voice-over: this is bbc news. we'll have the headlines for you at the top of the hour, which is straight after this programme. americast. americast, from bbc news. folks, it's time to take stock. it's been, to put it mildly, a busy few weeks. we're going to step back. we're going to look at the assassination attempt. we're going to look at biden dropping out. we're going to look at harris dropping in — very much — harris dropping in, and what happens next. but we're also going to look at it from an historical perspective because we've got an old friend, a colleague of mine, nick bryant, on. and nick is not only old, but he is also a genuine historian. he's written serious books about the american experience. so we are ready for an absolutely classic episode. and for that episode we have these. welcome to americast.

americast. americast, from bbc news. donald trump: there was blood pouring everywhere. _ and yet i had god on my side. joe biden: nothing can come in the way of saving our- democracy. so i've decided the best way forward is to pass the torch to a new generation. kamala harris: you think you just fell out of - a coconut tree? she laughs jd vance: we're effectively run in this countryl by a bunch of - childless cat ladies. alexandria ocasio-cortez: baby girl. marjorie taylor greene: ., , don't even play! jill biden: joe, you | did such a great job. you answered every question. hulk hogan: let trump-a-mania run wild, brother. _ hello. it isjustin in the worldwide headquarters of americast in london, england. and i'm the only one here. sarah's on holiday. marianne is making another podcast, as she always is. anthony has already done two this week, all available on bbc sounds of course, so i've achieved something of an ambition. i'm now able to sit here and say whatever i like,

although i'm doing so in the presence of nick bryant, former bbc washington and new york correspondent, who would be such a great podcaster if he had stayed on to do podcasting. but he's gone off to write important books instead, and he's on the line now. hello, nick. hey, justin, how are you? what do you think of the titles? i love them, and they capture this epic history that's just coming at us thick and fast. i mean, itjust doesn't seem to stop, does it? and itjust...and it just reminds me of 1968. i know we make that comparison quite often, but �*68 was a year thatjust saw mega news story after mega news story. it began with march, new hampshire primary. lbj faces this challenge from a senator from minnesota called eugene mccarthy. he gets 42% of the vote. that persuades robert kennedy tojump in the race. by the end of the month, lbj's withdrawn. april, martin luther king

is assassinated in memphis. june, robert f kennedy is assassinated in los angeles. we have the chicago convention. all this is played out against the backdrop of the vietnam war. and then, of course, at the end of the year, we get the election of richard nixon. an epic history, and it feels epic right now. it wasn't epic then, though, because they didn't have emergency podcasts, did they? there was no such thing as emergency podcasts, no! that didn't sort of crown it with its true sort of historical magnitude. but, yeah, nonetheless, it was mega history, and i just think we're getting that sort of similar sense now, justin. you just never know what's going to happen next this year. you've written this book, the forever war: america's unending conflict with itself, which i haven't read, i should confess up front. i read and loved your last book, as will the whole world, and everyone will be aware of that book — whose title actually escapes me. but anyway, i'm sure you can come up with it. but the serious point is that these historical

allusions are important because there is something about — although we keep using the word unprecedented — that there is a kind of warp and weft of american history, isn't there, into which everything that we're now seeing fits. well, what i argue in my book, the forever war: america's unending conflict with itself, is that donald trump is as much a product of american history as lyndonjohnson, or abraham lincoln, or fdr, orjack kennedy, or ronald reagan, orjoe biden or barack obama. it's just the history that tends to get forgotten. it's the history that tends to get misremembered, and it's the history that often is buried and deliberately concealed, and it's a history of a demagogic tradition. you mentioned something else. you mentioned the assassinations of �*68 and this kind of terrible subtext of violence that there were...that there were in those. . . in those years.

