Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener. Later in the show: The Americans who fought in World War II have been called “the greatest generation,” but historian David Nasaw argues that it’s more appropriate to regard them as “the wounded generation.” He’ll explain, later in the show. But first: House Republicans defied Trump on releasing the Epstein files, and he conceded defeat. John Nichols has our analysis – in a minute.
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We’re still thinking about the House vote on Tuesday to release the Epstein files. It was almost unanimous – after nearly a year of Trump doing everything he could to prevent that vote. For comment and analysis, we turn to John Nichols. Of course, he’s executive editor of The Nation. John, welcome back,
John Nichols: Jon, it’s great to be with you. Who would’ve thought that we would be devoting our time to talking about this?
JW: [LAUGHTER] Trump caved on Sunday night after learning that more than a hundred Republican House members were prepared to vote against him and in favor of releasing the files. Up to that point, House Republicans had done pretty much everything Trump wanted since he took office last January. I’ve been thinking about what changed over the weekend to bring about this dramatic defeat of Trump, not at the hands of the Democrats, but at the hands of the House Republicans.
I think it began in the Senate when those eight Democrats joined Republicans and voted to end the government shutdown. Meanwhile, in the House, speaker Mike Johnson had been refusing to convene the House for more than a month to avoid taking up the Epstein files. But now the House had to convene — to vote for the temporary budget that the Senate was sending them. And once they came back to work, a couple of Republicans joined Democrats in signing that discharge petition to force a vote on releasing the Epstein files, and a lot more Republicans said they would vote yes. So what began as a Democratic surrender to Trump on the shutdown ended up as a Democratic triumph pushing house Republicans to defy their president on the Epstein files. Is this the way you see it? Am I missing something here?
JN: Well, you’re a very cynical man, Jon. Obviously you’re seeing all these calculations and things going on, although I kind of had the same sense you had. But the one place where I would disagree with you is that you said, well, Trump found out that as many as a hundred Republicans were going to vote against him. Obviously, that bothered him — because Donald Trump wants to lead the parade, and if he sees the parade going another direction, what does Donald Trump do? He runs as fast as he can to get in front of it.
But I don’t think it was a hundred Republicans. I think it was one. I think it was Marjorie Taylor Greene, doing those interviews. She didn’t blink, and that’s the interesting thing. He called her a traitor. He basically read her out of the party. And she went right back on and kept doing more of those interviews, more of those statements. After Trump, she may well be the most effective communicator in the Republican party, and she was going against him. He can have all these other Republicans saying things. I think when he saw her going repeatedly on TV being absolutely unblinking in her stance on the Epstein files, that, I think he felt, ‘wow, I’ve got a problem.’ When Donald Trump has a problem, he tries to get rid of it. He initially tried to get rid of it by reading Green out of the party. When that didn’t work, he ran to the front of the parade.
JW: I have one simple question about these events: those documents, the Epstein files, are under Trump’s control in the Justice Department. He could himself order them released and avoid this whole vote. Isn’t it worse for Trump to have every Republican in the House voting? The way to get in front of the parade is to get in front of the parade, and release the documents, it seems to me.
JN: The question becomes, will these documents be released? You know what I’m saying?
JW: Yeah.
JN: If indeed it becomes a PR problem, right? That you’ve got Marjorie Taylor Green doing what she’s doing, got other Republicans saying, we’re going to break with the guy, it’s clear you’re going to lose a vote. Is it better to say, ‘yeah, go ahead, vote. If you vote unanimously to release him, that’s fine by me. I’m all good with that.’ Is it better to have said that very publicly and then have perhaps, and I don’t know if this will happen, but perhaps the Senate run into some conundrums in this regard, have perhaps the Attorney General find challenges with releasing everything, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
I find myself in a very weird position here, Jon, of quoting Marjorie Taylor Greene. She said today at a press conference where she appeared with many of the people we should be talking about the very courageous young women who kept this issue on the front burner. She said, ‘this isn’t the end. This is just the beginning.’ I think there’s still a lot of wrangling on this. I suspect Donald Trump knows there’s going to be a lot of wrangling and felt that this was a good way to get as far ahead of it as he could, and yet there still may be quite a bit of struggle as regards to what comes out. And by the way, this is a challenge for him. It’s also a challenge for some Democrats, so there’s a lot of political maneuvering that might yet be seen on this.
