Heather Cox Richardson tells Jim Acosta that Trump's UFC 'impulse' tied to 19th century lynchings

On Jim Acosta's show, historian and Trump critic Heather Cox Richardson insinuated that recent White House UFC events held a historical connection to lynching in the 19th century.

"He is doing so on the same cultural argument, of course, that people used to back the first Gilded Age. That is, these cultural wars that turn white Americans against marginalized people of color. That's the bottom line. It's not really a stretch to say the same impulse that created the UFC fight on the lawn is the impulse that really pushed lynching in the late 19th century.”

Jim Acosta nodded along in agreement.

Richardson has been critical of the Trump administration, especially its efforts to deport criminal migrants.

“If the president can decide who gets to come into the country and who gets deported, and can simply decide who those people are — really, none of us are safe,” she told Katie Couric during an exclusive interview.

“You can probably think of times in our own history when people were sent to prison based solely on someone's word,” Richardson continued. “And it's easy to find examples in other countries where simply doing something the person in power dislikes can land you in prison — like Syria until recently, Russia today, or any authoritarian regime.”

Richardson has frequently compared Trump's political movement to historical examples of authoritarianism. In her 2023 book, "Democracy Awakening," she argued that Trump “married Republican politics to authoritarianism” and warned that democratic institutions can erode gradually rather than collapse suddenly.

Her comments on Acosta's program drew criticism from conservatives on social media, who accused the historian of making an inflammatory comparison between a sporting event and one of the darkest chapters in American history. Neither Richardson nor Acosta appeared to elaborate further on the lynching comparison during the segment, which quickly circulated online following the interview.