post/p-...

Why Trump is getting more comfortable with war Why is Donald Trump getting more comfortable with war?

Why Trump is getting more comfortable with war
open.substack.com/pub/benrhode...

Opinion | The Rot Goes Deeper Than ICE

"Yes, Americans want a secure border. But most of us are also tired of war, wary of an intrusive militarized government, welcoming of immigrants, and protective of our core freedoms." www.nytimes.com/2026/01/30/o...

Opinion | The Rot Goes Deeper Than ICE

"The war on terror has become a war against ourselves. That forever war must come to an end. Enough with the military gear. Enough with the mass surveillance. Enough with the constant fear of an ever-shifting Other." www.nytimes.com/2026/01/30/o...

Living Under Lies What if there was no video?

"If you are 18 today, Donald Trump has dominated your experience of American political leadership for a decade. What have you absorbed, through cultural osmosis, because of that experience?" benrhodes1.substack.com/p/the-normal...

The Normalization of Lies What if there was no video?

"If you can’t trust a single word that the Department of Homeland Security says, how can we have any idea what is going on out of sight?" benrhodes1.substack.com/p/the-normal...

Notes on the Stories We Tell These are disorienting times. It is harder to understand the story we are living through, as individuals or a collective.

Starting a new substack: "We can watch a man get killed by federal agents in Minneapolis and then hear him besmirched as a terrorist or assassin despite what we saw with our own eyes. It makes you feel powerless, which it is intended to do." open.substack.com/pub/benrhode...

All We Say by Ben Rhodes: 9780593595121 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books What does it mean to be American? Who gets to decide? This sweeping history of the United States told through fifteen speeches relives the battle over American identity, from a New York Times bestsell...

19. I hope you’ll pre-order this book, and look forward to sharing more stories and ideas in the months to come: www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/717294...

18. The title comes from MLK’s speech the night before he died: “All we say to America is be true to what you said on paper.” To close that gap, we must understand our past and tell a different story for the future.

17. JD Vance recently argued that America is not rooted in a creed from the Declaration of Independence – that all men are created equal. This book takes that argument seriously, while opposing it: America is the effort to close the gap between who we are and who we say we are.

16. When we lack a shared national identity, we need storytelling that reimagines what binds us together. – that kind of storytelling has too often been missing in the movements in opposition to Trump and what he represents.

15. We are surrounded by forces designed to make us feel like we lack control—an algorithm that shapes what we see, an oligarchy that controls wealth and power, a world untethered from notions of order. The existence of truth itself is contested.

14. It is no coincidence that Trump came to dominate our politics just as our attention spans and experience of a shared reality was shattered by the Internet and social media.

13. Like other authoritarians, Trump’s emergence depended on his ability to frighten and embolden a crowd. Yet it also depended upon the breakdown of our capacity to talk to one another.

12. Trump is both an aberration and a very American product: neither he nor his presidency is possible in any other country. Nor is the nature of the opposition he faces. The battle today is so intense because it is about the highest of stakes: what this country is and will be.

11. We relive iconic moments: Lincoln’s second inaugural, FDR’s Four Freedoms, King’s dream. We meet forgotten American characters: the Seneca orator, the lonely abolitionist, the traveling suffragette, the fire-breathing populist. We reexamine the dizzying journey from Reagan to Obama to Trump.

10. The book begins with Franklin, who warned at the Constitutional convention that the new government, “can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other.” The book ends with Trump.

9. The alchemy of democracy is the interplay between movements and power. Each speech in this book exists in this space, emerging out of a movement— for racial or gender equality; for states’ rights or white supremacy; for populism or top-down government; for immigration or nativism

8. This is not an anthology – in each chapter, we meet a speaker, situating them in the sweep of American history, their own story, and the movement they represented. Where did their words come from, why did they matter, and where did they lead us?

7. Speeches have been the venue where this battle is waged. They resonate most when they capture the individual authenticity of a speaker, the unseen power of a movement, and the distributive media of the times. American history is unthinkable without them.

6. On the other, those who see American exceptionalism rooted in a bottom-up, disruptive, and at times revolutionary effort to forge a just and equal society on Earth; an effort that depends upon self-criticism.

5. On the one hand, there is a story that views the nation as inherently right: a promised land claimed by a particular people with a particular heritage and claim to power – a story Trump has made his own.

4. For 250 years, there have always been essentially two opposing stories about being American; two different notions of American exceptionalism that have remained in uneasy coexistence and occasional conflict

3. This argument is rooted in compromises embedded in our founding, when a group of men with different views and interests agreed to disagree about things as important as slavery and the distribution of power. Compromise made the United States possible. It also set in motion all the debates to come.

2. Through 15 speeches, I tell the story of how Americans have fought a battle over American identity itself: What does it mean to be American? And who gets to decide?

All We Say by Ben Rhodes: 9780593595121 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books What does it mean to be American? Who gets to decide? This sweeping history of the United States told through fifteen speeches relives the battle over American identity, from a New York Times bestsell...

1. How did we get here? What is the argument that Americans have had since our founding? I set out to answer those questions by writing my new book out this May, available for pre-order: www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/717294...

Trump trying to conquer a foreign country. ICE killing someone and lying about it. We're not even a year into this Trump term and we're already here.