‘The Rest Is History’ Hosts Talk Rome, Trump vs. Obama, and What’s Next for MAGA

By Sean Woods

Sean Woods

To the surprise of everyone, most of all maybe themselves, historians Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland have become the Jagger and Richards of the nerd podcasting world. Their show, The Rest Is History, was Apple’s Show of the Year in 2025, and boasts over 20 millions streams a month. There’s a Rest Is History club, a Rest Is History tour, two Rest Is History books, with another coming this fall, plus a spinoff The Rest Is History Book Club podcast. These are very big doings for a couple of middle-aged Englishmen delivering deep dives into everything from the fall of Carthage and Crazy Horse and Custer, to the life of Samuel Johnson and the Iranian Revolution of 1977.

At the heart of this very British invasion’s appeal, beyond the revelatory historical detail and sharp insights, is the friendship and repartee between the two hosts. Sandbrook, the more acerbic of the pair, is a historian who wrote a biography of the 1968 antiwar presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy (“Nobody else had written about it!” he says), and has authored many books on modern English history. He’s also the author of the Adventures in Time series for children. His counterpart, Holland, focuses more on the classical world, and is the author of the books Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic and Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind, among many others. Holland brings his deep knowledge of Christianity and a touch of the spiritual to the discourse — or, as Sandbrook will often playfully bemoan, “the sacral.” 

Launched in late 2020, The Rest Is History offers listeners hundreds of hours exploring the murders of Jack the Ripper or the fall of the Aztecs, the meaning of the Mona Lisa or Margeret Thatcher’s England. This is time very well spent. The banter between the two hosts is lively. (Dom: “That’s just woke tosh, Tom!” Tom: “Dominic is pulling a very Protestant face.”) The obvious joy, curiosity, irreverence, and rollicking humor Holland and Sandbrook display while spelunking into the past brings electricity and life to events both near and long distant.

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Rolling Stone caught up with the hosts over Zoom to discuss Rome, Disney, why Donald Trump is a more consequential historical figure than Barack Obama, and how nakedly pro-King George III agitprop masking as a history podcast came to rule streaming.

One of the things that I love so much about the show is when Tom asks, “What’s going on here?” right before you dive into a deeper explanation of a historical event. How long does it take before a historian can really put that in perspective? What’s the window? Sandbrook: There’s no formula. Depending where you are in history, depending where you are in time, you’re always going to ask different questions and you’re going to see different things in the past. The things that interest us about the Sixties now won’t be the things that interest people in 100 years’ time or 200 years’ time, because different things will jump out at them. By and large, I think it’s good to have a tiny bit of distance. One tends to be implicated in, or emotionally invested in, events that you’ve lived through as an adult, and it’s harder to write about them with a degree of distance.

Holland: There’s a kaleidoscopic aspect to history. Current affairs as they evolve will not just change your understanding of the future, but also of the past, because aspects of the past previously might have seemed occluded or not to have the salience that they have when suddenly new events happen. Our understanding, say, of the fall of the Roman Republic is going to be changed by events in American history. So over the course of my writing about Rome, my understanding of the fall of the Roman Republic was massively affected, I now realize, by the events of 9/11 and the wars that followed, and now is being affected by the anxieties around Donald Trump’s presidency.

You get asked about Donald Trump and the fall of Rome all the time. And I don’t want to make you repeat yourself, but comparing America to Rome is almost a historical cliché, isn’t it? Holland: It’s inevitable, because the Founding Fathers modeled their dream republic on the kind of primal republic that the Romans had founded when they expelled their king. And so the anxiety about what might happen to the American Republic is rooted in the knowledge that the Roman Republic fell. So when Benjamin Franklin comes out, after they’ve been drawing up the Constitution, and is asked, “What kind of constitution is it?” Franklin says, “A republic, if you can keep it.” So the anxieties that swirl around the prospects for the American Republic now, 250 years on, were there right from the beginning because of that consciousness of the Roman archetype.