and they went on into the �*70s, didn't they? mm, mm. there were attempts on ford as well... mm. ..and at least thoughts about attempts on nixon and the whole kind of...the undercurrent of domestic terrorism and... ..and all of that. just give us a sense of how american society deals with those things, but also how it comes out of them. political violence is a through line of american history. i mean, not many people remember, but the first speaker of the house of representatives survived an assassination attempt. andrew jackson, who was donald trump's great presidential hero and soulmate, this fiercely nationalistic, authoritarian populist in the 18305, he survived an assassination attempt. lincoln, garfield, mckinley, kennedy, all killed while in office. theodore roosevelt survived while he was campaigning. only the pages of his speech saved him. fdr, just before his inauguration. harry s truman, just opposite the white house. he survived an

assassination attempt. erm, you're right, gerald ford. two women within the space of a few weeks tried to kill him. and, of course, ronald reagan in 1981. erm, and often, justin, the violence is seen as legitimate. i think that's a key point to make about america, because of its kind of revolutionary ideology, because of the nature of how it came into existence, which was a war fought against the british. often that has had a kind of legitimising effect. and i was struck, justin, on january the sixth. so many of those insurrectionists stormed capitol hill chanting "1776". they regarded themselves as patriots rather than seditionists, acting in the spirit of the american revolution. yeah, that's a really interesting point, that, because i think that's one of those cultural things, isn't it, where when you just look at it, when you look at trump saying, erm,

these people are... ..i think he calls them hostages, doesn't he? and says he's going to pardon them. yeah. i mean, to british eyes, you just think on a whole... ..for a whole range of reasons, that's just utterly inexplicable, in a way. and yet you've put it exactly right, haven't you, that in the american experience there's a kind ofjust a roughness, actually, about american politics that ithink... mm. ..we get bamboozled by all the balloons, don't we, at conventions and think the whole thing's... yeah, right. ..kind of... it's just so seductive. exactly. it's all sort of jolly and people shouting and waving, but there is a real brutality as well. yeah. and at the end of the �*60s, which was a particularly tumultuous decade, you know, you had the assassination ofjfk, rfk, mlk. george rockwell was the head of the american nazi party, he was killed. malcolm x. lbj actually appointed a panel of scholars to try and investigate why it was that america was so very violent,

and racism was one of the reasons they came up with, lynchings, political violence against african americans had always been a big problem. there was a sense of vigilante justice that was meted out as america spread westward and native americans and mexicans were forced from their land. they also cited this idea of a sense of legitimate violence, which stemmed from the revolutionary era. and they also pointed out that america tends to forget all this stuff. and one of the reasons they erase it from their mind is because they have this sense that america is blessed, that america is the newjerusalem. it's that a positive sense of american exceptionalism blinds them to the negative aspects of american exceptionalism, and one of the big negative aspects of american exceptionalism is a level of political violence that we just don't see

in most other advanced nations. you have mentioned lyndon bainesjohnson quite a lot. we ought to focus a bit, then, on the last time that someone did step down — for it was him. let's listen actually to what he said right at the end of march 1968. with america's future under challenge, right here at home, with our hopes and the world's hopes for peace in the balance every day, i do not believe that i should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes, or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office, the presidency of your country. accordingly, i shall not seek and i will not accept the nomination of my

party for another term as your president. now, nick, a lot of people saying, oh, joe biden�*s done a similarthing, and it'sjust such a selfless act, and he's put country before party and his own personal ambition, etc, etc. well, up to a point, lord copper, because, my goodness, he hung around, didn't he? and he had in the end to be pushed out, frankly. he had to be. it's fair. . . it's fair to say, isn't it, that the kind of narrative that you get from the white house and frankly, from a lot of the democrat—supporting media outlets, that this was somehow a selfless thing, that they came to a kind of reasoned decision. uh—uh. they were pushed, weren't they? he was pushed. he talked about handing the torch to the next generation, but he had a white knuckle grip on that torch for so long, didn't he? it reminded me of that famous charlton heston line, "from my cold, dead hands". do you remember... yes, that's right! ..when he held the musket above his head?