JW: Yeah. I was fascinated to see in The Washington Post, they quoted an unnamed White House official who said, ‘Trump will survive this storm,’ and they compared it to quote his ‘being shot in an assassination attempt.’ I thought, wow, wow. Is the House vote on releasing the Epstein files really like an assassination attempt? They think this, some people over there at least think this is really big.
JN: Well, the Trump White House, the president and others, have tried very, very hard not to have this happen, right?
JW: Yeah.
JN: They literally, historians are going to look at this period in time, and they’re going to say, ‘you’re kidding me,’ right? US House of Representatives went on hiatus for months in very, very critical times in the world apparently, because you didn’t want to seat some newly elected member of the house from Arizona who would tip the balance on the Epstein file debate. That’s bizarre.
Donald Trump, since about mid-October, has had a really lousy time of it politically. The No King’s demonstrations were huge. They’re under covered, under understood by much of our media. But the fact is that when people in small towns and small cities and urban areas across this country come out in the millions to protest against the sitting president, that’s not good. And then when you have a series of elections as you did on November 4th across the country in urban, rural, north, south, east, west, and every place, the Republican Party loses everything? That’s not good. And when you’ve been working to keep one issue from arising and taking center stage for a very, very long time, and it arises, takes center stage and is literally, breathlessly covered by all the networks, that’s not good.
As Barbara Boxer, the former senator from California said, I think we will see this as the point at which the threads started to come apart. It’s not about the whole of politics. It’s about Trump’s control over the Republican party.
JW: Yeah. Let me point to a couple of other cases that add to that picture. The Senate Republicans also, in addition to the House Republicans defying him on the files, the Senate Republicans on the budget refused repeatedly to do what he was telling them to do, which was abolished the filibuster. So you can just vote for the budget. Then there would be a Republican majority and Trump would hope they would do whatever he wanted them to do. The Senate Republicans refused to do what Trump told them repeatedly and in public to do, and instead recruited eight Democrats.
And in the state legislatures, there’ve been some fascinating developments that haven’t gotten as much attention–over Trump’s demands that they continue to gerrymander and create more Republican House seats so the Republicans won’t lose control of the House next year. Texas, of course, created five, Missouri created one more Republican seat, North Carolina apparently this week may create one new red district.
But Indiana–this to me is mind boggling—Indiana’s Republican-dominated state legislature rejected Trump’s demand and has refused to go into a special session to redistrict the state. Trump said they could create two new Republican districts, abolishing every Democratic seat in the state of Indiana. This was despite JD Vance himself visiting the state twice to pressure the Republican legislators to do this, and Trump himself calling on the phone and twisting arms that way.
Indiana has been a deeply red state our whole lifetime here. The Republicans have a super-majority in the Indiana legislature. What is going on in Indiana? Can you explain this?
JN: I can explain it all, Jon. I hope I can just keep on top of all the elements of your question. First and foremost, if you’re trying to convince Indiana to do anything, don’t send a guy from Ohio. So the fact that JD Vance failed to convince Indianans of anything is not surprising at all. That’s number one. Number two, the Senate on the filibuster. At what point do senators decide that they like the filibuster? It’s on the day when they think they may not be forever in charge. Earlier this year, looked at a circumstance where they thought they were going to just hold the Senate, maybe even expand their majority. They’re now looking at a much more vulnerable situation. They’re looking at polls from places like Alaska where Democrats are actually showing viability from Ohio where Democrats, Sharrod Brown is narrowly ahead, at least in some polling where from Maine, where you’re starting to see evidence that Susan Collins could be beaten from North Carolina where you’ve got at least a decent chance that a very good chance, I would say.
JW:A very good chance, I would say.
JN: So what are we talking about here? We’re actually talking about suddenly Republican senators are thinking, man, we could end up in a situation where we might like the filibuster. So that’s number two.
But number three, this is the most fascinating thing of all, because you bring up the gerrymandering district line fight, and Trump thought that was just a sure route. You’re going to come through and you’re going to make all these states redraw and everything’s going to turn out fine. There are now analyses that suggest that with the California move with potential moves in Maryland and a couple other states, and with the fact that in Ohio and in I believe Missouri, you can petition onto the ballot a challenge to redraws.
JW: Yes. In Missouri, you are right. In Missouri, the Democrats are campaigning right now to qualify –they have almost enough signatures to qualify a referendum that will reverse the state legislature’s creating of an additional Republican district.