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What do you think explains some of the success of the podcast? I have a theory that maybe people are really enjoying disappearing into the past because times are so chaotic right now.  Sandbrook: I don’t think there’s ever a point when people are not interested in history. Twenty years ago, when things were a little bit less chaotic, history book sales were great. I think we were really lucky because we started the podcast at a time when the conversation about history on both sides of the Atlantic was sort of troubled — impassioned, very febrile, lots of arguments about taking down statues and changing street names and all those kinds of things. We definitely weren’t reacting against that; that’s not really our vibe, as it were. We tried to celebrate— that’s the wrong word. We don’t try to celebrate the past so much as we just enjoy it. We’re not trying to turn it into some kind of moral one-upmanship.

“We don’t try to celebrate the past so much as we just enjoy it. We’re not trying to turn it into some kind of moral one-upmanship.”

Holland: When you do a podcast, and particularly when you do a podcast for as long as we’ve been doing it, you cannot disguise from yourself the wellsprings of your inspiration. It’s the same for both of us, which is that we’ve loved this stuff since we were very young, when we were off looking at castles or reading picture books with Elizabeth I knighting Francis Drake. That ultimately is the sustenance for what we do: a deep sense of fascination and excitement when we contemplate the past, because the stories are so manifold, so gripping. And so it has something of the quality of fantasy or of science fiction, and yet it’s true, it happened. 

You both embrace narrative, but have academics dropped approaching history as narrative? Sandbrook: Yeah, it’s a really good question. It’s funny because when I was a student doing history at Oxford, I remember my main tutor saying to me, “You would be quite a good historian if you could cure yourself of your addiction to narrative.” And I actually did manage to cure myself, though clearly not completely. I taught history at the University of Sheffield briefly, and I can remember talking to some colleagues [who were] asking about what my then-girlfriend and I had done [over] the weekend and I said, “We went to this amazing castle.” And one of my colleagues said, “A castle? But your specialism is the 20th century. Why would you go to a castle?” And I was like, “For fun? Because castles are kind of cool. Normal people go to castles, they think it’s nice to walk around it.”

And, I remember my colleagues muttering, “Well, I hope you didn’t forget the castles were tools of oppression” or something, and I was like, “Do you know what? I didn’t think about that at all. I just walked around and thought, ‘This is a brilliant castle. I like castles. I’m happy.'” And I do think there is a slight spirit sometimes in the academy of being very quick to identify all of our ancestors or our forebears’ moral failings, and to judge them accordingly. 

Tom mentioned quite rightly that one of the things about The Rest Is History is that we fell in love with history when we were kids. The thing that gets you interested in history when you’re small is wanting to know what happened next in the story. Is Henry V going to win the Battle of Agincourt? Is Julius Cesar going to survive the assassination plot? That’s what keeps you reading. And if you lose sight of that when you’re trying to teach history, then I think you miss part of the beauty of it, part of the joy that brings people to it in the first place.

Holland: This may be more true in the United States than in our country, because the United States was founded as a kind of moral project, and therefore [there’s] the sense that history can operate as a morality play. I think that over-moralizing history, that’s something we consciously try to avoid. People in different periods operated according to different moral standards. 

Dominic, you’ve said a couple times that you think Trump is a more consequential president than Obama. Sandbrook: Yeah, much more.

But historically, wouldn’t you rather, going back to the Roman emperors, be, say, a Trajan versus a Nero — a ruler who is very successful but doesn’t get all the ink? Sandbrook: Oh. I mean, that’s a fair point that obviously a boring ruler and a period of great stability and prosperity, that’s what people want, right? That sounds like what people want.

Holland: To be consequential isn’t necessarily a positive.

Sandbrook: Yeah. However, you are asking about who matters and who people will write about in the future. Let me be completely frank. Obama will go down in American history quite rightly — he’s the first Black president. And there’s something very moving about some of the stuff with him and his family in the Oval Office, and when he has civil rights veterans come and visit. I remember some of that footage, it’s quite tear-jerking.