erm, yeah. he had to be blasted out, didn't he? and he had to be blasted out by the most senior figures in the party. i mean, my sense is, you know, maybe the democrats haven't ended up with the strongest candidate. but my sense also is that the process that might have led them to get a stronger candidate would have split the party. and at the moment they have real unity and a real sense of kind of energy and bounce. but that brings us up—to—date then, doesn't it, and to kamala harris and to race, which is where we ought to go, because she is of indian descent and jamaican descent as well. trump suggesting in his most recent rather incoherent thoughts about her that she used to stress the indian and now she stresses the black part of her heritage, erm, without any great evidence that that is true. but unquestionably, you know,

he is going to try to find ways of racializing the campaign against her. and it's interesting, isn't it, nick, we were both there for obama. the one thing barack obama, i think, hardly mentioned, except in one speech where he faced it, erm, in a very coherent and complex way, but generally speaking, he did not run, did he, erm, as the black candidate, the first black person to be in charge in america, etc, etc? in fact, let's listen to a bit of his victory speech in 2008. this election had many firsts and many stories that will be told for generations, but one that's on my mind tonight is about a woman who cast her ballot in atlanta. she is a lot like the millions of others who stood in line to make their voice heard in this election. except for one thing. ann nixon cooper is 106 years old. crowd cheers she was born 'ust a generation past slavery, i when someone like her couldn't

vote for two reasons — because she was a woman and because of the colour of her skin. and tonight, i think about all that she's seen throughout her century in america. the heartache and the hope, the struggle and the progress, the times we were told that we can't, and the people who pressed on with that american creed — yes, we can. and what really strikes me, nick, about that is the positivity of his message and if kamala harris, it seems to me, can echo that, she's...she�*s going to gain from it. yeah. 0bama wanted americans to feel good rather than feel guilty. and i think that's why he kind of de—emphasised his race. he didn't present his candidacy asjesse jackson had done when he ran in 1988, as a kind of natural progression of the civil rights movement. he just didn't portray his candidacy as the next chapter

of the struggle for black equality. you were talking about being in denver, justin. you remember that night at the mile high stadium. they kind of erected a stage that looked like a greek temple, didn't it? yes, it did! and 0bama gave this speech in front of it. and by this strange fluke of history, it was august the 28th, 2008. and i'm doing the maths. that's the anniversary, obviously, of the march on washington and king's "i have a dream" speech and even given that, 0bama just made an oblique reference to it, he didn't even mention martin luther king by name. he called him a young preacherfrom georgia, and reading his memoir afterwards, that was deliberate, erm, because they didn't want to link 0bama's candidacy too closely with the civil rights movement. as i say, they wanted americans

to feel good that year. they didn't want them to feel guilty about america's racist past. just hold that thought, nick, because we wanted to know what kamala harris might learn from the 0bama campaign. so we got in touch with lafleur stephens—dougan, who is assistant professor of politics at princeton university, author of a book herself, which is called race to the bottom: how racial appeals work in american politics, and she's been talking to us. she's dropped us a voice note about how she thinks all of these issues, both race and sex or gender, play in the modern campaign and in this campaign. hi, americast. vice president harris will have to walk the same tightrope that has been walked by many black candidates previously, including, of course, former president barack obama. she will have to recreate the 0bama—biden coalition that included white racial liberals and crucial black turnout. accomplishing this means that she will need to energise

the democratic party's most loyal constituents, black voters, while not appearing so liberal that she turns off white moderates, particularly those in swing states. also, her background as an attorney general should help to moderate perceptions of her as too liberal, which is a charge that is often lobbed at black candidates. however, harris's toughness is in many ways a double—edged sword. her background as a prosecutor will also likely be used by the trump campaign as a negative, by associating harris with incarceration of black men, a claim which has been wildly overstated. and of course, we cannot forget the historic nature of hercampaign. for some voters, the potential for vice president harris to be the first woman president will mobilise some voters to turn out for her, while for other voters it will mobilise them to turn out against her. it will be interesting to see how things play out. 0k, nick, so we talk about race.

