Ben Rhodes, former deputy national security advisor to President Obama and one of the most consequential speechwriters of the modern era, sat down with MeidasTouch co-founder Ben Meiselas to cover the sweeping damage he sees Trump inflicting on American power — and what a future Democratic president will need to do to reverse it.
Rhodes is out with a new book, All We Say: The Battle for American Identity, A History in 15 Speeches. The conversation touched on the book’s themes throughout, and the two dove headfirst into the geopolitical fire burning in real time amid Trump’s war in the Middle East.
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Meiselas opened by framing what he sees as the defining contradiction of Trump’s foreign policy — attacking allies while embracing adversaries. Rhodes explained that Trump feels most at home in what he called “the autocrat club.” Vladimir Putin wants to destroy the U.S.-led international order. Xi Jinping wants to replace it with something China dominates. And Trump, whether wittingly or not, is accelerating both projects simultaneously. Every institution he undermines, every alliance he destabilizes, advances that agenda.
“America is kind of the rogue nation in the world,” Rhodes said, describing how Gulf Arab allies who once counted on U.S. security guarantees are now reassessing their relationships after watching American forces fail to defend them during the Iran conflict. Nations shopping for a stable partner, he argued, are increasingly finding China — not the United States — to be the more predictable option. The terms may be harder, but they don’t change based on whoever won the last election.
Rhodes also pushed back on the assumption that the full costs of the Iran war have been disclosed. He said sources across the Middle East have described significant damage to U.S. bases, facilities, and embassies that the Pentagon has not been forthcoming about — Munitions drawn down from Asia, leaving South Korea more exposed, and fundamental questions raised about whether billion-dollar defense systems are suited for a world where Iranian drones built cheaply can strike American assets and a speedboat can effectively close the Strait of Hormuz.
The longer-term stakes Rhodes raised were even more pointed. If Gulf nations begin hedging toward China, and if dollar-denominated oil trades start shifting, the U.S. loses more than just influence, which is bad enough on its own. It loses the financial architecture that allows it to carry its debt load and sustain its standard of living. Most Americans, he said, don’t fully grasp how much of their quality of life depends on the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency.
Meiselas brought up a pattern that both he and Rhodes constantly grapple with. Democratic presidents inherit catastrophes, spend their terms cleaning them up, and then get blamed when the cleanup is imperfect, while the party that created the mess repositions itself for the next election cycle. Sound familiar? Rhodes said that Obama and Biden both made a version of the same mistake. They chose to look forward rather than hold the previous administration accountable, took ownership of the handoff, and left voters without a clear story about who broke things in the first place.
His prescription for whoever comes next is blunt. Don’t come in promising a return to normal. Come in like FDR. Rhodes pointed to Franklin Roosevelt’s response to the Great Depression as the model. Fast, large, transformative, unapologetic. The next Democratic president, he argued, needs to treat the situation as the emergency it will be. Expose the corruption, uproot any entrenched MAGA infrastructure inside the federal government, pursue a reform agenda ambitious enough to match the Gilded Age progressives who delivered the direct election of senators and women’s suffrage, and reengage the world not as a security guarantor for hire but as a nation with a genuine purpose.
On that last point, Rhodes returned to the core argument of his book. The speeches he found most consequential throughout American history, FDR’s Four Freedoms address, Kennedy’s civil rights framing, King’s moral vision, Obama’s 2004 convention speech, weren’t primarily policy documents. They were stories about what America is and who it’s for. FDR’s Four Freedoms didn’t just make the case for opposing fascism; they became the foundation of the entire post-World War Two international order, threading into the UN charter and the Declaration of Human Rights. That kind of storytelling, Rhodes said, is precisely what’s missing from Democratic politics right now.
When Meiselas asked him what a 2028 candidate needs to sound like, Rhodes pointed to three figures he sees doing something right. Jon Ossoff, he said, is connecting systemic corruption not just to abstract democratic values but to kitchen-table outcomes, like high prices, inaccessible healthcare, job insecurity. James Talarico in Texas is speaking from an authentic place of personal faith and moral obligation in a way that feels genuinely his own. And AOC is demonstrating that anger and joy aren’t mutually exclusive. That you can be furious about oligarchy and inequality while making people want to show up.
The 2008 Obama campaign, Rhodes said, was the most joyful political experience he’d been part of. He worries Democrats have spent the Trump era so consumed by appropriate alarm that they’ve forgotten how to make people want to be part of something. The ingredients for what’s needed, he concluded, are all visible — coherence, authentic values, and fearless joy. The question is whether someone can pull them together at the scale the moment demands.
Ben Rhodes’ book, All We Say: The Battle for American Identity, A History in 15 Speeches, is available now.