“To be consequential isn’t necessarily a positive.”

But in terms of Barack Obama’s influence on the world, on the destiny of the American Republic, on American political culture and all those things, he seems a tiny figure compared with Donald Trump. Donald Trump is colossally consequential. His war on Iran, his attitude to NATO, to the Western Alliance, but also Trump’s effect on political culture. People will follow his example, I would imagine, for years to come — the way he’s changed so many of his phrases, his tics, his mannerisms are embedded in our imagination now. Trump is a larger than life figure, far more so than George W. Bush, than Obama, than Biden, than Hillary Clinton.

He’s a colossus, yes. Sandbrook: For as long as the American Republic exists, people will write biographies of Donald Trump. And by the way, what an amazing subject. When you think of Robert Caro doing that life of Lyndon Johnson [book], imagine someone doing the same for Donald Trump, what a project that would be, taking in the wrestling and The Apprentice, and the real estate, and the casinos. And that’s even before you’ve got him entering politics. 

Trump is in some ways our most pop-culture president. How much does pop culture play a role in history?  Sandbrook: Oh, huge. Yeah, massively important. 

When did that start? Sandbrook: Well, it’s always been there. First of all, most people at any given moment are not very interested in politics. The moment we’re doing this call, there’s a political crisis in Britain. The prime minister might fall. People are jostling to replace Keir Starmer. If you’re interested in politics, it’s probably very exciting. Most people in Britain are not really following that. They couldn’t care less. They’re much more interested in their own lives or in pop-cultural things. 

Going back to the 19th century, it might be the music hall of vaudeville, it might be the cheap newspapers that people were reading — the jokes that people tell, the conversations they have in a pub, those things are a brilliant window into the minds of our predecessors. Often much better than electoral politics. I mean, people who are interested in politics tend to be a very small, unhealthy minority of any given society. I’m sure you’d agree with me about this, Tom, that culture is often much more interesting than high politics, and much more revealing about a society.

Holland: And our sense of what popular culture is and whether it matters also is subject to historical processes. In Athens, before it becomes a democracy, the elite sneer at popular culture. When it becomes a democracy, the culture of the people comes to be the very essence of the state. And in Rome, likewise. You mentioned Nero. The reason that Nero is a radical figure as an emperor is because he takes the popular culture of the masses seriously and makes himself its hero. 

One of the things that Dominic’s books are so good on, is the way that in the modern period, pop culture evolves all the time, and particularly in response to technology. So, for instance, what we would call pop music is only really possible in the modern sense once you have the technology that can sustain it, the infrastructure of the radio stations and the television stations and the vinyl and the transistor radios and so on. And it creates a common culture through the Sixties and Seventies and into the Eighties that now seems completely dissolved. I’m two years off my 60th birthday, and one of the things that I mourn is the sense of a shared common national popular culture, because it’s all dissipated. 

It’s been a huge problem trying to run a popular-culture magazine. Holland: Well, because Rolling Stone is [founded in] what, is it 1967? You have that sense of a common popular culture, a musical culture in particular, that is both innovative and genuinely popular. And of course we still have innovative and popular musical culture, but it’s so dissipated now. And in part, that’s because the technology that sustains it has become so complicated and so complex that no one can be across all of it.

That’s very true. One of the reasons our founder, Jann Wenner, started Rolling Stone was that he thought you had to report about the Beatles or the Rolling Stones as seriously as you would Richard Nixon. But who has more staying power, the Richard Nixons of the world or the Rolling Stones and the Beatles? Which has a more lasting effect? Holland: We probably have different views on this.