the otherthing is...is, erm, the sex of the candidate. and this, it seems to me, really matters and matters in a way that's quite difficult for people to...to get their heads around, because on the one hand, i mean, you've got the whole cat lady business from jd vance, the republican vice presidential candidate who's been really castigated and made fun of, erm, among more modern people, if i can put it like that, over his suggestions in the past that women who don't have children are somehow not invested in the future, and indeed men as well. families without children aren't kind of part of america's future or part of the world's future. er, and people really having a go at him for that. but on the other hand, it seems to me, still in american society, almost as salient as race, but perhaps less talked about, is sexism, actually, even misogyny,

and a kind of sense that women... ..it�*s still wrong for women to be in charge. is that putting it too strongly? look, she's going to face the problem of misogyny and she's going to face a problem of racism, for sure. the gender issue is really interesting. erm, you know, hillary clinton had a huge problem with misogyny, for sure, in 2016, but she also had a problem of persuading fellow women to vote for her. that traditionally has been a problem for female candidates in american history, even after the access hollywood tape emerged, erm, donald trump managed to gain the majority of white women. erm... why is that, nick? why? well, i think with hillary clinton, actually, it was a... ..her case was special. i think hillary clinton may have possibly lost the 2016 election in 1992, when she was forced to introduce herself to the american people in the most appalling

of circumstances. you remember the interview she did with 60 minutes... mm. ..ahead of the super bowl? so a massive tv audience and she sat there with bill clinton. he's facing these allegations of extramarital affairs from gennifer flowers, who he'd had an affair with in arkansas. and she had to say, i'm not just some tammy wynette, standing by my man. i think that really annoyed white, working—class women across america who had long memories. and i think that was a real problem for her in 2016, for sure. i mean, when the access hollywood tape came out, justin, i thought it was game over. i thought that election was hers. erm... yeah. but if you look at the stats... and this is...just to be clear, this is the tape where he's talking about... boasts about sexually molesting women. yeah, that's right. yeah. and, erm, but if you look at the... ..if you look at the sort of exit polling afterwards,

erm, you know, hillary clinton just got a small majority of white, college—educated women. i mean, after access hollywood, you'd have thought that had been in the sort of 70s or 80%, but she only just squeaked it with college—educated white women. and again, that...that speaks of the problem. it wasn't just misogyny that hillary clinton had a problem with. it was attracting female support as well. but it's also worth remembering, justin, she did win the nationwide vote by three million. yeah. and ordinarily that would have translated into an electoral college win. if you win that big in the popular vote, you generally win the electoral college. and that proves to me that america is ready for a female president. you just hope those votes for kamala harris's side are in the right place. yeah, but they're not, are they? that's the point. yeah. so kamala harris now has to win. .. ..and just to be clear about this, because this is something i remember being very striking in your first book, to go back to your books, which is where we should finish

as well as end. it's only right that we do so. erm, it is really striking, isn't it, the way in which, when we talk about the opinion polls at the moment and people say, oh, kamala harris is catching up, she's kind of neck—and—neck in the national polls now, maybe in one or two polls. er, that's not enough, is it? that is not enough to win the electoral college and win the race. justin, ijust keep on looking at the polling in those three states, in wisconsin, in pennsylvania, in michigan. and of those, i really pay very, very close attention to pennsylvania. and on the night when the votes are coming in, i'm going to be looking at the suburbs around philadelphia. i'm going to be looking at the suburbs around milwaukee and detroit. these are where these suburban women live who often decide presidential elections, and they are going to be so key in this moment. and i think kamala harris's superpower in this election,

it seems to me, is her ability to bring out the worst of donald trump. the other side or the flip side of that is, yes, she could bring out the worst of him and do better in the suburbs, but he could also potentially bring out the worst of her, as he did with hillary clinton when she talked about his supporters as being a basket of deplorables. and it balances out because she then loses, as hillary did, and as kamala still could, in other areas of those same states, not the suburbs where people think, the heck, ijust don't like this person, or she doesn't like me. yeah... that's the point, isn't it, actually? it's that she doesn't like me, particularly as a man. yeah, and talking about what lessons we can gain from history, i mean, the lessons for the democrats is you win presidential elections when you campaign in the middle, you know, often erm, john f kennedy