JN: So you got all these elements, right? And then you have the element that in some of these redraws, even in Texas, they made Republican seats more vulnerable, and if there is a big enough shift, there could be some political challenges there. What it all adds up to is, smart analysts are now saying, that everything Trump has done all of this might yield a seat or so for the Republicans, not some big shift. And if that is the case, Jon, then what we’re really looking at is a situation where if Democrats do well in 2026, all of these efforts by Donald Trump, all these efforts by Donald Trump to shake it up will not have worked.
That circles us around to the beginning of our conversation because we’re really looking at is a situation where Republicans have to start asking themselves, ‘how closely do I want to be aligned with Donald Trump?’ And that’s where politics shifts.
JW: I’ve studied up on one other case in some ways even more amazing than Indiana. Florida is a place where Ron DeSantis wants the state legislature–following Trump’s demands–to gerrymander and create, they say, between two and four more Republican districts. The Republican state legislature is very unwilling right now to meet to do this. A poll in September found that only 36% of Florida Republican voters support redistricting now, and the Republican leaders are very worried after what happened in Virginia in New Jersey, that indeed they may lose a lot of young people, women and Latinos to the Democrats, especially in southern Florida, even Florida.
JN: Well, polling data shows that Trump’s numbers among Latinos started to go way down. So that’s a very significant thing. Number two, do you know what people do in Florida? Move.
JW: They move.
JN: They physically move from one place to another. They do, a lot, and new people move in and things like that. So gerrymandering in Florida is different than in other states. You can do it. There’s no question you can do it, but it can also blow up on you. I’ve talked to a lot of Florida Democrats and Republicans, and they always understand it as somewhat of a more dangerous game in such a dynamic state as compared to states where the lines are pretty stable because people don’t move as much. Pennsylvania is a classic on that, and so end result is, I’m not surprised that there is resistance, and every time this happens, it’s met with a threat from Trump.
He says, ‘oh, I’m going to primary the state senate leader in Indiana.’ ‘I’m try and get this legislator knocked out in Florida.’ Maybe he can pull that off.
But at the end of the day, if that’s where Donald Trump is focused going into 2026, the Democrats might as well start to lay up the champagne, because if your opponent is obsessively just trying to punish the people that didn’t give him what he wanted to try and shore up a relatively shaky position anyway, if Democrats run on fundamental issues, as I think a lot of ’em did on November 4th, their potential becomes much greater. And so what we’re looking at now is in the history of this era, I think there’s a very good chance that there’s a chapter on the October, November, December of 2025 that suggests that this is where it shifted. This is where the pivot came, and that the potential, not the certainty by any means, these are such volatile times, but the potential for a real pushback and actually electoral accountability for Donald Trump became real.
JW: This is where the pushback became real. John Nichols, read him at thenation.com. John, thanks for talking with us today.
JN: Great honor to be with you, Jon. Thank you so much.
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Jon Wiener: The Americans who fought in World War II have been called “the greatest generation,” but historian David Nasaw thinks it’s more appropriate to regard them as “the wounded generation.” That’s the title of his new book about coming home after World War II. David is an award-winning biographer of Andrew Carnegie, Joseph Kennedy, and William Randolph Hearst, and his most recent book, The Last Million, is about Europe’s displaced persons after World War II. It was named the Best Book of the Year by NPR, Kirkus, History Today – it’s one of my favorites, we talked about it here. He also writes for The New York Times and The Nation. Last time he was here, we talked about Elon Musk. David, welcome back.
David Nasaw: Thank you. Good to be here.
JW: Your book is about coming home after World War II, but the first 150 pages are about the war itself and about waiting to be demobilized. There was a lot of waiting.
DN: Yeah, there was 16.4 million servicemen and women fought in World War II. At the end of the war, there were more than 12 million, 3 quarters of them overseas. It takes a lot of ships, a lot of the logistics to get ’em back to the United States, so it took a long time to get ’em back.
One of my favorite parts of my research was about the mothers’ clubs — because the wives of the servicemen, the mothers of the servicemen’s children, and the mothers of the servicemen, were outraged at the delay. And they formed clubs all over the country, and they petitioned and marched in front of their congressman’s office. They went to Washington. They waylaid Eisenhower, who was then chief of staff as he was giving, added a congressional investigation, and they demanded that the men come home right away in one of the rare instances where public opinion and protests work.