Sandbrook: Nixon is an unusual example, because Nixon does last. Nixon — almost uniquely among American presidents — is a sort of comical style icon, because he looks so awkward and he’s quite amusing. But to your point about who’s going to last more, that’s a slightly hard question to answer. High culture becomes canonized and the popular culture that’s set in the 19th century, the popular music, for example — I mean, we don’t listen to that anymore. So will people in the 24th century listen to the Rolling Stones or the Beatles? I’m not sure. However, what is certainly true is this: When Tom and I [examine] the 18th century or the 19th century — Charles Dickens, Gilbert and Sullivan — we know loads of our listeners know what we mean by it. But we could take the vast majority of British politicians and prime ministers and indeed an awful lot of American presidents from the 19th century, and people would be like, “Who the fuck is that? I’ve never heard of Lord Darby or Zachary Taylor. Who’s Millard Fillmore?” So, actually, most politicians who’ve ever existed are completely irrelevant. You could be prime minister of Britain for eight years and, frankly, in 200 years’ time, you’ll be completely forgotten. Whereas Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart will live on for as long as there are human beings.

Holland: I’m slightly biased on this, and there are two shades to my reply. The first is, I do think that, say, the Beatles have broken through the barrier that marks whether you’re going to survive or not. They retain their popularity. There are certain songs they made that will become part of the popular canon of music. And I say that as someone who interviewed Paul McCartney last week in Abbey Road, which was a dream come true.

Also, I am in the midst of writing a book [All You Need Is Love: The 1960s & The New Reformation] about the 1960s, in which I am precisely making the argument that the music of that decade had a seismic impact on all kinds of ways in which we see the world today, that it lit a fuse that is still very much burning, and that, yeah, absolutely, the Beatles and the Stones and Dylan do matter more than Harold Wilson or LBJ or whatever. And that in that sense, dare I say that Rolling Stone sheds more interesting light on not just the culture of the Sixties, but its impact on the way we live now than The New York Times might.

I’m sending you a contract tomorrow. Holland: Yeah, you’re welcome. I have the introduction to the book to prove it.

But the power of the protest song today, say, is so diminished, simply because it’s so hard for something to break through. Holland: I think protest songs in and of themselves actually have very little impact because they are overtly polemical. The really influential music is the music that impacts you without you necessarily being aware of it.

Like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” you wouldn’t necessarily know as a protest song if you were coming to it without context? Holland: Even “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” which seems to have not a political bone in its body, is nevertheless conveying to an entire generation of teenagers a perspective on relationships and sexual relationships and sexual love that is very corrosive to the kind of moral standards that had prevailed previously. And although the temptation now is to laugh at all the preacher men fulminating against the Beatles and Stones and so on, they kind of had a point. I mean, it did change. It did rewire the way that countless numbers of people thought about relationships and morality and all kinds of things. And it’s precisely because it’s not overtly polemical that it has the impact that it does.

Sandbrook: We live in an age when people don’t like being preached to. If try to preach to you, you resent it. That might be Trump voters who say, “I feel that Hillary Clinton talks down to me” in 2016, or it might be people saying, “Rich rock stars shouldn’t be lecturing me.” Your Hollywood actors and your rock stars who tell people, “Don’t vote for Trump,” I understand why they’re doing it, of course, but often it can be very counterproductive.

Politics in the U.S. has become almost a religious divide. Holland: It always was.

But, going to British history, in the U.S. we seem to be in an almost Protestant-Catholic political divide. There seems to be no willingness to acknowledge the essential humanity of the other side at times.  Sandbrook: Well, the stakes are very high if you frame your political opponents as enemies of the republic. You hear people saying, “Everything that America means and stands for is at stake in this election. These people are un-American, they don’t love our country,” blah, blah, blah. If you phrase it as that, then of course it’s going to feel apocalyptic to people. Maybe there have been times — perhaps in the 1980s, where Margaret Thatcher was prime minister — but very rarely is it ever really apocalyptic in Britain, because ultimately it’s an argument about who’s going to collect the bins.

Holland: Always a brave thing to do when talking to an American magazine, I’m going to stand up for the idea of constitutional monarchy. I think in Britain, the legal system is a lot less politicized because [of] the notion that it is all about the crown — it’s the crown that does the prosecutions, it’s the crown that organizes the prisons, and so on. Whereas in the United States, that is politicized. Sheriffs are elected and people are nominated by presidents to the Supreme Court and so on. So for people who want to politicize the legal system, it’s easier in the U.S. And there again, there is a parallel with Rome, where in the last century of the Republic, the law was massively, massively politicized, and it’s going be interesting to see whether you can row back from the degree to which Trump has politicized the legal system.