is kind of misremembered as this sort of crusading liberal. he fought a pretty moderate, a very moderate campaign, in1960. erm, lbj, '64. he won. you know, carter, a moderate. he won in '76. clinton, '92, '96, ran as a moderate, won as a moderate. you know, time was when you had to be a southern democrat to win the presidency in the post—civil rights era. but then, of course, barack 0bama comes along again. you know, we think of him as this crusading liberal, but really, he was a very pragmatic moderate. i think that is forgotten. erm, that's how you win elections as a democrat in the united states. nick, it's been so good to talk to you. your last book, i should... ..we've mentioned it pretty generously, but not in the terms that it ought to be mentioned, because it actually made it, didn't it, onto a pile of books behind joe biden in a picture in the oval office. and i... it's still there, actually, it's still there. it's been there three years,

which would suggest he's either a very slow reader, he hasn't read it, or he finds it so fascinating that he constantly keeps referencing it. erm, look, he's passed the torch, i hope, erm, you know, maybe he'll pass the book as well! and there's another one, the forever war, which i hope he'll read as well. it's been such a pleasure talking to you, nick, as it always is. thanks a lot for sparing us the time. oh, it's my pleasure, justin. it's great to catch up. americast. americast, from bbc news. hello there. for part two of the weekend, it looks like low pressure will be affecting more north—western parts of the country, whereas further south, thanks to the ridge of high pressure, we should see a lot of dry and settled weather. quite a bit of cloud around on sunday, but some sunny spells here and there and conditions turning wetter and windier thanks to this area of low pressure across northern ireland and western scotland as we go through the day. but much of central and eastern scotland, england and wales, quite a bit of cloud,

like i mentioned, but also some sunny breaks here and there, and pleasantly warm — high teens to low 20s from north to south across the country. now, it'll be turning windier and wetter across the northwest of the uk as we head through sunday night, the rain really starting to pile into northern ireland, certainly across scotland, western scotland seeing most of that rain. some of the rain could be quite heavy, perhaps even thundery in a few places. but we'll be drawing up some warm and muggy air, so by monday morning, areas starting off with temperatures around the mid—teens. for monday, we have this area of low pressure almost in situ to the northwest of the uk, with this weather front bringing further heavy rain to the north and west. we're scooping up this very warm and humid air from the near continent. so a wet, windy day to come for northern and western scotland, some heavy rain at times, could see some disruption across western scotland. for parts of eastern scotland, certainly england and wales, it'll stay mostly dry, with some spells of sunshine and feeling warm and humid, mid to high 20s in celsius. warm and muggy across scotland. tuesday night, we see that weather front

crossing the country. some of the rain could be heavy, maybe thundery on it, even as it pushes towards eastern areas. it'll take its time to clear the southeast on tuesday, so rather cloudy, some spots of rain. behind it, the air turns fresher again with plenty of sunshine, a few showers for western scotland and northern ireland. temperatures 19 to 2a or 25 degrees, so those values coming back down again with lower humidity. as we move out to tuesday into wednesday, low pressure affects the northern half of the country again. stronger winds, outbreaks of rain, higher pressure towards the south. so again, it's going to be a blustery day on wednesday for scotland, maybe the far northwest of england, northern ireland, with a few showers. further south, tending to stay dry with variable cloud coming and going and some spells of sunshine. again, low to mid 20s in the south, high teens, low 20s in the north. and as we end the week, we hold on to that theme, with low pressure always bringing more cloud and rain at times to the north of the uk. higher pressure continues to bring more settled and warmer conditions further south.

live from washington,

this is bbc news. the lebanese armed group hezbollah says it launched dozens of rockets towards israel. that's as the uk and us urge their citizens to leave lebanon because of fears of an all out war. bricks and bottles have been thrown at police as far—right rallies turned violent in england and northern ireland. hello, i'm carl nasman. hezbollah says it has fired dozens of rockets towards israel from southern lebanon. it is reported about 30 rockets were fired in communities in northern israel, one landed in the town of beit hillel. the army says most rockets were intercepted and others landed in open areas and there were no reports of casualties. tensions are very high in the region since wednesday's killing of the hamas political chief ismail haniyeh.