Heather Cox Richardson on Nicolle Wallace’s podcast, “The Best People,” said that Republicans need to stand up to President Donald Trump for “tearing up the post-World War II domestic order” that threatens to bring us World War III.

NICOLLE WALLACE, MS NOW HOST: His fitness is this story staring us in the face that we still can’t cover, right? It’s like he does something. And I listen to him live. I don’t take him live very often because he lies so prolifically. We tend to listen to him, pull out the news and then share that. But I came up at four and he was talking to someone, and I thought about taking it live. He wasn’t stringing nouns and verbs together in a way that I could even understand. So the reason for reviewing it and playing it back is usually to field the lies. In this instance, it was I didn’t understand anything he was saying. And I wonder why you think it’s so difficult for people like us to cover his clear decline. HEATHER COX RICHARDSON, BOSTON COLLEGE PROFESSOR OF HISTORY: Well, I don’t think it’s hard for us to cover it. I think the piece that is worth talking about in this moment is that the Republican Party really owns him at this point. And one of the things that has always protected him was the fact that the Republican Party was unwilling to toss overboard his potential voters. And so they were keeping him on board so that they could get those voters. Or they were true believers. We do have true MAGA believers in Congress. But in this moment, we have mechanisms for getting rid of the president that are not going to happen, I don’t think, under the 25th Amendment, for example. But the role of Congress is to make sure we do not have a madman in the presidency. And they’re abdicating that right now. And that is an indictment of the Republicans in Congress, as they should have been indicted from the beginning for letting him go on his first impeachment in 2019, 2020, and so on. But right now, when I look at what we’re seeing, the real pressure point for me is those Republicans in Congress. You only need a handful of them to say, hey, this is not OK. Maybe we were willing to look the other way when he tore up USAID, or maybe we were willing to look the other way so that we would get the extension of the tax cuts. But when you are looking at somebody who is not only tearing up the post-World War II domestic order, but is also tearing up the rules-based international order that has been in place since at least World War II, bringing us back to the same kinds of conditions that led not only to World War II, but to World War I, one would think that at least some Republicans would be open to the suggestion that this must stop. And the trick is, we have laws on the books that simply have to be enforced. We have mechanisms on the books that simply have to be enforced. So this is not saying, hey, you’ve got to go do something radical. You’ve got to rewrite the Constitution. No. You simply have to do what you took an oath to do. And this moment is now here, because if he keeps attacking Greenland and our NATO ally, Denmark, all bets are off. And that is a road that, you know, we know where that leads, except when it led there before, the world did not have nuclear weapons. And the fact that they’re playing with this, like, oh, we’ll wait for the midterms. And you know, Mike Johnson this morning, I don’t know if you saw this, sort of said, oh, don’t try and drag me into this. You’re the freaking Speaker of the House. Who else are we supposed to drag into this? If they don’t step up now, first of all, the damage is going to be extra. The damage to the U.S. is already extraordinary. But the damage to the world is going to be extraordinary. But second of all, we are watching the Republican Party, with its incredibly storied and often noble history, die by suicide. And the fact that people would do that to their own party, not just to the nation, not just to the world, is just simply mind boggling, really.

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