With a loosely based ideology like MAGA, it’s really a cult of personality. What happens to these sorts of movements throughout history when that kind of magnetic leader dies or leaves the scene? Sandbrook: Yeah, good question. MAGA is a loose coalition anyway, and you see with the war in Iran how already it’s fraying. Trump has had a lot of grief from people in his movement who thought he was an isolationist and they’re shocked. So there’s a tension within MAGA, but also, as you rightly say, a personality cult. MAGA would need to become institutionalized, it would need to become a political party. And the issue with that is that political parties and political institutions have been in decay across the Western world for decades. So will it survive Trump? I don’t think the movement itself necessarily will survive, but the impulses will survive. What Trump represents is deeply rooted. It’s been there in American politics for a long time. We did a series a couple of months ago about the Ku Klux Klan. And when we were doing that series and thinking about the rhetoric of the second Klan and the kind of demagogic speakers that they had, we deliberately were not really explicit about, like, “Oh, this is like MAGA.” But it’s kind of hard to miss the parallels. So something like MAGA, those impulses, I mean, they’ll be there for the rest of our lifetimes.

They may have always been there too, right? Sandbrook: Exactly.

Holland: When you think of Trump as a consequential president, one of the reasons why he’s consequential isn’t simply the actions that he’s taken, the policies that he’s adopted or whatever. It’s because he’s cloaked himself in a vibe, that’s quite rare in history. You can think of some very, very significant historical figures who have projected a vibe as well as through their actions.

Mostly bad ones. Holland: Well, I mean, Napoleonism is a word, Caesarism is a word. You say the name and you don’t have to know much about what these characters did to have a sense of what that is about. And I would guess that MAGA, Trumpism, whatever, will survive Trump as a kind of a mood, a style of politics, a way of talking and presenting yourself. But I think it will dissipate because it kind of needs Trump to do it. 

I found your episodes about Walt Disney particularly interesting. How important do you think soft power is to an American empire? Holland: Hugely, I would say.

Sandbrook: Massively important. During the Cold War, people at the top in American politics thought it was really important. That’s why the CIA invested all that money in promoting Jackson Pollock or promoting American culture. Walt Disney himself thought projecting an idea of America and his view was really important. He saw himself as an American storyteller. I do think, though, that as the world becomes very globalized and fragmented, the hold has loosened. [Disney] has competitors now. Korean culture, let’s say, or the Japanese. I mean, nobody cared about Korean culture [in England] when I was a little boy. It was America or nothing. But as the 21st century goes on, it’s only a matter of time before people actually start consuming Chinese culture.

Holland: I wonder about that, because Disney’s career covers that moment where the American hegemony replaces the British hegemony, and it’s crucial that both superpowers speak the same language. People in India or Australia would be familiar with figures from English history and English folklore and so on. And it really struck me when I was doing the preparation for that episode on Disney’s life, how many of the Disney classics drew, of course, on European culture, but more specifically on English culture, so Robin Hood or The Jungle Book or Mary Poppins or whatever. And there’s a sense in which he is culturally the link between the British and American ages of global supremacy.

Speaking of the British empire, the Revolutionary War episodes were a good bit of pro-King George agitprop. What kind of reaction did you get in the States? I mean, my God, making fun of Washington’s teeth, calling us tax dodgers… Sandbrook: Yeah, I love this, because we have a lot of American listeners, and of course our American listeners are very dear to our hearts. But I don’t think there were many examples where the Atlantic yawned quite as wide as it did with that series. Reading a lot of the comments from the American listeners, they said, “This is just pure British propaganda, blah, blah, blah. They don’t get it,” all of that. And yet the mad thing was all the books that we had used — and indeed we had a guest on, a professor at Oxford, all the books that he reads, that he engaged with — are by American historians.