Truman, who wanted a big army of occupation immediately after the war had to pull back. And the War Department decided that they couldn’t withstand public opinion, and they withdrew more soldiers faster from Europe and from the Pacific than they wanted to.
JW: You talked about the wives and the mothers wanting their boys home fast. But you also show there was a certain amount of apprehension on the home front about the return of husbands and sons and boyfriends.
DN: Mixed with the jubilation that the war was over that we had won, that the guys were coming home was this foreboding that they had been taught to kill. They had been taught to celebrate violence. They had been in male only units for 1, 2, 3, 4 years. And the fears were that they were going to bring the war home with them, and they were going to bring the violence home with them, and they were going to bring this macho warrior ethos and behaviors back with them.
JW: And of course, we know that some, maybe many did “bring the war home with them.” It’s what we now called PTSD, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. How was it defined and how was it treated after World War II?
DN: Literally millions, how many millions we don’t know, of servicemen and women came back, angry, depressed, anxious, filled with sudden rages that they couldn’t control, unable to sleep at night, flashbacks. They were told by the military and by the military medical establishment that this was some form of combat fatigue. Well, if you call something fatigue, then the treatment is rest and time, but it didn’t work that way. And these men, and again, and some women, including some donut dollies who had served refreshments just off the front line to men in Europe, they came back with this stress and disorder. What the VA and the military establishment said was, “look, if they don’t have any wounds on their bodies, we’ll do what we can. But you, their loved ones, their mothers, their wives, their girlfriends, you have to take care of these guys. It’s up to you to make them feel at home and to help them in the readjustment.”
JW: And for those who were, let’s say, severely suffering from combat fatigue, there were “medical treatments.”
DN: The VA tried to use the latest medical knowledge, techniques to treat these men. There were no drugs available at the time. There were no medications. So when rest didn’t help, the most severely depressed, the most severely anxious, the recourse was to electroshock therapy. Electroshock therapy 80 years later can help some people, but 80 years ago in the infancy of electroshock therapy, it didn’t. There were temporary alleviations of the pain and the suffering, but it didn’t last long and when the guys could not recover, the next step was what medical science at the time said was the last resort, but the one that worked, lobotomies, and thousands of servicemen were lobotomized.
JW: I think you should just explain what that is in case a few of our listeners don’t know.
DN: Lobotomy was to cut away part of the brain. In the beginning, it was done in surgery and soon afterwards, because the number of veterans who were prescribed lobotomies was too great to have a surgeon available, a new technique was discovered, and that was to insert a pointed scalpel into the right above the eyes and to scrape away part of the brain. The result was a numbing and a loss of speech, a loss of physical and mental ability. But the traumatized were permanently sedated, and that’s what lobotomy was supposed to do.
JW: To change keys here and look at the bright side, the achievements of the return home, of course, the GI Bill at the top of the list passed first in June, 1944. Historians teach it as kind of the creation of an American welfare state for veterans, notably free lifetime medical care by the Veterans Administration. The VA up to this point, had not provided free lifetime medical care. They treated war wounds. But now there was really what we have to call socialized medicine. The government ran the hospitals, the government hired the doctors, and if you were a vet, you could be treated. Of course, there was aggregation of VA hospitals. But what in addition to this lifetime medical care did the GI Bill include?
DN: The GI Bill was the most significant legislation that was passed in the 20th century. It created the most extensive social welfare system that the world had ever seen, greater than what was the beverage plan? What was going on in England greater than what had existed in Germany earlier. It was extraordinary, but it was for veterans, and it was written in such a way that it was for white male veterans only. White male veterans got special unemployment insurance for a year. They got college tuition for four years or tuition and living allowances to go to a vocational school for four years. They got mortgage guarantees. If you could get a mortgage from your local bank, it would be guaranteed by the federal government, which meant that the local bank was more than willing to give it to you. And the federal government said, put a cap on what the interest rate could be.
The GI bill created, and this is, I thought it was an exaggeration, but it’s not. It created a new middle class. It expanded the middle class. It was the first time in our history that individuals and families could jump a class from working class to middle class. And that included immigrants and the children of immigrants who had been left out of – or had to struggle to get into that middle class. And there were many who said that this would be the first step towards a social welfare program for all Americans. Roosevelt repeated himself over and over and over again. He had said, we’re all in this war. Children on the home front, women who go into the factories. This is a war fought not simply by the men in uniform, but by the whole country. And there was a movement to use the GI Bill as the first step towards a social welfare program. Never happened.