I know this will sound heretical to an American audience. [The Revolution] is not actually regarded as very interesting in Britain. If they want to do the late 18th century, they do the French Revolution and they do Napoleon because that’s the glamorous, exciting story. The stuff with a load of people wearing wigs moaning about taxes just isn’t seen as very glamorous. So the books we were using were by American historians, but because a lot of our listeners perhaps have never read those books, they don’t know what American academics are saying to each other. They’ve gone on the Freedom Trail in Boston and they’ve seen Ken Burns’ documentaries. And so they’re like, “Who are these sneering British guys in glasses being mean about the Founding Fathers? What’s all this?” 

Holland: Just to preview, we have an anniversary treat for our American listeners. Oh, for the 250th?

Holland: Yeah. We’ll be doing Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and Hamilton. They will be coming. One of the things that struck me in the Black Lives Matter sense of engagement with American history was the improbable casting of the British Empire as woke because there was a lot of stuff about from—

Sandbrook: The New York Times.

The 1619 Project. Holland: Yeah. So academics on the left and newspapers and so on, essentially saying that the American Revolution was all about slavery and that Britain was allowing the slaves to be freed, and all of this, so hooray for Britain, which was a very improbable development. So that was nice. 

One of my favorite fictional characters, Harry Flashman, shows up on The Rest Is History all the time. He’s a British cavalry officer who’s a coward and a cad, yet eventually rises to become a general. He’s the ultimate antihero — a Zelig-like historical creation. I think George MacDonald Fraser is a fantastic writer. But could those books be written today? Sandbrook: No. I think they are brilliant books. I also think the Flashman books are as morally subtle and sensible an audit of the British Empire as you can find because Flashman as a narrator is very aware of the hypocrisies and cruelties of the Empire. He simultaneously believes in it as a project and he’s patriotic, and yet he’s not blind to the darkness that imperial power necessarily involves. But you’re dead right. There’s no way that they would be published.

Holland: I think Flashman is a Regency figure who is fighting against the encroachment of Victorian moralism and as he would see it, hypocrisy. And that was the charge and excitement of the Flashman novels appearing in the Sixties when something very similar was happening. People felt we’re casting off all this kind of priggish, prudish, finger wagging hypocrisy. But in Anglo-American culture, periods of libertinism are followed by periods of restraint. And clearly I think that the fact that the Flashman novels couldn’t be published now is a reflection on the fact that that sense of libertinism and free speech that was a very electric part of the Sixties is now fading and we’re kind of entering a new Victorianism.

Oh, no. Really? Holland: Oh, yeah. And I think it’s really good because it teaches us to be more sympathetic towards the Victorians, because if you are sitting there and saying, “Ha, they covered up piano legs and we’re so much more advanced and superior,” but then you think of all the the reasons why George McDonald Fraser’s novels wouldn’t be published now, and you think, actually, yeah, I can see why it’s probably not good to write in that way. And it’s always good to be reminded that people have moral taboos for what seem at the time very good reasons.

You’ve done so much since the podcast was launched during the pandemic. What comes next? Sandbrook: We’ve got so much history left to do. Just to give you an example of three big subjects that we’ve never really done: We’ve never done what we used to be called the English Civil War. So, the civil wars of the 1640s. Massively important in Britain, but also they generate the ideas that lead to the American Revolution. We’ve never done the Crusades. We’ve never done the Russian Revolution. So, there’s a lot of history left to do, actually. And when we contemplate how much history we’ve done and how much history there is, we could be doing this for decades.

I certainly hope so. Holland: And the thing is, it keeps giving us experiences that you have to pinch yourself to think that you are having it. I’ve sung off-Broadway. I can now say I’ve done that. We’ve been in the Sydney Opera House. I’ve just interviewed Paul McCartney. These are all things that, if you told me even five years ago that these would be possible, I would’ve laughed. So part of the excitement of doing it is never knowing quite where it’s going to lead.

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