JW: There was one other limitation. You’ve already mentioned it. Black people were largely excluded from a lot of the benefits. Black military veterans could get medical treatment at VA hospitals, but they were segregated and suffered what is politely called “disparities in care and staffing.” But in some ways, it was the housing program that created the greatest wealth gap between white and Black veterans.
DN: Yeah, veterans, when they came back, thought that they were going to get mortgages. Well, they weren’t going to get mortgages. They were going to get mortgage guarantees. In order to get a guarantee, you had to get a mortgage. Where’d you get the mortgage? from your local bank. So you’re a Black veteran in Mississippi. When you go into your local bank and you say, “I want a mortgage to buy a house,” you’re not going to get it. If you’re a Black veteran in Newark or Minneapolis, the chances are you’re not going to get that mortgage. If you are a woman, a WAC, or a WAVE, or someone who had worked in the Red Cross, you’re not going to get a mortgage from your local bank. What the mortgage guarantees do from 19 – late forties through the fifties is that they provide the capital that is needed to buy private single-family homes.
And in the United States of America, outside the top 5%, most Americans, the greatest asset they have is their home. And what the federal government, what the VA did through the GI Bill, was to give white male veterans a home. And eventually that investment, that asset became so valuable that you could send your kids to college, that you could have savings, that you could buy a second car to put in your garage. The income and wealth disparities, gender and racial disparities that had begun to shrink during the World War and a little bit during the depression were exacerbated by these gifts given to the white veterans. And that disparity would last for generations to come.
JW: One of my favorite parts of your book was that the GI Bill, you write, led to a postwar renaissance in the American arts, because vets could go, to not just a college or vocational school, they could go to art school, they could study painting and music. And those who did–I mean, the list is mind-boggling: Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Ellsworth Kelly, Donald Judd, Cy Twombly, Noah Purifoy — here in LA. Noah Purifoy is a big hero. He founded the Watts Towers Art Center. Under the GI Bill, he went to Chouinard Art School, which eventually became Cal Arts.
And Harry Belafonte!
DN: And Walter Matthau, and Tony Curtis and Tony Bennett, Paul Newman, John Coltrane, Tito Puente, Dave Brubeck. What’s most remarkable is that a lot of the instructors in the art schools and the music schools and dance and in acting were German and Eastern European refugees from Hitler. American culture changed dramatically because of the GI Bill and the education and the instruction in their arts that the GIs received on returning from overseas places.
JW: One last thing: for those of us who are old, this is a book about our fathers. You dedicate your book to the memory of your father. How did this personal element affect your research and your writing and your thinking about this?
DN: My father returned from Eritrea. He was a 35-year-old lawyer when he was drafted, and the Army didn’t know what to do with him. He was a Lower East side and Brooklyn Jew. He started out as a driver. And when Colonel Hutter, who he drove for, was sent to North Africa, Colonel Hutter said, ‘you got to go to Officers Candidate School. This is ridiculous.’ He was shipped off to South Carolina. He became a second lieutenant in the Medical Corps, and the next thing he knows, he’s in Eritrea.
Imagine this guy goes from Brooklyn or Manhattan, to South Carolina, to Eritrea. Something happens in Eritrea. He’s sent there to dismantle a hospital because the American troops had moved on to Sicily after North Africa. He comes home with a medical discharge, full medical disability. And an alcoholic. He smokes three to four packs of Lucky Strikes a day, with a heart condition.
I tried to talk to him about the war, but like 95% of the children of World War II veterans that I talked to, my father didn’t want to talk about the war. So I didn’t know what happened. My father stopped drinking like other veterans, and he pulled himself together. But for the rest of his life, he never got a good night’s sleep without such strong pills that he had to take more pills to wake up in the morning. And that heart condition never got better. Whatever happened in Eritrea, he died at age 61.
And because I’m a historian, I could try to find out about my father’s experience by studying the generation that he belonged to. And every day I kick myself for not pushing harder to get my father to talk to me. And because he didn’t talk to me, I had to listen to the voices of a generation of veterans.
JW: David Nassau new book is The Wounded Generation: Coming Home After World War II. David, thanks for talking with us today.
DN: My pleasure. Thank you.
